David:
This is the BiggerPockets podcast coming at you from the Spotify Studios in downtown LA with episode 812.

Jason:
I think it took about a thousand conversations before I actually got a really good lead. You can’t take the rejection personally because every single person that gets in a real estate, you get rejected. Everyone’s going to tell you no in the beginning, and it’s just a part of getting into the game. It’s the gate you need to walk through in order to become a real estate salesperson or an investor.

David:
What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast here today with my co-host and partner in Multifamily Investing, also, one of the smartest guys I know, and incredibly funny for a smart guy, we’ll say that as well. In addition to being good-looking, you’ve sort of hit the trifecta of what we want in a podcast host. So thank you, Andrew Cushman, everybody.

Andrew:
I don’t know what to say after that, man. That’s untoppable.

David:
I left you speechless. That’s how I keep more mic time. I just say everything you were going to say, like Eminem and 8 Mile, and you have nothing you can do to reply.

Andrew:
Yeah. You’re out right now. I’m doing well. Glad to be here in person. Glad to be back in California. Been traveling a lot so good to be home, especially since they dropped the charges.

David:
Oh, good to know. And also thank you for pretending like you understood that Eminem joke, which I know you’re going to ask me later, what the hell that meant.
In today’s show, you and I are interviewing Jason, who’s sitting here with us right now who has an incredible story that has gone from being a very hardworking student in school, to a hardworking broker, to a successful broker, to a badass real estate investor, which is why you’re being interviewed on the biggest, the baddest, and the best real estate podcast in the world. So glad that you’re here.
Andrew, what should our listeners keep an eye out for to help them in their own investing journey?

Andrew:
There’s a whole lot. Throughout the entire show, Jason dropped all kinds of knowledge and just inspiring things, but I would say two that really stood out to me, was one he talks about he just worked his tail off to get that first deal, got it right to the finish line, and then it seemed like the whole thing blew up on him, and it almost took him out of the game. It almost emotionally crushed him.
And what he did, part of how he got past that is he zoomed out and looked at the big picture and the skills that he had learned in the business and the pipeline that he had built, and that helped him carry through and make sure you listened through to find out how he did eventually end up saving that deal.
And then also in line with that, is he focused on learning the skills. He wasn’t focused on, “Okay, I got to get this deal.” Or, “I have to go over here.” Or, “I have to get this partner.” Or, “I don’t have the money.” His focus was, “I am going to learn these skills necessary to become an investor, to become an entrepreneur, to learn real estate, and everything else will come from that.” I think that’s a huge part of why he’s so successful at such a young age in a very difficult market.

David:
There you go. So listen all the way to the end of today’s show. If you want to hear more about how Jason has been able to build a portfolio with a very impressive worth, which we’re not going to reveal here, you got to listen all the way to the end.
Before we get into the show with Jason, today’s quick tip. Pick up the phone, not once and not twice, but a lot of times by building in the reps that you need to get the deal. Andrew, how many phone calls did you have to make before you got your first flip?

Andrew:
4,576 rejections.

David:
And Andrew will tell you all why that is like taking the stairs, not the escalator in today’s episode.

Andrew:
That’s right.

David:
All right, my brother, let’s get into it.
Jason Lee, welcome to the podcast. For everybody listening, Jason has 119 units across 17 different properties. He’s been investing for just three years. He got started in 2020. So for everybody who says all of your guests made a bunch of money in the past, well, not this one, this has happened over the last three years.
Once lost a hundred thousand dollars to a terrible contractor. And as a fun fact, he loves dogs and plans to start a nonprofit that helps dogs who need homes and veterinary care. You just got a collective, “Aww.” From a huge percentage of our audience there. Well done, Jason. Welcome to the show.

Jason:
Thanks for having me, David.

David:
Yeah, so before we get into your backstory, tell us briefly how are you adapting or pivoting your strategy in today’s market?

Jason:
Yeah. Today’s market, it’s definitely tougher than it was in 2021 and 2022. It’s definitely slowed down considerably in my world. So I think to pivot, what I’ve been doing is reinvesting a lot of money into marketing, going all in on marketing because usually when things slow down, companies tend to shrink and lower their marketing budget. But I’ve been trying to reinvest my earnings into more marketing, to try to take more market share while some people might be claiming up while the market is slow.

David:
All right. And then what about the price of the properties? Are you kind of like, “Hey, whatever it is, is fine.” Or are you really narrowing down on what you’re paying?

Jason:
So definitely been a lot pickier lately with pricing. I think, I invest in San Diego. So in San Diego things are very economically sound. There’s a lot of great fundamentals to where nothing points to a big crash.
We’re over 70,000 homes behind on being the amount of demand of people that want to live in San Diego. We have no inventory. So in that sense, we’re not scared about our exit. But then again, interest rates is a huge question mark and some other global economic factors. So just because of that, we’ve been definitely put a bigger pad in our underwriting to make sure that the numbers will pencil no matter what.

David:
So before we move on, when you do that, that obviously means more deals won’t work. Have you found that that means nothing’s working or are you still finding something even with that bigger pad?

Jason:
So with the bigger pad, you’re 100% right. More deals are not working, but we’ve been able to do four deals in the last six months. So we’re still seeing deals that work in our newer, more strict underwriting.

David:
Okay. Excited to get more into this real estate success that you’ve been having, but before we do, let’s go back a bit in time first. What was life for you like, growing up?

Jason:
Yeah. So life growing up, I was born in Seoul, Korea. I was born in a US territory. My dad was in the army and my dad actually met my mom there. She spoke no English, was just Korean, grew up there. And then my dad, when he retired from the army, decided to move us to California, a small town in the East Bay. Clayton, California. I don’t know if you know where that is.

David:
Wow. I live in Brentwood, man. I’m very close to Clayton.

Jason:
Oh, no way.

David:
We sell houses out there.

Jason:
That’s awesome.

David:
I was a deputy in the county where Clayton is.

Jason:
Oh, cool. Yeah, so that’s where I grew up. I grew up in a little, you know where Ed’s Mudville Grill is?

David:
Yeah.

Jason:
I grew up right behind there. So I lived there until I was 18 and moved there when I was seven. And my dad was a full-time security guard. My mom jumped around from business to business and then eventually her last business failed, which was kind of like a small juice shop.
And then from there she started a house cleaning business, and from that, I think that really shaped how I wanted my financial future to look and how I wanted to give back to my family, because growing up, every single conversation or every fight that my parents had, it was always about-

David:
The money.

Jason:
“How are we going to pay the mortgage next month?” Every single month. And ever since I was eight years old, that’s kind of what was ingrained into my brain. So I actually was very fearful of money and was scared to actually even do anything to make money just because I knew that money was a big trigger for my anxiety.

David:
Very similar story for me. Sounds like Andrew might’ve been the same case for you, right?

