Brandon Turner 03:31
So wow, I would be bringing in like, what’s that? I don’t know. Not much, $25 a month. It’s not much, right? So in other words when you have no money, it’s really hard and you make no money because you have not a good job. It’s really hard to get into any other kind of investment other than starting a business or investing in real estate. It’s really hard to make good money. It just takes so long to do so. For me, it was kind of out of necessity, but more importantly in the beginning, I read a hundred books on real estate investing.

Brandon Turner 03:59
I’ve read every book in my library’s catalog that I could order in on real estate investing. I didn’t have money to buy a book. I had to get them all from the library. I read a few at the beginning on the stock market. And you know what, I couldn’t get into them. I read three pages and I was bored to death. Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with stocks, it’s just everybody in their soul has things that appeals to them. We call that in the on our podcast, we say like follow the fire.

Brandon Turner 04:24
There’s a fire inside you that just you’re like, “Oh, I love this thing.” And real estate fired me up. I could read 100 books on real estate. I could read 100 books today in real estate. I still love it and I still do read books on real estate. I can’t read books on S&P 500. I can’t read books on a lot of that stuff, on day trading, on any of that. I don’t have the fire. So that’s why real estate works for me is because I had the fire to do it.

Stig Brodersen 04:44
Brandon, I absolutely love that. I’m sure you’re much more interesting person to have in a cocktail party than me. Whenever I start saying, “I have the fire in me to talk about financial statements.” People are like, “I think I’m going to speak to the next guy.”

Brandon Turner 04:57
Those are the guys that are the richest in the world. Those are the billionaires are the ones that can study a financial statement, I think. I look at them and I’m like, “I don’t even know what that word means. It’s got more than three syllables in it. I don’t even try.”

Stig Brodersen 05:09
David, I want to hear your background. I absolutely love that. Actually, go into this meeting. I know I’m putting you on the spot here. I was speaking to one of your producers and he’s like, “You know what, if you want a fascinating story, if you want the best story, just ask David, ‘What is your background?’ Then magic will happen.” So I know I’ve really just built up the expectations here, but you have a very interesting background. Let me just put that mildly. So how did you get started?

David Greene 05:34
Well, I don’t know that I can top your story that you told on our podcast where a BiggerPockets member saved your life at a hospital came and paid your bill just because you were BiggerPockets friends. That was really cool. So I’ll do my best. My story is actually much less intentional than Brandon’s. When he tells his story, you hear he had a plan, he wanted to make it happen. He read books. He formulated something. He did some AB testing to figure out what worked and he built his way to success.

David Greene 05:58
I fell backwards on my butt into real estate. I had no idea that I was going to be here and from there thought, “Oh, this is pretty cool,” and really built everything out of that. So I was a police officer and I’ve always been a good saver of money. I knew that I wanted to build wealth or be rich. I had no idea what that looked like. I assumed you just save a bunch of money and then eventually things come your way and you buy them.

David Greene 06:21
I didn’t have a plan to be an investor. I was really all in on law enforcement. That was my career. I just wanted to be the best police officer I could be. And the economy went terrible on us. So I was saving just to buy a house and prices just kept climbing and climbing and climbing and then I got discouraged like, “I’ll never buy one.”

David Greene 06:38
So rather than doing what everyone else did and just spending way too much on a house you could never afford and get a loan that was going to reset in two years, I just said, “Well, then I’ll just save up money and I’ll build a house myself. I’m not going to jump into this market that was clearly insane.” This wasn’t like now where you’re like, “Oh, is the market going to crash?” You had teachers buying million dollar houses at that time. I got really lucky and I had a stable income when the economy tanked.

David Greene 07:03
So 2010 hits, 2009, every single property is for sale where I live. Every three homes has a for sale sign. All we hear on the news is don’t buy real estate. It’s an anchor. The economy is going into a depression. We’re never going to get out of this. And I had a buddy who had a property first that he was going to buy that he couldn’t buy because he was moving away to go to bible college.

David Greene 07:22
I really just as simply as it was said, “You know what, it sucks that he’s going to lose his money. I’m going to need a house at some point. I’m probably going to have a family. I’ll just buy this one, put a tenant in it and then later on I’ll move in.” That was as far as my thinking went. I had no idea that there were even resources to study when it came to real estate investing. I didn’t know anyone that did it. I bought that house, I vacuumed it. I remember my mom and my friend went with me to wipe down the counters.

David Greene 07:46
I didn’t know what I was doing. That’s what we did. And then I put an ad on Craigslist, a website we have out here where people go to buy and sell things like a glorified garage sale website. I found a tenant. I didn’t check their credit. I didn’t check their rental history. I didn’t call their employer. I just thought well this person seems pretty nice. I’ll be nice to them and they’ll be nice to me and it’ll go fine. And it did not go fine. They were much better at being a professional tenant than I was at being a professional landlord.

David Greene 08:12
They paid me for two months and then completely stopped paying. Kept saying, “Oh yeah. I left the money at your mom’s house under the mat.” It wasn’t there. “Oh, the check is in the mail. Don’t worry.” It never came. That dragged on for several months. I finally got them evicted and then I found out the bank had sent them a check. Not the bank, the escrow company from when the deal closed for the extra taxes that I paid during escrow that when the property was reassessed.

David Greene 08:36
Because you have to remember, at that time, prices were going down. So when you buy it, your property taxes are based on what the house was worth the last time it sold. Usually they go up. Usually you get a demand saying you got to pay more property taxes on the house you just closed on. Well, in this case there was an excess and the escrow company sent the check to the house, not to me.

David Greene 08:54
So my tenant cashed the check, paid me with my own money for two to three months and then just stopped paying. That was my foray into real estate investing. It was terrible. I was busy working. I had this new career. I couldn’t go. I was buying landlording for dummies books and trying to figure out what am I supposed to do. It was terrible. I tried it a second time because now you’ve got this house you’re stuck with for 30 years. I couldn’t sell it. Thank god I couldn’t sell it.

