100 Episodes: What I Learned Building Real Estate Wealth | Ep 100

Speaker: Welcome to the 100th episode of the Furlo Capital Real Estate Podcast. Yep. Where we dive into the intricacies of passive real estate investing and our mission for the 100th time is to equip people to invest wisely in both property and people, so that together we can build wealth while improving housing.

I'm James. And for the 100th time, this is my wife Jessi. Yay.

Speaker 2: 100. 100 seems like one

Speaker: of those

Speaker 2: numbers that's that's a lot. It's not a lot. It's in certain contexts it's like, Ooh, that's a lot. Like a hundred bucks to a kid is whoa, that's a lot. Like a hundred bucks to us is eh, I'll take it, I'll take it.

But I

Speaker: wouldn't say no to a hundred bones. It's

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker: Yeah, that's good. Yeah, no, that's true. So like a

Speaker 2: hundred podcasts, is that whoa. That's cool. You did a lot. Or is that like I,

Speaker: Oh, all

Speaker 2: We're getting

Speaker: there. I haven't seen the stats recently, so I'm not gonna, don't quote me on this, but it's something like, if you do more than 10 episodes, you're like top 5%.

Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah. Most of all podcasters. Yeah. Most

Speaker: weird. Most of 'em, they started up, they do a handful of 'em and then just never start really. It's a very long tail. Oh. But yeah, so I would imagine. It's even just getting to a hundred is a feat in of itself.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I guess I see a lot of podcasts that have, it's almost like they wanted to create a series and so they created that and so there's 20 to 30 episodes, but then it's that's it.

They didn't keep going. So it's less of a talk show and more of a class, so yeah, I think that's

Speaker: even rarer than the one I'm talking about. Oh yeah. Interesting. I see stuff get started all the time and then it just pitches Yeah. Goes away. Which is fine. No, we're here. I tried different things.

I also am a big believer in that idea of do a hundred reps do something. Yeah. You gotta just get your reps in, you gotta practice it. It's something we're talking about with our kids.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker: And here we are. Here we are. So now I can actually start caring about the stats 100. Before then it was just about finding our voice, but here we are.

100. So here's what I did. I went back and looked at the previous 99 episodes. Whoa. And picked one from each, I guess we'll call it decade that I wanted to talk about one.

Speaker 2: Okay. One from each group. I was like. How long have we been doing this? Yeah. No, like one through 10, 11 to 20. Yeah. Yeah.

Each. 10 z That's a decade, right? Isn't it? A decade refers to years, I feel are you sure? Yeah. Is that true? Otherwise okay, a group of 10 is just

Speaker: What

Speaker 2: is

Speaker: that?

Speaker 2: Each group of 10 a dozen is a group of, I feel like,

Speaker: I feel like 12. I agree with you that most of the time it is used to talking about to years, but I'm pretty certain.

So like for example, if someone says, Hey, I'm going on a Century bike ride, that's talking about distance. That's not talking about time.

Speaker 2: All right. All, I'll give it to you.

Speaker: So

Speaker 2: exactly. Highlight from each decade. Each

Speaker: decade, yes. So I got them. So the first one is from episode three.

Speaker 2: Two, three,

Speaker: where we talked about buying Columbus and the journey.

I do remember that. Plus we shared all the numbers in that episode. Yeah. Yeah, man, do you remember what you did on that very first night?

Speaker 2: I cried.

Speaker: Cried. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2: We ate mac and cheese and I cried.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. 'cause we were going around and we were just like, oh my gosh, we bought a dump.

And I'm like, I know. Isn't this great? I was like,

Speaker 2: I, I can't do it. Yeah. And we had planned to live in it too, so it was like, oh my gosh, I'm working to live here. It's really dumpy.

Speaker: Yeah. And it was crazy because we decided to fix up the side we were living in because the people on the other side were moving out.

And then we moved over. Then we did some quick cleaning, moved over to the other side, and our very first tenants were

Speaker 3: horrible. Yeah.

Speaker: And we learned a lot. We did learn a lot in a negative sense. It was a school of hard knocks. Yeah. But it was good ultimately 'cause we were like, oh, we can't just make this up.

Like we actually have to have a plan in place. Yeah. So it was good.

