In this episode of Follow-Along Friday, Joe breaks down his investor database and the four ways apartment syndicators can raise money in ANY market. Joe also explains the lessons he learned from the gratitude seminar he attend this past weekend and Theo provides an update on his move to Tampa and how that will impact his Cincinnati rental portfolio. Finally, Joe and Theo announce a new feature on the Best Ever Blog.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff.
We’re doing Follow Along Friday. Follow Along Friday is all about what we’re doing as it relates to what we’ve learned, so we can help you and what you’re doing in your real estate endeavors.
How do you wanna kick it off?
Theo Hicks: So let’s just dive right into the main topic today–
Joe Fairless: And with Theo Hicks, by the way! I should have introduced you.
Theo Hicks: I’m here today… [laughs]
Joe Fairless: Yeah, Theo Hicks is with us today, as he usually is on Follow Along Fridays.
Theo Hicks: So let’s just dive right into the main topic today. Your company just surpassed a quarter of a billion dollars in apartment assets, so first of all, congratulations on that. Impressive!
Joe Fairless: Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
Theo Hicks: And usually after you complete a deal, you kind of go back and analyze and try to extract if there are any lessons, or takeaways, or anything that you can tell other people that they can apply to their business. For this one, you went back and you kind of analyzed your investor database and extracted a couple of money raising lessons that people can apply in any market that they live in.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, and the purpose of this exercise was to learn more about where my investors live, and at what level investors are investing based on where they live… I was just curious about that. And I’ve got a whole bunch of other stats that I look at with my investors, but this is just one particular thing that we’re talking about as it relates to all these stats. And I found it really interesting and there’s a takeaway for everyone who is listening who works with private money individuals, so you have investors, or you’ve got hard money lenders or even private money lenders.
The interesting thing that I found — well, let me tell you a little bit of context. The top five cities were basically the top five cities with the biggest population… I don’t have the information in front of me, but it was Dallas, New York City, L.A., I think San Francisco was in there, and some other cities. Those were the top five cities with the most current and potential investors – current investors, people who are investing with me, and potential investors – investors who I have a relationship with but have not pulled the trigger on investment. So those are the five cities — I missed one… New York City, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Houston and San Francisco.
So the next one, I removed the potential and I was like, “Okay, let’s just look at the top five cities within those current investors”, so investors who are actually investing, and those cities are pretty much the same: New York City, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and then tied for fifth, Houston, Miami, Austin and Seattle.
New York City – 18%, which pretty much is the same as the potential 18%, and that’s because I’ve lived in New York City, I have a bunch of friends there and they’re investing.
Dallas-Fort Worth – I’m from there, it makes sense, plus most of our properties are there.
Los Angeles – it’s a large city, it makes sense. San Francisco, same thing, and Houston, Miami, Austin, Seattle – a lot of people from New York moved to Miami. People from New York City move to Miami, and people from everywhere else – they’re moving to Texas, it seems like. But if you’re in New York City, you’re likely going to Florida, for whatever reason.
Now, here’s the kicker though… Those two findings make sense; the kicker is that I looked at the top five cities with the highest percent investment of dollars in the deals. Basically, out of all of my current investors, what cities represent the highest amount of dollars invested in the Ashcroft deals? And one city showed up that wasn’t on either one of the previous lists. First, it was New York City – okay, that was on there. Second – here’s the new one – Cincinnati. 13% of all investor dollars in my deals comes from Cincinnati, but Cincinnati wasn’t even on the other two lists for the cities that have my most number of investors, so what that means is that fewer people are investing significantly higher dollar amounts on average in Cincinnati than any other city. Why is that? It’s because I live here, right? But I’m not from here. I’ve lived here for approximately three years.
So here’s the good news for everyone who’s listening who lives in a city the size of Cincinnati or larger, or even smaller — but Cincinnati is basically the same size as Anchorage, Alaska, Stockton, California… What are some other ones? I had a couple other examples. Saint Paul, Minnesota and Toledo — that’s surprising to me, Toledo, Ohio. So if you’re living in a city of approximately the same size (about 300,000 people), then you have the resources around you to fund probably most of your deals just from people in that city.
