WS448: Growing a Portfolio While Working Full-Time with Shiloh Lundahl

Having a full-time job while running a successful real estate portfolio is not easy. In fact, for many people, it’s one or the other. But today’s guest, Shiloh Lundahl, manages to pursue his fulfilling job alongside an ever-growing real estate investment portfolio. Shiloh’s introduction to real estate was an interesting one. He needed a way to earn extra money to attend further therapist training.

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Soon, he discovered that he enjoyed investing in real estate and realized the myriad of possibilities it offered him. In this episode, we learn how Shiloh went from flipping houses to the current lease-options he uses in his portfolio. Although he has not done any conventional, large syndications, he has raised money using a unique model that he further elaborates on. Through training, private money and refinancing into portfolio loans, Shiloh has seen his portfolio grow tremendously. Shiloh also walks us through how he has overcome some of the inevitable growing pains of scaling, the benefits of hiring an assistant, and his future plans. Shiloh’s story is one that many of us can relate to, so be sure to tune in today.

Key Points From This Episode:

  • How Shiloh’s desire to become a better therapist ultimately led him to real estate investing.
  • The two key pieces of advice Shiloh and his wife learned from their real estate coach.
  • Why it is important to find out whether a syndicator is good with their personal finances.
  • Shiloh’s approach to securing investors using teaching and second position notes.
  • The difference between conventional syndication and private money lending on a deal.
  • How Shiloh’s investor finding model has evolved over time.
  • Shiloh’s top tip for raising private money: be successful and people will have faith in you!
  • The similarities between growing as an investor and the different stages of human growth.
  • Discover how Shiloh found his assistant and what he has learned from having this help.
  • The secondary market Shiloh is investing in and how he has applied his model to it.
  • Why Shiloh has decided to sell a quarter of his real estate business.
  • Learn how being a high school wrestler has been a great contributor to Shiloh’s success.

[bctt tweet=”Before you raise other people’s money, make sure that you, with your own finances, are really good, that you know how to budget, that you know how to stay within that budget. — Shiloh Lundahl” username=”whitney_sewell”]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Shiloh Lundahl on LinkedIn

BiggerPockets

Voxer

Shiloh Lundahl | BiggerPockets

About Shiloh Lundahl

Shiloh Lundahl is a Child and Family Therapist in Mesa, Arizona.  He is also a real estate investor and has accumulated over 85 properties over the past few years. These properties include a commercial building, a mobile home park, 45 single-family residences, and a few multi-family properties.  Although Shiloh has not created a large syndication, he has raised over a million dollars of private money loans from over 40 private money lenders to build his portfolio. Shiloh also runs a monthly real estate meetup group in Mesa where he teaches and coaches other investors how to maximize returns on single-family homes, while minimizing the amount work that goes into managing the properties through utilizing the lease option strategy.

Full Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:00:24] WS: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I’m you host, Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Shiloh Lundahl.

Thanks for being on the show, Shiloh.

[00:00:33] SL: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:00:36] WS: Shiloh is a child and family therapist in Mesa, Arizona and a real estate investor who has accumulated over 85 properties during the last few years. These properties include a commercial building, a mobile home park, 45 single-family residences, and a few multifamily properties. Although he has not created a large syndication, he has raised over $1 million of private money from over 40 private money lenders in order to build his portfolio. He also runs a monthly the Real Estate Meetup Group in Mesa, where he teaches and coaches other investors. He just got and tell me – he taught an eight-hour block to other investors.

Shiloh, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you being willing to come on to share your expertise with myself and our listeners. But give them a little more about who you are.

[00:01:22] SL: I finished my schooling in 2008 and then I moved down to Arizona. I’ve been practicing as a child and family therapist for the last 11 years. What’s interesting is as a therapist, you really help people in very vulnerable situations, and they look up to you a lot to help them. It was really important for me to not do any harm to my clients, so there’s an ethical obligation to do no harm. With that ethical obligation, I felt like I needed to get more and more training.

I spent a lot of money on going to conferences and things like that to learn how to become a better therapist and I realized that in order to do that, it was going to be pretty expensive. This is, again, back in the day. I thought how – If I really want to become a really good therapist. I need to go to some of these trainings that are expensive. I need to get some more money in order to be able to do that.