Andrew:
A little bit different. We are solid middle class. We didn’t have struggles, but we also had a tight budget to fall and pay attention to.

David:
What I noticed in my childhood is that lack of money equals pain. That’s what the cause the fighting, is they’re scared, there’s fear. Where there’s fear, there’s pain. Little kids don’t like to be around their heroes who are supposed to keep them safe, being afraid. So you probably recognize money as the monster. If you don’t have it, you’re in trouble.

Andrew:
Everyone says money can’t buy happiness, and that absolutely is true, but it can eliminate a lot of the things that cause unhappiness.

David:
Good point.

Andrew:
And stress.

David:
Yeah. So did you make an inner vow, “I will never be broke?”

Jason:
No, I did not. I think the first thing that kind of really got me motivated was when I grew up and kind of grew my empathetic side of my brain, when I went to college and moved away, that’s when I actually got closest to my parents because I saw how other people grew up. I saw how good some people had it, and I saw how much my parents struggled compared to some of these other families at San Diego State University.
So I just really just made a pact one day, middle college that I was going to somehow give back to my family. And I’ve been able to do that, fortunately, still am, but that was kind of the first pact I made. I never wanted to be just rich for myself. That’s not how it started.

David:
So you mentioned going to college. What were your expectations when you first got there?

Jason:
It’s a great question. So when I first got to college, all I cared about was rugby. Rugby was my first passion. So in high school I started playing rugby. I played football as well, but I really fell in love with rugby. But I was excited to go to San Diego State to play for the rugby team there. And then that ended up not working out because I had about seven or eight diagnosed concussions in high school.
So I told the honest truth to the trainer at San Diego State and she couldn’t clear me. So that was gone right away. So I kind of had that loss of identity when I first got to college because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had been an athlete my whole life. All I cared about was eating right and working out and playing sports.
And when I got there, I knew no one. I just found out I can never play rugby again. And my parents were my ear saying, “No matter what happens, you’re going to go to grad school for whether it’s being a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer, whatever it is.” So I was just a very confused kid with a lot of bad and good influences, I guess you could say.
And my expectations, I really didn’t have high hopes of college. I just thought I was going to be studying all the time and going to grad school and have a normal life. So I thought I was just be going through the system like a usual person.

David:
What was your college experience like Andrew?

Andrew:
Mine? I was living in Texas at the time, and my parents suggested, “Hey, why don’t you go to Texas A&M?” And I quickly responded and said, “I won’t be caught dead at that redneck school.” Well, a couple of years later, guess where I was going? And I went there, and I knew in high school I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I just didn’t know how or what that looked like, I had no clue.
And so I figured, “Well, I like chemistry and I like problem solving, so I’ll go get a chemical engineering degree, that’ll give me a job that’s tolerable and I’ll always have something to do until I can figure it out.” And so I did that. I went and got a chemical engineering degree, double majored in meteorology for a while, and then also decided, “You know what? If I complete this, they’re going to send me to an outpost in the Alaskan wilderness, and I don’t want to do that either.”
So I graduated with an engineering degree and I guess it was an amazing four and a half years, but the freedom and creativity that you get to do as an entrepreneur, I would never want to go back, of just being in that environment of studying to take the test and not really to necessarily learn, and I found I was really good at that.
I could study something, remember it for two hours, write it back down, and then leave and completely forget all of it. And just looking back, that kind of feels like an empty thing to do. And I love being in this environment. Jason, you’ve absorbed so much in a few years, and that’s all self-taught, right? And self-learned, and from mentors, and that to me is much more exciting. So I had a good college experience, but today like what you’re doing, what we’re doing is just so much better.

David:
Okay. So Jason, you show up at college, prepared to be a good son, get good grades, get into grad school. What was your experience like?

Jason:
So my experience in the beginning, I was basically completely lost, like I said, didn’t know what exactly, if I wanted be a doctor, going to med school, going to grad school, whatever it is. But I chose the path of going down biology and trying to be a doctor, a physician.
So I took all the core science classes and there’s a lot of pressure on me because you have to get an A or B minimum to get to grad school, to go to med school. So I was living in the library, I was studying all the time, and there was this one class that eventually broke me and that was organic chemistry and that, if anyone’s taken that class, it’s the worst class I ever, have you taken it?

Andrew:
I have.

Jason:
You have?

Andrew:
I have organic chemistry 1 and 2.

Jason:
That was 1 and 2. Yeah. I’ll tell you why it’s terrible. So all day long, you’re drawing shapes with just different chemicals like carbon and nitrogen, whatever it is.
And I just had a thought in my head one day when I was studying for four hours straight for a test like, “Why am I learning this stuff? I’m never going to use this when I’m trying to actually help a patient.” So eventually, and it was just hard. My brain doesn’t work like that. And the way that organic chemistry works, you have to just, I don’t know, put different puzzles and stuff together. I can’t really explain it, but-

David:
Did you hate geometry?

Jason:
I hated geometry, yep. It’s kind of the harder version-

David:
It’s the chemistry version of geometry.

Jason:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew:
It is. Yeah.

Jason:
I hated geometry.

David:
I’m guessing you liked geometry.

Andrew:
It was okay. Yeah. I mean, I was decent at it, but again, I kind of went into that stuff as something I could tolerate until discovering real estate.

David:
Did you also have a terrible teacher?

Jason:
No, my teacher wasn’t bad.

David:
Oh, that’s good.

Jason:
It was on the teacher, no?

David:
I had a horrible chemistry teacher in high school and I was like, “I just can’t do this.” I thought I was dumb. They were a terrible teacher. Then I found half the class failed. They were an intern that they stuck in there because they couldn’t find a real teacher. They was not good at teaching. And that whole time I thought I was terrible.
It was that, “Oh no, the teacher was really bad.” But sometimes that’s a blessing because this opened up doors for something else. So what was the light bulb moment after organic chemistry where you realized, “I hate this”?

Jason:
Yeah. So like you said, like Andrew said I could tolerate most of my classes, but that was the one thing I couldn’t tolerate. And that’s when I started looking around, like, “What else could be there, what other paths are there for me?” Because I never even thought about business going to college because my parents never really taught me much about business. I didn’t really know what that whole sales, real estate finance world was about. I knew absolutely nothing about it.
But every single, all of my friends in school, they were all business majors. They were all finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, every single one of them. And I just started asking questions, “What are you looking to do when you get out of college?” “I’m looking to go into real estate, be a financial advisor.” All that stuff. So I think just through networking and meeting people at San Diego State, that’s what kind of got me the light bulb running around, like, “What else could be there for me when I graduate?”

Andrew:
And is that how you discovered real estate? How did you, it sounds like they started kind of planting those seeds. Where did you go from there?

Jason:
I mean, to be honest with you, the huge moment where I eventually found real estate, I don’t know if this is PG enough for the show. It was-

Andrew:
I think they can bleep things out, right?