So often we go and think that we want nationwide presence and we want to get massive exposure when the reality is you’ve got what you need in your backyard, it’s just a matter of leveraging that, and learning how to do it. So here are four ways to leverage the network that you are surrounded by in your city. But before I go in those four ways, I’ve been talking a lot…
Theo Hicks: I’m on board.
Joe Fairless: Alright, cool. One is host a local meetup. If you have time to attend a local meetup, you have time to host a local meetup, and the rewards for hosting a local meetup are exponentially greater than actually attending, even if you’re a passive investor.
I’m gonna suggest, even if you’re a passive investor and you attend meetups, if you were to host one, and maybe host one with other passive investors, or maybe host one where you bring in deal sponsors to talk about the deals in their business, that will elevate you to a different level of education and connection with others, at minimum, and perhaps it will open up a new revenue stream (if you’re looking for a new revenue stream), because you could pool maybe a group of you together and then maybe you get some sort of fee on top of that for leading the charge with an LLC that you all create… I don’t know, but it’s a no-brainer if you’re an active real estate investor; it’s a no-brainer.
If you’re attending a meetup – okay, great, but you need to be hosting a meetup. And if everyone took this advice, then I probably wouldn’t have this advice, because then there’d be a million meetups and no attendees, but not everyone will take this advice, so I’m giving the advice… And I’m living and breathing — the month after I arrived in Cincinnati to live here, I created a meetup, to make friends; that was the main reason why, to make friends, and it has resulted in investor relationships that I wouldn’t have if I didn’t host a meetup. Now Cincinnati represents 13% of all the investor dollars in the deals.
Now, one disclaimer – I had to remove my largest investor from this analysis because it would have greatly skewed everything. The largest investor has invested about 20 million dollars in our deals, so I had to remove that. He, by the way, was from Los Angeles and has moved to a different city. So I just wanted to give that disclaimer.
Theo Hicks: Just for the meetup, you’re saying how anyone has time to host a meetup… How much time would you say per month you spend on the meetup, besides the actual three hours?
Joe Fairless: I don’t spend any time on it now, but if I didn’t have team members — basically, when I started it, when I didn’t have team members doing it…
Theo Hicks: When have you started it?
Joe Fairless: …I would say one hour a month. You post it on Meetup.com, on Eventbrite and on Bigger Pockets. That’s about 45 minutes if you’re slow like me, when you get started, and you’ve got about 15 minutes of answering questions, or whatever.
Theo Hicks: Okay, so one hour of your time outside the actual meetup to host a meetup.
Joe Fairless: I’m gonna add one more hour, and the only reason why I’ll add one more hour is because ideally you bring in a speaker. By doing that, there’ll be some coordinating for the speaker to talk, in a no-pitch environment. Make sure that they are aware that they may not pitch anything and it’s purely education, no sales.
Okay, number two is host a board game and drinks night at your house. Colleen and I are doing that tomorrow — well, Friday, so I guess if you’re listening to the podcast today, then we’re hosting it tonight. You were supposed to come, and you just told me you and Marcella are not coming.
Theo Hicks: I can’t come, yeah.
Joe Fairless: Theo and Marcella were gonna come… I do this because I love board games, I love having people over, and I love getting together. In addition to having fun, we’re also gonna build and strengthen relationships with some investors of mine too, who are local and who are attending. It’s the investors and their significant other, they’re coming over. Doing stuff like that is something you can only do if you’re local. And we’re not playing Cashflow Quadrant, or anything like that, although I wouldn’t be opposed to it… We’re playing Balderdash, and Triopoly, which probably only Michigan and Ohio people would know about. But other games like that, and we’re just having fun.
Having those types of experiences and those types of events at your house brings a different level of relationship with your investors, and it’s important to come at it from an authentic standpoint; I just enjoy board games, I enjoy hanging out, but a by-product of that is our relationship is strengthened, and it is even better if you do it with your significant other and their significant other, because it helps everyone get to know each other’s families a lot more, and then that takes the level of trust and shoots it through the roof, because you all know each other incredbily well. That’s what you can get when you’re having conversations with your local investors, versus investors who live across the country.
