Robert Leonard (03:10):
I think people can tell just from that first minute or two, that you’re clearly a very humble guy, but you’ve done some awesome things in real estate. And I think it makes you really relatable. You started back in 2019, it’s only a year and a half, two years coming up on two and a half years ago. So people that are listening to it today, it’s relatable and it also tells them where they might be able to be in a year and a half or two years. And so I think that’s great.

Robert Leonard (03:31):
Talk to us about your transition into real estate full-time. Why did you make the transition and what has it been like for you?

Tony Robinson (03:39):
Yeah, man. I’ll be honest Robert, it was not by choice. I worked for a big company. I got let go in December of 2020, two days before Christmas. So December 23rd, 2020. And we had spent the last year building up our real estate portfolio and luckily, I earned a pretty decent six-figure wage at my W2 job. My wife and I did a good job of saving. So we had a pretty decent nest egg. And after I lost my job, we had this decision of, is this a sign from the universe that we should jump in full-time or do we go back and try and find something else? And I had always had in the back of my mind that eventually, I wanted to leave my W2 job, but I had about two more years left on that plan. So it just got accelerated.

Tony Robinson (04:23):
So my wife and I said, “Hey, let’s give it a year. Let’s let 2021 be the year that we focus and just go full force on the real estate business and see where we land at the end of the year. And if we need to go back, we’ll go back and we’ll get some W2s. And if not, then this is our life for the rest of our life and we’re working for ourselves.” So it wasn’t by choice. But I think we had enough confidence to bet on ourselves that we had laid the right foundation and yeah, man, we’re just rolling with it.

Robert Leonard (04:50):
You mentioned we, and I know you’re referencing your wife there, but is she a W2 as well now? Or is she full-time in real estate too?

Tony Robinson (04:58):
We’re both full-time in the real estate business. So she had actually left her W2 job maybe about 11 months before me. Once we started acquiring the short-term rentals, she was the person that we put in charge, and then, she manages everything else in our life, just keeping the house front and doing all those things. But yeah, she’s full-time in real estate now as well.

Robert Leonard (05:16):
So we’re nearing the end of 2021. We’re nine months or so in. You’re coming up on that year mark, where are you at? What does it look like? Are you getting prepared to start looking for another W2? Or are you continuing down the path of just real estate? What’s that look like for you?

Tony Robinson (05:30):
Man, the goal is that, on December 31st of this year that I delete my resume, completely swipe my LinkedIn profile and I feel like we’re on that path man. It’s scary making that transition, right? Because you go from climbing the corporate ladder, and getting these promotions and these raises and there’s this very steady paycheck coming in every two weeks. And then I got quarterly bonuses. There was just a very steady flow of money, right? But when you transition into working for yourself, it’s irregular, right? You get paid here, you get paid there, you get… And you’ve got to just live life with a different perspective. So it was scary. But I think for me, Robert, the biggest thing is that I understand how much risk there is in continuing to be a W2 employee. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that. They think that there’s more risk in being an entrepreneur, but where the risk really lies is in not building something for yourself.

Robert Leonard (06:22):
Why is that?

Tony Robinson (06:23):
Let me break that down, right? So my dad, my father, right? He worked for this trucking company for most of my young life, right? From the time that I was born, he was in the trucking industry. So he started this company when he was 20, right? Early 20s. Worked his way up from being a dock worker to being the general manager of this company. He had a nice cushy job. He had bought not one but two houses. He and my mom had two houses at the time. They were renting one out, they had a primary residence and in his mid-30s, right? So he’s 14, 15 years in the job at this point. He gets a call that the company’s going bankrupt. Like, “Hey, you don’t have a job Friday.” No warning, no, hey, prepare yourself. He woke up one day and he didn’t have a job, right? By no fault of his own.

Tony Robinson (07:05):
And he didn’t have another hustle, he didn’t have another business to fall back on. So it was very difficult for my parents when that happened to them, right? We ended up losing the house, just all kinds of things happened. Then they ended up breaking up, divorcing. So it was this very pivotal moment in my dad’s life and he just always communicated to me growing up about the importance of building something for yourself. So I feel super, I don’t know, fortunate to have learned from his lessons of that, when I almost went through the exact same experience as my dad, right? I’m in my mid-30s, spent all this time climbing the corporate ladder and I unexpectedly lose my job. But luckily, I had something else to fall back on.

Tony Robinson (07:46):
And that’s the part that people don’t understand is that, when you work for someone else, they might love you, right? You might be the best employee, but at the end of the day, they’re always going to have to make the decision that’s best for the business. And if that means the decision that’s best for the business is that Robert loses his job or that Tony loses his job, they’re going to do that, right? They’re not going to say, “Oh, we really like Robert,” or, “We really like Tony. They’re good guys.” It’s not going to happen that way, right? They’re going to do what’s best for the business. So if you’re not building something for yourself, then you’re putting yourself at risk, you’re putting your family at risk.

Robert Leonard (08:18):
I was going to say, you’re the perfect example of that, right? What if you didn’t have that real estate to fall back on when you had gotten let go from your job? I mean, you probably could have found another W2 job. You’re relatively young, well-educated, you’re a smart guy, hard worker. I’m sure you would’ve been able to find another job. But the point is, you didn’t have to because you had your real estate on the side. And I think you’re right. A lot of people have this false sense of security from a W2. But what I always think of about is too is, that’s just one source of income.

Robert Leonard (08:42):
Sure, there’s some sense of security from a W2. But when you’re an entrepreneur, you oftentimes have more than one stream of income. So even if you lose one of them, you still have all the others. Maybe you make a little less money, maybe you need to tighten your belt a little bit, not spend as much money, but at least you still have all these other streams. In real estate, if you have a bunch of big portfolio with a bunch of properties, if one or two properties goes down, you get fired, say, from those properties, you still have the other three, four, five to support you. And it’s not that way with a W2. You’re either in or you’re out.

Tony Robinson (09:12):
Robert, I’ll never forget. My first job out of college, I was working for this big corporation, right? They’re like a Fortune 100 company, right? And after my first year, the time for my raise comes up and I’ve been crushing it, man. I was killing it, staying late, going into work early, just doing all this stuff you’re supposed to do when you get out of college and it’s your first job and you’re trying to crush it. And I got a 2% raise, 2%. And I’ll never forget. I was sitting there in the office with my boss and sweet lady, loved her to death. And she was super excited to get me this raise. She was like, “Tony, you did such a great job this year. We really wanted to reward you.” They hand me my raise letter and it was 2%.

