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Keith is joined by Jim Sheils, a seasoned real estate investor and builder who specializes in new construction and co-living properties. 
Together they explore why traditional long-term rentals are struggling to cash flow and how co-living—renting individual rooms in purpose-built homes—can dramatically boost returns. 
Jim breaks down how the model works, who the typical tenants are, and why platforms like PadSplit are essential for management, compliance, and steady occupancy. 
Their discussion highlights how co-living can simultaneously address the affordable housing shortage and today's "cash flow crisis" for real estate investors.
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Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. For the first time ever on the show, we're talking about what some call the greatest real estate cash flow strategy today: co-living. Learn about what it is, what it is not, the pitfalls to avoid, and just how terrifically profitable co-living property can be today on Get Rich Education. What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056. They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge. While it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com. 
 
Speaker 1  0:59  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:15  
Welcome to GRE from Dover, Idaho, to Dover, Delaware, and across 188 world nations. You're inside Get Rich Education nation. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. For about five years now, it's been harder to make the cash flow numbers work on long-term rentals, and that's because sure rents are up, but not as much as expenses are, and that's why for your regular income properties, builders buy down your mortgage rate for you so that it works. But now enter co-living properties, and your cash flow can be multiples higher. In fact, today we're going to talk about a model that has seven times the cash flow of a regular long-term rental, for example, instead of renting a detached single-family home to one family, if instead you divide it up into six bedrooms and rent each one of the six bedrooms to an individual, you will drive substantially more income. You've got six rent checks instead of one. That's what a co-living property is in general, and you're usually renting it to tenants that are working a lot. They're away from the property. It's often run through pad split. You'll learn more about what that means. And though co-living is lucrative, you still need the right market, the right layout, the management, which is really key here, and the right operating model. Today, we'll talk to a GRE Marketplace operator that provides co-living properties to investors like us with a management solution. And as you'll see, it gets even better than that. Although they serve just one geographic area in the U.S. which happens to be an investor advantaged area, as you'll see, this is conducive to out of state investors. If you want to own there, we're talking about co living income property today. Next week, there's something vital I want to tell you about, and I can't wait to do that. It's about the way that I talk when I meet a 25-year-old, and I learn that their only source of income is as an employee at a job. And no matter what age you are, what I'm going to share with you is going to apply to you too, and it's pretty transformative. That's next week here on the show. As for today, let's learn about co living. Jim Shields is here. Jim, welcome back to the show.
 
Jim Sheils  3:56  
Keith, good to be here. Thanks for having me.
 
Keith Weinhold  3:58  
Well, Jim, we saw each other in person a few months ago at a conference. I wanted to have you back here today to discuss co living since you're involved in it and you help other investors learn about it. And now you even started providing properties for co living specifically for them. And you know, Jim, with co living, I have seen models in the past where, oh, a single-family home it might be retrofitted, renovated to say have six bedrooms and three bathrooms, and that way you, as the owner, you could rent it to six tenants, really who are each only renting a room rather than renting the whole place to one family. In this way, tenants get cheaper rent because they're only renting one bedroom, and then for the owner, this gives them stronger cash flow because they're renting it to six different parties and not just one. So, with affordable housing really being a struggle for so many, you know, co-living is. Really taking off. So tell us more about what co living is and what it isn't, Jim.
 
Jim Sheils  5:05  
Yeah, co living was something that was brought to us by one of the owners of Pad Split. Actually, they had met me and worked with me on other new construction projects, and and kind of my evolution, as you know, Keith was I I went from doing a ton of fixer uppers for many of years to new construction, and both can get you where you want to go. But I like new constructions. But meeting some of the owners of PadSplits, I found that they were starting to have the same struggles that I was when I was rehabbing a lot of homes. You know, it's not easy to take a three bedroom or four bedroom home and turn it into an eight bedroom or a seven bedroom, and so you know, starting from scratch with new construction, we're able to set up for what they're trying to create, and what they're really trying to create with co living is that affordable housing crisis. There's a lot more single individuals out there not looking for you know whole, not needing whole family dwellings to live. They're more at a basic income level that you know keeps them quite a bit below being able to rent. Like here in Jacksonville, the average price of a one-bedroom apartment is just outside of their qualifying range. So they might have a good job and decent credit, but they can't qualify. So what we've seen co-living do, and again, working through our our management partner of Padsplit, is they are bringing in this system of putting people together in one home, still with the screening, still with certain amenities that you know really help the property get seen, wanted, and rented, and then certain managerial things, where you're providing good options for living in areas that need more affordable living, and for landlord investors like ourselves, you're providing now a new opportunity to beat what I've called the cash flow crisis. You know, we have an affordability crisis, but that's also created a cash flow crisis, Keith. As you know, and the numbers that we've been able to see are quite advantageous for both the renter for the amount they pay and for the owner for the amount they're going to cash flow. And that's what I'm seeing this new co-living movement is about. It's really landlords taking a new risk on a certain type of property and tenants getting a type of property that fits their income and their needs.
 
Keith Weinhold  7:27  
You know, Jim, philosophically, I'm thinking about assisted living homes, and when society changed sometime last century, assisted living homes became more of a trend where a lot of times that's where the elderly people went. Now we have co-living, and you kind of wish the world would be a place like where you know someone freshly out of high school or college could be married and have children, and you know just one or two jobs could float and support that family, and they would be able to afford their own home, either to own or rent. But increasingly, that's just not the world that we're living in. It hearkens back to multi-time GRE guest and legendary investor Jim Rogers. To paraphrase Jim Rogers, Jim Rogers said, "I need to invest in the world with the way that it is, not the way that I want the world to be. That's one thought that keeps coming to mind with co-living.
 
Jim Sheils  8:29  
Yeah, for me too. Honestly, Keith, when I first heard about co-living, it was a few years ago. Someone saw me speak at a mutual event similar to one we last saw each other at. I got off stage, and they came up to me and they mentioned to me we're doing these things called co-living.
 
Keith Weinhold  8:44  
Yeah.
 
Jim Sheils  8:44  
And I was kind of blinded. I was looking backwards instead of forwards, and I said, "Oh, that doesn't sound right. That doesn't sound like it could work, you know. And I had a lot of what ifs, and how do you handle this? Well, you know, as the niches really started to solidify and show real wind at its back, all those questions and doubts I had have been answered, and I've kind of become a believer in why it's working and also the results. You know, for us, build right, finance right, manage right. That's always been our model. That's what's going to help us and our investors succeed. Building it right and managing it right. We had to figure out, but figuring that out-that's key. And it's very cool to see investors today breaking the norms of saying, "Well, you know, we can't have cash flow anymore on a nice new construction property in a growth market like Jacksonville, Florida. You can't have good cash flow. Well, that's just not true with co living coming on because again you're answering the call of a forgotten tenant and their needs.
 
Keith Weinhold  9:46  
Yeah, I just think for any thoughtful investor, it's got to give them pause. But this is where society has gone. Well, we're going to talk about how profitable co living is for investors later. But first, tell us more about the nuts and bolts of how co.
 
Jim Sheils  10:01  
Yeah. So the way that it works is, first of all, you start, you know, again going with our model, build right, finance right, manage right, building it right. When you're starting with new construction, you're able to go into the property with all eyes open, without a lot of surprises, and you're able to build it right to the design that a co-living property of success would entail. You know, we're doing seven bedrooms, seven baths. We're doing 14 bedrooms, 14 baths. We're doing 20 bedrooms, 20 baths. These are all things that we worked with the owners of Padsplit as they've worked and researched areas all over the country, starting here in Northeast Florida. But what we're doing, we figured out exactly what type of build you do you need to do that's going to work? Smaller living areas. There's only one utility box. There's not you know multiple utilities. It's not a multi-unit building. So there's one utility box. You build it to that specimen of either we build anywhere from seven bedroom, seven baths, right up to 20 bedroom, 20 baths, and that's the build part. That way, you're getting into it and not having to, you know, kind of. It's really tough, Keith. I don't need to tell you with your experience to turn a smaller house into that bigger house and starting from scratch with new constructions. Great. The second thing we found was finance. Right, as you know, we do our own in-house financing. Well, a lot of the co-living since the banks didn't understand it. Just like you know, it's become a newer niche. They were locking in at 8% You know, with our in-house financing, we were able to get deals down to five and a half percent. So right there, that helps with the rate, the long-term rate, the cash flow, and then management. Again, we've managed 1000s of properties, but we've really teamed up with PadSplit to help us manage these. This is what they specialize in, not only for attracting investors into their organization, but also for managing the properties and screening the tenants, getting them in, and their management system combined with our Build Right Finance Right has been a great combination.
 
Keith Weinhold  11:57  
Pad Split, somewhat of a platform like Airbnb, but it's for co-living type properties. We'll talk more about pad split shortly. But yes, you are making these more efficient for co-living because right from the beginning, you are building them new construction specifically for co-living type of arrangements, rather than that six-bed, three-bath retrofit example I brought up near the beginning of our chat, but tell us more about who actually lives in co-living homes. What's the tenant profile like?
 
Jim Sheils  12:29  
Yeah, let's go to the opposite end. When I first heard about this years ago, Keith, I said, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be really unqualified, seedy people not working, getting into trouble, and that's just not true. Again, a lot of these people are hardworking, but they can't afford the $1395 for a one bedroom apartment, but they can afford an $825 a month room. And a lot of these people might be working at a local warehouse, at a hospital. They're very localized, blue collar, or some in training jobs, you know, extra five $600 a month makes all the difference. Where it's not going out to rent, not even including utilities, it gives them a nice place to live. So it's really entry level replaceable income people, maybe single people that work at a nearby restaurant. But again, they're trying to save more money in their pocket and not spend it on that higher expense, which the competition would be a one-bedroom apartment.
 
Keith Weinhold  13:31  
Now, the tenancy durations here are shorter than what you're going to have in long-term rentals, of course, because one part of what you do, Jim, is for years you have helped GRE followers with build-to-rent long-term rentals. The resident does get more. They're going to get a furnished room with utilities in co-living arrangements, and they're also probably going to have their utilities bundled as well. So tell us about the typical tenancy duration, and then what all the resident gets.
 
Jim Sheils  14:00  
Yeah. So the residency is going to receive all the things that they have to be turnkey. That's the bed, the desk, the dresser, the closet, the bathroom. Everything is set up there for them, and so they just move in. They're not going to have to pay for electric or water or internet. All that stuff's going to be included. There's a washer dryer normally there. Sometimes they're coin operated, other times they're just included, but that way they're not trying to take out a utility in their name or set up internet. Also, for the investor, that's a good thing because you have one master lease. If you start to do a bunch of leases, well, you could get in trouble with the rules of your community, probably of having multiple leases on one property. It's not a multi-unit building, so you can't do that. So one master lease with one utility and all utilities included allows you to do that. This makes it very easy to move in and out. And the average Tennessee might only be six months, but again, the way that it's set up, what we like about PadSplit is they. Have a very good marketing and screening process, so they're constantly marketing and screening to people in the area, and then they have their own private community with investors. So we'll build it and finance it. Our people will move over to their community for management, so the owners can speak together, and then the tenants, though they're coming through pad split system, and so what I like about that is if they try to not treat the property well, well, they're not allowed back into any pad split properties anywhere within the city. So that's really good for co living protection. So we just see that turnkey approach, and you know you've been preaching turnkey real estate for a long time. Yeah, this is a turnkey room where they're able to move in, they're able to move out easily. They can transfer to another co-living property, and by doing that, you can get people in and out very quickly, which keeps the vacancies low, even with shorter tenancy.
 
Keith Weinhold  15:57  
All right, so an average tenancy duration of about six months, and for you, the prospective investor, as you're trying to understand co-living, maybe think of it as like when you check into a hotel. Co-living residents stay longer than you stay in a hotel, but as far as all the utilities are in the room combined, all into one charge with your WiFi, your water, your electricity, your natural gas, and the room is already furnished. Just one all-inclusive payment, making it easier for that co-living tenant. And Jim, you've been talking about pad split, where you're partnering directly with them, and that's the management part of this. Of course, this is more management intensive than a long-term rental. So, tell us more about Pad Split and how it works. Sort of like an Airbnb platform, but yet for longer-term, affordable room rentals that has the property management infrastructure somewhat already built into Pad Split.
 
Jim Sheils  16:56  
Yeah, I think your comparison to Airbnb is very accurate, Keith. But it's more of a community for both tenants and investors. Airbnb, you know, I have short-term rentals and I use Airbnb. But what I've seen with Padsplit, which I think they've done a good job with, it has a community feel sharing for the investors who are a part of the Padsplit community, and so there's extra communication on your management, how properties are going, what areas are doing that. You know, great source of communication on the ongoing management. But for the tenants too, they know right where to go to find these types of properties, and the tenants also have to join this community. So there's a joining where if you want to rent a pad split, they have to join the community. They have to go through all the approvals and such, so that's pretty much how it's set up. It's seen to be very effective. Again, what held me back from this probably for about two years, Keith, was the management piece. You know, we've always managed our properties. I said, well, this is not our niche. Just like we don't manage short-term rentals, we only rent manage long-term rentals, and so I really had to watch and survey a lot of the existing investors and how they were doing, but it's nice to see someone with a good managerial system for both the tenants and the investors to work together in.
 
Keith Weinhold  18:12  
Does PadSplit handle everything like marketing and tenant screening and rent collection?
 
Jim Sheils  18:19  
So what they handle is the way that pad split works, like here in Jacksonville, where's our main market where we've started building co living properties. Is they will work hand in hand like an Airbnb, but underneath them they'll have preferred property managers that they'll work hand in hand. It so they'll handle certain things of the marketing, the tenant screening, and then some more of the mechanical PM pieces, the property management pieces. There'll be an assigned property manager that the client will be working with, the investor will be working with, and the tenant will be working with. So it's kind of a two-tiered approach. Like right now, my I'll use Airbnb, but I have a property manager for my short-term rentals. Same thing here, but we actually have the preferred management list and approvals through Padsplit.
 
Keith Weinhold  19:06  
Okay, so much of this is handled through Pad Split, but not everything. There's a second tier where they partner with local property managers in that area to, for example, help with tenant turns or help with maintenance requests.
 
Jim Sheils  19:20  
Yep, absolutely, absolutely.
 
Keith Weinhold  19:23  
Now, short-term rental hosts are used to Airbnb fees. What are Pad Split fees like?
 
Jim Sheils  19:29  
There's a monthly fee for belonging to PadSplit to keep your property occupied in there, and I don't remember exactly what it is for the tenants, but I know that they keep it affordable. So overall, you're going to be paying a little bit less than an Airbnb property that you would for you know if you use Airbnb and use a short-term property manager, it can be quite expensive. We've seen the pad splits come in below that and still achieve the goals of a good short-term rental. You know we're seeing. I know we're getting into this later, but taking those fees out and doing quite a bit of contingency because of the move and move outs, we were still seeing like a seven bedroom, seven bath based around the same price of one of our single family homes. The cash flow can be about seven times higher. Wow, on that thing, so it it really does answer the call for higher cash flow by bringing that more affordable rental in.
 
Keith Weinhold  20:25  
We're going to talk more about just how profitable it is for investors, and more about co living somewhat nascent model, a model that's actually been around for quite a while, but it's really gaining traction in making things more affordable for tenants and making things more profitable for investors, we're back with more shortly. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. This is Get Rich Education. Flock Homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio, through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture, it's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now, mom and pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation. See if your properties qualify at flockhomes.com/gre. That's flockehomes.com/gre. Let me ask you something: If you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. And full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed. But with a track record of consistent, on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility.
 
Keith Weinhold  22:11  
Go to freedomfamilyinvestments.com to book a clarity call, or text family to 66866. That's family to 66866. Hey, it's corporate direct Ted Sutton. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your daydream. Welcome back to Get Research Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. We're talking about co-living, specifically how smart it is to get this right from the beginning and build a new construction single-family home, or something that could be larger than a single-family home with seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, or 14 and 14, or 20 and 20, and when we think about this gym physically, the footprint. What is parking like at a seven-bedroom home or larger? And did this entail any zoning hurdles?
 
Jim Sheils  23:15  
A couple of things. It can entail zoning hurdles, so I would make sure, especially if you're doing new construction, you have someone who is a builder in the area that knows how to work with the county department or city department of how to get these approved. That's a very important things for how you submit them and how you make sure you're staying compliant. I think compliance is very important, obviously, for a rental and and parking. What we've seen right now is we look for about 50% So when I say 50% of bedrooms, so a seven-bedroom house, we're going to have three or four parking sites. There's a large majority of people that don't have a car, and that's why a lot of these are built near public transportation. But we still try to always serve, you know, based off of what we saw, the needs to stay in compliance, also working with Pad Split on lots of their designs. 50% of parking spots is usually good for the amount of bedrooms that you have.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:08  
What about zoning hurdles? What had to be met there?
 
Jim Sheils  24:12  
It's going to be a trial and error for a new builder or a person who's rehabbing a property. You know, we were not the first to come in and do this, we had watched Pad Split do it for two years and more with rehab properties, but just starting new construction, we knew Northeast Florida and what needs to be done very well, and so it's all in how you present it. Again, if you go in there with multiple utility boxes and such, you're going to be in quite an issue. So we found that we didn't have any issue with that. Also, we own some of these in some of our quad communities, so these were for larger. You know, you've worked with our quads before; they're yeah, you know, larger buildings. Well, we've been able to turn those into, for example, 20 bedroom, 20 baths, and so they operate like a small. Building, but they're in our quad communities where we wrote the HOA, and so they're allowed. And there's a plethora of parking there, so that keeps us in compliance. So really, compliance is knowing what your local city or county is going to require and knowing how to get that approved. That's very important.
 
