WS1049: Long-Distance Real Estate Investing with Robert Leonard

EPISODE 1049

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:00.0 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.

00:00:24.000

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show, I’m your host Whitney Sewell. Today our guest is Robert Leonard. Robert is the VP of Growth & Innovation at The Investor’s Podcast Network, podcast host of ‘Real Estate 101‘ and ‘Millennial Investing‘. He earned an MBA in Accounting and Finance, a BSBA in Finance and Economics, and is a Certified Management Accountant. Robert has ton of experience in the stock market and now in real estate as well. 

One thing he’s become very good at is investing long distance. And that is such a mental hurdle for most people, especially those who are getting started, people will tell you to not do that especially in the beginning, right? You wanna be able to drive there. What about when somebody calls or a tenant call and you wanna fix that or you, yourself is self-managing. But he goes through how he thinks about that, why he does it this way, even how he selected markets, it is interesting, the detail that he went through to select a market and he has a business partner or buying deals in. He talks about a little bit of tech that they use as well to do that. And, just some other thoughts that were very helpful in thinking long distance. Again, you have to be willing to sometimes step out of the box, step out of you cover zone and sometimes that means investing at a distance, and Robert has done just that.

[INTERVIEW 1]

00:01:43.0

Whitney Sewell: Robert, welcome to the show. I know you have a unique story of how you got into real estate, but then you also have some skill sets that I know are useful to any of us that are in this business. And so, looking forward to hearing more about that, diving into that.

Give us a little more of your back story though, your real estate background and how that came about?

0:02:00.1

Robert Leonard: Yeah, absolutely. First off, thanks so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it. So, when I talk about my background, I almost always go back to when I was four years old, and people, the guest or the host always looks at me and is like four years old, where is this going? But I think it’s important, and I think it tells a little bit and it differentiates me a little bit from other guests you might have had, and even other podcast hosts that they’re out there. 

So, I go back to when I was four, I started racing motocross. I ended up raising for about 10 years, so I was about 13 or 14years old. At that point, I was number two in the world in my age group, so for reference, I like to tell people that this is similar to the minor leagues of baseball or basketball or things like that. So, I was an up-and-coming prospect to go professional. And in motor cross, you can go… This is ATV motocross, you can become professional at 16, and so I was one of the top prospects to go pro in the next year and a half or so. And so, I didn’t have a back-up plan.Nobody in my family had ever gone to college. Nobody in my family has ever made any investments in anything, all I was gonna do is race motocross, that was all I had planned, and then unfortunately, a couple of events took place, 2008 economy crashed, racing, super expensive, the industry started to decline. A couple of people that we knew actually passed away from racing, so there’s a lot of things that just combined, and I ended up stopping racing at 14, and I had to figure out what I was gonna do with the rest of my life at this point. And so, I was always really good with math and I liked the money, so I said, “well, why don’t I start to study finance.” And so, I decided to go into Finance, I ended up going to college. I ended up kind of falling into real estate through house hacking kind of a funny story there. If you wanna dive into that.

0:03:37.4 

WS: Why finance? I was thinking about you. You said nobody’s ever invested in your family, maybe you said nobody going to college, I can’t remember now, but what was it about finance that intrigued you at that time?

0:03:48.3 

RL: I was just looking at things. I really liked money and I was really good at math, so I said, Well, what can I do that combines money in math and finance? Investing was one of those things, and I knew one of the reasons why I got out of motocross or was forced to get out of motocross was because of money. And so, I think this was more subconscious, I didn’t consciously think of this, but subconsciously, I think I wanted to be rich and make a lot of money, so that I could kind of fix what had caused me to get out of my dream.

And so, it’s very common to think that you can make a lot of money in finance, and so combining an I do skill set, my interest and my goal to be wealthy just decided to get into finance.

0:04:25.4

WS: And I can only imagine, especially at 14 when you’re just envisioning becoming this professional athlete really, and making a lot of money, all those things, just how you would think about that at 14, much less older trying to envision that and then it’s not happening or we’re having to stop, that could definitely set you in a couple of different directions.

But it sounds like for you, you really focused in and took some action. But later on, you mentioned your house hacked something and that got you into real estate give us a little of that story.

