Listen Here
Today we have a true real estate titan: Josh Cantwell. He’s not just a real estate investor; he’s a maestro of multifamily transactions, a mentor to countless aspiring investors, and the host of the illustrious Accelerated Investor Podcast, where he’s chatted with some of the biggest names in the business world, from Kevin O’Leary to Barbara Corcoran and even Donald Trump Jr. Now that’s a lineup that’s hard to beat!
Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures and founded Strategic Real Estate Coach in 2007, a platform that allowed him to share his wisdom and guide countless apprentice partners and students toward their own real estate triumphs.
In this captivating conversation, Josh peeled back the layers on his transition from financial markets to real estate, sharing how his expertise in capital raising became a potent tool in his real estate endeavors. He shared how he turned the corner from traditional investing to multifamily deals, offering invaluable advice on locating and seizing the most lucrative opportunities.
Josh walked us through his systematic approach to structuring multifamily transactions, sharing tactical insights on negotiation strategies that have consistently secured him profitable deals.
This episode is a masterclass in real estate entrepreneurship, imparting lessons that extend far beyond property transactions and into the realm of true wealth mastery.
In This Episode
- Tactical insights into multifamily deals
- The importance of community and building relationships
- Structuring and syndication of multifamily transactions in the current market
- The success formula of Peak Performance
Welcome to today’s show on Wealth Strategy Secrets. We’ve got another excellent show today. Today we’re joined by Josh Cantwell. Josh in 2004 took his knowledge of raising capital and financial markets and started investing in real estate full time. He was able to combine his knowledge of financial planning with real estate to create a very successful business, which quickly grew into closing over a hundred wholesale and short sale deals per year.
Since 2019, Josh has invested in commercial apartments full-time, having completed 19 apartment syndications and taking nine of those deals full cycle from acquisition to sale. Along the way, Josh has taught thousands of investors how to replicate his success. He’s the founder of a variety of successful businesses, including Freeland Ventures, Strategic Real Estate Coach, and creator of the Maverick Multifamily Master. And, also of the Accelerated Investor podcast. Josh, welcome to the show.
Dave, thanks for the intro. I appreciate that a lot. Thanks for inviting me on.
You bet. Always great to connect, Josh. Looking forward to this discussion. I think it’s gonna provide a lot of valuable insights for the listeners. So for those folks who don’t know you, tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got into real estate in the first place and investing.
I think like a lot of people, we all know that real estate is a great way to build and hold wealth. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, so I got to see entrepreneurship in my own house growing up.
My dad started, founded, and built an amazing financial services company. It was focused on employee benefits when I was in high school and college. So I was able to watch entrepreneurship in my own home. And so when I graduated from college and I became an entrepreneur, I became a 1099 all-commission, salesperson, and financial planner. My dad freaked out. It’s like, why did I bother sending you to this expense college if you’re going to work at 1099 and not even have a salary? And I said, well, Dad, I’ve been watching you for the last six or eight years. I can’t believe that you’re even surprised by this.
And so, I got into that and I quickly also started studying and learning other financial services and other different financial programs like real estate, oil and gas, forex trading, those different kinds of things. And I would go to the weekend warrior boot camps. I learned everything my dad said. He’s like, listen, get in and out of college in four years, and you’re going to learn everything you need to know on the job.
Well, being an entrepreneur, I started at 22, 23, and 24 years old, going to the weekend warrior boot camps and learning about Forex trading and learning about real estate overfunded life insurance, and all these different amazing wealth accumulation strategies.
And of course, I immediately started learning about real estate investments, started going to all kinds of boot camps and strategies and learning from gurus, getting pitched their coaching programs, all that crazy stuff. And now you fast forward 25 years, I’m 47. And that’s been my whole life now, studying wealth-building strategies, primarily in real estate, pivoting from single-family to multifamily, and now big commercial strategies.
And I think a lot of the same journey that most people should take. I think I have a very replicable, duplicatable journey of jumping from Wholesale to larger rehabs to a private equity fund and now into massive apartment syndication. So that’s been a little bit about the journeyman over the last so long 25 years to cover in a few minutes.
