Episode #064 - Maximizing Trust and Managing Risks With Neal Stenzel!

Today our hosts Braden Cheek, Brian Duck, and Joel Thompson with The Criterion Fund team up with Neal Stenzel, CFO of Oral Roberts University, to discuss his personal experiences when investing with The Criterion Fund!

I use this as a life principle, but a lot of things in life you have to figure out what not to do, it's not necessarily what to do, it's not where to go, it's what not to do. And so it wasn't that investing itself was all bad. It was that the way I went about it was a mistake. And so I had to regroup and recoil and say, okay, people are making money, hand over fist all the time, it's happening every day. People are doing it, so I'm just not doing it. So what have I done wrong? Let's learn from that and let's go back in, but let's go back in a little bit more careful, let's get together with some guys that know something. Alright guys, welcome back to how to invest in commercial real estate. We've got a great show for you today. The three of us just got back from ICSC out in Las Vegas. It's the International Council of Shopping centers. It's huge. It's huge. It's it is international. Everybody that's anybody in retail commercial real estate is at this conference at the Las Vegas Convention center. And uh I think we had a bunch of good meetings, we talked to both brokers and some equity partners and just trying to to meet a network and I think it was overall a good show.

We've only been back one day and somebody's already sent us a deal from that conference, right? Yeah, We got a ton of deal flow for for Q three. we we got to talk to a ton of brokers and and a lot of them think there's gonna be a massive uptick and inventory hitting the market so there may be some amazing opportunities coming up. Yeah the other news we have today is that this will be the last podcast in this studio which happens to be brian's kind of office at his house and now we've built out a studio upstairs and so next week it's gonna have a whole new look and feel and we hope that it looks as good in reality as it does in our minds. Yeah. Yeah sure I can finally get some work done after a year and a half of not having an office. Yeah that's been my excuse anyway. Well okay so today is an interesting show because we have a guest and it is uh an investor of ours and what we thought would be interesting is to give perspective from an investor on both. I wasn't involved in commercial real estate, knew us, knew some people that were involved kind of started seeing our deals uh started to invest and has now been invested in, I think multiple deals and so we thought it would just be good information for people that are considering getting in real estate or becoming investors to hear kind of a real life story of someone that wasn't in the game, that is in the game now and how their experience has been.

So I will welcome Neil stencil to the podcast kneel and I used to work together at Caldas technologies along with brian, he was CFO there for years and one of the owners like brian which eventually sold to Honeywell. And so Neil welcome and I just want to give you an opportunity just to kind of tell who you are and a little bit of your background and then we'll get into how you got into commercial real estate. Sounds great. Well thank you very much and I'm thrilled to be on the show and uh and I love working with you guys. Um I'm Neil Stenzel, I am the CFO out at Oral roberts university, been there for about nine years. Uh this coming june, it's hard to believe that time is why. Yeah. So um you know after calavius, right, I ended up having, you know, a little bit of cash and you know, just think about, okay, what do I do with investments? You know, mid forties, where do you go from there? And so what did you, had you invested much before then? I mean or did you have any cash? I mean did you do stocks, bonds, mutual funds, any of that? So I was probably traditionally boring. Right, I was 8-5 guy had a job my whole life, graduate from college, get a degree, go get a job.

That's what I thought you were supposed to do You set up a 41K plan, you try to pay off your house a little bit early, You know you you kind of do a lot of blocking and tackling, you do the right things, try to get out of debt. Um and that's the kind of stuff I did for probably the 1st 25 years of my working career. I never had a whole lot of money, never took a lot of risk, never took, never, never made a lot of returns and then once you got a chunk of cash, what did you invest in at that point? So what you do with it? Okay, so being an accountant, being conservative by nature, the first, the first four years for me was probably 20 two 1009 eight or 9 and Then we got the rest of the money like in 12 I think it was around. Yeah, so so there was and but but at the time the market was really, really volatile. I mean super volatile. I mean you're going through the great recession, right? We just come through that. So I had just watched all this happen. I watched people lose a gazillion dollars in the market and I thought, ok, step number one, let's not lose all this in about three weeks.

