In this episode, Jason Hartman talks about predictions and current affairs. He discusses the three corners of the real estate triangle: Price, Terms, and Time and if the three value drivers of real estate are still location, location, and location. Jason also shares an article from The Atlantic, which argues that Americans are saying goodbye to cities and moving to suburbia.
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Welcome to the creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You’re about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world’s most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who’s actually been there and done it. He’s a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who’s owned properties in 11 states had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it on now. here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the company leet solution for real estate investors.
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Welcome to the creating wealth show. This is your host Jason Hartman with episode number 816 816. Thank you so much for joining me today. As we cover a bunch of different things. I want to talk to you about some trends, some predictions coming true nonetheless, and some news stories. And I’m going to be a little braggadocious a little cocky, because, once again, I was proven right, and thank you, Sarah, for bringing me this article from the Atlantic, which I will get to in just a moment. But before I get ridiculous, and arrogant and cocky with you, I thought I would share something more humble and nice. And that is a poem that I don’t believe I’ve ever shared with you before. And it’s amazing because this was such a foundational part of my life after discovering my four great mentors At age 17, Zig Ziglar, Denis waitley, Earl Nightingale and Jim Rohn. And of course, we had Denis waitley on the show, Episode Number 150. And then also replayed as a flashback Friday, and we got to get him back on again. But he’s got this fantastic Well, he’s got several of them and I did share one of them with you before one of his little poems called someday I’ll like I will, sort of in the metaphor and comparison of an island. And that’s a great little motivator to get us to get off the dime and take action and get on with our lives and get on with building our investment portfolio and doing things rather than suffering from the paralysis of analysis, that terrible disease that kills dreams and, and really just hurts us and by the way, speaking of paralysis of analysis, you know, you you attended my meet the masters of income property, not 2017. But the 2016 you know that I kick that off with a speech about how you can’t hear the dogs that don’t bark, talking about the profound impact of things unseen. And this is so true with our investments. As humans, we make decisions rather emotionally even though we may not be willing to admit that emotions definitely play a big part in our decision making, I believe, and then we rationalize them with logic, right? We all do this. We know we do it, come on, admit it. You know, you do it. I’ll admit it right now I do it. So, you know, there is no denying that we are emotional beings. And I’m sure that is programmed into all of our firmware, not our software, our firmware, because it was a survival skill. And that’s why we are here today because of all these various survival tools that we have in our arsenal. Right. Some of them are not really needed that much anymore in modern times, but through the aeons they are still with us. Right? So when it comes to paralysis of analysis, and by the way, can you tell we’re on a tangent already, we just started the episode. And we’re on a tangent. Gosh. So with a paralysis of analysis, when we don’t make a decision, and we don’t buy that property, we never see what would have happened. Had we purchased it, and had we done the deal, right? The profound impact of things unseen. You can’t hear the dogs that don’t bark. So very, very true. And we think, well, gosh, I’m doing fine without that property. Okay, great. But how much better would you be if you bought it? And as I say, sometimes the best deals are the deals you don’t buy, right? So sometimes a little paralysis of Analysis actually is beneficial to us right? Sometimes we talk ourselves out of the decision. And if we really evaluated it, sometimes we will see that that actually was the right course not to do the deal. So it certainly goes both ways. But I would definitely say that you want to err on the side of Jim Carrey. What are you talking about? Jim Carrey? Well, that great movie? Yes, ma’am. Right. That was a fantastic movie. And you see how when you say yes, more often than not, you will be proved right. So getting in the habit of the Yes, habit is I think overall a good decision in life cultivating what I call rational recklessness, rational recklessness. Okay. So finally, after all of that little tangent, let’s get to this wonderful beautiful poem by Denis waitley. Entitled winning is giving winning is giving. It’s such a great poem. And you know, Denis waitley talked a lot about the win win philosophy. And Stephen Covey talked about it later, when he talked about Win Win or No Deal. And when you’re in a deal, sometimes, you know, one side or the other, or sometimes both sides feels like they didn’t win. But we always need to do our best to try and make sure our deals are Win win. And by the way, would you humor me with another little tangent here? Yes, you will, because I’m in charge. And hopefully you’re not going to turn this off. But this is an important tangent. And it is the idea of the contract, right? When you buy a piece of real estate, you’ve got a contract. When you enter into a business deal, you’ve got a contract. Most of the time, these contracts are in writing. And there is the legalistic idea. That sort of school of thought That says, Well put it in the contract and the other side will have to live with it right? And then there’s this old saying in real estate, that the best real estate