That’s actually what sparked the idea of doing real estate investing was on to become a better therapist. I needed more money in order to do these trainings. So, I started off with one single-family residence back in 2010 in my neighborhood. Then from there, I just rented it out to a family that I knew that I wanted to move into the neighborhood. They rented it out for about five years, and then at that time I had become independently licensed and then I was in this building that the landlord decided they were going to be selling the building.

So, I approached the landlord and I asked if – Well, I approached the other therapists in my office because I was the youngest therapist in the office. I asked if they would mind if I tried to like purchase the building and they’re like, “No! That’d be fine.” Because I didn’t think that they thought that I was going to be able to do it. So, I contacted the seller’s realtor and I started negotiating with him in order to purchase the building that I have my practice in.

Ultimately, I was able to do that and then I opened up. It was a building that had two suites. I opened up the other suite, and then we put 12 different therapists in the building. Then at that point, I was watching a lot of shows on HDTV. I just got the building and I’ve developed this bug for, “Hey! This is really cool. I think I want to invest in real estate.”

I contacted a buddy of mine who later has become my real estate partner, and he was a realtor, and I asked him – I told him that I wanted to do a deal with him. Back at the very beginning of 2015, we did a deal together, and it was just a flip property but it worked out really, really well. I was the money partner on the deal. But he found it, he negotiated it, he coordinated everything. I just got to kind of be a partner with him on the deal. I earned about 13,000 through lending my money, and he earned about 40,000 and he did it without using much, if any of his own money.

It was a really interesting model and it was great to learn from him. That’s really kind of how we got started in real estate. In 2015, we flipped about three properties. 2016 about six or seven properties. Then we started to notice that the market for flipping properties, there wasn’t as much margin anymore in flipping properties. So, we switched our model from a flipping model to a lease-option model, where we can buy these properties, rent them out to people that want to buy the property eventually, and they come in with about $4,000 down in order to buy an option to buy that property.

After doing the numbers, we found that we usually make about three times the amount on a lease option on a three or four or five-year lease option than we do on a flip. That’s when we just kind of decided to switch our model and then we’ve just been buying properties a little bit more than one a month over the last three years. That’s how we got about 45 single-family properties. Then my buddy found a mobile home park in the area that we like to buy, and that actually turned out to be a really, really good deal, and so we bought that.

But along the way, what was interesting is I noticed, and to be really transparent, my wife and I, after we started doing real estate in 2015, when we did a deal where we lost $5,000 on it. I’d gone to like one of those three-day trainings and told my wife, “Hey! Sweetie, there’s this year-long training that we can go to. It’s like $40,000. You would to do it?.” She’s like, “No.” I’m like, “Okay.”

Then after we’ve lost $5,000 on a deal, she went and she found another training and said, “Hey! I went and I saw this training and I signed us up. We’re going to this training.” I’m like, “All right.”

We went to this year-long training program in how to invest in real estate. It was one of those weird programs that was expensive. But it worked really well for us, because we were in a position where we could pay for the training. We still have money left over in order to start investing and make some really, really good contacts that opened up our ability to get loans from banks and things like that. Ultimately, that really helped springboard us into investing in real estate.

[00:06:22] WS: Increased your network, right? Yeah, that’s a big plus of a lot of programs like that. You’re getting some education, but I feel like a lot of the bigger value you get is all with the contacts and the network increase. But that’s awesome about your wife as well. I know a lot of spouses, if one loses a lot of money, they’d be like, “No, we’re not doing anything else in real estate or whatever that is you’re pursuing.” But she actually pursued some training. That’s awesome, and it sounds like that springboarded.

Obviously, you all have grown a lot over the last few years. But when in that process did you decide to – we need to start raising money or we need to be able to bring money from other sources, so we can grow?

[00:06:58] SL: As part of that program, I had a coach, a real estate investing coach, a great guy. He was really, really helpful and he – We had a coaching call every week, and in that coaching he would obviously ask, “How are things with real estate? What are you working on?” Then he would coach us through that. But one thing that he said over and over and over again was two things. One, you need an assistant. You need an assistant. You need an assistant. Two, you need to learn how to raise money. You need to learn how to raise money.