Right? And so I capital preservation was the number one goal. Capital preservation. I have never seen, you know, this kind of money before, I just had my 41 K. Balance, a little bit of equity in the house. I thought you know, let's not screw this up. So let's just park this someplace where I think it's safe to earn a few percent, did some bonds, did some stocks and figured I'd write out the volatility in the market and, and, and see what people do. And then I went out and searched for a lot of advice, interesting. I like the tail into that. I went out and searched for some advice, you know, background and CFO bought and sold the company at this point and still sitting from the perspective of, hey, you know, I'm maybe a little ignorant in this. I need to go out and seek some advice. I think, I think you have to look at yourself and you have to say, okay, listen, what are you good at and what you're not good at? I was, You know, okay at going to work every day, taking an 8-5 job following orders. I can also tell you from experience that you weren't just good, but you were excellent at, um, managing companies money, um, understanding profit and loss.

Um, the accounting portion, uh, probably the best I've ever seen at that. So, and analyzing, uh, um, situations money situations, you, you were really good at what I saw it. I appreciate you saying that. And, and of course that didn't make me a great investor though. That's right. And so I, I said to myself, okay, I'm not an expert in investing, right? And so that's why I went and sought the advice. I said, listen, I've got some money. I've never really had this kind of money before. I don't want to lose it all. And I'm also not great at this. This is new territory for me. So where do I want to go from here? And I was interested in taking some risk. Okay. And I did take a little bit of risk. I ended up getting involved in, um, in kind of my own deal, if you will. And I found out about an opportunity to invest in a little business out in colorado uh, complete disaster, complete disaster. Right? And so I learned a lot. I mean it was it was a heavy price to pay. But I learned a lot. But I also kind of regrouped and I said, okay, now what do I do? I need to, I need to speak more advice. I need to be a little bit more careful, you know, a little bit more measured if you will. And so I went on with my life.

What I love about that is for the first thing is often times, education is expensive. And I remember the first time I bought an apartment complex and I didn't understand the numbers and the owner had kind of manipulated them and we got in and we lost money and we had to sell at a loss and I think we lost, I'll call it 60 90 grand And my business partner and I, we looked at each other and instead of saying, I'll never do that again, which is what most people do, they get out of the game is we just looked at each other and say, Okay, we just got a $30,000 education. Uh, and and we got to take what we learned from this and then we got to go build on it. And I like that, that you did that you you you you made a mistake or maybe learned a lesson and you decided to take that information and get better instead of getting out of the investment game. Well, I'd also say what I what I learned and I use this as a life principle, but a lot of things in life you have to figure out what not to do. It's not necessarily what to do, it's not where to go, it's what not to do. And so it wasn't that investing itself was all bad. It was that the way I went about, it was a mistake.

And so I had to regroup and recoil and say, okay, people are making money, Hand over fist all the time. It's happening every day. People are doing it. So I'm just not doing it. So what have I done wrong? Let's learn from that and let's go back in, but let's go back in a little bit more careful, let's get together with some guys that know something, they have done it before. So I I love what you said there about what not to do, what is what is one thing that that we shouldn't do and which we should question away from. Listen, I work at a college and so that's what kids are doing when they're 18 years old, they come to school, they're trying to figure out what to do. But the truth is they find out nine things that they should not do before they figure out what they really should do. So back to the statement about making a mistake. It's okay to make a mistake investing. It's okay to lose some money because it is an education. The only way to never make a mistake is never to do it. Yeah, never to take risk. And I I swear people that try their entire life to avoid risk, uh they're not going to end up achieving their goals. There's just no way around it in this life. You can't have what you want to have unless you are willing to take a risk. And I'm not saying that the whole farm, I'm just saying life is about taking risk, making mistakes, failing, and learning and then that's how people get where they're going.

