The Wisconsin Investor
Each week, we bring you interviews with some of Wisconsin's top real estate investors who share their tips, tricks, and strategies that you can implement right away. This show is dedicated to helping Wisconsin real estate investors elevate their game. Along with interviews, I'll also dive into hot topics in solo episodes and feature experts from various real estate sectors across Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Investor
The Best Place To Find Real Estate Deals in Wisco and Much More with Frank Rick
Unlock the secrets of real estate success with seasoned investor Frank Rick on the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. Frank, whose career started in the mid-1990s, offers a unique perspective on how the landscape of real estate has transformed over the years. We discuss how financing options have evolved, making it easier to secure funding while simultaneously increasing competition. Frank highlights the importance of cultivating strong relationships with lenders and the critical role of modern technology in today's market, contrasting it with the more challenging methods of yesteryears.
Experience firsthand insights into the benefits of transitioning from self-managing properties to employing professional property management services. After two decades of managing our own properties, Frank and I reveal the efficiencies and legal advantages that professionals bring to the table. We also discuss our strategy of moving from older properties to newer ones, allowing us to concentrate on high-value activities like deal-making and team-building, which ultimately enhance our investment portfolio.
Gain actionable tips on evaluating long-term investments and deciding when to sell underperforming properties. Frank shares his expertise on various financing options, from commercial loans to leveraging home equity lines of credit. We also emphasize the importance of timely investments, continuous education, and building a robust team of professionals to support your real estate journey. To wrap it up, we share our favorite local dining spot, Schwartz's Supper Club, and invite listeners to connect with our community for personalized investment guidance. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your real estate game with insights from a true industry veteran!
Welcome to the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. I'm your host, Corey Reyment. Oh, hey there, guy. Each week we bring you interviews with some of Wisconsin's top real estate investors who share their tips, tricks and strategies that you can implement right away. Oh, cripes, this show is dedicated to helping Wisconsin real estate investors elevate their game. Along with interviews, I'll also dive into hot topics and solo episodes and feature experts from various real estate sectors across Wisconsin, you betcha. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Hey everybody, Welcome back to another episode of the Wisconsin Investor Podcast Show. I'm your host, Corey Reyment, and today I have an exciting guest here, my good old buddy who we've met through real estate, Mr Frank ,Rick. , how are you doing today?
Frank:Real good, corey. It's a beautiful day outside on the patio here and I'm excited to be here.
Corey:Awesome, awesome. Well, I'm excited to chat with you because you've got quite a bit of experience in investing in Wisconsin and so we have a lot of folks listening here in Wisconsin and people outside of Wisconsin that are considering maybe investing in Wisconsin. So I'm really excited to dive into it with you. So let's get right into it. Frank, when did you get started investing in real estate?
Frank:We started in the mid 1990s, okay, and uh, so we've been at it, uh, 30 plus years. Um, you know we've seen a lot of good times. We've seen some tough times. Um, you know 2008 was was challenging, um, but you know it's it does well over time, right. So, yeah, um, we're glad we got in when we did. You know we were probably in our mid thirties at that time. So you know, we got a little bit of a late start but it, you know, money wasn't as available then as it is today.
Corey:Okay, All right, let's talk about that for a second. What are some of the biggest changes, so that you've seen in your 30 years what are the pros of today's investing market and what are some of the things that you know? Maybe when you started were a little bit easier.
Frank:Today you see banks that are a lot more investor friendly. They have a lot of different products to offer. You have your hard money lenders out there, your DSCR loans, you know, and stuff like that. So it's a whole different area of financing today than it was, you know, say, 30 years ago. Then it was the conventional ways. You know you had to have your 20% down somehow and you know you went to the bank and waited for their good graces and stuff like that. So it's a changing financial end of it. So it makes it a lot easier today. But you have to build those relationships with your lender and stuff and it becomes easier.
Corey:Sure okay, when you were back, when you started, was there anything back then? That was easier then than it is now.
Frank:Not really, because then you know you had to look in the newspaper for open houses. You know there was no wholesaling. If it was, it was pretty hidden. A lot of the, a lot of the like the apartment associations that we belong to the people were real secretive with the information. You'd ask them questions. They wouldn't tell you much. You know you ask them who their plumber was, they wouldn't tell you because if you were using their plumber it might interfere with when they needed it and stuff like that. So information was pretty secretive. But those people are from, you know, generations before us and I guess that's just how it was. Now you have the Internet, you know you can look at so many different places in a short amount of time. You can look up tax bills. Otherwise, before I had to go to the courthouse, pull the file out, you know, and look at everything and stuff. It was a lot more cumbersome back then but doable.
