Follow Along Friday is back for the New Year! Today Joe and Theo tell us mistakes they have made when evaluating deals and what they do differently now. If you’re in the market for any property, especially apartment buildings or communities, this is definitely an episode you want to listen to. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
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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 – it is the first Follow Along Friday of 2018. Happy new year!
Theo Hicks: Happy new year to you too, Joe!
Joe Fairless: Thank you. Let’s go ahead and get rockin’.
Theo Hicks: We’ll dive right into it. We’re gonna talk about how to evaluate a property in person before making an offer. Obviously, when you’re doing your pre-offer due diligence or underwriting on a deal, you’re gonna run your market comps, but you also want to visit the property in person before making your offer, so we’re gonna talk about you and your company approach that process.
Joe Fairless: Well, I’m gonna flip the script unexpectedly on you… How did you do that on your 12-units?
Theo Hicks: I’ll say what I did, and then while I’m telling the story, I’ll say what I would have done differently, because as most people who have been following my journey know, there’s all these mistakes that I’ve made that moving forward I would do something differently, so that I would not be paying as much in maintenance costs now.
Basically, when they came on the MLS, I went and visited them in person. I kind of just walked through very high-level and looked at the overall — not necessarily the condition from a deferred maintenance standpoint, but just I wanted to see what the kitchens and the bathrooms looked like, so I could figure out what I could… Either if I needed to update them to get higher rents, or if I’d just keep them how they were and have them rented out.
What I should have done instead of just looking at kind of the aesthetics of it, I should have looked at the big-ticket items. I should have looked at the boilers, all of them, and seeing how old they were, and if they were maintained, if I saw anything weird on them like duct tape or rust spots, because all of them were kind of Jerry-rigged and put together by the previous owner, I found out later… I would have looked at motors on the garage doors to see how those — because they’re fourplexes, so they have two garage doors in the back… So this might not apply to everyone.
One of the huge things that is still an issue to this day is plumbing. I would have at least looked at the plumbing to see what type of plumbing it was, whether it was a PVC or if was the old cast iron… Because now I know that if it’s old cast iron, it’s probably gonna need to be replaced here pretty soon. That’s something I could do before having to have a plumber come in there.
What else would I have looked at…? Right now it’s obviously freezing cold outside, so I looked at the windows to see what the condition of the windows was, because one of the things I didn’t really expect was tenants to reach out and be like, “Hey, it’s freezing in here because these windows are so old, and they’re drafty.” Obviously, it’s not due to neglect, it’s just because it’s — it was like minus five degrees outside a couple days ago here… So I would have looked at that.
I would have just looked at the big-ticket maintenance items to see what their condition was, because those are very expensive to fix. And if you don’t look at those at all and you don’t at the very least put in a couple hundred bucks a month or per unit for cap-ex long-term, you’re gonna be losing money the first couple months when you get in there and you’ve got tenants reaching out about “The pipes are clogged…” Because the plumbing is so old, their toilets are clogged. Or winter time approaches and the boilers won’t fire up.
It costs like 10k-15k to replace a boiler, or at least a couple thousand dollars to replace radiators. These are all things that I didn’t even think about at all. I just focused on, “Okay, this kitchen looks pretty good. The countertops are maybe a little older and I’m gonna put $1,000 into countertops…” So I’d say just big-ticket items is what I would have done if I was doing it now.
Joe Fairless: If you were doing it now and you were looking at the garage door, you were looking at the boiler, you were looking at the plumbing, would you with your current level of knowledge and expertise be able to know if they needed to be replaced, or would you need to bring in an expert regardless of whatever you see?
Theo Hicks: I would [unintelligible [00:06:05].02] but I would be able to tell with maybe 75% certainty whether or not something at least needs to be done… Not what level of maintenance it would need, I wouldn’t know, but I can just look — for example, I’ve spent a lot of money fixing radiators; if I would have known what to look for at the time, I would just look at this little valve, and the valve is completely rusted over, then you’ve gotta replace it. You could see it with your own eyes, I just didn’t know what to look for.