Speaker 2: Episode number 12. Okay.

Speaker: We talked about the three powerful Seth Godin principles for shaping your investor mindset. That was back when I had that daily calendar. Oh. For Seth Godin and I picked three of the daily things. All

Speaker 2: All right.

I remember the daily calendar. I don't remember what's the point. Were, so we talked about

Speaker: cost versus price. Okay. It was the first idea. Sure. That idea of there, there are two different things. Sure. But it's important to keep in mind and there are hidden costs per real estate. And then we talked about stretching boundaries.

Speaker 2: Alright.

Speaker: And his idea was like, you in order to not break, you gotta stretch. And his thing was like, it's gonna be tiring, it could be painful. But you can get better each time. It was like talking about stretching yourself. And I made the point podcast of Hey, if you're listening to this, you're stretching right now, improving.

So good job, you're still going. And then the last one was fairness at a, in. Fairness in investing was concept where it's not just about the dollars and cents. There's other things to look at for it.

Speaker 2: Yeah, our wisdom. Points of wisdom,

Speaker: Which is what he's good at.

Speaker 2: Huh?

Speaker: That like wisdom. E

Speaker 2: you think you're gonna get another you don't have a calendar right now of a daily wisdom thing, right?

Speaker: No.

Speaker 2: Oh,

Speaker: I know. I don't need one. Maybe

Speaker 2: next year.

Speaker: It's weird there. There's definitely, the daily calendars are interesting, but there definitely comes a point in time where you're like, this feels like a chore.

Rather than

Speaker 2: That's, I like, I have one that, it's like a recurring one. It doesn't have the year on it. It's just like the date this day of the month. Yeah. Yeah. The month. The month and the date. I just I get behind and so then when I go, I just flip to the whatever the day I'm on, I'm like, you know what?

Whatever that works, I'm gonna skip all the, for tear off. For tear off ones. That's, oh my God, I'm gonna miss it.

Speaker: I can't go back.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Although the far side one was highly entertaining. That was a couple years ago.

Speaker: I don't remember the far side one, but you're probably right. Yeah,

Speaker 2: it was like a far side comic a day.

So good. Sounds

Speaker: great. That must have been yours, not mine.

Speaker 2: No, I think it was yours.

Speaker: No. I had an office quotes one, office quotes, maybe I did, but a far side one. I don't know. I don't know. Whatever. They're fun. Anyways, they're cool. Number 21, episode 21 was, we were talking about the 10 31 exchange and we were going over key terms and practical steps for normal people.

Yes. Was what was like me. And what we did was we bought two duplexes in a single family home. More stuff. And then later on we've 10 31 those into a set of warehouses.

Speaker 2: Right?

Speaker: And you have up legs and down legs and crazy legs, and there's not crazy legs, but but there's just some, there's some subtleties there and some really important timeframes that matter.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And the, the premise of a 10 31 is. You're selling and buying something in the same transaction. Correct.

Speaker: In order

Speaker 2: to, and it has to. Why? You're exchanging your equity 'cause that essentially you're putting that value into something. Bigger or, yeah, more valuable.

Speaker: There's a bigger reason why you would do it starts with taxes.

T Yes. Stands for trouble. Yeah. You, yeah, because you don't, '

Speaker 2: cause you're like deferring the income 'cause you're rolling it into this other investment. Yeah. Usually

Speaker: you have to do either capital gains, right? Or depreciation, recapture. Yeah. And this essentially lets you roll those.

Speaker 2: Into this next thing, new, a new property.

Sure.

Speaker: Yeah. And so your basis is lower. So if you ever do sell that next one, it's oh man, look out. But but yeah, it allows you you can just roll more into it and in theory, get higher returns from putting more money into it. All sorts of good stuff happens. That was a highlight. Yeah, that was a good one.

Yeah. Check it out. Episode 21. Episode 38. Okay, we're getting there. We talked about you. Every

Speaker 2: time you look at me like I'm gonna know what the episode is. You don remember 38. What was

Speaker: 38? I have no idea. Yeah, no. This one was the fixer upper we didn't fix.

Speaker 2: Ooh, yep. I remember that First ave. Yeah. First Avenue soccer

Speaker: here.