Theo Hicks: Here’s a little bonus tip that’s coming to mind now – I know one of your clients, he was able to leverage his significant other’s network to raise money, so that’s something else too to keep in mind; just because you yourself may not think you have people in your network that could invest in deals, your significant other or some other family member might have a job or have some sort of connections, they know someone who knows people that would invest in your deals. That’s just like a little bonus tip that came to mind from the board night and significant other…
Joe Fairless: Let’s see… Number three, consistent online presence that has an interview component to it. Well, that’s my podcast. If you don’t have a podcast, then my recommendation is to have something that is available for people to access at any point in time, and it positions you as the thought leader. Two key parts to what this says, which is a consistent online presence that has an interview component – the two key parts are consistent and interview component.
Consistent – they want to see that you follow through with things over a long period of time, and it says something about who you are as a person. You can consistently do something over a long period of time, you stick to stuff, you commit to things and you follow through.
Two is the interview-based format. When you interview people, you then have them promote it to their network, and when you interview local people, they promote it to their network, which is likely people within the local area, and then you can meet those people who they promote it to and they reach out to eventually; you can have dinner with them and build the same level of relationship if you have rapport and if you two really connect.
Theo Hicks: And just another thought about having your online presence — I can’t remember what her name was off the top of my head, but we actually have a blog post coming out about it today (or if you’re listening to this on Friday, yesterday), and she was mentioning how when you’re building a brand and you’re doing it through a podcast, for example, you wanna make sure that you not only have your website aligned with the podcast, but also social media… Have all those three aligned, because if they listen to the podcast, then they’re gonna surf, they’re gonna be like “Okay, he’s got a podcast, he seems credible. Let’s look up and see if he’s got a website. Oh, okay, he’s got a website. Now, is he showing up in person somewhere? Oh, he does Facebook Live, so now I see an actual person. Oh, now he’s on social media also sharing advice, or he’s talking about his personal life, so you know that he’s an actual person.” Just kind of talking about aligning all those things to have that highest level of trust and credibility with your audience. I thought that was interesting.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, it’s important to know who you are, so that you can be consistent with what your presence looks like. When I got started as an entrepreneur, after I left advertising I went to someone’s apartment studio thing, and I had a suit and tie, and it was glamor shot style picture, and I posted it, I tweeted it — I hate Twitter… I don’t tweet at all anymore. I think there’s automatic sharing through Twitter for the podcast, but besides that… It’s just too much noise for me. Anyway, I tweeted out at the time when I was actively on Twitter, and a former colleague of mine replied back or tweeted back and he’s like, “Who is this guy in the suit?”, because it wasn’t congruent with who I was. I was trying to be someone who I wasn’t; that’s why right now I have an athletic shirt on, and I look like I’m about to go for a run, which I might, after this.
It’s important to be consistent with who you are. Whoever you are, be consistent with it, because if you have a suit and tie on your website, then you’re in jeans and a T-shirt in your YouTube videos, it just looks different than — people are gonna be confused about what you represent and who you are.
Theo Hicks: Exactly. Yeah, the confusion factor.
Joe Fairless: Cool. And then lastly, fourth tip is volunteer, then become a board member for that non-profit. I’ve talked about this a couple times – when I was in advertising, I joined the Texas Tech Alumni Advisory Board for the college and meeting communication. I did it because I wanted to give back, I wanted to help college students; I got a lot out of my experience there at Texas Tech, and I wanted to be involved, and I have been to Lubbock every year (I believe) since graduation, or at least since I’ve been on the board, which… I graduated in 2005, it’s 2017. I probably was on the board for about ten years. I’m pretty sure I’ve been back every single meeting – I don’t think I’ve missed a meeting – and I’ve always given back; through those relationships, now after I got out of advertising, I’ve had investors come from that board, and it was simply because I wanted to volunteer and help out and be more involved.
I’ve seen the same thing with Junior Achievement. I’m passionate about helping under-served communities and kids there, so that’s why all the profits from volume one and volume two of our books get donated to Junior Achievement in Cincinnati. Well, I also am on the board for Junior Achievement Cincinnati, and I have investor relationships through that board. By volunteering, then becoming a board member, you can accomplish the same things.