Tony Robinson (09:50):
And of course, I smile and I say, “Thank you. I’m appreciative.” But as I was walking away, I was like, “Man, I’m worth way more than 2%.” And what I love about being an entrepreneur and working for yourself and being in control is that I get to decide what I’m worth, I get to decide how much money I make on a monthly, weekly, annual basis, right? It’s up to me to go out there and bust my ass, do the work that’s necessary. And as long as I’m providing value to the marketplace, I know that I’m going to be compensated in a way that’s equal to the value that I’m providing. Not based on what some corporation feels that I should be getting, but on the value that I know that I provide, that’s why I love the journey of being an entrepreneur, man.

Robert Leonard (10:30):
And a lot of times, there’s a bracket there. Even if you’re a top performer, some companies say, “No matter how good you are, we can’t give more than 5%. That is literally the cap. It doesn’t matter how good you are. You could be the best employee in the entire company, better than the CEO, it doesn’t matter. You’re getting 5%. That’s the best we can do.” It doesn’t really work that way in real estate, right?

Robert Leonard (10:48):
I mean, it works the same way in any entrepreneurial journey, but we’re talking about real estate here. Let’s just say you have a rental unit that’s $1,000 a month in rent and you’re profitable there, you bought it that way. But then in a year, you can raise that to say, 1,250. Now you just got a 25% raise. You just gave yourself a 25% raise and it drops right to the bottom line because your expenses haven’t increased and nobody else is controlling that for you. There are market conditions there that can obviously play a role, but the point is you’re in control. And when you work at a W2, you have no control. You have a false sense of security, but you have no actual control. Whereas an entrepreneur, you have all the control.

Tony Robinson (11:23):
You’ve got to play it smart like you said. And there are some market forces at play, but at the end of the day, it’s up to me, it’s up to you, what your value is and how much money you actually make.

Robert Leonard (11:32):
When you first started in real estate, you had the W2 job, so you weren’t necessarily creating your portfolio in a way that needed to sustain your lifestyle. It was more this side hustle, I guess you could say, or another passive income stream. So what was your strategy then and what has it evolved into today?

Tony Robinson (11:51):
When I first started investing, one of the books that I read early on was Joe Fairless, the guy from the Best Ever Real Estate Podcast and all the things that he does. He had a book on apartment syndication. And I read that book and I knew that I eventually wanted my real estate investments to replace my W2 income. And I felt fairly confident that buying one and off single-family houses would be the slowest way to get there. So I knew that I wanted to venture off into an asset class that could produce bigger income, right?

Tony Robinson (12:28):
My initial thought was, okay, I want to get into apartment syndication, right? I want to go out and buy these 100 unit apartment complexes and do all these really cool things. But Joe Fairless in his book, the first thing he said is that, you need a track record if people are going to hand you their money, right? They need to see that you’ve done this once or twice. And Joe said that his track record before his first apartment syndication was buying and renovating single-family houses.

Tony Robinson (12:51):
I had already read the BRRRR book by David Greene, Buy, Rent, Rehab, Refinance, Repeat. I’d already read Long-Distance Real Estate Investing. All the BiggerPockets books I had consumed already. So I said, “Okay, cool. Let me start with a few single-family houses and then I’ll graduate into the apartment syndication space.” So that’s what I did, man. Went out to Louisiana, which was, I don’t know how many thousands of miles away from Southern California. We bought four properties out there. Two of them were long-term rentals, the other two, they were rehabs. So we were planning to turn the long-term rentals [inaudible 00:13:20] and then selling them beforehand. But that’s how I got started, man. I bought a couple long-distance investments out of state, got some tenants in there, and was off to the races from there.

Robert Leonard (13:28):
Why’d you choose Louisiana?

Tony Robinson (13:31):
My parents, my mom, and my stepdad, they had actually retired there. They were living in Southern California. My mom retired and wanted to make the retirement money stretch a little bit longer. And they moved to Louisiana. My stepdad had some family out there. Shreveport, Louisiana, if anyone’s wondering. And when they moved out there, they bought a house that had been sitting vacant for three years. They paid $30,000 for the house. They spent another, I think $40,000 on the rehab, right? It was a small place. It’s a two-bedroom, one-bath, just no space for the two of them. And it ended up appraising for $110,000 or something like that, right? It appraised for far more than what they put into it.

Tony Robinson (14:05):
And the best part was that there was a local bank that funded 100% of the purchase price and 100% of the rehab. So my parents had this house, built this equity and they literally spent $0 out-of-pocket. So after they did this, I’m just talking to them like, “Hey, tell me more about this.” And they gave me all the details. So I ended up calling the bank. I said, “Hey, my parents just got a house with you guys. Can I do this too? If I buy an investment property, will this work?” And they’re like, “Yeah, sure. And they gave me the guidelines.” You got to have this certain level of cushion or margin in between what you pay for it and what it’ll be worth afterwards. But if you find the right deal, we’ll fund it. So I did that twice with that bank and that’s how I got started out there.

Robert Leonard (14:46):
Here at TIP, we’re mainly focused on stock investing. We do have a little bit of real estate, obviously with this real estate show that we’re talking on today, but we’re predominantly focused on stock investing. So when I heard that you used a line of credit against your stock portfolio, I thought that was really interesting. And I thought that the audience would really like it and could learn a lot from it. So talk to us a bit about what you did with this stock portfolio line of credit, how it all worked. How did you even find that bank? Let’s talk through that a bit.

Tony Robinson (15:14):
Yeah, absolutely. The company that I was working for, a big part of our compensation was through restricted stock units, right? So we got company stock as part of being an employee, right? And it was all managed through E-Trade, right? So etrade.com. I’d have to log in there, I’d see all my stocks that got vested. And I can’t remember how I came across it, just like monkeying around on the website. I came across this line of credit tab and I said, “Oh, what is this?” And what it allows you to do is to take stock that you own. And they’ll use that as leverage to give you, or as collateral to give you a line of credit.

Tony Robinson (15:49):
I think they’ll only go up to 10 or 15%, maybe even 20%, 25, somewhere around there of what you actually have. But the benefit is that it’s a really, really, really low-interest rate in comparison to a typical line of credit. I think when I got it, it was like 2.875 or something stupid like that. It doesn’t show up on your credit report. So as you’re trying to get other loans and things like that, it’s not going to work against you. And it’s super, super easy. There’s no credit. They’re using your stocks as collateral. So I think I called on a Monday morning to say, “Hey, can I get this line of credit?” And I was approved Monday afternoon, right? It was that simple. And we used those proceeds to go out and pay cash for some of their investment properties we bought in Louisiana as well.

