Property Management Growth with DoorGrow DGS 118: Investing in the United States
What do you want to do with your life? Sit on the sidelines in a cubicle or travel the world? Take control of your life instead of watching it pass you by. Consider investing, start your own business, and enter the world of entrepreneurship.
Today, I am talking to Reed Goossens, Lead Asset Manager/Chief Operations Officer of Wildhorn Capital, about investing in the United States. After spending two years abroad, having a great time, and meeting the girl of his dreams, Reed returned to Australia to sit in a cubicle as a civil structural engineer and wonder how he could get paid to travel.
You’ll Learn...[03:17] Real Estate Investing: Rich Dad Poor Dad ignited Reed’s interest in being an entrepreneur.
[03:45] Reed’s Journey: Leaving the safety of his cubicle in Australia to moving to America without a job for the love of his future wife.
[03:58] No job, no network, no problem: Took just six months for Reed to find a job in the United States and purchase his first investment property.
[04:29] Investing in the U.S. and 10,000 Miles to the American Dream: Reed went from reading Rich Dad Poor Dad to writing his own books on real estate investing.
[04:51] Structural Engineering: Prepared Reed for his future in America when it comes to construction. He’s built about half-a-billion dollars worth of infrastructure worldwide.
[06:21] Do you want financial freedom? How to get started in real estate investing.
[07:37] Benefits: Real estate investing creates cash flow, appreciation, and amortization.
[08:07] Rental properties aren’t turnkey, but property management is key to success.
[10:00] How to find a good property manager? Business culture with growth opportunity.
[14:10] Ok Boomer: It’s not just about doing work whether you’re miserable or not. People want meaning and purpose.
[15:27] Invest in Yourself: Self-educate by reading books, listening to podcasts, joining local meetup groups, and expressing a willingness to learn.
TweetablesStructural Engineer: Scheduling, foundation and soil issues, you name it, throw it.
You make money when you buy, you lose it through bad property management.
Culture: Critical and pivotal to foundation of business and why clients can trust them.
Change and grow. People want meaning and purpose. Get out of your own way.
ResourcesRich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator
TranscriptJason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.
DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s guest, I’m hanging out with Reed Goossens of Wildhorn Capital. Reed, welcome to the show.
Reed: Good day, Jason. Thanks for having me on the show, mate.
Jason: All right. You’ve got a really cool accent. Tell everybody where you’re from.
Reed: From deep West Texas, mate, down below New Zealand and Australia.
Jason: Very deep Texas. Got it.
Reed: I’m originally from Australia. Grew up an Aussie, I went to school there, and moved to the United States back in 2012 when I moved here for two loves. One love was for my then girlfriend and now wife, and the other love was for the Big Apple. That’s really how it got me to the United States.
Jason: All right. Those women man, they get us to move. They just do it. Awesome. We’re going to be talking about investing in the US but before we get into that, tell us a little about how you got into this and then lead us right into this topic.
Reed: Sure. Let’s do it. My background is in structural engineering. I went to university for structural engineering, graduated in 2007, went abroad which means going overseas, and worked in the London 2012 Olympic games for about a year back in 2008. Then, I moved to the south of France, had an incredible life journey down there and that’s actually where I met my American wife or at the time, girlfriend. We fell in love and after galavanting around the south of France, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I worked for some Russian billionaires on some super yacht (it’s a whole story in itself). I found myself back in Australia in 2010 in a cubicle working as a civil structural engineer.
The whole idea of I spent these two years abroad, having a great time, meeting the girl of my dreams, and I’m now sitting in this cubicle going, “Geez, what the hell?” I want someone to pay me to live this life of travel. Really, the thing that came up to me was investing, but I didn’t know what entrepreneurship was. I didn’t even really understand real estate investing. I picked up the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, and that’s back in 2009, a decade ago. That was the spark that got it all started.