Or the garage door, for example. The garage door that I had to replace, it was very obvious that it was broken. The chain was laying on a pipe, the [unintelligible [00:06:39].00] was bent… So basically now I wouldn’t necessarily have to have an expert, because whenever the boiler people came in, the garage door people came in, the plumbing people came in, I was with them and asking them a million questions, like “What do I have to look for? What do I do to maintain these things at the end of the year, and after winter what do I do to with the boilers? Do I have to bleed all the valves again? Do I have to evacuate the entire system? What do I have to do?”
That was very helpful, and I think I’d be able to at least tell, “Okay, these boilers are fine” or “Okay, we’re gonna do something to these radiators or these pipes.” Then I would bring in an expert after I put the property under contract to kind of go into more details.
Joe Fairless: Okay, that makes sense, and certainly you learned throughout the process… You actually learned a lot by not doing it the right way initially, because now you know what to look for on your future properties and you don’t necessarily have to be accompanied with an expert.
When we look at properties prior to putting it under contract, I don’t have the expertise of identifying all of the things that you mentioned. It’s not part of my skillset, or at least I don’t excel in that area. So we always have a property management partner with us, who tours it with us, so that he/she can identify any of those big-ticket items.
So let’s take a step back though… When we go to an apartment community prior to having put in an offer, or at least prior to that offer being accepted, then we look for things and we seek things out that we can’t find on Google or through the financials. So it’s a matter of some sort of intangible information, or what additional on-the-ground information can we acquire to complete the picture… Because we’ve got a picture already drawn up, but it’s incomplete because we haven’t visited the property and there might be some color or some other things we need to fill in.
When we visit the property, we first want to look for those big-ticket items, and because that’s my primary skillset – or even my secondary skillset, quite frankly; my dad is great at that, but that gene didn’t get in me – the property management partner will tour it with us and identify the big-ticket items, if they need to be replaced.
Now, usually if it’s an on-market deal, the information is fairly accurate from the broker, but you just can’t count on it. If it’s an off-market deal, then all bets are off; go in thinking you need to replace everything and be pleasantly surprised if that’s not the case when you go do the tour.
So one is the big-ticket items that you mentioned. Then two is you ideally have a tour with the property manager, and when you speak to the property manager, you’re asking questions not that you have seen on the rent roll, like not “What’s your occupancy over the last 30 days?”; that’s on the rent roll. I mean, you can ask it, but it’s not that good of a question. A good question would be “Tell me about your competition and what type of feedback are you getting from people who don’t rent from you and they end up renting at the competition? Who is the competition?” Because eventually, you’re gonna go visit that competition.
Also, the people who do rent, what are some of the reasons why they rent? Where do they work? What unit sizes are most appealing to them? What amenities, or when you show the apartment, what’s the wow factor, if there is one? What would you do different if you had a budget that was unlimited in order to attract more high-quality residents? You’ll get this feedback from the person — and you also should ask him/her how long they’ve worked at the property, because that will give you a frame of reference for their frame of reference.
Once you ask those questions, you’ll get a better idea of who’s living there, what are they looking for, where do they work, and what the competition is doing to attract them, and what you’re currently doing to attract them.
Then you start getting the lay of the land for the on-the-ground stuff. Once you do that, then you want to visit the surrounding area. It depends on your market, but we go five, seven miles out and just visit the surrounding area around the property. The property is a dot in the middle of the circle, and then go seven-mile radius around it, and just see what’s going on. Specifically, look for the closest Walmart. And again, it depends on your market. North-East people are like “Walmart? We don’t want Walmart!”
When you look for the closest Walmart or Starbucks or Chipotle, you want to look for when it was built, because that also gives you a sense of path of progress. If it’s a relatively new Chipotle or McDonald’s, then you have a sense that the smart people in Fortune 500 companies have identified this area as a path of progress and growth, and they plunked down a Starbucks or whatever right there, and maybe there’s something to it. Certainly, it’s not the end-all-be-all, but it’s definitely an indicator of some sort of potential growth, because they’ve got access to a lot more research than we do.