David:
I’m curious how on earth you’re going to turn real estate into something. PG-13, I think everybody wants to hear what you’re about to say.

Andrew:
Now we really want to know.

Jason:
Yeah, yeah. So it was finals week, my first semester of junior year for organic chemistry. And by this point I’d already been like, “I’m going to do something else. I have to do something else.” And I started investing in stocks, a little bit of finance stuff here and there, like Forex trading, bunch of BS.
And this one before finals, we go out to a concert in San Diego, and my friends and I decided to try magic mushrooms the first time. And we went to the concert, hit me like a train, and I became like a philosopher for the night. My whole world opened up. I started telling people what I was going to do with my life, “Dah, dah, dah, dah.”

Andrew:
Just like a Binance meetup.

Jason:
My left and right brain just connected. I swear. I got home. I gave my roommates a speech on how my parents are holding me back, on how science is a terrible path. I’m never going to be a doctor. And I woke up, changed my major to communication, and I went to every club on campus the next week and found real estate.

Andrew:
I think that’s one of the more unique paths to real estate I’ve ever heard.

David:
You just make it sound like psilocybin was, if everyone just took it, they’d immediately figure out what they want to do in life. There was nothing else that occurred in there. It was literally just left brain, right brain connect. You check every class or every course available, and then, a club you said, and then the real estate one just stood out, like, “That would be good”?

Jason:
Yeah. I joined the Real Estate Society. I joined the finance club, and my first event at the Real Estate Society was like a speed dating thing. So 20 professionals from San Diego met with 20 students, and we each had three minutes to meet every single professional.
And I connected really well with this guy named Brian, who was my old mentor, who hired me to be a commercial real estate agent. And he was talking numbers, talking about potential and what I’d be doing. And it just really resonated with me, my personality. I have a very type a go, go, personality. That’s what brokerage is. As you know David. So after that event, my first event at my school, I just started working in this company and that’s how I got into real estate.

Andrew:
How did you either convince him or get him, how did you go from a 3-minute meeting to working with him and his company?

Jason:
That’s a great question. Yeah, it didn’t just happen after a 3-minute meeting. So after 3-minute meeting, after the event ended, I was extremely scared to go talk to him after the meeting, but he said, “Feel free to come back and discuss more.” But I was in a corner thinking for four minutes on what I was going to say, because I knew nothing about real estate at the time. “What am I going to say to this guy when I come back?”
But I basically just came back and said, “Hey, I really enjoyed our conversation. I’d really like to work for you and see what you have going on.” And he told me it was a non-paid internship, no salary, no pay. Basically I’d give up my time for knowledge and skills. At the time, I didn’t understand that, but I said, “You know what? I really like this guy. I’m going to go for it anyway.”
So he invited me to his office and I met some of his employees, some of his agents, and I really liked the company culture there. I really liked what they were doing. There was guys that were doing very, very well at the company and the rest was history, I guess.

Andrew:
Awesome. Does he play any kind of role in your life or business today still?

Jason:
No. After I left the company, him and I haven’t really talked much. We ended on very good terms, but him and his partner, they’ve kind of taught me the whole business. But since we broke up, it was a good breakup, but we haven’t really talked to each other since.

David:
It’s a tricky thing, when it’s like you bring this person into the world and then they go and do their own thing. Sometimes if there are expectations where that’s going to happen, it’s okay, but it can hurt also, when you get an emotional connection with someone, that’s what no one talks about with partnerships. There’s an emotional component to them as well. So what time in history was this when you are moving up to be an intern?

Jason:
So, this was March of 2018. This was the second semester of my junior year. I just turned 21.

David:
Okay. And then when did you get your license?

Jason:
I got my license five months later, so in August.

David:
All right. And you’re still in college while this is going on?

Jason:
Yeah, still in college.

David:
Okay. So what are you doing there?

Andrew:
Failing organic chemistry?

Jason:
No. Yeah, no. Surprisingly I got a decent grade in that, but after that I changed to communication, like I said. So that was such a night and day shift from science. I didn’t study at all, just got through and got straight B’s. So I was focusing five hours a week on school, just going to class. And then Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, all day I would be at the office making calls.

David:
So you’re going to school, you’re studying, you’re doing your homework, and then when you have time, you’re just banging out stuff on the phone.

Jason:
Yeah. So I stacked all my classes on Tuesday and Thursdays, and then I would work four days a week.

David:
I did that too when I was in college. Same thing. Was it difficult to accept that you’re going to be making cold calls and getting rejected? How did you handle that?

Jason:
Yes. It was very tough at first. I had never ever gotten rejected like that before. I had no sales experience. So when I first came into it, I was the worst salesperson ever on the phone.
I got rejected really quick. People got me off the phone really fast. They knew how young I was just by my voice. So no one took me seriously and it took a lot of reps to eventually become good at what I was doing.

Andrew:
So that’s a really good point. So I’m in my mid-40s. I’m at the point where my once unlimited potential is starting to seem somewhat limited. You’re in your mid-20s, hopefully many decades ahead, which is a huge advantage, you’re starting early, but a lot of people in the audience, that’s one of the challenges is, “Well, hey, I’m young. I sound young. I have no experience. I barely know the language. How do I get people to take me seriously? How do I break into this?”
So could you speak a little bit more to that? So the person who’s listening who maybe just graduated college or just starting off, what did you do when you’re cold calling an owner of a 5-unit in San Diego? How did you get that person to take you seriously? And I’m sure a lot of them didn’t, right? And so that was part of what you were talking about, just pushing through.
But what would you say to the person who’s trying to do what you did in terms of having the internal strength to push through and to get people to take you seriously? Did you just own it and say, “Yep, I’m just getting started, but if you’re my first deal, you’re going to get more attention than anybody’s going to give you because your deal means everything to me.” Or was there, what tactics did you take?

Jason:
Yeah. So I think it took about a thousand conversations before I actually got a really good lead.

Andrew:
Been there.

David:
He knows his number. Ask him his number.

Jason:
What’s your number?

Andrew:
It took me 4,576 cold calls to get my first deal.

David:
Nice. That number makes it cameo in Long Distance Real Estate Investing, and if anybody wants to check that out. So you had to say a similar experience. You’re just getting rejected. Rejection sandwich every day for lunch, breakfast and dinner, with snacks.

Jason:
With snacks and dessert. Yeah, but eventually, I think the biggest thing that I want to mention is you can’t take the rejection personally because every single person that gets into real estate, you get rejected. So everyone’s going to tell you no in the beginning, and it’s just a part of getting into the game. It’s the gate you need to walk through in order to become a real estate salesperson or an investor.

David:
It’s like hell week, but it lasts for a lot longer than a week. It was dragged out for a 4-year period of life.

Jason:
Exactly, 100%.