Keith Weinhold  25:18  
Okay, so these can thrive in sort of duplex and fourplex type neighborhoods. That's where they're being built, and you have a good bit of control over that with you having your own de facto HOA there as well. And Jim, I looked at several of the co-living properties and the footprints and the floor plans, and you know I was really encouraged to learn that really the cost for one of these brand new build seven bath seven bed co living properties really isn't that much more than a regular single family home designed for one family. So talk to us about the pricing.
 
Jim Sheils  25:57  
Yeah, in Jacksonville, for example, seven bedroom seven baths, going between 325 and 345, which is very similar to single-family homes. And then our pricing for our quads, like a 2020, would be in the low nine hundreds, and that's the same as a quad as well. So we've been able to match our pricing to, and we have duplex ones. The 1414 would be mid five hundreds, which would be about the same as a Jacksonville duplex. So you know, I'm going off Jacksonville pricing right now, just as a sample. Sure. Okay.
 
Keith Weinhold  26:30  
The model I looked at was seven bed, seven bath. It had two stories. The price was 325k, and it had 1800 66 square feet. Talk to us about just how profitable that it is for an investor on a pro forma income and expenses basis, Jim.
 
Jim Sheils  26:49  
From what I've seen is if the average single family home was bringing in about $3,500, and that's a net on the year. So we're saying net, you know, cash flow on the year. Let's say it was about $3,500 on the year of a single family home that you bought. Well, your pad split property would be more closer to about 25,000 for the year. Wow! So that's a big jump. Now, with that comes a lot more rent collected, Keith. But also, and again, we can't do it here, but on the performa, there's more expenses because you have pad split. You have just very similar again. I think your analogy of a short-term rental for anyone who owns those very similar. There's more components. There's more pieces to it. There's more management. But what I did like about the performas that were first brought to us, large amount of rent collected, but also a large amount of contingency and expenses calculated in to get that number. So those are what I liked again seeing these is there's a lot of expense taken out to still reach that you know higher cash flow, but you know it's something that you will want to account for as well. You know what keeps people safe? Do your numbers. Do your numbers real. You know talk to people who have owned co-living properties, make sure that you're accounting for the extra expenses of tenants turning over more and and just more management involvement.
 
Keith Weinhold  28:10  
Okay, so on that comparison where you likened it to a long-term rental versus this model, it's about $25,000 of annual cash flow, which is about $2,000 of monthly cash flow, and was that for the seven bed, seven bath model?
 
Jim Sheils  28:26  
Yeah, and it would go up from there for the larger models.
 
Keith Weinhold  28:29  
Yeah. Now, are tenants paying in advance by the week or by the month, or how does that work?
 
Jim Sheils  28:34  
That's a key thing. They pay by the week, which I didn't realize how important that was for affordability and staying current on your rents, but from the things that I've been shown on working with Padsplit, they showed that when they charge people by the week, it's much more affordable. A lot of these people are paid weekly, so it really keeps them in good rhythm, and so they go on a weekly process.
 
Keith Weinhold  28:57  
And is this just as conducive to out of area investors like long term turnkey rentals are?
 
Jim Sheils  29:03  
Yeah. Well, that's why you always want to build right, finance right, manage right. You have lots of great connections. You can find a great builder that's willing to build them. You get good financing and then good management. So you don't have to live in the area, but you want to make sure someone is taking care of that for you. Again, I am going to say I know some people like to manage their own properties from afar. That can work with long-term rentals. I've done it with a few of mine when I left California and came here. From what I've seen, though, for co-living, the involvement-if you are from out of area-I would highly, highly recommend that you follow a manager process and work with a manager.
 
Keith Weinhold  29:43  
Meaning that you would use one of PadSplits recommended managers.
 
Jim Sheils  29:47  
I would use PadSplit with one of the preferred managers that we know well, and actually one of the managers that they highly recommend worked for our company for five years, and she's great. And for what we're. Doing, I can put a stamp of approval on it, and again, I think just seeing the involvement, these can work really well. But you want to have just like any time, but even more importantly, on these ones, you want to have management in place, especially if you're afar.
 
Keith Weinhold  30:14  
Sure. So, what could the involvement realistically look like, Jim, if that out-of-state investor is using Pad Split and using Pad Split's recommended manager. What might that investor have to do remotely? And maybe that's just on an email basis.
 
Jim Sheils  30:32  
You know, a lot can be done by email. Again, Keith, our goal-I don't think you should be spending more than two hours a month on managing your property manager. So again, just because there's more involvement, what I like is it doesn't mean there's more involvement for you. You're paying someone to set that up to handle it. You'll have to be involved somewhat. You are a property owner, but again, I don't see that you have to get involved with every little thing. In fact, I like to step back and not get too involved in my properties. I find like I just kind of go and stir things up. Let my manager do their thing. I'll manage certain big picture managerial things and in communication and overall just directionals. But you should not be getting overly involved. That's what their job is. You should not be doing that.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:18  
Now I'm a turnkey real estate investor myself, as you know, with multiple properties in various states and places, and I'm used to getting monthly emails from my manager in those markets, and that is what my owner statement looks like: income and expenses and anything that's going on with the property. But that's just on a monthly basis. Are there weekly statements for co-living managers and owners?
 
Jim Sheils  31:42  
Still rents are collected weekly, but statements still come out monthly.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:46  
Because—
 
Jim Sheils  31:47  
You want to, what you do is you collect all of the rents, but then again, it's easier to reconcile with all expenses and such that come out on a monthly basis. So it's done monthly.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:58  
Are they writing common mistakes to avoid that are developing in the space, like an investor that gets in and buys their first co living property, and then they think, "Oh gosh, I wish I would have known about this thing sooner that I didn't think about because I'm only used to long term rentals. Any common mistakes to avoid pitfalls like that with co living, Jim?
 
Jim Sheils  32:17  
Yeah, a couple of things. First, again, I can't stress enough that co living, from what I've seen and experienced, they do make money. But on the build it right, you know, going back to our build right, finance right, manage right. Just know if you're going to try one your on your own and you want to convert a home that's three bedrooms into a seven bedrooms, it is a much more tedious, involved process. Where again. Keith, like you said, are you getting things approved with the county or city? Just know that you really want to be in the know, and that's going to take some involvement. So that's my warning on if you're going to use co living and rehab your own property, financing wise. The thing that the mistakes I've seen made is people didn't see that they had higher interest rates, so you want to do that in your numbers. You know, working like with us, we're we have our own in-house financing. We're able to get it down to five and a half percent, but some of these co living banks are looking at it differently, and you might be more around 8% So you want to just do that in your numbers, and then the third pitfall, which we've you know hit on, and this is one of your real foundational rules: is management is key. And on these, where I see the biggest harm, once you get it built right and financed right, it could all fall apart if you don't have management in place. So I would just be you know some of you do it yourselfers. I have some things that I like to do it myself too, but on a more technical type of property like this, I highly encourage you get management in place to do their thing.
 
Keith Weinhold  33:47  
For sure, it is easy to make the case that the management is even more important than the property itself. One of the things that I like about what you do there, Jim, is you're so forward-thinking and you are so into making the experience as turnkey for that investor as it can possibly be, and one of those things is as you rolled this out, you had a lot of the financing hurdles rolled out right with it. Tell us more about those in-house financing options you have that you touched on specifically for co-living, and especially I'm thinking through the lens of like that seven bed, seven bath, 325k co-living property that I saw.
 
Jim Sheils  34:28  
Yeah, I mean it's nice with getting to be a builder of our size with a really good balance sheet. We're able to work with banks and buy large tranches of money or slate large tranches of money at cheaper rates than available to the public. You know, for our normal long-term rentals, we can get down to 3.75. That's for normal houses. You can't get that low because of risk factor. Banks still they like working with us, but we have gotten it down to five and a half percent. So right now, our most popular program is a 30-year fixed five and a half percent for co. You know, and again, a lot of people that have come to have said, "Holy moly, we were locked in at 8.15. We are getting it not as low as our lowest rate, but at a really good rate now. You know, below what's normally offered out there. So that's normal qualifying that you would have to do with any bank loan through us. And our counselors are happy to talk more about that. That's our most popular program for the co living for the seven seven. You're looking at a five and a half percent interest rate, 20 to 25% down. That is a super attractive rate. Is that something that the home builder helps participate in buying down discount points, or that the buyer is asked to do in order to get down to that rate? Working with us, well, it could go either way out in the marketplace, Keith. When working with us, we pay all of those required fees and points to get the lower rate. That's on us, not on the buyer.
 
Keith Weinhold  35:50  
All right, we're talking about co-living properties today-a way to supercharge your cash flow. This is one of the greatest cash flow strategies in all of residential real estate today, Jim. Is there any last thing you have to tell us about co-living? Perhaps something that I did not think about asking you that I should have.
 
Jim Sheils  36:09  
I think that's probably just what you and I talked about, like what Jim Rogers said. It's how not how I want things, but how things are. Yeah. And so for me, I held back for a few years, even when some of the founders right here in my own backyard have pad split to team up with, but I think that I couldn't picture Keith 10 years ago having a short term rental and like wait a minute I'm going to have them stay there every week and I'm going to have to furnish it you know is from the old guy doing long term rentals so I think for people just read up on it it's becoming a very interesting trend there's some very interesting statistics of why this is working, how management can be handled effectively, how to stay in compliance with your city. There's a lot of good information. This is a great starting point to our conversation today, but I don't think this niche should be ignored because the track record is already there and it is answering a need of both investors and tenants, which is pretty cool.
 
Keith Weinhold  37:04  
It has been super intriguing to learn more about this. Jim represents one of our GRE Marketplace providers. It's been great having you back on the show.
 
Jim Sheils  37:13  
Now, thanks for having me, Keith.
 
Keith Weinhold  37:20  
Yeah, a really informative episode today. If you want to learn more about co-living properties, you can do so at gremarketplace.com/co-living. That's where you'll get the investment report, floor plans, financial projections, see the exact pricing, and learn more about pad split there. I've been around this space for a while, and I know investors that own co-living properties. Some other best practices that I've learned about are that you want to have limited visitation or a zero visitation policy for your co-living tenants. As we touched on, these properties can really make money, but don't try to manage them remotely. Make the house rules unusually specific. Address guests, quiet hours, smoking, drugs, pets, parking, food storage, shared bathrooms, thermostat settings, and cleaning and abandoned belongings, and enforce the rules consistently and quickly. Because one disruptive resident can cause several good residents to leave, and in co-living, retaining household harmony that is often more valuable than retaining one problem tenant. Provide professional common area cleaning. Don't expect seven or 14 unrelated adults to collectively develop some passion for wiping down the stove. That is not going to happen. Shared areas should be cleaned at least weekly. Install bedroom locks and then smart exterior locks. Give each resident private space, eliminate shared keys, and immediately revoke keys after move out. Cameras they should generally be limited to lawful exterior and entry locations, not in private spaces. Provide excellent internet in co-living, unreliable WiFi. That is practically a habitability crisis. Use business-grade equipment, strong coverage, and have a backup plan for internet. And as an investor, it's wise for you to maintain a larger repair and turnover reserve than you would for a normal long-term rental. Keep these things in mind, and it can keep seven times the cash flow from becoming seven times the headache. Again, you can get the investment report, floor plans for the very properties we discussed today, financial projections, pricing, and get more information about pad split all at. gremarketplace.com/co-living. That's gremarketplace.com/coliving. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.
 
Speaker 1  40:15  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.
 
Keith Weinhold  40:43  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building getricheduceducation.com

Keith welcomes back Todd Drowlette, star of A&E's The Real Estate Commission, to help demystify commercial real estate for residential investors. 
They explore which sectors are most resilient to disruption from AI, automation, and Amazon, why certain office and warehouse assets still work, and how service-based retail like nail salons and quick-service restaurants can offer durable returns. 
Todd breaks down the basics and advantages of triple net (NNN) leases, key considerations in office-to-residential conversions, and how rising interest rates are reshaping commercial deals. 
He also shares negotiation tactics from large commercial transactions that investors can immediately apply to their next rental property purchase.
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Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. We're talking with the star of the A&E show, the Real Estate Commission today. What real estate sectors are safe from AI, robots, and Amazon disruption? How many deals on the commercial side are still going to implode due to mortgage rates resetting higher? And some of the best negotiation techniques from $100 million deals that you can use in your own deals, and more today on Get Rich Education. You know, Mid South Homebuyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties. It's an executive coach. For nine years now, their CEO Terry Kerr and his COO Pat Nix have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners, his name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one-on-one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to DanielThomashHind.com. H-I-N-D. That's DanielThomashHind.com and sign up before spots fill. What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056 They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge. While it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com.
 
Speaker 1  2:19  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.
 
Keith Weinhold  2:35  
Welcome to GRE from Peoria, Illinois to Peoria, Arizona, and across 188 world nations. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. Though we're a show centered on how to build wealth through residential real estate investing, today we're talking mostly about the commercial side with a guest that's more comfortable investing in commercial real estate than he is residential. We'll learn why. He is the star of the new real estate show called the Real Estate Commission that airs on A&E Network. Todd Drowlette, because he was here with us last year shortly before the show debuted, and he had so many interesting things to tell us then. That's why he's back. Now we know that residential real estate is positioned well at surviving the boom in artificial intelligence's influence because everybody still needs a place to live. You can't download a kitchen or living room, and a chatbot can't replace a roof. But some types of commercial real estate are vulnerable to AI. I'm going to ask Todd which types and businesses are the most resilient to survive AI, robots, and Amazon, because there surely are some. He does a good job of making commercial real estate approachable to those that have never invested in it before.
 
Keith Weinhold  3:59  
Contrary to the narrative, he also likes to talk about why office real estate is not dead. Occupying both worlds, I will ask him about office to residential conversions and also get his take on what is happening with commercial loans because apartment investors have been feeling the pain ever since mortgage rates doubled and nearly tripled in 2022. I'll ask about commercial loans blowing up and just how much more of that is expected to happen because the pain is certainly not over there. Let's meet this week's guest. A series on A and E Television and streaming launched last year called The Real Estate Commission, and it's going well enough that it's gearing up for season two. The star of that show is with us today. He was with us last year just before the show debuted, and that's when he shared all kinds of interesting insights with us, like why. A gas station is on a certain side of the road. He's perhaps the most prolific commercial real estate broker in the nation. He's managing director at Titan Commercial Realty Group in New York, closing deals totaling over $2 billion all across commercial real estate sectors. He's represented everyone from local startups to national reits. Hey, welcome back to Get Rich Education, Todd Drowlette.
 
Todd Drowlette  5:26  
Thank you so much for having me back. I appreciate it. It's always great to talk to you.
 
Keith Weinhold  5:30  
Yeah, same. It was so interesting when you were here last year, and I do want to ask you about how it's going with the A and E show later. Most of our listeners own single family rentals or small multifamily, and I think the commercial side, Todd. Frankly, it it intimidates some people. I know I've thought of it that way before. What are some of the misconceptions that the residential side seems to have about the commercial side?
 
Todd Drowlette  5:56  
So a big misconception is that you have to be smart to do it. You certainly do not. A lot of people also think you have to already be a multimillionaire to do it, right? So the same way with residential, there's levels to it. There's levels to commercial real estate. So I say there's pros and cons, right? So in commercial real estate, if you have an office building or a shopping center or a ground lease, you rent to a McDonald's, whatever. You don't get phone calls at two in the morning saying my hot water tank just exploded, my furnace isn't working. So you still get property management calls, but they're typically from you know Monday through Friday, nine to five type of thing, and you don't need millions of dollars. People think you do. It's like you can buy a small two or three tenant office building or a two or three tenant retail shopping center, maybe something has a nail salon, hair salon in it. Depending on the market you're in, that could be a couple $100,000 to buy. If you're in a tertiary town in the United States, if you're in a major metro, it could be a million, 2  million bucks. But the rent is commiserate with what you're paying. So if you can make an 8 or 10% return, a lot of banks will finance startup people as long they're looking in commercial at the quality of the tenant and what the lease is. So you could have no experience, but if you're going to rent to a Hertz rental car, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, even if you personally have like say a 750 credit score, it's decent. It's not a perfect credit score, but you're financeable. They're lending in commercial real estate based on the credit and the length of the leases, not necessarily on your own financials. And a lot of people don't realize that, and they think, "Oh, bank's never going to approve me because I've never done commercial real estate before. Well, nobody's ever done anything until they do it, right? So as long as you start small, banks will lend to people, you know, on smaller things, there's a ton of pros to being in commercial real estate compared to residential. There's less competition. It's easier to repeat deals because once you know one tenant's looking for something, then you can find the next thing they're looking for, and it's a small knit group. You know, if there's 3 million real estate agents in the United States, I would say across the entire country, maybe 10,000 of us are commercial real estate agents.
 
Keith Weinhold  8:05  
Yeah.
 
Todd Drowlette  8:06  
So if you get into commercial, once you get into that network of people with a deal with the tenants and the whatever, you know, if you're in, you're in. If you're out, you're out. That was a very long answer to a very short question.
 
