
After graduating with an engineering degree and then an MBA from Ohio State, Paul Moore entered the management development track at Ford Motor Company in Detroit. After five years, he departed to start a staffing company with a partner. Along the way, Paul was Finalist for Ernst & Young’s Michigan Entrepreneur of the Year two years straight (1996 & 1997). They scaled and sold the company to a publicly traded firm five years later. After a brief “retirement”, Paul began investing in real estate in 2000 to protect and grow his own wealth. He completed over 85 real estate investments and exits, appeared on HGTV’s House Hunters, rehabbed and managed dozens of rental properties, built a number of new homes, developed a subdivision, and started two successful online real estate marketing firms.
In this episode, Jack Bosch discusses Paul Moore’s investment journey and the detrimental effect of “chasing shiny objects”. You’ll discover how Paul become a more sophisticated and calculated investor through some very difficult moments of growth in his career. You’ll also discover how multi family real estate investing has allowed Paul – and many other investors – to be able to thrive during tough economic climates.
Listen and enjoy:
What’s inside:
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Learn about Paul Moore’s investment journey
- Discover why multi family real estate is well positioned during recessions
- Find out why many people are opting to rent instead of buy
- Understand why you should be careful of “shiny objects”
Mentioned in this episode
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Subscribe and rate our podcast at: http://www.Jackbosch.com/
podcast -
Follow Jack Bosch on Facebook to get the latest updates: http://www.facebook.com/jack.
bosch -
Learn to flip land for pennies on the dollar: http://landprofitfun.com/
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Join the Land Profit Generator Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/
groups/LandProfitGenerator/ - Register for a free 5 day Land Profit Generator Lab at: http://lpglab.com/
- Find out about The Freedom Place: https://www.freedomplaceproject.com/
- Get Paul Moore’s book: The Perfect Investment – Create Enduring Wealth from the Historic Shift to Multifamily Housing
- Listen to Paul’s podcast: How to Lose Money
Tweetables:
Transcription:
Jack: Hello and welcome to another episode of “The Forever Cash Life Real Estate Podcast ” where we talk about cash flow streams through multiple kinds of ways of real estate investing. Today, we have a specialist on…well, actually, we have a specialist in many areas, wrote a book, but we’re going to talk about multifamily, why it’s great, and a whole bunch of different things. So with that, let’s get started. All right, so welcome very much. My guest today is Paul Moore. Paul, how are you doing?
Paul: I’m doing great. Great to be here, Jack.
Jack: Wonderful. Paul and I, we met about a year ago. We both belonged to a mastermind that a friend of us is putting together and we talked about all kinds of things, from podcasting to multifamily to timberlands to other kind of forms of investments, to the principal of the wealth. So we have like a smorgasbord of subjects to talk about. I think, why don’t we start, first of all, quickly, with your story, Paul? You have kind of like a rags-to-riches story from being in debt, for being like not in the money, in the money, out of the money, back into money in a short time period. Just tell us a little bit about who you are, give us a little background.
Paul: I got an engineering degree and that was my first mistake. And then after that, I was smart enough to get an MBA. And I went to Ford Motor Company for five years. And I found myself, Jack, just constantly trying to start businesses on the side. And I didn’t know anybody who was an entrepreneur, but I just realized, you know, that that’s what I really wanted to do.
And so a friend of mine at Ford and I just decided to start our own company and we did. And that went incredibly well. Everything was just perfectly timed and we were able to sell to a publicly traded firm about five years later for a lot more money than I ever dreamed a 33-year-old would have. And then I thought I was an investor. Well, that was a big mistake because I didn’t know the first thing about investing. I thought I did. And I knew about one thing and that was speculating. You know, investing is when your principal is generally safe and you got a chance to make a return, and speculating is when your principal is completely at risk and you’ve got a chance to make a return. And so I did a lot of that. And I made a lot of money on a few deals and I lost a lot of money on several deals.