David:
I was rejected by my own hairline. I got exposed to this earlier in life. I can relate.

Andrew:
Basically, it sounds like what you’re saying is, is just put in the reps and you’ll learn the language and you’ll be able to connect with people, and then you’re still going to get tons of rejection, but if you just hang in there eventually you’re going to make the connection and not get the rejection.

Jason:
Yeah. But there’s two more things that really helped me besides the reps. The first thing was I had a really good sales trainer. I had a really good broker that was teaching me on what to say, how to say it, teaching me how to be an expert in my market and how to analyze deals, how to understand the lingo, know what you’re talking about because if you sound like you know what you’re talking about, no matter how young you are, people are still going to take you seriously. And deal by deal, your track record gets better and better. So you can use that to your advantage, your testimonials.
But the thing that really moved the needle for me that I think is mandatory for anyone that’s young watching the show, that’s graduating out of college that wants to be in real estate is you got to have an older, wiser partner to go to meetings with you, to be on calls with you in the first year of your career no matter what.
Because if you go into real estate without a team just on your own and you’re trying to sell properties or buy properties and you have no guidance and no one by your side to go to those meetings to close sales with you or to close deals with you, you’re going to have a really hard time compared to the person like me that had that partner by my side.

Andrew:
Yeah. I mean, I would concur 100%. I had that too when I started off. It still took me 4,500 calls, but without that official mentor and my wife sitting next to me and I’d hang up and she’d be like, “Honey, that was good, but next time try this instead.” Yeah, you’re absolutely right.
Finding that person, whether it’s a paid mentor or you’re working for free or someone in your office or even a family member, is absolutely critical. It is so hard to see yourself objectively and fully enough and develop it all on your own.

Jason:
Commercial real estate brokerage is a revolving door and it’s a revolving door, not because of the lack of talent, it’s because the lack of mentorship, the lack of time people are willing to spend into these new agents, because if you just tell them to give them a script and a call and you don’t give them any guidance until they bring you a lead, which is what most commercial real estate brokers in the industry expect, a lot of your agents aren’t going to succeed.
And I’ve taken the opposite approach of my agents and give them a lot of guidance, a lot of training, being on every follow-up call to make sure that they know that I’m here and I care about them.

David:
So what came first? You’re banging the phones. Did you get your first deal or did you get a client first?

Jason:
So I got my first client from banging the phones. I didn’t buy my first property until I was three years in two brokerage.

David:
All right. So tell me about your first client. What type of a deal was it?

Jason:
I’m glad you asked. It’s a horror story. So the client was great. The client was amazing. It’s a horror story because of the circumstance. So this was six months into the business. Keep in mind I had no money in my bank account.
I had finally got a great lead and after doing my side hustles, going to school and trying to spend time into brokerage, I’d finally gotten my first really good listing appointment after six months and my senior broker crushed the meeting. We got the listing, I was on top of the world.
This was November of 2019, I want to say, no, 2018, sorry. November of 2018, four or five days after the appointment, the owner unexpectedly passes away and the owner didn’t have a trust for the property. So you know what’s coming next. It went into probate.

David:
It goes to the state, the state has to determine where it gets messy, process takes forever.

Jason:
Thank you.

Andrew:
Yeah, not fun at all.

Jason:
Not fun at all. So through a probate attorney, they told me it would take at least six months to a year to get it out of probate into the son’s hands and to be able to sell it. And when I got that news, I went home from the office that day, cried the entire way home, and I told myself I was going to quit real estate. I was done. “My family was right, my friends are right. I should not have gone into real estate. It’s way too risky. It’s a terrible business. I need to get out of this.” But something in my gut just told me to stay.
Something in my gut said, “You’ve learned so much in these last six months. You have a great team behind you. You have a lot of potential.” And for some reason I came in the office that day and just kept doing what I was doing, but I was very, very close to quitting the business forever.

David:
Those are some key linchpin moments in our lives. I can look back and remember several of them. And as you were talking, what I realized with a little bit more wisdom is it wasn’t just the experience that was so bad, it was my interpretation of the experience.
So what you were interpreting was, “I was told not to do this. I was told to take the safe route. I thought I knew better than everyone. I told them all, I know what I’m doing, get out of my way and now I’m wrong. I failed. I should have listened. Why did I trust my gut?” And that’s so dangerous because if you lose confidence in yourself, you’ll become a slave and live in the matrix for the rest of your life.
That’s why that was such a powerful moment that you didn’t quit because if you had quit, you would’ve been empowering the interpretation that you don’t have what it takes. And that would’ve become your identity and maybe the story of your life for a very long time, maybe 20 years before you give it another try. Maybe that’s why all these middle-aged guys end up getting Corvettes and it’s because they’re having to come out of that identity.

Andrew:
Finally, getting out of it. Yep.

David:
Yup. That they developed. But that didn’t happen with you. How did you respond instead?

Jason:
I showed up, put my big boy pants on and just said, “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.” I had a decent pipeline built, so I knew I wasn’t just like, “I had nothing going for me.” So I knew I had something going for me. And when I talked to my mentor about it and really just ran through what I was feeling, that it’s been six months I’ve made a single paycheck and I just lost any sort of chance I had of making one soon. And from that conversation and a lot of upbringing from my peers, I ended up just sticking with it.

David:
So your boys picked you up?

Jason:
My boys picked me up, the property went out of probate much faster. They did a really good job. It was actually out in two months. That ended up being my first deal. The check was a whopping $3,000. Huge check.

Andrew:
Still a check.

Jason:
Still a check.

David:
It’s funny that that’s what you were crying over, right? Like 3000 is nothing, but it’s the interpretation that was causing all the pain. It’s not the actual reality.

Andrew:
And Jason, you said something that I think it’s critical for everybody to listen to and remember and that you told yourself, a part of how you kept yourself going. You said, “Well, look, I know I’ve developed a pipeline. There’s more behind this.” And I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of that, is don’t focus on, “There’s just this one deal. I got to get this one deal.”

David:
It’s zooming in.

Andrew:
Yeah. You’re getting too far zoomed in. You were zoomed out in the big picture saying, “All right, you know what, this might fail. It’s like a gut punch, this sucks. But you know what? I’ve got more coming. I’m going to keep going and zooming out and keeping that perspective.” Is absolutely critical, especially when you’re getting started and is just build that pipeline out. So that was really good on your part.

Jason:
And I mentioned earlier, and this is when I got the best advice I ever got from my mentor is you’re learning the skills now, don’t worry about money. You’re learning the skills right now in your career to be able to become a great broker, a great agent, great investor in order to make more money in the future.
Because in commercial real estate brokerage or in any brokerage, when you’re an agent, David, your first year, it’s your toughest year, right? It’s the hardest year of your career, but your income can literally two x every single year just because of the skills you’ve learned in that first year.