From there, I took the blinkers off a little bit. I definitely felt like a star athlete sitting on the sidelines, watching my life go by, and I really wanted to take control of that life. Over many years of self-education, I ended up moving to the United States. I quit my safe engineering job in Australia and moved in early 2012 to chase Erica, my wife.
I moved here without a job. I didn’t have any network here and over a short period of time I was able to find a job. I think within six months of moving to the United States, I had my first property purchased, a triplex. The various [...] here in the United States for those people who are not aware are very, very low compared to Australia. The whole thing about Rich Dad Poor Dad says, “Get started by putting cash in your pocket and having assets.” That’s really where it got started.
Jason: All right, and you’ve written some books.
Reed: Yes I have. I’ve written two books, Investing in the US which is the podcast form, now in book form. I’ve written a second book with a couple of other Aussie entrepreneurs called The 10,000 miles to the American Dream. We’ve all moved out here and successfully invested in real estate, inside of real estate businesses, and now we’re sharing our story with the world.
Jason: Structural engineering, how do you feel that prepared you for the stuff that you’re doing now.
Reed: It hugely prepared me. I probably can walk into a room and run rings around most people in terms of when it comes to construction. As a project manager in a career, I had built about half a billion dollars worth of infrastructure, multi-family retail across the globe. Scheduling, understanding foundation issues, and soil issues, you name it, throw it at me, and we can go bat if you want to go bat. It also got me into a role that I worked for a developer in Long Beach for many years and learned the business side of the real estate game through them as well.
Jason: Where are you located now?
Reed: I’m in LA. I was in New York for a couple of years back in 2012–2013, then moved back out to sunny California because it was just too cold in New York.
Jason: I get it. I’m just north of you. I’m in Los Angeles county, in Santa Clarita.
Reed: Nice. We have to go meet up and go surfing some time because I love the beach.
Jason: Yeah. The beach is cold, though.
Reed: Let’s see, mate. Let’s see.
Jason: Yeah. Reed, really cool to connect with you. Let’s get into this topic of investing in the US For those that are listening across the pond or those that are in the US, let’s make this relevant for both of them.
Reed: Sure. Let’s do it. What do you want to know? I’m an open book.
Jason: Where should we start? How does somebody start investing if they have no clue? You’ve been there at one point and if somebody has never done real estate investing, they haven’t invested themselves whether they’re here or not, how would they get started?
Reed: Well, I think the whole idea is about what you want to achieve in your life. Do you want financial freedom? A lot of people get started in real estate investing to achieve some sort of financial freedom.
Per my story in the beginning of the show, I felt stuck. I felt trapped in a cubicle. I wanted more to do with my life. The whole thing that drives me, Jason, is the fact that I have a fear of regret. If I wake up when I’m 65 years of age going, “Geez, I wish I’d given that a go,” I’ll have regrets. The whole thing that gets me driving, gets me up in the morning is going out and pushing my boundaries and being uncomfortable.
The whole thing about real estate investing is you’ve got to ask yourself, “What do you want to do it for?” Is it to create financial freedom for your family? Is it to create a little bit of extra income? You love your job, but you just want to put your money to work and not sit in a bank? Whatever that might be, real estate investing is really big compared to the stock market investing. It’s one of the best investment vehicles in the world because it has all the benefits.
There’s the four benefits as cash flow, there’s appreciation, there’s amortization, and it has appreciation of a long-term in terms of market appreciation. There are many benefits that you can have through investing in real estate compared to other stock investing or bond investing that make it a really quite a safe haven. It really goes back to, “What do you want to grow for your family or for yourself personally?” Once you answer that question, we can get off into the details of how you go do it.
Jason: One of the challenges that you’ll see in the real estate industry is that a lot of people will make these claims. You see these gearers that are like, “Hey, just get into real estate investing. Buy this matching program and then it’s going to be easy.” And then they end up with these rental properties that are really difficult and they realize it’s not so turnkey. They’ve got tenants. They’ve got renters. Property management, maybe more than anything, is kind of the gateway to this because property management played a role in the properties that you tend to be involved in or the real estate investment that you do.