0:04:52.1 

RL: Yeah, so when I was entering my freshman year of college, my dad sat me down and he said, Listen, you’re probably gonna make a decent salary when you graduate college, if you’re still living at home when you graduate, you’re gonna have to start paying me rent. And I didn’t think that was really unfair or unrealistic, I thought it was pretty fair, to be honest with you, but I just didn’t wanna do it. Something in me, I was just like, I don’t wanna pay rent.

And so, I had always thought renting was throwing away money, and there’s arguments on both sides that. So, I don’t wanna get into that, but at the time, 18-year-old kid, I thought renting was throwing away money, and I said, Alright, I’m gonna buy a house as soon as I graduate and I sided I can move there and I don’t have to pay you any rent, and of course, my dad thought I was crazy, you didn’t buy a house until he was in his 40s, none of my friends or family had ever owned houses or invested in anything, so I saved up as much money as I could through college, I had to pay my own way through school. And like I said, I was the first one in my family to ever go to college. So, this whole time I was saving up money, getting educated, trying to find out how I could buy this house and avoid paying my dad rent.

And so, my senior year of college, I ended up buying a house, and I moved there before I walked at my college graduation, and I did not think I was becoming a real estate investor, I did not do it as an investment. I just purely did it, so I didn’t have to pay my dad rent, and then what ended up happening was it was a two-bedroom condo, and I realized that I didn’t even open the bedroom door for the second bedroom for months when I lived there, and I said, Well, I should probably do something with this. And so, I end up renting out that bedroom for like $700 to $750 a month. My total all in cost, mortgage taxes, insurance, HOA fees, everything was $1,100. So, I was living for $300 to $400 a month, and I was like, Wow, this is pretty cool. 

And then I realized, I’m like, I’m not really that smart. So, somebody has definitely done this before me. And so, that’s when I started to search for the strategy, of course, I found Mastermind, I found Bigger Pockets, and up until this point, I had been pretty well-versed in stock investing, but I never thought I could become a real estate investor, ’cause I thought I had to have a lot of money to do that. Now, when I found Bigger Pockets, I found thousands and thousands of other people that were doing what I wanted to do. And they were no different than me, and that really just knocked on all my limiting beliefs and really jump started my real estate career.

0:06:56.7 

WS: That’s incredible. I also have many limiting beliefs, and then all of a sudden started going to conferences and thought, Okay, wait a minute, all these people can do it, I can probably figure it out. Right, and so it sounds like it’s similar. So, congratulations to you though, and figuring that out and pushing forward. 

Okay, and so now though, I know you are doing a lot of investing in a lot of long distance as well, and that alone is very fearful or it brings a lot of fear to most people, if they think, Well, there’s no way I can invest in a long distance. It needs to be in my backyard. I think, I was talking to, when I was first getting started in real estate and trying to scale many years ago, just getting started, numerous people say, Oh, just find something here, just find a single family or a duplex, here are close to you. And that’s how most people get started, and all of that, I think, is based out of fear, it doesn’t have to be that way, but those times in there a little bit, how do you start getting into long distance investing? What does that look like in your business?

0:07:48.0 

RL: It’s entirely based on fear, and it’s also based on these old notions of what real estate used to be like, and we could talk about that a little bit more. But how I got into long distance was I house hack that first property, and then I did a live in flip for my second property, which is sort of like a form of a host, and then my third property, I did another house hack, and so between the second third property, I wanted to buy an actual rental, I wanted to do something that I didn’t have to live in that was a true rental, and the market that I live in is pretty expensive, it’s not the most expensive in the country by any means, but it is pretty expensive. I’m just outside of Austin, and so it’s pretty expensive, and so to get into something that was multifamily… the single family stuff around here makes no sense in terms of an investment, so you have to go multi-family if you want anything that makes sense financially for returns, and so to look into a multi-family, anything that’s in a decent area with decent units is gonna be upwards of $400, $500, $600,000. 