He said, “With using your own money, you can only get so far in real estate until you run out of your own money. You have to learn how to raise money from other people.” That’s what he said. But I was nervous about raising money from other people. Even though I have done really well managing my own finances, which I think is very important in order – Before you raise other people’s money, make sure that you, with your own finances, are really good that you know how to budget, that you know how to stay within that budget. Very, very important. Because if you don’t know how to manage your own money, you’re not going to magically become better at managing other people’s money.

[00:08:00] WS: Great advice, by the way. I’ve had investors ask me about my own finances and are they in order. Not very often but, I mean, they want to know, just what you said. There are experienced investors and are very savvy, and they want to know you’re savvy as well.

[00:08:15] SL: Yeah. I think that’s great. I’ve never thought to ask that when I invested in somebody else’s deal, how well they did with their personal finances. But very, very important question. He really encouraged me to raise money. We got to a point where it’s like, “Okay. Well, we can’t get any more deals.” I tried to ask a family member for some money, and he’s like, “Well, I don’t lend my money to family, because it hasn’t worked for me in the past.” I’m like, “All right.” I’m like, “All right.”

I’m trying to structure this. How can we make it so that it’s enticing for somebody to lend us money? I don’t want to give away the farm in lending money. I’m like, “All right. How can we do this?” Well, there’s a lot of people that are new that want to learn how to invest. I’m like, “All right. Well, what if I were to create a teaching program? But instead of keeping their money, they get their money back but with interest, but I still taught them.”

That’s kind of the program that we made is we – Somebody would lend us like $10,000. What I did is I started putting on what’s called second position notes on my property. If I would get a note of a loan from the bank for 70% of what a property is worth. Let’s say I had a property worth 100,000. The bank loaned me 70. And I still had about 10% of my own money into the deal because I was able to buy it under market value and fix it up and stuff pretty economically.

My all-in was 80. The bank gave me 70. I still have 10 in the property. I opened it up to people that wanted to learn. If they wanted to come in with like $10,000, then what I would do is I would give them a second position note on the – I’m sorry. Give them a promissory note in second position. It’s about $10,000 and it was earning like 8 to 10%, depending on the note. Then they would also get a deed of trust on the property so that their investment was protected.

As I started doing that, I just thought, “Okay. If I can get 1 person to invest in this, I know I could get 10.” I was reaching out to people, and then one person said, “Yeah. I’d be interested in that.”

[00:10:16] WS: How were you reaching out to people?

[00:10:19] SL: A lot of it actually came from BiggerPockets. So, me just kind of posting on the forums on BiggerPockets, just sharing a little bit about what I was doing. Some people would kind of reach out to me. I put in my bio kind of what I did and how we had these second position notes and stuff.

I went to lunch with somebody one day, and she’s like, “Yeah. I think I’d be interested in that.” She got for 10,000 a second position performing note. Then within the next week, I got two more. Now, I’ve raised 30,000 at that time. Then from there, it was a lot easier just to start raising more and more. We have, as you mentioned, this meetup in Mesa. As we were talking about the deals that we’re doing, and then at the end I would just let them know like, “Hey! If anybody’s interested in learning more about our process, you can lend to us in one of our deals, and then I would show you.”

When it comes to the difference between a syndication and then private loans, and this is really, really important to do this correctly, because if you don’t do it correctly, then you can get in trouble. With the syndication, you have to do everything according to what the SEC tells you to do. Then if you do that, then you can take on private money. You can do this. You can buy. Probably it’s worth a lot more money in apartment buildings and things like that.

I was just doing these single-family homes. So rather than doing a syndication or creating a fund, I would bring in a private money lender on one deal. Basically, as a private money lender, you can lend anybody your money. But it’s not an investment. An investment is I’m putting money in where I could lose it. I mean, it could go up and it could go down.

This is different. This is a loan from one person to me or to my business. Then what I do is I give them a promissory note and then a deed of trust on a very specific property. In that promissory note, it defines, “This is the interest that you’re earning on your loan.” It isn’t that it’s going to go up. It isn’t that it’s going to go down. That’s the amount that you’re earning.