David Greene 09:20
I found the next couple that came to look at the house said, “Oh, yeah. We were working with the property manager. He sent us over here to take a look. I was like, “What’s a property manager?” They said, “Oh, he’s this person that helps collect the check from the landlord and find the tenants and he helps us find houses.” And I’m like, “Oh, I got it. I should talk to one of them.”

David Greene 09:35
I literally just called the property manager that they had and said, “Do you want to manage my property?” And he was not good at it. It was a former drug addict I found out later that was in and out of rehab the whole time. This is the person managing my funds. It was a rocky experience. But even with a terrible property manager, it was so much better than when I did it myself. A little light bulb went off and I realized I just need a better property manager and I can just work and save money and buy these houses and someone else will do all that stuff that I’m terrible at and that was how I became a real estate investor.

Stig Brodersen 10:09
That is an absolutely amazing story.

Preston Pysh 10:13
So guys the reason why we study billionaires here on the show is not only to study their success, but also their failures to achieve financial success. Also, we found it a lot more profitable to learn from other people’s mistakes than to make the mistakes ourselves. So could you talk to us about your most expensive mistake and how our listeners can avoid them.

David Greene 10:33
Well, after that initial experience, I got burned really bad, so I became a much more conservative investor. Probably more so. In fact, if we’re being honest, one of my biggest mistake was being too conservative. We’re talking about 2010, 2011, 2012. I’ve got a job in law enforcement that’s incredibly stable. I can work unlimited overtime. I have zero bills. I have no family. I don’t have any risk, no obligations. I’m living with my parents still and I’m saving and I wasn’t buying more houses because all I could think about would be what if every tenant leaves at the same time. They’re all vacant and it’s six months to find a tenant.

David Greene 11:09
All the overtime drives up and a comet destroys my mom and dad’s house and I have to buy a new one. It was just non-stop worst case scenarios going through my head and I built my plan on I have to be able to survive under those conditions. I never asked myself is that reasonable? Is there a problem finding tenants? I mean, looking back, tenants were begging to find a place to live in because they all had their houses foreclosed and they didn’t have anywhere to go.

David Greene 11:31
So I went too far on the other side. I became ultra-conservative and I looked at everything as what could hurt me and I lost millions of dollars in money that I would have made if I had just bought a couple houses a year instead of one house a year. So that was one big mistake. Another mistake that I found over the course of my career was that I didn’t, and it’s funny. We started off talking about leverage. I should have used leverage earlier. Part of why BiggerPockets said that you should hear my story was that I would work a hundred hours a week as a police officer.

David Greene 12:01
I would go to work. I’d work an 18-hour shift. My house is about an hour away from work maybe further. So I didn’t want to drive all the way home, sleep and come back. So I just sleep in my car for two hours, maybe three hours, get up, work another 20 hours. I did that for several years in a row. I slept in my car, two to three nights a week and if I could sleep in my bed, that was like a day off is how I looked at it.

David Greene 12:20
I just saved all this money then I put it all into real estate. The problem is you get taxed horribly when you do that. You’re just running on this treadmill thinking you’re going somewhere and you’re not going nearly as far as you think. And then you dump your money into real estate. Well, I was buying two houses a year, maybe three in a good year and it was so much work and you’re paying such a price, it’s so hard on your health.

David Greene 12:40
I thought I was getting really far, but I wasn’t. And what happened was I switched my strategy from put 25% down on every house, be extra conservative. Don’t borrow the extra money on that. 3.5% interest rate or 4% interest rate you could get with real estate. I started buying properties for cash, fixing them up and then refinancing them after they were fixed up and pulling my capital back out.

David Greene 13:02
So then I could use the same capital over and over to continue buying real estate, buy them pretty significantly below market value, improve them through the rehab process. So I’m creating a lot of equity. It’s not risky. I’m still leaving 25% of the equity in the deal. I’m just removing 100% of my investment basis back out of it. And then I went from buying two houses a year to two houses a month. And that’s really when I became what I call like a black belt investor.

David Greene 13:26
I got so many repetitions, I did it so many times that I got really good at identifying what properties work, what people I need on my team. The fear of it went away. It just became this monotonous boring process of let’s look at the numbers, let’s look at the spreadsheet. Let’s look at the area. They all look good. Buy the property.

Stig Brodersen 13:44
Okay. So I heard your story now, Brandon and David. Say I’m convinced. We just started the interview, but I’m convinced. At least, I should test out real estate investing, see if I have that fire in me to get started with that and say that I commit to set aside at least, call it a thousand hours and then don’t have as much money. Say I have a thousand dollars to make an honest effort to get started. What is my first step?

Brandon Turner 14:09
I would say first of all there are a million ways to invest in real estate. Okay. Maybe not a million, but hundreds of ways to invest in real estate. You could be in an area where vacation rentals would be awesome. If you’re in a city where people travel a lot, man, you could do vacation rentals like Airbnb or Vrbo. If you own a house right now and you just want to turn it into a rental property and you move to another house, that’s another great way. That’s why I would say most people get involved in real estate is they turn their own house into a rental.

Brandon Turner 14:35
So there’s that. And that costs no money really. I mean you just move out and rent your house out. So there’s that option. You could put money into somebody else’s deal. For example, if you have a good net worth, you can put money into somebody else’s deal. If you have the desire, if you have enough for a down payment. In America, it’s typically 20 to 30% down. I’m not sure what else in other countries, but 20 to 30% down. So if you’ve got enough money for a down payment, you could go that route.

Brandon Turner 14:57
Or one of my favorite ways, when you have no money is to find somebody to work with. I mean you find a partner and say, “Hey, why don’t you put in the money and I’ll put in the time.” If you got no money, it means you better have some time and effort and hustle and everything else that you got to bring to the table. So go find a partner who’s got some money, but they don’t have any hustle, they don’t have any time. They work a full-time job, they’re busy, but they can put down 20, 30, 40, $50,000 for a down payment.