It is too to summarize it like that, but such an interesting background Josh, I mean the fact that you grew up with traditional, financial planning with your dad and then started to Invest and look at different asset classes and understand, what are some of the pros and cons of some of those things? And then to become an entrepreneur and Also to then, niche down and focus on real estate So you have a nice 360-degree view, I think, of the world.
And what have you learned from that? And have you developed an overall investment thesis or a particular wealth strategy that you follow today?
Oh, absolutely. And I think it’s taken me the better part of the last 20 years to sort that out. When I was a financial planner, we were selling traditional financial services products. We were doing fee-based financial plans, charging clients 500 to $1,000, and then implementing all the strategies, primarily managing mutual fund accounts, and overfunded life insurance policies. Disability insurance and things like that.
I felt out of love for the traditional financial services world, because I knew that primarily if you’re gonna buy mutual funds, which is what your average person does in their 401k and their brokerage accounts, 96% of the time they’re better off buying an index fund, having lower costs, lower fees. And they’re also going to get a higher return one of the books that changed my view of what I used to do as a financial planner is Tony Robbins’s book Unshakable Where he interviewed like 20 or 25. The world’s best money manager and wealth builder and I believe his last name is Swenson.
He the Yale Endowment Fund manager says that 96% of all mutual funds underperform their related index, and the typical financial advisor charges a 3% fee and then a 1% additional fee to the mutual fund. There are 13 hidden fees in actively traded mutual funds, and you can wipe all that out and get a higher return. I’m like, okay, so I discovered that over time. So I do own a lot of index funds inside of overfunded life insurance policies. That’s going to leave a massive legacy for my family. That’s important.
From a real estate perspective, I went from wholesaling because I didn’t have a lot of extra money to buy. I didn’t know about private lending. And then eventually pivoted to raising a lot of money and doing a lot of rehabs and rentals in the single-family space. And then we decided to scale that into a fund where we did private lending.
The problem with all of those is that You have flipping houses and there’s ordinary income. You have private lenders that are getting 1099s for interest income. It’s great to get a 12, 15% return, but interest income is taxable. Flipping houses is taxable.
So I eventually stumbled into multifamily because I was underwriting and lending to other real estate operators and they needed funding. And so we were doing their underlying debt. Through our fund and through brokering for other people. And I still realize the income that we were making, although it was relatively passive, was still interest income. It did not have any ability to wipe out that income through depreciation.
In 2017, we started to joint venture in CoGP and bought and owned apartment buildings. And that led me to my current, and I believe my final investment thesis, which is to buy and syndicate multi-family apartment buildings, which then allows us to get eight different fees, but primarily it’s about cash flow and equity and that ownership allows us to have a significant amount of depreciation. So, it’s almost embarrassing because we own a 250 million dollar real estate portfolio, but because my taxes show a loss, I qualify for financial aid. At my kid’s high school.
So, because all of my income from the cash flow and the equity gets wiped out by depreciation. So when you look like you’re poor, but you’re not, that at the end of the day popped my head off my shoulders. And that’s where we’ve landed for the last six years. And we love it.
No, that’s perfect. The only challenge, once you get this figured out is when you’re trying to talk to traditional lenders about getting financing, even if it’s for your existing house or another house, they’re like, you have no income, we can’t qualify this at all. So I guess it’s a good problem to have though.
It is, And I also own my education business, so we still run this mastermind program. We’ve got about 100 members, and I take a W-2 out of that, but I take a very, very low W-2, and so all of my losses still wipe all that out. But I only take the W-2 to show some income in case I need to get some loans at some point.
But at this point, we’re focused on cash flow and equity. That’s it. I’m not worried about buying. The next house where I have to walk into a bank or a credit union and fall into their box. I know that I’m not in their box. Like the last 25 years of my life, I’m not in anybody’s financial box. It’s going to lend to me on a traditional basis. So I’ve got to be very creative.