Robert Leonard (16:28):
You’re right. You typically can’t get a huge percentage of your portfolio, but there are somewhere you can get 30, 40, 50%. I mean, if you have a decent-sized portfolio, that could be awesome. And like you said, they’re just using the collateral from the assets, the stocks, and so, it’s super easy. And I think that’s a great way to get into a property for somebody, especially somebody listening to the show because a lot of people listening to the show probably have more stock investments than they do real estate yet because of how much TIP has focused on stocks in the past.

Robert Leonard (16:58):
Do you still utilize that strategy at all? I mean, I’m guessing you probably don’t have those RSUs anymore, but if you have a stock portfolio, do you still use that at all?

Tony Robinson (17:08):
I haven’t used it since. We’ve been able to find capital in other places. So I’m just letting that one ride and growing and doing its thing.

Robert Leonard (17:15):
How did you pay that loan back?

Tony Robinson (17:17):
So we actually ended up selling the properties that we bought. The goal was initially to do a BRRRR with them, but we ended up just selling them for what we paid for them. So once I got that money back, I just paid out the line of credit.

Robert Leonard (17:28):
Would you be willing to do that same strategy? And let’s just say the loan monthly payment was, I’m going to use random round numbers here for easy conversation. Let’s say the loan on that was $100 a month. If you knew you were going to cashflow $300 a month on a property, would you be willing to use that loan to buy that property to net the difference?

Tony Robinson (17:49):
I guess, a couple of things, right? Before I answer that. First is that the benefit of using that line of credit at least through E-Trade is that, there are no monthly payments due. So any interest that’s accruing, it just gets added to your line of credit balance. So technically, you wouldn’t even have to pay this monthly note until whatever time that you chose to.

Tony Robinson (18:06):
I think the way that I would use it is probably not to buy just a traditional rental property. But if I were to do it, I would use that as cash to buy a distressed property that needed to be rehabbed. I would go through the rehab process and then refinance out to get that capital back, pay off the line of credit and then just recycle the capital that way.

Robert Leonard (18:26):
What happens if you don’t get all of the capital back out?

Tony Robinson (18:28):
And you got to come out to pocket a little bit, right? To pay off that line of credit. But I mean that’s just part of being a good real estate investor is doing your best to buy, right? Even if you leave a couple thousand bucks in a real estate deal, the returns are still pretty solid.

Robert Leonard (18:41):
And you could use the monthly cash flow still at that point. If you got most of it back and you just had a little bit leftover, you could use the monthly cash flow to pay off that remaining balance if you wanted.

Tony Robinson (18:50):
Absolutely.

Robert Leonard (18:51):
I’m not really the type of person in the real estate world to care much about unit counts and how many units people own. I think that that’s often a vanity metric for a lot of people, but give us an idea of what your portfolio looks like today. Where are your properties located? What types of properties are there? What strategies are you using?

Tony Robinson (19:10):
Gosh, I got to do some thinking here. Again, we got our first property in October of 2019, right? So we’re coming up on two years now. We purchased four properties as long-term rentals in Louisiana. We’ve sold all but one of those. We have one of those four that’s left. It’s on the market right now, we’re trying to sell it. And then we’ve got short-term rentals. That’s what we transitioned into last year and that’s when our portfolio has just grown quite a bit over the past 12 months. But we invest primarily in Joshua Tree, California, and in the Smoky Mountain area of Tennessee. So Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg area.

Tony Robinson (19:43):
In Joshua Tree right now we have, six active listings in Joshua Tree. We actually just sold one a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got another two that are currently in the rehab phase and another four that are under contract. And then in the Smoky Mountains we’ve got two active listings out there, two active properties out there and then another five under contract out there as well.

Robert Leonard (20:07):
How did you pick those areas?

Tony Robinson (20:09):
It was kind of happenstance. So one of my friends in the world of real estate investing, he and I were initially partnering up to do this total apartment syndication thing, like I had mentioned earlier in the show. And as we were trying to gain some traction in the world of real estate investing or apartment syndication, we realized that it was very difficult to break into that space as someone that had as little experience as we did. And my friend, he said, “Hey, you know what? I’m throwing in the white towel. I’m not going to try and be an apartment syndicator, but I’m going to Tennessee and I’m buying this cabin and I’m going to rent it out on Airbnb.” And I was like, “What? What are you talking about?”

Tony Robinson (20:42):
Well, obviously I had used Airbnb before and I knew that there was some benefits to doing it, but my friend flew out to Tennessee and he spent some time out there and he just fell in love with the place and when he came back from his trip, he let us know that he was buying one and we just blindly followed him into that market. We did a little bit of our own due diligence, but after we saw the potential returns in that market, we bought our first one last August sight unseen. Like I said, we’ve been off to the races ever since.

Tony Robinson (21:08):
After seeing the success that we had in the Smoky Mountains, which is a national park, that drew our attention to Joshua Tree, right? We live in Southern California, Joshua Tree is a 90-minute drive from us, another national park, big visitation, millions and millions of people every single year and we saw some similarities between those two markets. And that’s how we got into Joshua Tree as well.

Robert Leonard (21:27):
How does financing work with these short-term rentals? Is it the same as a traditional long-term investment property, 20, 25% down? What are you doing for financing on these?

Tony Robinson (21:37):
Man, that is the beauty of short-term rentals. Man, why I think for most new investors, it’s probably one of the best asset classes you can purchase in right now. So if you were a traditional real estate investor, you’re buying a house, you buy with the intention of getting a long-term lease in place, right? Someone staying there for six, 12, 18 months, you’re limited in the type of financing that you have available to you, right? It has to be labeled as an investment property because that long-term lease is there.

Tony Robinson (22:05):
With a vacation rental, with a short-term rental, Airbnb, Vrbo type property, you can purchase these as vacation homes for yourself, right? You can purchase these as vacation homes for yourself because there’s no long-term lease in place. It means you as the owner still have the options, still have the availability to visit and use that property for personal use throughout the year.

Tony Robinson (22:26):
So we’ve purchased the vast majority of our short-term rentals using a vacation home or second home mortgage. And the benefit of doing this is that it’s typically only a 10% down payment, 10% down payment. So we’re getting this property that’s, I’ll give you actual numbers Robert, right? Because I was actually just looking at this yesterday. The very first cabin that we bought last year, it was a $590,000 purchase price. So we got it with a $59,000 down payment, our total cash to close, after closing costs, we had some credits that came back to us, our total out-of-pocket expense to buy that property was $59,000. And it was almost a $600,000 purchase price.