Keith Weinhold  8:16  
Well, some people even have one of the same hangups about residential real estate investing-they think just to buy income property takes an awful lot of money, not realizing you can start with a single-family home of less than 300k or even less than 200k still today and make a small down payment on it. And you know, Todd, I think one thing that refines commercial real estate for some people and piques interest among residential investors is one of the first things that they learn when they're finding out about commercial real estate investing is the triple net lease. Oftentimes, you see that abbreviated NNN out there, and how that can make things somewhat more hands off for that commercial real estate investor. So, can you tell us about triple net leases?
 
Todd Drowlette  9:00  
I sure can. Number one, the funny thing about triple net leases: none of the three things the N's represent start with an N. So your triple nets are literally your real estate taxes, your insurance, and your commonary maintenance. None of which start with an N. Yet it's called N N N.
 
Keith Weinhold  9:14  
It's kind of like reading, writing, and arithmetic. The 3r is what only one of them starts with an R. It's a terrible acronym, but yes.
 
Todd Drowlette  9:22  
Exactly. So there's different types of triple net properties. So essentially, a triple net property, unlike most residential, where you're responsible, you get X amount of rent, and then out of that rent for your income, you're going to subtract out your school tax, your property tax, your property insurance, liability insurance, you know, snow plowing, lawn mowing, all that type of stuff, right? So triple net properties, you have absolute net properties, which is the best thing you can own from a landlord's perspective. Those are things that are called absolute ground leases or an absolute net lease. Typically, you'll see those in like many gas stations. Will be that a lot of McDonald's. Deals are that where essentially you own a piece of property, you buy a piece of property, and you go here. You have X amount of time to put your building up, do construction, get your approvals. You're going to pay me X per month in a ground rent. You build your own building, you own your own building, you're responsible for it, and I just own the dirt. And those are typically 10 to 20 year leases with options. The downside of a triple net ground lease is you can't depreciate anything because it's just ground, right? So you don't get the depreciation you get with other properties, but you have no risk other than the credit of the tenant. So if you're signing a lease with the United States Postal Service and it's the federal government, you know you're getting that. Those will trade typically about one percentage point higher than U.S. Treasuries because there's very, very little risk in it. But there is some risk, so as an investor, you need a little bit better return than the guarantee of a U.S. Treasury.
 
Todd Drowlette  10:54  
Then you have roof and structure triple net properties, where basically, okay, the roof and the structure I'm responsible for as the landlord. Anything inside of that, or you're responsible for, and then the tenants pay the proportionate share of, like I said, the taxes, the snow plowing, whatever. If that's a multi-tenant building, then you run the risk. Oh, tenant moves out as the landlord, you got to pick up that percentage. If if you have a 10,000 foot building and someone's in 2000 feet and they move out, well, now you're responsible for 20% of that tax and CAM and insurance bill until you replace it with a new tenant. But typically, if you're investing in small strip centers, smaller office buildings, which people say office is dead, I've made a fortune in office. Office is not dead. You just have to own the right office in the right place. A lot of downtown offices are dead, where they're moving to the suburbs for drugs and a lot of other issues. But typically, you know, strip centers today, people are buying those for 8% returns to as much as 10, 12% and a lot of times they're vacancy. That's upside you can add into it as well. But again, these are all things that you can get into for a couple $100,000 down, and there's way more room for error than people think there is. As long as you have a professional that's looking at the lease for you before you buy it, you know you just want to make sure the guarantee is on the lease that you have corporate guarantees. But typically, if a bank will finance it, they're also looking at that. But it's not as scary as people think it is, and it's really a strong alternative to investing in single-family homes. Not that I'm knocking single-family homes. There's pros and cons to literally everything you do in life, as you know. 100.
 
Keith Weinhold  12:28  
A triple net lease, where in commercial property the tenant covers three main expenses or nets: property taxes, insurance, and the maintenance and repairs. And in a lot of the situations, like Todd is describing, that really leaves landlords responsible for little more than the mortgage, really increasing the passivity here. And you know, tenants that are willing to shoulder a triple net lease, I don't think of them as taking on those extra costs for nothing. I think about it is in exchange, tenants typically pay lower rent then, and the tenant also gets more control over the property in a triple net arrangement.
 
Todd Drowlette  13:08  
That's a generally safe thing to say, but I hate saying this. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but you know they say location, location, location. So it really depends on the market. The biggest mistake people make to go, oh, I get asked all the time, should I invest in land? I'm like, hell no, raw land. I go when I develop stuff, I have a use for it. Once I get the approvals, then I'll close and buy the land. Land banking stuff and just going and buying land and hoping it goes up in value. I have a number one rule that I always say to people, and it's anytime you can buy $1 for 50 cents, you buy it, but you don't buy property for $1 hoping it goes to $2 because there's no guarantee that that'll happen. In raw land, you know you have a guaranteed. You're paying taxes every year, so just paying taxes on something that's also not returning you anything is a terrible investment, in my opinion. You're speculating. If you want to speculate, just go to the casino, play roulette, pick black or red, and you have roughly a 50-50 shop minus the three greens, but there's a lot easier ways to make money than buying raw land. But shopping centers, triple net properties, there's definitely ways for people to get into that that are much lower risk, and they're not as scary as you'd think. And many banks will finance them.
 
Keith Weinhold  14:18  
Now, if you had to buy one commercial asset today, what would that be? I know that might depend on some factors, but generally, I've got to say, industrial comes to mind for me as one of the hottest commercial real estate asset classes in quite a while.
 
Todd Drowlette  14:32  
So I would pick two strategies. One would be high bay warehouse, whether it's specifically industrial or just warehouse, but things with high ceilings, open floor plans, like you know, a 20,000 foot warehouse, 30,000 feet, something in that range, that a lot of people want that type of use. Warehouse rents have been increasing way faster than office or retail rents have been in the same markets. And as things get more and more automated, you still need to ship stuff. You still need to. Stuff you still need to get things to people's houses, so with the whole AI boom and the crazy things that are happening, I think there's going to be a lot fewer people with jobs sooner than people realize. But I do think the warehouse is a good thing to be invested in, especially if it's on main streets. It could be retail, could be warehouse, could be whatever. The second thing I'll say that's very low risk are any businesses that Amazon can't compete with you for. So, a small strip center that's two or three tenants, that's a hair salon, a nail salon, service type business, retail tenants, because it's a turnover business. So, like nail salons, they're never going to come to your house and do your nails unless you're a billionaire, because they can make more money with people coming to them in back-to-back appointments. So any type of service business tenant that you can have, and typically nail salons, hair salons, they don't usually go out completely. Usually, if they don't want to do it anymore, they'll sell the business to somebody else, and you keep a tenant. From an ownership standpoint, there's very low turnover and having to pay new brokerage fees or do give tenant fit-ups or free rent to like get their business up and running. So I would either go high bay warehouse with loading docks like 18 foot, 20 foot or higher ceilings, open floor plans, overhead doors, 20, 30,000 square feet, or two or three tenant strip malls with high traffic counts, good suburban locations that have service type businesses. Those are your two. Would be very hard to lose as long as you don't overpay when you buy them.
 
Keith Weinhold  16:25  
This is such an interesting thing to say when you think about a resilient business, something that can't easily be disrupted by AI or Amazon, which something like a nail salon would fit into. Tell us about some of those other types that might fit into a small retail center that are resilient that way.
 
Todd Drowlette  16:45  
End caps, so any kind of like a Popeyes, a McDonald's, anything that's drive-through or food. Even you're starting to see, you know, the Tesla robots, and you're seeing more and more of that. However, people will still buy the food. So whether the employees are actually still in there, it's all robots. They still physically need a place that's close and convenient for people to drive to, or even the food delivery apps. Like a lot of the retail restaurants now are telling me 30, 40% of their orders are delivery through like Uber Eats and whatever. But those are great tenants to have because they're still making money, and as the world's changing, they're adapting. And I want tenants that adapt to the changing world. And honestly, they can afford to pay more. This is terrible. But from a strictly landlord perspective, the fewer employees they have, you don't have workers' comp claims, you don't have the insurance, you don't have all those things. The more you can afford to pay rent to landlords. So as the world's changing, those type of retail, small strip centers, end caps, fast food, QSR type food, quick serve retail. Those are definitely things that I would be considering if I was someone getting into this, and they're things that I also own. So I always recommend what I would do myself.
 
Keith Weinhold  17:55  
Right, and with that commercial tenant, if they're serving fast food, yes, it's not like their customer has to physically show up there at that business for that business to thrive.
 
Todd Drowlette  18:06  
And actually, if you have them as a tenant, because of the delivery, like with a drive-through, you're typically only working off one or two miles. But Uber Eats or these other meal services, they're now going out five, six, even seven miles in some places. So that actually means their sales could be higher. And another thing I didn't mention, but now I'm thinking, a lot of restaurant tenants will pay a percentage rent. So actually, as their sales go up, even though there's not more infrastructure, you know, strains from more customers coming in and out of your property, as they're doing the meal delivery, you're actually potentially be getting cut of that as a landlord with percentage rent, which is a thing that doesn't exist in residential real estate, obviously, there's multiple streams of income for triple net properties at times when you have percentage rent that doesn't exist in warehouse, where it's in retail. It doesn't exist in office, doesn't exist in warehouse, doesn't exist in residential. So that can be a nice bonus, and you see that with supermarkets, restaurants, different types of retailers pay percentage run.
 
Keith Weinhold  19:05  
Okay, so in a sense, Todd, we've been talking about going against the flow, if you will, in being in businesses that are resilient toward disruption from AI or Amazon. But while we're talking about industrial real estate, warehouses do come to mind for me soon afterward, I think generations ago maybe industrial had the connotation of a dirty factory. But today, when I think about warehouses, I think about Amazon fulfillment centers or AI data centers. So, what is the business like for investing in those sort of warehouse deals, and how do those deals even get put together for these warehouse types.
 
Todd Drowlette  19:42  
So you have two types. So you have people who do spec building. So there's guys that will go out and say, "Hey, I'm in the warehousing business, and they'll go through. They'll get approvals and they'll say they'll buy 10 acres, 20 acres, 30 acres, and they'll say, "Okay, we're going to." Put I'm making this up. 500,000 square feet of warehouse on this. They'll go get approved, but they basically will put up a spec building of 40,000 50,000 feet, and then they'll lease it. Depending how long it takes them to lease it, then they'll build the next one. Once you kind of have one building up, it's much easier to prelease. If you just have a piece of dirt and say, hey, I'm going to do a warehouse building here. Unless you have a direct in specifically with Amazon, and they're like, hey, we need to be in Skoda, New York, you know, at this exit within 10 miles of that. And it's like anything. Once you do something for someone once, they're working across the whole country. So if you're particularly good in a specific region as developer, they will often say, "Hey, find me a spot here, here, because they're in the business of getting open and running data centers. They don't care if you're making a profit on the real estate, and they're not set up to locally go through the approvals, know the politicians, know the process, that whole thing. So there's opportunities like that. If you don't know anyone from a hole in the wall, if you have a big piece of property and you start with whatever you're comfortable with to spec out a warehouse, 10,000 feet, 5000 feet. See how long it takes. Do you lease that in six months? Does it take three months? Does it take a year? And then you can kind of take some of the profits from that, either refinance, or if you have a construction loan, then build the next one, build the next one, and build the next one. You can kind of build out as the demand comes along.
 
Keith Weinhold  21:22  
You're listening to Get Rich Education. We're talking to the star of the A and E show, the Real Estate Commission, Todd Drowlette. So much when we come back. He's going to update us on what's happening with office to residential conversions, how much higher interest rate pain is still going to surface in some of these deals, and a negotiation tactic or two that you can use for your own residential deals. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Flock Homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio, through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now, mom and pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation. See if your properties qualify at flockhomes.com/gre. That's flockehomes.com/gre. Let me ask you something: If you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. And full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed, but with a track record of consistent, on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility.
 
Todd Drowlette  24:15  
Well, I'll tell you about some of the pitfalls, and I'll tell you the huge opportunities. If you have office buildings that are vacant, you know, particularly in downtown municipalities like in Albany, New York, you know, our state capital in New York. Politicians and the government right now are creating a lot of incentives to convert those, where they're putting up grant and giving away millions of dollars to private developers that you don't have to repay. So there's a huge opportunity to have people take on a lot of the risk for you to do it. Some of the pitfalls people get into are you want to pick the right office building to do it for. So you want to a make sure that that office building either has on site parking garages or on site parking because I've seen people try to do it and that. Downtowns where there's no parking, and you can put a lot of money in a building with no parking. And if you're not in New York City, where people are used to, and you're competing against suburban apartments, that's a tough sell. So that's number one. Number two, for whatever reason, people really want in office buildings and downtown settings floor-to-ceiling windows. So you really want to pick office buildings that already have floor-to-ceiling windows because it can be very expensive. If you get over three floors, it can be very expensive to cut out windows and make them larger. And another, this is a huge money potential pitfall if you're not careful. Many municipalities and states have different codes for elevators for residential buildings than they have for office. It makes no sense to me, but office buildings. It has to do with fitting the elevator has to be large enough that you can get a stretcher if someone had a heart attack and needed to be wheeled out. Ah, for some reason, residential buildings require larger elevators, and if your shaft isn't big enough and your car isn't big enough. You could have a million dollars or more of an unexpected expense to either make the shaft bigger. Some buildings you can't even do it.
 
Keith Weinhold  26:08  
Well, but if it was originally set up for-
 
Todd Drowlette  26:09  
It doesn't make any sense either. This is new. If you have an office building that's 30 stories tall, people could have heart attacks in the middle of the day at the office. So how is that any different than if they're at home in an apartment and have a heart attack, so it doesn't make any sense to me why the code is different for the fire code. But in New York State, the fire code is different, and that can be astronomically expensive, or it can literally stop your project dead in the tracks if it just becomes cost prohibitive to do it.
 
Keith Weinhold  26:34  
That's something that I never would have thought about. I generally like to see office to residential conversions revitalizing central business districts in our cities. You know, you talked about the parking before having less need for parking. If people can walk to work and where they work, that increases the walkability of an area. I like so many things about office to residential conversions, despite all the hardships and the pitfalls you have to avoid.
 
Todd Drowlette  27:01  
Oh, they're great. You just want to make sure you're picking the right building. So my point is, if you have five or 10 vacant office buildings, mostly vacant office buildings, just make sure you're choosing the right one. And before you buy it, do your due diligence and go through with contractors and engineers and architects that understand all the codes and say, hey, the other positive thing that saves money in office conversions is most office buildings. If you have an elevator bank, typically have bathrooms directly across from the elevator bank, so water and sewer can be very expensive when you're running apartments. So having central lines going up through usually concrete floors can save you a ton of money in the design and the layout of how you place the units and do it around central bathrooms, but typically larger office buildings will have plumbing and sewer on different parts of the floor. So it just means you have to go less distance and it saves money. And a lot of office buildings, even older ones, have higher ceilings, which today is very desirable for apartments. So if you can have a building that has natural light, high ceilings, and you can get grant money to do it, that's definitely something people should look into. And even with a smaller building, I've seen people in New York people are converting 5000 foot office buildings into like five units. You know, there's money to be made. You just have to buy right. I always say, you know, if you can buy $1 for 50 cents. Buy it. Don't buy $1 and hope it goes to $2 A
 
Keith Weinhold  28:25  
lot of these physical limitations, oftentimes in the office to residential conversion, and Todd in the residential world, oftentimes apartment buildings have been problematic. A lot of these syndicators have had their deals blow up because in 2022 or earlier they got five to seven year fixed rate debt. Those deals are coming due. The mortgage payments double, and a lot of times the operator just can't meet it, and it blows up. And apartment building values have been down about 30% nationally, largely for that reason, even though an apartment building owner gets a commercial loan, I still want to know from the commercial side and the commercial use type how much higher interest rate pain do you see that has surfaced and is still going to surface.
 
Todd Drowlette  29:17  
So, I'll answer this by quoting my grandmother. She said, "Anytime you want to cook, whatever size pot you think you need, pick twice that size pot and start using that.
 
Keith Weinhold  29:29  
Yeah.
 