deals, never close, the best real estate deals never close. And what that means what that concept means is that eventually, the other party if you got too good a deal, right, if you took advantage of them, in essence, they will figure it out, they will wake up, they will come to their senses, someone will shake them and say, Hey, this deal stinks. They’ll find a way to get out of the deal. So in life, we always have these sort of two choices, we can have the legalistic choice, that’s what the contract says. Or better, much better than that. That’s kind of a immature, amateurish choice. And, and I will tell you in my business career, which is pretty long and big, and you know, I’ve done a lot Not as much as some but more than most, you know, I used to think that way. I used to think that it was all about the contract. What’s in writing, right? But that is amateur Ville, okay? That’s the amateur way to do things. The right way to do things is to help align everybody’s interest, and never go into a deal where interests are not aligned. Always, as they say, walk it. You know, this probably would be considered like racist to say this today, but it’s an old saying, walk in the other Indians moccasins for a mile before passing judgment on him or her, right? Walk in the other person’s shoes, get on the other side of the table and try to gain their perspective. How are they looking at things and if you can, try and align your interests with there’s so in a real estate deal. For example, you’ve got a buyer and a seller well Obviously, the seller wants the most money in the best terms and the quickest steal, and the buyer wants the best terms and the lowest price, right? The best terms for the buyer. And generally speaking, it’s always this triangle, right? And the triangle has three corners and the corners of this triangle. And this can apply to probably most deals. Certainly it applies to real estate deals. There are there’s price, there’s terms and then there’s time. Okay, price terms and time. P P, P, price terms and time, okay? The old saying is you can either have price or terms but you can have both right? And that’s an old saying in the real estate world. So try and make your deals Win Win as much as you possibly can make sure that the other person is winning, or it doesn’t matter what you write in the contract. How many brilliant Don’t lawyers you get if that deal does not serve both parties, and it is not a win win deal. It’s ultimately at some stage, going to be a loser, and it’s not going to work out for you. So alignment of interest. And that’s what we really try to do with our whole investment philosophy with my 10 commandments of successful investing. You can tell when you study those 10 commandments, that it is, there’s this like theme that winds through everything I’m saying is alignment of interest. And when you look at the world of Wall Street, you have a strong dis alignment of interests where the interests are completely unaligned Okay, they’re, they’re at polar opposites. So those deals don’t work so well. Okay, the poem then I got a really interesting article. And then we’ve Well, we’ve got a few more things even then we got to talk about the Retail Apocalypse, we got to talk about housing and what that means and Oh wow, we got a bunch of stuff to cover today. Okay, let’s dive in. Winning is giving by Denis waitley. This is awesome. Winning is giving your best self away winning and serving with grace every day, you’ll know that you’ve won when your friends say it’s true. I like who I am. When I’m around you. You look for the best and the others you see, and you help us become who we’re trying to be. Winning is helping someone who’s down and sharing a smile instead of a frown. It’s giving your children a hug by the fire and sharing the values and dreams that inspire. It’s giving your parents the message I care. Thanks mom and dad for being so fair. winners are willing to give more than get their favors are free. You’re never in debt. Winning is giving 100% it’s paying your dues, your taxes, your rent, it’s trying and doing not crying and stewing. Winners respect every color and creed. They share in the care for everyone’s need. The losers keep betting that winning is getting there’s one of God’s laws they keep on forgetting. And this is a law you can live in believe the more that you give, the more you’ll receive. Isn’t that awesome? I discovered that at age 17. And that was, you know, I kind of get out of touch with stuff like this, these fundamentals that really were, I think the core of my life transformation at age 17. Denis waitley, Earl Nightingale, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn. For Awesome mentors, I remember telling a friend of mine, kind of my life story once, and I was saying how I didn’t really have much guidance, you know, didn’t have much of a family life. And at age 17, I discovered these four mentors, and he said to me, Jason, those are some pretty awesome mentors, you ask? Yeah, so I agree, and I’m very thankful for it. Keep this kind of fundamental philosophical stuff in mind. It’s too easy in the day to day push and pull of life in the case. To get away from this foundational stuff, I can tell you in my own life, I was much more, I’ll say on it in that respect when I was younger, because my life was much less busy. And as we get older and our life becomes so much more complicated, you know, we just kind of forget about this stuff. And we become like these technicians rather than these philosophers, right. And I think there’s a balance between the two, kind of like, how Stephen Covey talks about the P versus PC balance, production versus production capacity. And we’ve talked about that on prior episodes. You know, all of this stuff applies to investing in real estate and it applies to so many areas of life obviously. So now’s the time to not be this humble winning is giving guy And now’s the time to be a little cocky. Okay, so let’s brag about this one. Ah, right again, another prediction Coming through, right? And this article share, Sarah shared