A lot of my highlights are gonna be deals that we actually did. Yeah. Yeah, we used to joke about that. We bought a fixer upper, then didn't fix her up. That was our place on First Avenue. So it was duplex, duplex, single family home. It was that single family home that we were talking about there, and that was like, man, I still remember.

We were there at red Robin. Having dinner. It was all pre-kids. And we're those weirdos who, when we were waiting for our food to come, we were just scrolling through Zillow, looking at listings. 'cause again, we're weirdos looking for deals. And this house popped up and I remember I saw the picture of it, and it just looked like a piece of garbage.

It had like moss all over the roof. Pepto Bismol siding, shag carpet, wooden windows, like it was bad. I was like, oh, it looks like a dump. And you were like, yeah, but look at the price. I was like, yeah, I know, but look at the pictures. You're like, but look at the price. So we agreed after dinner, we drove by and kid you not, there's a homeless dude in the front yard.

And I was like, alright, I think we've seen enough here. And you were like, I know. Let's call our broker. I was like, what? That's it was a flip flop. The girl who was crying that first time to I'm like, oh my gosh. Oh

Speaker 2: yeah, we would definitely had a role reversal on that deal. Yeah. Where I was like, but look at like the numbers are so great.

There's such an upside, and I was like, it is the Dumpiest house, like on the street. So that's great.

Speaker: Yeah. Because it was listed for $60,000 and it's like ridiculous. Normally would've been like 120,000.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It

Speaker: was like, it was half off. It, just

Speaker 2: half off.

Speaker: And it was just because of the size and where it was located.

Yep. It you couldn't qualify for an FHA loan.

And flippers just weren't that interested in it. So it was this weird tweeter space. So we walked in just conventional, no questions asked, no contingencies, and just bought it.

And yeah, that actually worked out really well. Yep.

As, and the 10 31, honestly,

Speaker 2: it was a cute house. I thought it was a cute house. It had character. Yeah, it had built-ins. Oh yeah. And like it was super quirky in different ways. Yeah. But. It was cute and it was like, at the time, pre-kids, it was the right size for us. Yeah. I think it was A 2, 2 1 1.

Yeah. My, and I had this upper weird, my office was in

Speaker: the living room. Yeah. And then once we had our first kid, it got, it felt tighter. And then it was when we were pregnant with s Samson, that's when we were like, okay, we can't have to make this work anymore. Yeah. Turned it into a rental. And then, like I said, we, 10 31 did something else.

Sold it for two 60. Yeah. At the time. So yeah, that was a good deal. Aw, that is a highlight. Yeah. Yeah. That was fun. Episode 42. Hey. And the title of this one was Don't Panic, the Hitchhiker's Guide to Passive Investing. So I just celebrated my 42nd birthday and I've had a few people already asking me like, so what's the meaning of life?

Hey, I got all year to figure this out. And I'm gonna take it on. I don't know if I have a. I got a couple, I got a couple potential thoughts and answers for it. That's awesome. But yeah, it was fun because we just, we connected a bunch of the sci-fi humor to yeah, to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It talks about having a towel and universal transl, or not to universal translator. It's got the babble fish and all those things. And yeah, just fun. Can I,

Speaker 2: can I make a confession?

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker 2: I have never actually read that book,

Speaker: but you've seen the movie right.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: Which movie Follows?

Follows? Pretty close. Does it follow pretty closely? Yeah. There's multiple movies to it. I think I've seen the movie that the latest one was, yeah,

Speaker 2: seen the movie.

Speaker: It's good. Yeah, it was fun. That was in my reading Classic books year or listening to classic books here, or Christmas Carroll was on there.

Speaker 2: Would you recommend reading it?

Speaker: It's weird.

Speaker 2: I, that's how I feel about the movie. I'm like, it's weird. The book's

Speaker: just as weird. Okay. It's fun. It's, yeah. Whatever. It's sci-fi. Yeah. Yeah. Huh? It's there you go. It's weird, so I'm trying to like,

Speaker 2: what word am I thinking of? Weird.

Yeah. It's just weird.

