Terry Moore is the Co-owner of ACI Apartment Consultants Inc. and is the author of “Building Legacy Wealth” from San Diego California. Terry shares his beliefs and thoughts on how to build your legacy. He works with many investors in helping them change the way they think to ensure they build a legacy worth leaving.
Terry Moore Real Estate Background:
- Co-owner of ACI Apartment Consultants Inc.
- ACI has closed more than 4,000 escrows
- Author of “Building Legacy Wealth – How to Build Wealth and Live a Life Worth Living”
- From San Diego, California
- Say hi to him at: www.sandiegoapartmentbroker.com
- Best Ever Book: Love and Money by Roy O Wilson
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Best Ever Tweet:
“I help people become abundance thinkers” – Terry Moore
TRANSCRIPTION
Theo Hicks: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. My name is Theo Hicks, and today we’ll be speaking with Terry Moore. Terry, how are you doing today?
Terry Moore: It’s a great day in the neighborhood, and I’m glad to be here with you.
Theo Hicks: Yep, and I’m thankful for you joining us today. A little bit about Terry – he’s the co-owner of ACI, which is Apartment Consultants Inc, which has closed more than 4000 escrows. He is the author of Building Legacy Wealth – How to Build Wealth and Live a Life Worth Living. He’s from San Diego, California, and you can say hi to him at his website, sandiegoapartmentsbroker@sandiegoapartmentbroker.com. So Terry, before we begin, do you mind telling us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on today?
Terry Moore: Yes. I’m one of those rare people who love what I do; it’s a calling. It started out as a job, became a career and became a calling. When I was about 40 years old, I finally figured out some of the themes in my life, and part of what I love about this is that I get to help real estate investors make the most important financial choice of their next decade. I help people buy or sell, primarily, San Diego County apartments, and to some extent, single tenant triple net. So for more than 50 years, I’ve been helping adults make smart choices about money, and in the last 20 years or so, I’ve been paying a lot more attention not just to wealth building, not just wealth management, but more important issues like legacy. So I’m an income property broker in San Diego County and my focus is legacy. It’s great, Theo, that you and I and thousands of our listeners are wealthy, but more important is, to what end, and we’ll try to talk more about legacy with passing time.
Theo Hicks: Sure, thanks for sharing that. Well, let’s just jump right into that. So first maybe just differentiate the difference between ways of building a wealth as opposed to building a legacy. Is there a difference between those two? Are those two different things or are they connected?
Terry Moore: Sure. So the guy with the widget factory who gets wealthy, he’s built wealth. You leave a legacy whether you’re the richest person on the planet or the poorest pauper. The legacy is what people do and or say and or think because of your influence. So when a dad yells at his kids, that leaves a legacy. When a mom helps a neighbor, that leaves a legacy. Legacy of the lessons that people learn is they watch you live out your values. So regardless of your wealth, you’re creating a legacy. The focus of my life in this part is not just to help people become wealthy. For 40 years, I’ve helped people become wealthy. We’ve had a couple of hundred people who become millionaires and probably more than 50 who become multimillionaires, but now that I’m [unintelligible [00:06:19].23] and I have some silver hair, I recognize that there’s a lot of things more important than wealth, and the virus and the recession have gotten us all thinking about things more important than just money. I hope that you haven’t had a live event in the last year where somebody you care about has been threatened by an accident or cancer or the mafia have stolen the favorite grandchild. But lots of us eventually recognize that an inheritance is just the stuff. The inheritance is the dimes, the dollars, the deeds. The legacy is what people say and do and think because you were here. So everybody has a legacy, not everybody gets wealthy. In my day job, I help people become wealthy, and I want my clients not just to leave a big stack of net worth. More important, I want them to have a life that’s worth imitating.
Theo Hicks: So do you mind walking us through how that plays out in your day to day? So obviously, you’re working with clients to buy real estate and you focus on helping them find the proper deal, but what’s the part of your process that you implement that helps them and teaches them how to build a legacy as well?
Terry Moore: Well, in one sense, if they were paying attention, their parents or their grandparents or their rabbi, their pastor, lots of folks — there have been a variety of mentors and heroes that have lived lives or talked about lives worth imitating, and my job as their guide… I don’t pick what they’re going to do, I don’t pick what property, but as their guide, I help people live out their values and their integrity in ways that benefit others.
