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Today’s guest is Brian Burke—an industry veteran with decades of real estate experience and a knack for navigating market downturns. Brian is the President and CEO of Praxis Capital, and author of “The Hands-Off Investor.” If you’ve ever wondered how seasoned pros manage risk and seize opportunity in turbulent markets, this episode is for you. Dave sits down with Brian to dig into his journey from law enforcement to active investor, where creative financing and relentless hustle led him from flipping houses to managing large multifamily and commercial portfolios.
Brian’s story is both relatable and inspiring—he shares how he started with no silver spoon, leveraging credit cards and sweat equity to break into real estate. As the conversation unfolds, Brian offers a no-nonsense perspective on today’s commercial real estate climate, especially the recent downturn in multifamily. He breaks down the root causes of these market shifts, the importance of understanding the debt stack, why track record matters more than glossy projections, and how he pivoted to senior housing—an asset class thriving on demographic tailwinds.
Whether you’re new to passive investing or want to sharpen your due diligence skills, Brian’s insights provide a practical roadmap for strategic wealth-building.
In This Episode
- Brian’s path from law enforcement to real estate entrepreneurship
- What caused the multifamily market downturn and how to avoid critical mistakes
- How to critically evaluate passive investment opportunities as an LP
- Why senior housing is emerging as a high-potential sector
I would love to say I’ve learned a whole bunch of things, but I’ve been through about two or three other downturns and I’ve learned all my lessons then; this really looked a lot like the other ones. In fact, I started aggressively selling my multifamily portfolio about a year and a half before the bottom fell out of the market. We managed to sell three-quarters of our portfolio before everything fell apart. You can never rest on your laurels and think that you always know what’s going to happen because sometimes something new comes along and makes it a little worse than what you…
Welcome to the Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy podcast, where we help entrepreneurs like you exponentially build wealth through passive income to live a life of freedom and prosperity. Are you tired of paying too much in taxes, gambling your future on the stock market, and want to learn about hidden strategies for making your money work for you? And now your host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of the bestselling book, The Holistic Wealth Strategy.
Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. Today’s conversation is a timely deep dive into the current commercial real estate landscape and what it really takes to navigate private investments successfully. I’m joined by Brian Burke, a seasoned real estate investor who has weathered multiple market cycles and brings a no-nonsense perspective on due diligence, risk management, and portfolio construction. We unpack what actually caused the recent multifamily downturn, where opportunities are emerging next, including senior housing, and how LP investors can make smarter decisions in today’s uncertain market. If you’re investing in real estate or considering it as a part of your wealth strategy, this episode is packed with practical insights you won’t want to miss. Brian, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me here, Dave.
Great to see you. I think this is going to be a really timely discussion for people in terms of where we are in the market cycle for commercial real estate overall and helping to peel back some of the mystery and intrigue around private investments and how to properly do due diligence and vet deals. I know you’ve got some great work out there, including one of your books that I read a while ago, which was really helpful for me in learning how to diligence deals properly. Before we jump into some of the specifics, tell us a little bit about your background and how you actually got into real estate. I know you were actually in law enforcement originally, so that’s quite a transition. How did that all play out for you?
I got started as a small-time house flipper and my law enforcement job actually helped me do that because I was working evenings and weekends. I was on swing shift with Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off. I didn’t go into work until 4 o’clock in the afternoon, so I basically had the whole business week free to start my small-time house flipping business, which eventually grew into a big-time house flipping business. It got me out of my—well, I can’t call it a 9-to-5 because I was working nights and weekends, but you get the idea. Eventually, I just grew that business into large multifamily properties, development, and commercial. In my younger years, I think I tried just about every type of real estate, figured out which ones I was better at than others, and stuck to what was really working for me.
And what drove you to the active side versus passive, Brian?
Well, I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon, so I had to really work for every dollar I’d ever earned. When I started investing in real estate, I literally had no money. I was borrowing off of credit cards and doing all the creative finance you could think of to get my foot in the door. It took me about a decade to get to the point where I actually had enough money to even invest in my own deals. It’s a long process. Being a passive investor is great if you’ve got the bankroll for it, but until you get to that point, you’re stuck being active. I guess if you start out active, you just stay that way.