Brandon Turner 15:21
So basically the partner brings the money. You bring the hustle, the knowledge, the deal like a good investment and then you just work together. That’s how I built up my portfolio. A lot of it was… And I still continue today. I mean today, I buy big deals, but we still use partners who bring the money and then we bring the deal and the expertise and the knowledge and we do deals together. So you can do that on a single family house, you can do it on a 200-unit apartment or mobile home park. You can do it anywhere in between there. So those are just a few avenues for getting started.

Preston Pysh 15:47
So guys, we have listeners with just different backgrounds in their personal net worth. We have many listeners who manage more than a million and even a significant share with even more than 10 million in the stock market. They might not have too much time to conduct real estate research, but they would like to allocate a part of their portfolio away from the stock market. So what would be your recommendation for people like that?

David Greene 16:11
So the benefit of investing in stocks at least from my opinion, because we get this whole stocks versus real estate conversation all the time. Real estate is going to be more labor intensive. It’s going to be a slower way to build wealth. It’s more like planting a tree and you wait and maybe five or 10 years later, that tree starts to produce fruit. 15, 20 years later, it’s producing a lot of fruit and 20, 30 years later you could literally cut that tree down and plant a bunch more trees with the equity that you’ve built.

David Greene 16:37
Stocks is a much quicker… If you invest correctly, you can build wealth faster and there’s less labor that you can do yourself to affect the outcome. With real estate, there’s a lot you can do specifically to add value to your investment. Stocks you’re not in control. So what I find is people that appreciate stock investing, they don’t want to do a lot of work.

David Greene 16:59
Maybe they do works on the research that they do for the company, but they like pushing a button, buying the stock, they’re done then they see how it goes. Real estate investors tend to be someone that wants to be a little more hands-on. So the first part of this question that you asked, “How do you invest if you’re used to doing stocks you want to diversify into real estate?”

David Greene 17:16
You probably don’t want something that’s hands-on because if you enjoy stocks, what you enjoy is picking the horse you think is going to win that race and betting on it and doing your research, that’s the work you do. It’s not managing a contractor and researching rents and looking through contracts to find out how you can adjust your lease. People aren’t going to like that. So if you’re into stocks, what I would recommend is you go find a general partner and invest in either their fund or their syndication because the process will feel very similar to picking a stock.

David Greene 17:44
You’re going to go choose the partner which is like choosing the company. You’re going to look at their track record. You’re going to look at their investment plan, what type of properties are they going to buy, what is the income based on and then you’re going to bet on that person and put your money into that that person’s plan. It’s very similar to stock investing and it’s also hands off. You do nothing. Once you’ve invested the money, they’re doing all the work.

Brandon Turner 18:05
I like to call that strategy the earn, learn, and turn strategy. You earn your money doing what you do best. A lot of people think they got to jump into real estate and then go like flip houses or whatever like buy them, fix them up and sell them like you see on TV. It’s a great way to make money but most people who have money like for example, you’re a banker, you’re a lawyer, you’re a doctor, you’re an athlete, you’re whatever, a finance person. You make really probably good money at your job. Your best thing I think is to earn money doing what you already do really well and then you learn about the type of investing you want to get into.

Brandon Turner 18:38
Well, I’ll come back to that one and then you turn your money over to somebody else and somebody you trust. So the learn thing is important though. You can’t just give your money to anybody. So you got to learn about the type of investing you feel like you got some fire after you and then you got to learn about the investor that you’re going to invest with and you just don’t want to throw money at some random thing because it is riskier than for example throwing your money with Apple.

Brandon Turner 19:00
I mean, we can all trust that Apple is not going to suddenly run off to Mexico with your money because there’s a lot of people and there’s a board of directors and they have a lot of laws and rules that govern what they do. But if you give your money to me, in my fund, you have to trust me that I’m not going to run off to Mexico. Now, there are safeguards in place. There are things legally I’m not going to run off to Mexico, but you’ve got to trust, you’ve got to build that trust first. You got to understand that it’s a lot smaller organization. There could be a higher increased chance of shady operators and just bad people out there.

Brandon Turner 19:29
So anyway, you earn your money, you learn about the investment and the investor and then you turn your money over to somebody else. I think that’s a good strategy for people who don’t want to be actively involved in real estate, but still want to play in the game.

Stig Brodersen 19:41
It’s interesting you would say that. Let’s say that I’m even lazier than that. I don’t even want to go out and find a partner perhaps. I’m that lazy. One of the main objections we hear from the audience here is when we talk about stock investing is that they don’t feel they have enough time to do any type of analysis. They make a good income. Like you mentioned before, Brandon, they might be a lawyer or doctor or whatnot, but to them, it’s hard to figure out what should invest in might be interesting. But they just don’t want to lose money. I guess that’s the first thing that we hear.

Stig Brodersen 20:12
But by the way, we should also grow that money we set aside and also we don’t want to spend too much time on it, right? So it is a tall order. So for those guys who typically say, “Well, buy a low-cost ETF, a stock ETF. Buy a Vanguard.” It might grow 8% a year or whatever that might be. It’s not going to be super, super exciting but you own a small part of every single business on the planet. It’s probably not going to go to zero at least. I’m sure you hear about the lack of time too when it comes to real estate investing.

Stig Brodersen 20:42
So what if our listeners want to be exposed to real estate but they just have so little time to conduct research regardless of the net worth, how do they enter? What do they do if they want to diversify?

Brandon Turner 20:53
There are other things that are even more hands-off. There are crowdfunding portals. You’re literally in your phone can invest in a company the same way of buying a stock. It’s very, very easy and passive. At that point, you really are nothing more than just a glorified lender to these other real estate investors. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re not necessarily going to always achieve a lot of the upside that the owners of the deal are going to get. Same with a syndication. You get a little bit more in a syndicate.

Brandon Turner 21:19
When I say syndication, I’m talking about a bunch of people pulling their money together and then giving it to an operator like myself or David and then they go out and invest in the deal. So there’s like the syndication side and then there’s these crowdfunding portals, which you can give money to. There’s also this idea that if you don’t have time, first of all, real estate is fun, I think because it doesn’t take much time.