The important thing is to make sure that you’re genuinely interested and passionate, or at least want to contribute. Maybe not passionate initially, but you’re generally interested in the cause and you want to contribute. Then as you get more and more involved, then look to become a board member; after you volunteer, look to become a board member. Then once you become a board member, you’re likely gonna be surrounded by a bunch of ladies and gentlemen who are high achievers and also passionate about the same cause.
Theo Hicks: And built into the idea of non-profits volunteering is that idea of giving and contributing to other people, too.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, absolutely.
Theo Hicks: I think that being genuine and passionate — it’s kind of a thread that runs through all the different tips. You’ve gotta go in there with the idea of either educating yourself and then helping other people get educated, and then the benefits will come from that, instead of focusing on just the benefits and being hyper-analytical about that. That sounds like a thread that kind of runs through all the tips that you provide.
Joe Fairless: It’s a thread that runs through life… [laughs] Focus on helping and contributing, and then things will shake out the way–
Theo Hicks: I was talking to my Cincinnati realtor agent yesterday, as we were considering selling our personal house and she was coming over to look at it. It sounds like it’s similar to Junior Achievement; she helps out kids that go to – no one’s gonna know what this means, but [unintelligible [00:20:06].24] high school there that has lower income people that go there, and she is trying to teach them just life skills and discipline skills. She said she’s donated so much money and so much of her time, and even though her real estate business and this are not connected at all practically, she said that once she’s started investing all this time and money into this, her real estate business magically (that was her word) skyrocketed up. Even though they may seem like they’re not related, from her perspective, by her giving, she’s getting back way more, despite the fact that she’s volunteering, and things like that. That was interesting.
Joe Fairless: It’s a concept that it’s tough to really do a cause and effect analysis and quantify, but it’s a concept that the wealthiest of the wealthy people completely embrace, because they get it, they understand how it works; once we embrace that concept and live it, then our net worth will go through the roof.
Theo Hicks: Cool. So that ends that… Let’s move into some updates and observations. What do you have going on with your business, Joe, for the past week/
Joe Fairless: Well, closed on the deal, and things are going well. We’re highly occupied. We’ve already picked a new name for the property, we’re already got the branding selected… We were working on all this in due diligence. Got the branding done… It’s gonna be called Avery, and I’ve got the design style identified for our community space at the property. We’ve only owned it for a week, but just starting the renovations on units that we can start renovations on, and gonna rock and roll. It’s a strong start.
Then I was in North Carolina, in Raleigh — I guess technically Chapel Hill; I flew into Raleigh and then went to Chapel Hill. I had no idea — do you know the oldest university…? Guess what it is? I’m kind of giving it away…
Theo Hicks: Is it North Carolina?
Joe Fairless: Yeah, it’s North Carolina. [laughs]
Theo Hicks: I think I’ve heard that before.
Joe Fairless: I shouldn’t have started with “I went to Chapel Hill.” [laughter] I had no idea, it’s the oldest university in the United States… 17-something.
Theo Hicks: You’d think it’d be like Harvard, or Yale, or something like that.
Joe Fairless: North-East. I thought it’d be in the North-East somewhere. Yeah. Anyway, we walked around campus there, and then did the gratitude training, and… I don’t have any face tattoos and I don’t have a shaved head.
Theo Hicks: [unintelligible [00:22:33].04]
Joe Fairless: I survived that experience. It was something that I’m glad that the organization exists; I wholeheartedly embrace the message, and I got some takeaways from it. One takeaway… My mom and my step-dad divorced when I was a couple years after college, when I was living in New York City, and they married when I was in the sixth grade, so I grew up with my mom and my stepdad, and he’s a great man. He and I have lost touch. Not for any negative reason, we just don’t communicate… So one thing I made a commitment to do in that training was to reach out to him, so I’m gonna actually call him tomorrow and reconnect with him. So that’s one thing.