Reed: Yeah, 100%. In property management, you make money when you buy, you lose it through bad property management. If you don’t have the right property managers on board, you can be royally screwed. We’ve experienced it. We have the daily grind of running a real estate investment firm at Wildhorn Capital, we have a constant struggle with trying to find good bums and seats to make sure that when they’re running our $40–$50 million assets, that they know what they’re doing, and they’re competent.
You might be in certain markets which might not attract the right type of property managers. You really got to be really careful at how you select the people who sit at the helm of the ship of any property that you buy. We happen to buy large multi-families, so we have 200–300 units at any one property. There is a lot going on, a lot of moving pieces. Making sure that you have those right people in those positions, to make sure that they’re steering the ship in the right direction and you’re not going to lose money, and the deal’s going to continue to perform for the investors, is really important.
My job within Wildhorn Capital is to make sure as a Lead Asset Manager, Chief Operations Officer, is really to make sure that those individual property managers, those individual sites are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The original point, property management is the key to success.
Jason: Love it. I get asked this question all the time when I go on other people’s podcast. They’re always asking me, “How do you find a good property manager? How do you identify them?” I want to put this on somebody else for a change. What do you look for when you’re looking for either a good property management company you’re going to partner with, in situations where you need that, or when you’re doing hiring to find a good property manager?
Reed: Let’s answer the first question. To give some context, we have 1700 units across 8 assets in Austin, Texas. We have a third party property manager. I live in Los Angeles. My business partner lives in Austin, but we stood third party better.
Probably, what a lot of people would do whether you start with a single family or you’re buying 150 units, you’re probably going to go out at the beginning to a third party. How do you identify those third parties? We just recently went through a transition. We had to fire our original property management company and it really boiled down to a couple of things.
One was culture. Business culture is really, really important. If you’re going to be attracting someone to earn, sitting at an asset, $50,000–$60,000 a year, managing a $45 million asset, you better bloody have a good business culture. You need to have room for them to grow, and they want to grow into more than just being a property manager. Maybe they want to be regional. Maybe they want to get into the executive office.
If you don’t have that growth opportunity, combined with somewhat a decent pay, and then also the training wheels (I’ll call it), the training services and programs within the company, within the organization, to help those people blossom, really, what we as owners employ these property managers for is to go out into the market and find the best “eggs on the shelf” and form those eggs into great, successful, property managers so our assets can be successful.
We look for a couple of things. When we do interview asset managers, we look at how many properties are they currently managing. How many units do they have on the contract? How long are they doing this for? We go and get references from other owners. How have working with ABC property company been? Have you enjoyed their reporting systems? Have you enjoyed their business culture or are they really transparent with you?
There’s a lot of things out there that you need to be aware of when you’re hiring and sitting down and “dating” a property manager because you need to go and understand all the rigmaroles that go on with asset managing it. I hope that answered your question.
Jason: Yeah. I would agree. I think one of the first things when a property management company comes to me that’s struggling to grow and to figure out how to grow the business, that I will tackle with them is helping them get clarity on that cultural piece. It’s never the thing that they think they need but it’s so critical and pivotal to the foundation of their business. It’s why clients can or cannot trust them.
Helping them get clear on their personal why and then helping them get clear on the why their business exists, and to feed that personal why. One of my goals is to create this golden thread all the way from them, the business owner, the property management company, their why, through to the business why, through to the person with the rental property wants. If I can help them create that connection with each potential client, sales happen really quickly. Deals happen very easily because there’s a golden thread of trust between what the person wants and what the business owner wants, the property manager wants. They can see that. It’s transparent.
That’s so critical and we have to have culture. It has to exist in order for that to happen. If your team can sense that and can see that, then you’re able to attract A-players. B-players are not going to stay in a company without good culture. Especially millennials and Gen Z, they’re not going to work in a situation in which they’re just getting paid to do something that keeps them miserable. They want purpose. They want meaning.