Corey:The barrier to entry for real estate investing now is a lot lower than it used to be, just based on the information that people have. Is what you're saying.
Frank:Yes, pretty much so. It's also more aggressive because it is easier.
Corey:You got more people trying to get into it. More people, competition wise yep okay, what, what types of investing do you guys do? Frank? So it's you and your wife, patty, who invests together. Yep, how do you? What do you guys invest in? Are you flipping? Are you wholesaling? Are you, uh, buy and hold? Are you commercial? Are you residential? Tell us and hold. Are you commercial? Are you residential? Tell us a little bit about what types of investing you do.
Frank:We started out with just buy and hold residential long-term and just recently, within the last couple of years, we did some short-term stuff. We stay within our area. We have about maybe a 50 mile radius of where we live is where we stay. That's the market that we know. We have commercial and we do flip houses. Everything that pretty much that we buy, is off-market. It's with wholesalers or word of mouth.
Frank:Everybody that we come in contact to you know we tell them hey, you know we're into real estate. When they ask you what to do, um, so we have a pretty good uh size social circle, so everybody knows that. You know we were interested in buying houses. So sometimes, um, a family member passes or has to go to an assisted living situation, people call us hey, you want to buy my mom's house or you know stuff like that. So a lot of stuff finds us. Um, the commercial property that we have is a strip mall. Um, there's 10 commercial tenants Uh. Uh, it's a very nice property. It's about 20 years old. Um, that was probably um about a year and a half ago that we bought that. It'll be two years in October. So very nice performing property.
Corey:Okay, now let's talk about that for a second. So how did you get that deal? Why did you go to that deal? Is that your first commercial deal? Tell me a little bit about how that one came to be.
Frank:Our first commercial property was a storage business, you know, mini warehouse facility, and we had that for about 20 years. We decided on that one we managed ourselves. So you know we're out there plowing the snow, cutting the grass, you know managing the tenants, or you know the people that rent the spaces. And, um, what we did is we did a 1031 exchange and bought some side-by-side duplexes, turned them over to management and they perform the same as what we had. Now we don't have to do any managing and stuff. And so that was our first commercial property. Now we bought this, uh, and we tried buying that for the last 10 years.
Frank:The seller just wasn't ready to sell. Now he wanted to retire. So I hadn't seen him in about two years and we were out one evening and we ran across him and I asked him if he wanted to sell a strip mall. He said sure. So my next question was as if he would, um, consider any seller financing and he said you know, for you guys, I would, you know, cause we knew him. You know it helped the process Right. So, um, we had known him for probably 25 years. So he was comfortable with the deal. That was a big project to purchase that property. And you know so we went to, we solicited seven different banks, okay, and started narrowing it down. You know some weren't even interested in the deal.
Frank:Um, you know they were, they would have been at about 40% loan to value in the first uh mortgage position, which is a good spot to be right. So if you're the bank, you know some wanted, you know this, that um. So we sorted it out down to one lender and it's been working very well. The seller if he would have sold it and took all the money out at one time, his capital gain would have been so huge his gain tax that he agreed to do the seller financing over a period of time and to help make the deal go. And he got his asking price also. So you know there's some trade-offs. So a very good property. You know we have a commercial manager that takes care of all the leases and all of the. You know we had a couple of tenant turnovers so we had to do some build outs and stuff like that. But a very good performing property.
Corey:That's awesome, frank, I love that. So you guys have done a little bit of everything. It sounds like some seller finance stuff, some commercial stuff, residential flip, short-term rental. I mean you've kind of done in 30 years it sounds like you've got experience kind of in a lot of different areas here. Huh.
Frank:Yeah, diversity is good. You spread it around a few different places and, um you know you, you get a little bit of um fluctuation with each right. So, um, but in the last, oh, I would say the last five years, it's just been a robust market in all the sectors, um, if it's short-term, long-term, commercial, um flipping. The last five years have really been good.
Corey:Is this the best five years you've seen in your 30 year history, frank? As far as real estate investings goes?