With us in our company, we have enough reserves to make sure that we are stable so that I can make sure that I give the private money lenders back their money and their interest as we go and we refinance all of these properties. Those are some important things. When you’re lending to somebody, you need to make sure that they have enough reserves to weather the storms that come.

If somebody were to ask you if you wanted to invest in one of their deals, one of the first questions would be, “Okay. So, if it goes bad, what’s it going to look like? What’s the worst-case scenario? How am I going to get my money back in that situation? How much you keep on reserves in case something were to happen?”

And we’ve had people ask us that, and then we explain. This is the amount of money that we have in reserves. Then in the worst-case scenario, we’d probably do this, and this is how we would handle that. That’s really, really important as you’re investing with people.

[00:13:06] WS: No doubt. Wow! Some great information there. I wonder though, from – When you started trying to raise money or borrow money or find money, so you can grow your business, do you still have the same model now or do you have other private lenders or other investors? What does the model look like now compared to then?

[00:13:25] SL: It isn’t a similar model. But what is interesting is as the market’s gone up in value, a lot of our properties have gone up in value. So, we were able to take 18 properties –Over this last summer, we were able to take 18 of our properties and then put them in a portfolio loan. We had like 20-year loans at like around 5% adjustable. We were able to take all of those and switch them over into a long-term portfolio loan. Six or seven years at about 5% as well. It is amortized over 30 years So our cash flow went up, and then we were able to pay out a ton of those second position notes where I was paying between 8 and 10% on those notes.

It was great because our investors were happy. They got their money back. I’m sorry, our lenders were happy. They got their money back and they got their interest during the time. I was happy, because it allowed us to grow and then we were able to put it into this long-term portfolio loan, making things a lot easier. And then also, we were able to pay out high interest rate debt, and it was just fantastic.

That’s what we’re doing now, is we have these properties coming up in value. We’re grouping them. We’re putting them into portfolio loans, paying off the individual lenders on the second positions. Again, I mentioned this, but we’ve been able to raise about a million dollars in private money. The way that we’ve done that has been a lot through BiggerPockets and just kind of sharing people what we do. A lot through my meetup.

What I think when it comes to raising private money, the biggest thing is being successful. When you’re doing deals and you’re successful at doing deals, people see that. You have a track record. They feel confident in coming and lending money to you, because you’ve done it before several times and their confidence in you is pretty high, especially if you’re like in the community and you’re rooted in the community. If they don’t know you, if they don’t know that you’re like rooted in the community, then I don’t know if this guy is just going to take off one day and leave.

But because I have a practice here in Arizona and I’m meeting with clients here daily, they know that I’m here. I’m not just going to come in for a weekend, get people’s money, and then take off.

[00:15:37] WS: Experiencing this kind of growth, I mean, in just a few years, doing this many deals pushing to grow even faster, that creates other growing pains, right? I know we’ve experienced those, and it’s good. It causes us to grow and causes us to get better and improve all the time, and that’s something we’re always striving to do.

Tell me about some ways through this growth you’ve been able to manage that and continue to grow.

[00:16:01] SL: That’s such a good question, because I look at the growth of an investor the same as the growth of a child from baby through toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It’s funny, my partner and I talked about how we just went through investor puberty the other day. Now, we feel like we’re more towards getting close to graduating high school when it comes to investing. Meaning that we started out, and a lot of people will start out with a small investment or maybe they’ll put their money in a syndication, somebody they trust, and they only have a small part in the whole process.

Then they start to learn. They start to grow. They start to meet other people. This is kind of the infant stage of investing, the idea meeting with some people, and then they start feeling more comfortable. They hear the words and they know what the word syndication means. They know the difference between hard money and private money, and they start to understand all of these little differences in the jargon that’s used in the investing world. They start to feel more confident. Then they might go and do a second property, and then that’s going well. They feel confident. “I think I know what I’m doing.”

But along the way, it’s likely they’re going to make quite a few mistakes like, “Oh! That’s painful.” You want to be careful at the beginning. You want to get out and go. Jump in. Be willing to do that and take that risk. But at the same time, as you do that, then slow down just a little bit. See what you’re doing. See what the mistakes are that you’re making. Then recover from some of those mistakes and then keep going. That’s kind of what we’ve done.