And so I actually went from about $2 million in the bank in 1997 to, exactly 10 years later, being $2.5 million in debt. Now, fortunately, all that debt, every bit of it was tied to real estate. And I didn’t know that we were about to plunge into the darkest recession America has seen since the Great Depression. Of course, I had no way of knowing. I thought maybe the little jitters we were feeling in ’07 was the end of it. Anyway, my partner abandoned me at that point, we’re still good friends by the way, but he said I can’t make half these interest payments anymore, so I was stuck with the whole $2.5 million dollars in debt.
And I made a crazy decision. I decided I was going to give my way out of debt, because one of my heroes is a guy named George Müller. Now, I don’t know if you know who George Müller is. He’s a German-born amazing guy who moved to England and he started orphanages that housed 10,000 orphans, total, over his lifetime. And he did it all by doing all kinds of crazy stunts. He never ever asked anybody for money, never told anybody he needed money, but he raised something like up to half a billion dollars, some people think, in today’s dollars.
And so, at any rate, I thought, well, what would he do? Well, first of all, he wouldn’t be in debt, so that was one strike against me. But I also thought if he was in the situation, he might do something really crazy like giving his way out of debt. So I began to aggressively give to charities, nonprofits, church things I cared about January 1st, 2008. And I’ll tell you, in summary, it’s a long story, it’s already been long, but four weeks later, I met a real estate developer who gave me a little idea that germinated into a huge bright idea that led to me being able to subdivide some land that was not subdividable by according to the zoning laws, and 13 months later, through a lot of blood, sweat and tears along the way, I was completely debt-free.
Jack: All right. So, first of all, let’s jump into that a little bit more. So I would, first of all, be interested because, obviously, we flip a lot of land. So you mentioned that you subdivided a piece of land, my antennas go up. But first, let’s start with the speculation. Was that stock market speculation or did you invest in businesses or what is the investments that got you from…?
Paul: One of the reasons I got in trouble over the years is I considered myself a serial entrepreneur, and I really was a certified shiny-object chaser, Jack. And I mean, I didn’t know anything about a nurse staffing company or a respiratory therapy staffing. I had a petroleum engineering degree but I didn’t know about any drilling oil wells in a certain shale formation in North Dakota. I didn’t know anything about wireless internet, yet I started companies in all those areas. And honestly, you know, the ones in real estate generally did really, really well. The ones outside of where real estate even including, you know, the wireless internet and oil and gas just completely tanked.
Jack: Okay. All right. So you went, in essence, your lesson learned is like we really have no business in areas that we don’t know well about, right?
Paul: So true.
Jack: Or at the very least, partner with somebody who you trust and you have vetted and you really know that they know what they’re doing and it’s not a speculative investment in the first place.
Paul: That’s absolutely right.
Jack: Right. Okay, cool. So then, you subdivide it, and I know we’re going to talk about multifamily, those things right now, but let’s get, just for a second more, into the piece of you subdivided a piece of land that was not subdividable officially. So which are the strings that you pull, what idea did you have in order to be able to subdivide this thing?
Paul: Okay. So this is fairly technical and it’s fairly hard to explain even though I did it. It’s been 11 years ago. So this real estate developer said, “Have you thought of…” Oh, let me tell you the set up first. This land was on a private road. Now, it also happened to be on the lakefront of Smith Mountain Lake, a beautiful resort in Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And it had 600 feet of waterfront, 600 feet of road frontage, and over five acres.
So if it would have been on a public road, a publicly maintained road, we would have been able to divide it into five, like, 1.1-acre lots, okay? But because it was on a private road, it could not be further subdivided. It was, you know, a five-acre minimum. You understand that?
Jack: Sure.
Paul: Well, my speculation, Jack, was that we could somehow convince the county to make it a public road. I thought it would become a public road, I thought it was gonna happen any month, and I had heard rumors of that by the way. But that was just foolish, pure speculation. So I had a lot of money tied up in this. I had like $800,000 or so tied up in it and, of course, if it was subdivided into five beautiful waterfront lots, it might be worth, you know, $1.5 million or more, and it turned out that way. But let me tell you what happened.