It’s quite an interesting dynamic. I think you explained the trajectory well; a lot of people get into active investing because it’s really a business. You’re an entrepreneur creating a business and you may not have achieved accredited status yet. You start that way, and then on the passive side, you can actually scale a true portfolio because time is actually your biggest asset.
Time is your biggest asset, and passive investing lets you scale a portfolio without trading more of it away.
It’s not just limited to real estate. Let’s say that you want to start up a technology company. Look at all the starving tech founders that are sleeping in their offices and eating fast food because they don’t have a dime to their name. On the other hand, they could simply just invest in a startup and let somebody else do all the work, but that’s not the position that they’re in. They have a skill and an idea and they want to build a business out of it. They don’t have capital and just want to funnel that to somebody else’s business.
It’s the same thing here with real estate. I started and created a business around it. Fortunately, the business did really well because we made a lot of really good decisions and probably had some luck on our side. That put me in a position where I could eventually become a passive investor, and now I get the best of both worlds. I get to be an active investor and an entrepreneur, and I also get to invest passively in other things that I have high conviction in and reap the rewards without having to do all the work. I think that’s really the ideal spot to be.
Brian, you’ve been around like myself and have seen a few cycles now. Let’s talk about the current market conditions and where you think we are. Have we actually bottomed out? Are we coming through on the other side?
I don’t think we’ve quite bottomed yet, but it also depends on what you’re talking about because real estate isn’t just one singular marketplace where it all moves in tandem. There are so many different things going on in the realm of real estate that are creating cycles that are off-sequence with one another. You might have single-family homes in a down cycle in California, while single-family homes are going up in price and have no days on market in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They’re two completely different markets—same asset class, same strategy—reacting in different ways. Right now, I think multifamily is one of the most common investments that people make in a passive sense. Multifamily just went through a really hefty down cycle in 2022. The bottom fell out from underneath the multifamily market, especially larger multifamily properties. This is where a lot of passive investors have put their capital.
A lot of that has gone into significant distress. Prices are down quite a bit, as much as 50% in some areas. That’s causing distress there, and I don’t think that market has bottomed yet. We’re still seeing negative rent growth and elevated vacancy, but some markets are not as affected. There are a little bit of differences there. Then you have things like senior housing.
That’s what we’re doing now: assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing. That bottomed its cycle about two years ago. It went into an adverse market thanks to the pandemic and then bottomed out a couple of years ago. Now it’s on its way back, very robustly. Again, it is a different asset class in a completely different point in the cycle. I think the answer to your question is it really depends on what you’re investing in and where you’re investing in that.
What do you think has been the biggest learning lesson you’ve taken with this recent multifamily downturn?
I would love to say I’ve learned a whole bunch of things, but I’ve been through about two or three other downturns and I’ve learned all my lessons then. This really looked a lot like the other ones. In fact, I started aggressively selling my multifamily portfolio about a year and a half before the bottom fell out of the market. We managed to sell three-quarters of our portfolio before everything fell apart. Not every adverse cycle is a twin, but they’re certainly cousins; they have family resemblance and you can see some of the indicators. If I had to say I learned something out of this one, it’s probably that the market can move at remarkable speed when it goes down. It doesn’t really do that when it goes up. It usually goes up slowly, but when it goes down, it can move remarkably fast.
That can be made especially worse when interest rates move remarkably quickly and go significantly higher than anyone expects. That’s what we saw in this last one. You can never rest on your laurels and think that you always know what’s going to happen because sometimes something new comes along and makes it a little worse than what you saw last time.
Can you characterize what was the root cause of multifamily challenges? Was it floating rate debt? Was it the rapid rise in interest rates that were unprecedented? Was it a combination of things that you saw as an operator?