Frank:Almost definitely, Okay, Most definitely. Um, even even years prior to that, it's been good, you know, ever since, like and 08, when that happened, we all know what happened then. There was a lot of foreclosures and we did a lot of buying. Then the stuff that we had we were able to keep A lot of people went bankrupt. We were in a good position that we didn't have those issues. So a lot of foreclosures were taking place. So we did a lot of buying at that time and and at deep discounts. So you know, we always look for, you know, when we buy through wholesalers, a lot of times it's value add properties, um, stuff like that. Uh, it's rare that we would buy anything off the MLS. It's rare that we would buy anything off the MLS. If we need to complete a 1031 exchange and the time is running out, we may look to the MLS for a property fast, but that would be about it.
Corey:Okay, got it Cool. I want to go back to something that you've. You know I've been picking up on this and hopefully our listeners are picking up on this as well, frank, as they're listening to you talk. A lot of what you're describing is maintaining a good reputation, being trustworthy and having good, strong relationships with a lot of different people. That I'm seeing is attributed a lot to your success.
Corey:So you talked about the commercial guy. Well, that was a 10 year nurturing that. You had to do with that guy to get that thing to go. Your lender you got to have great relationships with your lenders. I know you and I talk all the time and you're always talking about how, oh, we got this other deal from so-and-so. We were at the tavern and we were talking. It's just like a lot of what I'm noticing that's attributed to a lot of your success is just building a lot of relationships with a lot of people and maintaining a really a good name, doing it the right way. It sounds like I mean anything you want to speak to on that for the listeners as far as people who are hearing you and maybe thinking of getting into real estate investing.
Frank:Absolutely, having a good reputation is key.
Frank:We've had tenants that you know they. They moved out of the area. They came back, you know, they call us, say, uh, do you have any places? You know they, they want to come back and rent from us.
Frank:Um, networking is huge. Uh, you know, we belong to the, the, the real groups in the area, the REI success, uh, meetings, uh, caffeine and cash flow, um, apartment associations, you know, and it's that networking that's huge. You know, there's times where I've made an announcement at a REIA meeting hey, I'm looking for a property of a certain kind or whatever. And at the end of the meeting somebody comes up hey, I have one like that I would sell, you know, and stuff, so networking that I would sell, you know, and stuff so networking, uh, talking to people having a large social circle, um, which we have, um, you know, just maintaining all those relationships all the way around. You know, uh, it's been very good to us. But uh, you know, your personality is part of it, you know, um, you know you have to be an interesting individual as well, you know, to talk to people and stuff like that. So it helps yeah.
Corey:Oh, totally For sure I. I mean, I just wanted to pound that point home that I was hearing of a lot of the success is coming from, you know, personal relationships that you've spent the time developing and maintaining, and and and relationships that you've spent the time developing and maintaining, and not because you want to deal out of it either. That's the other thing, frank.
Frank:Anybody who knows no, not at all.
Corey:It's not because you're manipulating and trying to get a deal. It's just who you guys are. You're just great at building relationships with people and maintaining those, so I think that's great. What areas do you guys invest in geographically in Wisconsin?
Frank:We live in between Lake Winnebago and Lake Michigan so we have about a 50-mile radius that we operate. There are certain areas in that 50-mile radius that are not in our buy box. We buy in Green Bay, fox Valley, sheboygan, sheboygan Falls and some of the smaller towns in between, elkhart Lake, stuff like that, so we stick with the areas that are more robust.
Corey:There's some cities within that 50-mile radius that we just don't uh do business and what is it about some of those areas that uh is a turnoff for you guys when you're talking about your buy box? What are you know, for those listeners out there? What are just to give them some ideas of some things that you guys are looking at?
Frank:One city in particular, and I won't mention which it is, which one it is. But you know there's a lot of flooding when it rains and I don't know the area well enough to know where those flooding areas are and stuff like that is one thing. Some cities are a little more distressed than others. You know there's no job growth. You know, like Appleton is very robust, um, we like the west side of green bay, um, just great areas. It costs you a little more to operate there but it's well worth it sure yeah, perfect.
Corey:Um, you mentioned now before you guys had the commercial space that you were managing yourself. Then you bought the duplexes, turned it over to management. Obviously, it sounds like you're a fan of property management. Talk to me about were you guys always managing properties before, and when did you make that shift and why, and what were some of the outcomes that you noticed by turning it over to management, or what did it allow you guys to do?