this with me. And it’s from the Atlantic. And it says, Why are so many Americans saying goodbye to cities? Why are so many Americans saying goodbye to cities? What’s happening to New York City is a microcosm of what’s happening around the country, the hollowing out of the US city. So this is from the Atlantic, written by Derrick Thompson, April 4, okay. And he talks about an April Fool’s story that was written in another publication, right. He says, it was an April 1 headline, but the statistics were no joke, quote, people are fleeing New York at an alarming rate. The New York Post announced and indeed For starters, a bit of terminology. Okay, now I’m just going to read a little bit of this to you and I know I’m not the best reader, I should actually get a professional. But you know what I weave in my commentary and I hope you can tell, which is the article in which is the tangential commentary. I think this will be fascinating to you. And why have I said this? Well, there’s two giant forces that add up to my prediction. Remember my prediction? I’ve been predicting it for a few years now. The resurgence of the suburbs, the renaissance of the suburbs, the burbs are coming back baby, and they are coming back with a vengeance. Two major forces obviously, technology in general, you know, Skype, goto meeting, join.me, all of the screen sharing all of the technology, our mobile devices, our smartphones, all of this technology, the internet in general delivery services, FedEx, UPS, and soon to be drones delivering packages. All this makes geography less meaningful than it’s ever been in human history. And then you layer on top, this other burgeoning technology, the autonomous car, the self driving car, and even if it’s not totally self driving, and by the way, let me give you a metric on replacing the automobile fleet. It’s eight years, eight years. That’s pretty much how long it takes to see that almost every car on the road is new is within the last eight years. So a car today, a 2017 car will probably very, very likely not be on the road eight years from now. Okay. Now with self driving technology, if it gets good enough and cheap enough, I think you’re going to see that cycle speed up, kind of like Moore’s Law, right Moore’s law. Remember Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, said the power of a processor would double every 18 months. And all that’s done is increase exponentially. We live in an amazing time. It’s an amazing time to be alive. exponential technologies, right? So that is another thing leading to the revival, the renaissance of the suburbs. Okay, they’re coming back. You know, I have kind of a love hate relationship with suburbia. It’s good and bad. But let me tell you something. If you are an investor, and you invest in an asset class that has its three primary value drivers based around one concept, okay, three, three, the first three value drivers of this asset class is based around one idea, and that idea becomes less potent, becomes less meaningful, then you better really, you better really rethink your your ideas about investing You could be in trouble, you could make a huge mistake. If you believe that you better pay a huge premium for these three things. Location, location, and location. The game has changed. It’s like people in 1970, who were saying, Well, you know, we better save money for a rainy day and never go into debt, and all that kind of stuff. And guess what happened a year later, the rug was pulled out from under them. The rules of the game had changed. Why did it change because Nixon took us off the gold standard, okay. And then governments were untethered, they could create money out of thin air, we have a lot of inflation. Now they’ve found ways to say we don’t have a lot of inflation, we still have a decent amount. And we all know this. We’ve discussed on many other episodes, but this has been Important this location location thing. Okay, let’s get Jason, back to the article focus. Okay, here we go. Alright. So in the in the Atlantic article, it’s talking about people fleeing from New York City, right? And now this is going to be fascinating. All right. Okay, so the Census Bureau tracks two sorts of American Movers. First, there are what’s called domestic migrants who move from one us county to another. Second, there are international migrants who move from a foreign country to America. Somewhat confusingly, the ladder definition does not mean all migrants a Guatemalan born woman who lives in Houston for two years and then moves to Dallas. It’s considered a domestic migrant, since she’s moving between American cities. That sounds like some methodological mumbo jumbo, but it’s critical understanding for what’s happening to New York and the rest of America’s long Just city’s net domestic migration to New York metro area, which includes the five boroughs, plus slivers of New Jersey and Pennsylvania is down a whopping 900,000 people. Folks, did you hear that? That’s almost a million people since 2010. That means since 2010, almost a million people have left New York for somewhere else in America, then have moved to New York from another us Metro. Okay. More than any other Metro in the country. This is the fleeing that the post finds so alarming, but the New York Metro has also netted about 850,000 International migrants since 2010. That number is also tops among all metros more than Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco combined Okay, so seems like you figured it out right at keep on reading. Okay, so that’s the story of New York City today. This is an extremely popular first stop. An extremely popular first stop for immigrants. Obviously we all know about Ellis Island, etc, etc. In the old days, a little different now, obviously, but the ideas still holds true. They come to New York first, it’s a first stop. Okay. It is also a popular destination for young upwardly mobile millennials who have graduated from top colleges in Dune and don’t yet have families with children. But since it’s expensive, chaotic and mostly long, free, it’s not