#37 Commercial Investing and Brokerage with Mark Hulsey
Are you thinking about getting into commercial investing?
Mark Hulsey, a Managing Broker, is an accomplished public speaker and trainer who liberally shares his commercial and investment world knowledge. He is a businessman, a family man, and the RE/MAX Results Commercial Group founder. He has received numerous commercial real estate sales production awards and is a global production leader within RE/MAX Commercial. If you are serious about commercial investing, you need to hear this one!
More about him – https://resultscommercial.com/
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Itunes – www.TonyJavier.com/itunes
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Show Transcription:
Tony (00:01):
All right. Welcome to today’s show. We have an awesome guest, as usual, Mark Hulsey. He is a REMAX agent. He’s got a ton of awards. If you’re watching the video, you can see behind him, he’s got a ton of accolades and been in the business a long time. Has raised five kids, I think he’s, he said, and does a lot of high-level stuff in the commercial real estate world, mainly on the brokerage side, but also an investment as well. So, as you guys know, I just love interviewing successful people. Doesn’t matter if it’s residential real estate, commercial, sales, or investing. We’re just going to have some high-level conversations on how Mark has scaled his business up and how you guys could potentially get into commercial investing. So Mark, welcome to the show. I appreciate you coming on.
Mark (01:25):
Tony, I love being here. Really appreciate it. And yeah, let’s get our conversation going. I’m anxious to talk with you.
Tony (01:33):
All right. Sounds good. Well, I love talking about people’s stories. Everybody has a different story, right. About how they got in the business, and maybe some struggles and things you’ll learn throughout the way. So we’ll just kind of start there. Tell people how you got started and, and how you got to where you are now.
Mark (01:52):
Be in Chicago in 1983. So a crazy long time ago, probably well before your time I got licensed in real estate in Chicago, and so I knew I was a real estate guy from very, very early on, but then I spent a lot of years kind of in the marketing, advertising, and business development world. And so to kind of cut to the chase, I’m a hybrid, I’m a hybrid between a marketing business development guy and a real estate guy. And knew that I had a lot of I had a passion for investing for many, many years, but like many people kind of sat on the sideline, sat on my hands, and didn’t do much with it. And then after spending about oh eight years or so in Chicago, eight years in Michigan, working in a marketing and business development and media I moved my young family at that time back to Minnesota and became an investor and built a portfolio of about 50 units primarily small residential, multifamily, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, some mixed-use properties.
Mark (02:49):
And then, and did that essentially up to a full-time position as I was kind of transferring my time from being a retained marketing consultant into an investor. And then ultimately got recruited to go into real estate sales because I was moving so much real estate myself. And at that time I was a little bit apprehensive about actually putting the suit and tie on to represent clients. But I started doing that instead of representing businesses and guiding them with their marketing and business development. And it’s done very well. I really enjoyed taking a lot of real estate knowledge and I’ve converted a lot of investing knowledge into the brokerage side. So that’s really what I’ve done. I’ve parlayed lots of lessons, many hard lessons, and difficult lessons. So it didn’t always, certainly come easily by any means and, and then turn that into representing clients.
Mark (03:39):
And so we’ve represented hundreds or thousands of clients over the years, and we’ve just done a huge amount of business. And we worked with from the very beginning investor to the most sophisticated investors, many of whom we work with today on things like commercial investment, net lease investments. But we’ve covered the gamut and I’ve covered the gamut. I love brokerage, but I also love helping people build portfolios. So yeah, that’s a little bit of the story, but more, most importantly, yeah. Raised five kids. Two of my kids work with me in the business, so I’m super proud of that. I’ve got Hayden Sawyer working my business. Hayden is a CCIM. That’s certainly one of the very best designations in all of the commercial real estate. And so we’re a CCIM shop. That’s for sure big time and Sawyer also works with me, but we run a small boutique firm here in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and we do some work nationally as well with some net lease buyer clients.