The second is they have an exercise that is an exercise where — there’s like 60-70 people in this room that you’re doing the training with, and the exercise is there’s an inner circle and an outer circle of people. The inner circle just stays stationary; the outer circle rotates from one person to the next, and when you get in front of the person, you say what is the most attractive thing and the least attractive thing about that person. Not necessarily physically, but just general presence, things you’ve picked up from that person as they’ve communicated with the group in the previous days, maybe side interactions you’ve had with the person etc. Well, the common I got from the least attractive, besides the old men who said they didn’t like my beard, was that I could open up more. I have a lot to share, but I was a little bit closed off… So I took that to heart; I think that is the case. The most attractive was I’m warm, and some good stuff like that, like I connect with people etc. So that was the second takeaway.
And the third takeaway is eye contact. We did an eye contact exercise, and you just stare into these people’s eyes for a very long time and connect with them, and it’s a valuable thing to do, and it’s a way to connect and really see and feel what other people are seeing and feeling through their eyes, and know what they are experiencing. So those are the three takeaways I got away from it.
There’s a part two, and I wouldn’t do that, and apparently that’s blasphemy if you don’t do it, but there was too much sitting down and sharing. Coming from Unleash The Power Within, where you get up, you dance… Unleash The Power Within is a conference for the ADD, and I don’t have ADD by any means – I’m probably almost the opposite of that – but I appreciate how active you are, because as Tony Robbins says, emotion is created by motion, and there’s no motion in this conference that I just went to, the gratitude training. You’re sitting on your butt for two and a half hours, and then you have like a 30-minute or an hour break, and then you go in, you sit on your butt for two and a half hours. The only part where you do stuff is these exercises, which I found incredibly effective. But too much sitting and too much sharing; there’s people who share crazy stuff, and I just wasn’t into that as much.
Theo Hicks: Those are good lessons, and I’m glad that you have a full head of hair…
Joe Fairless: Full head of hair, and no face tattoos.
Theo Hicks: Perfect.
Joe Fairless: What’s the latest with you?
Theo Hicks: So rental property-wise, I put it under a property management company. That is all set up, they’ve got the keys, they’ve got all the tenant information, so I don’t worry about making any more maintenance personally myself. They’re gonna send me a report every month, and for now I’ll just kind of use that, and kind of check in and see how well they’re doing. I’m trying to not have these massive expectations for how this is gonna go, just because I’ve never had a property management company before.
They’re newer, and they’ve been managing properties in this area for a while, but it’s just been their own, and now they’re finally taking other people’s. I think they were maybe managing like 24 units before, and now they’re managing 36, so I guess that’s increased by 50%. We’ll see how it goes… They’ve been very good so far, but again, [unintelligible [00:26:25].24] and no maintenance issues have happened that I know of, so we’ll see how that goes.
I’m moving to Tampa, as I’ve mentioned last week, so we’re in the process of renting out my personal house. My piece of advice for people that may be interested in doing higher end single-family rentals that are on the higher end of the rent range, and if you’re in a large city and you live by a hospital, you can rent out to people that will be moving in in the summer, May/June/July timeframe, because doctors will come in for their fellowships, or their — I can’t remember what they call them, but… Whenever you’re just out of school and you’ve got your first job, but it’s not really a job, because they work like 100 hours and get paid very little… But they need a place to live.
Joe Fairless: Residency?
Theo Hicks: Residency, there you go. So we’ve gotten a bunch of people reaching out so far about “Hey, your house is beautiful. We wanna move in in June or July”, and we’re just like “It’s a little far out, we want a little bit of mortgage for that loan” but if we were re-renting it in June or July, then it’d be perfect and I’m sure we’d get a lot more doctors reaching out for that, so that’s a great way to rent out a property at a higher rate, because we’re getting no traction anywere else but these doctors, because I think I’ve put it too high. So I’m gonna reduce that cost. We were thinking about selling it…
Joe Fairless: What were you trying to rent it for?
Theo Hicks: $2,500.
Joe Fairless: And what did you lower it to?
Theo Hicks: I reduced it to $2,350 and I think we’re ultimately probably gonna rent it for $2,200. That’s where I’m at in my head, by if we get $2,350, perfect. If we get $2,200, we’ll still cash-flow… Not a lot, we’ll probably cash-flow $150/month.