For sure. So Josh, what would you say, I mean, we have a lot of sophisticated investors in our community, And people are always looking for different tax strategies, wealth acceleration strategies. And oftentimes a CPA might say, okay, let’s say you’ve got a great strong income year, or maybe you even exited a business. And CPAs out there might say like, okay, go purchase some real estate.
So you can get that office offset. But I think if you’re dealing with, especially if you’re dealing with say six, high hefty six figures, maybe seven figures that you’re trying to offset, it can be a little bit scary to say, Hey, I’m going to go do my multifamily deal and, go buy even a $5 million asset to offset the taxes because, now all of a sudden, there’s, there’s a lot of competition for that market.
People are doing it every day. , does it make sense? Are your assumptions And then do you want to become now an active investor, in that, versus say doing a syndication? So what are your thoughts there?
Well, look, I think if that person has a big income or they’ve exited a business, it’s because they focused on that and it worked out, They’re making a big income, they’ve exited a business.
And so I would say, look, unless they can focus on real estate the same way that they focused on that exit or focused on their current job that pays them a big W-2, I would say don’t buy the real estate on your own. I work with a lot of groups, investor clubs, doctor groups, and family offices. Primarily my deal still, when we syndicate a deal, when we raise five or ten million dollars, those are retail investors, guys that are writing checks for a hundred to five hundred thousand dollars as part of their investment strategy.
But to your point, I work with a doctor group several other family offices, and different high-net-worth groups. They usually have a lead sponsor who leads the person, leads the investment group, finds different operators, finds different syndications, and finds different opportunities. They can collectively then go and bring their collective horsepower to an operator and say, look, we can stroke a check for 10 million, 20 million dollars. And then collectively, because we can stroke the check, they’re gonna typically want a little bit extra, a little bit extra equity, a little bit extra cashflow.
And then typically, because their main plan is to get equity, deploy cash, but get depreciation, accelerated depreciation, bonus depreciation, they come to an operator like me and say, this is what’s most important to us.
So I would say to that guy or gal who’s exiting a business or has a big income is not to do it on your own, but to get comfortable in a community. Dave, maybe it’s your community, other investment clubs, other communities.
Where that you’re collectively working together, have a similar goal, cashflow, equity, depreciation, whatever that is, and then put yourself out there as a group with more horsepower, and then like we craft specific investments, and we look for specific apartment deals that we can then park with certain groups, like a certain doctor group, or an investment club, or a family office.
So we know what their goals are. And we try to find an investment that matches their goals, and we remain as the operator, but we’re essentially like that middle man, that middle operator, connecting the investment group to the deal where they don’t have to be the operator. They don’t have to be the boots on the ground. We’ll handle that and we will all partner up together.
So I would say instead of going and buying that one deal, first of all if you’re gonna be exiting a business, you probably know what’s happening for at least a year or two ahead of time. In that year or two, you need to do some planning. You need to make sure that you either get with some investment groups or investment clubs, you need to make sure that you can qualify as a real estate professional to take the depreciation, or have your wife or your spouse become a real estate professional. Like I have a friend of mine that does that. He’s a high-income earner. His wife is in real estate. She’s a real estate professional. They do a joint tax return.
So collectively they can use the write-off. That’s another way, but I would say get involved with the group a collective investment group So you don’t have to do it all on your own
No, it makes perfect sense. And I think you hit the nail on the head, When you said like, if an entrepreneur or a high-income earner, they’re doing well, then, focus on what you do well at, Because that’s where your strengths, truly lie, And your unique ability. And so you want to double down on that. And then you can get leverage by working with these other groups, You get the power of the group or getting into a syndication.
You have someone who. , for instance, on the acquisition side, has been doing it for 20 years and they have relationships inside and outside of a particular market. They know exactly how to identify off-market deals and things like that. So you’re getting some great, leverage by being able to move up, into the syndications and such.
Dave, I will give you one more example. Like we have a friend of ours who’s a billionaire. I’m not close with him, but we know each other pretty well. And he has another group that he partners with that underwrites and makes the decision. And he will often say, if they’re in, I’m in.