You’ll see a lot of dinosaurs in the industry get really frustrated because they’re saying in business… Then there’s this trend of the “OK Boomer.” But the Boomers are like, “Well, we pay you, so just do the work. Do the freaking work.” That’s not how people want to live nowadays. It’s not just about hunkering down and doing work whether you’re miserable or not. People want purpose.
Reed: You bring up a good point. This comes not [...] also rent a business culture, but how you run the business with OK Boomers and a historical way of smacking someone over the back of the head if they’d done it wrong. They’re the old school dinosaur ways of the ways managers work. We’ve come a long way and as much as we—I’m a Millennial, I’m on the early end of it—get criticized for not working and all that sort of stuff. Look at my track record. I come from Australia.
For most people, I don’t want to swear on this podcast but you know what I’m going to say. Millennials also have created a lot of changes and disruptions in the way that we approach things and change through our thinking around it. That is really important. If you’re not willing to change and grow, then you’re going to be stagnant and someone’s going to eat you.
Jason: [...] Xennial which is kind of Gen X and kind of Millennial, and sort of bridges the gap. I remember dialing phones with the rotary dial.
Reed: I was born in 1986, so I still remember that. I remember my first mobile phone in Australia was actually when I was 18 years of age. It was the Nokia 3310 and it’s funny.
Jason: I had the Blackberry and I’ve had just about every version of iPhone that’s existed.
Reed: Exactly.
Jason: I think there’s a big shift in culture. I think that if business owners of larger property management companies, the most successful companies, they all have culture. They all bring up culture. I think a lot of smaller property managers hear them talk about it and go, “I don’t get it. That doesn’t make sense.” Then you’ll see a lot of property managers get to maybe about 200–400 door category and this is where if they don’t have culture, they get stuck.
I taught the second sand trap in property management. It’s because they don’t have culture, they’re not able to maintain and retain good staff, and they don’t have a clear vision, clear purpose, clear values, a clear mission statement or whatever you want to call it. There’s a disconnect, and they’re wondering, “Why can’t I just find good managers?”
One of my business coaches said this, “If you don’t have the business that you dream of, you’re not yet the person that can run it yet.” I think that a lot of times, we as business owners externalize everything. “Oh, it’s the Millennials. Oh, it’s my marketing. Oh, it’s my website.” Really, I found that if I could get the business owner to see that it’s them and make changes, everything else changes by default.
Reed: I have a similar business coach. You have to be a key person of influence in your industry. Whatever industry that is, if it’s property management, if it’s being a real estate investor/entrepreneur. I’m trying to attract investors to me, so I’m putting all the content out there. I’m sitting on this podcast right now, talking about the ins and outs of building business culture.
It’s easy as humans to blame something else. It’s someone else’s fault. It’s this one’s fault. But that’s why as humans, we can’t stop learning. If you stop learning, you stop growing. If you stop growing, you’re dead. It’s really about that embracing of change. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore. If you don’t know something, go ahead and freaking learn it. If you don’t want to go do that, well then you’re dead in the water.
That’s this whole mindset of changing the way in which we were historically taught to learn, grow, do business, manage people, expectations, and blah-blah-blah. We can get all into it, but it boils down to, you were right, you have to be a key person of influence in yourself. Your business is you. You are a business and you’ve got to start there. From that, people would want to feed off you, be around you, and then want to grow with you. If you don’t have that growth opportunity, you can’t attract better employees, better clients, and have better outputs for your company. I like this a lot.
Jason: It certainly makes a lot of people uncomfortable, too. I get a lot of flack in it in this industry just for being a change bringer. Some people don’t like it. They don’t like that I’m not a property manager, I’m from outside, and I’m bringing change to this industry.
Reed: “You don’t grow, you don’t know.”
Jason: Yeah, and for a while, I was kind of fearful of that fact. I thought, “Well, I’ll just stay in the background.” My business coach has consistently pushed me to get more and more uncomfortable as we were talking about earlier.
Side question. You’ve got all this business in Austin which is so favorable and friendly to business because I’m legitimately looking to move to Austin. I’m seriously considering it. Why are you still in LA?