Brandon Turner 21:38
In reality, if you have an extra 30 minutes a week, you could probably buy a real estate. It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time to get started, to make an offer, to go online, to look at a deal, to analyze one. I mean, it’s all five-minute tasks. Take some learning. You might have to read a book or two. But if you have the fire, you’re going to figure it out. You’re going to take make the time. And if not, then like David said, you could put your money into another person’s fund and just say, “Hey, I trust John. So I’m just going to wire John $50,000 and see how the investment does.”

Brandon Turner 22:05
A lot of people choose that route and they just send money to somebody else as long as they trust them. And the nice thing is you can diversify it. So you don’t have to invest with one fund or one syndication. You could go and give 10 different investors 50 grand a piece and take half a million dollars and dump it into 10 different investments. Some of them might average 10% return on your money every year.

Brandon Turner 22:22
Some might average you a 20% return on your money. I know we try to aim for 15%. If we can do a 15% return every year, and that’s from the time both in terms of the money coming every month and every year. We call it cash flow. That’s just profit. Kind of like dividends. And then there’s the actual you sell the property again someday and you get a big chunk of that, so that’s the money at the end when you sell it.

Brandon Turner 22:42
So combining those two things together, we can hit a 15% return. That’s a whole lot better than the stock market. So if you’re aiming for a bunch of different investors all trying to get 13, 14, 15%, hopefully on average you get a better return than you would in the stock market with no effort other than signing a couple papers and wiring money.

Stig Brodersen 23:01
How about the inflation piece in this? How does that work? One thing that we do like, not to give you too much pushback, whenever I’m saying this. One of the things that we do like in stock investing is that it’s inflation-proof at least to some extent. How does that work in real estate? Is that a fixed payment or is it just all about fixed payment you say your tenants or is it something you always figure out. Is it adjusted compared to a CPI index?

Stig Brodersen 23:24
How do you guard against inflation? I know a lot of people out there are probably sitting there thinking, “Well, we don’t have an inflation. Why is this relevant?” If you entered the ’70s or ’80s thinking, “We have no inflation, it’s not relevant. Let’s just fix all payments the next hundred years,” you’re probably going to regret that decision. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that, guys.

David Greene 23:42
I don’t know that there is a better investment vehicle than real estate when it comes to inflation. In fact, personally 99% of the reason why I invest in real estate is because I am baking on inflation. We live in America. The American government or economy has shown they will consistently print more money whenever we are facing a recession. Money is becoming worth less. You have to be investing it just to stay even. And real estate is… I mean at every single angle, Stig, it benefits you when there’s inflation.

David Greene 24:12
So let me give you an example of someone who wants to go buy a $120,000 house and put say $20,000 down. If you borrow $100,000 to buy an investment property, your payment with taxes insurance, mortgage, all of it at 4% will be less than $600. You’re probably right around $575 a month. Your rent could be in the 700 to $800 a month right off the bat. So the first way that you’ve now benefited is your risk is very low. Most people investing money can afford if they don’t get a payment coming in 575 a month. That’s your worst case scenario.

David Greene 24:45
If your asset for some reason drops in price and it goes from 120 down to 60, it doesn’t matter because your rent is still coming in. You just wait. You’re actually still making money every month. It’s like a stock that pays dividends regardless of what the value of the stock is. If you can hold on long enough, it will come back up especially with inflation. When prices go up, if that property goes up from 120 to 140, that’s only an increase of… What would that be like? 15%, 10% or so.

David Greene 25:12
But the money you made on your investment which was say 20,000 is a hundred times increase. That leverage really helps you and that payment is locked in for 30 years at 4% regardless of what happens with inflation. So you’ve won right there. Every year, as inflation occurs, rents go up. We typically have one year leases. So that, you made 700 the first year, the next year is 750, then 800, then 8.75. And your payment stays at that 575 to 600 number every single year. This is looking better and better for you.

David Greene 25:42
While your property is also appreciating, this is one of the reasons that I love investing in real estate is I tell people you don’t got to be smart, you just have to be able to hold on for a long time. It’s like putting a buoy in the water and then the tide will rise. As inflation occurs and everything becomes more expensive, your payment is locked in for the 30 years you have it until it’s… Then you can refinance it again if you need to.

David Greene 26:07
But you choose if you want to refinance it. We tend to look at that like that’s risky. You’re refinancing, you’re pulling money out, you could lose it. Well, if your rents have gone up to 1,200 a month and your payment is 600, you can refinance and push your payment up to 900 and you’re still in the clear $300 a month. So there’s so many ways that real estate protects you because of inflation. It’s one of the reasons that I’m hugely bullish on why more people should be owning it.

David Greene 26:32
If you’re not owning real estate and you’re just banking on your savings to get you through, you’re going to see that get wiped out. You can’t control what the government does. You can just control how you invest the money that you’ve got.

Preston Pysh 26:44
So guys, let’s focus on valuation. As we’ve talked about here on the show, you find the intrinsic value of a stock by discounting the cash flows back at an appropriate discount rate, back into today’s value. Could you please just talk to us about the valuation in real estate and perhaps use a specific example from your previous deals?

David Greene 27:03
So the value of a property is essentially worth… Let’s divide this up. There are two types of real estate we want to look at. There’s residential real estate which is like a house. I buy a single family house. That house is worth what other houses have sold. That’s the best way to say it. What’s an iPhone worth? An iPhone is really worth… It has nothing to do with how much it cost Apple to make it, it’s worth what the competitors are charging maybe a little bit more because it’s a little nicer, right?

David Greene 27:28
So real estate in terms of residential houses and maybe duplexes and triplexes, two, and three, and four units, they’re all valued that way, what the neighbor’s house sold for, the house a mile away sold for. When we get into larger deals like commercial properties like what I do today, I buy a lot of mobile home parks. I buy big mobile home like, “Oh, we have these…” In America, we have these things called mobile home parks. They’re basically like little houses that are cheaply built and you can have a hundred or 200, 300 a month on a property and they’re all hooked up to the water.