a great place for middle class families who dream of an affordable house car in a yard. You know, that American dream with a white picket fence. Okay, in this regard, New York is a microcosm of the American city population growth in big cities. He has now shrunk for five consecutive years according to a prior guests on Jason Hartman show a couple of times Jed Calico. The articles did not say that I think you can tell right? Okay. But Jed Calico has been on our show and here he is commenting in this article in economist and writer, the Well, well educated millennials without children have concentrated in a handful of expensive liberal cities. The rest of the country is slowly fanning out into the sunny suburbs. It’s the revenge of the past, in a way in the housing boom of the 1990s and 2000s. Americans moved south and west. Folks, I was talking about that trend in 2002. I was saying that how, you know, all these retiring baby boomers are leaving the cold Northeastern climates Right. Exactly, as I had said, although, you know, been happening for a little longer, it gives me a little while to notice it. Look, I don’t do demography full time, okay? It’s just a little. It’s a hobby. I’m a hack demographer. Okay. All right. Then the housing crash happened. Not the housing crash, by the way. Isn’t that interesting how they call it the housing crash? It was the everything crash. It was the global economic crash the worst in seven decades. Okay. Anyway, whatever, whatever, whatever. Then the housing crash happened for a few years, it seemed as if America might be experiencing a great rewinding, as the ex Serbs and the ex ex Serbs collapsed and some families moved back to the largest, most prosperous cities right now the ex Serbs, by the way, someone asked me what I meant by that on a on a prior episode I had mentioned the exurbs. Basically you have it this way. You have the cities Have the suburbs and you all know what that is. Then you have the exurbs that are beyond the suburbs, right? And a lot of these excerpts are very affluent areas where people have a lot of land and, you know, maybe kind of ranch style living, maybe equestrian living. And so the excerpts are more rural, the suburbs would not be considered rural, they just be considered, you know, tract houses, right. That’s the typical suburban landscape in America and America being very unique in the concept of the suburbs. That’s a very American concept. Right. Okay. So the Serbs and the Serbs collapsed and some families moved back to the largest, most prosperous cities. But that rewind button really hit a pause key was really a pause key. Gas prices spiked, and then came back down. Population growth in the densest urban areas. Places like Manhattan in San Francisco has been falling each year since 2010. And it’s the sparser West suburbs that are seeing the fastest growth in the last few years. The winners have shifted from southwest to south east. Now the 10 fastest growing large metros in 2016. Seven or in this is amazing in the Carolinas in Florida. Okay, nothing like what we’re talking about with the cities right, one can see glimpses of the rise of low density suburbs, even in non housing data. On Monday, Ford’s car sales fell 24% in March while f series pickups rose by double digits. Jim’s latest sales growth was similarly driven by crossovers and trucks, not little cards. Now, why is that important? I think you can get the gist of this right as to what’s going on here. You know, you don’t drive a big Ford pickup truck. If you live in New York City, obviously right? That’s not the typical car you probably don’t drive at all when you live in New York City. But anyway, maybe families want to live in denser areas but are being priced out moving to the suburbs in buying larger vehicles rather than smaller than a small car that can be parallel parked on a crowded city block. Or maybe America suffers from a unique residential claustrophobia, where its residents naturally seek to fill out America’s bounty of land. With ever larger homes, trucks and lawns. America’s largest cities have so much going for them. They are rich, productive and pulsating with culture and culture and life. So what happened to the great urban revival, America’s cities have domestic net out migration out migration, because they’re not affordable, said ej McMahon, founder of empire Center for Public Policy. I think we have someone from them on the floor. Yeah, anyway, for many New York City is a temporal portal, a temporary portal. The baby boomers retire to Florida, the middle class millennials move to Long Island for a house. The woman from Slovakia comes to Queens lives in her second cousins basement lover, gets her feet on the ground and gets a better apartment in West Orange, New Jersey. It leads to the great hollowing out of the city. There are lots of new immigrants and rich people in New York but there are fewer dead center families McMahon said okay, so do you just see how hugely significant this I mean the article goes on and on. And as you can tell on my crappy voiceover reader, so it’s kind of hard for me to just read stuff to people like this. So let’s talk a little bit about another one of the 10 commandments real quickly here before we wrap it up cuz I got to do another podcast interview. That is where I talk about, thou shalt only invest, where there is universal need, thou shalt only invest where there is universal need. So, you’ve heard me talk about this, especially if you’ve come to my creating wealth seminar, but also here on the podcast, I talked about how it is very easy to outsource office space demand to homes to people working out of the house, to people living in foreign countries, especially the Philippines and India. So if you’re an office property investor, that would not be good for you right? Because it reduces demand for your office properties that you want to rent to people, okay. If you are an industrial property investor, and you invest in warehouses and industrial style properties, and you see this huge movement of offshoring where places