Then the adolescent part or the puberty part that I would say that has to do with investing is when you get too big to handle things yourself and you need to start systematizing in order to keep growing. That’s a difficult part, because handling the books for my businesses is very, very difficult and complicated. I was always big in doing personal finance and budgeting. To be honest, my wife and I have budgeted to the penny for the last – Ever since we’ve been married, so for 15 years. I don’t say that we’re fanatics about it. Just with our budgeting system, you really need to budget to the penny. Otherwise, it doesn’t come out right, and you don’t know if you entered everything in.

So, it’s important that we did it that way, and I started to try to do that with my business finance. Man, that was tough. That was really, really tough, because we had so many things coming in and out. We were flipping. We had some buy-and-holds. I had to hire an accountant to help me through that process, and accountants are expensive. With that, that’s kind of the puberty part, “I can’t handle this all on my own. I need to get other people helping me.” So, we got an assistant. As soon as we got an assistant, oh, boy, that was so helpful. But it was really difficult, because I felt like, “Ah, I don’t know. I don’t want to pay somebody all the time to do all these things. Where is that money going to come from?”

Then I realized I was a therapist. I charge people over a hundred dollars an hour. During my second flip, I would during my lunch break go out to my property that we were flipping, and I was mowing the lawn of the property. My buddy was like, “Dude, what are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m mowing the lawn of the property.” He’s like, “That is like a $20 job. Pay somebody else to do that.” I realized I can work for one more hour as a therapist and I could pay somebody five hours to go –

[00:19:21] WS: That was some wisdom right there he’s spoken to you, right?

[00:19:25] SL: Absolutely. That is part of the process of development as an investor is you start letting go of some things and then you start really focusing on the things you do well. You start finding other people to do the things well that you don’t do well, and that’s part of the growth process.

[00:19:42] WS: Tell me about how you found your assistant.

[00:19:44] SL: It was interesting. I had somebody in my neighborhood that also was involved in real estate. They had a friend, and she was looking for some part-time work. So, we hired her, and she started to work for us. Well, what’s interesting is I really come to understand the process of hire slow, fire quick rather than hire quick and fire slow. Because with her, and she worked with us. In the very beginning, she was doing pretty well and she seemed pretty confident and excited about what she was doing. Then there were some things coming up in her family that were difficult. Eventually, things weren’t going so well for her, because there were some major things that were going on.

I’d give her a call to have her go and do something for me. But that day, she was just kind of – She was out of it. She was just not able to function because of all the critical things that are going on for her. I felt bad every time I called her to ask if she could do something. And I’m like, “My business is just really not going anywhere right now.” Then we brought on another assistant, so somebody that actually found a property for us. It was interesting. She found a property she was selling to a wholesaler who then was selling it to other people. We got the property but we saw that she found it.

So, we reached out to her and had lunch with her, and she was just really positive. She spoke both English and Spanish, which it was really helpful for us with some of the tenants that we have. We asked her if she’d want to do some stuff for us and some work for us, and she said yeah. So, we gave her a few properties to kind of help us out with, and she rocked it.  She did fantastic, and so we gave her a few more properties in order to help us out. She was doing a great job.

Over a six-month period of time, eventually we gave the other assistant less and less and less and gave her more and more and more. The other assistant was moving and everything like that. So, it just kind of worked for us to stop using the other assistant and then start using her full-time. Truthfully, she works full-time for us and she does a ton of stuff manages all of the rehabs, manages the mobile home park.

That, again, is another part of the whole process of development as an investor is, man, you need an assistant. If you’re going to scale, get an assistant. If you want just one to five properties, you can probably handle those yourself. But when you get over 10 properties and if you have your own full-time job, get an assistant and pay them hourly. Have somebody who’s trustworthy where they’re not going to lie about their hours that they’re working. Get an assistant that’s going to help you, and that will take out so much off your plate. Then you can actually start scaling more and more if you want.