Reed: Two things. The beach and my wife’s family are from here.
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Reed: But it’s insane. I set up my company to be a life by design company. It’s me and my business partner and I’ve got a couple of other small employees. I still outsource the general contracting. I still outsource the property management. As we grow, we have 17,000 units now but a 150 million under management with our investors.
We want to keep it lean. I’m Australian. I just got back from a 2½ week vacation. It wasn’t really a vacation, I was working every day, but I went to the Rugby World Cup in Japan. I was in Australia. If I have Internet, I want to work and my business partner’s completely aligned with me. We’ve always joked that if we ever need to get HR within the house, we’re done growing.
Part of the business of owning multi-family real estate is what can I control? The engineer within me wants to control everything. It’s the business systems, it’s the ecosystems that you create that can truly create true wealth, but like property management, do I want to go off and create a property management company?
I know how much property management is a thankless job. I was literally sitting in my property management company’s head office in Austin the other day, beating him over the head about budgets in 2020. Literally beating him over the head. And having clashes with upper management, that they’re saying stuff in these meetings that should have been prepared, so I’ve just literally experienced it with, and that’s got nothing to do with property management. That has got to do with how you manage your people.
Some people come into the meeting not prepared for budget review. I literally flew in from LA. What else are we going to do? The expectation is I’m sitting here ready to review budgets with you and you don’t know if these are baked yet.
There are all these things that go on with any corporation, that you got to make sure you have your systems in place the hierarchy, and to your point before that, the old dinosaurs, there’s a couple of old dinosaurs in that organization that we have to get a bit of feathers ruffled, but you got at those honest conversations because I am the client and I do expect things to be presented in a certain way. And that’s regardless of the fact that there’s a property management company.
Jason: Okay. What did you notice difference-wise between the Australian market? I would imagine you’re still connected to that. We get a lot of Aussies coming over here, where property management is very well-seasoned in Australia. We talk about a property manager as a household word, like a realtor is here, like people know what property management is over there is not as common here. Stats like 80% of single family residential rentals there are professionally managed by property managers. The US is nothing like that yet.
What is your perception on the differences between the US market and the Australian market when it comes to real estate investing, rentals, and property management?
Reed: I’m going to answer your first question first. This is because I’ve got a different lens on. Yes, you’re correct. My dad has an investment property and he has a property manager. When they say property manager, they’re really a real estate brokerage company that does sales for new homes. To keep the ecosystem going and the lights on when the market’s crap, they do single family rentals or vacation rentals, something like that. So that’s definitely well-baked.
What isn’t well-baked? In Australia, we don’t have the per the construction way of financing set up in Australia. We don’t have large multi-family. I moved to the United States and I, as a 29-year old, bought a 150-unit complex. I would never have had the opportunity to do that in Australia because the way in which the financing is set up is that, it’s a condo market. Before it goes into construction, they need to pre-sell X amount of units before it goes under construction. We have all this condominium market.
Within the condominiums, you might get ABC property manager to manage one of the units and you have someone completely different managing the other unit. Unlike here in the States where if I go to Texas, there’s a leasing center and I walk into the leasing center because one entity owns the entire thing.
One thing really missing from the Australian market is in [...] the commercial property management game. I just mentioned the other day in the corporate office of my PM firm, is like, “Guys, there’s an opportunity to go to Australia and start this out as multi-family starts to have more traction.” I see this as the opposite, that in the commercial multi-family space, America has it dialed in. It’s a true business. I know universities offering degrees in property management now, whereas in Australia, because we don’t have that commercial multi-family space, you haven’t driven that professionalism that I’ve come to expect here.
Again, I’m not in the single family world as much you plug in both here or in Australia, so I can’t comment as much on that, but just from the large multi-family commercial space, Australia is very mid-90s, like the Internet was in the mid-90s. No one really understood what it was, so that change. Does that answer your question?