Theo Hicks: I think you interviewed someone on your podcast before who was [unintelligible [00:12:14].10] Starbucks strategy; one of his strategies was “I look where the new Starbucks are going and then I invest in that area because of it being a path of progress; they must know something I don’t know.”
Joe Fairless: Yeah, absolutely. And when you’re touring the property, you also want to talk to the residents. The questions you ask are “What do you like about living here?” That’s assuming they do like living here… “How do you like living here?” That’s the better question, “How do you like living here?”, and they’ll tell you, they’ll say straight up: “I hate it. Blah-blah-blah, maintenance”, or “Theo’s got these really thin windows and it makes it really cold”, or whatever it is… And you’ll get a sense of the vibe, at least for this resident. And maybe ask a couple residents whenever you’re there. That’s the type of intel you can’t get, or it’s very hard to get if you’re not there.
The last thing you’ll want to do when you visit your potential purchase is you want to visit the comps. Actually, there’s two things – you wanna visit the comps and you want to see what they’re charging in rent. You already know what they’re charging, because you’ve done your due diligence prior to arriving and you know the rents; you’re going to the properties to verify that they are charging these rents, and you get to see first-hand why they’re charging them, what type of amenities does the property have, what’s in the units, are they renovated units? What type of renovations? What level of amenities do they have? Is it clean? Is it next to an area that doesn’t look very safe? Those sorts of things.
The last thing that you want to do is you want to tour your potential property as though you’re a resident, and you want to walk in the area, which will be usually the leasing center, as though you’re a resident and you’ve gotta see things. This is what I first experience — and again, you’re probably gonna update this stuff, but just get a sense of the community as it is. There are some things that even if you update it, they’re not gonna move… For example, if it’s an apartment community and there’s a big leasing center right upfront, you’re most likely not gonna knock that down and build another leasing center somewhere else. So if there’s pros or cons about that leasing center being right there upfront, then make note of that. Or if the leasing center is in the back or maybe it’s right next to the highway, when it could be in the back, or it couldn’t be, and it’s stuck there, then those are all things to take note of. You don’t want it next to the highway, to be really loud, and it’s not very peaceful… Although there are advantages to that, too. So you just have to look at it from a case-by-case scenario.
But then when you go to tour the units, then when you go in the unit, you need to know what type of resident is going to be attracted to this unit, and is this the resident that you’re seeking to attract once you do renovations? Or if you’re not doing renovations, is this going to attract your ideal resident?
Some things I always looked for – one is the closet. That’s huge, because with some of our properties, our residents choose to spend their money on cars and clothes and other items, and they have a whole lot of stuff. And having a large, walk-in closet is a big amenity, and that’s tough to change. If you buy the property and it’s got really small closets, it’s gonna be a hard change to make. So if it already has these nice built-in closets, then that’s great.
Another is just the overall flow of the apartment and what do you see first. How many bathrooms are there? Are they convenient to the bathroom? Is it an open layout? Is it closed off and boxy? That sort of thing.
You’ll find that these newer apartments that are being built in the last two-three years, they are smaller square-footage-wise generally speaking, but they feel more open because the architects and the developers have identified, “We can do smaller apartments as long as you can make them feel more open”, and it’s more cost-effective for them to do it. So if you’re looking at a 1980’s, 1970’s apartment or older, look at how boxy and closed in it feels, or how open it feels, because it’s really about the feeling that the potential resident has when they visit the property and they can see themselves and their family living there.
So those are all the things you do when you visit a property, and we have a document that summarizes all of this stuff, and then some, and it lists out the specific questions that you should ask the different people. And if you e-mail info@JoeFairless.com, Samantha will send you the document so that you have this when you tour a property to purchase.
Theo Hicks: A couple follow-up questions… On the first step, when you’re obviously looking at the big-ticket items and you’re touring the property with you actual property management company, I’m assuming it’d be different if we’re looking at a large apartment community versus a duplex or a fourplex. From my understanding, usually for those larger apartment communities there’s like an offer period, so you have time to schedule, like “Hey, property management company, can you come in this day or this day or this day, at this time, to come to the property with me”, whereas if you’re investing in a smaller deal that just came on the market and it’s like a quick rush, and you’re [unintelligible [00:17:48].10] the next day to see it, and your property manager can’t come out there… It’d be a little bit different.