Todd Drowlette  29:29  
So I say the same thing when you're financing a deal or you're writing it out and seeing what your returns are. I always say to people, make sure that you have a big enough cushion in there for all the things you can never predict in commercial loans, there's a ton of guys that are about to lose their shirts, and you're starting to see it because, unfortunately, I don't know if it's true in residential real estate, but in commercial real estate, I've seen guys go from nothing to 50 million, 100 million, $200 million net worths, but I've also seen. Lose everything. So what happens in commercial real estate that you don't want to do is so many people say OPM, use other people's money, use other people's money, use other people's money, which is fine as a strategy. But what you don't want to do is cross collateralized loans. So if you have one property and then you go, oh, let me refinance that and then buy a next property and I'll refinance that and buy the next property, and then the bank's like, okay, we'll refinance that, but we're going to now tie all these properties together as one mortgage, or you're going to cross guarantee these properties. Right. The problem with that is, the people who do that strategy, if you started at that, you know, in 2021 when interest rates, you could get things at three and three quarters percent. Well, commercial loans are five-year loans typically, and they might have 20 or 20-five-year amortizations. So, unlike a residential mortgage that's a 15 or 20 or 30-year self-amortizing loan, they're not. At the end of five years, you have a balloon payment that you have to pay off. So, if interest rates are going down, that's amazing because if your tenants are the same, and even if your rents didn't change, and you bought something at 6% and now it's at 5% Your cash flow goes up significantly, and nothing happened other than your refinance. The problem is you have a ton of guys right now, guys, women, people that were financing stuff five years ago at three and three quarters, and now interest rates are hanging six and a quarter, six and a half, depending on the property, is might maybe seven. Same tenant, same everything. You're giving the keys back to the bank because you're broke now. Because all of a sudden you're financing, you squeeze too much out of the deal. I always say you can take on the in in or you can take on the out, but you can't have both. So when people are financing stuff, they just need to make sure. Like here's another thing I'll go off on. A lot of people will buy stuff with tax credits, and you see even with residential apartments, a lot of guys are financing that, selling people tax credits. Economies and things change and things move. If a deal is so tight that you need the tax credits to make the deal make sense, yeah, don't do the fricking deal because tax credits should be an added bonus. That's just, hey, that's a nice adding to the cushion. So many people have razor thin margins. They go, oh well, I do the tax credits. If I can get 70 cents on the dollar, this is how I make the money. I tell people I will have nothing to do with tax credit deals unless it's strictly a bonus. The deal has to stand on its own, and always assume in the course of five years interest rates could go up three points or down three points. Most people will not listen to me and will not do that. If you do that, you'll never get killed and you won't lose a property. It's super conservative, but there's enough money you can make, and if you buy it right, that's how you can afford to figure that spread in when you're financing something. But just so many people get greedy, and I just think back to my friend Bob Bear, who died. I met him when he was like 70-five. He was a billionaire, self-made, and he used to say to me, "It's not what you make; it's what you keep. And when people would ask how rich are you, he knew how rich he was. He would say, "I don't owe anybody in the world a dime.
 
Todd Drowlette  32:59  
And to me, my entire strategy is I don't owe anybody in the world a dime. So I personally look at deals and say, out of my own cash flows, what can I buy? And instead of buying four properties a year, I might buy one property a year. But if I'm buying that and compounding my returns, I'm not paying interest to the banks. So it's just a different strategy. I sleep at night. I'm like the multimillionaire next door. I don't live extravagantly. I don't drive Ferraris and Rolls Royces. That's just not my thing. But I sleep at night and I have peace, which is important to me, knowing I don't owe anybody in the world a dime. But will I get as rich as the guy who's risking everything? No. But real estate to me is musical chairs, and the music always stops at some point. And there's never enough chairs for everybody. But if you're somebody who's in a cash position, which you're going to be going through in the next six months to a year, on the residential and commercial, I think there's going to be blood in the streets. And I think people who are sitting in cash are going to have like a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy things at a deep discount.
 
Keith Weinhold  34:02  
Philosophically, we're different in one way. I use debt and leverage to grow larger, but ensuring that I do have enough income to cover the mortgage and all the operating expenses. But Todd, to your analogy about your grandmother in selecting a bigger pot than what she would need to cook whatever she's going to do, when it does come to debt, the last time I bought an apartment building myself, which wasn't recent, I could have chosen seven-year fixed-rate debt with a balloon at the end, or 10-year fixed-rate debt with a balloon at the end. The 10-year fixed-rate debt cost me one quarter of a percent more in mortgage rate, which dented my cash flow during the entire duration of that loan. But I did indeed choose that 10-year loan in order to have that much more certainty, and I sure am glad that that's what I did.
 
Todd Drowlette  34:54  
That's always the game because it's people think that rich people know what you don't, or it's inside. Whatever I'm like. Number one, if you sit in a room with a bunch of rich people, yes, they will work against you if it benefits them to work together. But if it doesn't, you have egos and separate interests that are all competing. And there's always that thing of I know very very rich people who could buy and sell me 100 times over, and I also know that you don't know what you don't know, and the world has gotten so complicated, and financial markets are all intertwined globally. Anyone to be able to predict, it's like it's a crapshoot when you're like, okay, do I take seven years? Where do I think interest rates will be in seven years? It's hard to say where interest rates going to be tomorrow. You ask a banker tomorrow, they can't tell you. So it's like, what's your best educated guess of seven or 10 years? What's the better play? But I always go the conservative route.
 
Keith Weinhold  35:43  
I think it's easier to predict the future direction of capital prices than it is interest rates. Myself,
 
Todd Drowlette  35:50  
but I will say also, I am the exception. And if you have 100 other guests on here in the next year, well, 50-one more guests in here the next year, yeah, they would all say Todd's an idiot. That's terrible advice. If you want to get rich, literally leverage, leverage. Just do it intelligently, and I acknowledge that. I don't see the world the way other people do, but my end game is to be rich and comfortable, and to sleep at night with peace. And that's why I choose to do what I do, realizing I'm giving up. It's the you know what are you giving up to what do you gain benefit analysis, and I'm realizing I'm giving up some upside in my total potential net worth. But I like peace, and you know I had anxiety for years. I don't have it anymore, and I live my life to be as anxiety free as I can possibly be.
 
Keith Weinhold  36:34  
That's interesting, and that certainly works for you, Todd. What's one negotiation tactic that you get from dealing with, well, let's say Decca or Centa million dollar commercial deals that our listeners could use the very next time that they buy a rental property.
 
Todd Drowlette  36:53  
So the number one mistake I think people make is they assume what's motivating the other person, and they assume it's always price. So anytime I'm going to negotiate a deal from someone, whoever has the most information always wins, and whoever doesn't need the deal always wins. Yeah. So I want to know as much about that other person on the other side as I am. Are they going through a divorce? Are they desperate? Do they hate each other? Is it a partnership breakup? Did somebody inherit it and they live five states away and don't even know what this thing is worth that they have. So the number one thing from a negotiating standpoint is understand exactly who you're negotiating with and what's motivating them. From an actual tactic standpoint, just think logically through whatever the process is, and you can always go up. You can't go down. So the key is to offer as little as you can without insulting the person, so they don't even respond. So figure out what that fine line is, and before you go into the negotiation, know what your walk away number is. That's just the point you're not getting over. The fast way to lose in a negotiation is to get stuck in a bidding war. There's nothing I want so much that I'm going to overpay for it. So when people go, "Well, if somebody else is interested, I go then sell it to them. Yeah, I don't need it. Sell it to them. And then the other thing I'll say is, if you start the negotiation, this is the one piece. Say your number and shut up. So many people are scared of silence. And then, right, if the person doesn't immediately respond, they go, "Oh, well, I guess I offered you 500,000 I mean, I guess I could go 550. As soon as you talk after you give a number, you're negotiating against yourself. So throw the number, let it land wherever it lands, and do not talk until that person responds to you. That's like the number one mistake I see people do. They throw out a number, they get nervous with the silence, and then they immediately go up in their offer. That person could have been thinking, "Oh my God, did I forget to call back my whatever? And they're not even thinking about the number you just threw out. But people just assume, oh God, the number was too low, and then they negotiate against those. Do not do that.
 
Keith Weinhold  38:48  
Risk the awkward silence. And yes, to your point about learning more about the other side, terms are often more important than price for sure. Well, Todd, you know a lot of commercial real estate content in mainstream media it tends to focus on these big institutional deals. But what has made your A and E show interesting, the Real Estate Commission, is what it's called. Is it focuses more on sort of leasing and this negotiation that we're just touching on there, and that's what makes you interesting. So tell us about what audiences can expect for season two of the Real Estate Commission on A and E.
 
Todd Drowlette  39:24  
So, season two, you will 100% see real landlords, real brokers, real investors. You'll see real retailers. You'll see people relocating their offices in New York City. You'll see stuff in upstate New York. It's generally in the Northeast. In the first season, we helped a kitchen cabinet manufacturer relocate their suburban offices in Philadelphia. I sold a 50-unit HUD property that has a HAP contract you might be familiar with. That was crazy going through a bankruptcy foreclosure proceeding two year. That was crazy. Yeah, so you are going to. See more of that. It's a documentary. It's not a reality show, so you're watching the deal as it unfolds. Some things have happy endings. Some things have terrible endings, but they're real endings either way. So people will see a lot of that of deals happening in the Northeast. And if someone's listening and they're a business owner and they want to be part of the show, they can apply. We're announcing the casting will be open for about three weeks across the U.S. They can go to the realestatecommission.com/forward/tv and they can apply to be part of the show.
 
Keith Weinhold  40:32  
Now, since you started this last year, I want to ask: Has this A and E exposure helped you generate more business and create traffic? I would really think so.
 
Todd Drowlette  40:42  
Yeah, I wasn't sure. You know how because you never anything new. You never know, right? Like I put time and energy into it. It definitely did. Definitely, people start to notice you, which is a little weird. I was in a cell phone store, and they literally it was playing, and the guy's like, "Oh, it's you! Like, and then everybody who's walking in, he's like, "Hey, look, it's the guy on TV. He's right here. That was like kind of an awkward. Like, I'm like, "Okay, this is weird. Guy was excited, so that was fine. It's an adjustment of things, but it definitely has increased our overall visibility and people reaching out to do deals with us for sure.
 
Keith Weinhold  41:18  
Is there any last resource you'd like to tell our audience about.
 
Todd Drowlette  41:21  
I would just quickly announce the first season did so well. We're actually doing a spinoff show that'll also air on A and E called the Real Estate Commission New York that we're casting in upstate New York as well as New York City for brokers, agents, home sellers, home buyers that will actually document real buyers, real sellers, same thing. It'll follow our format, which I know there's a million shows on TV about real estate. Those are reality shows, not docu series. And I'll say, without going into the details, there's a very big difference between those two and what you're actually seeing on camera and what's happening. That will air in March of 2027, back to back with our show, I will make cameos in that. But I'm executive producing that show, so from your residential audience, that's a show they should tune into. I think they'll get a lot out of it.
 
Keith Weinhold  42:12  
Congratulations! Your show has had so much success that it's setting the template for another show, and it has been most interesting since we first had you here last year to follow this along, Todd Drowlette. It's been a valuable chat. Thanks so much for coming back onto the show.
 
Todd Drowlette  42:28  
I'd love to come back anytime, and thank you so much for having me on again. I appreciate it.
 
Keith Weinhold  42:38  
Drowlette is spelled D R O W L E T T E. Todd and I talk a good bit off mic as well. In addition to the elevators, sometimes he emphasizes how cumbersome to impossible HVAC system compatibility is when you're doing office to residential building conversions. Too, you just never seem to hear about an easier than expected office to residential property conversion. It is most interesting and rare that Todd is not much of a leverage guy at all. Whereas in the vein of financially free beats debt free, I like to approach deals where the interest cost is lower than the expected opportunity cost. When it comes to negotiating, some of Todd's approach, you know, it's similar to what prominent hostage negotiator Chris Voss shared with you here on the show a few years ago. That silence is powerful in negotiating. In fact, if you feel like you need to say something to fill the silence. Use what Chris Voss calls the mirroring technique, and the mirroring technique that is simply repeating what the other party just said, kind of like a parrot would. For example, if you're trying to buy a property and the seller says that the best they can do is sell it to you for 550k and a delayed 90-day close. Reply with 550k and a 90-day close, and then listen to see if the seller comes down from there. Or instead, you can simply say nothing and just sit there with the silence like Todd recommended. The reason I like these particular negotiating techniques right here is that they're easy to remember and they're easy to do. You either remain silent or, per the mirroring technique, you just repeat the last words that the other party said. Thanks to Todd Drowlette today, you can check out the real estate commission on A and E Coming up here on the show soon. Back to residential, where for the first time ever on the show here we discuss what might be the greatest real estate cash flow strategy because it's becoming quite popular today. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.
 
Speaker 1  45:08  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.
 
Keith Weinhold  45:36  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building getricheducation.com

Keith explores how investors can build legacy wealth by owning productive teak timber and the land beneath it in Panama. 
Mike Cobb, an international real estate developer with over 30 years of experience, explains why Panama's legal framework, economic stability, and U.S. dollar economy make it a compelling destination for first-time offshore investors. 
They discuss the long-term return profile of teak, its resilience as a hard asset, and common mistakes to avoid when investing internationally, along with how a sawmill and vertical integration can enhance returns. 
This discussion highlights how the strategy can diversify both geography and asset type while also opening doors to potential residency options abroad.
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Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold, talking about a legacy investment. You can profit from this real asset long term, and so can your heirs. It's real estate, but not housing. It's a diverse and more primitive use type. Today on Get Rich Education, you know. Mid South Homebuyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties. It's an executive coach. For nine years now, their CEO Terry Kerr and his COO Pat Mix have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one-on-one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to DanielThomashind.com. H-I-N-D. That's DanielThomashind.com, and sign up before spots fill.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:35  
What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056. They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge while it's on your mind. Start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com.
 
Speaker 1  2:08  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.
 
Keith Weinhold  2:24  
Welcome to GRE from Cherokee, North Carolina, to Cherokee, Panama, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Welcome back to another Wealth Building Week. You are inside Get Rich Education, where financially free beats debt free. Today we're talking about a specific investment that is not residential real estate. In fact, it's a more primordial real estate type that predates housing. So therefore, it is lucid and intelligible. It's easy to understand. Sort of the opposite of more arcane investment like AI data centers or crypto mining. At a basic level, this makes it easy to understand, and there aren't any tenants to manage. It also does not pay you as often as monthly, though as you'll learn, there is income and appreciation is expected too. Now, if you invest outside your home country, you're probably going to want to be diligent and select a politically stable nation that also has an operator based in that region with a fantastic track record. It helps if they're close to the U.S. This small nation is close to the U.S. in both geographic proximity and economically. Their currency is even the U.S. dollar. They even share an electrical system with the U.S. with the same outlets and voltages. As you might be guessing, where I'm talking about, this nation also has a consumer culture somewhat similar to the U.S. with American restaurants and retailers and brands in our real estate world. What we find more important is how, like the U.S. this nation is a constitutional presidential republic, and both nations have these separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the three branches and elected presidents, in these competitive multi-party elections, and both America and this place have market-oriented economies that emphasize private property and private enterprise, banking and financial services, international commerce, logistics, ports, and aviation.
 
Keith Weinhold  4:49  
Today, we're talking about the opportunity for you to own productive timber and the land beneath it, teak hardwood trees in Panama, a quarter-acre parcel. At a time with your name on the deed, that direct ownership is known as fee simple ownership. I have directly invested in Panama for about 11 years myself. Now, though teak might be able to survive in a climate like Hawaii, mere survival is not enough in the U.S. It is difficult to impossible to find anywhere that grows productive plantation teak. Here in the late 2020s decade, we've had bouts of El Nino or La Nina a lot of places in the world, and that has severely weakened some crop types. Other providers of different agricultural investments are failing, but not this teak. They're resilient, and we'll get into the physical properties of the teak. I'm going to ask today's distinguished guest about that. He and his business partners planted some select timber 27 years ago, and they've been offering teak hardware parcels to investors for that long, 27 years, and for about the last 10 years to GRE investors. Hundreds of you are participating now, but I'm going to wait to ask more about the physical teak product itself until later, because what's more important are the investment environment and the strength of the operator. So learn more about this and what the projected investment returns are, and just how much exactly does a quarter-acre parcel of teak cost? If you so choose, owning teak parcels also gives you the option of residency status in Panama, and you only need to spend two days there every two years in part of maintaining that status, they offer investor in-person tours of the teak plantations too because they're proud of what they do there. I expect a fascinating discussion with Mike, the teak company co-founder and CEO. This week's guest has become a friend since I met him about 10 years ago. He co-founded and is CEO of an international real estate development company. He's got active projects throughout Central America. He's been doing it for more than 30 years, so he's not a tinkerer and not trying out project concepts.
 
Keith Weinhold  7:26  
And at this point, he's helped thousands of North Americans diversify their portfolios through international real estate ownership and residency planning, and even lifestyle investing. And if you've ever attended an investment conference on something like global diversification. You might have seen him speak there because he's such a frequent, recognized speaker and voice, and he's authored multiple books on real estate, financial freedom, expat living, and just unlocking a better lifestyle. Hey, welcome back onto the show, Mike Cobb.
 
Mike Cobb  7:59  
Oh Keith, nice to be with you. And you're right. 10 years, we've enjoyed one another's company at many conferences. It's always great to be back with you virtually. I look forward to seeing you again personally one of these days as well. And yeah, thank you for the very kind words on the intro.
 
Keith Weinhold  8:14  
Yeah, if I'm teetering on whether or not to attend a conference, I ask myself, is Mike going to be there? That's right.
 
Mike Cobb  8:20  
We'll hang out,
 
Keith Weinhold  8:22  
100% And you know, Mike, he's also an avid reader of GRE's "Don't Quit Your Daydream" newsletter. So then, clearly, he's even smarter than you've ever thought. You heard him on the show before, so you knew he was smart, but now he's even smarter than you ever knew since he's a reader. Tell us what you like about the newsletter.
 
Mike Cobb  8:40  
You know, Keith. I gotta say, every issue that comes in, I read it. By the way, today's issue said read before Thursday, so you give me a couple days tomorrow at least to read it. Anyway, no, you know what? You are so powerfully succinct. The charts that you put in are wonderful. You were a geographer major, and and so spatial things are important. I also recognize. I love the charts. I love the graphs, and I hate to even say I love sort of the I hate to call it the trivial information, but you know enough data points that seem trivial when you put a theory around them actually become meaningful. And what you are able to do is you're able to connect dots that most people don't connect. That's the hallmark of genius, and I think you are a genius, by the way. And I think your newsletter shows that. And so, thanks for putting it out. Your readers are very, very fortunate to have you there, giving them the kinds of information that are super relevant in the marketplace at one level and on a specific level. But even more important, creating the theoretical constructs that allow them to understand the why of something's happening because you know if you understand the why of something you know it makes a lot more sense first of all but it also allows us to maybe forecast the next what coming down the pike and if we can be on the front edge of something or you know being able to look over the hill or around the bend that's. Powerful in the marketplace, and and you bring that power to your readers. Well done, man.
 