Jason: Yeah, very much. That’s very interesting. I love hearing about the contrast, because contrast gives us perspective here in the US.
As far as investing in the US, what are some of the most common questions that people ask you when they hear about what you do, they’re curious, and they’re interested (maybe) getting into this?
Reed: From a high level, it doesn’t break down what the United States is. I’m going to compare to other western countries, so Australia, Europe, and Canada to some extent. I’m just going to break it down to Australia because I’m from Australia. You guys have 300 million people who live in this country. You are the king of capitalism. You guys have this financing options up the wazoo. You’ve got thousands and thousands of financing options.
With a large population, you have forced and you can inhabit north, south, east, west. You can pretty much inhabit the entire land mass. You force these what I call secondary markets. You have the New Yorks, the LAs, the San Franciscos, the Chicagos of the world, where people want destination cities. But then, because of the population and where jobs are being driven to, you have these secondary and tertiary markets. Through secondary and tertiary markets, you have more affordability. And that’s purely driven from a population point of view because you just got so many people.
Compare that to Australia, we got the same land mass as America (excluding Alaska, we roughly got the same land mass), but we only have 25 or 26 million people. We have not even one-tenth of the population of what you guys have. America has this really weird, awesomeness of having so much population, so much affordability, it drives cash flow. But there’s also appreciation, it’s got a ton of pro-business, all these things and you compare it to other first world countries.
We don’t have the cap rates that you guys have. You look at Charlotte, North Carolina or Austin. Historically was a seven- or eight-cap market. It’s now transition into these very low digit sort of four-fives. You compare that to Sydney, Brisbane, London, or Hong Kong where commercial real estate and real estate in general where cap rates have been like 1% and 2% because the supply and demand is forced to go that low.
So, there’s these still pockets of growth in America where, because you can inhabit all these different parts of the country and through job growth, that you guys have these awesome opportunities for investing, and that’s where a lot of people have heard about it, where you’re cash flowing in the States. You got appreciation and all these great financing options. It’s also the US dollar, like where do I come? Where do I sign up?
A lot of people hear about it internationally, and they come and want to invest here. That’s why I started investing in the US, and it was more of an idea of my journey, about how I’ve got started because when I first moved here, I had no idea what a credit score was. I had no idea what an LLC was. I had to learn all that stuff.
Jason: All right. I think there’s an advantage of doing that. There’s an advantage in coming into an industry or into a market with no experience in it because your eyes are wide open. Nothing’s assumed, you have to learn everything from the ground up.
That’s been my experience coming into the property management industry. There were so many things that I looked at and said why is everyone doing it that way? Why are people doing it like that? That doesn’t make sense to me. And why is pay rent the largest called action on their website when they want more owners and that’s the primary goal with this website?
There’s this disconnect and I think that’s the advantage of coming in with this outside perspective. You coming into this, what do you think Americans are missing? That they just assume? That has given you this advantage? Because you’re doing obviously quite well.
Reed: And thanks to America, I have been doing quite well. Let’s not get any wrong here like I haven’t made money in Australia. People ask me, “How do you make money in real estate?” I’ve never purchased anything in Australia. I got my fishing lines in the water out there, but until I actually go and do something, my whole portfolio is here in the United States.
You are correct. Perspective is the difference between what gives me an advantage over someone else. A lot of the American ethos is being around, “I got to go to school, I get this huge debt, I can’t go traveling after university because I got this debt, and then I will get no job. Once I’m in a job, I can’t leave, I’ve got a 401(k).” All of a sudden, you’re 65 and like, “What the hell just happened?”
As Australians, it’s in our DNA to go traveling. I didn’t come out of university with six figures of debt. It was absolutely more socialistic society back down in Australia, but that it allowed me to travel the world in open and give me that perspective so I can, when I move here, I can see an opportunity to go invest in America, I’m going to take those with two hands because I can see the opportunities compared to where I come from, how cash flow is so much more prevalent here. The barriers to entry into the United States market from a real estate investing perspective are so much lower than Australia. I can see a lot of people like that, a lot of international folks like that.