And so, I was looking at having to come up with anywhere from $100 to $200,000, say in cash just to buy this first rental. And between me and my business partner, Ryan, we were like, they’re probably not gonna be possible. Maybe we could scrape this together in a couple of years between the two of us, but do we really wanna put all of our money, we’re gonna save every penny we have into this one deal that we have no idea what we’re doing. And so, we said, Well, why don’t we go long distance? Why don’t we just try buying a cheaper property somewhere else, and so that’s what we did. And so, we said, well, you mentioned fear, and I think fear comes from loss, losing your money, and so when I think of fear, I’m actually more fearful of buying that $400 to $600,000 multi-family where I live, and I am buying a long-distance property. And the reason for that is because when I bought my first long distance property, it was $65,000, it was a single-family house in Texas. And we could talk about how I found that market a little bit, if you’d like, but I didn’t have fear for that because I felt the risk was really, really low, and that was what we decided to do was we said, Let’s find a property, let’s just test it out with something that’s super low risk, and the way we define low risk is by the amount of the monthly mortgage payment, not so much by the price of the property, but by the mortgage payment, so we said, Alright, we’re gonna be the $65,000 House in Texas, and if everything goes as bad as it possibly can, we’re horrible landlords, we don’t know how to rent it out, this is just completely awful, can wecover this mortgage payment until we could sell the property, and that’s how we define risk, and therisk of us not being able to cover that mortgage payment is what we saw as the downside, and so on that $600,000 property up here, that might be a $4.,000 mortgage. That’s gonna be hard for us to cover. But down there, that $65,000 property, it was like a $400 mortgage, and I could easily cover that for as long as we needed to liquidate the property.

Our risk is really, really low. We really redefine how risk is viewed in real estate, and we also, as I mentioned, there’s historical misconceptions around real estate that you have to be local, but technology has completely changed that.  And so, that’s how we were able to go long distance, that property ended up working it out really well, and now we’re up to five or so properties down there.

0:11:01.2 

WS: No, that’s awesome. And I think many people won’t get into real estate, period when they hear the term rental because of the fear of the management portion, right? I don’t wanna be taking the tenant calls and I don’t wanna be doing these things or whatever, having to go fix the tall it at midnight and then you say, Well, in Texas, when you’re on the East Coast, it’s just like not even an option to most at that point. So, getting past the managing issue… How did you do that? How do you manage well? Just no problem for you to add long distance?

0:11:31.2 

RL: So, this is probably one of my favorite pieces to talk about, finding the markets is probably my favorite, this is probably one of my second… 

0:11:36.2 

WS: Well, I wanna go there too in a minute, but I know there’s people thinking, Wait a minute, just managing something at a distance is difficult. How do you do that?

0:11:42.7 

RL: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s why I think people are misinformed there because it’s notas hard as people think. And so, that’s why I like to talk about it. And so, I do self-manage between my business partner and I, we self-manage all five single family properties that we have down there, and we’re 2,000 miles away, we’ve never been to the city, we’ve never seen any other properties, and we’re doing it all from here.

0:12:01.2 

WS: You’ve never seen any of the properties?

0:12:03.2 

RL: Never even been to the town. 

0:12:04.2 

WS: Wow, wow. Okay, go ahead. I wanna hear more. 

0:12:08.5 

RL: And so , you mentioned that I can’t go there, and that’s what I love about this, but I think a lot of people do wrong in real estate is they don’t treat it like a business, and part of the reason why they don’t treat it like a business is because it’s local, the toilet breaks, they know they can just go over there or if something goes wrong, they know they can just go over there. That’s not really how you run a real business, whether it’s real estate or something else, you don’t just go and check it all out yourself, every single time.

Being long distance forces you to treat real estate like a business and makes you find systems and processes to handle these things. And so, for me, I was kind of forced into this because I’m a numbers guy, I went into finance, investing. I couldn’t swing a hammer to save my life, I don’t know how to fix anything, I’m not handy at all. So, I always joke, but I’m kind of serious when I say, even if I bought a rental property next door to me, if something broke, I could go over there and look at it, but I don’t know what I’m looking at. I have zero idea. So, I have to hire somebody to go fix it, and so it’s the same way down there, why does it matter if somebody calls me and says, Hey, my toilets not working, and what I would do, whether it was next door or it was down in Texas, I hop on the phone and I say, Hey, I have a trusted plumber, can you go take a look at whatever needs to be handled, and it’s the same way with electricians or handyman or landscaping, whatever the case is. It’s always the same answer. 