David:
If you learn the skills.

Jason:
If you learn the skills.

David:
Yes, a lot of people focus on the money, not the skills. It’s like a leap of faith. You’re just constantly building skills and believing eventually that’s going to turn into money for you.

Andrew:
All right, so you told us the story of how you got your first brokerage deal. Tell us the story of your first investment deal, how you got it, what kind of deal it was, where it is, all those kinds of things or where it was.

Jason:
So like usual, day-to-day, I was calling people as a broker, as an agent, and this was three years into the business. And I finally saved up a little bit of money to go to buy my first property. And I called this owner who lived in San Jose. He just inherited a fourplex and a duplex in San Diego. And he told me that he was listing the properties with his property manager and I give him a call, gave the property manager a call, and the fourplex was extremely overpriced, but the duplex was actually extremely underpriced.
They listed it at $750,000 and it hadn’t gone to the market yet. It was a three bedroom, two bath house in the front and a little one bedroom, a studio house in the back with a two car garage in the front and a one car garage in the back. And at the time, the property was probably worth about 800, $900,000. So I knew it was a good deal and it had ADU potential because the garages can be converted into two units.
So I let the property manager represent me. He made an offer on my behalf because when the listing agent represents you, I believe at least that you have a much higher chance on getting the deal. So I let him do that and went into contract for 750. I went into contract and did my inspections, did my due diligence, and got some really tough news that the entire foundation basically had to be replaced. The electrical system was old knob and tube, which if you don’t know what old knob and tube is-

Andrew:
That’s not good. Yeah.

Jason:
Yeah. You can’t get insurance. It’s the worst kind of electrical, 1920s wiring and needing a new roof. It was ridden with termites and all the windows need to be replaced.
So when I got that news from my inspectors, my contractors, I almost backed out of the deal because this is the first deal I was going to buy. I was too scared to take on a massive renovation project. I was like, “There’s no way I can do this. I have no idea how to manage a contractor, how to run anything.” But took a risk like most investors do.

Andrew:
How did you get over that fear?

Jason:
I got over that fear of buying the first deal just because the numbers were so good. I just knew I trusted in the underwriting. I knew even if I was a 100K, 200K above budget, I still would make a lot of money on the deal.
So I think just the deal being so good itself made me feel comfortable that even if I screw everything up, make every mistake in the book, I can still come out of this a little bit positive.

Andrew:
Did you find a mentor or someone to help you manage the contracting element of it? How’d you get past that piece or did you just go for it?

Jason:
I just went for it. I never had a mentor for managing contractor. I had some clients who kind of gave me some info. I actually had a client who gave me the referral to the person that scammed me, which I’ll talk about later. But I have a lot of horror stories with contractors just because I learned the hard way.

Andrew:
And you said this thing’s in San Diego, I thought, you can’t make investments in California.

Jason:
I said that?

Andrew:
No, no, no, no, no. That’s the running narrative is can’t invest. And candidly, that’s one of the things I say is I love living in California and I love to live where I love to live, but invest where I get the best returns, and for me, that’s not in California, but to me… So you’re doing a different business model. You are making it work. And the reason I want to highlight that is because again, I think a lot of people say, “Oh, I live in San Diego. It’s too expensive. Well, I guess if I bought in San Diego 20 years ago.” Well, you live in San Diego and you just did this in the last few years.
So is there anything you think that’s different that, again, it sounds like you got it at a great price, but is there anything else that if someone is trying to invest in a market like that, that they should be pay attention to or that can say, “No, I can invest here.”

Jason:
Well, I think when most investors who are starting out think of California, first off, a lot of people like yourself probably say, California’s a bad place to invest. So they hear from all the YouTubers, people on podcasts that you want to buy in a red state. California’s a blue state.
And when people think of California, a lot of people think of the strict laws in the city of San Francisco and in the city of LA. Not all of California has extremely strict laws on displacing tenants, on doing a renovation, on executing on what you want to do. And investors do it every single day. And something that California has that no other state has is we have the best weather in the country. People still want to move here. We have a great economy. Companies are still coming here. Apple just invested millions into an office park in San Diego.
So if you’re not investing in the city of San Francisco and the city of LA, I think you’ll be just fine. And the thing that I look for when I buy properties even in California is that I make sure that no matter what, I understand that my basis is going to be significantly lower than what properties are going for right now in my location. And that’s how I’ve been able to scale pretty quickly.

Andrew:
So you’re looking at basis versus not to say you’re ignoring cashflow, but you’re looking at basis which is going to create equity, which as David you say, is really what builds your wealth, not necessarily cashflow.

David:
Yeah. Over a longer period of time.

Andrew:
Over a longer period of time. And so that’s how you’re making it work, so awesome. Thank you. Appreciate that.

David:
So, explain what that means by how you’re focusing on basis and why you feel that’s beneficial.

Jason:
Yeah. I mean I actually learned a lot about it from listening to you. So in a lot of shows you say your money’s built on gaining equity, not gaining cashflow. So you make your money on appreciation, and California arguably appreciates faster than any other estate in most cities.
So when I buy, I don’t buy for cashflow because I’m in a career that I love. You guys always talk about, you want to buy for cashflow if you’re in a career that you hate because you want to get out of the career as fast as possible, but that’s not the case for me. I love being a real estate broker, so I don’t need cashflow. So I don’t really pay attention to that as much.
I care about what am I buying it for and what can I sell it for or what can I refinance it for? What’s the appraisal value after I’m done? And the super simple rule of thumb that I use, is if I know I can sell a property for a million dollars, I want to buy it for 60 to 70% below that million dollar value. So I want to buy it for 700 grand or less. That’s my first stress test. And then I go deeper into things.

David:
So let’s break down. First we’ll talk about the area, then we’ll talk about the actual properties, little many economic lesson in supply and demand for people who are listening that have been told, California’s bad or expensive is bad because that’s the objection. “California is too expensive. I will go over here and buy something else.” But they don’t ask the question of, “Why is California expensive?” Okay, so let’s break into this. San Diego, is that a terrible place to live?

Jason:
Horrible.

David:
Do people hate it?

Jason:
They hate it so much.