What I’m saying is it might make sense for someone who’s investing in smaller units to be better, at least, again, being able to identify if something needs to be done to these big-ticket items. Not necessarily what needs to be done, but if something needs to be done, so you can make that decision, “Okay, I might need to replace the roof” or “I might need to replace the boiler, so I’m gonna take that into account when I’m formulating my offer”, just because I’d be afraid that I’d miss out on deals if I had to schedule a plumber and a contractor and an HVAC guy to come in and look at everything, and I’ve gotta schedule that with the owner, and him having to give the tenant the schedule, so that they’re home when we come to see the property, so they approve this… That could just take too long.
I know for these 12 units that I bought, it was just so quick. It was like they were posted, I saw them the next day, we put in an offer that day without having to bring anyone in. So I can just imagine it being slightly different for the smaller units on that first step.
Joe Fairless: I don’t disagree with you, because I would never say it’s not beneficial to have an additional skillset, because that’s what you’re saying… But let me put an asterisk on this – there’s another way to do what you were seeking to accomplish without acquiring that additional skillset. Because I know myself and what I’m good at, and I’m just not a mechanical person; that’s just not in my nature. Instead, I’m really good at building relationships with people, and I enjoy it; I enjoy the heck out of it. So instead, what I would do if I were buying a two-unit, a four-unit, a twelve-unit, is I would become friends with a local inspector in town. I’d buy him/her coffee, or — I don’t drink coffee, but maybe lunch, or something, and we’d just be pals. And I would tell him/her “Hey, if I come across a deal and I need to check it out, this isn’t my skillset; would you be okay coming to the property with me?” They would say yes or no. If they say yes, then great, they’d come.
If I am terrible with people and I don’t have a mechanical skillset, then I would simply reach out to some property inspectors and I would say, “Hey, I’ll pay $100 for an hour of your time if when I have a property you come meet me and we just look at it together and you just tell me high-level thoughts, nothing official.” I would approach it that way.
That way, instead of me trying to acquire a skillset that I know I have no foundation for inherently, I would bring another expert and then team up with me and just give me their thoughts.
Theo Hicks: That’s great advice. I’ll just say that too, because now once I’ve gone through this process, I have a plumber I could call, or HVAC guy I could call. So the only time you really run into issues is if it’s your first deal and you haven’t been doing any type of teambuilding beforehand. So that’s why you should build a team beforehand, right?
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Theo Hicks: Perfect. So again, the document that this conversation is based off of, you can get that if you e-mail info@joefairless.com. Alright, so let’s move on to any updates or observations… I know you said you’ve got a couple of observations from the holiday season…
Joe Fairless: Just a couple. One is Colleen and I were at a restaurant… We always sit in the bar area because we like the action in the bar, versus sitting at a table, secluded. So we’re sitting at the bar area, and Colleen is a raging alcoholic — no, I’m kidding; we’re sitting at the bar area, and we’d never been to this restaurant before… Not Cabela, but…
Theo Hicks: [unintelligible [00:21:19].14]
Joe Fairless: I think that’s an outdoor company.
Theo Hicks: Yeah…
Joe Fairless: Anyway, some restaurant that starts with C, and there is clearly a regular who comes in, because everyone’s welcoming this guy. “Oh hey, you want your usual…?” “Sure.” Well, he sits down — and this is before Christmas. The regular comes in, sits down, and the bartender, who clearly has been there a while, because she knows everyone, she hands this regular a gift… And he’s like, “No, no, you shouldn’t have! You shouldn’t have! What are you doing? No, no, no, you shouldn’t have…!” and she’s like, “No, I wanted to get you something for the holidays.” I thought that was so smart – it ended up being just a plastic big candy cane with Skittles in it. That’s it. I think there’s a card too, but a plastic candy cane with Skittles. Probably the overall cost was $7, at most… I’m being really aggressive there on the price. Well, do you think she got more than a $7 tip for that?