Tony Robinson (23:03):
We netted, not grossed, but we netted actual profit on that property over the first 12 months with $65,000. So our first 12 months of ownership, we gross about 140K. We netted $65,000 on that. After all expenses, after mortgage, principal, taxes, insurance, repairs, and maintenance, we netted at 65K. So we’re taking this $59,000 all in cash investment. And we were able to get more than that back in the first 12 months of owning it. And the reason why that works is because that 10% down payment. So that’s the financing that we use because it’s fantastic.

Robert Leonard (23:36):
Is there a limit to how many of those you can get? Can you only have one? Because I’ve heard of this, but I thought that you can only do one at a time.

Tony Robinson (23:43):
You can only have one in each market. So I have one in Joshua Tree, I have one in the Smoky Mountains. My partner has one in Joshua Tree, he has one in the Smoky Mountains. So that’s the way that you get around it. What you’ll see a lot, Robert, is that people jump from market to market, right? Say it’s a husband and wife duo, they’ll each buy one in market one. Then they’ll each buy one in market two and they just jump around leveraging that for as long as they can.

Tony Robinson (24:09):
Now, you still have to be able to get qualified for those mortgages, right? They’re still looking at your debt-to-income ratio to make sure that you can carry all those mortgages. So there is a bit of a limitation there, but man, it is a great way to break into the short-term rental space.

Robert Leonard (24:22):
Do they require W2 income for those?

Tony Robinson (24:25):
They don’t require W2 income, right? I mean, you just got to be able to prove how much you make and then again, just meet those DTI requirements.

Robert Leonard (24:31):
So is the financing piece, in terms of actually getting approved, the underwriting, is it similar to a traditional investment?

Tony Robinson (24:38):
Same exact thing.

Robert Leonard (24:40):
Because there’s a lot of people that say, one of the big benefits of W2 is that, it’s super easy to get loans for the most part. Once you become self-employed or an entrepreneur, it’s much harder. Are those still going to be issues for people if they’re not W2 when it comes to getting these loans?

Tony Robinson (24:55):
The underwriting process is the exact same thing as it would be as buying a primary residence. So if you have an easy path to getting that mortgage for your primary residence, it’ll be a very easy path for your short-term rental. If you have a more difficult, complicated path for your primary resident, you’ll meet some of those same challenges with the vacation home mortgage as well. Now, I will add though that there are more companies, Robert, that are popping up that are specializing in funding short-term rentals.

Tony Robinson (25:24):
What you see a lot in the apartments’ syndication space, right? The hotel space is that there’s a very mature infrastructure for financing these things, right? You can give Fannie and Freddy that non-recourse, very attractive debt. That’s still being built out in the short-term rental space. But anyway, what you’re seeing is that there are companies that are popping up that are underwriting these properties based on their projected short-term rental income. So they’re not underwriting you as the borrower, right? As long as you meet their credit score requirements, they’re going to look at, okay, how much does this property project to gross? What’s the debt service coverage ratio on this property. And as long as it meets those guidelines, then you’ll be able to get approved. But those typically, 20% down, possibly more depending on the property.

Robert Leonard (26:10):
Who are you getting the loans from? I’m assuming it’s not your typical Bank of America, TD Bank, these types of normal, big institutions. I’m guessing it’s probably a different type of bank.

Tony Robinson (26:19):
People think that, but our very first purchase was with US Bank, big national bank and they offer this product as well. I think it’s just not spoken of all that often. So people don’t even know that it exists and unless you go and ask for it, they might not even present it to you. But our first one was with US Bank. We’ve used a variety of lenders since then.

Robert Leonard (26:39):
What are the terms? I know you could do 10% down, you mentioned. But what is the length of the term? Are you able to get 30-year fixed debt?

Tony Robinson (26:45):
30-year fixed. Interest rates are almost in lockstep with primary residence rates, probably our best interest rate right now. We’ve got a 30-year fix at one of our Joshua Tree properties at a 2.675% interest rate.

Robert Leonard (26:58):
Financing doesn’t get much better than that. That’s for sure.

Tony Robinson (27:01):
Yeah.

Robert Leonard (27:03):
How does it work with investors? I know you’ve brought in some investor money for some of these Airbnbs. So how do you manage the financing aspect when it comes to investors? Because I know sometimes these bigger banks don’t like to lend to people if they have investors and they can just make it really difficult. So how are you handling that piece of it?

Tony Robinson (27:19):
So what we do is we bring in partners and they carry the mortgage and we typically identify, find the property, and then we manage it on a day-to-day basis, and then we just split the profits. So it’s very cut, and simple, and dry. Partner does the financing piece, we do the operational piece and we split everything down the middle.

Robert Leonard (27:36):
You brought up the next question, which is managing them. Are you self-managing all of these long-distance Airbnb properties? And if so, walk us through how you’re doing that.

Tony Robinson (27:45):
Yeah, we are self-managing. My company, my team, it’s Alpha Geek Capital, and that’s me, my wife, and my wife’s cousin. So the three of us make up the tripod that is Alpha Geek Capital. And we each play different roles within the business. So my wife’s cousin key focuses on all the vendor relations. So he’s the one that’s coordinating with the cleaners, paying all the contractors, doing all of those things. Ordering all the supplies, all of the back of house operations is what he runs.

Tony Robinson (28:14):
My wife is in charge of all the front of house. So she’s like our guest relations person. So she’s the one that’s typically communicating with the guests, doing all those things. And she has some interaction with the cleaners and things like that as well. And then I do all of the acquisitions, the finance, the systems, and operations, right? Like running our pricing strategy, all the software and tools that we use, getting all those things put together. So between the three of us, we’ve found a good rhythm to keep the business balanced and moving forward.

Robert Leonard (28:40):
Hypothetical example here, what happens if somebody’s at one of your properties and gets locked out, the keys are gone or something like that. Something that you almost have to be there to solve. What do you do in those cases?

Tony Robinson (28:51):
We’ve automated a lot of the business, right? So there are no keys, we have no physical keys in any of our properties, there are keypads, but just to get at what you’re asking, if there’s ever a situation that would absolutely positively require someone to be there, we’ll typically call our cleaner or our handyman and they’ll swing by. But there’s never been an absolute emergency where someone had to go. If there was a real emergency, we would just call the police and say, “Hey, get over there.” But most of the guests’ needs are urgent, but not so urgent that they need to be handled immediately in real-time.