David:
Absolutely. I don’t know anybody that sticks around in San Diego. They’re like, the running joke is I called the Bermuda Triangle, because all my buddies from high school that moved to San Diego to be bartenders and stuff, they never came back. I don’t know what they’re doing or where they are now, but no one does. You go to San Diego and you just get stuck there. It’s very, very difficult to live anywhere else.
It’s some of the best weather, some of the best locations of anywhere in the entire world, first off. There’s also only so much land out there. So you have a constricted supply because it’s a very small area, which is something people fail to look at when investing. Yes, you can get a cash-on-cash return if you go buy a single family house in Kansas, you’re never going to have a constricted supply in Kansas. They can just build houses ad nauseum forever. So the prices can’t go up.
One of the first things I like is a constricted supply. Austin, Texas has a constricted supply. They’ve got a river that runs through the city. There’s only so much within that river. It’s not shocking to me that you get appreciation there when everyone else talks about it, like “Appreciation is just luck. It might happen, but you can’t bank on it.”
Well, we can’t bank on cashflow either, but the odds are, if a property is newer, in a better location, has wages that are rising, in better condition, it’s going to cashflow better than a property that you have no idea. You can still put the odds in your favor. So constricted supply, you can build more, and a rising demand as more and more people want to go live in San Diego and people that go there don’t want to leave. That is a formula for appreciating assets, first off.
So you’re going to make money in equity investing in a market like that, but you might have to wait because everyone else wants to buy it. Cap rates are going to be very low in areas that everybody else wants to get into. If you look at that and say, “Oh, it’s too hard to make money here, I’ll go somewhere else.” You’re missing out on why everybody wants to be there.
The other area we have to look at is cashflow. Of course, it’s not going to cashflow super strong because cap rates are going to be low. Demand is going to be very high to get into that space. There’s going to be a lot of competition for every building because it’s desirable. But what do rents do in an area with constricted supply? It’s very difficult to find somewhere else to rent and wages keep rising because tech companies and other wealthy people keep moving there. Do they go down or up?

Jason:
Up.

David:
Right? So if you wait long enough, rents are going to be going up. The properties you buy in San Diego, 10 years ago have insane cashflow versus the stuff that everyone was saying, “It’s too expensive. You don’t get any cashflow. You have to go to Wichita, Kansas if you want to get cashflow.” Wichita, Kansas cashflow, and I’m generalizing right now, is roughly the same in 10 years as what it was when you bought it versus that San Diego property. You look like a brilliant genius.
It’s that to me, my perspective is how much gratification are you willing to delay? Does it need to make money now or can it make money later? Now, part of that’s the model. If you’re raising money as a syndicator, you’re on a timeline maybe five years before you got to pay back your LPs. You do not have the, what’s the word I’m looking?

Andrew:
Luxury?

David:
Yes, thank you. The luxury of delaying gratification for 10 years. So that property falls outside of your buy box to no fault of yourself, but if you’re buying it for yourself, you’ve got some other partners that are involved in this that don’t need to pay off really well, it can work. So are you using some of those ideas to find inefficiencies in the market to make these deals work that other people miss?

Jason:
I think one thing to note is that right now in the market, it’s much less competitive than it’s been in the past five years, six years I’ve been in the business in San Diego. So there’s a lot less buyers that are sharpening their pencil in San Diego right now.
Competition has gone down, but inventory’s still gone down. But the inefficiencies in San Diego are that everyone just looks on the market and thinks that that’s what San Diego is and there’s no better deals.

David:
Oh, I see where you’re going. You got that superpower of being able to call people on the phone.

Jason:
Yeah. And I’ve been able to find my clients some very good deals and myself by just picking up the phones, doing marketing, sending postcards, doing a lot of social media, digital marketing and bringing leads to me.
So you have to find leads in a competitive market before they get listed in order to have a chance at getting a deal that pencils, because I’m telling you right now, if you look at every property in San Diego right now, none of them are buys on the market, but there’s a lot of buys that are potentially off market right now.

David:
Buys by your metric of 70 cents on the dollar or buys period?

Jason:
I personally think buys period, I think a lot of I mean, no, I mean, everyone has different goals. So if you’re looking for a buy and hold, a very stable investment and you don’t need to get that uptick in equity right away, it’s a good investment.
So it’s a lot of old money. A lot of people are going to park cash into San Diego, but I’m not that kind of investor. I’m looking to grow the portfolio. I’m young, I don’t have that much money yet. So I’m looking to early quickly-

David:
That is a good clarification. And the reason I ask is when people hear that, “Oh, it doesn’t make sense to buy there.” And they just take it at face value, they expect prices will have to come down. Because if it’s not a buy, no one’s going to buy it. So they’re going to have to drop the price and then prices don’t drop.

Andrew:
Right. And I think another key point, and you mentioned this earlier Jason, is you have an income from something that you love to do. So you’re okay buying something that maybe doesn’t cashflow. So that helps enable you to do that.
One thing I don’t want to miss is you, I think you mentioned something about getting scammed by a contractor. Could you dive into that? Tell us about what that was, how it happened, what you learned?

Jason:
Yeah. So like I said, the contractor referral was a referral from a client of mine in the business. But after I bought that first property and a couple months went by and I actually bought four more properties in the span of three months when I bought my first one. And all five of those properties, me and my partner, they were complete full gut renovations and I was really dumb. I was young and stupid, still am young and stupid.
But I trusted this contractor to take on all of these five properties at once and no work was being done. He didn’t have a contractor’s license, he wouldn’t put anything in writing really, and I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing at the time. It’s the worst thing you can do is not put things in writing as you guys know.
So nothing was in writing, didn’t have his license. I later found out that he lived in, I mean we’re close to Mexico. He lived in Tijuana, so didn’t find that until deep into the process. So basically-

David:
Was he licensed in America?

Jason:
No.

David:
Okay. So he was using the phrase contractor, but he’s like a contractor in Mexico.

Jason:
He’s like a handyman.

David:
Yeah.

Andrew:
Yeah. Here you go.

Jason:
Yeah, he had a crew. He had a crew of people. Now they did do work. They did try to get things done but didn’t have the manpower, didn’t have the skill sets to do all the work that we required. And eventually I think he just blew up one day and just started covering up stuff.
Didn’t do the plumbing right, put drywall over it, kind of put crappy showers in. Didn’t do any of the plumbing, didn’t replace the electrical. He said he fixed the foundation, but all he did was stick a wooden post and pier under it. That’s all he did.

Andrew:
Might not pass code.

Jason:
Might not pass code. Yeah. It was actually worse than if he had just left it alone. It would’ve been better than what he did.

David:
He’s like, “Throw a two by four in there and we’ll say that it’s braced.”

Jason:
Yep. That’s what he was doing. He said everything was getting done. I didn’t know how to, at the time I didn’t know what was right and wrong. So I just kind of believed that at face value, I was just cutting him checks left and right. $25,000 check here, $40,000 check here.
And eventually if you add up the work he did versus what I paid him, I was probably at like 125, $130,000 loss on what he did before he just walked away and just ghosted me. So one day he just stopped answering his phone, stopped talking to me and just fled.

Andrew:
I bet a hundred grand goes pretty far in Tijuana.

Jason:
Probably does.

David:
That is a scary thing. You learned a lesson there. Definitely. When I wrote Long Distance Investing, one of the things I said is you can give your contractor a little bit of money up front to do the work, but then you don’t want to pay until it’s been done and you just probably didn’t have the experience to look and see that the work is being done right. You’re like, “Yeah, that looks like plumbing. I guess,” You had a person-

Andrew:
I wouldn’t know either, right?