Keith Weinhold  10:04  
Thanks. Yeah, it's not just what; it's why this matters. And that was an incredibly kind thing to say. I write every word of the letter myself, and you, the listener, you can get the letter free now@greletter.com I send it about weekly, and Mike, I know that U.S. investors, including some Get Rich Education followers, they've been increasingly looking offshore for one thing many perceive the political risk has palpably higher than it was a few years ago. So, just broadly, tell us more about what North American investors seem to be looking for.
 
Mike Cobb  10:42  
Sure, I summed it up earlier today. I was talking with a conference organizer, and he was really giving me the hard sell on why I should come to his conference. And it's probably not a good fit. But I heard myself say it for the first time. What we really help folks do in certain spheres, but maybe in this sphere, is help people get a good night's sleep, you know, peace of mind, right? And when you've got the political turmoil, you wrote an article or a newsletter a couple weeks ago, and it was about inflation, the kinds of things that were happening, and it was so spot on. And I think your readers, and not just your readers, but people who are tuned into what's really happening from a political standpoint, a financial standpoint. There is no way you can print this much money. There's no way you can have these kinds of things going on all the time that create a huge run-up of debt, right? And it's not even the debt; it's the implications of the debt. What's going to happen next? How's this thing going to unwind, right? And so when you have all of this stuff going on. You have people who are really, really worried about their future. It's a financial future. I say there are two train wrecks. There's a train wreck of debt, which is what I just talked about, and there's a train wreck of freedom. And that train wreck of freedom is really, in some ways, a result of the train wreck of debt. But when you've got a train wreck or two train wrecks happening, we really have three choices. We can ride it out, right? Take the ride and go for the crash, right? We can do something about it, but we really have to do something about it before. I'm going to mix a metaphor here, but if you know a hurricane's coming in three or four days, you don't wait till the wind's blowing 150 miles an hour to put up the plywood, right? You get out there while the sun's still shining. You put up the plywood, and then when the hurricane hits, like you got plywood over the windows, and you can ride out the storm. And this is where I think so many people are today. They're recognizing this hurricane is coming. The problem is, is that I don't think people always know where to go get plywood, right? What do I do? How do I protect myself and my assets, right?
 
Mike Cobb  12:38  
And what this conversation right here is about is here's one kind of plywood you can put up on your window and the diversification overseas the diversification internationally into a hard asset that is not really inflation proof because I'm not sure there is such a thing but largely inflation proof or a big a great hedge against inflation real stuff hard assets real estate timber commodity right this is. what so many people are now looking at, and then the other piece of it is you can layer in a residency, which starts to give you that political plan B. You've got an economic plan B, kind of the hedge against inflation, but you've got this residency component that gives you sort of a hedge against the political uncertainty, and 1000s of folks have moved in this direction. Several 100, I think it's about 600 folks now, have picked up the residency as part of their timber investment as well. So a lot of different things going on, but I think they do circle all the way back to this train wreck of debt and a train wreck of freedom, the political divisiveness kind of what's happening.
 
Keith Weinhold  13:40  
Now, what if someone hasn't invested in a hard asset overseas before, Mike? I'm thinking some people might come ask you. You know, why would I do this? For example, I live in the United States, where we have a rule of law and stable, mature markets and high property ownership rights. So, why should I look to diversify internationally with hard assets,
 
Mike Cobb  14:01  
yeah, I think there's a general answer, and then maybe a couple specific answers. Generally, you know, I would never bet against the U.S. the U.S. economy. We're the largest economy in the world. I would never bet against it, right? But I think that for prudence, we would all want to have at least another basket for a few of our eggs: 5% 10% 20% Pick. Pick a number that's comfortable, but have some of your investable net worth outside your home country. Like that's just prudent, right? Why would you have everything all in one basket? And so we see that as a general answer. Specifically, a country like Panama, where we do have artique plantations, they have public title escritora publica. It's fee simple title, but in the civil law, so it's called escritora publica. The rule of law is strong in Panama. And then the other thing about Panama that I absolutely love is you have the canal, and the canal provides both economic stability and political stability. On the economic side, it generates just. Under $5 billion a year of cash flow, year in year out, right? So just it's like an ATM machine for a country with a population of about 4 million people. Do the math on that; like that's a huge amount of money on a per capita basis, right?
 
Keith Weinhold  15:13  
Narrow water passages have really been newsworthy for a long time now, too.
 
Mike Cobb  15:16  
Well, they have, and just like the Strait of Hormuz, right? You know, people sometimes go. I hear it said, "Oh, the canal is a vital strategic U.S. interest. That is absolutely 100% correct. But if you're a country that produces any goods that ship, or you're a country that receives any goods by ship, that canal is a strategic interest to you, and by definition, that's every country in the world. Every country in the world wants that canal open and transiting, right? Because everybody either produces or receives or both, right? And so you've got the political stability element as well as the economic stability element. You've got the rule of law. Panama is a great, great place for that person who you mentioned who's never done an overseas investment, never gone offshore, right? What's an easy place to start? What's one of the safest places to start is Panama, and it's in this hemisphere too, so it's close. I mean, you can get there for three hours from Miami, three and a half hours from Houston. Flights all over to U.S. Canada. It's easy. So I think a lot of folks see Panama as a very, very easy way to make that first step overseas.
 
Keith Weinhold  16:25  
I happen to know that you just flew in from Panama. You're in the United States today, but you're constantly going to Central America. You span time zones more often than almost anyone I know. You mentioned fee simple ownership in there. For those that don't know, I think of that as direct ownership, where you don't have some weird administrative government layer in there that can dilute your hard asset.
 
Mike Cobb  16:47  
Right, you can own it in your own name, you can own it in a corporation, so it's easy to own it. But yeah, no layering, right? By the way, the Constitution treats owners who are Panamanian the same exact ways it treats all foreign owners, and actually, we do business all over Central America. The one thing that we look for is a a legal regime that protects foreigners and foreign investors the same as it does domestic. Panama does that.
 
Keith Weinhold  17:12  
Yeah, so investing in hard asset in Panama is a bit like investing internationally with training wheels on, due to its close relationship with the United States bolstered by the Panama Canal, but yet if someone hasn't invested internationally first, there are still a few mistakes to avoid. Maybe things that one isn't aware of. Can you tell us more about that? 
 
Mike Cobb  17:33  
The biggest danger people have when they make their first foreign investment is what I call margarita madness, right? And a lot of times it happens. You're on vacation in Cancun. You're having the time of your life. You're you just went parasailing, whatever. You're walking down the beach, and some developer says, "Hey, come on up here and take a look at my condo project. You know, and we'll buy you dinner at Senior Frogs tonight. We'll give you a coupon or whatever, right?
 
Keith Weinhold  17:55  
Right.
 
Mike Cobb  17:55  
And a lot of people do that, and then later that night, that's Senior Frogs. They're celebrating the condo they just bought, right? I mean, it's not how we transact real estate in the U.S. and Canada. There's a due diligence process. There's a due diligence period. It takes weeks or months to transact on a property, not hours, right? And so the single biggest mistake is that, and the way that we really can resolve it. I mean, my book is all about this. In fact, you have a copy, and I think you've helped some of your your readers and listeners get copies as well. It's called "How to Buy Your Home Overseas and Get It Right the First Time, and it really boils down to three simple principles: buy what you see. Is it there? Right. Own community. Right. Make sure it's in a place where you have people around. Right? Because there are a lot of ghost towns out there, and then know the developer. Do your due diligence on the developer himself, right? So you've got these three principles, and if you follow those three principles, you could do a lot better. But I actually think there's even a better way, and it has to do with character. It has to do with us, and you know when we move to the developing world, anywhere outside of you know North America, Northern Europe, maybe Australia, New Zealand, right? We're moving from the land of seller beware, right? Think lemon laws, think Ralph Nader, think advocacy groups, you know, lots of laws and regulations that control the seller, to the world of buyer beware, where none of those laws exist, and so now you're on your own. And because we've been living and transacting our whole lives in a seller beware environment, in a bubble of protection, we're protected by the government, right? We think we are. We'll just say that anyway. But we're protected. We're in a bubble, and we move to the land of buyer beware.
 
Mike Cobb  19:38  
The problem is we don't really know how to transact. We don't know the right questions to ask, and our single biggest advantage, our single biggest attribute or asset that we have, is actually humility, because we don't know what we don't know, and we have to forget what we think we know. Assumptions, right? We can't bring assumptions with us that hold true. Some do some. Don't right. If we approach a transaction overseas with humility, there are no dumb questions. I'm going to ask every question I can think of. I'm going to do as much research as I can within a limited period of time. I'm not going to not analysis to paralysis forever. I'm going to say, look, I'm going to spend the next 30 days. I'm going to do a ton of due diligence, and at the end of 30 days, if I like what I say, I'm going to transact, right? So you're you're not getting the deer in the headlights never to do something, right? But you know, several weeks, maybe a month or two, depending on what it is you're doing, is enough time to do really, really good due diligence. Ask all the questions you can think of, but approach it with humility. And when we do those things, we transact so much, so much better than if we just rush into it with Margarita Madness.
 
Keith Weinhold  20:44  
Right? People get caught up in those emotions with Margarita Madness and end up with a timeshare that they can't get rid of, or something like that. You said something so interesting there, Mike. When you move from the developed world to the developing world, you move from a seller beware world, like with some of the things you have to be aware of, and like you need to give disclosures and such into a buyer beware world. I hadn't thought of it that way before.
 
Mike Cobb  21:08  
Yeah, and really, a lot of my book and a lot of the presentations that I've given, you've seen me give over the years, really deal with what I call a change in thought process. Because mostly in presentations, right? My goal in a presentation is to help somebody change how they think, to take away the bubble and understand that they're on their own, right? It's not really their own. They have you, they have me, they have other resources, right? But they don't have this bubble of government or regulations or laws out there protecting them anymore. Now it's the individual, and as an individual, I don't want to be rugged individual. I want to find other people that can help me, right? But I have to do that as opposed to it's just there for me, right? So if I can help people change how they think, they will transact so much better. They'll make better investments. They'll make investments that work for them in ways that they want them to work for them, right? They'll achieve the goal or the dream in a much, much, much higher percentage of the cases,
 
Keith Weinhold  22:04  
we're talking about investing antique tree hardwood plantations, principally in Panama, like you mentioned, and we're talking about one mindset about crossing borders with our investing, and another is oftentimes, at least for GRE listeners, we're crossing asset use type because we're so used to residential rental housing. So when you cross into agriculture or forestry, I guess as it is with teak, what are some of the bridges to cross there as we change use type? 
 
Mike Cobb  22:35  
The reason I love timber generally and teak specifically in Panama in this case is that most people, most people, and I hope that many of your readers aren't most people. Most investors look at 20-five years and they simply say themselves, "No way, no way. And I love that because right now teak timber is being cut down 10 to 12 times faster than anyone is replanting it. And the reason people don't replant it is because most average investors come along and say, "Oh, it's 25 years. I can't wait 25 years. Well, you know what? Good, because the folks who do decide to move ahead and plant the teak, what that means is the price of teak is very highly likely to continue to increase in value far beyond inflation. Teak wholesale teak prices have gone up five and a half percent a year on average for the last 50-three years. I think that number is going to increase largely because there's this huge psychological barrier. People think, "Oh, 20-five years, but back in 1990-eight I bought 100-acre cattle pasture in Panama, and we had a professional forestry company plant it and maintain it for the last now 27 years, and two two and a half years ago, we started building a sawmill. Our sawmill is up and running. In fact, was just down there and brought back one of our first retail products. We're producing lumber. Our first container of lumber is headed out to a distributor in Colorado next week.
 
Keith Weinhold  23:56  
Mike's holding up a nice cutting board for those in the audience.
 
Mike Cobb  24:00  
Nice cutting board. We're setting up an e-commerce site. We're going business to consumer with cutting board, bath mat, shelving, tables, chairs. We have our whole production facility ramping up with new retail products. So the bottom line is, is yeah, man, it does take 25 years. You know.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:15  
The lantation to harvest cycle. That's the 25 year span you're talking about here. The patience it takes for an investor.
 
Mike Cobb  24:21  
Thank you. Yes, absolutely. And then, as we cut down this mature plantation that we we are now harvesting right now, it gets replanted, and the next 25 year harvest. I'm 61 Maybe I'll make 86 I don't know. Maybe not. Right. But my kids probably will, and they'll get the big harvest in 25 years, and then it'll replant, and maybe they'll get a next one, or maybe it'll be the grandkids, right? And so what we found savvy investors, people who are really not your average bear, right? And they think to themselves, how can I create generational wealth stewardship? I have enough money coming in. I mean, Keith, that the I mean, you can own teak for 10 grand. You can. Own a quarter acre of teak. You own the land. You own the trees. 10 grand, like it's 9000 something or other, but 10 grand, right? I mean, the bottom line is it's such an affordable, easy investment, right? And it turns into well over $100,000 in today's numbers. Who knows what inflation? But in today's numbers, buying power, you know, 10,000 turns into 100,000 right? Over 20-five years, and so most people who do this recognize the fact that they might get the first harvest, but it's their kids, their grandkids, their great grandkids who are going to get this harvest every 20-five years thereafter. And so the 20-five year thing becomes a wonderful thing, not a bad thing. Right, it keeps many people out, which keeps the price of teak high and growing, which we like. But it also creates this cash flow period. People go, "Oh, it doesn't cash flow. I'm like, "Absolutely, it does. It cash flows phenomenally four times a century. Like you have an internal rate of return of almost 11% 10 point something, right? You have an internal rate of return of 11% and it cash flows four times a century. This is a phenomenal cash flow investment. You might get to see the first one or the second one, but you're probably not seeing three or four. But somebody else in your lineage, your family, your heirs will see it, and they will all be so happy you made that decision to own teak.
 
Keith Weinhold  26:22  
We're talking about the ability for you to own teak parcels and the land beneath it, title in your own name, one quarter of an acre at a time. We're going to talk more about that with Mike when we come back. You're listening to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Flock Homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio, through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now mom and pop landlords can 721 their residential real estate. Request your initial valuation. See if your properties qualify at flockhomes.com/gre. That's flockehomes.com/gre.
 
Keith Weinhold  27:09  
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Ken McElroy  28:12  
This is Rich Dad advisor Ken McElroy. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold and don't quit your daydream.
 
Keith Weinhold  28:29  
Welcome back to Get Rich Education. We're talking about international investing with teak tree plantations. This isn't something experimental. We're not talking about a tinkerer here. You have to be more careful when you go overseas, and we're talking about with the owner of an international company that's been doing this for 30 years, providing international investments. But the teak tree plantation, I think, began in 1998 or 1999 Is that right?
 
Mike Cobb  28:56  
Yeah, 98 was the purchase of the property, and in the rainy season of 99 we planted the first 100 acres. Yep.
 
Keith Weinhold  29:03  
Yeah. Well, talk to us more about that because you talked to us about how historically teak appreciates at about 5% per year. Tell us about how we get to that 11% internal rate of return.
 
Mike Cobb  29:15  
Yeah. Sure. I mean, so two things. One, you've got the five and a half percent a year kind of calculated out over a very long period of time, 50-three years. So that's a pretty good statistical baseline. And then the fact that your trees actually physically grow, right? I mean, back in 2008 my joke is from 2008 to 2012 While the rest of us in real estate were hating life, my trees just simply kept growing, right? They just kept growing. And so what you start off with is about 100 maybe 110, I think, trees on a quarter acre, and in the end, after all the thinnings, you end up with somewhere between 22 and 25 trees per quarter acre, and each of those trees produces about 1.2 to 1.6 cubic meters of timber. For lumber, by the way, one of the things that we are working on, and you know, look at the end of the day, you had a walk, jog, run, right? And we're in the walk stage right now, but we're harvesting out all of the other elements of the teak tree. Your lumber piece, that just you know, sell it as boards, you know, one by fours, one by sixes, one by eights, whatever it is. Ship that stuff off. That's your 1.2 to 1.6 cubic meters, but you've got other pieces of the tree. You've got stuff that's too thin, the root stock that can be turned into other things, including cellucrete with cellulose, the ground up, the sawdust itself. We're saving all the sawdust. We're going to use that for cellulite. This is the math on this. Our investors get 80% of the net proceeds after processing costs, which is 15% my company gets 20% and so we, my company, has the highest incentive to drive the highest possible return to the investor possible because I get 20% of whatever I make for the investor, and so all the numbers we use are always the net investor number, right? And we have a business plan. All the numbers are laid out. It's all there, and it's pretty easy to see how the IRR gets up. About I think it's 10.6, 10.7% I can't remember. Just under 11% but it's all in the business plan, Keith. And again, this is part of that due diligence process, right? Get a copy of the business plan. Get on the phone with one of our property consultants maybe take a trip to Panama. I just got back. We just took a group of people. Yeah, we got tours. Yeah, we have tours, and so like as part of the due diligence process, come visit, come see the trees, come see the sawmill. Right? If it's something that makes sense from a an investment standpoint, yeah, the material, the facts, and the due diligence is all there for people to be able to pick up and do over a you know several week period, you know 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever it is.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:47  
Well, let's back up because seemingly you have had really good prescience. Because when we look at world agriculture today, we see some problems. Whether some people want to call it erratic weather, other want to call it climate change, and how that's really ravaged some crops and created disruptions in certain produce. Or with coffee, you know, we've also got a cattle production problem, for example. But you've chosen something that's been really resilient. Tell us more about that resilience and just why teak of all crops and forestry.
 