So I talked to this real estate developer and he goes, “Why don’t you try the family exemption,” which I think you’re familiar with. In rural land, rural areas, there’s a an old law that’s called the family exemption. And so when somebody had, let’s say, a 100-acre farm and they wanted to subdivide, let’s say, 1 acre or 5 acres for an in-law, a parent, an aging relative, or even a couple of their kids, let’s say that land was back off the road, you know, you see these big farms in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, where there might be a second or third house way back from the road on the back 40 or whatever. Well, that’s what the law allowed. It allowed you to subdivide a piece of land for a family member and gift it to them, okay?
So I told the guy that won’t work because I said I already checked that law and you have to hold the land for like…you can only subdivide it once and you have to hold the land for a minimum of three years. In other words, if you gifted it to a child or a parent, they’d have to hold it a minimum of three years and I said, “I got to subdivide this five times this year.” And he said, “Well, you got to think about it,” and like this lightbulb went off. And again, I think it was tied to our commitment to give generously, but I can’t prove that, because I had this lightbulb moment.
And here’s what we did, and this is where it gets really hard to explain, but here’s what we did. I sold the entire parcel of land for like $1.4 million to the first guy, okay? So we’ll call that buyer one. He bought all five acres and then we already had it all surveyed, all the soil tests were done, I had paid for all that. He cut off one acre, okay? Basically, he donated the one acre to his wife. But here’s the catch in the law. The law didn’t say that you had to hold the father parcel, the main parcel any time at all. No one had ever thought that the person with the main parcel would want to sell it immediately.
And so when I went to the county planning and zoning board two days after this lightbulb idea, Jack, I threw this by them and they just laughed and they said, “You know, you’ve found a caveat, you found a loophole in our law.” So here’s what he did. He donated the one acre to his wife and then he sold the four acres for like a million, okay? Remember, he paid like $1.4 million for the whole thing, so you’ve effectively paid $400,000 net. And then the next guy donated one acre to his wife and now, she had to hold it three years, that’s a lot they were gonna build on. And then he sold the three remaining acres for, let’s say, $700,000 to the next guy. The next guy donated an acre to his wife and sold the rest for, let’s say, $350,000 and then on, so on and so forth.
So I was able to sell, for those five lots, Jack, amazingly, right in the very worst weeks of the recession. Just to punctuate how powerful the story is, it happened in September and October of 2008. As the whole world was crumbling, I actually convinced a banker to give these guys virtually a 100% mortgages on a $1.4 million and then a $1 million and then a $700,000-lot. Can you imagine that? A banker doing that? Well, it was a local community bank and that’s why it worked. And this county planning and zoning people just shook their head and they said, “We got to close that loophole, but congratulations.”
Jack: Wonderful. Well, that is a creative way. What it tells us is whether that is possible in this state, in other states or not, I personally have not heard of the family exemption, for example, in Arizona, I’ve got to go look into that. But whether or not that exists or not in other states, the point is you want to look into all those, you want to have a good advisor, know somebody good. And the other bigger point here is that you found that person by giving to all kinds of charities and all kinds of good causes. And in that process, not only did you build up, I wanna say good karma, and other people could say good, like whatever it is, like you build up a positive deposit in the world, you could say, but obviously, by putting yourself into that environment, you met some other people. Because the people who give in larger quantities, often, are the people who are more successful, and because they’re more successful, they got more successful by thinking outside the box. So by doing that, you got yourself in an environment of out-of-the-box thinkers, if I interpret that right, and that ended up leading to this opportunity and solving a problem. Is that about right?
Paul: I think that’s true and that’s an angle I hadn’t ever thought of before. I also believe, you know, some people call it karma, some people call it the law of sowing and reaping, which is what I’d refer to it too.
Jack: Anyway, I believe in that, anyway.
Paul: That’s both, yeah.
Jack: I just figured, in that particular scenario, there’s a couple of other things that might’ve played into that.
Paul: I love that, I love it.
Jack: Wonderfull. So now let’s fast forward. So for the last few years, when we last met, you talked about multifamily, you also wrote a book since, it’s called “The Perfect Investment,” and it is about multifamily. So tell us about that.