Speaker: It's it, there's just a bunch of stuff that goes on. It's all loosely connected, but it also isn't necessarily there's this overarching grand story that's connecting everything together. Yep. It's just you're on a, you're on an adventure. It's more important that they're having like weird to make weird things happen.

Then for you to get done and go, wow, that was amazing growth. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's no heroes circle, whatever. It's just a fun little adventure. All right. So yeah, so that was the first half. First half century there, if you will. Yeah. And then in episode 52 we talked about the, from a slum lord to success, the 11 unit turnaround.

Ooh yep. Yeah. So that's the one. That's good one I like to share. 'Cause I always try to go for the shock factor. Yep. We bought this 11 unit apartment building. It was 50% occupied and 100% of the occupants were sex offenders. And the guy who bought it was. Losing money on the property.

And so it was slowly turning into disrepair. And he himself was like, I become a S lawnmower. I don't want this. I want out. And so he sold it. And and it was actually because we had been talking to other investors that they knew. People who knew this guy who then connected us with him.

It was our first true though off market deal. Just Did

Speaker 2: he have it listed?

Speaker: Nope.

Speaker 2: He just, he was like, I can't list it. No one's gonna buy this. His,

Speaker: that was his thing. He was calling me to help. To hire me as a property manager to turn it around. Oh yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2: To get it ready to list and sell. Yeah. And I

Speaker: asked him, at the time, I was like what are your goals?

What do you wanna do with this? And he's I just wanna fix it up and sell it. And I was like, what if you just sell it? If you sell it? And so that was what we did. And yeah, that was o our role

Speaker 2: switched back on that one. I remember walking through and you were just like yes. Each new thing we saw, I was just like, oh my gosh.

I think we're done. Yeah, so the first

Speaker: unit had bedbugs. The second unit had mold from an exposed sewer pipe. The third unit, you couldn't see out the windows. So gross because there was so much nicotine in the room. The smoking, yeah. The fourth unit was rented out to the Department of Corrections for people getting out of jail for a sex offense.

So it smelled like a men's locker room. Then the fifth unit had cat yearn, which I always like the joke that cat yearn is a smell of money. And by then I was just like, yes. That's awesome. Yeah. And yeah, that was just the bottom half actually. The top half wasn't as bad. It wasn't as bad, but it was it was, there were some funky layouts and it was a project.

Yeah, it

Speaker 2: was definitely a project,

Speaker: but it yeah we found new homes for everyone. And actually, honestly, it's a great story. I highly recommend it. 52 listening to it. 'cause we learned a lot. We did a lot of good things. They all landed in good spots too. So it turned out really well.

That was a great one. Episode 61. Oh man. How one property manager defrauded an HOA out of $75,000. I remember that one. Oh my gosh. Gosh, bad. And this was a property manager bad who I was looking at an investment and I was considering hiring him. Yeah. At one point. And I just remember at the time talking to him, being like, man, something's off.

Like this just doesn't feel right. Yeah. And yeah, it turns out that he I. Was causing all sorts of problems. He was representing himself in ways that he wasn't. Yeah. And was doing some really sleazy, probably illegal stuff, but because his offices were located in Washington and he was working in Oregon, it suddenly fell into a federal thing and Yeah.

Which, I dunno I haven't followed him. I have zero desire to find out what's going on with that. Sure. But we actually did a previous episode talking about that property and I mentioned that property manager, and it was this person reached out to me to say, Hey, you need to watch out for him. Yeah. And yeah.

And then the second half of that episode we go into okay, how do you know if someone's a good property manager or not? Yep. And I've actually shared that episode with a few people who wanna hire me as a client. I'm like,

Speaker 2: here's how to evaluate this. The

Speaker: second half's really good, but the first half is kinda the setup.

Like, why this is important. Yeah. Why you want to care about it. Yeah, that was a good one. Number eight, or episode 80, I should say. What my 10-year-old thinks about building wealth through real estate. So that was, is that the one you did with her? I did with Eleanor. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. She sat in for you.

Yeah. Sick. I think you were sick. I think I was sick or something. That sounds about right. Yeah. And yeah, I just I asked, she did a good job. Lots, some questions about what her dream house would be, what she thinks that I do for a living.

Speaker 2: You gotta get Samson on here.

Speaker: Yeah, he said he wasn't interested.