David Greene 27:55
Anyway, people live in these. They’re low cost, they’re low rents. It’s really just affordable housing and we have a lot of these. So I buy these. And when you buy big things like apartments and mobile home parks, they’re valued based on the profit that they generate. So there’s a thing, I don’t want to go too deep into this but there’s cap rate and NOI and all this stuff that we basically… We’re asking the question. What type of return would an investor want on this property?

David Greene 28:19
If in the area every investor wants a 5% return then that property is going to be valued looking at all the income that comes in, all the expenses that go out. What kind of return are they making? It’s valued based on that and they want it. What’s it worth at 5%? If the average in an area, everyone wants 10% because maybe it’s a little bit more risky area. So they need a higher return, then everything’s valued on what would give the investor… Who buys it a 10% return.

David Greene 28:43
Just not to get too far in the weeds here, but when I say that 10% return, that’s without leverage. So what would an investor without using a loan, what kind of return would they get on their money every year. And typically in America between five and 6% is pretty normal right now. You can get down to the threes in some area. You can get up to the sevens in some areas.

David Greene 29:02
But typically, I would say five to six is a pretty normal, what we call cap rate and again that’s the return. So that’s how you value real estate is either the small ones like the houses are valued on what the neighbor is and what the neighbors sold their house for. The larger deals are based on what the neighboring properties, other commercial properties what kind of returns they generate.

David Greene 29:19
So I bought a house. Actually, this is a true story happening right now. I bought a house eight years ago for $65,000 because all the houses in the area were going around 65, $70,000. Some houses were up in 80 and $90,000 because they were a lot nicer. Some houses were down to 20 or 30,000 because they were just dumps that were full of garbage. But pretty average was about 65,000. So I bought it for 65,000.

David Greene 29:41
Over the last eight years now it has continually gone up because more and more houses are worth more and more money around the area. Inflation is carrying it up. More and more people, the supply and demand is playing into it because more people want to buy. I just talked to my real estate agent yesterday and he says that house now… All the neighboring houses, all the air in the neighborhood, they’re all going for over $200,000. So here I am, I bought this property for $65,000.

David Greene 30:04
I’ve been making several hundred dollars a month every month on that property for a long time now and now it’s worth over $200,000. Maybe up to 215. Why is it worth 215? Because a lot of other houses, there’s that one that’s just like it. It sold for 220. That one is just like it sold for 200. That one is just like it sold for 205. So we can get an idea based on that, that’s again the residential side. We should probably highlight if we’re being completely honest.

David Greene 30:26
Brandon, had no idea that that would happen when he bought it for 65,000. He knew I’ll make X amount of money a month. I’ll pay it off and I hope it goes up. If it doesn’t, I’m okay. So this isn’t necessarily about outsmarting the market. It’s really just waiting and inflation does that work for you. So what he’s describing is residential real estate. When you’re buying residential real estate, what you do is you try to buy in an area that you think people want to live because as time goes by and there’s increased demand, prices will go up to supply in real estate.

David Greene 30:57
You can’t just go like an IPO and a bunch of houses pop up. It takes a while for houses to be built. You’ve squeezed some value out of the long-term hole because you bought in the right area. The other strategy is you look for the messiest ugliest worst house in the best area. You buy it and then you make it nicer. So if every other house was selling for 100,000 when he bought it and he bought this one for 65 because it was nasty and ugly and no one wanted to deal with it, he could have created $35,000 in equity right off the bat which then turned into 200,000.

David Greene 31:27
So when you’re asking the question of how you value property, it’s actually pretty simple. A lot of people get caught up trying to look at too many numbers and trying to figure out where migration trend is going and what’s the hottest thing. But really, if you just continually invest, buy houses in areas where you get a solid tenant and you don’t have to worry and you wait, you see stories like Brandon’s, pretty frequently.

Stig Brodersen 31:49
That’s interesting. I think that story is a really good segue to my next question because we do live in a time with low to no interest rate. What has been the implication of your portfolios in particular and what is the general implication for real estate investors being in this low interest rate environment?

David Greene 32:06
I would say it’s good and bad. For properties you already own, when interest rates go lower, it tends to push the value higher because like Brandon said, you can pay more to buy that property and still get the return you want. So as everyone’s like, “Ah, interest rates are low. It’s hard to get a return. I got to go invest in real estate that creates more demand, you have more competition.”

David Greene 32:26
So for stuff we already own, it’s great. The prices are going up. For the stuff we want to buy, that becomes a little trickier. It’s harder because more people are trying to buy it and the prices go higher because the debt itself is so cheap. You have to understand with real estate investing because 99% of the time it’s being leveraged, the prices are very sensitive to what the financing is.

David Greene 32:46
In fact, how we were saying there’s two ways to look at property, commercial property which is based on its profitability, residential that’s based on what someone else paid for it literally comes from the financing. If you’re buying a house just to live in, the financers looking at what does that person care about? They care about what my neighbors pay. “Oh, I’m pre-approved for 400,000. What’s the nicest house I can find for 400,000. That’s the one I’m going to buy. That’s why it’s valued that way.

David Greene 33:10
When you’re looking at commercial property, it’s not bought by someone who’s thinking, “Well, what’s the best I can get?” It’s a more sophisticated mind who’s looking at it like an investment. The value is based on the financer who’s saying, “Well, if I’m lending you this money, how much money are you going to get in return so I know that I’m going to be paid back?”

David Greene 33:26
It’s really important to understand that when you’re looking at where am I going to go invest? How they’re valued will determine how much money that you get. In general, lower interest rates are very good for real estate. I think one of the things you have to be aware of is if interest rates go up, theoretically values would come down. That’s where you can still make cash flow, but you may end up what we call underwater where you owe more on the property you could sell it for.