Mike Cobb  32:22  
Let me start by saying, who was it? Yogi Berra says, you know, predicting is hard to do, especially when it's about the future or something. Exactly. Yeah. Right. But I mean, look, we're talking about the future. I mean, who the heck knows, right? I mean, that's what makes it investing rather than you know something else. But teak has been grown in plantations for almost 400 years. It was started by the British in India, what was then Burman throughout Southeast Asia. And one of the things the Brits did so so well is they documented everything. They had statisticians keeping track of altitude, rainfall, soil types, different stock. I mean, just anything and everything that you could imagine, and so by the early 1900s, some of the best books about teak and teak plantation farming was written. I actually read those books in order to interview the forestry management companies in Panama that we would hire them to manage our plantation, because I don't know anything about it, right? But I wanted to be prepared to do the interviews, so I was. What amazed and fascinated me was this incredible track record of production for almost 400 years of teak as a commodity in the marketplace, and then for the last 50 years, 53 years, you know, seeing what's happened to the price of teak in that time period. Look, nobody can predict the future. Weather patterns change. Teak as a species, is very very resilient. You know, the highest quality teak is grown in very specific conditions, and the Darien province of Panama has exactly the conditions to produce the highest quality teak. If those conditions change, maybe the quality of the teak goes down. Maybe the quality of the teak goes up a little bit. Who knows, right? I mean, at the end of the day, we don't control weather. We don't control weather patterns. We don't control the future. But that thing goes back to the idea of diversification. Like, how can we mitigate against the future? I think we do that by just simply broad diversification. And if we have all of our assets and stocks, bonds, and rental real estate, we're pretty concentrated, especially if it's all in the United States, right? Our home country, for example, and so some diversification into other sectors probably makes sense. I know it makes sense for me because I think that's my way of hedging against the uncertainties of the future.
 
Keith Weinhold  34:37  
Let's talk about the tree quality and then the sawmill, because some people don't understand that teak really has pretty special properties that maple or black cherry or oak doesn't have.
 
Mike Cobb  34:47  
It does. It has a very very high oil content and it has a hardness that makes it extremely resistant to rot fungus, which is why it's used in the marine environment. If you look at Chris Craft. Boats or yachts. You always hear about teak, teak, teak. Teak is used in maritime environments because it holds up to the salt water-not just salt water-holds up to water, but even more so, salt water and the environment, which makes it unique. And so, even if you don't treat teak, right, you just leave it out. It turns gray, but it doesn't rot. And then you can come back. You can you know sand it and varnish it and turn it into that beautiful, rich color. It's a beautiful, beautiful wood. It's funny because it has furniture uses, outdoor furniture, patio furniture, things like that, decking. But now they're starting to use it in hardwood floors. They're using it in gates and fences and soffit materials. Again, outdoor uses, but it can be used indoors as well for very very fine furniture, which at the end of the day teak has a panache that a lot of these other woods don't have. Mahogany is certainly one mahogany. The thing about mahogany is it's softer, right? It's a softer wood. It carries some qualities in terms of the grains and the colors that make it a a very favorable product for cabinetry and other things. We actually looked at mahogany as a species to possibly grow, and it's about a 30-five to 40-year harvest cycle. And so, when we looked at that, we said, you know, we can get our heads around 20-five, and and maybe someday we will do some mahogany plantations as well. But for now, we we started with teak. Actually, when we did the analysis, I don't know if this is still true, but 27, 28 years ago, when I did the initial research and analysis, it had the best time value of money ROI.
 
Keith Weinhold  36:29  
Ah, that's the first time I learned that. And some of these durability properties that you've been talking about really go back to my earlier question about how some more sensitive crops have been ravaged lately.
 
Mike Cobb  36:39  
Yeah, it holds up very very well to the environment. By the way, it'll do well in pretty much everything but desert, right? If it rains too much, the teak will grow faster. Actually, it produces a less quality. The quality of the teak is less. If so, if panama's rain system changed and it started raining every day of the year, where we have it growing, teak trees would grow wonderfully. The quality of the teak would be lower, right? Still, be teak. It'd still be valuable, but not as valuable in the marketplace. So.
 
Keith Weinhold  37:08  
Now you've been here to talk about teak before, but something that you added a few years ago was a sawmill to really bring some vertical integration there. And now you're not at the mercy, perhaps, of the price that you would need to sell to a lumberyard. Can you tell us more about how it's going with that?
 
Mike Cobb  37:22  
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the bottom line is, is because we earn 20% of what we earn for the investor on their wood, our goal is to sell it for as high a possible price. And lumber does pretty well. I mean, you can sell logs. Let's just start there. You can cut the trees and sell the logs for X. You can turn the logs into lumber and sell it for you know whatever 578 x. You can turn it into things like cutting board, chairs, tables, a finished product, and there you're talking about you know not just five to 7x You're talking about another 10x on top of that. So that's like 30x right? I mean it's an incredible difference. So from log to finished product, it's about a 30 times differential in what you ultimately achieve out of the marketplace for return. Right now it takes longer to do it. There's more work involved, but at the end of the day, because you make more of the investor, we make more. Some of the teak is going to go out as finished product, and so we get a blended return of lumber. We don't do logs, but we're going to have a blended return of lumber and finished product that will push that yield up maybe higher than we've anticipated, which would be just fine with everybody. 
 
Keith Weinhold  38:30  
ll right, all right. Diversifying your exit, then. Well, before we learn about how we can get a hold of more information, is there any last thing that we should know about investing across international lines into teak, maybe something that I didn't think about asking you, Mike.
 
Mike Cobb  38:45  
The only thing there is two of the teak farm parcels can be bundled together for a half acre with about a I don't know it's a seven $8,000 legal piece government fees to achieve a residency. So you can actually become a resident of Panama with the teak investment, and again coming in on about 600 folks have done the residency as well as the investment and ownership of the teak farms. So I would say that's a piece. Again, if people aren't sleeping well at night, they're worried about inflation, they're worried about social disruption, polarization, where things are headed, right? And they like the idea of the teak investment, then you know it may make sense to just do the extra government legal piece and get the residency card. I mean, I just did that. By the way, I think you know I'm a I'm a Nicaraguan resident because I lived in Nicaragua for 14 years.
 
Keith Weinhold  39:34  
Mike is holding up his Nicaraguan ID.
 
Mike Cobb  39:37  
but last summer I also got my Panama residency card, so now I have, y'all. I'm a U.S. resident, U.S. citizen, and I'm also a Nicaraguan. I think I held up my West Virginia driver's license. Hold on, let me go. Here's my Nicaraguan residency. Sorry, I was like, yeah. Wait a minute. Anyway, so right. So I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm a resident of both Nicaragua and Panama. And so, this is something that a lot of folks choose to do because of the uncertainty, the political and social uncertainty in their lives. The teak itself will help with the economic uncertainty, but the residency then helps with the other two elements.
 
Keith Weinhold  40:15  
Next time you fly in and you're doing customs in Panama City or Managua, show them your West Virginia driver's license and see how they like it. See what happens.
 
Mike Cobb  40:22  
It wouldn't work. Hahaha.
 
Keith Weinhold  40:25  
Well, the prices are low. You do not need to be an accredited investor in order to do this. So there's really no qualification bar to clear. There's really no limit in the number of parcels that you can buy. Some people like to purchase 10 parcels, but you can buy as little as one, and tell us more about that price.
 
Mike Cobb  40:42  
Yeah, in fact, we've introduced Keith since the last time we talked a financing program. Oh,
 
Keith Weinhold  40:48  
I didn't know that yet.
 
Mike Cobb  40:49  
We did. That's a fairly new. It's a this year thing, right? So the teak parcels, I think 9890 or something, whatever. Call it 10 grand. The parcels just under $10,000.
 
Keith Weinhold  40:59  
Okay.
 
Mike Cobb  40:59  
Yeah, and they have a down payment and a credit card thing. I think it stretches maybe over a year or two, so it's a fairly short period. Let's people who don't have the entire 10,000 upfront who want the teak investment to be able to acquire it. And if they're doing the residency piece, the residency piece can only begin after the teak farm piece is acquired, right? But it can also lead to the residency piece over time. So yeah, and then there are some discounts on three of them and 10 of them. So we have a lot of people that actually end up getting them for. And and here's a really cool thing because it's titled in your own name, it can also be titled in a child's name or a grandchild's name. And so we have a lot of people that actually acquire them and they don't take ownership. They put it in their kid's name or their grand name. Yeah, so it's a wonderful way to move that asset already right out of the gates into the next generation or the next generation.
 
Keith Weinhold  41:52  
So we're talking about diversifying at least twice, both internationally and then in a different asset type as well. This has been fascinating to learn about, Mike. It's just fascinating alone, I think, to learn about the geography and the teak itself. And like we touched on earlier, they do organize tours. Any reputable provider should do that. They're proud of what they offer there. Tours in the Darien province of Panama, in this case, to see your teak tree parcels. It's a really approachable price. If you want to learn more and get a report and perhaps purchase some parcels, Mike's one of our GRE marketplace providers. You can visit gremarketplace.com/teak or talk to your GRE investment coach. Mike has been fascinating as always. It's been great having you back on the show.
 
Mike Cobb  42:40  
Nice to be here. Thank you, Keith.
 
Keith Weinhold  42:48  
Teak is one of the more durable crops that there is. The demand for teak hardwood is substantial, and it's really growing. They have also had the same tree manager for all 27 years since the teak was planted, some real continuity there. The name of the manager is Heyo Forestall. There's a little to manage with the teak hardwood trees, like performing thinnings, and those thinnings do give investors like you intermittent income. So you're not waiting for absolutely everything for 25 years, but the income from the thinning is really small. Most of the return takes place in that 25 years, and it's interesting to me to see the profile of the GRE investor in teak because it attracts young investors, and maybe that's because the cost of entry is so low. It also attracts older investors because they more often have an eye toward passing along something productive to their heirs that is going to outlive them. A lot of them don't want to give their heirs money because money can be spent on fleeting trivialities. Also, the older a person is, they just have an easier time visualizing the fact of 25 years and knowing that it really will pass by. And yes, in-person tours are offered there in the Darien province of Panama, and there were 13 to 14 attendees on a recent tour. They do need to limit the group size, and the tours are for you, whether you're an existing investor or not. If you're just checking it out, that's for you too. If you believe that you want to attend a tour and you don't want to buy, I understand that you can get your money back from the tour.
 
Keith Weinhold  44:35  
The next tour is in September. Each quarter-acre newborn teak parcel costs $9,680 $9,680 and over 20-five years, it's projected to produce about 110k in today's dollars. And yes, now with financing, we've talked about this investment on GRE before, but it's the first time where they now have financing in place, so you don't even need. 9680 to get started. Also, retirement funds might be eligible for use here. And really, when you think about the long-term horizon of this investment, retirement funds make sense. If this is potentially interesting to you, get a hold of the report that goes into the details and shows you some projections and more. You can do so by either contacting your GRE investment coach or visit gremarketplace.com/teek. Money may not grow on trees, but sometimes trees grow into money. Until next time, keep growing your means and maybe a few trees. You could visit gremarketplace.com/teak. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.
 
Speaker 1  45:53  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively. 
 
Keith Weinhold  46:21  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. getricheduceducation.com

Keith Weinhold explains why inflation has become a permanent part of the post–World War II economy and what that shift means for today's financial system. 
He breaks down economist Dr. Mark Skousen's five structural reasons behind never-ending inflation and ties them to the hollowing out of the middle class and the "last generation to live normally" concept. 
Keith then introduces opportunity cost as the biggest financial expense most people overlook and illustrates how leveraging low-cost, long-term debt to buy productive real assets can turn inflation into an advantage. 
He closes by outlining a practical hierarchy for which debts to eliminate first and which to keep as tools for long-term wealth building.
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Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. In less than 40 years, America has gone from 75% gasoline to permanent inflation. Then learn about the biggest financial expense you will ever have in your life. It's not taxes, housing, interest charges, inflation, children, or healthcare. Most people have never heard of it today on Get Rich Education. You know, Mid South Homebuyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties. It's an executive coach. For nine years now. Their CEO Terry Kerr and his COO Pat Nix have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one-on-one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to DanielThomashHind.com. H-I-N-D. That's DanielThomashHind.com, and sign up before spots fill.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:41  
What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056 They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Chaley Ridge. While it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com.
 
Speaker 1  2:14  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world, this is Get Rich Education.
 
Keith Weinhold  2:31  
Welcome to GRE from Bavaria, Germany, to Batavia, New York, and across 188 world nations. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. In the 19 the 1988 movie Die Hard, there's a California gas station sign in the background that's visible. You can see it there. The gas price on this sign is a jaw dropper. Unleaded 77.9 cents per gallon, regular 70-4.9 cents per gallon. That now looks like it belongs in a museum next to rotary phones and blockbuster video cards. Yes, California gas for 75 cents, and the movie Die Hard. It had all these actors from yesteryear, like Bruce Willis and Reginald Vel Johnson. Yet you, depending on your age, you might remember 1988. It's not like ancient history. Now we all know that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, like Milton Friedman said, but is there more to this? Is there more than the Fed targeting 2% inflation, just like it says on their website? Oh, there sure is. And by the way, with a little research, it looks like California Gas averaged 95 cents in 1988, not 75 like it shows in Die Hard, but in any case, the point is still there. And today, inflation keeps running hot. Four years ago, the pandemic made CPI inflation peak at 9.1 percent. Today, the hangover effects of tariffs push it up, and the Iran war are turning up the heat even more, with the latest reading above 4% Inflation is running at more than double what the Fed wants. You can even make the case now that inflation is out of control. But here's the thing: inflation has exceeded that 2% target for 60-three consecutive months now. I mean, think about what that means. My gosh, just imagine having an important target that affects every American and missing it 60-three times in a row. That's kind of what's happening now, and they're. Going to keep missing it. So this streak of inflation above 2% started back in March of 2021 during the pandemic hangover, and it is still going strong after 63 months. Nobody knows where this is going to end. Most Americans get crushed by rising prices because their wages don't keep up, and you know collectively they sort of think we are concerned, but then they mostly keep doing the same thing while their lifestyle quietly shrinks. So consumers despise inflation. Everyday investors are lukewarm about inflation, and leverage real estate investors are smiling like they found a 20-dollar bill in last winter's coat. Leverage real estate investors are pretty ecstatic about inflation. Now the history gets super interesting.
 
Keith Weinhold  5:59  
Okay, how did we get into this, where we just always seem to have inflation? So learn the history, and then I'll tie it back to how it affects you as an investor. Because before World War II, inflation behaved differently. The old pre-1945 pattern was that we had inflation during wars and booms. We had deflation after panics and depressions. So therefore, the result was that over long stretches, price levels often just moved sideways. We used to have recessions more often back 80 plus years ago than we do now. So therefore, you just had these price levels move sideways because a recession even prompted deflation, actually a strengthening of purchasing power. But then after World War II, inflation basically went permanently positive. I mean, yeah, permanently positive, where inflation is just always turned on with very few exceptions to that. In wartime, now we have inflation. In peacetime, now we have inflation. During the Super Bowl, now we have inflation. It is inflation, no matter what is going on. Right then, so what changed? Prominent economist and GRE podcast guest here, Dr. Mark Skousen. He has cited five major reasons that inflation became a permanent fixture from 1945 until today. And Mark Skousen was here on the show with us almost exactly two years ago because he's also the founder of a great event called Freedom Fest that Nareesh and I broadcast a show from, the five reasons that Scowson cites for never-ending inflation are first, never-ending wars. Now this doesn't only mean formally declared boots on the ground wars where tanks are rolling, never-ending wars. It means this permanent state of global military readiness that we have today, where we have overseas bases, defense contractors, right with the military-industrial complex. We have NATO commitments.
 
Keith Weinhold  8:17  
We have anti-terror operations, naval patrols, intelligence agencies, and all this enormous machinery that's required to keep America as the world's security backstop. Well, all that costs an awful lot of money, and when government wants more money than it collects, it has a favorite trick: just create more dollars and create them out of nothing. I mean, it's like ordering another round of drinks for the table and then putting it on the unborn grandchildren's tab. The second reason for the never-ending inflation is the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve and how that's changed over time because the Fed they were originally supposed to defend the dollar, defend the gold standard, and act as lender of last resort. Today it mostly just does the last one. It acts as the lender of last resort, and it's really not even last resort. I mean, she shit seems to patch any significant hole in the economy by creating more dollars and then pumping them into the system. When markets wobble, banks panic, or politicians overspend, or the economy catches any kind of cold, you know, the Fed often just shows up with this fire hose of liquidity. Now, sometimes that's necessary, but either way, it means more currency creation. So, the Fed it began as this sort of sober hallway monitor, but now they're often the responsible party that needs monitoring. But no. No one is going to stand up and do it because no one in power wants austerity under their watch because that is extremely unpopular. The third reason for permanent inflation is the Bretton Woods Agreement. You've probably heard of this, but let me summarize what it briefly means. Okay, Bretton Woods was the 1944 deal that basically created the post-World War II global monetary system? It made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency. If you remember anything from Bretton Woods, just remember that it did that. It made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency, and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce.
 