Robert Leonard (29:23):
I think the point that you made though about the keyless entry is important. I think that’s the answer, right? That is one of the big answers is you’ve already thought about these things and you’ve already taken steps and put things in place. So you don’t have to worry about that. You’re like, “Okay, I can’t deal with keys and I don’t want to deal with keys and people are going to lock them, they’re going to lose them, they’re not going to find them, whatever the case is. Let’s just put keyless entry, electronic keypads, I’m assuming, into the doors and then that’ll solve that issue.” So that’s one of the great answers there is, you’ve thought of all these different things that could go wrong with the property and you’ve got ahead of them.

Tony Robinson (29:52):
To me, automation is a critical piece of being able to continue to scale, right? We’re at, a small handful of properties right now. But my goal is to get to hundreds, if not thousands of these units, right? So we’ve got to figure out, what are the processes and systems we need to put in place now so that as we start to scale, all these things scale with us, and we’re still finding different ways to try and continue to automate the business and make it more hands-off. But yeah, we’re slowly putting those pieces into place.

Robert Leonard (30:18):
I want to talk a bit more about the partner and investors you have. You said that the investors get the financing and you guys handle the rest. So are they putting up all the capital for, I mean, they’re your investors, right? So I’m assuming they’re putting up all of the capital, the majority of the capital. So is this right? Are they going out, getting the loan, getting the mortgage, putting up the capital, going through that whole process, and then you’re doing everything else for them, and for that you split 50/50? Is that pretty much how it works?

Tony Robinson (30:46):
That’s absolutely correct. So we do pretty much all of the legwork. We involve them to the extent that they want to be involved, but the vast majority, once we close the property, they’re just hanging out in the background, collecting their profit distributions but, yeah. They bring the capital, they bring the mortgage approval. We find the deals, we get them set up, we run them on a day-to-day basis and we split it all down the middle.

Robert Leonard (31:06):
So why is that enticing to them? Just because they could be completely passive and they don’t have to do anything? Because I mean, in theory, they could do what you’re doing, right? And so what is enticing to them? Just because they’re completely passive, they don’t have to worry about anything?

Tony Robinson (31:17):
I think a lot of people are intrigued by the idea of owning a short-term rental. They see the benefits, they see the increased cash flow, but they are in no way, shape or form, do they have the desire to manage that kind of asset. So I think the way that we provide value to them is by giving them better returns in what they would get if they were to go buy some single-family residents, put a property manager in there, but still make it as passive as they want it to be. So we hope that we’re giving them value in that way.

Tony Robinson (31:49):
And then there are some people that we work with that have hopes of doing this by themselves one day and they’re working with us just to learn the ropes and we’re okay with that too, right? If you’re here to use us as a stepping stone to build your portfolio without us, we’re fine with that too.

Robert Leonard (32:03):
So why wouldn’t they look at you as just a property management company? Why wouldn’t they just say, “Hey, instead of giving you 50% of this deal, why wouldn’t I just give you 10, 12, 15%, whatever it looks like for Airbnb as my property manager?”

Tony Robinson (32:17):
Great question. And I’m glad you’re asking that, and this is not a knock on property management companies, right? But A, in the short-term rental space, there’s no way that you’re paying 10% for property management. Those fees are closer to 30 or 40%. When we bought our first cabin, there was a contract in place with a property management company that we had to honor for, I think the first month and their fees were about 40%.

Tony Robinson (32:39):
In addition, what we’ve seen, at least in the markets that we operate in is that the property management companies underperform. The same cabin that we did 140 some odd thousand dollars of gross revenue in our first 12 months, did $86,000 in the 12 months prior, right? Not including COVID, right? We bought it in 2020. But if you looked at just 2019, it did $86,000, right? So that’s almost half of what we did as brand new first-time, short-term rental operators. So I think there’s value in having someone that has a vested interest in the property.

Tony Robinson (33:11):
In addition, we help them find the deal. We help them analyze the deal to make sure that it actually makes sense, right? So a property management company isn’t going to source the deal for you, they’re not going to tell you, “Yes, this is a good investment.” Or, “No, it’s not.” And then last, if there’s ever a situation where the expenses on a property exceed the income, right? So say that for whatever reason, we’re not doing a good job or something breaks, there’s a big bill that comes through. We split that cost evenly with our partners as well. So we have a vested interest in making sure the property’s doing a good job.

Robert Leonard (33:42):
And so you mentioned 50/50, how do you handle that from a legal perspective? If they’re getting the loan, a lot of times what I’ve seen is that the financing company, the bank, typically wants that deed to only be in that person’s name. So how do you handle that piece? Do you guys quitclaim it after the mortgage is done? How do you handle that piece of it?

Tony Robinson (34:01):
Essentially. And this honestly varies by state. We’ve noticed in Tennessee, you can actually close with two people on the deed, even if only one of them is on the mortgage. But in California, we have just the person that’s on the mortgage, so our partner, they’re the only ones listed on the deed at the time of closing. And then after we close, it’s close to a quitclaim deed, but it’s called grant deed. We go back, we update the title to make sure that everybody’s on there with the correct percentages.

Robert Leonard (34:25):
And then how do you handle the taxes? And this is a little bit of a selfish question for me, to be honest because it’s something I’ve struggled with. You have a podcast, I have a podcast, we have audiences, social media, things like that. I’ve had people that want to invest with me. I’ve talked to my CPA and I just haven’t found a way. I need to use a different strategy ultimately is what it boils down to because the strategy I’m using now, it doesn’t make sense to partner with somebody to cover the tax cost.

Robert Leonard (34:49):
And so I’m trying to learn how to fix that. And so I want to learn from you that, and I think it’s selfish in that respect, but I think it’s also helpful for people listening because, somebody listening might want to partner with somebody they know, or a couple of people they know because they don’t have enough money. And I know that they’re going to run into this tax issue. And so they might not realize it now, but in the future, you probably will realize that if you partner with somebody, you might have this tax issue here.

Robert Leonard (35:12):
And so what I’m referring to is with, I do long-distance, single-family rentals, long term, and they’ll make roughly say, $300 a month in profit. So we’ll net around $4,000 a year on one property. It’s going to cost me between 1,000 and 1,500 for what they call a partnership tax return. And so if you take out $1,000 from a $4,000 profit, you’ve just cut 25% of your profits right there. And so for me, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring in a partner to do that. So I’m curious to hear, how are you handling the tax piece in a similar situation?