And so, we leverage technology doing that. And the other key piece here is that we really focus on getting high, high, high-quality tenants. And that helps a lot because now they’re not super high maintenance for us, they’re not hard to manage, if they have an issue, they’re very respectful, they’re very trustworthy and responsible, they just give us a call and say, Hey, this is going on, and then I know that they’re high quality. I know they’re good people. So, what I can do is I can just connect them with my contact on there, whether it’s a plumber, electrician handy, and whatever it is, I connect them with the tenant and say, Hey, just work out a time that works well for the tenant to get into the property, they go in, do what they need to do, they bill me and that’s it. And it’s really pretty simple.

0:13:58.7 

WS: Robert, I think it’s interesting you talk about it, well, even if there was a problem, if you’re right there, you wouldn’t be able to fix it yourself, and I just think it’s like a blessing and a curse, but more of a blessing. It’s kind of like when we started the podcast, I knew I couldn’t do it all myself. So, I just had to build the team from the very beginning, and if I had have tried to do it on myself, I would have gotten so frustrated and probably already quit, it would have been half done, and I think it applies here as well, because you just said,you know what, it’s not worth my time to go learn how to fix the AC unit, you would have started trying to fix all of them then, right. Instead of trying to find the next property or grow your business, or put in better systems and all those things. So, I think it’s more of a blessing. That made me think that what you just said, that I’m not good at those things and I’m gonna hire those people that are really good at that.

What about some tech that you use to do this well, to manage it well, you mentioned using tech as well?

0:14:46.2 

RL: Yeah, it’s really pretty simple. There’s not like this super complex, detailed tech that you have to use. We use an iPhone and FaceTime, those are probably the biggest things. And the reason I mean that is because if there’s a problem, the tenants can take pictures and just send it to us. A lot of times when we’re acquiring properties, our agent will walk us through the property on FaceTime, so it’s almost like we’re there, but we’re not. And going back to me not knowing what I’m looking at, a lot of times, I don’t even go to look at the houses just because I don’t even know what I’m looking at, I couldn’t tell you if something is wrong in the house. So, it’s no different if I’m on FaceTime, or if I’m here, I can’t see the details well enough when I’m there anyway, so I’m gonna rely on the inspection report or somebody that knows what they’re doing.

So FaceTime has been big for us to be able to see the property, you take videos and sends it to us as well, but other than that, we just use a couple of software platforms to use an accounting software, we use a property management software that’s free, but basically, that’s how we collect rent, but it’s really pretty simple, you just choose to collect it in accounting, and then just ways to see the property and chat with your tenants.

0:15:48.5 

WS: Nice, let’s talk about the market. I wanna jump into that as well, how you’re finding the markets that you’re wanting to invest in, because once you’re comfortable with investing long distance aim, it’s just wide open, right, then it’s down to finding that best market instead of being so confined to where you can easily drive to. So how do you do that?

0:16:05.3 

RL: So, there’s a quote I heard, and I believe it’s from David Green from bigger pockets, but if it’s not, whoever said it, it’s had a big impact on me, and the quote is, live where you wanna live and best where the numbers make sense, and you’re right that once you go long distance, you know that the entire world essentially is your playground and you could find a property anywhere that the numbers make sense.

And so, how I did this is I had a guest, I host a podcast as well, and I had a guest on the podcast, his name is Niel, and he has this strategy for analyzing markets and he uses six demographic data points, and so this really, really spoke to me, because being a quantitative financial guy, all these kind of qualitative ways of looking at markets, even where you live and saying, Oh, this market’s improving, this neighborhoods improving, they didn’t really have hard data, they just said, Oh, it seems like it’s improving… That didn’t really sit well with me. I wanted data that really backed everything up, so when I heard Mel strategy, it just really spoke to me because he has data and numbers to really back everything up, and so basically Neil has this strategy where you look at six demographic data points and they have to meet certain criteria, and if they do, then it’s probably a good rental market.