[00:22:21] WS: I couldn’t agree more. I could not do everything we’re doing without numerous assistants, especially like an executive assistant that’s really my right hand. There’s numerous other people that support us through an assistant role, doing other specialized things. But I just couldn’t do it without them. I mean, by no means. I’ve said this before on the show. We use the app called Voxer, so we can – It’s like a walkie-talkie app where we communicate a lot. But even if I just have random thoughts about, “Hey! This is a way we can improve this or this is something we could do here,” Or I mean, just at random times I just document it that way. Then I know she’s like documented it in a way that we’re going to use that later or just so many different ways that you’re talking about when you’re scaling. It’s just been a must and completely agree.

Anything else or any other ways that you plan to move forward using assistants in a way maybe we hadn’t thought of?

[00:23:10] SL: Our market has mostly been in Arizona. But I Iived North Carolina for a summer. I really liked North Carolina, and so we were looking at going to a secondary market. We looked at Texas. We looked at Florida. We looked at Georgia I think and Tennessee and North Carolina. Out of all of those, we decided on North Carolina. With our lease option model, it works really, really well in buying properties under 145. Well, buying properties where our all-in is $145,000 or less, and that number is 75% of what the after-repair value is of the property so that it builds an equity about 25%.

With that model, we’re able to buy properties, suck out the majority of our own money, and then continue to buy properties. Then when we’re not able to suck out all of our money, we’ll put a second position note on the property and then we’re able to suck out our money and then continue to go. There’s still equity over and above that. So, we’re going to take that model that we used in Arizona. That work really well. We’re going into North Carolina.

We bought one property last month and we’re closing on another property here in the next week or two. Then our goal this next year is get about 24, 25 properties and then the following year another 25 properties in North Carolina. Just following the same model with second position note investors, along with hard money and then take those and refinance them into portfolio loans and just continue to collect properties. So, we’re going to need to build a presence out, and it’s actually going to be in the tri area or the Triad area of North Carolina. So, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point is where we’re going.

I always see a lot of great little properties out there, and North Carolina in general really started to appreciate and a lot of the bigger cities. When we saw that here in Arizona, we saw appreciation come to Gilbert, Mesa, and some of those other areas in the East Valley where we invest mostly. So, we started to invest in the cities just outside of those, and our properties have increased in value probably by 50% in a two or three-year period. We really think that the Triad area is probably going to start increasing value quite a bit as well. That’s what we’re doing and that’s our plan.

[00:25:24] WS: Yeah. Well, next time you’re in that area, let me know. I’m not far from there. But before we run out of time, just a few more questions, Shiloh. What’s a way that you’ve recently improved your business that we could also apply to ours?

[00:25:36] SL: We have an accountant that’s also been kind of a business coach. He isn’t just your run-of-the-mill accountant. He’s somebody who does a great job, and what he’s mentioned to us because we were growing, he said, “Okay. This is what I think you should. I think you should sell a quarter of your real estate business.” I’m like, “I don’t want to sell any of my real estate business. I like my real estate business. I don’t want to sell it.” He’s like, “You do, and this is why you want to sell it.”

Because when you sell a quarter of that, you’re going to be able to take about – About $400,000 is what we’re selling a quarter of our business for. You take that. You pay off all of these little debts that you have that you’ve used in order to fund the business. Then that $400,000 that you have in there, it doesn’t look as debt anymore. That’s just a capital contribution by a new member of your LLC. So, it’s going to improve the way that your business looks and functions. Banks are going to want to give you more loans now, because your debts have gone way, way down.

That’s what we’re doing right now and that’s one thing that we’re doing in order to move forward is my accountant gave me this great idea. He’s going to prepare something as we go, and we’re probably just going to go to maybe one or two private money lenders that we know. So, we’re not going to create the syndication around this, although we have considered creating a fund. We’re still in that process. But right now, we’re just going to sell a quarter of the business to one or two people that we know, and that’s kind of what we’re doing now in order to really propel us forward, because then we’re going to take about 100,000 of that, and that’s going to be some seed money as we go into North Carolina.

[00:27:06] WS: Wow! What’s the number one thing that’s contributed to your success?

[00:27:12] SL: Man, that’s really, really tough, because there are so many different things that have contributed to my success. One thing is I have a very strong drive, and I think that that has been a big contributor to my success. Now, I make a lot of mistakes because I have a strong drive. But I also am able to get up from those mistakes.