David Greene 33:52
So you can’t get rid of it without taking a loss. Our bet in this situation is that if that happens in our country at least, it’s more than likely the government would just print more money, create more stimulus, values would go right back up because money would become cheaper. So we feel like you’ve got a really good hedge if things go wrong with cash flow and you’ve got a really good upside if inflation continues to increase.

Stig Brodersen 34:16
I love your point, David. I mean, it’s all about owning real assets whatever those real assets may be and we can talk more about the finer prints, which we are right now in terms of real estate, but in this time with everything that’s been going on with the money printing, real assets, I mean that’s really just key.

Preston Pysh 34:32
So as much as we use formulas to calculate expected returns for your investment, we also have another rule, the best way to test if a stock is trading at a good price to value ratio is it seems screaming obvious that it’s a great deal. I mean, if you have to fire up an Excel spreadsheet to make calculations, it’s just not cheap enough. So for someone that just doesn’t have a lot of real estate experience, what would be your recommendation for a rule of thumb or a specific example for deals that you’ve made in the past for identifying something like this?

Brandon Turner 35:02
When we’re talking buying like residential property, let’s just say you’re buying… I mean we can get real complicated on commercial stuff like apartments, but the basic, you buy a house, right? There is money that comes in and there’s money that goes out. I like to look at this what I call the four square method. Now, we’re only on audio now so you can’t see it, but if you can try to visualize there’s four squares. Think of like a drawing a box with a cross in the middle. So there’s an upper left, upper right, bottom left, bottom right.

Brandon Turner 35:25
So in the upper left, I like to say you want to record all your income. So how much money is coming in on the property. Now, normally that’s just the rent. So there’s a thousand dollars in rent. Great. The bottom left. I always write. That’s where we’re going moving down the box. So the top left was income, the bottom left, we’re going to write all of our expenses. So what do we pay? Well, there’s taxes. We got to pay the property taxes on the property. We got to pay insurance. We got to make sure if it burns down, we’re going to be paid back.

Brandon Turner 35:53
When things break down, repairs, right? Things break. You got to pay your mortgage payment. You got to pay that. If you’re going to hire a property manager like David talked about earlier, you got to assign a certain percentage of the rent for that. So typically it’s around 10%, sometimes a little lower, sometimes a little higher, but if the rent’s a thousand dollars, I’m going to write a hundred dollars a month for property management. And so on.

Brandon Turner 36:13
It’s not terribly difficult to figure out what those expenses are because you can just talk to the owner, “Hey, what expenses do you have?” You can talk to other investors in the area. What’s normal here? So there’s these expenses we want to account for. That’s the bottom left of this four boxes. Then we go to the top right box and I like to say, “Well, what’s my cash flow?” And that’s simple. It’s just box one, your income minus your expenses.

Brandon Turner 36:35
This is really third grade math, right? So your rent was a thousand dollars, your expenses was 700. Okay. So your cash flow, that means the money that you can expect on average every single month, we’ll say, was $300. Okay, that’s pretty good. $300 a month or that would be 3,600 a year. So now we know what our cash flow is. The final box that I look at then is called cash on cash return. And in real estate, what we mean by that is what’s our percentage that we’re making on our money from that cash flow.

Brandon Turner 37:06
We just looked at cash flow. It was 3,600 a year. So how much money do we invest into this property? Well, for easy math, if we put $10,000 into the investment and we made $3,600 this year, that is a 36% cash on cash return. That’s the most basic simple way of running the numbers on a real estate deal that I can do is just income expenses, cash flow and then cash on cash return.

Brandon Turner 37:32
For me, I like to see at least a 12% cash on cash return. If I can make 12% on my money right away, that’s not even counting the fact that real estate goes up over time. We’re talking basically dividend here. So if I can make 12%, maybe I’ll go down to like 8 or 10 if I really believe in the property. If I can get 12%, that’s awesome. Why 12? I don’t know. I just threw that number out there when I was younger and I’ve been holding to it since and it makes it hard but not impossible.

Brandon Turner 37:56
So I still get the property getting paid off over time. I still get it going up in value over time. I still get all the tax benefits at least in America. The government just makes it so good to own real estate here in America. I don’t pay money taxes on my real estate. David doesn’t pay money taxes on his real estate. We pay a lot of money and taxes on this, the money we earn from book sales or from a job or from commissions.

Brandon Turner 38:16
The government loves the tax employees. They don’t tax real estate investors much. So anyway, it’s about that simple. The four square method, income expenses, cash flow, cash and cash return. That’s how I run the numbers quickly. We have software in BiggerPockets that people use, but is a more fancy version of what I just explained. David, anything you want to add on that?

David Greene 38:34
It’s really good. I think when someone’s listening to that, they might be intimidated by all the different ways you make money. Well, there’s your cash on cash return, there’s your equity, then there’s your loan pay down, then will it appreciate? Will it won’t? Your best way to look at it is to say your cash flow is what protects you in case the market goes down. It’s a defensive metric. I’m going to make more than it cost me to own the property so that I can continue paying that mortgage and saving up money for if something breaks or I have a vacancy.

David Greene 39:01
Your real wealth will be built when you’ve paid your loan down over time and the value of the asset has increased and that difference is what we call equity. So I just make it really simple. Every person I’ve ever talked to that bought a house 30 years ago, not one of them has said, “Oh, I wish I wouldn’t have invested in real estate.” It doesn’t happen. What every one of them says every single time is, “I wish I would have bought more.” That’s just what we hear constantly.

David Greene 39:24
So if you take that long game approach, I’m buying a house so that 30 years from now, I look back and say, “Thank you, David. That was awesome. You just paid for three of my kids’ colleges plus a new car for my wife and a vacation to Europe. I’m going to enjoy that I made that decision.” So I buy properties with the expectation that I’ll feel really good later and I make sure that they have a cash on cash return to cover me during that period of time while the asset grows. And if you just simplify it to that level, it feels much less scary to get started.