And so part of this show needs to be teaching people how to take intelligent risks. Being willing to fail and learn through the failure. And that's the only way you end up on the other side where you want to be you and risk. It can be a misleading word because you know, it's just one word, but there's this vast range of risk that you have to learn to be be tolerable with. And like you said, it's, it's educated risk. It's thought about risk. It's, it's risk that you did due diligence on its risk, that you got advice on its risk that you talk to people about and at some point and at each and every step, it becomes less risky every single time because you're learning, you're turning over stones and you're saying, hey, you know, if this happens, we'll go, oh wow, that could be bad. Stay away from that. You know, So let's, let's talk about that because you have in my mind, I categorize it as risk and risky. And so risk might be, hey, I'm gonna buy this, uh, this retail center and I might lose this tenant. Yeah. One out of 10 tenants. Okay, That's, that's risk.

I have to, I have to assume some amount of risk. But let's say that I'm gonna buy a 40,000 square foot, you know, big box with a tenant that's slightly on shaky ground, I can get a high return. But it's risky because if they, if they bail, then I don't have anything supporting me and I have to make the payment myself or you know, like what I did when I first started investing, I invested with people, I didn't know I had no way of knowing if they were trustworthy or not. That's risky versus just taking on some risk. It's funny you mentioned that because when you dipped your toe back in that pond and start investing, I mean, because this happened before precision, right? Invested with people you didn't know. And it also, you know, the real crowd thing. I mean, some of those didn't necessarily go amazing again, didn't didn't know them, right? So there's a little bit of a theme here is you really, one way to eliminate the risky nature of investing is to invest with a proven track record or someone that you have some familiarity with. Uh because otherwise there's no incentive for them not to be honest.

And Truthful, that's a good segue into into Neil 1st investing with us because Let's jump to 2000, late 2019, early 2020. Brandon and I approached you about investing with us, uh a shopping center in broken arrow. And I distinctly remember you saying that um one of the first thing you said, well, brian, I I trust you and I know you have a track record that's gonna help. Um So, but but other than that we came to you with with the numbers and and we were we were touting 11 or 12% cash on cash, 20 plus percent. I r r what was your first impression when we started talking about returns like that? Because that's super exciting right? Because I mean I'm still in my um I'm getting older at this point right now. I'm in my fifties, right? And I'm saying to myself, okay, do I want to make you know dividends of three and 4% for the rest of my life and oh by the way at some point you have retirement, so life events is starting to happen. And so I was looking for something. I was I was I mean the timing was right but I also knew you and I trusted you and I will say that when you go into investing, talk about risk, I want to go back to that for a second.

There's this thing called Swindle Risk which is kind of what you're talking about. If you don't know who you're in business with, there's always a chance a very good chance many times because you're dealing with people's money that you're gonna get swindled. So it's really really important to know who you're dealing with. And so I had a relationship with brian I had known brian for for a couple of decades really. And so I trust him, I knew about Brandon, okay. And I heard your story and I believed it, okay. And when it comes down to returns again, my first reaction is I don't want to lose money, I don't want to put money into something and find out it was a black hole? And it's gone stupid risk, right? Remember you asking about the risk was on your list. And I sent you a couple of emails saying, hey, I'm just trying to work through this. This is all brand new territory for me. It's not that it's bad territory, just this new territory for me and I need to be educated a little bit on this and I need to talk to somebody who I can trust. And so I sent you a couple of emails you said, here's what, here's been my experience. I've been doing this for nine years or whatever it was at the time. And and had all very positive experiences.