The message I have for the American folks is realize what’s in your backyard. Don’t be ignorant. I’m telling you this for a reason. Perspective is good. Listen to what I’m saying. Go out and educate yourself on what is in your backyard, what is in the state across from you, or in an affordable market where you can start buying and investing.
Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore. I’ve said that earlier in the show. It’s really true that if you stop learning, you stop growing, and I think that’s what people get in there. Not just Americans. I’ve got Aussie mates back in my hometown, they’ve not left. They’re in that same blinkers on type of scenario. Not that that’s an issue, which is that if you want to understand the benefits of real estate investing, then get out of your own way sometimes and just start going out and educating yourself on what’s in your backyard.
Jason: What would be a good place to start with getting education towards this?
Reed: Well, sitting here right now talking about it, listening to your show. I still remember when I moved to the United States, I was going to real estate investment seminars made up in Aussie, and I remember being pitched to pay $10,000–$20,000 for a guru to help me teach everything. Then, when I got to the States, particularly in New York, the Big Apple, the firehose of information, it was all readily available at my fingertips. Websites, podcasts, books, meet-up events.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but at the end of the day, you do have to spend time. If you don’t want to spend the money investing in yourself or the time, then you’re never going to go anywhere. You got to understand that this is an investment in yourself.
So, I would start by listening to podcasts. They’re free. Picking up a couple of books that can start educating you on whatever niche you want to get involved with, with real estate. Maybe just financial education and literacy that you need to be sharper on.
Join a local meet-up group for real estate. I encourage everyone listening to the show, if you don’t have any experience, if you go to two meet-ups a month for the next six months, that’s 12 meet-ups. I bet your bottom dollar and I bet you $100 that they will know, or they would have created a circle around them, more knowledgeable than they were listening to the show today.
It’s about getting out there, being willing to pick-up a book, being willing to say, “Hey, it’s okay that I don’t know what this is about, but I’m willing to learn.” I’m an example of that. I’m self-taught, I went to university with structural engineering, and now I run a multi-million dollar investment firm.
You can change. The real advice is that we are in the digital age. It’s all at our fingertips. Go out, start investing yourself from an education perspective, and you will see change.
Jason: Reed, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. How can people get more information from you as to what you’re up to or get plugged into whatever you’ve got going on?
Reed: Simplest way, go to my website. It’s reedgoossens.com. I live in Los Angeles. If anyone wants to hit me up for a beer, coffee, or lunch, just shoot me an email at info@reedgoossens.com. You can check it out all there. Find the podcast, find the books, find the videos. It’s all there, so have fun.
Jason: All right. Hey, thanks for coming on the show, and like Reed said, start getting involved in investing. Just start, right? There’s this power in just getting started. Set that intention, start going to some meet-up groups. You can check out meetup.com. You can check out Facebook groups, there are all kinds of resources available, and maybe you’ll find your passion the way Reed has.
Reed, I appreciate you.
Reed: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Jason. I really appreciate it.
Jason: It’s been a pleasure.
All right, so if you are a property management entrepreneur and you’re wanting doors, then reach out. We’ve got some cool programs that we’re adding to our lineup of what we’re doing. We’re really excited about something new that we’re launching, the DoorGrow Referral Amplifier that Jay Berube and I are doing, so make sure you check that out.
He is an amazing entrepreneur, one of my clients that was able to close and acquire over 300 doors into this property management portfolio from ground zero in Florida in about two years. He did it largely through outbound, reach out to agents for referrals, and he systemized this. He’s now even got VAs helping do this for him. He runs his company remotely from another state now, and it’s still growing.
So, reach out and check us out if you’re interested in this. By the time this airs on iTunes, it will probably already be filled. We’ve only got 20 seats, so if you’re watching this live, then get in. We’ve already sold about half the seats already, and we haven’t even announced it publicly. I’m just throwing it out there now. Get in before we close out the remaining 10 seats. Bye everyone.