Stig Brodersen 39:53
The listener might be sitting out there and thinking, “Well, I heard these stories, Brandon’s story and David’s story.” David even hired a junkie or ex-junkie being property manager and all the mistakes he made and he still made money. That’s probably because David lives in a fantastic place with this particular state has these tax laws or he just like hit the mark at the exact right time or he gained this superior knowledge eventually, just allowed him to outsmart other investors.

Stig Brodersen 40:23
I guess my question to you in continuation of that would be, do you have to invest locally? Because it sounds like that you started investing locally. Can you invest long distance? What are the opportunities here?

David Greene 40:36
So the market that I got started in is actually probably one of the toughest in our country to be able to make work. It’s very expensive here. I live in the most expensive part of it. So I started earning this money working as a police officer, but I would go invest it in other parts of the country where properties were much cheaper. That was really my strategy is I realize investing in real estate is similar to the to stock investing where what you’re looking at are fundamentals.

David Greene 41:01
The market fundamentals as well as the company fundamentals and making a decision based on that. Those work whether I’m buying in Kentucky or California. The numbers Brandon is describing are all the same. So it’s to me one of the easier things to invest in because it works anywhere. It’s not like the rules change when you go to a different area. Now maybe, when you buy a blue chip stock, it’s different than if you invest in a tech company, right?

David Greene 41:25
One of those is safer and one of those has a little more upside. We’ve got a similar thing with real estate, but largely it’s the same thing. So what I described in that book is what I call finding your core for. You need four people and if you have them, you can invest in any market. The first is a deal finder, which is typically a real estate agent, but it could be someone else.

David Greene 41:44
The next is a lender. You need someone to pre-approve you for a loan and finance the property. The next is a property manager, but you can use that property manager as your scout. They know the neighborhoods, they know the area. They manage properties. They know what part of town gives them problems and which areas are pretty smooth. And then the last is a contractor or a handyman because in this investment class you frequently have things that break and you need someone to fix it. If you’ve got those four people, you can invest anywhere.

Stig Brodersen 42:08
I absolutely love that. I love how simple you make it guys that this big complex thing, this black box called real estate investing, I absolutely love how you unpack that for our listeners. Now, let’s talk about deal making. We invest in [inaudible 00:42:24] on the show and we can look up Apple and I think right now it’s trading around 117, now that I look it up. It’s up to us to decide whether we want that stock at that price or we can just come back tomorrow for another quote.

Stig Brodersen 42:37
Now, the flow is a bit different in real estate. Say that you found a property that you liked and you’re meeting with the seller and I haven’t bought as much real estate as you guys, but I would imagine that one of the things that you would often not agree upon that would be the price. And this does not necessarily have to be real estate investor investing for passive income. I mean, this situation could just happen for those of us looking to buy a new home just in general So you don’t agree on the price, but what is your thought process going on from here?

Brandon Turner 43:06
In real estate, it’s not like the house is worth this much. There’s a flexibility and everything and there’s a lot of emotions at play, especially when you’re dealing with homeowners. When you get in the commercial space, there’s a little bit less emotion, but there’s still emotion no matter what. So if you have a good real estate agent, for example David here is actually a real estate agent, so he helps other people buy properties.

Brandon Turner 43:25
A good real estate agent can help try to keep the emotion out and try to do negotiation for you, but there’s a lot of negotiation in play. So you think I only want to pay $100,000 for the house and the seller says, “No, I want you to pay 120.” Well, that’s why we get into the negotiation. So then we say, “Well, I don’t think it’s really worth 120.” Look right here. All these other houses are only selling for 100 and then the person says, “Well, yeah. But my house is nicer than those houses.” And you’re like, “Okay, that’s true. I’ll pay you 105.” And they say, “No, 115.” And you say, “Hey, let’s just meet in the middle at 110.”

Brandon Turner 43:55
So it’s super important for real investors negotiations. And at some point, you get to a number you’re like, “Oh, yeah. We think we can both agree on this.” Or you don’t. So that’s typically how real estate works. I know, David you probably have a lot more on on that being the agent, but it’s definitely negotiable, everything is in real estate, which is actually one of the benefits of it.

Brandon Turner 44:11
I can go buy a house that they’re asking a million dollars for and I can buy it for $800,000. You can’t do that with Apple. You can’t just go and call up… Well, not Steve Jobs anymore, but you can’t call the board of directors at Apple and be like, “Hey, I’d like to get a 20% discount on your stock today, please,” and they’re not going to do it.

Brandon Turner 44:28
You can get discounts on stocks obviously, but it’s not a personal thing. It’s not based on your negotiation skills, it’s just based on your research so a little difference there. David, what do you think?

David Greene 44:37
One of the ways that you actually do well with real estate is that you look for properties that other people don’t want. In fact, when Brandon and I are looking at deals, we are looking for what we call motivated sellers. There’s someone who doesn’t want to own that property anymore. And other people don’t want to buy it. That’s one of the areas where I was describing that you have a little more control over how well you do is you can spend your time looking for… Imagine a stock that nobody else was buying and the company really needed to raise money so you made them an offer. “Well, I can’t pay $50 a share, but I can pay 40.” And they may say, “Well, we need the money so we’ll take it.”

David Greene 45:08
It’s kind of like that with real estate. When it comes to negotiating, the wrong way to look at it is I’m just going to hire a great negotiator and go convince a seller to sell their house for less than what they think it’s worth. If nobody else is buying the property, you can get away with that. When there’s other buyers that want it, that will pay more than you, it doesn’t matter how good of a negotiator you are, they’re going to go with somebody else.

David Greene 45:27
So one of our strategies is to look for properties that other people don’t want. It’s been sitting on the market longer than other people. One of the great ones is sometimes you can’t get financing on a property if it’s in really bad shape. If it’s got a hole in the roof, if it’s got leaks, if it’s got too much dry rot like a fungus that gets into the wood, you can’t use a loan, which eliminates a ton of your competition. And if you can raise money from other investors and go pay cash for it, fix those problems and then get a loan on it, get your money back out. You can get great deals. So that’s another reason that we like doing this because we have a little more control over our efforts creating wealth directly.