It’s multi-causal; it’s kind of like anything else. There’s something in aviation they call the “Swiss cheese of the accident chain.” If you line up pieces of Swiss cheese, you can’t run a string through the holes because the holes in another piece won’t be lined up. But in a certain situation, you can have all the holes of the Swiss cheese lined up, you could run a string right through it, and you have a plane crash. That’s the same thing that’s happened here in multifamily. All the holes in the Swiss cheese just lined up. You had several things happening at the same time.
One was you had all kinds of money being handed out after the COVID pandemic, from unemployment benefits to helicopter money to fraud and all kinds of stuff that was going on where money was being passed around. So much money was printed and created during such a short window of time that it caused rapid inflation. The rapid inflation also affected rents. People moving due to COVID policies really affected rents in certain areas. You had this massive run-up in rent growth. When you had that, you had multifamily investors going in and buying this stuff up under the thesis that it was going to continue forever and bidding prices up to the moon. That drove transaction values up and cap rates down. The next thing you have is inflation, economy-wide, that causes rises in interest rates.
Inflation is increasing your expenses and interest rates are increasing your debt service. You just had this massive run-up in rent growth that’s unsustainable, and all of a sudden, when the music stops, you don’t have the rent growth anymore, so your income starts to decline. You don’t have the tenant base that can afford the higher rents, so they start doubling up, moving back in with mom and dad, or just don’t pay rent altogether. Now you’ve got declining income, increasing expenses, and increasing debt service. A lot of the owners that were purchasing during all this frenzy were buying with bridge loans. People want to blame floating rate debt as the problem. It really isn’t the problem.
It’s the same thing here with real estate. I started and created a business around it. Fortunately, the business did really well because we made a lot of really good decisions and probably had some luck on our side. That put me in a position where I could eventually become a passive investor. Now I get the best of both worlds. I get to be an active investor and an entrepreneur, and I also get to invest passively in other things that I have high conviction in and get to reap the rewards without having to do all the work. I think that’s really the ideal spot to be.
Brian, you’ve been around like myself and have seen a few cycles now. Let’s talk about the current market conditions and where you think we are. Have we actually bottomed out? Are we coming through on the other side?
I don’t think we’ve quite bottomed yet, but it also depends on what you’re talking about because real estate isn’t just one singular marketplace where it all moves in tandem. There are so many different things going on in the realm of real estate that are creating cycles that are off sequence with one another. You might have single-family homes in a down cycle in California, while single-family homes are going up in price and have no days on market in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They’re two completely different markets—same asset class, same strategy—reacting in different ways. Right now, I think multifamily is one of the most common investments that people make in a passive sense. Multifamily just went through a really hefty down cycle in 2022. The bottom fell out from underneath the multifamily market, especially larger multifamily properties. This is where a lot of passive investors have put their capital.
A lot of that stuff has gone into significant distress. Prices are down quite a bit, as much as 50% in some areas. That’s causing distress there. I don’t think that market has bottomed yet. We’re still seeing negative rent growth and elevated vacancy, but some markets are not as affected. There’s a little bit of differences there. Then you have things like senior housing.
That’s what we’re doing now: assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing. That bottomed its cycle about two years ago. It went into an adverse market thanks to the pandemic, and then it bottomed out a couple of years ago. Now it’s on its way back, very robustly. Again, a different asset class in a completely different point in the cycle. I think the answer to your question is it really depends on what you’re investing in and where you’re investing in that.
What do you think has been the biggest learning lesson you’ve taken with this recent multifamily downturn?
I would love to say I’ve learned a whole bunch of things, but I’ve been through about two or three other downturns and I’ve learned all my lessons then. This really looked a lot like the other ones. In fact, I started aggressively selling my multifamily portfolio about a year and a half before the bottom fell out of the market. We managed to sell three-quarters of our portfolio before everything fell apart. Because these, not every adverse cycle is a twin, but they’re certainly cousins and they have family resemblance and you can see some of the indicators. I think one thing—if I had to say I learned something out of this one—it’s probably that the market can move at remarkable speed when it goes down. It doesn’t really do that when it goes up. It usually goes up slow, but when it goes down, it can move remarkably fast.