Frank:Sure, we self-managed for probably 20 years. Wow, and just in the last, I would say the last 10 plus years, that there have been good managers all over. Years ago there would be a manager, they would just manage, say in sheboygan. They wouldn't come out to keel or no hallstein or chilton or you know the little outlying cities. So, um, and a lot of times they were realtors and stuff, so they just managed within their areas.
Frank:Today there's there's so many management companies that are good by having a professional manager. You know that's their everyday business, right? So when Patty and I did the managing, you know we're raising a family at the same time, so maybe there was a day that I was supposed to serve a five-day notice and I couldn't get there for some reason. Maybe there was a basketball game or something that I had to go to after work, right, we both worked full-time and the efficiency that a management company can bring to the table is well worth the fees that you pay them. We have we have right now. Currently we have five managers management companies that work for us. Uh, one is commercial, one is short term. Uh, there's two that are short term because they're in different areas, and uh, two commercial uh sorry, two residential, wow and um, they all do very well for us.
Frank:It takes the burden off of you. You know they have all the databases for doing the background checking. You know doing credit rating reports and you know they have all these subscriptions to all those databases. Where and it's vital to finding good tenants by doing it yourself, you know I mean the management companies that manage hundreds of units. You know they're using and utilizing those databases quite often, whereas a small operator, private person, whereas a small operator, private person, it would cost too much to have access to all that for the little bit of use that you would be using it right.
Frank:So the other thing you know they stay up to date with all the laws and you know it's a forever changing legislative situation. You know like discrimination and you know all discrimination and you know all the different laws that apply. You have to be so careful. It takes that monkey off of our back and it it is. All those responsibilities are then with the manager and it just like I said for for for the fees that they charge. It's well worth it. I would recommend anybody hiring professional management. It's just a lot smoother.
Corey:Yeah, I always joke around with people when they're looking at getting new investing and they're talking to me about like hey, how do I get started and all that stuff. And I'm coaching them and I'll say, well, what are you planning to do for management? And they say, well, we're probably going to self-manage for a while. And I'm like, okay, well, call me in a couple of years when you want to sell those properties at a discount to me, because you're sick of managing, because unless you're built, I mean, some people are builting it. It works great for some people, but I would say, if I was going to say, the majority of people their best time spent in real estate investing. Frank, and I'm interested to hear your opinion on this this is what I preach a lot is if you can find deals, find money and build your team. Those are the three main activities of the highest income producing activities you can do in real estate investing. What are your thoughts on that?
Frank:Absolutely. Our time is best spent buying right. So searching and buying properties Managing will turn you into a person you don't want to be sometimes. You know, it's just a fact of the matter. You know, dealing with tenants and their situations and whatever, it'll turn you into a person you don't want to be once in a while. So, yeah, like I said before, it's worth every penny that you spend with them, just for the efficiency and the results.
Frank:And, um, the results, uh, the other thing that we've done is, you know, years ago, uh, when we first started out, you know, you started with the older upstairs, downstairs, the 100 year old houses and stuff like that new, and we've, over time, been able to shift to more modern properties. What we look for now is stuff that was built probably the oldest, in the mid-60s. You know the codes. The building codes are so much different. All the wiring is grounded, um, you don't have asbestos, you don't have knob and tube. You know all that kind of stuff. So we've we've weeded out those very old properties. We still have like two of them that are, that are in very good condition, that will probably hold on to, but, um, for the most part we've transformed into side-by-side duplexes and and stuff like that. Four plex units, uh, but yeah, nothing that's really really old and you know dungeon basements and you, you know stuff like that. We tried it. We weeded that out.
Corey:That's cool that you can't, but you know you started where you had to start, right, right, those older ones. And you get into it, you get them going. They're good assets, but at some point, basically you know, like what you talked about earlier, 1031 exchange you're trading up into, you're kind of playing Monopoly here. Now you went and you took the single family house, turned into a hotel and some you know, quote, unquote, hotel you know you're. It sounds like you're utilizing the strategy that Monopoly taught us as kids.
Frank:Right.
Frank:You know it's kind of like a chess game. You know you have to analyze every move before you make it. Look at all the ins and outs, what it's going to do before and after. It's a chess game. You have to be good at making great decisions to be successful at it. You'll make some mistakes along the way, minor mistakes. You learn from that and build off of it and don't make that mistake again.