So he’s essentially offloaded that responsibility of the underwriting, the decision making, selecting an operator, selecting an opportunity because his expertise is not in real estate. His expertise is in his current business that’s made him a billionaire. So he says, look, I wanna invest in these real estate opportunities because of the cash flow, the equity, but primarily the depreciation. And in some cases, some. historic tax credits are involved and they’re able to get access to those as well.
But he essentially says, if that underwriter, that group is in, I’m in. So I would encourage your group as they listen to this to say, okay, who’s that one person who’s a good underwriter, good at due diligence, good at selecting groups, partner up with them, build that personal relationship? And then, hey, if they’re in, I’m in. If that guy’s writing a check for half a million, I’m in for half a million. That guy’s written a check for $5 million. I’m in for $5 million.
That is that personal relationship. And often, that underwriter should be an attorney, someone who has a legal license to lose if they screw it all up, If you have attorneys that partner in real estate deals or attorneys that buy out real estate deals, they have that added layer of fiduciary responsibility, that added layer of underwriting. Plenty of real estate guys who have attorneys they work with.
And I think that gives you that insulation to say, look, if that guy’s going to invest, and he’s a lawyer, and he’s helping this group, he’s not going to screw things up. He’s going to go the extra mile to do the right underwriting. So that’s some niche ideas right there that I think people if they want to be good at this and deploy a lot of money, they need to be niche. They need to be well-schooled in those things.
No, great points. And, again, getting leverage, we all think of leverage typically as a rookie real estate is great. We’re going to get, leverage with the lender, to amp up our returns here.
But can you think about the human capital leverage factor and how much that ties into the success of this? And it’s interesting as well, working with family offices, ultra-high net worth, A lot of this is also about, not losing capital, being very defensive, making sure you’ve done your due diligence properly, the risk mitigation. To make sure that the investment is going to be successful.
And in some cases, you may, you may hit a home run, but sometimes, hitting and meeting, projections is great. So Josh, what do you think about, let’s talk a little bit about the current market, today, we’re discussing a little bit earlier.
I guess at the time of this recording, we’re mid-August right now, it’s been super slow in the multifamily space. Several transactions have been down considerably, this year, primarily due to the Fed increasing interest rates unprecedented, that’s never happened before in history. We have a lot of that debt coming due if people underwrote, say, three years ago. So what are your thoughts? What are you seeing in the marketplace right now?
Great question. So a couple of things. First of all, things are starting unthought, meaning the transaction volume is starting to pick up. I do believe that if you were an investor in 2021, August of 2021 is well known by many people to be the peak of the market. And if you were buying at that time when interest rates were super low because of COVID and everybody was in the market in liquid. Then you should be buying now.
Because cap rates are up, which means values are down. It means that interest rates are up, values are down, and transaction volume is down, which means there are fewer people involved in the industry, and there’s less competition.
So if you were gonna invest two years ago, there’s no question that you should be investing now. Now, what we’re planning on doing is getting deals under contract in Q3 and Q4, and waiting until Q1 or Q2 of next year to close.
Because we do feel like by that time, interest rates are going to be flattened out, maybe not going up or going down, but they’re going to be flat. We don’t feel like the Fed has a whole lot more reason to raise rates anymore. The labor market is starting to soften. The labor market was so strong the last 10 to 14, 15 months. The Fed had to continue to raise rates, even when property value started to peak, a lot of people were still hiring and the labor market was on fire.
So incomes are going up, which is causing more inflation. That’s starting to slow down. You’re seeing CPI dropping back down to the levels that the Federal Reserve wants to see. They’re gonna wanna see that for the next several months. But I don’t feel like the Fed has a lot of reason to raise rates anymore or raise rates significantly. They’re gonna be maybe flat or maybe 25 basis points. And then I think by next year, if we saw some shines of recession, some cracks in our economy, remember, interest rates, it takes nine to 12 months for that to hit the economy in a real way after the rates have been raised. Well, those rates went up last summer. We’re finally seeing that impact our economy today.