To answer your question, I think the thing that’s contributed most to my success has been being a wrestler in high school. And that might sound weird but that probably has helped me be more than anything that’s helped me be successful in life, and the reason being is because I had some really great coaches as a high school wrestler. But basically, you go out there, and in practice you would wrestle. Then you got tired and you wanted to stop. That was the middle of practice. Then you have to get up, and the coach will say, “Okay. Grab a partner. Okay, wrestle.” Then you’d wrestle and you were tired and then he said, “Okay. Grab another partner and wrestle.” If you weren’t wrestling hard, then he would tap your partner out and you’d go and he beat you up for a little while, and so you start wrestling harder.

But what was interesting is just developing the mindset of when things are difficult, what do you do? You go harder. You work harder. You know what I mean? So really getting out of difficult situations meant just working harder and working smarter as well, connecting with great people. That’s been probably the second thing.

The first thing is, as I was a wrestler, I learned how to work hard. Then second, networking with people has been so, so helpful, because I’ve gotten into a couple positions that were very difficult. I’m like, “I don’t know what to do.” So, I went to somebody who was a more experienced investor and said, “Hey! This is my situation.” The more experienced investor said, “Well, this is what you do.” Then he outlined exactly how to do it. I’m like, “Oh!” Then he helped me with it. Then I was able to get out of that difficult situation. It cost a lot of money, but I was able to get out of it, and it was really helpful. That’s probably the second thing is developing a great network.

[00:29:04] WS: Wow! Yeah, I can relate to that. I can even go back to like military training and things like boot camp and similar situations where they’re putting you in just tough, tough situations just time and time again and really just making you see what you can put yourself through and keep going. And that just quitting is not an option. It’s awesome. But before we have to go, tell us how you like to give back.

[00:29:29] SL: I appreciate that. One thing that that we do as a family is each Christmas, we like to adopt a family, and we’ve been doing this ever since I was going to school. When I was going to school, we made probably 20,000 a year together, my wife and I. So, we didn’t have a lot to give at the time. But each year, we would give Adopt-A-Family and give a family a Christmas. A couple years back, we went out of state to celebrate Christmas since we didn’t have a family that we were going to adopt.

We saw one of those people from the Salvation Army outside of Walmart. So, we talked with our kids about, “Oh, hey! This is what we want to do to adopt a family this year. We’re going to give what we would to a family over to the Salvation Army guy.” It was really, really neat as my kids went up there and they were giving quite a bit of money in this little pot. It was really neat to see them do that, and the Salvation Army guy, as he was watching us donate, he just started to cry. It was really, really neat to have that experience where we were able to do that for a family and, well, do it for the Salvation Army that year. Just our kids doing that got the experience what it was like to give. That’s one thing that we do to give back.

[00:30:43] WS: That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that. It’s great to know how your kids are involved in that as well. I think that’s great for building character and teaching them many things. Great. Many good teaching moments created there with kids.

But, Shiloh, thank you so much for your time today on the show. I appreciate you just going through your business and how you all have been successful in real estate, even while you’re a therapist on a full-time position and how you’ve hired an assistant in some of those struggles but now how you’ve worked through those and even moving into another market. Growing your team there and a business there all the way across the country. I appreciate you sharing that. Tell the listeners how they can get in touch with you.

[00:31:22] SL: I’m pretty active on BiggerPockets. People can reach out to me through BiggerPockets. They can – My phone number is there on BiggerPockets as well. So just go to the search bar. Put in my name, Shiloh Lundahl. Then you’ll be able to find me and reach out to me there.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[00:31:38] WS: Don’t go yet. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. I would love it if you would go to iTunes right now and leave a rating and written review. I want to hear your feedback. It makes a big difference in getting the podcast out there. You can also go to the Real Estate Syndication Show on Facebook, so you can connect with me and we can also receive feedback and your questions there that you want me to answer on the show. Subscribe too, so you can get the latest episodes. Lastly, I want to keep you updated. So head over to lifebridgecapital.com and sign up for the newsletter. If you’re interested in partnering with me, sign up on the contact us page, so you can talk to me directly. Have a blessed day, and I will talk to you tomorrow.

[OUTRO]

[00:32:18] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

[END]

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