Tony (04:29):
Fantastic. Fantastic. So tell us you talked about residential before we started here and you talked about 50 units. I’m not sure if they were residential, not, but tell us the kind of transition or the difference between residential and commercial in your mind. Because there are some people wanting to go from residential to commercial or some people that just want to jump directly into commercial. So if you could touch on that a little bit, and then also, you know, the difference between the sales side in the investing side, because for me, when I started in this business 20 years ago, I started as an investor and got my license as an agent, did both for a little while just to kind of get going. And then once I could just do investing on my own then I, then I took off and just an investing from there. So I guess start with the residential to the commercial aspect. If people are wanting to jump from residential to commercial any advice you can give them and kind of the main differences between the two. Yeah,
Mark (05:24):
Yeah, so, and I speak a lot to this, even on our YouTube channel. Results in real estate results in commercials, you can look it up, but I talk a lot about this. And I talk about both sides. So I talk a lot about the investing side of things. I talked about the brokerage side and, and going from a residential investor with your houses or your small multifamily or mixed-use buildings, apartment buildings, and then giving consideration to other types of commercial investment assets, office, retail, industrial, maybe you rent a land. And then of course the same thing on the sales side, on the brokerage side of things what it takes to basically play in our space or swim with the sharks. Some this is the doggy dog business when it gets into commercial investment brokerage. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not something you just jumped into. It’s definitely something that you need to grow into. I love brokerage. Many people are involved in real estate sales, leasing but they’ve got their sights set only on investing. And I believe in investing because it’s obviously one of the very best ways of creating wealth in America, around the world period.
Mark (06:32):
Um, but I also was a one who built up from, you know, a single unit to 10 units, to 20 units, to 50 units. And, and I ran around like a crazy person with a young family and that was all good and well, and I learned as I said earlier, I learned a lot of lessons about how to build a portfolio and how not to build a portfolio and some of the key things that you don’t want to do. But actually, I’m a marketing salesperson. And so being given the opportunity to represent clients and sell and lease commercial investment real estate I love it. I mean, I don’t know that I love it every day, but I really love it. I’m passionate about it. And probably most importantly is the opportunity is huge. I can’t really kind of get away from that. So building the portfolio is great from a wealth-building perspective and certainly, from a cash-flow perspective, it’s pretty good. At the same time, what I can compare, what we do from a brokerage point of view for creating income and creating wealth off that income, it’s extraordinarily substantial.
Mark (07:33):
So, I’m maybe the opposite of many people that, you know, start off in the sales and they just want to be an investor. I was more of the investor and I got more into the brokerage side of things. And the brokerage side of things has served us really, really well. It’s again, I raised a family and, and, you know, it’s paid for lots of, you know, tuition and all kinds of things. So it’s done really, really well for us. And of course, I didn’t have to deal with quite as many tenants, toilets, and trash, but instead, I shifted my energy over to client service. The difference is huge. So I’m not going to minimize the difference. I think that anyone that thinks they can quickly, whether it be in it as an investor and give consideration to say, you’re having your, your single-family homes or your apartments, and you want to give thought to starting to invest in retail or office or industrial or net lease investments.
Mark (08:20):
So we love net lease investments and those are triple net investments. They’re kind of the ultimate of all investments. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better than net lease investments, but it takes a tremendous amount of capital. Those are the Starbucks coffees, the Walgreens. Okay. So that’s what a net lease investment is. And we do, we do a good amount of that work and we enjoy it even within the commercial brokerage world, Tony, it’s very different. It’s one thing to sell a, a, you know, a $2 million office building or a retail small strip center versus transacting or brokering a net lease investment. It’s a different world, and so it doesn’t make any difference what side of the fence you’re on, be it investing or brokerage. And you start looking at the differences between residential and commercial and there are very many of them. And like I said, it’s hard to articulate all of them at this time, but, you know I mean the key thing for, you know, for anyone who’s an investor, once you start to understand the numbers, right?
Mark (09:15):
When you understand the numbers, that’s going to be the key to everything. The differences on our commercial side of things were based very much on key pieces like certainly, you know, cap rate, discounted cash flow. Yeah. We care about cash on cash returns. Whereas a smaller investor might be looking at, you know, cash flow per unit per property. They might be looking at debt, service, coverage ratio, all those things are important too, but some of the vernacular and some of the underlying underwriting, of course, is a little bit different as we look at each of these different categories.