And so. what I did was I paid a software developer to scrape consensus data off the internet for 7,000 cities across the US. And he exported all of these six demographic data points for those 7,000 cities into an Excel spreadsheet, and I lived in an Excel spreadsheet for 12 hours a day for probably five or six years in my corporate world career, and so I was pretty good at Excel, and so I did some manipulation and I found out what are the best cities with all these demographic data points. And I rank them from one to 7,000. And so, my business partner and I started to go through the top 25 and we said, Let’s cross off anything that doesn’t have inventory that we can actually purchase, so if they don’t have any properties we’re looking for, or there’s just nothing for sale, we’ll cross that off or if there’s no real estate professionals, so if you have a great market, but there’s nobody there, like no good agents are no good electricians or handyman, it’s probably not a good market to invest in. So, we crossed off any of those out of the top 25 that didn’t meet those two criteria, and then we had like 10 or 15 left, and we were pretty open to any of them, it didn’t really matter to us, we didn’t have any contacts at the point, we just wanted to find a deal, and so we made offers across all of these cities, I think we had 13 offers, maybe I would at once. And we had… This was ranging from Texas to Idaho to Ohio, Alabama to the Carolinas to Florida. I mean, all across… And we basically said, wherever we get this first deal is where we’ll continue to build. And so we ended up getting our first deal in Texas, our agent ended up being an absolute rock star, and so it just worked out really well. We’ve decided to continue to build there, but that’s how I ended up finding the market.

0:18:55.7

WS: It was strategic anyway, it wasn’t just this randomness in or like you said, Well, I feel like there’s been growth there, Well… Okay, how do you know that? Right, and so you did find a system and we’ve had Neil on the show numerous times, we’ve talked about some of the market statistics he uses, and wealthy calling the mad scientist something I can’t remember now, but yeah, I love his… A systematic way of thinking through things like that, how he does that, and it sounds like that’s been successful for you as well, and building that she even taking these steps of hiring someone to scrape tons of data for you to review and narrow that down in a big way, I think that just says things about you and just the time in detail that you went into to ensure you’re finding the best market, and I think that is gonna pay forward in many ways. 

Well, anything else about just investing long distance Robert that maybe you get questions about that you’d like to share with listeners.

0:19:46.5 

RL: I would just say that it’s not that scary, and I really do think it’s a great way to get started. I don’t think you need to have a kind of experience before you do it, and I just really highly encourage people to re-define risk and redefine how you think about risk, there’s a lot of out there that recommend going as big as possible, as early as possible, and I agree with that, I’m a really hard-working guy. I have big goals, but I personally think you should probably start a little bit smaller in real estate first, and then if you wanna go big for your second property, fine, but I think you should at least get started on a small scale, and that’s just what I highly encourage everybody listening to do…

0:20:18.3 

WS: Do you have any predictions for the real estate market over the next, say, six to months?

0:20:22.9 

RL: I do not, I don’t make any predictions, and this comes to my background from stock investing, so when I got into finance, I felt absolutely in love with Warren Buffett. I’ve been out to Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting on Oma, and so I spent 10 years studying stock investing before I even got into real estate, so my background is really ingrained in Warren profit principles, and I’ve taken a lot of that to real estate, and I think it’s really helped me, and one of those things that he does is he doesn’t try and forecast the market, he doesn’t try and time the market, he doesn’t try to do anything with macroeconomic factors, and it’s the same way for me with real estate. And that was a big shift for me, because when I first got started, I always thought I’m gonna wait for a crash before I buy something, and then I just realized I’m never gonna buy a deal, I think two or three years went by when I was thinking that I didn’t buy anything and then I just said, you know what, if the numbers make sense, I need to buy a deal, and that’s my philosophy. Now, I don’t try and forecast your time, the market… I have no idea where it’s going. I think if anybody tells you they know where it’s going, they’re lying because nobody knows, and if the numbers make sense by a deal and keep going…

0:21:20.7 

WS: No, that’s awesome. So, all that macro now in the stocks, or what’s your philosophy now between stocks in real estate, or do you have both and your percentage is of investing in both?