Tony Robinson (35:46):
Maybe I’ll have to consult with my CPA about this, make sure I’m not giving out the wrong advice. Basically, the way that we structure it is that, based on the equity ownership that we have in the property, that’s the percentage of the tax benefits we get from that property, right? So say that on paper, there’s a $10,000 loss on paper, right? My team would get $5,000 of that loss, our partner would get $5,000 of that loss and all that we will do is give our partners, I don’t know what the document is called. We’ll give them some kind of document at the end of the year that says, “This is how much money we distributed to you as owner’s distributions and profit for the entire year.” And then it’s up to them at that point to take that information with their CPA and workout whatever they need to work out. So pretty straightforward, man. I don’t know if there’s any secret sauce or maybe I’m missing something, maybe my CPA will have a surprise for me at the end of the year. But that’s the process right now.

Robert Leonard (36:36):
That form is the K-1. And I think what you’re doing, that’s the same process that my CPA told me, that’s exactly what I go through. But I think the issue for me is that these properties are so small, they don’t profit a ton. $4,000 a year in profits is not a ton. You’re talking about $65,000 a year in profit. So if you do have a $1,500 tax bill to file your partnership tax return, which you would have with this investor, it’s not really a big deal, right? What’s $1,500 on $65,000 in profit.

Robert Leonard (37:05):
But for me, for a property that only makes $4,000, 1,000 to $1,500 for a tax bill, just for my CPA to prepare the taxes for partnership return is a ton of money in terms of the percentage of the profits. So I think that’s the big disconnect is, yours are so much more profitable because you’re doing the short-term rentals. And so that’s what I mentioned. I think I need to just do a different strategy with partners and if I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, I can’t have partners. And if I’m going to have partners, I need to do a different strategy.

Tony Robinson (37:31):
I’m glad you brought that up because we’re honestly struggling with that same thing in our business right now as well, right? This $65,000, that’s our biggest property, that’s a cabin. It was the first one that we bought, it’s doing well, but our Joshua Tree properties are probably going to do half of that, right? In gross profit. So you’re looking at the 30 to 35, then we got to split that 50/50 with the partners, right? So it gets sliced up a lot of times. And we’re going through that same thought process now as, does it make sense for us to continue to scale if we’re doing it for 50% of $30,000? We’re looking at $15,000 a year or so.

Tony Robinson (38:00):
We’re looking at other ways to still leverage the short-term rental platforms, but do it in a way that produces bigger revenues. We just put in an offer on a nine-unit hotel here in Southern California that fits our model. I was just in Big Bear Lake, which is another market here and we’re looking at a five-unit apartment complex. So we’re looking at different things to solve that same problem that you’re talking about too, Robert.

Robert Leonard (38:23):
What are you doing, if anything, to prepare for a potential recession? And I’m not saying one’s coming but, with long-term rentals, traditional rentals, I think they’re a little bit more recession-proof, which is one of the things I like about them. I think Airbnb can be a little bit more, I think you could struggle more with a recession. And so if a recession hits, you’re almost exclusively in short-term rentals, what do you do? And what are you doing to prepare for that, if anything?

Tony Robinson (38:49):
And this is a good question that comes up a lot. I guess I’ll answer that in two pieces, right? Because another way that that question is posed to me, Robert, is, what happens if home prices decrease, right? Because there’s a lot of talk about that, right? Not so much a big recession, but that you’ll start to see a drop in home values because of whatever reasons, right?

Tony Robinson (39:12):
For us, the value of the home in the short term isn’t super important. We plan to hold these things for a while. So the value of your property in the short-term, isn’t super important because as long as there’s still travel and leisure happening across the economy, then people are still coming to our property, right? Even if the value of this home fluctuates like this, as long as travel is still doing this, or even just staying flat, then we’re still making money, right? So the home value in that piece, I’m not super concerned about.

Tony Robinson (39:43):
If there is an actual recession, 2008 type recession, then yeah. I think we will be a bit exposed, right? Because if we’re talking that level of economic chaos, then people probably aren’t traveling to the Smokey Mountains to spend seven weeks and pay several thousand dollars for a cabin anymore, right? So we’ve got to lean in on our reserves, got to hope that we’ve got enough money stocked away to weather that storm. We got to hope that there’s enough, at least travel happening to cover the bare minimum to keep the doors open. And if worse comes to worst and we’ve got to come out-of-pocket to fund some of these deals, we’ll do until we run out to money. And then we’ll pivot, we’ll see if we can run them as long-term rentals. In these markets, we probably can because they’re primarily vacation rentals. So yeah, man.

Tony Robinson (40:24):
I mean, I don’t have a great answer because we, let me put it this way, right? When Hilton or Marriott or Hyatt or all of these other hotels, when they’re looking at a piece of land and they say, “We want to build a hotel here.” The CEO of those big companies isn’t asking his team, “Hey guys, did anyone check to make sure if these would work as an apartment complex before we build it?” That’s not their model, right? Their model is, we are first and foremost, a vacation and tourism company. We’re first and foremost, a hospitality business That’s focused on giving short-term stays to people who travel and that’s the same approach that I take in my business as well. We know that there will be fluctuations in the market, we know that there will be ups and downs in how people travel. But our goal is that we’ve got enough cash stashed aside to weather those storms and that in the long run, we remain a profitable business.

Robert Leonard (41:18):
I was thinking more along the lines of the travel like you said. I’m not really too concerned with the property values for the exact same reasons you said. They’re going to go up, they’re going to go down. Whatever happens, that’s fine as long as you continue to hold the property. I’m more thinking what if travel goes down, people just can’t afford to travel, right? Recession hits, people lose their jobs, they can’t afford to travel, especially on a luxury like that, typically, what do you do in that case? And so I’d love to learn a little bit more about your reserves. What do the reserves look like? Are you putting money aside every month? Do you have a certain percentage? Are you putting three times the mortgage payment aside for every property? What are you doing for reserve strategy?

Tony Robinson (41:52):
Our target right now is three months of principal interest and taxes payments for each property. But luckily my partner and I, we both have just personal reserves as well. So as we’re solely building up business reserves, we know if there is a break glass in case of emergency, we can dip into our personal finances to keep the business whole until we can get back to where we need to be.

Robert Leonard (42:12):
How do you align your partners in terms of how long you’re going to hold the property? What happens if one of your investors that finance the property decides, “I want to sell, I don’t want this anymore.” What do you do in those cases?

Tony Robinson (42:24):
We give control to our partners in terms of when to sell the property, right? They’re the ones that brought the capital, they’re the ones that are carrying the mortgage, so we give them the control. What we do have though in our joint venture contract is that, if they sell before, I think it’s five years, we get a 10% kicker on our equity stake. So if it’s a 50/50 split, we then get 60% and they get 40% just to incentivize them to hold it for at least that long. So yeah, that’s how we structure our deals and protect ourselves to make sure we’re not putting all this work in the upfront. And then six months later the partner says, “Hey, I want to sell the property.”