Theo Hicks: Yeah.
Joe Fairless: I do, too. And it is the law of reciprocity. She was so smart — I don’t know if she consciously thought through this, but as soon as I saw that, I was like, “You’re on point, girl! That is so smart.” She proactively gave him something, and I can almost guarantee that she got her ROI and then some, not only that day, but in the future, too.
So it was just something smart that I saw a bartender do to a regular. It’s something that we can all implement in our business. Even if we’re not bartenders, we can implement the give-give-give-give-give, and in some cases – in most cases, hopefully – you’re not expecting to receive, you’re not expective a cause and effect relationship there, but the reality is you will receive. Maybe it’s not from that instance of giving, maybe it’s just from the Universe or whatever, but I guarantee you’re gonna get a lot more in return.
Then the second thing – and this is just a quick thing… I was watching the ball games, and Northwestern beat some school, I forget the school. On the half-time interview, the head coach for Northwestern was interviewed, and one of his players got kicked out of the game because of a targeting call; his defensive player allegedly hit the defenseless receiver in the head, and got kicked out of the game. Well, it was clear that he shouldn’t have been kicked out of the game, so the sideline reporter asked this coach – his name is Patt Fitzgerald – about it, and he didn’t even address whether or not the person should have been kicked out, he just said “Next man up!”
I loved his approach, because it’s something that a winner does. A winner doesn’t focus on if that person should or shouldn’t have been kicked out, a winner doesn’t focus on what may or may not have happened. It already happened, so now what do we do about it? I just loved his quick comment, because a lot of the times when head coaches for football teams are interviewed about something like that, they focus on that in particular, and they’re like “Oh, I don’t know…”, or they might say, “Well, we’ve got another person, and hopefully they’re ready to be ready.” Patt Fitzgerald said “Next man up!”, and I know that’s the approach that we need to take as real estate investors when stuff happens to us. Okay, yeah, the boiler went out, or a resident is calling about the windows – okay, now what do I do? What’s next? Versus sulking about “Well, I should have looked at this during the inspection process.”
I’ve talked about this just playing softball, my softball team, where someone drops to fly ball, then they’re pissed of about it for three innings – well, that’s just dumb. Just get over it immediately, and then don’t let that carry into other stuff. It’s pretty easy to tell basically someone’s success level as a professional – and perhaps personal, too – if they immediately move on and focus on how can that be empowering, and move forward, and “That’s the reality of what happened, so whatever, move on!” versus sulking about it, getting pissed off, and letting that affect other areas of your life, or in this particular case, the game.
Theo Hicks: That was the theme of that interview you did with Jay Williams… It’s exactly what he was talking about, how he had that car accident. I’m sure there was a time period where he was very upset about that – and obviously you would be – but then he was able to kind of reframe it as something to empower him to move past it and use that experience to become a motivational speaker, write his book, be a college basketball analyst, and things like that.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, he was playing for Chicago Bulls, and got in the accident, and then no more Chicago Bulls. That’s huge, but just keep on moving.
Theo Hicks: And also I liked the anecdote about the bartender with the gift. In real estate you’re always working with someone, whether it’s an agent, or a contractor, whatever, so there’s opportunities to do that. It’s very inexpensive, but you’re gonna be at the top of that person’s mind.
Joe Fairless: It feels good to do it. It feels really good to give, too. What have you got going on?
Theo Hicks: Well, I am closing on my house in Tampa in a week from today, and then we’ll be moving two days after that, so next Saturday… So we’re kind of just trying to figure out things here, like packing and all that fun stuff.
We did find a renter for our house, signed a lease, we got a security deposit, so that’s exciting.
Joe Fairless: That’s outstanding.