Stig Brodersen 46:03
Guys, this has been absolutely amazing. Creating this outline thinking about, well, these are probably the questions that I should ask because I’m definitely no expert in real estate. So those were the questions that I wanted to ask, but I also wanted to put you guys a bit on the spot there. What have I missed? What is the one thing that I should have asked you guys about in terms of getting started into real estate investing? What should our listeners know?

David Greene 46:28
I was going to say that when we are describing these strategies right now, a lot of them are, they are for a little more experience of an investor. You’re going to go look at a property, you know it’s worth less than the other ones around it. You’re comfortable fixing it up to make it worth more. You don’t have to start there. There’s a strategy we call house hacking, which is when you buy a property and you rent out a part of that property to other people and you stay in it.

David Greene 46:51
So it could be a duplex, a two-unit property where you live in one side, you rent out the other or you rent out two sides and you live in one. It can be buying a regular house and renting rooms out to other people or it could even be buying a regular house and splitting it into two units where you live in one and you rent out the other. And the reason that we love that strategy especially for newer people is that you are going to be making a rent or mortgage payment anyway.

David Greene 47:14
So let’s say that you have to pay $2,000 a month in rent for wherever you’re living. Well, if you can rent out part of your property and reduce your overall expenses from 2,000 down to 700, that’s the same as a $1,300 profit. It’s actually better because that $1,300 isn’t being taxed like revenue that would be taxed normally, okay? So it’s better than $1,300. And it’s incredibly low risk.

David Greene 47:38
If you could afford that $2,000 payment, you would have been making to live in the property and you’ve reduced it down to 700, that’s 1,300 that you can save to buy your next deal. And if worst case scenario, you have to make the payment, you’re just at par. That’s where you would have been as far from a financial position, if you didn’t have the tenant. And then after a year, you can move out, buy another property, do it again, rent out both units and now you’ve got a cash flowing deal.

David Greene 48:01
So what I recommend is if you’re hearing this and you’re like, “I want to do it, but I’m just scared.” Don’t go huge. Don’t try to hit a home run. Start with something like that, get your feet wet, get a little momentum going and once you start to recognize, “Oh, there’s a pattern to this. I’m just doing the same things over and over.” Then maybe you go take on some of the strategies we’ve talked about earlier.

Stig Brodersen 48:20
I absolutely love that example. And I think it’s a good equivalent of what we talk about here in the show whenever new investors are saying, “I don’t know if I’m ready? How should I get started? I haven’t a pool of money yet?” Typically, I would say something like put $100 into the stock market, put $10 into the stock market. Try to figure out, how do you feel whenever that drops 2%. Some people, if it’s hundred bucks, it’s, “Oh, god. For that 2% drop I could have bought a pasta or something on the supermarket.”

Stig Brodersen 48:45
They can’t do it and it’s better just to do for $100 than all your money. I kind of like what you said there. For most people, it’s difficult to say, “Oh, let me just make my feet wet and buy an apartment house. Let’s see how I feel about it.” That’s probably not the strategy for you, but I really like how accessible you made that in terms of, “Hey, rent out a room. See how that goes? How is it to have a tenant? What kind of legal work do you need to do?” I absolutely love the example.

Preston Pysh 49:09
So guys, where can the audience learn more about BiggerPockets?

Brandon Turner 49:14
There’s a BiggerPockets Podcast of course which is the real estate show that David and I host every single week. Been doing it now… We’ve got over 400 episodes and we’re usually in the top 10 of business on iTunes. So you can find us anywhere podcasts are at or you can follow me personally @beardybrandon on Instagram. I’m like a 13-year-old girl with my Instagram. I’m on there all the time. David, where are you at?

David Greene 49:33
Yeah. So if you guys want to hear Stig’s interview with us which came out great, it was episode 415 on the BiggerPockets Podcast. Come listen to him crush it. I’m also on the BiggerPockets website as well as my Instagram which is David Greene 24. I’m really all over social media, @davidgreene24. So Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. All of them. There’s an E at the end of Greene when you’re looking me up.

Stig Brodersen 49:55
And I just wanted to say, because we got a lot of requests here from audience like why don’t you guys do videos? And I just want to debunk that myth. The reason why we don’t do it here on our show is that we’re not as good-looking as Brandon and David. So they actually do videos on all the interviews. So if you’d like to see how the sources have been made, BiggerPockets is the place to go.

Stig Brodersen 50:13
All right, guys. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with Preston and me here on The Investor’s Podcast.

Stig Brodersen 50:20
All right. So as we’re letting Brandon and David go, let’s check in with Robert Leonard, our host for our real estate investing show here on The Investor’s Podcast network and hear what he’s up to.

Robert Leonard 50:29
This week on the real estate show, I talked with Justin Eaton about his journey into real estate investing and how he looks at it through the lens of a home inspector. On next week’s episode, this coming Tuesday, I’ll be talking to Peter Politis for one of my personal favorite episodes yet. Peter has overseen over 80 developments encompassing 39 million square feet, with an estimated gross completion value of over $17 billion.

Robert Leonard 50:53
We talk about his private equity fund and this concept of luxury social living arrangements. I think this concept is very fascinating. I love learning about it and I wouldn’t be surprised if I launched my own private equity fund in the future to implement a strategy similar to Peter’s. I’d love to have you guys come check out TIP’s real estate podcast and join me each week on Tuesdays for new episodes. All right. Back to you, Stig.

Stig Brodersen 51:17
Hey, so if you want to subscribe to Real Estate Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network or any other show, simply go to Spotify, Apple Podcast or whatever you listen to your podcasts and just search for The Investor’s Podcast you can find Real Estate Investing, you can find our show, Real Estate Billionaires, Millennial Investing. But guys that was all the precedent I had for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode of The Investor’s Podcast.

Outro 51:45
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