That can be made especially worse when interest rates move remarkably quickly and go significantly higher than anyone expects. I think that’s what we saw in this last one. You can never rest on your laurels and think that you always know what’s going to happen because sometimes something new comes along and makes it a little worse than what you saw last time.
For sure. Can you characterize what was the root cause of multifamily challenges? Was it floating rate debt? Was it the rapid rise in interest rates that were unprecedented? Was it a combination of things that you saw as an operator?
It’s multi-causal. It’s like anything else. There’s something in aviation they call the “Swiss cheese of the accident chain” where if you line up pieces of Swiss cheese, you can’t run a string through the holes because another piece, the holes won’t be lined up. But in a certain situation, you can have all the holes of the Swiss cheese lined up. You could run a string right through it and you have a plane crash. That’s the same thing that’s happened here in multifamily. All the holes in the Swiss cheese just lined up. You had several things happening at the same time.
One was you had all kinds of money being handed out after the COVID pandemic, from unemployment benefits to helicopter money to fraud and all kinds of stuff that was going on where money was being passed around. So much money was printed and created during such a short window of time that it caused rapid inflation. The rapid inflation also affected rents. Then people moving due to COVID policies really affected rents in certain areas. You had this massive run-up in rent growth. When you had that, you had multifamily investors going in and buying this stuff up under the thesis that that was going to continue forever and bidding prices up to the moon. That drove transaction values up and cap rates down. Then the next thing you have is inflation, economy-wide, that causes rises in interest rates.
So you’ve got inflation increasing your expenses and interest rates increasing your debt service. You just had this massive run-up in rent growth that’s unsustainable. All of a sudden, when the music stops, now you don’t have the rent growth anymore, so your income starts to decline. You don’t have the tenant base that can afford the higher rents, so they start doubling up, moving back in with mom and dad, or just don’t pay rent altogether. Now you’ve got declining income, increasing expenses, and increasing debt service. The way a lot of the owners that were purchasing during all this frenzy were buying with bridge loans. People want to blame floating rate debt as the problem. It really isn’t the problem.
Floating rate debt certainly compromised some owners’ cash flows, but the real death sentence was the short-term maturities. Now you’ve got all these owners with three-year bridge loans that are maturing. The lenders are saying it’s time to pay us off. And the owners are saying, “Well, now my property isn’t worth as much now because interest rates are higher, incomes are lower, and expenses are higher,” and they’re stuck and the property is worth less than the loan amount. They have to do something because their maturity date has long since passed. This is creating all this distress. It was a confluence of all those different factors happening at the same time, or at least in sequence with one another, that put us in the position that we’re in.
If you’ve ever wondered how the wealthy use energy investments to reduce their tax bill while generating cash flow, we just answered every question on camera. Go to pantheoninvest.com/energy to find out. From an LP perspective, how are LP investors supposed to take that and learn from that as they diligence their next opportunities? Because you couldn’t necessarily be the smartest guy on the block and figure that out in your underwriting. Banks were underwriting these projects, too. And we’re talking—the scale of this was not just an operator or two; it was some of the best operators in the entire market, including a significant portion of the market. No one really saw this and put this all together.
Luckily for you, you were fortunate with some things, but if you were to put on your LP hat and take some of those learnings—and I’m sure a lot of people are cautious about moving into multifamily or even other asset classes again—what should they be cognizant of to avoid that in the future?
That’s a good question. First of all, you say that nobody saw it. Well, somebody saw it—I saw it. We sold three-quarters of our portfolio right before it tanked. And the portfolio that we did have, we financed with 10-year debt because that’s the thing: you don’t want to get caught in the middle of a downturn with a short-term maturity. I think LPs should be looking for the exact same thing. What has the market been doing? We’re 10 or 12 years into a bull run. Does it make sense to finance with high-leverage bridge debt that has a short-term maturity? Because you know what’s going to happen 12 years into a bull run; it doesn’t mean there’s going to be another 12 years of bull run.