like China become the workshop of the world, right? And that’s where the sweat jobs are done right. And that would lessen the need for industrial properties. And then you look at America where you’ve got population increasing, you’ve got an increasing number of knowledge workers, we’ve had that going on for a few decades. Now, of course, largely, by the way, due to the personal computer, because, remember, in the old days, this is before my time. But the used to be that all the computing power was in a mainframe, right? And it was not distributed. And with the personal computer revolution with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, you know, they brought it to the desktop. And when the computer power came to the desktop, and workers were empowered, they also shortly after that became mobile, right. And when they became mobile, then technology allowed them to work out of the house. Okay. And so that’s a big change that actually increases demand for housing, because the size of the house has to be if possible, if affordable, a little bit larger, and the decrease in demand for office space. So, you look at this, there is literally the segment we have not talked about yet is retail. Well, we look at people buying stuff online. They’re all of these different online e tailers. doing incredibly well. Of course, we’ve all heard of Amazon. But you know, there’s a whole bunch of other companies that deliver all sorts of specialized products. The shopping mall is going out of style. The grocery store is going out of style. Virtually every form of retail property is in four A revaluation. How’s that that’s a nice soft way to put it in for a revaluation. And so Aren’t you glad you listened to me and you didn’t buy high priced properties in big cities, right as we just talked about, and you aligned all your deals to be Win Win and you bought something that has universal need, and that is housing, housing, universal need. The old saying goes, people only need three basic things food, clothing, and shelter, shelter, so let them rent that shelter from you. And if they want to buy that shelter, let the demand of all those buyers push the price of the shelter you already own up so you can practice the refi to die plan or you can rebalance your portfolio. Which by the way, this will be my final thought for this episode. portfolio rebalancing. This is an important thing to do every once in a while now, many of you clients listening have been clients of mine for 12 years, right? 13 years. Yeah, maybe 13 years now that I’ve been in the investment only side of the real estate business. And some of you have some properties in your portfolio, and you need to move things around a little bit. You need to rebalance your portfolio, just like all those Wall Street guys say, you know, rebalance. So you’ll have the right mix of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, high cap or you know, small cap, large cap International, blah, blah, blah, right? Well, we got to do that a little bit with real estate too. Because if your properties like the ones that I have sold in the past couple of years that I’ve talked about on the show, and I’ve told you how I’ve done my two for one deal, okay. And I have sold properties in say North Carolina, highly appreciated and I bought two properties for that one, I bought two in Memphis. And then last year I did it again, I sold a Houston area property, and I bought two in Memphis, and I increased my cash flow. And I increased my safety and diversification by rebalancing my portfolio. So a lot of you need to think about doing this because you’ve been with us for many years, and you have profited, you have become, hopefully much, much richer, investing with us and following my plan, and I know many, many, many of you have, and that is a wonderful thing. So talk to your investment counselor. If you don’t have an investment counselor at my company yet, just go to Jason Hartman comm fill out any contact form there, and we will get in contact with you and our investment counselors will help you do a portfolio review. You should really be doing this every six months or so every year at least. And we balancing your portfolio. If you And sometimes rebalancing your portfolio doesn’t mean trading properties. Sometimes it means restructuring your financing. So there are lots of things you can do in terms of rebalancing your portfolio. Maybe it just means dumping your property manager and getting a better one. Maybe it means dumping your property manager and self managing. Maybe it means increasing the rents. Maybe it means doing some capital improvements to a property. There are always things to consider. So be in touch with us. That’s what we’re here for. We’re here to counsel you, we’re here to help you. It’s all free. You know how we make money. The way we make money is we get paid a referral fee for referring business to our various local market specialists. And unlike so many other groups out there that are might appear to be doing something similar to what we do. Many of them are not because we do not do one off deals. We only do deals where we have relationships with these local market specialists, and they take good care of our customers. And if they don’t, you’re fired as our now president used to say, actually, I think he still says that once in a while, but anyway, there we go. Okay. Thank you so much for joining me today. And we’ve got I just interviewed yesterday interviewed Harry dent. Again, I think that was his fifth time on the show. So we will probably publish that interview next week, maybe Monday. We’ve got flashback Friday coming up. And thank you so much for listening, and rating and reviewing the show also on whatever podcast platform you are using. We would appreciate your reviews and ratings of the show.
Thank you so much for joining us and happy investing. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes, be sure to check out the show’s specific website and our general website Hartman media.com For appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.