Keith Weinhold  13:29  
And finally, the fifth reason for never-ending inflation post World War II is Keynesian economics. I mean, you probably at least heard the term before. It's been thrown around here from time to time. Named after John Maynard Keynes, K E Y N E S. And before I go on, I invested in real estate for a long time before I learned all this stuff. Probably close to a decade of investing first. So I taught myself this material, Keynesian economics. That's the belief that demand is what drives economic output and employment. So, if you only remember one thing about Keynesian economics, it's that you need demand, and it stokes demand. It says demand drives everything, and what I mean by that is the spending, spending from households, corporations, and government. So, in plain English, when private demand weakens, the government should step in and spend. That's what Keynesian economics says. Well, that means deficits, borrowing, stimulus, support, programs, relief, rescue packages, emergency measures, and see what happens is that temporary measures somehow become permanent measures wearing a fake mustache. Remember, even Nixon said removal from the gold standard is temporary. Well, that was now 50. 55 years ago, in theory, the government runs deficits in bad times and then tightens up in good times. But that doesn't really happen because, in practice, government often runs deficits in bad times and good times, war times, peace times, election years, non-election years, leap years, all the time running deficits, spending more than we take in, and when deficits become normal, well, then currency creation has got to follow. That's the consequence. Well, these five forces that I told you about for never-ending inflation, the reasons that I just shared with you-they are now structurally embedded. They are not going away.
 
Keith Weinhold  19:03  
I mean, there is even political resistance to deflation in this system. Investors benefit the most when they own one thing: real assets tied to long-term debt. You probably knew that I was going to say that because if the dollar is designed to slowly melt. You don't want to be the one holding the ice cube. You want to own the freezer. That's the control that you have. The first half of the year recently ended. It's time for our asset class rundown. From the midpoint of last year to the midpoint of this year, single-family home values are up only about one and a half percent. That's the average of Case-Shiller and FHFA. Apartment building values are down 1% in the past year. When it comes to rents per Zillow, single-family home rents are up 2.8% in the past year to an all-time record of almost 20-$300 Apartment rents are up just. 1.3% nationally. Sunbelt Apartments were the weak spot. Apartments.com said the South was down seven tenths of 1% year over year, and the mountain region down one and a half percent. With San Antonio, Denver, Austin, and Phoenix among the weaker markets, that's due to oversupply in those areas. 30-year mortgage rates down from 6.8 to 6.6% The S S&P 500 up 21 percent on AI optimism, despite a war in Iran. Though down in past months for the year, gold is still up 21 percent, silver soared 63 percent, Bitcoin down 45 percent. I mean, speculative digital assets have really gotten a cold shoulder. Oil up 4% although it went on a wild ride, and CPI inflation reheated to 4.2% That's our asset class rundown.
 
Speaker 2  22:59  
This is our rich dad poor dad author Robert Kiyosaki. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.
 
Keith Weinhold  23:17  
Welcome back to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. I want you to listen to something along with me, and then I'll come back to comment. This is from the parallel truth. It's called the last generation to live normally, and it's less than two minutes in length.
 
Speaker 2  23:32  
We have to talk about something that sounds dramatic, but it is becoming true. Your parents may have been the last generation to live a normal life-not an easy life, not a perfect life, but a life where the basic deal still made sense. You could get a stable job, you could buy a house, you could raise children, you could save some money, you could retire one day. And even if life was hard, most people still believed that if they worked honestly, their future would slowly get better. But look at what happened to your generation. You work more, but own less. You study more, but feel less secure. You have more technology than any generation in history, but less peace, less time, and less confidence about the future. Your parents were told, "Work hard, and you will build a life. But you are being told that, "Work hard, and maybe you can afford rent. And the most disturbing part is that this did not happen overnight. It happened slowly. First, housing became an investment instead of a basic need. Then, education became a debt trap. Then, healthcare became too expensive. Then, stable jobs disappeared. Then, everything became a subscription: your house, your car, your software, your entertainment, even your future. Everything slowly became something you rent but never truly own. And while ordinary people were falling behind, the economy kept looking strong on paper. The stock market went up, billionaires got richer, companies made record profits. Politicians kept saying that everything was fine, but if everything is fine, why does an entire generation feel like it is drowning? The truth is, your parents did not live through normal history. They lived through a rare window where ordinary people. People were allowed to share in the wealth of the system, but that window is now closing. The old promise was simple: work hard, buy a home, raise a family, retire with dignity. The new promise is different: work forever, rent everything, delay children, carry debt, and call it freedom. So maybe young people are not lazy. Maybe they are just the first generation honest enough to admit that the old deal is dead. Your parents were not lucky because life was easy. They were lucky because they were the last ones who got the deal before it was taken away.
 
Keith Weinhold  25:27  
Yeah, there it is-the last generation to live normally. That's really a fresh slant on the hollowing out of the middle class. The rules have changed. Inflation is entrenched. Now you know why. Back in 2020, the pandemic accelerated that effect, and yet it's just unbelievable to me that people think working hard and saving money is enough to get you the lifestyle that you desire. Now I am not against hard work, it's the fact that people think that that's all that it takes. Before we hit the permanent inflation era, it might have made sense for you to say, save your money, pay all cash for a cheap fixer-upper property, and work hard for years to fix it up yourself. Oh, and then you could own a modest home debt-free. Today, even if you could do that, why would you? Instead, you can just prudently finance your way through life. You could have instead borrowed for two or three already renovated properties and let debt, inflation, and perhaps even tenants do the work for you. Above all, do the right thing before you do things right. That's what I like to say. Well, the way you get wealthy is by owning a lot of assets, not by grinding in the salt mines to pay off your debt. Those that are debt free are often asset poor. The biggest financial expense that you will ever have in your life. Do you know what it is? It is not taxes or interest charges. It's not even inflation or housing or healthcare or having children, most people have never heard of it. You probably have, but most people have never heard of this biggest financial expense you'll ever have, and they certainly don't know how to avoid it.
 
Keith Weinhold  27:34  
Say that you're 35 years old and you put 100k under a mattress for 30 years until you're 60- years old. Instead, if that would have been invested at a 12% annual return, do you know how much that would have grown to? That would have grown to $2.996 million All right, basically 3 million bucks, a 30x increase. Therefore, it would be a 2.9 million dollar mistake to save money, and what this means is that the biggest expense you'll ever pay in your life is called opportunity cost. Yeah, opportunity cost is life's biggest expense. It's the return that was foregone when you chose one option over another. So opportunity cost is not what you spend; it's what your money could have become had you put it somewhere more productive. All right, now that was a pretty extreme example of 100k under a mattress. As a listener to this show, you are probably more savvy than a person that would save big lumps of money for close to zero return. Let me give you a better example of how when you pay all cash for something, you've usually just made your future self poorer. A friend of mine heard the episode last year where I talked about buying a new car for myself, a BMW X3 SUV. As it is, you probably remember that episode. Though I could have paid all cash for the car, I put the minimum down payment in there and then financed as much as I could because of a favorable 4% interest rate that I got on a car loan. Well, my friend Jesse heard that episode. This influenced him. So what he did is he bought a Subaru for his wife. Although he had planned to pay all cash and could have paid all cash for the car, Jesse got financing, and he did better than me. He got just a 1% interest rate somehow. Wow! It was actually nine tenths of 1% but let's just call it 1% What a deal! Instead of paying all cash for the car, he held on to that chunk of money. Instead of tying it up in a depreciating asset, he is financing it all. Now I don't. How much the Subaru costs, but let's just say it was 50k to keep the numbers simple. Well, look, if Jesse feels like he can get a 10% return over time by investing his money instead of sinking it into a car, how much does he profit by borrowing? Of course, he has the advantage of keeping his funds more liquid as well, but how much does he actually profit from this arrangement?
 
Keith Weinhold  30:24  
Well, the math is so easy that you can even visualize it in an audio format here. Now it depends on the loan term, but the simple spread is a 10% investment return minus a 1% car loan cost. That is a 9% positive spread on 50k. That's roughly $4,500 per year in benefit. That's before any taxes, risk, or fees. $4,500 a year just for doing some loan paperwork. Like if you wonder whether the loan paperwork is worth it or not, that's what we're talking about here, and that's 375 bucks a month. So if you're wondering if it's even worth it taking the time to get a car loan when you could pay all cash, it probably is. All right, now that's the upside. What about the risk that's associated with taking a loan instead of paying all cash, well, the caveat here is that the 1% loan is guaranteed, but the 10% return is probably not, and that risk gap does matter. If you're financially fragile and you can't make the payment with another pot of money, well, then you risk default. That is over leverage risk. That's the worst case scenario. All right, what's the flip side? The flip side is that you could earn a return even better than 10% As we know, with real estate pays five ways on investment property. If you earn a 20% return, now you're making $9,500 a year on the spread, not $4,500, but a 10% return. That is the base case. So again, by paying all cash instead of getting the loan, your future self would be poorer by $4,500 a year. And now, my friend Jesse, that learned this from me, he's actually a CFA, a chartered financial analyst, a sophisticated money guy. But he had simply been overlooking this. And said another way, what you're doing here is that over time, your investment is paying you more than your interest is costing you, and in my life, I have been doing exactly this sort of thing all over the place for decades. An interesting thing that I hear about this, although it makes me scratch my head, I've heard a few people say this. It's just like, oh well, I don't want to have to deal with a car payment? I just rather be done with it and move on. What is there to deal with? Just set up auto pay with preserving funds for say a 10% return. You're then going to see more dollars flowing into your account than you will out of it. I mean that part can just be automated.
 
Keith Weinhold  33:19  
My life and finances are set up this way. In fact, when I get a loan for a rental property, I have had mortgage loan officers that are looking at my finances. They tell me that I have more stuff flowing into and out of my checking account than they've ever seen anyone have. I'm I'm financing and arbitraging my way through life passively. This is thanks in part to inflation. I am not paying very much at all in that biggest financial expense that we all have in our lives-not taxes or children or housing, but opportunity cost. I am avoiding paying that. This is the world that we live in today, a lot of times debt reduction is horrible advice. Debt free that can keep people from falling over a cliff, but it stalls any wealth creation. Now the debts that usually make the most sense to pay down they're the ones with high interest, variable rates, no tax benefit, and no productive asset attached. And here is the priority order that I use for paying down debt or paying off debt. First, it is credit cards. Pay down these first almost every time. I mean, a 20% or even 30% credit card rate. This is like financial quicksand. You don't need a sophisticated investment thesis when you can get a guaranteed 20-4% quote-unquote return by eliminating this debt. The next place I would pay down are payday loans, personal. Loans and consumer finance debt. I mean, these are usually bad debts because they're at a high rate, have a short amortization, and they're usually tied to consumption instead of an income-producing asset. Pay these aggressively too, and then next in priority is paying variable rate debt that could reset higher. This isn't quite as important to address.
 
Keith Weinhold  35:24  
We're talking about things like HELOCs, adjustable rate loans, margin debt, and some business lines of credit. Some of those can become dangerous when rates rise, even if the rate's tolerable today. The uncertainty can be a bit of a problem. Now, when it comes to should you pay down student loans, consider that. low fixed-rate student loans that might not be urgent. It sure wasn't for me. High-rate private student loans that could be different. That could get more of your attention. You also got to weigh things like tax benefits. Look out for forgiveness programs when it comes to student loans, those haven't been quite as available lately under this administration. Also, look at employer repayment benefits before you rush to pay down student loans, and then really the last one: low fixed-rate mortgage debt. Pay that last if you ever do. In fact, it is quite possible that I will always keep this debt type around that low fixed rate mortgage debt. So really, my rule of thumb here is to kill toxic debt. Be careful with unstable debt, and don't rush to pay off cheap fixed productive debt if you ever pay it off at all. You and I covered a lot of ground today, starting with 75 cent gasoline in California, all the way to the biggest expense you'll ever pay throughout your life, being something that most people have never heard of: opportunity cost. Coming up on the show here, a lot of good episodes, including a great guest and I are going to discuss a new way to invest in residential real estate that we haven't discussed before, and it will massively boost your cash flow. If you found today's show valuable, whether it was the history of why we have permanent inflation or the idea of passively financing your way to wealth, rather than only working harder. I would be grateful if you share this episode with a friend. Just tap the share button in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and send it to someone who would benefit from hearing it. Or take a screenshot of this episode and post it on social media. It helps more people find the show, and it gives you and your friends something smart to talk about with each other. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.
 
Speaker 1  37:53  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively. 
 
Keith Weinhold  38:21  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building at getricheducation.com.

Keith breaks down five major mortgage myths, including the belief that today's mortgage rates are unusually high, that the Fed directly sets them, and that rising rates automatically push home prices down. 
Drawing on historical patterns, he explains why mortgage rates and home prices often move together, and why waiting on the sidelines for "better" rates can quietly erode your long-term wealth. 
Keith also explains how inflation can benefit borrowers by shrinking the real burden of fixed-rate debt and shows how leveraged real estate can outperform traditional stock investing. 
He ties these insights into today's K-shaped economy and the growing role of AI, and explains how strategic action and the right guidance can help position investors on the winning side of these trends.
Episode Page:
GetRichEducation.com/613
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GREmarketplace.com
GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE 
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Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. There are myriad misunderstandings about mortgages. I dispel the myths and discuss the expected mortgage rate level in 2030 You will know more about mortgages than 99% of people today on Get Rich education, you know, Mid South Home Buyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties, it's an executive coach. For nine years now, their CEO, Terry Kerr, and his COO, Pat Nix, have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally. You can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one on one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to danielthomashind.com H I N D, that's Daniel Thomas hind.com and sign up before Spotsville. What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group, NMLS 42056 they provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone, because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your pre-qual, and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge, while it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com that's ridgelendinggroup.com
 
Keith Weinhold  2:07  
Flock Homes helps multifamily owners exit the operator grind, whether it's your six plex or a 50 unit apartment, through a 721 exchange. This defers your capital gains tax. It's a strategy long used by institutions. Now you can swap tenants and toilets for passive income and zero management. Request your initial valuations. See if your property qualifies at flockhomes.com/gre That's F L O C K homes.com/G R E.
 
Speaker 1  2:40  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.
 
Keith Weinhold  2:56  
Welcome to GRE, from Keene, New Hampshire, to Kenai, Alaska, and across 188 nations worldwide, I'm Keith Weinholding. You're listening to Get Rich Education. Everybody knows that a mortgage rate is the interest rate that a borrower pays on a property loan. Okay, sure, that part is easy. And then, oh boy, the misunderstandings begin about eight seconds later, where will mortgage rates be in 2030 I want to tell you about this and more, because mortgage rates are one of the most talked about parts of real estate, and people discuss them with this confidence and bravado of a guy at a semi quincentennial barbecue that's explaining crypto and nutrition between bites of potato salad, yet he's probably got a lot of things wrong. In the next few minutes, though, you're gonna know more about mortgages than 99% of Americans. Let me tell you about five Goliath mortgage myths that throw a lot of people off, and this includes what mortgage rates are going to be, both next year and in 2030 The first myth is that mortgage rates are high today. I almost can't believe the number of people that say this in the world that I'm in. I hear it almost every day. The reality is that mortgage rates have normalized. The 30 year rate is currently normal to low. Now, I shared with you before that the long term average is 7.7% per Freddie Mac. They have the best, most respected stat set on historic mortgage rates, and theirs go back to 1971 Well, today's rate is between six and 7% They just don't feel low after the freakishly low era about five years ago. Now, after I tell you about mortgage rates in 2030 I'll tell you also about whether we're ever going to go back to the. 3% mortgage times. Understand, it's not just mortgages, but most other interest rate types are also on the low side today. A lot of rate types are based on the effective federal funds rate. What's based off of that are rates for credit cards, HELOCs, some business loans and personal loans, they are all based on the prime rate, which is based off of the federal funds rate. Well, the federal funds rate's long-term average is 4.6% Do you know where they're at today? 3.6% So, the fed rate is fully 1% below the long run average. The second myth, gosh, and this is such a pervasive one too, is that when mortgage rates rise, home prices fall. This is such a myth, and because I've talked about this premise before, let me bring some fresh angles to it for you today, with some historical accounts too, because the reality is that when mortgage rates rise, home prices usually rise right along with them, but sharply rising rates can slow appreciation, and before we move on, one of the most famous, I suppose, American real estate investors ever. He spoke about mortgage rates recently. Let's see what he says. This is under a minute in length. Oh, and he also happens to be the current White House occupant.
 
Donald Trump  6:34  
I made billions of dollars with housing. I know housing better than anybody, maybe anywhere. It's all about the interest rate. Lower the interest rates. You can have all the housing you want, but you have to understand, I don't want to have - I don't want to hurt people that own houses, too. These people, for the first time in their lives, they have valuable houses, they become rich. I don't want to hurt them either. What you want to do is what's good for everyone? Get the interest rates down. We have this num skull that was the head of the Fed before, and he's a stupid person, and we call him too late because he was too late with the interest rates all the time. We need low interest rates. Low interest rates will solve everything, will solve that.
 