Frank:You know, um, but we, we do have a professional team. You know it's. You have your accountants, you have your attorneys, you have your bankers, um, realtors, wholesalers, um, you know the list goes on and on. Uh, management, people and and stuff. And you know, at any given time, if I have a question about something, I just call one of the people on my professional team and I have an answer right. So, and and there's, even though we've been in the business as long as we have, we still don't know everything. With the way markets change, you know you have to be able to pivot on certain things sometimes. You know, keep an open mind and you know, just look at what the trends are. You know, and by going to the like the REIA groups and the REI success group and talking to other people and seeing what's going on within our markets helps us stay in tune.
Corey:Yeah, no, that's, that's really good advice. Management Now going back, you said you had five management companies that you're that are managing your problems. How many, how many doors do you guys have currently that you buy, that you have for holding between the commercial, short-term and long-term?
Frank:The commercial. The commercial is 10 tenants. We have two short-term rentals, so there's two different managers, cause they're, uh, quite a ways apart. And then we have two, uh, residential long-term management companies and one one management company will, will do a rehab for us, and and then they rent it out, uh, and the other one doesn't have that capability. So, uh, I would say there's probably, uh, just off the top of my head, close to 30 units between those two uh.
Corey:Then, like I said, they're mostly side by side duplexes, so, uh, and and some four plexes so how much time a month, frank, would you say you're manning, quote, unquote, managing, uh, the the portfolio uh, in a month's time.
Frank:You know the busy time is is at the first of the month, like right now, um, you know, going over statements and stuff like that Um, once, every once, every quarter, we look at our whole portfolio, property by property and evaluate um, and and the way what we look at is okay, this property, property, a, um, what is it going to need for a CapEx in the next one year, three years, five years? How long have we held that property? How is it performing? Look at your profit and loss statement. If it needs a lot of CapEx in five years, maybe we should consider selling it and buying a different property. So we study the properties quarterly and how they're performing, what they're gonna need and stuff like that. And in a month's time hours wise, I would say less than 40 hours, you know, and a lot of that time is spent searching for properties.
Corey:Okay, so um, that's not really managing the assets you currently have. You're just talking about being in the business in general.
Frank:Right Day to day, I don't know. I uh, in a month's time I would say even maybe hour a day, you know, roughly um hour, hour and a half a day, something like that. Uh, some days it's more, some days that you don't even have any involvement.
Corey:Yeah, I love that, that, that I love your point about the evaluating the assets that you currently own.
Corey:I mean, that's something as you're talking.
Corey:I'm like I need to start figuring out a system for that, frank, so you and I can maybe talk offline of your system.
Corey:But just trying to understand, like looking at the properties themselves we've just been acquiring and then we have we have the Wisconsin discount property business that we're running the day-to-day stuff on, so that takes up most of our time for kids, all this stuff. But like, but we really should be doing what you're doing and every quarter sitting down and going, okay, which of the properties that we hold are performing? Or could we trade in this property for something maybe a little bit nicer or something some other thing, some other life goal that we want to achieve? Maybe it's not even financial, Maybe it's just more of a nicer asset that we want to own because we want to own a nicer, you know could be something like that. But what do you take us through that real briefly, when you're evaluating them, are you strictly looking at how they're performing or what factors do you and patty look at when you're deciding what you're going to do or you're going to keep or move, move on. You said the capex.
Frank:Yep, capex is a huge one, like roofs. If it needs a 12 to $15,000 roof in, say, three to five years, maybe it's time to pass it on. It depends on what your cash flow is on the place. One thing that we look at is the longer that you hold a property say it's 20 plus years right, I guess I'm looking for the best word to describe it it's not as attractive as an investment the longer you have it. So it's time to roll that one out and buy something different.
Frank:You know your interest that you pay on your mortgage gets less and less so that deduction starts decreasing over time. Say you've had it 27 years, your depreciation is gone. You know just stuff like that. So as you hold them longer they become less attractive as an investment. So you know you have to evaluate them. You have to know how they're performing. You know weed out the bad ones. You know the you're from your accountant you get a profit and loss statement. You look at that, um, you know, and you compare it against the rest and the good performers. You always want to keep those and the ones on the lower end and it happens, it just happens. You know I'm sure you might have a great cash flow on it, but it's, you know, going to need some major improvements. It's time to maybe let it go. You know, I'm sure everybody has their own formulas on that. It's just what works well for us.