0:21:30.6 

RL: Absolutely, I do both. And so, that’s one of the things I think is a little bit different about me as well as what you find with a lot of real estate investors, and I don’t think this is necessarily bad or wrong, but a lot of real estate investors are very, very anti-the stock market, and I don’t personally think that’s the right strategy, I think there’s room in everybody’s portfolio for stocks and real estate, maybe you’re a little more heavy on real estate in your stocks, but I personally believe that there’s room in everybody’s portfolio for both, and so I actually don’t work a W2 job anymore. I invest in real estate and host my podcast full-time, but prior to that, I kept my allocations very simple, anything that or in W2 is went to the stock market, just went into my 401k, and I just kept it simple that way. 

And then anything I earned outside of that or saved outside of that would go into real estate, and that was pretty much simply how I allocated it. Today, it’s a little bit more detailed just because I don’t have that W2 job or be two income anymore, and I’m really more focused on passive cash flow, and so if I’m looking for cash flow, I default to Real Estate, if I’m looking for more appreciation, I personally default more to the stock market, so when I think about, I have this or I wanna invest, do I want that dollar to go out and bring back more dollars now that I can spend on a monthly basis through cash flow, I’ll put it and really say if I wanted to go, I appreciate and come back in 10 years with more, then I’ll put it into the stock market, so that’s kind of my philosophy on the two…

0:22:51.7 

WS: I appreciate you breaking that down, I think that was very simple and well said for the listeners and myself, just how you think about investing that dollar. This is your background with not many people on the show that’s experienced in investing in stocks, probably as you are, so that’s incredible, I appreciate that. 

Tell us a way you have recently improved your business, Robert, that we could apply to ours

0:23:11.0 

RL: Probably hiring a virtual assistant. And I just have so many different projects going on right now that I realize I can’t do everything myself. And we talk about not being able to go fix a toilet… That’s true. That’s one piece of it, but then the next piece is there’s still other stuff in that business that I can do that I probably shouldn’t be doing from long distance, and so whether it’s real estate or my podcast or some other projects that I’m working on, having a actual assistant to help me out with some of those things has really been impactful and to really help take some things off my plate and getting organized and having a plan for every day is also really helped.

0:23:43.6 

WS: Having a plan for every day it. Could you elaborate on that a little bit of how you do that?

0:23:48.1 

RL: Yeah. So, I actually created this same called a daily time log, and every single morning when I wake up, I fill out this daily time log, and at the top I put the date, below that, I put what time I woke up and how long I slept for, that’s just kind of my personal preference. I like to know if I got a good night sleep or not, I personally think sleep is really, really important, and then below that, I write one thing I’m grateful for every single morning, then below that, I write my three major goals that I’m working towards, whatever they are they’re not tasks? They’re not to do list for the day, they’re just my three major goals that I’m working on right now, and then below that, I list all my tasks for my day… 

And I have four different categories, I have things that have to be done today. Things that should be done soon, things that have a little bit a while, but I got to do them eventually, and then things that I just gotta get to at some point, there’s no rush, fill out all those and I make sure I do those tasks every single day, and then at the bottom, towards the end of the day, I have a self-reflection, things that went well, things went bad, if I read, if I drank enough water, etcetera, and I do that every single day, and it helps me stay really, really organized, takes probably five to 10 minutes total. And it really, really helps.

0:24:53.6 WS: No, that’s incredible. You have a plan, every day you’re writing those things down that you plan to accomplish that day, I think that alone is instrumental in moving things forward, taking action. I always ask about daily habits people have, that their discipline about that have helped them achieve success, sounds like that’s a big one for you. Is there anything else there that you wanna elaborate on as far as daily habits that have helped you achieve success?

0:25:14.9 RL: I think there’s a lot of common ones that people would recommend reading, networking and things like that, but I think one of the ones that not enough people talk about that has had a big impact on me is exercise and fitness, and I talk about how fitness and exercise gives you an edge in whatever you’re trying to do, and a lot of people, for some reason, when you bring up fitness, they just default to being a body builder or like an Olympic weight lifter, and I’m just like… You don’t have to do that, you just gotta be active, you gotta go to the gym and work out, or go for a walk, or go for a run. I don’t really care what it is that you do, you don’t have to be the next World Strongest Man. But just getting some sort of exercise every single day, and it has to be actually hard work, you can’t just go lightly walk around your neighborhood for 20 minutes and call it a day, I’m talking like an actual good solid work out and drink enough water throughout the day, it’s just massive. I think it has a huge impact on people’s lives that they don’t see… It keeps you sharp mentally, gives you a ton of energy, and it just really, really helps in so many ways.