Keith Weinhold  7:18  
Well, lower interest rates don't solve the main problem, though. We need to build more housing no other than the fact that low rates could make it a little easier for builders to finance their operations. Lower mortgage rates do nothing to increase the housing supply, and, contrary to what most people think, rates have exceedingly little to do with home prices. When mortgage rates blew past 18% in 1981 they were between 18 and a half and 19% Then, what do you think that home prices did? Well, they kept on rising right through it since 1994 Mortgage rates rose 1% or more six different times, and home prices went up all six times. Even when mortgage rates tripled three years ago, home prices still climbed on a nominal basis. How do they do that? Well, the short version here is that we've got to think about what's happening in the larger economy when rates rise. What does that mean? What does that signal? What is that a symptom of rates rise to keep a hot economy from overheating, and when the economy is hot like this, that usually means people are employed and they're confident and they're financially flush, so then what do they want to do? They want to buy a home, and therefore there are more bidders. That's why higher rates usually lead to higher home prices, and they're talking about raising rates again, because employment has been resilient, and inflation is more than double the Fed target. All right, well, if higher rates usually correlate with higher home prices, then do lower rates mean lower home prices, no, because nominally home prices rarely fall at all. Now, what then did rates do when real estate prices had a rare national fall in those years around the 2008 global financial crisis? Do you know? Do you know what mortgage rates did then? Do you think that mortgage rates were up or down during the global financial crisis? And this is a definitive answer. There's no gray area. They were clearly either boldly up or boldly down. What do you think during the global financial crisis? Mortgage rates plummet. Did more than 2% so the only time since the Great Depression that national home prices fell substantially, mortgage rates also fell substantially. 
 
Keith Weinhold  8:05  
The problem in that era, around 2008 is that you often could not get a loan, banks were barely lending, man. People overlook this. You can't just assume that you can get a loan whenever you want it, even if you qualify. But yeah, it's just amazing how many people believe this. I guess second myth. I mean, it is one of real estate's most persistent fairy tales that when mortgage rates rise, home prices fall, that just doesn't happen. And gosh, it feels like I explain this to somebody every week, that when mortgage rates rise, home prices usually do too. If you explain this phenomenon to somebody, I think what you can tell them is that history shows, and as I like to say, take history over hunches. History shows that mortgage rates don't have much to do with home prices. The, I guess, third mortgage myth out of five is that the Fed sets mortgage rates. The reality is that they don't, and you probably already knew about this one, because you're unusually sharp, and you're listening to this. Mortgage rates are more closely tied to the 10 year treasury yield, and inflation expectations, and bond market demand, and lender spreads, and the appetite from investors for mortgage-backed securities, and even your credit score, that's what mortgage rates are tied to. The fourth one here is that you should wait for mortgage rates to fall before buying, and the reality is that maybe you should, but usually not. And again, we can look at history here almost every time you look back at when you purchase property and how much property you owned when you added it into your portfolio, there you know. Do you ever think, oh gosh, I sure would have been better off had I waited two years. Now, if you do wait two years, what happens? Prices will almost certainly be higher, and you don't know where mortgage rates are going to be. Run the numbers, and you'll probably see that waiting is not the free lunch that some people think it is.
 
Keith Weinhold  9:13  
The main problem with waiting is that it delays how the real wealth gets created from the five ways real estate pays, and to my earlier point, if you do wait, you're probably still going to be able to get a loan, but mortgage markets can seize up in times of distress, and you might not be able to get a loan at all. A lot of people just assume that credit is always going to be available. We don't know that for sure. Now, let's take a look at my most ill-timed real estate purchase ever, since we're talking about timing, and this is when I bought a green fourplex building in May of 2007 right on the precipice, just as we were about to tilt in to the global financial crisis. I paid $530,000 for this property. It was pretty nice, like not a beautiful building, but just a good setup where every tenant had their own attached one car garage in that building. Okay, so I did not wait, and by the way, this was a big purchase for me at the time. I mean, 530k perhaps that's about a million dollar purchase in today's inflation-adjusted terms. Back at that time, that was my biggest property yet, until I got into larger apartment buildings and other single-family homes and things like that. But what happened just after I bought this in 2007 Well, that green fourplexes value temporarily went down, and during this time I was paid the other four ways that real estate pays. Rates fell during the global financial crisis, so I had a refinance opportunity, and then that green fourplexes value had fully recovered by about 2012 or 2013 and it paid me positive cash flow every single month that entire time, and that's it. That was actually my worst timed purchase ever. That scenario, the worst mortgage conditions in anyone's lifetime, and it still wasn't so bad. Well, here's what else happens with the strategy of waiting for rates to fall. When rates fall, more buyers tend to rush in, and because you've got more buyers that qualify for a. Mortgage that didn't qualify previously, that means more competition. There are fewer seller concessions, if any, and there are higher prices. It might even create bidding wars, somewhat like we had in 2021. 
 
Keith Weinhold  9:13  
The last of the mortgage myths is that mortgage rates can be predicted, so you had better pay close attention to forecasts. Oh no, the reality is that trying to predict mortgage rates is about as predictable as to whether your contractor is actually coming on Tuesday. Let me tell you, all right, what the prominent analysts and agencies have to say about the future of mortgage rates, amalgamating forecasts from Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo, the Mortgage Bankers Association, a Reuters poll of economists, and more. By the end of next year, okay, so about 18 months away, they all cluster in a range of 6.2 to 6.5% This is for the 30 year fixed rate mortgage by the end of next year, and for 2030 it is about 5.8% That's what we're looking at for crystal balls of all these agencies, if you average them together, and you know what I have to say about these numbers, don't count on these at all. These people do not know, nobody does, they'll probably even tell you that they don't know. Okay, they are your forecasts right there. And what about us here? GRE does not make mortgage rate forecasts. We only make a home price appreciation forecast annually, and we are not about to make mortgage rate forecasts here. That is because they're just really hard to predict, and therefore that would not serve you. It's really just a form of entertainment that's a poor use of your time. It doesn't serve you. Making a bold mortgage rate prediction is exactly how economists audition for humiliation.
 
Keith Weinhold  17:14  
Mortgage rates, future direction, that's based on so many factors, like inflation, jobs, treasury yields, deficits, geopolitics, oil prices, and wars, and the future direction of mortgage rates has to do with investor sentiment, which often changes and often doesn't make sense, and whatever new fresh economic surprise is going to wander in tomorrow, and you know, I'll tell you, when I was a pretty new real estate investor, and I had a property under contract, I remember sometimes asking my mortgage loan officer over the phone, now, do you think that mortgage rates are going to be lower next week, because maybe then I should wait and lock in. I mean, that's a question I asked a number of times. I mean, sheesh, it would have been just as useful if they answered by reading me their horoscope. Now, that is not a knock on mortgage loan officers in any way. They're smart people, but they just know the borrowers do want some insight, but it's just so hard to forecast now that you know that most forecasts base around 5% mortgage rates in 2030 which is useless information. Will rates ever be 3% again like they were about five years ago? There is no forecast by any of these agencies that predicts a 3% mortgage rate at all in the next five years, but you know, really, you have to ask, Who saw that there would be such low home loan rates on the horizon back in 2007 and things like the Great Recession and a global pandemic, you know, those sort of black swan events, they're just rarely, if ever, on the radar, and see drastic events like that are what it takes to move mortgage rates down into the seller, but a couple things are for sure, 3% mortgage rates anytime soon are extremely unlikely, and if that does happen, it probably means that there has been a real world calamity. Okay, that's what I can tell you. 
 
Keith Weinhold  19:31  
I've got more to tell you here, but to summarize what you've learned so far today, in this era, rates of all types are historically a little low, contrary to popular belief, mortgage rates have little to do with home prices. Waiting for rates to fall rarely works, and mortgage rates are nearly impossible to predict. And my favorite way to make it easy for you to remember how interest rates move in an account. Economy is that they are like walls. A high interest rate is like a high wall. It's an impediment to the movement of money, because people are less likely to borrow and more likely to save, since savings accounts yield more. And then a low interest rate is like a low wall that you can easily just step over it facilitates the movement of money, making you more likely to borrow and less likely to save. And if you want to understand more about how interest rates move economies and affect real estate, and you like analogies like that, I discuss more about how interest rates are like money walls in the latter portion of GRE episode 573 I've got so much more for you today. Straight ahead, I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to Get Rich Education. 
 
Keith Weinhold  20:53  
Flock Homes helps you retire from real estate and land learning, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now, mom and pop landlords can 721 through residential real estate. Request your initial valuation, see if your properties qualify at flockhomes.com/gre that's F L O C K homes.com/G R E. Let me ask you something. If you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. In full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed, but with a track record of consistent on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility.
 
Keith Weinhold  22:14  
Go to Freedom Family investments.com to book a clarity call, or text family to 668 66 That's that's family 266866 This is Rich Dad Advisor Tong Wheelwright. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your daydream. Keith, welcome back to Get Rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, and let me help you with a couple questions that some of you have had, and when listeners or followers like you engage with us, whether that's through our general inbox or our investment coaching, or even my face-to-face interactions with people. Sometimes I hear something like, "Hey, well, I am waiting for the crash until I build my real estate portfolio. Now, I don't know how to take this always. Sometimes I think people are joking. Other times I actually think that they are serious, and see what happens is that an awful lot of media creators, they will produce a video or a blog or a podcast, and they like to talk about how a housing crash is imminent because that type of material really gets attention, words like crash and collapse, they're hype words, and these hype words like crash and collapse, they really play on people's very real primordial survival instincts that are produced in your brain's amygdala, that's why people keep consuming them, and it's also why fear-producing media gets lots of attention. I mean, it's the if it bleeds it leads phenomenon, you know. In fact, I have one real estate pro friend, and he's told me that if instead of talking about real estate logically and with an education bent in the way that I do here at GRE, well, instead if I flip that and I talk about doom and all the improbably bad things that could happen that could make my material so interesting that it would create a following so big that would transcend real estate circles, and I'd be a regular on whatever CNBC and The Joe Rogan Show. This friend somewhat jokingly suggested that with the way I use the pre. Frontal cortex to discuss real estate. I should speak from the amygdala instead. I could become a doomer, a crashaholic, an appreciation denier. And by the way, the prefrontal cortex is the sort of executive brain. It helps you think things through, compare options, solve problems, make plans. Ask yourself the question, is this actually a good idea? Logically, it's the logical part of the brain. 
 
Keith Weinhold  25:33  
Oppositely, the amygdala, that's what tells you something feels dangerous, I better react now. And your prefrontal cortex tells you, hold on, let's think this through. It's what's logical, and you know, though, this is what we've always done here, the logical, because scaring you is not serving you, it's only entertaining you. In fact, lately, there are even some people that were calling for a home price decline that no longer are doing so, and the NAR just revised their home price appreciation forecast this year up to 4% and then the other piece is that I've received more feedback recently from listeners about something that you're trying to grasp, and that is the concept of inflation profiting on your debt, which I've always presented as the fifth of five ways that you're simultaneously paid through real estate, and really the feedback it goes something like this: I don't see where I'm profiting at all if I borrow 100k on a mortgage, and then 10 years later I still owe 100k because I still owe 100k So, how is this getting me ahead, even if the tenant pays all the interest? Really, that's the question. And before I answer that, you can always reach out to us at our general inbox at Get Rich education.com/contact How do you contact us? Get rich education.com/contact where we have a real human being here at GRE monitoring the inbox for you, and oftentimes we also get comments on our videos at the Get Rich Education YouTube channel, so that's a less formal feedback mechanism, but if you're trying to grasp inflation profiting, think of it through the opposite lens. What if you put 100k in cash under the mattress, you slid it under there, and you left it there for 10 years, and then you unearthed it. Well, you probably wouldn't want to do that. Why not?
 
Keith Weinhold  27:49  
It's still 100k We all know full well that, because at 3% inflation over 10 years, it will get worn down to about 74k of purchasing power since prices and rents and everything else is now higher. Well, in a similar way, 100k in debt after 10 years is still 100k same name, but it will only have 74k in real value. That is the way to think of it. The saver lost purchasing power, the borrower gained repayment power. Hopefully, those two persistent questions about a housing crash and about inflation profiting gave you some satisfying answers. And you know any more, so much of what we've discussed with you here every week since 2014 it is now in view, or actually it's not even in view as much as you are living inside it, that hollowing out of the middle class represented by the K-shaped economy, we are living in it, and when I told you about it, perhaps a decade ago, I was not using that term, K-shaped economy. However, that term was born in 2020 and it was popularized on Twitter back then. When we had our big wave of inflation five years ago, the asset owners recovered, if they ever suffered at all, they're the ones on the upper branch of the K, and the middle class and lower class that do not own assets. They were not able to recover, and inflation makes their standard of living sink lower. Where we're at today is that the top 10% of US earners now account for fully half of all US spending. Well, how much time do you have if you haven't yet? How much time do you have left to build your portfolio to make sure your trajectory has you on the upper branch of the K, not the lower branch? Rich, five years, you only have five years left to get rich, all right. Now that's not my answer, but that's what Andre G says, and I like some of his material, and I don't know if I'm saying Andre's name correctly, but according to him, the reason that you only have five years left to move economic lines trajectories to move from the K's lower branch to the upper branch is because of AI. You've got five years to learn a skill, start a business, or invest in real estate. The reason why is that upward mobility comes from finding efficiencies where you can make things better, but artificial intelligence makes things so much faster and more efficient, so that gap between the way things are right now and the way they will be in the future is going to close. 
 
Keith Weinhold  30:56  
AI compresses that gap to almost zero, because when everyone can use AI to build websites, write code, analyze markets, automate workflows, whatever it is, is because it becomes really easy for anyone to do anything, and it becomes a lot harder to move from the bottom of the K to the top, so for those at the bottom, there are fewer inefficiencies to solve and get ahead, and this is why the saying "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" has the propensity to speed up. So, what can you do? I've described elsewhere about how stocks are not a wealth building tool, they're a wealth preservation tool. If you already have wealth, stock price to earnings ratios are bloated. It's good to select an asset or business that's hard to be replaced by AI, and then get good at that thing, like HVAC, plumbing, pest control, electrical, roofing, masonry, or investing in real estate be in a niche that AI is going to have a hard time replacing. Just buy some rental houses, and here at GRE, we talk about optimizing the five ways that you're paid all the time. Buyers who are waiting for 5% mortgage rates, you know, they're a little like people who refuse to buy gas at $4 because they remember $2. Okay, those days are not coming back. The market rewards action, not nostalgia. Actually, you can get 5% mortgage rates today through our GRE investment coaches, because we know the builders that are buying them down to that level for you.
 
Keith Weinhold  32:54  
Now, do you realize that even with zero appreciation and zero cash flow on a property, you're probably still going to win bigger than stocks in their average returns of 10% That's right, even if you get zero appreciation and zero cash flow on a property, because with a historic average from your ROA, from your tax benefits, and inflation profiting alone, that's a 14% total return, just using today's mortgage and inflation rates. A 14% return, even with zero appreciation or cash flow, you're probably going to have more than zero from those. This is why we do what we do here, and you're owning your own deal, your own rental property, and you don't have to be the manager. I'm talking about your own and emphasizing that because a lot of investors got burnt recently because they said, "Oh, I'm going to invest in this influencer's deal, he's pooling all this money together for a deal. Instead of that, you can invest in and control your own deal without having to be the day-to-day manager. Those that bought property through our GRE marketplace with our coaching a few years ago, they are rich today. We had a number of those listeners come right here on the show last year, and joined me for an episode, and you heard some of them say, "Here is what my life is like now. They got on the upper branch of the K, they turned get rich education into got rich education, and it's not just for beginners, you know, we also have listeners that booked a free coaching session with us, and they gave real estate another shot after their first attempt at real estate investing failed, and that's because here they got a coherent strategy from a GRE investment coach, and then they got the outcome. It's actually pretty straightforward. Here's how it works. Our coaching actually understands this business because they work with investors like you every single day, and we are investors ourselves. What they do is they sit down with you, probably virtually, understand your situation, your goals, your timeline, where you're at financially, what your preferences are, what your concerns are, and they ask you the right questions. They listen, and then they show you what's actually possible, given your specific situation. A big difference between what we do and what a lot of others in the business do is that we are focused on your big picture strategy. 
 
Keith Weinhold  35:44  
See, we're not attached to any one market. Take local agents and local operators. Now, those people can be helpful, but they're clearly incentivized to have you buy whatever their product in their geographic market is well, RGRE investment coaching doesn't have that conflict of interest, and that's why, for free, our followers have such a good success rate in making sure they occupy the upper branch of that K. To find what's best for you, we'll walk you through different markets, different property types, and different strategies, depending on what makes sense for your situation. And it's truly free. There's no weird pleading to have you do something else. We don't try to sell you some paid coaching program or anything else like that. In fact, if you want to buy something from GRE, you simply cannot do it, because we don't even have anything for sale in almost any other industry. You would have to pay to talk to someone this knowledgeable, but you'll know more when you hang up than when you called. So, if you're ready to add real income-producing property to your portfolio, that's exactly where we can help, but it's more than that. If you want, come away with a plan to retire in five to 10 years, because it's about a total strategy. You are cordially invited. You can book a free coaching call at GRE Investment coach.com Until next week. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't quit True Daydream.
 
Speaker 1  37:28  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.
 
Keith Weinhold  37:56  
The preceding program was brought to you by Your Home for Wealth Building Get Rich education.com.