Paul: You know, when the lightbulb went off for me in 2011, that I wanted to be involved in commercial real estate investing, I had no idea how powerful it really is. I had been doing residential of all kinds, you know, subdivision, single-family flips, single-family rentals, a few mobile home rentals, which were honestly a disaster on an individual basis, I can get back to that later. But I didn’t realize the power in the value formula, the magic formula, if you will, of value creation in commercial real estate. You know, Jack, the power, you know, he formula, it’s value equals income divided by rate of return. And another way of looking at it is it’s the net operating income divided by the cap rate.
And so that basically means that in residential real estate, no matter how well you fix up a house, you’re gonna be limited by comps, the comparable properties. But in commercial real estate, you can force appreciation by driving the NOI, the net operating income up in our formula and then also if possible, seeing a compressed cap rate as well, which is possible when you buy from a mom-and-pop, when you buy a jewel multifamily, diamond in the rough, and you can improve it and then sell it to an institutional buyer. That is the way to potentially compress the cap, right? And so by doing this with a little bit of safe or a lot of safe leverage, you can dramatically increase the returns on the equity.
And so that’s why I want… I didn’t even understand that, really, in 2011, when I got started, but when I did, the lightbulb went off. And so I eventually wrote this book called “The Perfect Investment.” And in the book, I talked about how multifamily became so popular. You know, in 1995, the government, our brilliant, infinitely smart government decided that anybody who can fog a mirror deserve to own a home and they should own a home. Then they came up with all these and mandated all these programs like no-doc mortgages and all these things where, you know, these people, like a guy I knew who had $35,000 or $40,000 annual income bought a $600,000 McMansion as his second home with no good plan for it, and of course he lost it back to the bank in a few months.
But this happened over and over across the country in various levels. And by 2005, homeownership had shot up from its historical norm of 63% to 64% up to a new high of 69.2%. Well, of course, some people shouldn’t own homes. And of course, what happened in the next decade, from ’05 to ’15, is homeownership went back to its normal rate of about 63%. Now, every 1% drop, Jack, all 6% there represented a million people per percentage, so 6 million new renters in the renter pool at a time when very little multifamily or any housing was being built during the Great Recession. So there became a seven to one supply and demand imbalance of new renters versus new apartments, so this created a real popularity in multifamily.
There are about four demographic drivers we can look at, to look down the road decades, and see what the multifamily business is going to look like. And one of the reasons I think it’s the perfect investment is number one, the smallest group of renters right now is baby boomers, however, it’s also the fastest-growing group of renters. And statistics say when we baby boomers rent, we’ll never go back to owning again. A second group is millennials, they’re about the same size, 77 to 80 million strong. And by and large, they have a lot of school debt, a lot of credit card debt, they’re not consummate savers. And many millennials think, “You know, why should I be tied down to a seemingly overpriced home with a 30-year contract when I might have a new job, new adventure, new friends across town or across the world next year? I’d rather rent.” A third group is Gen Z and they’re also 78 to 80 million strong and early samples from them show that these 18 to 23-year-olds or so are also gonna be more renting than buying. The fourth group is immigrants who rent longer and more often than folks born in America. So those four demographic groups are giving us a great gauge that multifamily is going to be a very, very powerful asset class and a great investment for a long, long time.
Jack: Right. And I 100% agree with that. That’s why for example, we currently have an apartment complex under contract which is smack in an immigrant neighborhood. So it’s a class C property in a class C, C-plus kind of neighborhood. But it’s very attractive for the immigrant neighborhoods. And currently, it’s not targeted to that, so as a result, it has some vacancies and some things because the sellers just have rented for 12 years without putting a nail into it and really not paid attention to the property that they’re running it from out of the country and so on.
So once we come in, we will definitely target market it to the degree of, of course, the Equal Opportunity Act. Of course, we all will follow that to a 100%. If somebody that’s not an immigrant wants to rent, be my guest, if they’re qualified for the pieces, but the neighborhood is conducive, obviously, to the immigration population that, so far, just has not been marketed to generally speaking… And so yes, 100%, I agree with you. And I agree with the other parts because I’m a big…I like to study like overall demographics and I don’t have all the statistics in front of me, but the fact is that something like well over 50% of the United States American population, the baby boomers, ultimately will retire without enough money to pay longterm in mortgage. And most of them also don’t retire with the house being paid off already.