You know, and you talked about some of the things that could go wrong. Some of the things that can go wrong is maybe maybe you lose a tenant, but you don't lose the whole shopping center. Um And so maybe you don't get a distribution that quarter or maybe you get a less distribution than you thought you were going to get. But it's not like you lost all your money. So it's it's kind of a calculated risk. You know, it's a reasonable risk. It's a smart risk if you will. But to get those kind of returns, it's something that you really ought to try and you don't bet the whole farm right? You say okay. And so I ask you, how much, you know, are you putting in, I mean here you're putting your own money in. I believe you. I trust you. If you're putting your own money and you're not gonna want to lose that right is putting his money and he's got his sweat equity. And I mean, you know, this is a deal that I want to be a part of. I just don't know. I think the bigger question for me was, how much money do I want to put into that? I think it's emotional to say, okay, wow, I can make 11%. I'm gonna take the whole shooting match and I'm gonna take it from a three or 4% return and get out of the market volatility and I'm gonna move into this, which is probably a little bit more boring, but a little bit more profitable over time. So instead of doing it all at once, you just say, well, really, I want to do this, I'm interested, let's do this.

But how much? Yeah, yeah. And you've done what we've told other people to do or suggested that other people do, which is put a little bit in this first one, try it out, then maybe a little bit more in the second one and just just get, get a feel for it. Get get the trust factor built up and then, and now you've invested in maybe all our deals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and go back to the swindle risk, as you say, because I've invested in deals that have not gone, well, a couple of people have been indicted, you know, I'm really good at investing your money. I'm always not so great at investing my money in other people's deals. But I think that's what what I would say is, people should look for. And it doesn't have to be us. It can be some other person, you know, but that we we I think we eliminate the swindler risk because we are investing our own money. We are investing our friends and families money and we have a track record. So, so we lose money. We show up to thanksgiving and everyone hates us and we're getting sued by the bank. It's a yeah. So there's a lot of reasons why we're going to stick in the deal. And, and of course deals can go south and, and the market can change.

Interest rates are on the rise. But what you you want is okay. Did the deal not work great? Why didn't work? And did we do everything that a reasonable responsible, uh, investor fiduciary would do on behalf of our investors to limit their losses and to make the investment as successful as possible. And as long as you have someone like that instead of, uh, someone that that will just up and bail or maybe they were being very, very careless in their evaluation because they just, they just wanted to get their hands on the investor dollars. That's kind of been my experience on a couple of the ones that I've done is that there, there was no relationship. They were just seeking, whoever would give them money. And when it didn't, when it didn't work, they were gone, uh, you know, they're not going to return your calls and, and so you don't want that type of a situation. You want to have someone that, that you can see their track record. And if you can know them personally even better because at least, you know what kind of life they live and, and, and you know, how they conduct themselves. And investor approached me the other day and he was playing golf with a buddy of his, it was, it was a friday morning and you know, the stock market now is, is back to that, you know, sense of volatility.

I mean, almost worse than volatility. It's, it's a bear market and in some senses. So there's a lot of money being lost right now. Anyway. Most of the time you're talking about that at your buddies with golf is how bad you suck at golf first of all and how much money you've lost and, or made. Um, and, and you know, people talk about that kind of stuff and I would say 90 90 plus percent of our investors have a personal recommendation from another investor that is invested with us. And that is, that is the sole reason that they approach us, the sole reason they signed up for the list. The sole reason they said, hey, my buddy was telling me about this deal. He did. You know, it's it's doing whatever I love to get involved or I'd love to ask more questions or what what about this? What about this? You Know, it's important. So 2019, you get some of the answers you think, Okay, I'm gonna dip my toe in. Tell us about how you started investing, how it went early on, that kind of thing and how it's going now, yep. So, right, so I stuck my toe in the water. I I listened to the advice that you guys provided I invested. I can't remember what the number was. A couple $100,000 probably, and I think it did two deals right away.