Tony (09:48):
So 2021, if we had this conversation a year ago, early 2020, you may have had a different answer to this, but someone wanting to get into commercial real estate right now, they’ve never done a deal before. What would you – how would you recommend they start? Like, what would the steps be? And then what type of commercial investment would you push them towards – multifamily? Warehouse? Give us a little bit of a scenario on that, on how people can get started a little bit easier and faster on potentially how they could do that.
Mark (10:18):
I don’t know that there’s an easy or fast way to get involved in commercial investment brokerage. So I don’t know that those words work really well within our industry. It’s a capital heavy investment. So if you’re under-capitalized, you probably don’t belong in the commercial investment world. It takes capital. That’s why so many people will pull their money together. Or of course, we work within syndications and partnerships to start to pull money together, to potentially buy some real estate. But it’s just kind of like, it’s really not any different than the residential sense of saying, well, let me start small and let me work my way up. Right. So you certainly can do that. And so you don’t need to jump into the biggest office building or retail building. Many people naturally should gravitate to that, which they know that’s just a logical thing.
Mark (11:08):
Everybody understands that in commercial real estate, typically you’re not going to find an industrial investor who owns one to 10 million square feet of industrial space. Also balanced out with this multifamily portfolio. It’s a very specialized business. And most people absolutely stay in their lane. Industrial investors stick with industrial product offices, people, retail people, and surely multifamily people. And we also recommend and suggest that that’s a good idea. Now, the sophisticated investor, can they start crossing over into some of the other product categories? Of course, they can, but each of these is very different. An office tenant and the office tenant requirements is going to be different than the retail tenant and certainly dramatically different than an industrial tenant. Somebody who’s worked within single-family homes or small residential multifamily, I call that two, three, four units or small apartment buildings, less than 10 units each, you know, they should stay probably within the residential space, but sometimes what happens Tony, as you know, is that they can get really kind of tired of dealing with tenants.
Mark (12:13):
And so typically they’ll move over and have a property management company start working with them. And that’s fine, but not always is that the answer. And then sometimes they say, I want to get into commercial investment work because I want five-year tenants. I want to have a retail strip center where I can put in a good national credit tenant, and I can have them taken care of more of the property expenses and property improvements. And I want to get a little bit more, hands-off like a net lease investment. And so that’s a good opportunity to do a 10-31 and start to really study the various product categories, maybe consider even going out and working on your CCIM just as an investor, not even as a broker, but working on your CCIM. I can’t, I can’t recommend that enough. I think that’s critical to start really understanding the fundamentals of investment analysis because that’s what we do.
Mark (13:03):
We are investment analysis experts, and we can dissect this information. We can understand the risks. We have great measurements that we can put to every single income-producing asset so that we can know where are we today and where are we going with this asset? And so I think that it’s an education component and then a team-building component. So you want to put – it’s just like anything else, right? You gotta have the very best people, the very best team around you, whether it be the tax attorneys the real property attorneys the commercial real estate brokers, people who are playing in this space every day. So I hope that kind of answers that question.
Tony (13:41):
Yeah. A lot to touch on there. So I think you started touching on something I was going to transition to and it’s that no matter what you get into, you really have to have good people on your side. Right? Like when I got in the business 20 years ago I can, for the first 10 years in the second, 10 years, first 10 years, I didn’t have very good people on my side. I was just throwing people in and didn’t have mentors. Didn’t have coaches, didn’t have, I was just trying to figure it all my, all myself. And that’s, that’s just how I’ve done things all my life. I feel like. And then the last 10 years, or the next 10 years, which has been the last 10 years I’ve stepped my game up with hiring really good people with having really good mentors, coaches, mastermind groups, and things of that nature.