And Social Security has really no way to increase on a net basis because every single person that pays for our Social Security or for the baby boomers when we retire, when I retire, every person that pays for my Social Security has already been born. So we know the numbers, right? There’s immigration plays into it so we know that Social Security cannot go up. So, therefore, if people can’t afford all these houses and they keep paying $1,000, $1,500, $2000 monthly payments on the houses, eventually they realize that they’re better off actually renting something and that’s where we come in with the best class C in the neighborhood, they’ve clean, solid, good-looking class C property or C-plus property. It offers affordable housing where a two-bedroom apartment cost $750 a month, a one-bedroom costs $600, $650 is way more affordable than a mortgage of $1,500 plus property taxes plus all the other pieces. So I’m 100% with you that this is a shift that we’ve seen that is unlikely to be reversed.
Perhaps the millennials at some point of time, when they have babies and so on, will look into ownership, but the definitely the baby boomers is the fastest-growing way and will continue to be, in my opinion.
Paul: I completely agree. Great. I’m really happy for you. So you got a good apartment deal, it sounds like. It’s hard to get those these days, isn’t it?
Jack: It is. We’ve been looking and looking and looking. We had two on a contract, backed out of two, said no to three other ones that we could have gotten but the numbers just didn’t make sense. So one of the five that we just literally took into the closer look, we got in, and in the process, we also probably analyzed another 40, 50 to find one. So it’s not easy these days, but there are deals out there. And particularly with an outlook on a potentially recession or something like that, we’re definitely only picking properties that we know through 100% we can carry through a recession no matter what happens.
Paul: What type of debt would you like to see through a recession?
Jack: Well, I like to have larger in debt because I’m not afraid of the recession. The recession itself will mean the less people can afford houses and more people need to actually rent potentially, depending how deep the recession. But even if house price has come down a little bit, banks might not be willing to lend as much to those same people, and as a result, more people ultimately will be pushed into rental market. So I’m fairly confident that rental market rates will not go up but will stay stable, which is a good thing.
And then what we, in terms of debt, do, I mean the interest rate is depending on…and in a recession, interest rates are lower, but we like to see debt that is about 75% or so of purchase price. If we can get at 80%, great, but we don’t like to over leverage our deals. We like to make them sure that they even work at 75%, with the 25% being raised from our investors. And then we like to have, usually, at least 10-year debt, because even though we have a prepayment penalty with that, but we figured 10 years is a safe enough horizon that if our entire investment horizon is only three to five years on the property or four to five years, then we have an extra five or six years, just in case, if in four years, four or five, we hit a recession right there, then and we have to be forced to hold onto property, the most important part, as you said early, the difference between the speculation and investment is the principal preservation. So the most important piece to us is principal preservation.
Like in a worst-case scenario, the absolute worst case that we might not be able to pay as much dividend to people or preferred return to investors, but once we make it through that slump, and that’s why we have the extra five, six years, we can then go sell it again, everyone gets their money back, everyone gets a profit share and everyone walks away with a nice return. So that’s why we don’t believe in five-year return, five-year debt, even though our debt comes with a little bit of a prepayment penalty. But I’d rather pay a 2% prepayment penalty. We don’t do yield maintenance, we do step down. So basically, like the three, three, three, two, two, two, one, one, one. So after five years, we still have to pay 2%. But 2% on a $5 million loan is only $100,000, which obviously is a lot of money. But assuming the property, assuming we did the first appreciation by increasing the income by $200,000 and with the value of the property by $3 million or more, then paying $100, 000 price, it’s almost like an insurance policy and we’re more than happy to do that.
Paul: Right. You know, I mean, if you were gonna have somebody assume your loan, your cost would be, you know, $50,000 or probably, with legal fees and everything, would probably be close to the $100,000 anyway.
Jack: Right.
Paul: It makes total sense.