Joe Fairless: But they’re paying down the mortgage…
Theo Hicks: They’re paying down the mortgage, and we were thinking about selling it and pulling out the capital to buy more rentals, just because if we’re gonna be able to pull out $100,000, why not use that to buy two fourplexes and cashflow way more than $150/month… But we’re not gonna be able to sell at a high enough dollar that we’ll be able to pull out anything more than maybe 20k… So it’s just not really worth it.
Joe Fairless: What’s your interest rate on that, do you know? I’m wondering if you can cash-out refinance…
Theo Hicks: We just refinanced the property, and we got the appraisal on it. I think our interest rate —
Joe Fairless: It doesn’t matter, yeah… Alright, so about what you’re getting out.
Theo Hicks: But our payment did reduce significantly. We refinanced because the interest rate was so high — I think it was like a 5.5% at the time, and now it’s closer to a 4%, so I think it dropped by a 1%, maybe 1,5%.
Then we’re also in the process of buying a house in Tampa. We went down there this weekend, for the first time ever; we’d never been to Tampa before. We drove around to as many areas as we could, and we saw maybe eight properties, and in much different areas than we were considering living in. We put in an offer on a house, and it was accepted, so now we’re closing, 11th January.
Joe Fairless: How are you closing so quickly if you have financing?
Theo Hicks: So it was 30 days from the day that we put it under contract. Our lender – I don’t know how he does this, but he can close with financing as quick as 18 days.
Joe Fairless: Wow.
Theo Hicks: They’re called Guaranteed Rate…
Joe Fairless: Oh yeah, I know them.
Theo Hicks: And it happened to be our lender that did the loans on our rental properties and our personal house is certified/qualified to give out loans in Tampa, so we’re just gonna use him for our house down there, too. We’re doing business with him, because we’ll use him if we need to buy rental properties here.
It was 30 days, and originally we were gonna do it in 23 days, but the seller wanted an extra seven days for whatever reason. It’s good, because she’s gonna start the week before that, so she’ll only be in like a hotel for a week. Someone from her company just relocated here, and he is closing maybe this week, and he has been here for three months, going back and forth, living in hotels… But I think if just the lender is able to do that, and we’re gonna do some long-term debt on the property…
Joe Fairless: And why don’t you do Airbnb for your property here, versus look for someone at $2,200-$2,300?
Theo Hicks: Mostly just that I don’t know what the logistics would be of how that would work, us not being here at all… Because we’ve got friends that have done Airbnb before, but they lived in the actual house. When someone moves out, you have to clean it, you have to resupply all the toilet paper, and I don’t know how much would cost to actually do that versus how much higher we have to rent it and if people actually wanna buy it, but we should consider doing Airbnb until June or July if we have people interested in renting.
Joe Fairless: Yeah. So it’s really just fact-finding.
Theo Hicks: Yeah.
Joe Fairless: I think that’s a good exercise to go through, to fact-find to see how you could put that together, how other people are doing it. I’m pretty sure I’ve interviewed some Airbnb people; if you can reach out to them…
Theo Hicks: See how you Airbnb out of state houses…
Joe Fairless: Yeah, that’s a good Google search right there, right? It’d be easy.
Theo Hicks: Especially since, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re gonna be selling our furniture, so we might as well just keep it there and Airbnb it out.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, and then do it until the summer. Test it until the summer, and then if you like it, keep rolling with it. If not, then don’t.
Theo Hicks: I’ll look into it and we’ll talk about it next week.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, cool.
Theo Hicks: And that’s it, we’re just kind of preparing everything for the move. Once we move down there, I plan on trying to tap into the investor network there and maybe taking your advice and starting a meetup.
Joe Fairless: Host a meetup.
Theo Hicks: And then as of now, I plan on continuing to invest in Cincinnati, just because I know the area really well. I know it’s gonna take six months to a year for me to feel comfortable with the areas down in Tampa… So I’ll do a direct mailer once we kind of replenish our money, and go from there.
Joe Fairless: Sweet. Big moves, my friend. Great stuff.