So maybe more tangible – the way you deal with a tenant makes a difference. What you will and what you won’t say in negotiating is part of the legacy. I think of rental ownership as face-to-face capitalism. Not everybody gets to play, but the rental owners, by definition, are leaders; by definition, they are impactful people. If you get to decide when somebody gets new appliances or when their rent goes up or whether or not they get a concession when they get laid off, that makes you a very influential person.
A lot of people that I serve are financially independent. They don’t have to go to work next week if they don’t want to, but they have a big influence on the people around them. They may not have a way of working on their staff, but they influence where people live. So the people that I serve are in the richest 3% of the world’s population. They’re impactful people whether they recognize it or not, and I invite people to think about not just how do we help you get the best price when you’re buying or how do we help you get the most money when you’re selling, but instead, how do we make it something where you do great things and the people around you also gain at the same time? A different way to say it is I invite people to become abundance thinkers. Folks who have a zero-sum game mentality, I’m not much value to them. I can help them transact business, but I don’t have a lasting influence in their lives. But instead, I try to empower wealthy people to create values for those around them. That sounds good esoteric, but essentially, I help people buy and sell apartment buildings, and we do it in a way that’s not grinding the other side, but forgive me for saying this, blessing the other side.
Theo Hicks: So is it like when you first meet someone, is there a requirement that you have for working with someone, like they have to be thinking in this way, or is it something where you’re having a conversation with them to say, “Hey, here’s a list of things that you should be doing if you want to leave this positive legacy”? I’m not sure if that’s a good idea [unintelligible [00:10:23].16].
Terry Moore: Here’s the brutal reality. I serve folks of political party A and political party B. I serve folks who are of every religion, and if you take the outrageous claims of Jesus, seriously, yay, hooray, I’m glad to work with you. Alternately, if you think Buddha has the monopoly on spiritual insight, that’s fine. I’m glad to serve you. So I don’t work with only people whose worldview matches mine. I don’t have to agree with my clients and need to understand them, but essentially, if people think that I’m a crazy religious zealot, they don’t hire me, that’s fine. God bless you, have a nice life. Who’s next? The folks who think that my history will enable them to do better are inclined to hire me, and some people do and some people don’t. Whether they agree with me on my worldview is immaterial. My job is to serve them with excellence, and maybe they’ll buy some of my crackpot notions and maybe they won’t. My job is to be the servant. The clients that I most love dealing with don’t necessarily share my worldview, but they do the right thing. Plus one more, they do have some version of people benefiting from dealing with them.
Theo Hicks: You mentioned in your background introduction that you’ve been doing this for 50 years and in the last 20 years, it’s been the focus on what we’ve been talking about for the majority this conversation, which is the legacy aspect. Did something happen to you? Was there an event in your life that made you start to think this way 20 years ago?
Terry Moore: That’s a great question; it is an hour-long answer. The short version was 40 years ago, I made a life choice; I became a person of faith, and a couple of years ago, I was on a bike on a triathlon. I’m the oldest and probably the slowest triathlete that you know, but I was minding my own business in San Diego thinking, “Boy, this is a triathlon, so I have to kind of go slow start”, and the short version is I spent two days and night in hospital. I fell off the bike and I could have easily woken up dead. And that was a startling event, and since then, there is a phrase that stuck with me, and it’s Psalm [95:12] – Teach us to number our days, that we might gain a heart of wisdom. Theo, you and I have no guarantee of mortal life tomorrow.
There’s a fellow named William Carey, and he had a prayer at one time and he said, “I’m not afraid of failure. I’m afraid of succeeding. It’s something that doesn’t matter.” The book of essentialism talks about picking the very few things that really matter and going for gusto for those few things and skipping lots of confetti. So with passing time, I’ve gotten a greater focus trying to put what little time, what little chips I’ve got left on the things which will matter after I’m gone.
So it’s been a gradual process for a long time to then focus on trying to help my clients succeed, and with passing time, it’s not just how do we make you wealthier, Theo; instead, it’s how do we make you wealthier and invite you to consider being a blessing, creating abundance, adding value to the people around you? I understand you’re going to engage with me because you think you’re going to get wealthier. I get that. People read my book because they want to know how to build wealth. I wrote the book because I want them to think about something more important than just material wealth. Money is a great slave; it’s a lousy master.