David:
Most of us don’t. But if you had a person with a little more experience involved, kind of like you said, brokers that are helping out newer agents, they would’ve said, “Yeah, that rough and looks terrible. We’re not going to move forward with this.” Or you’d recognize you were scammed.
Luckily it didn’t stop you because you haven’t quit. That’s the story here is you just paid a hundred thousand dollars to get a very, very, very valuable education that you’ve now turned into much more money in the future, which has allowed you to help your parents out. So tell us about how you’ve been able to help your parents out with your success.

Jason:
Yeah. So that was the big why on why I got started in real estate and it’s amazing to say I’ve come full circle with it. It’s probably the biggest accomplishment in my life so far. Like I said, my mom was a struggling immigrant that came to America, had a lot of failed businesses. And the last two Christmases, I think altogether I’ve given them about over $200,000 just as like a thank you card, and also I bought them a triplex in Oceanside, North County San Diego.

David:
Awesome.

Jason:
So they cashflow a little bit off that each month too. But I’m looking to buy my mom a house here in San Diego next, coming up soon.

Andrew:
All right. So you told us about the first brokerage deal. You told us about your first investment deal. You certainly had some tough challenges in those first deals, which both cases you very much overcame.
Where are you today? My understanding is you’ve done quite a lot since then. So give us a snapshot of what your portfolio and investments and business looks like today.

Jason:
Yeah. So on the real estate portfolio side, I’ve acquired a total of 26 properties. I’ve sold off about-

Andrew:
All San Diego?

Jason:
All San Diego, yeah. When I first started it was all small, like two to 4-unit buildings, but a year or two went by and I 1031 those buildings into larger assets. So I’ve done about 26 acquisitions, sold a good amount of them to trade up into bigger assets.
Now we have 17, so we’ve never actually cashed out on a property except one. We’ve kept reinvesting the profits into larger assets. So that’s how I was able to grow pretty quickly. A lot of people ask me if I raised money to start and because I bought a lot of properties quick, but I’d actually just saved up a good chunk of change and I had the perfect partner to start with me.
So I was the deal guy, I was the front lines guy and my partner, he had a debt fund, like a private money, hard money fund. And me and him put 15% down, 50/50, got debt, renovated it quickly, and then refied out or sold it. So we just did that over and over again in 2020 and 2021 and eventually built our portfolio pretty quickly without outside capital from LPs.

Andrew:
Quick aside, how did you find that partner and how did you, for lack of a better term, convince them that you were investible?

Jason:
Yeah, so here’s why I think being a commercial real estate agent is so valuable. If you want to get into multifamily, if you specialize in selling multifamily investments to clients for a living, eventually you’re going to get pretty damn good at underwriting those assets and know your area pretty well.
And eventually you’ll develop some really good client relationships where you do deals with them over and over and over again. And when you build that trust with a client and you build a good friendship, like I did with my partner. After we built that friendship, I had four or five properties tied up in escrow that I couldn’t buy on my own.
And he actually offered me to, he asked me to partner with him. I didn’t even ask him because he knew I was a hard worker. I sent him deals every single day. I’m on the phone with him constantly, so he knew I’d get it done. So I built that relationship with my future partner just by being in the business as a broker.

Andrew:
What’s the, back to your portfolio, what’s the current value? What would you estimate is the current value in today’s adjusted market and cashflow?

Jason:
Yeah. I mean we’ve sold some stuff and prices are still steady, but right now it’s like I sent an REO to a lender. It was about 48.9 million portfolio value and we have 117 units, 119 units around town.

Andrew:
Nice. Well done. So you mentioned getting to know your market, underwriting deals as both a broker and an investor. Can you share your formula for underwriting deals?

Jason:
Yeah. I can share with anyone. It’s an easy one-page sheet. So if I’m buying a property, I want to know the current cap rate, what the cap rate can be after I’m done with it.
So I have the current rents, the pro forma rents, which is the market rents after I’m done rehabbing it. And then I have the GRM, which is a gross rent multiplier. And I like the gross rent multiplier a lot more than the cap rate just because a lot of brokers can mess with the cap rate because you can lower the expenses to make it look like the building’s actually operating-

Andrew:
David can do that.

Jason:
… better than it is. And a lot of the times when you get these offering memorandums and marketing packages from brokers, a lot of the times the expenses are estimated. So I like going off of GRM because it’s just the rents and that’s the metric that I go off of because you can’t really mess with it.
So I go off the GRM cap rate. If I can stabilize at a cap rate that’s two points above the going cap rate, I know it’s going to be a pretty good deal. And if it fits that 70% or 30% below market value stress test. So if I buy a property for a stabilized seven cap or I can get it to a seven cap and the market’s selling for a five cap or under, I know the deal is going to pencil. So I’ll make an offer at that point.

David:
All right, Jason, what advice would you give investors who are experiencing how hard it’s gotten to find a great deal right now?

Jason:
I think, I mean myself, a lot of people are struggling with this. Are you having a tough time finding deals?

Andrew:
Absolutely. We’ve only closed one large acquisition this year and we’ve underwritten probably 400.

Jason:
Got it. I’m excited. I want to hear your take too. But my take is I’m not super technologically fancy. I’m very simple and I just think for me to get more deals, just because there’s less inventory, the market’s not moving as much. You just got to put in twice as many reps as you were before.
And one of my mentors told me it was one of the best advice I ever got was in a great market, any average person can make money. But in a slow market, in a down market only the superstars can make money and the superstars emerge in markets like this. So I think that if you’re telling yourself there’s no deals, there’s deals closing every single day in every state, in every city.
So if you tell yourself that deals aren’t going to move, then that’s what the world’s going to give back to you. But if you tell yourself that the market’s still moving, I’m just going to work harder to get a deal and do what I’m doing because it works, eventually you’re going to make it happen.

Andrew:
Yeah. I was in the airport this weekend and cross country flight, got off the flight with tons of people and this is LAX coming back to California. You got off and you come to that place where you’re on the ground floor and there’s just this massive escalator up to the second floor, and for some reason the airports, each floor is 30 feet tall instead of the normal amount.
And so I’m standing there looking and I see seriously probably 120 people on the escalator and on the set of stairs right next to it, zero, not one person. And I stood there and I thought, I’m like, “Okay, that escalator represents the real estate market for the last 10 years.” If you basically had the courage to at least get on it, you probably had a fairly easy ride to the top.
Now, we’re in a market where you got to put in, you got to take the stairs, you can still get to the top, but it’s going to be a whole lot more work and a whole lot more effort and doing the kind of things that you’ve been doing and are still doing.

Jason:
It’s a really good analogy.

David:
Yeah. And you’ll be better off for it, right? Taking the stairs is healthier.