Um And I figured I'd learn if nothing else I'd learned. And and if I lost it all, it wouldn't it wouldn't be the end of my life, right? But but I wanted to learn and nothing like learning then putting your own money in it. Right? So sure enough, 2019 last quarter I invest in probably a couple of deals. First thing that happens to Covid right there shows up, right? And I'm, you know, I'm saying thinking, okay, great, well thank God I didn't invest the whole kit and caboodle, Right? But but but what you have to remember is you're in it for the long haul. Right? Remember the story the story was this is not a quick game. What you're trying to do is invest in something, build some value and sell at a higher price down the road and it's a 5-7 year time period most of the time. So you know, year one, you can't freak out. I mean you just can't and if you've got your money diversified in enough different places it's fine. Um but anyway, to your question, uh covid hits and everything, the world shuts down. So of course I'm thinking, ok now what what have I just done? I've just, you know, kissed goodbye because I don't want, nobody knows what the world's gonna look like in the year two, we were shipping that money to the Caymans man.

Well draw one name. So anyway, one of the things that I really appreciated throughout the whole process was that every time I had a question brian or Brandon would would be available. Right, So if I had a question, I can make a phone call. If I had a question, I send an email or a text, I get a response. My experience when you have a swindler or when you have a bad situation happening, they don't want to talk about it. People disappear. People don't return phone calls. Next thing, you know, you're you're standing there all by yourself wondering what the heck just happened That never happened with me. Okay. So I was never ever worried. Okay. Everybody understands business risk. Everybody understands that things happen. You know, tornadoes come insurance happen, floods happen and get that, nobody's worried about, that's not swindle risk, Nobody's worried about that's business risk that's going to happen okay. And uh, but, but you guys were great about being responsive during difficult times. Be responsive. Just talk to the person, just say, hey, listen, you guys did that.

You answered my question. He said, hey, it's all going okay. We got tenants in there, people are behind on the rent, whatever the story was, people are catching up on the rent, you know what I mean? And it turned out to be a great story. So now that's come and gone, Everything has, has come back full circle, everything is happening as you said it would, that's the other thing. You know, you want to look at when somebody says this is what's going to happen, you want to say, okay, there's 50 stepping stones between here and there. Right. So what happens on the first one is the first one. What they said? Yes, it is. Okay, I feel better. Second one, okay, we're marching in the right direction. Third one, same thing. So you start to build up some confidence and then when they come to you with the next deal, you're thinking, well everything they said about the first deal, even though it hasn't closed, even though it hasn't finished, even though we haven't finished the seven year time frame. Everything they said is happening is happening the way they said it would. And so that's why I invested in deal 34 and five before we ever got a return on any of them, right? Because I believed you because they trusted you because you're responsive.

And one of the things I think it's important to say is that what I was looking for in these deals was a combination of capital appreciation and income. All right. It was a combination of the two. So you've gotten some, gotten some checks so you get some checks. It's not gonna make you rich, right? You're making your, your money, you're making some income. But the point is, it's a point of contact. It's like, okay, they said it's gonna happen. It's happening. They said it's gonna happen. It's happening. So it just builds confidence, right? And then when one does break, when one does sell and you do really well you're thinking, wow, this is awesome. This is really starting to get fun. Now let's, let's let me ask about that. Uh, I know you're in several deals and we haven't sold a lot of deals. So if you had one that sold and exited and how did that go? So, so it's, it's kind of a funny story because you know, I don't really know what to think about las Vegas the whole, the whole thing, I'm just kind of waiting for the Lord to just smite the whole place to be honest Neil I just figured out going to be that I just don't want to be there when it happened. Well so then so then one of the deals was a restaurant that was in Henderson Henderson, Henderson, Henderson south affluent suburb of south Vegas.