So. I do feel like there’s a lot of deal flow out there that’s getting a lot less offers in multifamily. I do feel like the area that was overbought where there’s too much competition we want to avoid because those markets are coming down, including Dallas, Houston, Nashville, and Phoenix. I wouldn’t touch those markets right now because I think there are some ways for them to come back.
So I think the Midwest, places like Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. Those types of areas, Missouri, those types of Kansas City, those types of areas that are Midwest or landlord friendly. There wasn’t as much competition before, and there’s even less competition today because now interest rates are up. So that’s our strategy.
I also feel like next year, there’s going to be some more cracks and some more deals that, from a lending perspective, we’re going to have to sell. So I think you ought to be patient. I think it’s another six months to nine months until we see a great deal flow. It’s truly a buyer’s market. The interest rates might be going down a year from now. Cap rates will continue to go up because that hasn’t been added yet. Values will still be coming down.
But I do think, look, if you can find a good deal today in Ohio or one of those Midwestern markets or the Southeast, and it pencils. You’re only going to be three to four to five years from now in a lower interest rate environment. Nobody thinks we’re going to be in a higher interest rate environment three to five years from now.
So if you acquire that deal now, even with higher interest rates today, three to five years from now when you go to refire and sell. I think if you have a great value strategy, that property is going to be worth a lot more because interest rates will be down, cap rates will be back down, and values will be back up. So I think people are making a mistake sitting on the sidelines. If I had to guess at an exact time, that would be the right time to buy. The perfect time to buy is gonna be Q3 of next year. But that’s not to say that we’re gonna sit on the sidelines right now either.
Interesting. So given all of the market dynamics, especially over the past 12 months, how have you changed your underwriting around lending and what type of lending products are you looking at today for a solid deal?
We’re trying to do loan assumptions where we can. If there’s a good loan that was refinanced a couple of years ago, somebody bought a property, let’s say in 2018, or 2019. They refinanced in 2020, and 2021 when rates were super cheap. And that product has some sort of fixed-rate financing or interest rate cap. And we can get that financing in the mid-fours.
There are several deals that I’m underwriting right now. A couple of deals I’m going to look at tomorrow, a deal I offered yesterday. We had $22 million on a deal yesterday. 37 we offered on a deal on Monday. We have a $5 million deal we’re looking at tomorrow. A lot of those, the smaller deals will still pencil with bank or permanent financing, new financing. The bigger deals are hard to pencil, Dave, with 6% new financing and possibly triggering a tax reassessment.
So those deals that have some sort of loan assumption opportunities are fantastic. So the deal that we looked at yesterday does not have a loan assumption opportunity. It looks like it’s gonna get reassessed. The whisper price on that thing was like 28 million. We offer 22, okay? I don’t know if we’ll get it. I don’t know if the seller, I think their loan amount, their basis is more than 22. So the bank would be taking a pretty major short sale. What if we could get it, but we also have another deal that we’re going to look at next week a big 400-unit deal that had good financing put on it two years ago.
It’s got long-term fixed rate debt and because the values were so high back then they got a very high appraisal and very high loan amount now values have come back and So that loan-to-value is in the world between 80 and 85 percent that’s a good deal for us to buy because we have high leverage, we have to recruit less equity, we have fixed-rate financing in the fours. And so those are ideal deals when it comes to the financing that’s in place. If we can find stuff like that, you gotta look a lot, you gotta dig through a lot of deals to find those, but they are out there.
Tell us a little bit about the market in the Midwest. I mean, typically, everyone talks about the smile states, southwest, and southeast, but, tell folks a little bit more about why you like the Midwest.So the word is boom-bust. Okay, boom-bust. So I was invested in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Five states were responsible for 50% of the foreclosures. Those were all smile states, It was Florida, Vegas, Arizona, and California. And then the last one was Michigan because of what happened in Detroit with the car business.
But those four states had the biggest run-up, the biggest boom, and the biggest bust in 2007 and eight. Well, I lived through that. I was investing in that, primarily in real estate, but also in the financial stock markets and also in the currency markets, and physical gold and silver. And so I know that that’s going to happen again. The boom-bust markets are exactly the markets where we saw all the activity in 2020 and 2021. It was Southern California, it was Vegas, it was Arizona, it was Texas, and Florida. Maybe even in Colorado, you could add that, maybe in Nashville, you add that. Those are boom-bust markets.