Oh. And so I just decided not to push it, but yeah. Yeah. I should make that happen. Alright. That'd be fun. Could talk about it. If he

Speaker 2: gets to wear like a cool outfit or something, he'd be into that.

Speaker: He might be into that. Yeah. He does like the dress up. Yeah. And I think once you like if you, once you start going, you just forget that all this stuff is here and it's okay.

Yeah. You're just having a

Speaker 2: conversation.

Speaker: But yeah. No, it was really nice and I have had. Where, or who was I talking to? This was very recent. I was talking to someone and he was asking about how you teach your kids about real estate and investing or business in general. And what was the. I don't remember the context of it anymore.

Oh, lots of

Speaker 2: people ask that.

Speaker: Yeah. And and at the time, common question, my answer was like for us it's really easy because I live this life. I can bring them along with me, like in the summer times they come with me, we talk about it. They know about the concepts, Yeah. When we tell them and it might just be like when we tell 'em how many units that we own and manage, they're like, okay, cool.

Whatever. It's we'll talk to other kids about it and they'll be like, what? Yeah, no, for us it's normal, but the kids go with me, they see it

Speaker 2: well, and they say things like, oh, my dad's at one of the properties. And they're like, one of the properties. What do you mean? Don't you just have a house?

It's no. Like

Speaker: yeah,

Speaker 2: manage

Speaker: a bunch of other places, but they but that's you just kinda stupid 'em in the concepts. And we play like the cash flow board game with them and eventually we'll upgrade to the real one. Yeah. And it'll be fantastic. But yeah. So those are just some of the ways that we.

Let 'em know. Yeah. Here's

Speaker 2: what's going on. I love too, that like they pitch in sometimes they put in some sweat equity. Yeah. 'Cause it's yeah, this property needs to be cleaned. The cleaner couldn't get in. We're gonna go take care of it. And it's come on, let's go. Yeah.

Speaker: We did that.

Was that last? It was the beginning part of this year. I think, yeah. We had to go

Speaker 2: remove some junk or turn a property.

Speaker: Yep. We had to do the final cleaning.

Speaker 2: Oh, yep. That's right. Yeah. We did that one. I was like, come

Speaker: on guys, let's all go. Yeah. It all helped. It was great. It was cool. Episode 89, getting there.

Oh, I hate this one. How to buy a property for a dollar and still lose money.

Speaker 2: So sad. It still hurts.

Speaker: It's good. But yeah, this was a mobile home that we bought so much potential. We're a dollar, then we put a bunch of money into fixing it up. We couldn't sell it right away and the holding cost, we ended up just losing money on it.

Yeah. It was super frustrating. But I didn't lose any investor money 'cause I used all my own, but still super lame. Yeah. So that happens. Yeah, there's there's reasons for it and we're trying to do things to not have that happen again. Yeah. Essentially just makes us more conservative, which means we have to say no to more deals.

But I am okay with that. Yeah. 'cause it really wasn't fun. Losing money. Yeah. And then episode 94, a recent one, how I purchased the tallest building in Oregon, east of the Cascade. So this was really more of a review of Yeah the highlights

Speaker 2: are purchases. All of our deals all the purchases

Speaker: are, those are fun episodes, honestly.

They're fun episodes. They're fun. I highly recommend them. But yeah, if you haven't listened to that one recently it's awesome. The way that we financed it was highly. It was pretty creative. Not the most creative deal I've ever done, but pretty creative. Yeah. And it's in Baker City and it's awesome.

And I'm currently in the process of making the website for it. So that people can reserve the ballroom 'cause there's a ballroom. Woo-hoo. And a future. Yeah. If you're planning an event and

Speaker 2: pretty cool.

Speaker: If you wanna rent an office space or live there, there's a lot of stuff going on. And that property, it's super fun.

It's very cool. It's a syndication, so it's myself and a whole bunch of other owners have it. But I run it for all of them and so they don't have to worry about it. Yeah. And yeah, and then

Speaker 2: it's super intriguing to me, like stepping back and just seeing like those highlights throughout the year.