Andrew:
Absolutely.

David:
Even though you sweat a little bit.
All right, so any advice on turning leads into deals once you find a lead?

Jason:
I think one of the highest paying skill sets is being able to close a lead because you can hire people to find leads for you. You can have a marketing budget and get leads, but when you actually have to convert the leads that come through your door, that’s what separates a great business from a mediocre business.
And the thing that’s worked extremely well for converting leads in my brokerage business and in my investing business is that we always lead with credibility. So we always lead with, here’s what we’ve done, here’s our track record and we have a nice little package on our reviews, 5-star reviews work extremely well for us and our deal history works very well and we lead with that.
But then after we kind of say who we are, a huge mistake that a lot of salespeople make because in real estate we’re all in sales, is that they do a lot of the talking like me as the professional, a huge mistake that people make is you do 80% of the talking. But the University of Harvard did a study that the best salespeople actually only spoke 20 to 30% of the time and the client spoke way more. And it’s your ability to ask the right questions that actually lead you to your destination much faster than you just blabbering along.
Asking the client from a place of caring on how you can help them, what their goals are. “If we did this for you, what would your dream place be looking like?” So asking tactical questions. A question that works really well for me is when a client kind of comes to us and says, “I’ve been thinking about selling.” I always ask, “We don’t want to waste your time. What would be the perfect scenario for you if you were to sell your property? And what would you do with the money?”
Because in the real estate world, whenever you sell, no matter what, the biggest issue on why people don’t sell or do sell is, “What am I going to do when I sell? Am I going to cash out? Am I going to exchange? What am I going to do with it?” So if we can tailor the process to where their goal is matched with the actions we provide.
For example, if a client cashes out, they want that money as fast as possible. So we want to try to find a buyer listed as fast as possible and do a quick close. But if they want to do an exchange, which is a huge rebuttal, a lot of clients don’t want to sell because they’re scared of not finding a property, is that the huge thing that we do that benefits our clients is that we bill in two to four 30-day extensions after the close of escrow, after the actual close of escrow.
So if escrow is 30 days, if the buyer removes contingencies in 17 days, the seller can exercise two to four depending on what we can negotiate with the buyer, 30-day extensions to have more time to go shopping for a property.

David:
That’s smart.

Jason:
So that is just two examples of how we can cater a scenario to what our clients are looking to achieve. And that’s really helped me convert leads is coming from a place, like, “What can we do to help you?”

David:
Solving problems.

Jason:
Solving problems.

David:
That’s what we’re here to do.

Andrew:
That’s what you get paid for.

Jason:
Yeah.

David:
Awesome man. Well, we appreciate you sharing your story. I’m very glad you didn’t end up an organic chemist. We would all be worse off for it. Same for you Andrew. Glad that you’re not still a, you were a-

Andrew:
Chemical engineer.

David:
Thank you. I think word chem was in there, but I realize it wasn’t the same type. Yeah, chemical engineer, this is great.
Where can people find out more about you if they want to follow up?

Jason:
Easiest way is to find me on Instagram or YouTube. It’s just jasonjosephlee, and then I also have a free multifamily investing course if anyone’s interested in hearing about it as well.

Andrew:
And should also point out if anyone’s just trying to look up Jason Lee, this is not the Jason Lee who starred in My name is Earl back in the early 2000s.

David:
That was a great show though.

Andrew:
It was a great show.

David:
You don’t remember that, do you? Not old enough.

Andrew:
He doesn’t, he.

David:
It was funny.
All right, so reach out to Jason if you are in the Southern California area and want to buy commercial real estate and reach out to me if you’re in the Southern California area and want to buy residential real estate and reach out to Andrew Cushman, if you’re just in Southern California. Where can people find out about you?

Andrew:
Go to BiggerPockets and give me a colleague request so we can connect there and then follow me on LinkedIn and of course, just look up Vantage Point Acquisitions and there’s a handful of tabs there to connect with us that way.

David:
That’s such an Andrew thing to name your company. Vantage Point Acquisitions. Have I ever told you this?

Andrew:
No, but I have a follow-up comment. Go ahead.

David:
It’s so accurate but yet incredibly hard to spell. And you never thought about the fact that most people are not going to know how to spell acquisitions perfectly and they’re never going to find you.

Andrew:
Well, and also it shows that what shows when my early mistakes, and this is something I think most beginners make, I was too focused on. “I got to get a deal. I got to get a deal. I got to get a deal.” So I named the company, it should have been Vantage Point Capital, not acquisitions, right? But, so every time I say Vantage Point Acquisitions, I think I’m like, “Oh, it should be capital.”

David:
I made the same mistake with my social media. I called myself davidgreene24 because that was my high school basketball number and there was already a David Greene. Looking back, people are always like, “Why do you call yourself that?” I have no good answer. It was just pure laziness, because I had no idea that it was going to become this big of a thing.

Andrew:
Yeah, I just wanted to acquire deals, so there you go.

David:
So speaking of that, you can find me on social media @davidgreene24 or check out my website, davidgreene24.com. I put a chat feature on there. So people don’t realize this, but they can actually chat with me directly going to that site. I talked to some of them and then I’ll pass them off to the right team members.

Andrew:
So it’s not David GPT. It’s actually David?

David:
Yes. I am going to have some kind of a stamp of guarantee that you will never get. You may get a form of AI at some point. I can’t say it will never happen because it works into operations, it works into things. And I even think that that chat system has AI that starts the conversation, but I get a notification on my phone and I will talk.
So at some point I’m going to have a little cheesy seal that’s like, “It will always be a human that you talk to, not a bot pretending to be human.” Because-

Andrew:
I like it.

David:
… everyone’s excited about AI, saving them time and no one’s thinking about the customer. I’m not super excited for AI to take over all the conversations I wanted have with Jason and instead I’m talking to a computer that’s telling me what I want to hear. So you still talking to your own clients?

Jason:
I am.

David:
All right. You hear that. Andrew, Jason and David all talk to real people, so.

Andrew:
Yep. No chat functions here.

David:
There you go. So check out that site. Go give me a follow and check out BiggerPockets on YouTube. If you’re not listening to this on YouTube, you could be and you can see three very good-looking guys, or at least two good-looking guys and me on YouTube here for your viewing pleasure. Let us know in the comments what your favorite part of today’s show is.

Andrew:
Well, they say handsome guys are eye candy. I think that puts you and me more in the category of eye broccoli.

David:
That’s right. This get your visual vegetables here on BiggerPockets, cheese scoop. Jason, you’re like the cheese whiz to put on the broccoli man.

Andrew:
Yeah. There you go.

David:
You make us look good.

Andrew:
You make us look good.

David:
Yeah. That’s how we eat it.
This is David Greene for Andrew, my partner in Multifamily Investing, Cushman signing off.