And so when that happened in multifamily, you saw so much activity, so much pushing up of the prices, low-cost money. And those are the markets that are now already getting pinched. Like I would never buy something in Phoenix or Nashville right now. Because not only is there not going to be a lot of appreciation in the price but there’s also not going to be a lot of appreciation in the rent because they’re building so much inventory.
Okay. So to avoid the boom-bust, we focused on our backyard. I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I like the Cleveland market, even though it’s not a super high growth market because it’s a cashflow stable market. Okay. So in 2007 and 2008, Values went down. Yes, but they might want to down 8 to 12 percent depending on which outlet you’re paying attention to Depending on which data you’re reviewing If you look at Kentucky if you look at Indiana if you look at Pittsburgh if you look at, Missouri look at a lot of Oklahoma a lot of states in the middle of the country.
They’re not boom-bust So if I’m trying to create an investment strategy in a thesis that I can stick with for the long haul I Want to remove as many bumps, and rollercoasters as I can I cannot remove them entirely I’m gonna have some volatility no matter what I invest in but if I can flatten it out I’m okay with buying a property having it appreciate in a very methodical way Getting lots of cash flow methodically and letting my residents pay down my mortgage.
There’s a guy that I’ll never forget. I looked at this portfolio This how this property I was trying to buy was 112 units. I pulled up This little old guy in a Cadillac getting out of his Cadillac gets in his gets in his golf cart His name is Turk and he is showing us around his properties.
Well, he owned almost a thousand units in Youngstown, Ohio Which is a not growing at all C class city, but he played the long game He invested for cashflow and equity, and he had a $95 million real estate portfolio that was paid off.
So for me, I’d rather be Turk than a guy that’s going to play the markets in a boom-bust area. So that’s why I prefer the Midwest and some markets in the Southeast. I like Atlanta a lot. I like Oklahoma, Oklahoma City. I have a 216-unit in Lawton, Oklahoma. I’ve got over a thousand units in the Atlanta market and some markets in Atlanta.
But I also like if you’re going to do multifamily, you should be investing with an operator who’s investing in their backyard. Because when stuff happens like COVID, you wanna be able to manage that, well. And so we like the Midwest for those reasons, try to avoid the boom-bust.
Great insights. Appreciate that. I wanted to ask you also, Josh, I know you have this 10-step peak performance success formula, which resonates with me. So let’s unpack that a little bit for the audience.
Sure, absolutely. So there are a few things that I feel are important when I think about what I call the ACER exercise. The ACER exercise for me is about peak performance. It’s about understanding what we want to accomplish. It’s about, it’s a 10-step process and I don’t have time to go through it all. But that to me has identified what I want to be, and who I want to become down the road. And that formula for me is about understanding the result.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about their why do I do things? The why is the reason, it’s the passion for what we want. Well, for me, it’s not about the why. A lot of people are like, They post pictures of their family on their Facebook or their Instagram and say, this is my why. I said, that’s great. Those are your reasons, okay? But when you got married and you had kids, you sort of became obligated to those people, okay? So that has to be your why, okay? It has to be.
Now, when I look at what we want, what I started doing years ago, peak performance success for me. The most important step is step number four. And I’m gonna, so I’m gonna skip to that. The ACER stands for absolute clarity of the result. So when I talk about Turk, and I talk about having a $100 million portfolio that’s paid off, that’s part of the result that I want. So I’m willing to be patient and work methodically towards my goal, instead of being hyperactive, trying to force that goal to happen in a super short amount of time. I want my result to be happening in my lifetime. It doesn’t have to happen tomorrow, or three years from now, or five years from now. Of course, I’m working hard, and of course, I’m motivated.
But I have this vision of what I want my life to be like. And so I encourage people to close their eyes and on their perfect day, their perfect average day, what does that look like? So if we have 365 days a year, let’s say 50 of those are amazing days where we’re like walking through a rainforest or we’re on the beach in Hawaii or we’re going on a European vacation. It’s this unbelievably crazy experience. We’re parachuting or we’re whitewater rafting. These are the special days of our life. In one year, maybe at 50 amazing days.