It means we’re probably going to see an adverse cycle coming soon. And you really don’t want that to happen in the middle of your three-year loan. I think that LPs should be looking more at the debt stack—how are these properties being financed? A three-year loan maturity will come in the blink of an eye. Now, part of the problem is as you get to the bottom of a cycle, a three-year bridge loan may not be so toxic because a lot can happen at the bottom of a cycle where things turn around and start to go up. There’s value-add that you can do and there’s distressed opportunities that you can finance with bridge debt and then refinance into permanent. You’re not going to get caught shorthanded when you’re already at the bottom, assuming we’re at the bottom. I think the LPs need to look at the debt stack more than they looked at that before. They need to look at the overall temperature of the market. When you start to see massive euphoria in the market, that’s a time to be a little more cautious and take a step back and say it’s time to get conservative and not be quite as aggressive. Now when you get out of the bottom of the market, I’m not a fan of even buying into multifamily right now.
I think the market still has a little bit more left in its downward cycle. What I want to see is I want to see some confirmation of a bottoming, such as return to positive rent growth, stabilized interest rates, stabilized expenses, reducing vacancy, and a little bit higher occupancies—or at least trending towards higher occupancies. Then you know we’re past the bottom and we could start to get a little more aggressive. I think investors should be looking at those indicators and they should be looking at the financing and, of course, they should be looking at the track record of the operator and their investing philosophy.
And how about from a return perspective? Regardless of whether it’s multifamily, self-storage, or other asset classes, talk to us a little bit about your analysis and the truth about IRR, equity multiples, and projections. How does an LP investor try to make sense of that all and really map that to their specific goals?
Investors love to make investment choices based on projected return because it’s something they can measure. I understand the attraction to that, but it is the wrong way to approach an investment. If you’re considering making a passive investment into real estate, what you really need to be looking at is the track record of the sponsor, their skill level, their longevity—how long they’ve been in business—and their investing philosophy and how that matches with yours, and the way they’re structuring the capital stack. All of those are the things you should be looking at and not so much focusing on return because any sponsor can engineer to any return you want. Show me any real estate deal and tell me what you want the return to be, and I’ll show you how you can model it to show that you can achieve it. Now, whether you’ll actually achieve it in real life is a separate issue. That’s where sponsor experience and track record really come into play because they’re going to get the best outcome possible for any real estate deal and probably get closer to their projections than many others. It’s attractive to want to say, “Well, I want a 20 IRR,” or “I want a 10% cash-on-cash return,” or “I won’t even get out of bed for less than a 2x multiple.”
But all of that stuff is meaningless if the inputs arriving at those outputs make no sense. I wrote a book called The Hands-Off Investor. It’s to teach passive investors how to invest in passive real estate syndications. I dedicated something like 100 pages to how to look at the numbers going into this modeling to figure out whether the outputs they’re proposing are even achievable. Oftentimes they aren’t. They’re also market-dependent. You can have the best, tightest pro forma; if the market moves against you, you’re not going to achieve it.
And if you end up in a really good surprise up-market, you’re going to blow all those returns out of the water. So projections aren’t really worth a whole lot. It comes down to finding the right sponsors to invest with.
How about some of the core metrics? Because I know it can be confusing if people are new to investing in syndications. You’ve got IRR, you’ve got bonus depreciation, you’ve got a cash-on-cash return, and you’ve got recapture that comes up later. How are investors supposed to make sense of this when a lot of people just come from a market-driven approach where they’re just looking at an annualized return?
One thing you can do is study up on how all those things impact your investment outcomes. The nice thing about real estate is that all investments are going to offer some depreciation. They’re all going to be burdened by depreciation recapture. Some will have maybe a little bit more bonus depreciation than others, but I really wouldn’t drive my investment decisions solely based on tax considerations. You’ve really got to look at the investment quality because a lot of people let the tail wag the dog. You really want to invest in good, solid deals with good, solid sponsors and operators and make that your top priority because all that other noise is the same across the entire spectrum.