I don't want to spend a lot of time in, in in las Vegas, this is the first time that I'm sort of out of broken arrow Oklahoma right, Or in an area that I don't really know much about. So I really have to trust you guys right, I have to believe that you've done your due diligence that you know what you're talking about, that you've looked at the numbers because I haven't liked any of them, Right, and we bought a vacant building in the city you don't like in the city I don't really feel good about. Right? And so I thought you know what, I either trust him or I don't I'm either and I'm not that's interesting. That is that is that is very interesting. And so and I said you know again the first four or five by this point you're too in. Right and so I had six or eight quarters where I can see okay this is actually happening the way he says and you got to remember a lot of this has to do with your family, you got your wife going what's going on, you know it's not just me right, I mean I'm having a kind of account for, Right, Right. So that happened. So anyway, with that I felt good about it and I was very, very intentional about saying, hey this is the quarterly check from, you know, wherever it was in Broken Arrow. And and so we did that. I did that same thing with my wife. Actually I I let her open the checks and I'm not sure what this is here, open this one, I let my ex wife open, you don't just text her pictures of him and I know I owe it to her still investing with this still investing with this.

She actually does. That's good. I'm sorry, go ahead. That was pretty much so that the deal was the first one that closed this one in Henderson and made a great amount of money on it. I mean a really nice return, I would say more than Was expected more than you represented. Which is another thing I was looking for. And Brian you can attest to this because when somebody says you're gonna make 11% cash on cash. My question is does 11 equal eight? Or does 11 equal 15 or what where what does 11 mean? I don't I mean 11, 11, as you said it, I don't really know too much about, I have no experience. And so as you go down the path you learn? Okay, 11 means in this case 13 or 15 or 20. Right, Well this was a kind of a by resale, right? I mean it wasn't really an income producer. It was a capital gain kind of a situation. But nonetheless, when the deal sold, when the check showed up in my bank account, it was well in excess of the representations you guys made. So that tells me that these guys are generally conservative. So you were safe. So you were happy with the 78, you were happy with the 78% IRR that we just want to I just want to make sure that I want to bring up a point going back to the checks and the cash flow is that That is giving you and our investors confidence when we ship them checks because sometimes a a a sponsor will promise return, but there's no cash payout.

So it's basically just a hope job for five years, seven years, 10 years at the end of it. You just hope that it's going to be what it is. But as as we pay out quarterly Investors gain confidence because they can see that the deal is working in line with what we said it was going to do and they don't have to wait five or 10 years. Another point I'll make is is I have invested on online and crowd street real crowd and others and I think There may be one out of like 10 investments that I've done that have met expectations to have been fraudulent out of out of eight or so and and most of them are are not meeting their cash flow returns or their cash on cash returns. So I'm proud that that we have delivered and that we are reasonably conservative brian your first deal. Uh you know I don't think I pitched you that I was gonna triple your money but that's exactly what we did brian is still getting paid on that deal. It makes me sick. But that's what you want is you want to sponsor that.

That isn't pitching pie in the sky numbers in order to solicit as much as much money as possible is that we're trying and this is really honestly what we try to do is be as conservative and honest as possible. We want to hit every time we wanted every number that we project and I don't think we've hit every single one. We've had deals that have missed a little bit, but most of the time we're exceeding and that's an important part of being a good sponsor. Yeah, we saw a speaker this past weekend named jesse Itzler. Amazing speaker and and one thing he said that really resonated with me from this conference we went to is you have to put yourself in a position to be lucky. You have to not create your own luck but you have to create the situation to where you can attract it to you like is this is this a situation people normally get lucky in and you have to say, okay, I'm going to be their commercial real estate is a position where you can, you can attract a lot of luck to yourself. Uh, A corporate job could move in and bring 100,000 jobs across the street from you and then you could make tons of money or all of these things can happen and it can bring tons of luck to you. So, you know, el luchador, this mexican restaurant Vegas, we knew it was a good deal.

We knew it was going to make money. We knew it was going to make a little bit more than the return we projected. But that was 100% of situation where we put ourselves in a situation to attract luck to us and we absolutely hit a home run on that deal. And what happened was the market was continuing to heat up post Covid. And so we were anticipating selling out one cap rate, but, but the market was heating up and so we ended up selling at a lower cap rate than we had projected. And that's why the returns were quite a bit higher than we than we anticipated. But from an investor perspective, you have to know, even when you put out that investor sheet and all the information on it. I never heard of that company. I never heard of the restaurant. I don't know anything about las Vegas. All of my trust and my confidence is what you guys are saying, right? And as an investor, I don't, I'm not looking for if you would have told me a 78% return on day, one I probably wouldn't have bought in because I thought you're nuts. You know, you're trying, it's pie in the sky. You're trying to just get whatever. I mean, it's just, it's just not real. But you didn't have to do that. You know somebody, I mean, somebody like me. I mean if you tell me 11, 12, 15, I mean, I mean, I mean, you don't have to say it's gonna be 30 even if it is.