And maybe you have 50 unbelievably terrible days, crappy days, horrible days. You fight with your wife, you lose money in business, your kids are fighting with you, you can’t get through to anybody, you’re not motivated at all, you get rid of those. Well, there are about 250 very average days left. And the question now becomes, what do you want your ideal average day to look like? Your investment strategy and your investment thesis need to support that. So the result of what we’re trying to get to in the peak performance success formula is trying to create an investment strategy that supports that average day, that ideal average day.
Because this whole idea of living this amazing, crazy, wildlife is not true. We’re going to have 250 days a year where we’re having an Average average day. So what does that look like? So if everybody closed their eyes and thought about that What does that look like? When do you wake up? What do you do? What do you eat? What do you drink? Do you go to the gym? Do you play with your dog? Do you go for a walk with your wife go for a run go for a bike? Like you go to the beach. Where do you live? What do you see when you wake up? What’s the scenery? Where do you live on the beach or in the mountains? This is the average day. This is the result, and to me, all that’s important is having a true vision for what that looks like. That will then determine the investment strategy.
Like people who were chasing these multifamily deals in Phoenix and Nashville in Orlando were chasing a quick nickel. They lost sight of the long-term investment that multifamily should be. They fell in love with the quick nickel of cheap money, rising rents, COVID-19, and low supply.
But did they buy something that met their ideal average day and met the result that they were trying to pursue? So again, for me, Dave, I go back to the Midwest because that supports my long-term vision of what I want my ideal average day to look like and what I want my regular life to look like. This whole sexy idea of the boats and the cars and the parties, like everybody gets sick of that. I’ll give you 50 days of that fun and crazy life, depressing, horrible days, the middle 250 is what we’re working for.
That’s what this ACER exercise and this 10-step peak performance were successful and it was all about. There are a bunch of steps in the middle, cover that some other time, but that’s what I’m trying to accomplish in my own life and for other people who follow along in that process.
Love it, Josh. I mean, that is essentially the underpinning of our entire holistic wealth strategy creating a vision for yourself and having crystal clear clarity on what that vision is. And if you think back to, Napoleon Hill’s Thinking Grow Rich, how he has so many affirmations of every day you’re talking about, you’re waking up, you’re meditating, you’re thinking all of these affirmations around, how you’re going to achieve that goal is, what it looks like for you.
And, when it comes to investing, again, I think you hit the nail on the head. Because what are we after anyway? Money buys us stuff, It buys us time. It buys us certain freedoms and everything. So, you have to define what it is that you’re going after. Or if you don’t have a target, you’re going to miss every time. So getting clarity on that is critical.
Create a vision for yourself and have a crystal clear clarity on what your vision is.
Yep, You talked about that when you came onto my show about having a holistic strategy. I think that’s unbelievably important. And I think it’s like, especially if you have a partner, spouse, it’s important that the two of you get together and talk about that and make sure that, in my life, my wife is pretty much out of the business taking care of our kids and all the crazy things that they do.
And so I want to make sure that I’m engaging the people who are important to me, my wife, my business partners, my CFO, and what’s important to them, because the apartments are again, like you said, Dave, a tool to help not only me as the CEO and entrepreneur hit my goals, but it’s also impacting all of our investors, all of our staff, all of their spouses and all of their children.
And so the more we can know about the main operator, the main sponsor, and what their goals are, now these investors and staff and spouses and partners can all align there. I think that’s important. So going back to the beginning of this conversation, if you were a limited partner making a passive investment, the more you can know about that sponsor’s ultimate goals, not with that property, but with their life. Then you can decide, does your ultimate goals line up with them. Does Acer, the absolute clarity of their result, line up with yours? And if it does, I think you have a much higher likelihood of a successful investment.
No, such a great alignment, such a great point that you make there. So many good insights here and good takeaways, Josh is appreciated. If you could give the audience one piece of advice about how they could accelerate their wealth trajectory, what would it be?