Theo Hicks: That’s gonna be paying the mortgage on the house, so now I officially have 13 rental doors, so that’s fun. Then, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve put those 12 units under management, and I was kind of explaining to you beforehand how much better it feels to not be the person that’s actually managing the property. In my opinion, as a tactician, like actually on the ground, doing the tactical work, you can’t focus as much on strategy. And I didn’t even really know it at the time; I was just always playing catch-up, and always trying to fix this maintenance problem, or collect rent from this person…
When you’re not doing those tasks, you can focus on, “Alright, so what’s the longer-term play here?” For example, some leases that are ending… Before, I was kind of like just “Hey, are you gonna resign or are you gonna leave?”, because I was so focused on those things. But now instead of just asking them that, I can say “Okay, we’ve got two options. You can raise your rent to this [unintelligible [00:27:20].00] and move out”, because April, May, June is coming up here pretty soon, so if they do move out, that’s the best time to have someone move out, because that’s when most people are looking for renters.
I had a really good strategy call with my property. We were kind of just brainstorming how to approach signing the leases, because everyone is still on the old leases from the old owner, and a couple of ideas that we had that I thought were just kind of interesting that I wanted to share was there’s 12 units, six are one-bed and six are two-beds, and we’re trying to figure out if we’re gonna do all new leases right away. If we do that, they’re all gonna end at the exact same time, so we’ve got 12 people… Let’s say half of them wanna move out at the exact same time – that’s not gonna be good. So what if we stagger them, so we just talk to these four people this month, and then the next month we’ll talk to these four people, and then the next month we’ll talk to these four people.
Actually, what if we did all the one-bedroom units at the same time and all the two-bedroom units at the same time, or do half the one-bedroom units one month, and half the next month… Because if you’re gonna have vacancies, at least from my perspective, I almost think that you wanna have the same type of unit vacant, because if you’ve got a one-bedroom unit that’s vacant, and you’ve got it listed and you need to choose from four people who we wanted to pick for our one unit, well now we’ve got to choose from four people for two units, so we’ve already got the built-in people that are wanting a one-bedroom unit, whereas if we’ve got a one-bedroom and a two-bedroom, it’s like “Oh, I really want that one-bed. The two-bed is too big”, and now we’ve gotta find someone else for that two-bedroom.
So this is an idea that I had, and we’re gonna try that and see what happens. I wanted to bring that up to see what your thoughts were on that.
Joe Fairless: I would think the opposite, I don’t know… Because I haven’t owned a 12-unit and gone through this process.
Theo Hicks: Neither have I. [laughter]
Joe Fairless: I would think that it would be good to have a couple different options. I just know we’ll have two-bedrooms and one-bedrooms, and one-bedrooms tend to go quicker, for whatever reason, at most of our properties. If I had kept it even, then I could always plug in someone for a one, versus trying to always put people in two’s. And you might feel more inclined, if you don’t have any one-bedrooms but you have two’s, you might feel more inclined to lower the rent on the two-bedroom just to fill it with someone who wanted a one but you didn’t have a one. I don’t know, test it out… Not my money. [laughter]
Theo Hicks: Yeah… I’m very curious to see how it goes. At the time we were talking about, I was like — I just remembered when we had so many people that wanted the one-bedroom unit, and we had turned so many people away at the end that were qualified to live there. It’s just — this person right here was the best candidate, so it’ll be better to just be like, “Oh, you know, we’ve got another one-bedroom…” Because we were telling them that, that we might have another one-bedroom open up, because at the time we planned on potentially having another vacancy occur, but it just didn’t happen. So yeah, we’ll see what happens.
I guess overall, I enjoy this strategy, strategizing, and then kind of having the property manager go in and implement and then come back and tell me, “Hey, this didn’t work” or “Hey, this is going great.” And since the property manager is still small, I get to talk to him directly and we get to kind of figure it out together, which is fun. It’s kind of fun to do that, because we both don’t really know what we’re doing, so we’re just figuring it out together.
I think besides that, I was thinking of what my real estate goals were gonna be for this year. I plan on getting more details on it, but I wanna double our portfolio this year. We had 12 units last year, and we wanna get to 24 by the end of this year.
Joe Fairless: Outstanding.