Robert Leonard (42:59):
A lot of times on podcasts, people just talk about their wins and don’t talk about struggles or losses. So I want to chat a bit about what you’re struggling with in your business. What are you struggling with and how are you working through those challenges?

Tony Robinson (43:12):
Yeah, man, I’ve got a couple. The first one is the last long-term rental that we have in Louisiana. It has turned out to be a terrible investment for us. It started off great. We put zero money into the deal, we were using that same bank that funded all the rehab and the purchase price. But we bought it in a flood zone and we knew it was a flood zone, but we factored in the cost of the flood insurance and it was still a profitable deal for us, right? Especially given that we didn’t put any money into it. What we didn’t anticipate or I guess account for is that flood premiums can change from year to year. So our flood premium literally doubled from one year to the next, for whatever reason. And we shopped around to multiple insurance brokers and everyone was saying, “It is what it is.”

Tony Robinson (43:51):
So instead of us netting, I think we were netting, I don’t know, 200 bucks a month on that property. We were actively losing $50 per month on the mortgage, right? The mortgage was 1,400. It was rented out for 1,350 and then we had $100 property management fee on top of that, right? So we’re in the negative with 150 bucks. Anyway, the tenants ended up trashing the place. We had just renovated it right before they moved in, they trashed the place. So it’s been vacant now for three months and we’re in the process of doing [inaudible 00:44:19] rehab to try and get it ready to sell. We’re going through it.

Tony Robinson (44:22):
And the reason why I bring that one up first Robert is because a lot of people are afraid of a deal going sour. But I think that the lessons that I learned on that property far outweigh the small financial loss that I’ve accumulated on it. That deal was the first deal that I did with my partner, my wife’s cousin, who’s now been my partner on all of our other deals. So had we not done that deal together, Alpha Geek Capital, our business would not exist.

Tony Robinson (44:51):
It gave me another property a track record that we could buy and renovate from a long distance and place a tenant, right? And make a profit. It gave me so many other things that I feel are far more valuable than the loss. So that’s one challenge for me. It’s something I just want to share with the audience because I feel like sometimes people don’t talk about the deals that go bad, but there’s, I think a silver lining to those as well.

Tony Robinson (45:11):
The next challenge that I’m facing is just scaling the business. We’re still trying to figure out what that growth plan looks like for us. Do we continue to partner on these one-off deals or do we just exclusively focus on building out these bigger short-term rental developments and having these 10, 15, 20 units at short-term rental complexes and compounds? I mean, it’s a good problem to have, right? There’s a lot of interest to work with this. We’re just trying to figure out what the best way is to leverage that and give good returns to everybody.

Robert Leonard (45:40):
It was a relatively small detail that you mentioned on that property that went bad, but you did mention that you have about $100 a month in a property management fee. And I was kind of surprised to hear that because you just told us how you’re self-managing your Airbnb property. So I said, “Well, why is he using a property manager for a long-distance traditional rental?” I personally manage my own rentals, long-distance from 2000 miles away and the traditional stuff’s pretty easy. And if you’re doing Airbnb, I’m like, “He’s definitely going to be able to do the long-distance traditional.” So why is that?

Tony Robinson (46:13):
When we bought that property, our first long-term rentals, my wife was not involved in the business yet. It was just me and her cousin, which is my partner. And at the time I was still a very busy W2 employee, he still is a W2 employee. We just didn’t have the bandwidth at the time to do that. And my wife had no interest in managing this house in Shreveport, Louisiana that was thousands of miles away. So that’s why we opted to do the property manager in that place. And when we bought the short-term rental for the first time, my wife was on board with being the person that would manage it to begin with.

Robert Leonard (46:47):
Do you have a long-term contract with them for the lease period or something like that? Is there a reason why you can’t cancel with them?

Tony Robinson (46:53):
So there is no contract anymore. That property is vacant. So that tenant moved out about two months ago. So we’re just doing some rehab to get it ready to sell.

Robert Leonard (47:01):
Could you have ended the property manager beforehand if you had decided you wanted to?

Tony Robinson (47:07):
For a fee. I don’t recall what that fee was, but yeah. There’s some early termination fee if you wanted to do.

Robert Leonard (47:13):
So they were locked in for a set period of time?

Tony Robinson (47:16):
Yeah. For the length of lease, yeah.

Robert Leonard (47:19):
We’ve talked a bit about your struggles, on the flip side, what’s going well in the business? What are you proud of? What are you succeeding at? And what are you happy about that you’re doing?

Tony Robinson (47:28):
Man, that is a good question. There’s a lot to be happy about Robert. Like I said, I feel… Not even just about my business, but just about life. I feel super grateful and humbled to live the life that I’m living, right? October 29th, 2019, I bought my first real estate investment. And now I’m a podcast host for a top 25 real estate business podcast. It still blows my mind to even say that out loud, right? So I think I feel super grateful just to have the reach to share my story, to share my journey. I get messages. And we talked about this yesterday, right? I get messages on Instagram, all the time from people saying that I’ve inspired them to take action. And to me that’s probably the biggest thing that I’m proud of is just to have a positive impact on the lives of other people and hopefully help change their financial trajectory.

Tony Robinson (48:18):
Specifically, within our investing business, I think I’m pretty proud of how fast we’ve scaled. We’ve done quite a few transactions in the last 12 months. It was 12 months, almost the day that we got our first short-term rental and all the different deals we have going on now. I don’t think that’s super common. So I’m super proud of the growth that we’ve had. And I’m super excited for what’s to come. So yeah, man. Just all around, just lots of things to be grateful for.

Robert Leonard (48:42):
Admittedly, your show has a couple of different segments on it. And to admit I was inspired by that. For a while, I didn’t have any segments on the show. We just went through questions with the guest, we’d wrap up and that was it, but I’ve really enjoyed your podcast and other BiggerPockets podcast where you guys have different segments. And I decided to add a segment to my show and it’s called The Action Plan.

Robert Leonard (49:02):
And in this segment of the show, as we wrap up, I ask every guest three questions to create an action plan for listeners. And the reason I wanted to do this is because I think too many people listen to podcasts, read books, whatever the medium is, they consume too much and they don’t actually take action. So my goal with this segment is to create a real action plan for people. When they’re done with this episode, they have three things that they can go do. So for the first one, what is a habit or principle that you follow in your life that has had a big impact on your success that not enough people do, but should?