Tony (14:19):
So I think probably really, what it comes down to is probably finding someone that has done what you want to do, pick their brain, get them, get some mentor-ship figure out who your team is. Right. You mentioned the team and then stay in your lane. I think that’s a good one. It’s like, you know, pick something, you may have to look at a few different things before you pick it, but like stay in your lane, learn something really well, stay there, laser-focused on it. And then as you become successful in one thing, then maybe you could take on getting into potentially another type of investment. So let’s get into sales and marketing. So you said sales and marketing. I love sales and marketing. I mean, if you think about any business is really sales and marketing, right. It doesn’t matter what it is. That’s right. So let’s talk some high-level stuff there. So what, you know, you’ve been very successful in commercial real estate. I can tell you’re a very educated, polished guy, right? So that obviously helps. But you also have to have, you know, marketing sales, you have to have a bunch of other things to it. So tell us what you’ve done on the marketing side to help yourself stand out from the competition and be as successful as you’ve been.
Mark (15:25):
Well, thank you for that, Tony. I appreciate some of the underlying compliments there, big time. Thank you so much for that. So I have a career in marketing. And so as a commercial investment broker, our group results in commercial today, we’re very much on the listing side. So we’re on the seller side of things. Our focus is very much on taking products to market. And the reason I mentioned that is that taking the product to market is very much a function of marketing. We are packaging and positioning assets and taking them to market. We also do it because I like to be in control of the listing. If I’m in control of the listing, I’m in control of the transaction. We work with buyers. We’re extraordinarily selective when we work with buyers. And that just becomes, once you work in brokerage for many years, you start to realize, you start to realize the nuances, what works and what doesn’t work.
Mark (16:16):
And our time is so extraordinarily valuable that we need to make sure that we’re focusing on money-making tasks. And so, but I also, because we’re marketing experts, that means we know how to take the office building, the industrial building, the net lease asset. And how do we package it up? I’m a big believer in maximum exposure. Okay. So, so my job is to get the most money for my sellers as we take these products to market. So I’m not a, let me sign a listing agreement, call up a couple of people and say, Hey, I got this great, this great office building for you. We’re not that. Once in a while, sure. We put together off-market deals. But many times we are the people that take this to CoStar and LoopNet and to our local boards. We put together very elaborate offering memorandums and videos and drones, and we take it to the market and we shop that product.
Mark (17:09):
We maximize the equity for our clients. I’ve been the person I’ve been the seller many, many times over like you have Tony. So you know what it means to squeeze everything we can out of that asset, right? We’ve, we’ve put so much money into the asset to be a strong income-producing asset. And now it is time to exit. It’s time to move our money’s into another place. We want to get everything we can out of that. So I’ve got no problem with off-market deals. Off-market deals are fine and they’ve got their place, but then there’s a place for folks like us that know how to do the marketing and know how to do the positioning and, and work that product in the market. So my many years of working in strategic marketing, marketing, consulting, and all of that, serves us really, really well for what we do today.
Mark (17:56):
And so but you’re right because it doesn’t matter what the business is. If you’re kind of missing that marketing piece of it, you’re going to have a hard time being very, very successful because marketing is just fundamental today to making any business work. So I think that we have a huge advantage with that automatically. We’re able, which allows us to stay as a very small focused investment boutique because I’m not interested in having 80, 90, or a hundred agents. I work within a very large brokerage. The brokerage that our commercial investment group is, is a 1200 agent firm. We’re a very large firm, but I happen to run a very small firm within a very big firm. And I dig that. I like that. It allows us to be very picky and selective about the work we do and the people we work with. And once you’re a mature business, you’re kind of given that luxury to start saying yes to you and no over there. And so, but marketing has allowed us to do that. So I hope that speaks to the marketing piece a little bit.
Tony (18:55):
Yeah. I think residential real estate is probably a little bit different than commercial real estate from a standpoint of residential, you can get a lot with, with relationships, but I imagine commercial real estate is even greater than that because you’re dealing with astute clients, you know, astute clients hang out with other astute people. And so, so, you know, creating those relationships and really doing a good job for them. I mean, you could have a 2, 3, 4, $5 million listings do a really good job for them. And then some are free a $10 million client, right? I mean, it’s just one of those things that you may not have to market really that well, I imagine at this point you’ve been in the business long enough where marketing for deals probably isn’t as important to you as really catering to the client, doing a good job and then getting referrals. Would you agree with that?