A deal with sponsor A isn’t going to have better depreciation or avoid recapture any more than you would with sponsor B because they all abide by the same set of tax rules. Just know that real estate has some tax advantages and that’s going to go across the board. I wouldn’t let that factor too heavily into how you make your allocation decision.
From a portfolio allocation perspective, what do you recommend to folks in terms of how they should be thinking about real estate in their portfolio and whether there’s an active component or a passive component? Do you subscribe to models such as the endowment model or Tiger 21?
No. I think that every investment allocation choice is an individual decision. It is ingrained in each individual’s investment objectives and goals, their particular position, where they’re trying to go, how old they are, how much income they have from other sources, when they plan to retire, and what kind of a lifestyle they lead or want to lead. There’s just so many different choices out there that to make a broad statement about what I think an allocation should be would just be improper. But I do think that real estate has a place in most portfolios because it does provide something different than conventional stock and bond returns. It does provide generally some stability or at least some lack of correlation to the publicly traded markets. It should have a place in most portfolios, not every portfolio. In terms of some cautions I would throw out on allocations in this space, you don’t want to allocate any more than you could afford to lose without drastically changing your lifestyle into any one deal, sponsor, or sector. You really want to eliminate your single points of failure.
If you’ve got a million dollars, let’s say that is all the money you have, don’t take that whole million dollars and invest it with sponsor X in a multifamily deal in the Midwest because you think that’s going to be the greatest thing. Instead, you spread it around. Maybe you put a hundred thousand with that sponsor in Marvin Gardens, and another hundred thousand with that investor in Park Place, and then another hundred thousand with a different sponsor in a different deal. Maybe you invest in the third sponsor in a fund that’s acquiring a base of assets. Try to eliminate single points of failure. You’re not relying on any one thing. You’re not relying on only multifamily. You’re not relying on only the southeastern US. You’re not relying on only sponsor X.
You have a bit of a diversification strategy going.
I would totally concur with that. So tell us why you’re bullish about senior housing.
It’s just in a whole different phase of the cycle than a lot of other sectors of commercial real estate. Office is trying to figure out where the bottom is. Multifamily is still trying to get legs underneath it. There’s some risks there. But there’s an old saying in commercial real estate that says if you want to make money in commercial real estate, follow the demographics. Well, where the demographics are going right now is an aging population. During COVID, the demographics were saying invest in the Sun Belt because everybody’s moving there. Buy multifamily in the Sun Belt because that was the thesis. Right now what you have is a stagnant population. The US population is barely growing and that growth is even getting smaller year over year. But the over-85 population is growing rapidly. The over-65 population is growing rapidly.
In that sector, some percentage of those individuals are going to need—not want, they are going to need—some specialized care. They’re going to either need assistance in activities of daily living such as bathing and meal preparations, or they might even need 24-hour full-time nursing care. That can’t always be done in the home and they’re going to need some support and a place to go.
That’s where assisted living, skilled nursing, and memory care comes in. These are needs-based industries for a population that’s of a certain age, and that certain age is getting more populous, yet no one’s building anything. If you look at multifamily, there was record-high construction for the last four years to meet the demand that actually isn’t there anymore. But on senior housing, you’ve got all this demand and there’s very little construction. That’s just creating intense demand and everything is tailwinds right now for that sector. That’s really why we like it.
How do you actually really break down that market? I’ve seen everything from nana mansions to the typical ones that you’d see, the retirement homes with full staff of nursing, medical, things like that. Are there any sweet spots that you like or is it market dependent?
In some respects, it’s market dependent. There are basically two models. There’s the residential assisted living model, which is where you have a single-family home with five or six bedrooms that might house five or six individuals and have a person or a couple that’s there that oversees things. These are quite common and frequently mom-and-pop owned or independently owned. That’s certainly one model. My strategy has always been a little bit more “go big or go home.” We’re doing larger facilities that are typically in the 50 to 175 beds range. Much larger facilities that have full-time staffs and a range of caregiver levels where you could go from a very basic level of just minor assistance with activities of daily living all the way up to the highest level, which is 24-hour care.