You, you do learn a lot through like storytelling or like living or seeing somebody else's experience and then I dunno, just hearing the nuances of what they did, what they maybe learned from what they shouldn't have done, what they would do next time, and so that,

Yeah. Maybe we could do like a little offshoot or like a focus thing on getting other people in here, being like, what was the deal that you learned from? What did you learn?

Speaker: Yeah. All right. I like this when we have a little on air meeting in terms of what? Some

Speaker 2: brainstorming. Brainstorming. I I just, I find it interesting yeah. All of those episodes, they had some context, they had learning involved.

There were definitely numbers analysis, like all the concepts and you need the concept. Episodes two. 'cause like it balances out, it goes deeper, then you see how it's applied. Yeah. But it's interesting to me okay, what if we had a concept, of we wanna focus in on 10 30 ones Again, who's done that in a different context Yeah.

Than we've done it. Can they come and tell their story? Oh, interesting. Or perhaps they just submit it. And then we read it or I don't know. Oh, it's better if they come and tell it, but

Speaker: yeah. All right. I will, that's interesting to me. Yeah, I think that's something that just popped into my head that that we're gonna be thinking about.

Yeah. As we're rolling into next year. What do the next 100 look like,

Speaker 2: man? Yeah. I'm like, I just go right to that. I'm like yeah. We did the a hundred. Yeah. Where are we headed next? What's next? That's unusual. Here's another roll flip, yeah. That's not typically me. I like it.

Speaker: No, it's good.

Yeah, no, it's good. I like it. Yeah. I think, yeah, it was a good, it was a good hundred. I feel like it was a good hundred. It was again, I was less worried about like the stats behind it and just more of the, Hey, let's get into this cadence. Let's prove that we can do it. I feel like we've done that, which is good.

But yeah. Now that question is Yeah. How do we take it to the next level? If you've got ideas, we're open to it. I know one of the things that. I'm trying to think about like you were talking about the stories. I've been doing some research recently and stories are one of the ways that you change mindsets.

Hides people. It's very rare that you can just logic people uhhuh into it. I can see that it's through the stories. You hit that emotional connection. 'cause I know that, and I'm just kinda, I'm just gonna throw this out here without a solution. I know that oftentimes, like the person, you who's listening to this podcast, you are interested.

And the other, like your significant other is usually less interested.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker: And the question is, how do you. Not drag them along, but how do you bring them along? And so I'm trying to think through what does that look like? How is there a way for us to help in that process as well. And yeah, one of the things I've learned just in my initial research is yeah, no stories are the things that are convincing or it just helps with the mindset shift.

Yeah. And so anyways, that's not that I'm thinking about as well, but yeah, I like your idea too, of maybe getting some more people in and Yeah. Hearing their stories. It could be cool. I like it. That'd be cool. Yeah, 100. It's cool. Thank you so much for listening. If you've caught all 100 gold star to you.

Good job. Ooh, maybe giveaways. Ooh, yeah, we, that's another cool thing for podcasts. Could do giveaways. That is a thing, huh? Okay. All right. Giveaways. I like it. I like it. Yeah, I don't think they'll do. I don't foresee a lot of like solo episode type of stuff, or it's just me talking. I like, I do the dynamic between you and I.

Yeah. Who knows if you're sick letting the kids wanna come on with me? I might. But Chuck seems

Speaker 2: pretty interested in the podcast. My gosh. Yes. You could interview him, man,

Speaker: after last week's debacle, we locked him in the house. We're like, Nope, he's not allowed out here. How does

Speaker 2: a crazy loud puppy teach you about real estate?

Oh, my word. No pit. That's not a

Speaker: horrible idea. Yeah. But no, we're gonna keep going. That's mainly the plan is we're gonna keep going. Yeah. I know I'm enjoying doing this. I think what we're producing is good and hopefully

Speaker 2: it's helpful Yeah. To people. And

Speaker: I think so too. Yeah. Yeah. So awesome. So again, thank you so much for listening, for helping us get to.

100 episodes and having it not just be me and my editor being the only ones who hear it. So yeah, and if you are interested in investing with us love to hear from you. You can check us out at our website, it's at furlo.com, and you can learn all about us and read more about these stories. Listen to every single one of these episodes if you want to.

So yeah, again, thanks for listening. We truly appreciate it. Have a great day.