Theo Hicks: Alright, Terry. What is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Terry Moore: See more deals. The best folks that I serve do not have to be sold on a deal. The best folks that I serve see lots of options, and they look for ways to limit the risk, but it starts with you don’t get two deals a year. I had a conversation ten minutes before we started with a guy who’s got a quarter of a billion dollars worth of real estate, and he looks at a couple of hundred opportunities every year. So he knows how to recognize a good deal and that’s the starting point. The second piece is, how do you minimize the risk on the good deals?
Theo Hicks: Perfect. Alright, Terry. Are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?
Terry Moore: I hope so.
Break [00:15:12]:04] to [00:16:12]:09]
Theo Hicks: Okay, so what’s the best ever book you’ve recently read that’s been, in some form, related to this idea of building a legacy?
Terry Moore: There’s a book called Love and Money by Roy O. Wilson. He did a study of young presidents’ organization families, a couple of thousands of them. When the money transferred from the first to the second generation, most of the families blew up. They sued each other or they lost them in income-producing property, and by time of the transfer from the second to third generation, 97% of them lost the main asset for the family; they had sued each other. So Love and Money talked a little bit more about legacy and what it takes to be able to transfer to your kids – the values, not just the money, but the values that created the wealth.
Another book that I’ve recently read was called Righteous Mind, and that was insightful because it talked about how people with different worldviews, different political views, understand the world differently, and how hard it is for people, figuratively speaking, from Mars to communicate, figuratively speaking, with people from Venus, and how to be effective. We need to stretch with what our listeners hear, what’s inside their skin and how they perceive it. They could be ethical people of the other political party who understand the world differently, and our job is to find a way to help them understand and trust to understand them.
The third thing that I’ll mention is a classic – The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and one of those ideas early on is you need to understand before you can be understood. Another idea in that book was, begin with any end in mind. What is it you want to accomplish? If you know [unintelligible [00:18:15].25].
Theo Hicks: If your business were to collapse today, what would you do next?
Terry Moore: I would cry, I would hug my wife, I would buy the RV and start reading the rest of the next hundred Pulitzer Prize winners that I have in mind to do.
Theo Hicks: What is the best ever way you like to give back?
Terry Moore: I’m a person of faith. So we give time, money and prayer to make it easier for people to understand our worldview and at least consider it. But on memorial days, I go to Mexico and build a house, and on most memorial days, I pay for somebody to go with me, and the group that I’m part of has now built more than 50 houses in Mexico for folks. Some of them share our faith and some of whom don’t. But if you and I were to go to Mexico and you went with me, you would hand over the keys to Mrs. Garcia or Mrs. Lopez or Mrs. Rodriguez and she would cry and you would cry, and you wouldn’t remember Mrs. Rodriguez, but she would always remember you, and that’s one of my favorite ways to get back.
Theo Hicks: And then lastly, what is the best ever place to reach you?
Terry Moore: The phone number is 6198891031.
Theo Hicks: Perfect, and that’s your office number or your cell phone number?
Terry Moore: That’s my cell.
Theo Hicks: Well, thank you very much for sharing that. Best Ever listeners, definitely take advantage of that because this was a very, very thought-provoking interview. I really enjoyed it. I really like your mindset, your worldview towards building wealth, and really the biggest takeaway in what we talked about was that it’s not about the money, it’s more about, as you mentioned, having a life worth living, but also leaving a legacy. And when most people think of legacy, they think of leaving dimes, dollars and deeds, but it’s more than just that. It’s about your interactions with people, what you’ve said, what you think, and how that influences other people, and you gave lots of examples of that – the way that you help others leave that type of legacy, why you transitioned into thinking this way. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this with us. It’s been a very insightful interview. I know Best Ever listeners are going to get a lot from this; I sure did. Appreciate you coming on here again. Best Ever listeners, as always, thank you for listening. Have a best ever day and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Terry Moore: Thanks, Theo. You’re a gentleman, a scholar and drinker of fine wine; be a blessing.
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