Theo Hicks: I’m gonna dive in to see how many direct mailers I have to send out or how many deals I need to look at, how much money we have to bring in to do that, and figure out exactly the tactics I need to do to get there… But I think if I can just keep doubling my portfolio every year…
Joe Fairless: Cash-out refi’s… Once you start building equity in these first 12 units, then start doing cash-out refi’s and that will help you with the doubling process.
Theo Hicks: Exactly. I know that they are four units, so us raising the rents wouldn’t have a direct relationship to the value, but I know it does affect it slightly, and when I’m strategizing with the property management company, we’re gonna be raising the rents here pretty soon, so I think that’ll also have some effect on the value of the property, just because the area and the properties in it are doing really well right now.
So hopefully in a year or two we can cash-out refi on these ones probably even more… That’s more of like a couple years down the road to do, but it’s still a really good strategy. I’m looking forward to talking about that when I get there. [unintelligible [00:31:28].23] we’re progressing our way through that.
Joe Fairless: There you go.
Theo Hicks: So that’s what I’ve got for updates.
Joe Fairless: Sweet.
Theo Hicks: Miscellaneous stuff – we’ve got the Best Ever Conference coming up real soon…
Joe Fairless: Yes, in about a month. You can go to BestEverConference.com, there are all the speakers there, and there’s also a Bigger Pockets meetup. This isn’t connected — we’re not connected to Bigger Pockets in any way, but there happened to be a meetup at the Bigger Pockets headquarters on Thursday, 8th February. If 8th is a Thursday, then that’s the day, but it’s the weekend of the 9th, 10th, so I think it’s Thursday. Anyway, Thursday at the Bigger Pockets headquarters there’s a local Denver meetup, which will be really cool, and then we’ve got the conference, Friday and Saturday.
We’ve got happy hour on Friday night. Everyone’s gonna hang out who attends the conference; that will be a lot of fun. Then Saturday we’ve a good docket of speakers. More so than last year, this conference will be more networking and getting to know each other more, more like small group sessions, although there are a lot of speakers and presentations also.
Theo Hicks: [unintelligible [00:32:38].00] attending yesterday, with the speaker agenda, is that right?
Joe Fairless: Yeah. And it’s available at BestEverConference.com, the speakers and the flow of the thing.
Theo Hicks: Exactly. Also, if you might be watching live from the Best Ever Show Community right now, but make sure you go to Facebook to check that out and join the Best Ever Community.
Joe Fairless: And one benefit of that is we get a lot of questions to us, or either sent to me via e-mail, or Bigger Pockets messaging, or comments underneath this video if you’re watching this via Facebook Live, and we’re not able to get to all of those questions, so what we’re doing is we’re also posting those questions to the Best Ever Facebook Community.
Today we posted the questions, some asset management questions that someone had, and — Grant, some attorney answered them?
Grant: Yes. A multifamily syndication attorney.
Joe Fairless: A multifamily syndication attorney who is a member of the Best Ever Community answered these questions. So with all of our communities, it’s a higher-level group of investors that you’ll be a part of, and as a listener you’re obviously in that category, because that’s what I’ve found – the people who listen to this show and engage tend to be more experienced investors… So go to the Best Ever Community on Facebook and become a member, and we’re looking forward to helping add value to your life that way, too.
Theo Hicks: And to wrap things up, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and also subscribe to the YouTube channel for these videos, and leave a review for your opportunity to be the review of the week.
This week we’ve got Dana Dunford. The subject line was “It’s called ‘the Best’ for a reason.” She said:
“This Cincinnati guy knows his stuff. His portfolio of acquisitions is impressive and he has an unbelievable number of impressive guests on his show, from Barbara Corcoran to Robert Kiyosaki. It shows the caliber of Joe – the Best Ever.”
Joe Fairless: Thank you, Dana. Much appreciated. I actually met Dana through the podcast, because she will be a guest on the show. I’ve already interviewed her, and her episode has not aired yet. She proactively left this review, and it was so nice of her… So thank you, Dana, and much appreciated.
Best Ever listeners, if you leave a review on iTunes, then that will help us attract more high-quality guests, which will help the overall content of this show and help you be more successful, so please do so. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