Jack: Correct. So that’s what we do. So with that said, now, tell us about… You’re also investing in, I think, in other commercial real estate assets like self-storage and things like that, right? So what is your favorite investment right now?
Paul: So what we found is, unlike you, we have not done a good job on the acquisition strategy side, finding multifamily. And what we found was that there’s a lot of mom-and-pop sellers in self-storage and mobile home parks and they’re very recession-resistant, much like multifamily. Did you know by the way, Jack, that multifamily, at its height, the worst foreclosure rate with Freddie Mac was only 10% as high as single-family homes in the worst part of the recession? And since the recession, multifamily foreclosure rates have only been 2% of the single-family rate. And so multifamily is a great, you know, asset in that way too.
Jack: I didn’t have the exact numbers but that makes total sense. The main reason people lost multifamily in that recessionary period was, in the big recession was that their loans reset, they had to refinance the loans through a time when banks just would not finance anything.
Paul: Right.
Jack: That’s why we do the five-year because let’s say we would have bought something in 2003, and then in 2008, this loan comes due, if we would’ve have done a five-year loan, we would’ve had a problem. If we would’ve had a 10-year loan, we are now in 2013, and to finance it would have not been a problem.
Paul: Right, exactly. Well, what we found was that self-storage and mobile home parks had similar recession-resistant characteristics, but they have all these mom-and-pop sellers. You know, 93% of multifamily is owned by companies who have wrung the value out of those assets, much like you will, hopefully, when you acquire this asset. But about 90% of mobile home parks are still owned by mom-and-pops and over 70% of self-storage are owned by independent operators, a lot of those are mom-and-pops. And so by acquiring these type of assets, it gives our operators a chance to significantly increase the asset value, and of course, the equity.
So when we looked into this though, Jack, we realized we didn’t have a team who had done this. We hadn’t done mobile home parks ourself, we hadn’t done self-storage. And so we decided it would be best for us to go out and find the best in class operators we could in these different asset classes and we invest with them. And so what we’ve done is our company, Wellings Capital has created an on-ramp for people who want to invest in a diversified portfolio of multifamily, self-storage, and mobile home parks. And so one investor can invest across, like, right now, 34 different assets in the fund. That’s how we do it.
Jack: Okay, wonderful. That’s really cool. And that makes total sense. Both asset classes that you mentioned, self-storage and mobile home parks, is still on our horizon also to look at down the road as we diversify our own asset management strategy. We utilize our land flipping as our cash machine and then we drill the cash over into other items, and occasionally allow some of our friends and family and people we already have a pre-existing relationship with to invest with us on these items. And you’re obviously built it larger into a fund, it’s very, very cool. Right.
So now the last thing is I also happen to know that you set up a company to fight human trafficking. Tell us about that. How did that come about? How come you’re passionate about that? Everyone is passionate about something else, what triggered your passion for that and what did you do there?
Paul: Well, so I was shocked. I saw a documentary about three years ago called “Nefarious” and this documentary, I highly recommend people watch it if you can stomach it. The producer shot 800 hours of footage around the world about human trafficking, including in the U.S. and he only used an hour and a half of it for this film. And he said this is PG compared to the other footage he’s going to be releasing in the future. But at any rate, I was shocked to find out, Jack, that if you took the record profits, the record annual profits of Amazon, excuse me, Apple, General Motors, Nike and Starbucks, combine those together, doubled that total, that would be the approximate revenues generated by human trafficking every year. It’s appalling.
And I’d like to believe that if I was alive in the 1800s, I would be abolitionist fighting against slavery. And this is slavery. And I’d like to believe if I was an adult in the 1960s, I’d be fighting for civil rights and this is a civil right that’s been ripped away from about 40 million people around the world. And so I thought that as long as I’m breathing, I might as well do something important. So we decided that we wanted to fund, as much as possible, and raise awareness, as much as possible, the fighting human trafficking and rescuing its victims.