0:26:13.0 

WS: I couldn’t agree more, and at my mentor of mine says like sweat every day that is made… I love that. So how do you like to give back?

0:26:20.7 

RL: So I like to give back in a couple of different ways, one is that I just… Through the podcast, when I first got started, everything I wanted to do in life was just about money, I just wanted to make as much money as I could, and then when I started the podcast, people started to reach out and they’d say that I’m really changing their lives, and that’s been huge. It’s a free resource for everybody, just like your podcast, and being able to impact people and give education in the freeway like that has been huge. Also, probably this is very new, so this is gonna come out by the time this comes out, this episode, this will probably be in full swing, but I just officially got the letter from the IRS that my non-profit has been approved as a tax-exempt organization, so I’m super, super excited about that. That’s a way that I’m gonna love to give back, I’ve been doing a little bit of it without the actual organization, and so I filed the paper work months ago, it took a while with the IRS to get everything approved, but I’m super excited to have the tax-exempt real non-profit going. And I’m super excited about that.

0:27:21.5 

WS: Nice. What’s the mission? 

0:27:22.8 

RL: So, the mission is to help everyday people with everyday issues, and so it’s called the front door Foundation, and so the idea behind it is that we’re opening the front door to opportunities through real world scholarships, and so my idea for this came from… There’s a lot of amazing charities and non-profits out there that are doing amazing things, fighting world hunger and cancer and all these things, but one of the things that I feel like that was missing was… And those are great, but the problem is, there’s a lot of everyday people that are struggling too, with a lot of different things, just the other day, I was at a gas station and this woman was crying because she didn’t have enough money to fill up her car and her car was empty, and those are the types of things that I wanna help people with. Those are the things that I really think I can make an impact with. I walk over and fill our gas tank for her, or you’re at the grocery store, and somebody’s card gets a client that they can’t buy groceries where they just can’t afford groceries, you go and you buy their groceries for them, and so that’s really what I wanna do.

And I also think that sometimes there’s a lack of transparency with charities, you donate money to it, and you never know where that money goes, you know the general mission, you don’t necessarily know where it goes, so one of the things I’m really, really gonna try to do with this organization is to allow people to track where their money is going, so if you donate money and that gets to buy somebody groceries, my goal, and I’m not sure I tactically, how I’m gonna actually be able to do this logistically, but my goal is to be able to tell you, Hey, you donate it 100, that 100 was part of buying this person who couldn’t have groceries, and so transparency is massive for me, and so I say our three pillars are focusing on helping people with fitness or health, finance, and then just everyday problems and so I wanna help people with every day education, I think there’s not enough scholarships or opportunities to help people pay for untrained forms of education, like books and online courses, so if somebody is struggling and they can’t afford to buy a book or a course, I wanna pay for that for them, and I wanna help people realize they don’t have to go to college and help fund these other ways that they can’t necessarily afford themselves.

0:29:18.4 

WS: No, I appreciate you sharing that. And congratulations, aren’t getting it approved, we also have a foundation, and I wondered how long it was gonna say to get approved, right. It was great to receive that letter, but congratulations to you, and just the desire to give back in that way and be purposeful about giving back, and so grateful to hear that, but Robert, thank you for the show today and just really helping us break that fear of that long distance investing as much as anything and thinking through, Hey, if all these other people can do it, I can do it too, and it doesn’t have to be that scary, we can’t make it happen. It doesn’t have to be in our backyard, but… Robert, how can people get in touch with you and learn more about you? 

0:29:52.7 

RL: Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. The best way to find me is on Instagram or Twitter. User name is @RobertLeonard, or you can check out the podcast. I have two of them, one is called Millennial Investing, the other is Real Estate 101. You just search those in your favorite podcast player. They should pop right up. Do you have any questions about anything we talked about? I’d really like to give back. I answer every DM, just send me a DM on social media, I’m happy to help.

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0:30:14.0 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.

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