Theo Hicks: Yeah. Alright, some housekeeping items… So your Best Ever Conference is coming up here in less than two months. We’ve got the location secured, we’ve got speakers, we’ve got Terrell Fletcher, a bunch of other people that are well-known that you’ll recognize, so make sure that you go to BestEverConference.com, and secure your ticket for that.
Would you say that the advice that’s given there is for all investors, from someone that has never done a deal before, to someone like you? Or would you say it’s more for people that have done a couple of deals and are ready to scale or just to kind of improve their existing business?
Joe Fairless: The primary audience is people who have done at least one or two deals. Everyone who attended — I think literally, everyone who attended last year had done multiple deals before, and it’s a higher-level, more sophisticated conversation than what’s typical at a conference. That being said, if you’ve never done a deal, yeah, you’ll benefit from it. It’s like if you’re in fifth grade and you’re learning tennis, and you’re playing third-graders… You’re gonna smoke their ass, right? You’re gonna beat them real good. But if you are competing against eighth-graders, then you’re gonna lose but you’re gonna learn a lot. Same thing here – if you come to this conference, you’re gonna be around a bunch of eighth-graders if you’re in the fifth grade from an investing standpoint, but you’re gonna learn a lot from the eighth-graders.
Theo Hicks: So it’s BestEverConference.com. Also, make sure you join the Best Ever Show Community on Facebook. Usually, we post the Facebook Lives there, and we’re trying to get a bunch of the Best Ever Listeners to join the startup community there, and interactions with the listeners, the guests, Joe… So make sure you join that. Actually, we’ve added a new feature on the website…
Joe Fairless: I love this one.
Theo Hicks: So we went through all the blogs that we have… We have almost 400 blogs now on there, and we categorized all of them into 30 different real estate categories; we’ve got apartment syndication, we’ve got fix and flipping, we’ve got lead generation, we’ve got overall real estate strategy where we give you step-by-step guides to finding off-market deals, or buying this many properties and paying them off in this number of years… So make sure you go to the TheBestEverBlog.com, or just go to the main website and click on the Blog, and then go there and click on whatever category you wanna learn about, and every single blog post related to that category will be listed out for you.
Joe Fairless: Awesome, yeah. It’s inspired/ripped off from Tim Ferriss’ blog. I was on Tim Ferriss’ blog and it had all these easy ways to get access to the information that’s most relevant to you through these categories. We have a whole bunch of great content, but you couldn’t search for any of it, it was just very cumbersome, and perhaps impossible in some cases to find the stuff that you’re looking for… Now all you’ve gotta do is go to TheBestEverBlog.com, and you’ll be able to search for everything from private money to picking your market, to — if you’re a passive investor, articles that are relevant to you, fix and flipping, all sorts of things… You can easily search and get access to those articles. I love that so much.
It’s helpful for me too, because I’m always like, “Hm, I know I interviewed someone, I know there’s a blog post and I’d like to reference it”, but I couldn’t search on my own website for this stuff; now I’ll simply go to TheBestEverBlog.com and check it out.
Theo Hicks: And finally, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and leave a review for your chance to be the review of the week. This week we’ve got Julian Junior, and I loved the title to his comment – “More precious than rubies.” [laughter]
Joe Fairless: Wow! Alright, Julian…
Theo Hicks: So he says: “Mr. Fairless without a doubt delivers content that is not only designed to inspire, but is catered to the needs of others, which is the most important. This man truly wants to help you. With the type of wisdom he is giving away, I’ve learned more in just one day from him than the last few years of my search for quality content. Thanks Joe and team members, but as you would say, it’s not about me.”
Joe Fairless: I love that, wow! That’s top 1% of my favorite reviews. He started off strong with the subject, “More precious than rubies.” I love that so much! [laughs] I’m gonna use that phrase for the rest of my life on certain things; “You’re more precious than rubies”, I love that. Well, thanks everyone for listening. I’m really grateful for you listening to this show, and learning along with us as we go through this journey together. If you have a chance to do a review on iTunes, that would be much appreciated. It helps us get high-quality guests to this show, so it helps you as well in the long run.
Also, if you’re on Spotify, you can subscribe on Spotify to the show, so that’s a new thing, too. Have a wonderful day, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