Corey:Yeah, that's awesome. On that, it's just what works well for us. Yeah, that's awesome. That's one nugget I'm implementing right after we hang this call up. Frank, I got to start evaluating my assets a little bit better than just kind of hold it on and they might be a turd and I could probably turn it into a gold nugget, but got to evaluate it and understand what we got to understand what kind of decisions to make. Right, talk to me, uh, frank, about the lenders. So you talked about lending being easier. Now, what are some of the? You said you mentioned hard money. What are, what are the types of lending you use? And and talk to us about why you use certain lenders for different things. And you don't have to name the lenders, but just the type of investor or lender for different things. And you don't have to name the lenders, but just the type of investor or lender.
Frank:When we're buying wholesale properties, a lot of times you might have to move a little quicker than what like a conventional loan would allow. You know there might be a house that you have a two week window. So to make that happen, like with a conventional loan, in two weeks would be very difficult, probably most likely impossible, because of the cumbersome process that it is Right. So sometimes we'll look at commercial loans. They're a lot easier. Not all banks do them. Sometimes we'll go hard money stuff like that. The hard money process is probably the quickest. It might cost you a little bit more, but if there's a deal lurking out there and you don't want to pass it up and hard money is your only option, do it. And then usually a hard money lender will want an exit plan within six months of how you're going to refinance it. Right, so you should get pre-approved with a secondary lender before you do the hard money loan and it's not that hard to do. And actually we're in that process right now. Um, and actually we're, we're in that process right now.
Frank:You know, and sometimes several deals pop up at the same time and and you hate to pass one up, Um, you might have, say, a commercial lender tied up with another deal and then all of a sudden another property shows up that, hey, I should buy that. So our money is another option. So it's, it's just a lot more options out there for financing today. You know, 30 years ago there was no hard money lending that I that I ever saw it was just, you know, conventional bring your 20%, you can do a little leveraging. You know you had to stay within the margins of equity on your, your leveraging properties and stuff. But it was a whole different, a whole different game at that time, if you want to call it a game, Right, but yeah, yeah.
Frank:I love that I love having so much easier today.
Corey:I love having different buckets of money. You know, like we talked to a lot of people at home equity lines of credit as well. So so many people have equity in their houses or if they don't own a house, they rent. They know somebody who's owned a house for the last five years and if somebody's owned a house for the last five years they probably got a lot of dead money, as we call it, just sitting in their house, not right? So they could pull that equity. You know, pay their buddy a percent or give them a percent of the deal for using their line of credit and that could be their down payment money or their rehab money or something like that.
Corey:And the hard money lenders, like you said, they're great when you don't want to pass a deal up or you don't have any other options. At that point you don't have a portfolio yet to show a commercial bank those kinds of things. So that's great. Appreciate you sharing that. Frank, talk to me. Let's shift gears here quick. Tell our audience is there a favorite town place, restaurant, some favorite place for you and Patty in Wisconsin?
Frank:If you had to pick one spot you could go. Where would you go and why? One of our favorite eating places I'll mention name is schwartz's in st ann. It's a supper club. It's very good, it's close by and supper club and, um, you know, we usually run into a bunch of people that we know there and actually that's the place where we got the uh strip mall deal sealed up so nice and it's even nicer you like it even more now.
Frank:Right. Coincidentally, we had bought a house in Sheboygan and we sold it to a couple that we knew. We took them out to eat to Schwartz's and that happened to be the night that we ran into the fellow that had the strip mall. So it just killed two. Know, killed two birds with one stone right there.
Corey:So it's getting done all the time at Schwartz's. I love it. You mentioned this is kind of fun for our out-of-state listeners. You mentioned supper club. That's a that's a Wisconsin tradition. Tell our out-of-state listeners what is the supper club experience like here in Wisconsin and why should they attend when they come to visit a supper club.
Frank:There's quite a few supper clubs, and good supper clubs, you know, and you know they all have their own atmosphere. You know it's, you know, very relaxed, and you know you go and have a couple old fashions and that seems to be the.
Corey:Those areisconsin old fashions not right. Old fashions of everywhere else right. So they're a little bit different than the old fire breath that you get when you go over old-fashioned somewhere else, right yeah, and that seems to be the drink of choice a lot of times.