Mm Hmm. We funny story about that deal, we flew out to the grand opening of the restaurant and it was severely not not open ready. They're behind schedule. There was guys working in there at eight or nine PM and they're telling us stories of like, yeah, we're gonna get to see, oh, tomorrow. And I'm like, dude, you're not gonna see, oh, this week. Um, but you know, still still did an amazing job and we've got other deals like that. You know, maybe lagged a little bit of permitting, maybe lagged a little bit of construction. We're still in time frame and the market is doing great to where we're, everything is going to be okay. So everything isn't always going to go right. But like you said, if, if, you know, we're reasonably moving in the right direction and everything starts to add up in your mind it you know it's it's good. Mhm. So let me let me compare and contrast that for just a second to two stocks. Okay because one of the things that you could say to yourself and I did this right, you say okay well I'm gonna invest in solid stock. So even if the stock market goes down, everyone else with the 20% but your guy tells you that you should be thankful that you only last 12. Which I love that statement. But anyway so so I invested in A T. And T.

For example, okay A T. And T. S dividends probably 8% of the time. And lo and behold A T. And T. Of all places cuts their dividend in half. Right? And so you invest thinking one thing and next thing you know now you got all this A T. And T. Stock and oh by the way when they cut their dividend what happens in the stock goes down Goes down. So now I've lost my income earning going from 8-4. So I invested in thinking eight. Now I've gotten got 43 and the value of the stock has gone down and who knows how long it's going to stay down. Right? So all of that emotional roller coaster that's going on just in the stock market and how close am I to a T. And T. How much of a T. And T do I own? I own a fraction. Nobody cares whether I live or die. I mean, I mean whether he or anyone else, right? I mean, it's all of them. I mean, you don't, you own a piece of thin air and you're you're inconsequential, your meaningless to them. If I call them, they're not gonna they're not gonna call, I can return my phone call. That's that's for sure. With a T and T. I get through if you have service problems. Yeah. So I feel like that's an overwhelming theme is is, you know, going back to the very beginning here, you've got to be seeking advice.

You've got to be asking people, hey, what are you, what are you doing with your money? Do you, what are they doing with their money? If if you're getting advice from somebody else who can I talk to? Who, you know, find somebody who drives Ferrari, find find somebody actually don't do that. Okay. Probably, probably not that where we live, but you need to go out and seek advice and ask questions and and find someone who's actually investing in something real, you know, their phone number, you can get, you can get a hold of them. You know, you can get a couple of personal recommendations on this. Like you said, people are making money, Hand over fist every day, all the time, all over the world. Um So you've got to get networked into those people, You've got to find him. So overall neal it seems like it's been a good experience. I hope you continue to invest and hope that this episode just gives people a little bit of confidence. If they're considering investing in real estate, find a good sponsor doesn't have to be us, but find someone that you trust, get a good recommendation and then start slow. Alright, let them prove themselves over time. The worst thing you can do is tell people to put all your money on one deal, uh spread it out and uh you know, hopefully we can be a resource.

Well, thanks everyone for tuning into an episode of how to invest in commercial real estate. Like Joel said in the beginning, this is the last time we are in the studio. It has been a long two years and we cannot wait. We cannot wait to unveil this new studio. It is going to be awesome, every part about it. Um We're gonna have, I don't want to spoil anything but it's gonna be awesome. So tune in next week for another episode of how to invest in commercial real estate. Thanks guys