And so I actually didn’t do it, but a friend of mine set up a company and it’s gonna be called the freedomplaceproject.com. We’re not taking any donations. Our goal is to build a billion-dollar office, a tower in Dallas, obviously called the Freedom Place and we’re going to be renting that out to normal corporate tenants. And though, we’ll, of course, pay for the construction and the land and the building materials and the, you know, architects and the property management, etc., any profits made by the developers, which will our team, 100% will be donated to fight human trafficking and rescue its victims.
Jack: Oh, man, wonderful. That’s a beautiful vision. Not easy to implement, I bet, but it’s a beautiful vision. And Dallas is probably the right place to do this in, from a point of growth and a need for office space. Very, very nice. Great.
So with that, we have to wrap things up. I have a couple of usual questions, just like what do you consider the biggest mistake that you’ve ever made?
Paul: You know, there was a lot of them. I think chasing shiny objects, as a whole, was absolutely my biggest mistake. I mean starting a wireless internet company against my wife’s advice, by the way, was definitely one of the biggest mistakes. Investing in an oil and gas venture that was somewhat speculative in nature, when honestly, all around where we were drilling, there was people making millions of dollars on their oil wells but we decided, at least this drilling company decided they wanted to do something different. And of course, that did not end well. But I think that was it, chasing shiny objects.
Jack: Okay. And then the other question is what book have you…leadership book or business book pops into mind as the one that you most recommend or that made the biggest impact on you?
Paul: You know, it’s the antidote to chasing shiny objects, that’s not the name of it, the name of it is, and many of us know what it is, it’s Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s book called “The ONE Thing,” which teaches us to focus on one thing on a day-to-day basis, but also as a life goal, and then to say no to 10,000 potential shiny objects.
Jack: Absolutely. We call that, in our company, “Get in line and stay in line.” Basically, find the one thing that you’re interested in, and then stay in line, pay your dues, do whatever it takes to succeed at it, and instead of just jumping from line to line to line and never going to the front of the line and never enjoying the fruit of being at the front of the line.
Paul: Right.
Jack: Wonderful. Well, with that, thank you very much. I really appreciate you being on the call here today. Thank you, Paul. I love that. We didn’t have a chance to talk about a couple of other things but perhaps we’ll have you back on the show or perhaps we’ll have your son on the show, perhaps we can talk to him about…he’s an expert in trees and things like that, right, in timber. Or we’re just do a second show at some point of time. But with that said, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. That was wonderful to tap into your wisdom.
And with that, do you have any kind of last words perhaps for our audience? I always ask, if somebody is like on the fence, doesn’t know exactly what to do about real estate and they want to start, what is your number one advice you would give them?
Paul: My number one advice would be don’t swing for the fences. You know, Babe Ruth famous for being the home run king but many of us also know that he was a strikeout king as well. And it’s one thing to do that in baseball, but if you do that with your investing dollars, you know, if you continue to play double or nothing all the time, you’ll eventually land on nothing and then you’ll have nothing left to double. And so I really highly recommend that people don’t speculate with their investment dollars. Sorta like Warren Buffet. You know, Jeff Zuckerberg from Facebook asked him, “Why don’t people just follow you? Why don’t they just copy you?” And Warren laughed and said, “Oh, no, no, nobody wants to get rich that slow.” Well, you know, Buffet, obviously, is the king of investors and he did it by generally trying to hit singles and doubles and of course, he hit a lot of home runs inadvertently along the way and that’s my advice for investors.
Jack: I would agree with that. Yes, go build something that you can scale slowly or fast but that is not… I was in real estate. A lot of programs are out there teaching you a treasure hunt, and a treasure hunt is not predictable, right? It’s that something that you can hit singles and doubles on a predictable basis, it ultimately makes you much more money. With that, thank you very much. Thank you, Paul. I love it.
And with that being said, that concludes our episode of the “The Forever Cash Life Real Estate Podcast.” I love that we talked about multifamily, we talked about how to brand human trafficking or the goal of human trafficking, we talked about other asset classes. I loved it. And with that said, this concludes our podcast. As always, give us a five-star review, give us a thumbs-up if you watch this on YouTube. Share this with your friends so we can reach more people about passive income and real estate investing. Right. Thank you. Bye bye.