Mark (19:47):
To me, they’re both equally important. So I really wouldn’t dismiss the latter for the former. Okay. But never do we let the former start to let the ladder weigh itself out. So in other words, yes, those relationships are critical. The relationships I have with my fellow commercial brokers who are very successful as we transact together become very important. So yes, as you’re moving up the ranks, you know, who are the producers, who have the product, who knows how to put the deals together, because if you’re, if you’re a residential person you’re trying to play in my space, you’re going to have a hard time. And actually, commercial brokers are not the easiest people to deal with. So that’s a big one right there. That’s why you want to make sure you’ve got the right people on your side. If you can’t talk the talk and walk the walk, we’re pretty much going to not want to deal with those people so much.
Mark (20:38):
But so when it comes to marketing, quite honestly, if I’m taking a 400,000 $400,000 building to market, or if I’m taking a $4 million building to market, we actually put an equal amount of, I gotta be careful there. Yeah. Sometimes the $4 million or $10 million building is going to take some extra marketing horsepower and dollars. But quite honestly, the amount of work by the time you package it up, you put the offering memorandum together, you put your rent rolls, your financials. There’s a lot of information that goes into a commercial investment property. So I consider, but then again, we’re kind of, you know, we’re kind of picky, best practices people. We, we kind of make sure that everything is in good order and try not to miss a beat on any of it. So it’s all of it. It’s your reputation is everything. So reputation is it hands down is, you know, I mean, reputation, we live and die by it.
Mark (21:30):
We’re in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Minneapolis, St. Paul is a vibrant market. It’s a smart market, but it’s about a number 14 market and it’s a small market. So yeah, we’ve got 3M and target stores and general mills and we’ve got some, you know, failing football teams and not-so-good baseball teams here as well. But we’re a highly educated and very strong corporate environment. We’ve got a lot of good smart brokers here. And, and I’ll tell you what, the moment you, the moment you screw up, right? The moment you don’t treat somebody right is the moment that you’re going to start feeling the pains within your business. So, and you know how that is. I mean, you know, there’s nothing better than having those relationships with lenders, with brokers, with lawyers, and obviously with all of our investment clients.
Tony (22:22):
Absolutely. A great team can make your life really easy or much easier, I should say. So let’s get into the kind of, kind of the past lessons you’ve learned. So I always like to know kind of what some lessons you’ve learned, you know, a lot of people, when they think of successful people, they think they have it all together. Right. I mean, you know, in some capacity we do, right. But then it’s like, there’s a step behind the scenes that happens, you know, whether it’s, you know, business almost fails or, you know, cash flow issues or whatever it is, there’s always stuff that happens throughout a career. So tell us about, I don’t know, one or two things that you really learned in the past that, you know, maybe were tough things for you that ended up being, you know, potentially good that you could share with the audience.
Mark (23:06):
Yeah, no, in fact, you know, it, Tony, I mean, the best lessons are the toughest lessons, right? I mean, that’s, that’s where we really get our growth. We get our growth and that’s why they’re called growing pains. Because many times you got to go through some pain to get to the other side, and then you can really bang zoom. And yeah, I went through all of mine, you know, I can sit here now at this stage, in this age of a career, and sound like I know a lot. And, you know, hopefully, I do after all of these years and hundreds of thousands of transactions, I better, right, at this stage of the game. So there’s nothing special about that. Oh, I’ve got some really great lessons I’ve learned and some really hard lessons that I’ve learned and I’ll go to the investor side, the investor side more than the brokerage side, for sure.
Mark (23:51):
Because I had been in other businesses before I was recruited to now represent clients. And so I had been an investor. I had bought dozens and dozens of properties. And so I knew transactions very well from doing them. And so then it just came down to a, and I take fiduciary very, very seriously. So fiduciary just means when I represent a client, just like a lawyer represents a client we’re not haphazard about that. There, you know, my license is worth literally millions of dollars. And so we don’t jeopardize our license in any way, shape, or form. So we follow all that closely, but let’s get back to the important stuff. And that’s your question, that’s the lessons. I was able to grow a portfolio during the days when just about anybody could grow a portfolio. Okay. You didn’t need to be very smart.