Frank:you know and and uh, you know you go there, you wait for your table a little bit and then they call you in and you go have your meal and you know, usually it's a good steak dinner. You know seafood and you know good variety on the menus and just, yeah, it's kind of a Wisconsin tradition thing. You know, I travel outside the area and I don't see a lot of supper clubs elsewhere.
Corey:It's a Wisconsin thing. You got to visit one. If you're coming to Wisconsin, Frank, before we let you roll here, if anybody wants to get ahold of you, if they want to reach out, ask any questions about anything we talked about today what's a good way for them to get ahold of you?
Frank:Probably email is frick R-I-C-K 41 at yahoocom, or you know. I'll even give out my phone number, 920-918-6013. You can text or call me. I will put a disclaimer out there.
Corey:Free real estate advice is worth as much as you're paying for it. I love that. Frank, now you're going to be getting a bunch of calls and texts at 2 in the morning for people at Schwartz coming to pick you up after having too many old fashions right, just don't ask to borrow money from me, that's all. There you go. I love it, Frank. Any final words for the audience here before we let you get on with this beautiful day.
Frank:Sure, you know some people have, and I think it's a misconception. You know they say, well, I'm going to wait till market comes down, or you know there's going to be a crash and then I'm going to buy. It's never. It's never a bad time to buy, it's always good. The sooner you get in there and and purchase some property, the better off you are. Some of the markets that we're in there's 10 plus percent appreciation. You'll never make that up by waiting right. So the sooner you educate yourself on managing properties buying properties and that's the key is is to educate yourself first before you actually jump in there and start buying properties and try and manage them. I always use the scenario of you know you wouldn't buy a restaurant and then go and learn how to cook Right. So, um, you know it's learn, learn the process and and and. The sooner the better that you start buying, the better off you'll be.
Corey:That's so good. I love that advice and you mentioned even for learning how to manage. The beautiful part now is if you get around some of the local groups wherever you're located there's real estate meetup groups. Even if you're out of state and you're not quite sure, just going to meet people and talking to them about how they manage properties, how they do these things, and then you know, build some relationships if you're out of state or out of the area with people who are local and find a great property management company, and that eliminates a lot of that, that learning curve.
Frank:Right when we started.
Corey:One of our early mentors told us to self-manage at first, and now we joke together that that was terrible advice. He admits like, yeah, I should have never told you that. You should have just got management and kept growing and not worried about trying to learn the leases and the laws and all this stuff. Not that you shouldn't know that stuff, but it can stunt people's growth sometimes. And so now, like you said, frank, with some of these management companies that eliminate some of that hurdle of getting started, you know that it's like just learning okay, what is a good deal for me? Who are my lenders I need to get? What other people do I need to have on my team, like the bookkeepers and the accountants and the real estate attorneys and those kinds of things. So that can eliminate a lot of that startup. But I love that.
Corey:I did a YouTube video not that long ago, from the time we're recording this, about the wealth gap, or the wealth cone. I call it you. You know you mentioned the appreciation. The other thing you got in over 30 years is tenants paying off your debt for you. So, while the market appreciated, your tenants paid the debt down and it just created this huge equity spread for you, which is so powerful over time. So I love that advice. But you can't get that equity spread if you don't buy.
Frank:That's right, absolutely.
Corey:Yep, awesome, frank. Well, thanks so much for hopping on, man. This has been awesome. I learned a lot. I got some notes I'm taking away here today that I'm going to be implementing right away. So hopefully all of you guys listening got some good nuggets from Frank today. If you guys are looking for off-market deals, go to wisconsindiscountpropertiescom, sign up for the buyer's list and start getting off-market deals in Wisconsin sent to your inbox every Monday morning and this has been another episode of the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. If you got some value out of this show, subscribe, like share. The more people that listen to this, the bigger guests we can get, the more guests we can get and the more value we can bring to you guys here as an audience. So that's it, frank man. I appreciate you being on here and we will see you probably at one of these meetings soon.
Frank:All right, Corey.
Corey:Thank you. Hey, this has been another episode of the Wisconsin Investor. Thanks for tuning in. If you got some value out of the show, please go like, rate, subscribe, share, do all that fun stuff. And if you're new to investing in Wisconsin and you want to have a conversation with somebody from our team, we would love to have that conversation with you. To do that, just go to our website wisconsindiscountpropertiescom, Hit the contact us form, put a little bit of your info in there and somebody from our team will reach out and have a conversation, hopefully help you start moving forward.