That’s really where we’re focusing. You get a little bit more economy of scale there in that sector. For us, for the way we’re structured, that works really well. For somebody that’s more capital constrained or individuals trying to make this work, I think the residential assisted living model probably is a better fit for that type of an owner.
What markets do you like?
I’m really market agnostic for the most part. What we’re finding is—I used to say on the multifamily side, I would always preach that you want to invest where people are moving to and avoid where people are moving from—but with this model, I don’t have to worry about that. All I need is for people to stay put and get older, and time will take care of that. We can invest in these anywhere.
Interesting. I would think that maybe you had certain considerations like certain states that might be more advantageously friendly towards landlords operating these types of things. There might be certain markets or certain populations, like we’ve seen in the Northeast or in the middle of the country, that have actually had declining populations. They’re aging, but they’ve also been declining because people are still moving to Sunbelt areas. But your data doesn’t identify any of those trends?
No, you’re just going to be looking at each facility, what the demand is in that area, and what kind of supply is in that area. There may be a few states we won’t go into for skilled nursing because the regulatory climate makes it untenable. Outside of a few minor nuances, pretty much nationwide is fair game. There is a concept, especially in skilled nursing, called “certificate of need,” where some states limit supply because you can’t build a new facility without getting approval from the state. The state won’t approve it if they determine that there isn’t a need that exceeds the existing supply. There are some artificial supply constraints put into place as well that can make some states a little bit more advantageous in that regard. We certainly look at that. But there are even states that don’t have that constraint that still have supply constraints in certain markets.
Right now we own in six or seven states, mostly Midwest and Southeastern states. But that just happens because that’s where we’ve found the opportunities. We’ve looked at opportunities even in California of all places, which is a state I probably wouldn’t buy any other type of real estate, but I would consider this type of real estate. It really just depends on each facility’s individual supply and demand picture.
Brian, on this show, we talk a lot about holistic wealth. What does that mean to you?
I look at wealth as—it’s not just money; it’s not just about financial security. I think also, how are you as your personal mental wealth and your work-life balance? What wealth looks like to me is I live a quarter of the year in Hawaii on a beach where I get to walk along the ocean every morning, go play golf on an oceanfront golf course, spend time with my wife, and just really enjoy life, not only work. A well-rounded life with a work-life balance—not having to worry about money, traveling, and seeing the world—is really what defines wealth to me.
Wealth isn’t just money, it’s freedom, time, peace of mind, and the ability to live life on your terms.
Nice. Do you have a wealth strategy in place yourself?
If only. I bootstrapped this thing from the very start. Sometimes you just find yourself in these positions where you’re like, “I wonder how I got here.” If I would have had a plan, I probably wouldn’t have executed this as well. I actually probably wouldn’t have planned for as well as it turned out. No, I’m more of a “roll with the punches” in that regard. For personal wealth, I just roll with the punches.
Awesome. If you could give just one piece of advice to the audience about how they could accelerate their own wealth trajectory, what would it be?
That’s a tough one. I think you first have to start with having some idea of what that looks like—what wealth looks like to you—kind of like how I laid out what it looks like to me. That is what you have to work towards. All along, I’ve been working towards a life where I didn’t have to work 100 hours a week; I could travel and have freedom to move around and just enjoy life. With that in mind, everything else went towards that particular goal. If I didn’t have that goal and I knew nothing about where I was going, then I probably wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Fair enough, Brian. I really appreciate your time and insights today. If people want to connect with you or learn more about what you’re up to, where is the best place?
They can connect with me on Instagram at investorBrianBurke. They could learn more by visiting our website for Praxis Capital; it’s praxcap.com. Or if you want to know everything I know, just check out the book The Hands-Off Investor, which is available on Amazon, bookstores, or at biggerpockets.com/syndicationbook.
Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Brian.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com.