Tony Robinson (49:32):
Man, this is a deep question. I guess, one thing and more of a principle than a habit, but I don’t do anything unless I believe I can be world-class at it. If I’m going to do this thing, I want to be one of the best people to do it, period. I did a fitness competition a couple of years ago, an amateur fitness competition. I actually just started training for another one right now. And my wife was like, “Babe, why don’t you just go to the gym? Why don’t you just get in shape on your own?” I was like, “No, it’s not enough.” If I’m going to do this, I want to be in the best shape of my life. I want to compete with other people and see who’s the better person doing this thing.”

Tony Robinson (50:07):
Sending for the short-term rental spaces. When I jumped into this, my goal wasn’t, can I have one or two short-term rentals? On day one, it was like, “Okay, how do we get to 1,000?” Right? “How do we become the biggest single owner of short-term rentals in North America?” That’s the thought process that I has. So it’s kind of a curse sometimes as well, right? To have this almost unrealistic expectation of what you’re capable of, but I feel like it serves me well and I use that guiding principle with a lot of things that I do.

Robert Leonard (50:35):
I can speak from experience, it’s definitely a blessing and a curse. I feel like I do the same thing in all aspects of my life. So I totally know where you’re coming from. So for everybody listening, the first part of your action plan, if you have a bunch of different projects you want to work on, pick the one that you think you could be world-class at. Really only work on things that you can be world-class at.

Robert Leonard (50:52):
So second one, what has been the most influential book in your life? And I like to distinguish between favorite and influential because just because your book is your favorite doesn’t necessarily mean it was the most influential. So what book has had the most impact on you?

Tony Robinson (51:07):
There are so many, but the book I’m going to say isn’t even a business book, it’s a relationship book and it’s called The Five Love Languages. It’s really about intimate relationships, but the principles apply to literally any relationship that you have. And what it says is that everybody receives and gives love in one of five ways: physical touch, gifts, quality time, acts of service, words of affirmation. And it was a game-changer in my relationship with my wife. Once we really understood that framework, it helped us get along better. Not that we were getting along poorly, but it just deepened that relationship.

Tony Robinson (51:45):
But I also understood that, man, this applies to every relationship. Robert, I’m sure, as our relationship continues to deepen, I’m going to learn how you like to be appreciated, right? Maybe it’s not love, but you like to be appreciated in a certain way. And if I can speak that language to you and you can speak my language back to me, it’s immediately going to deepen that connection. And what I honestly truly believe man is that real estate is really a relationship business. If you want to succeed, it’s really in the quality of the relationships that you have and that you maintain. So for me, that book is pivotal both on the personal and the business side.

Robert Leonard (52:19):
For everyone listening, your second step of this action plan is to go read that book. And the final thing is, what is one action that somebody can take other than the first two we just mentioned, that can improve their life, career or business?

Tony Robinson (52:35):
One action I think is just to try something, just try something. I think so often people are so afraid of failing that they don’t even try. And I heard this the other day on the BiggerPockets, The Real Estate Show, they interviewed Scott McGillivray. He’s a host from HGTV. He does the… I don’t know. He’s got a couple of shows with them. But anyway, he was on the podcast and he said this statement and it was probably the most articulate way I’ve ever heard it described. What he said was that “People that are successful, they hate failure, but they’re not afraid of it. People who never find success, they are fearful of failure and allow it to prevent them from taking action.” And that just resonated with me so much because who likes failing? Nobody likes failing, but I know that I’m not afraid of failure. And I understand that it’s a necessary step to achieve the success that I want in life.

Tony Robinson (53:32):
So what I would recommend everybody that’s listening right now, if you’ve been thinking about starting that business, if you’ve been thinking about investing in that stock, if you’ve been thinking about buying that piece of real estate, just try it, just try it. The absolute worst thing that’s going to happen, that you will be in the exact same position that you’re in right now. The absolute best thing that could happen, is that you change your life for the rest of your life. You change your kid’s life, you change your grandkids’ life because you made that decision today to try that one thing. So that’s my final tip.

Robert Leonard (54:00):
There you go, guys. Those are the three pieces of your action plan for this episode. Work on things that you could be world-class at, read The Five Love Languages book, and try something new. Tony, before we wrap up the show, I like to give the guest a chance to ask me a question. I like to turn the tables, let them ask me something. So what question do you have for me?

Tony Robinson (54:22):
What’s next for you in your business? And what’s the next big thing on the horizon for you?

Robert Leonard (54:28):
The next big thing is something that I’ve already been working on a little bit. And so I think it’s a little bit of a cheat answer, but I’ve been working on RVs and so it’s new. And so that’s why I think it’s still next for me because I’m just starting. And so I think that’s still the next piece of it. And so I guess more broadly, I would say, short-term rentals because RVs, I would classify as a short-term rental because it is, but it’s also, I want to focus on more short-term rentals, whether it’s a house, an RV, whatever it is. And so I’m trying to get into the space that you’re in a little bit more, starting to do that with RVs, hoping to scale that.

Robert Leonard (55:03):
We’re heading in the winter here in the Northeast, we’re going to get snow, probably not going to rent it out a lot. So not looking to acquire any more right now, but come spring, I wouldn’t be surprised if I bought another two, three, four more RVs. I’d like to get, like I said, more into the short-term rental space, buy an Airbnb real estate property. So I think that’s what’s next for me. I think I’ve done well in the long-term, long-distance rental space. I know how that works. If I want to buy more, I can pretty easily. I think what I’ll do is probably get more into the short-term space, take that cash flow, put it into long-term stuff. And I think that’s what’s next for me in my business.

Tony Robinson (55:39):
Beautiful, man. I love it, brother. You know I’m here to be a resource for you, man, in any way that I can.

Robert Leonard (55:44):
I appreciate that. Tony, I know everybody’s going to love this episode and I know a lot of people are going to want to connect with you. So where’s the best place to find you?

Tony Robinson (55:53):
Instagram is my main social media platform. So you can follow me there at Tony J. Robinson. My wife and I have a YouTube channel where we detail our journey as being short-term rental owners and operators so you can find us on YouTube at The Real Estate Robinsons and then obviously, I’m the co-host at the BiggerPockets Real Estate Rookie Podcast as well.

Robert Leonard (56:11):
I have personally relied on Tony’s resources Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, to learn a bit more about short-term rentals as I get into this space more as I just mentioned. So I highly recommend you guys go check out everything Tony’s working on. I think you guys will really enjoy it. Tony, thanks so much for joining me.

Tony Robinson (56:28):
Awesome, brother. Had a good time and hopefully, the listeners got some value from this.

Robert Leonard (56:32):
All right guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Real Estate Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro (56:38):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.