Look, so I have a very personal story. I can’t go through it all, but I’m a pancreatic cancer survivor. 12 years ago, I was given, I was 35 years old, I was given this wild diagnosis. I had a major surgery. And the surgeon saved my life on the operating table. I’ll never forget. After the surgery about six weeks later, I went to meet with my oncologist and I was sitting in front of a computer like we are today.
My oncologist walked in the room and he went through this post-surgery summary report. So Dr. Ali is reading about what Dr. Walsh did to me on the operating table. 10-hour surgery. They took out my gallbladder, my spleen, my stomach, most of my pancreas, and most of my liver. They had to reconstruct the arteries in the back of my, your back of my pancreas, and the back of my liver because they were crushed by the cancer, take arteries out of my leg, and put them back in.
I had to relearn how to eat because I had no stomach. I lost 50 pounds in four weeks. Dave, on the operating table that day, I lost 21 units of blood. To put that in perspective, you and I, as we sit here today, we have seven units of blood in our entire body. So I have everybody else’s blood in my body except my own. I’m everybody else. Like none of my blood cells are mine.
And I’ll never forget Dr. Ali, he sat back in his chair and looked over at me and he said, Dr. Walsh is a daring surgeon. And I looked at Dr. Ali and I said, what do you mean, is it daring surgeon? And he said, Josh, he’s like, I’m reading this report and now I realize what a miracle you are. 95% of surgeons would have never even tried this surgery. They would have opened you up and saw how complicated it was. They would have sewn you up and sent you home and said, there’s nothing we can do.
And I said to Dr. Ali, I said, hey, so you’re telling me the only reason why I’m alive is because Dr. Walsh was daring. And he said, yes. And I cried. I sat there and cried because I didn’t realize the magnitude of what had happened that day.
And so I would say, look, life in general, investing strategies, and your investment thesis, are going to require two things. One, you have to be daring. You have to be willing to get out of your shell and do something that nobody else has done because it’s your life. You’re in control. You have to be daring enough to try new things, go and do new things, and meet new people.
You have to be daring, you have to be willing to get our of your shell and do something that nobody else has done. It’s your life, you’re in control.
The second thing is I would say, look, in the theme of being daring, you can mitigate some of that risk, because that might sound risky, being daring, but you can mitigate that, like you said, Dave, earlier, with the human and relationship capital. Every good deal I’ve ever done was because I was either referred, I was brought in, I was introduced. Or I get some special information from someone else? All And so I would say be daring in your relationship building.
If that was the one piece of advice to bring all that together, be daring in your relationship building. Be willing to put yourself out there. Go to events, go to dinners, go to podcasts, meet new people, be part of investment clubs, and build up your relationships. Build up your relationship capital because That will introduce you to incredible investment opportunities and incredible people who are doing wild amazing things with their lives, but you have to put yourself out there. You have to be daring to put yourself in these new rooms and these new groups and these new clubs. That is going to create so much flavor and color in your life. So many people though want to live, stand by the house and be a hermit. No, be daring, create new relationships. And then new investment opportunities will come.
Awesome. Such a powerful story, Josh. Thanks for sharing. If people want to connect with you and learn more about what you’re up to, what’s the best place?
Oh look, I’m active on LinkedIn, active on Facebook. You can look me up there, but you can go to our main website, freelandventures.com, I’m the CEO. And that website is like our home base for everything we do. You can go to freelandventures.com slash passive to learn more about our investment strategies. Freelandventures.com to check out our mastermind groups and our YouTube channel. We’ve got over 700 free videos online. We’ve got 500 podcast episodes. So I would go to FreelineVentures.com and check out everything we have to offer there.
Perfect. Thanks again for coming on the show, Josh. Look forward to next time.
Dave. Thanks for having me. This was fantastic and fun. Thank you.
All right. Thanks. And for all you listeners out there, if you’re enjoying the show, and getting good value out of it, please do us a favor and give us a rating and review. Goes a long way to get awesome guests like Josh on the show. So until next time.