Mark (24:40):
You didn’t need to be very special because money was free-flowing. Money was everywhere. And I was part of that. So I was part of that, you know, ability to go out and get money, get money easily, get money too easily. So this was certainly obviously a pre-great recession. So it was within those years, I started investing in 96 and was pretty aggressive from 96, probably all the way through 2008, somewhere in that range. I still hold investments today, but I shrunk my portfolio dramatically. Partially willingly, partially not so willingly because I went through the great recession and got, and went through lots of good pain. Lessons. The lessons are simple. Okay. The lessons are super simple. You heard me talk before about, I made the point that commercial investment real estate, you better have capital. You better have money. Cause if you think you’re coming in here and you’re going to go become the next billionaire on just your, your smile and a handshake, no, you need to have capital.
Mark (25:38):
You have to have that money. And so I was able to work and build a portfolio that was fantastically over-leveraged all right. I mean, you know, I took leverage to the moon and back, and of course, did ultimately over leverage catch up with you or did I not follow some fundamental principles of manage growth? Did I grow too quickly with too much leverage? And the answer is, yeah, I did. I absolutely did. And so that meant that I was ultimately under-capitalized and when you’re under-capitalized, not only can you not grow, but you can’t sustain in the event. Okay. Just so happened that the event that I was lucky enough to experience was the great recession. So we got to experience a dramatic decrease in values that almost happened overnight. I mean it happened rapidly. It happened in I’m talking a matter of six or nine months where you could suddenly say that’s individual little property over there just lost 30 or $40,000 worth of value that now put me into a negative position and now I’m upside down.
Mark (26:42):
So even though I might be able to service my debt, my spreadsheet, the value just took a big plummet. And if you don’t have the capital to be able to sustain through that, you’ve got some serious issues. So I was fortunate enough to be able to dispose of a lot of properties rapidly. And I came out just fine through all of it. But I absolutely tell investors a couple of key things, a couple of really important things, Tony, and especially today, because I, you know, our YouTube channel does a lot of educating of investors and brokers. And it drives me crazy when I see some of the other people in the marketplace trying to make real estate investing sound too easy and too simple, and everyone should do it. I don’t think everyone should do it. I don’t think this is designed for everybody. This is a business and it needs to be treated as such.
Mark (27:28):
And not everyone’s going to jump into real estate investing with very little capital and suddenly become the next, you know, Elon Musk. No, but that’s not the point. The point is knowing how to use real estate that’s a collateralized asset and start to let appreciation, depreciation, OPM, other people’s money, right? The tenants, over time, paying this down to truly create a passive income stream. And you don’t need to be gigantically huge with this huge portfolio to do it. And so that was something that I learned as well. And I really talk a lot about it today. And I’ll say to people, I’ve found some crazy successful investors who have had six or nine houses, that’s it, nothing more, a half dozen houses they’ve paid them down. They’re paid off, they’ve created a wonderful income stream and everyone always thinks, yeah, but I need to turn those six houses into 60 houses and then 60 houses into those huge, gigantic shopping malls over there.
Mark (28:31):
And they’ve got all these like super duper grandiose ideas. That’s not me. I’m not a believer in that at all. Now, if you want to go there, more power to you. Okay. So I’m not going to stop anybody from going after their dreams of building the biggest portfolio in the whole wide world, but I’m a lifestyle guy. So I’m a lifestyle guy. I’m about raising a family and having a nice relationship and going to the lake and having a great business. And so I want to make sure the balance is there. And sometimes people can get too focused on – your ego can sometimes run away with you. So your ego can run away with you with this gigantic portfolio. And suddenly like I’m worth more because I have all these properties. And I say, let’s just slow down a little bit. And let’s make sure that this investment strategy fits your lifestyle strategy. Let’s design a life where the real estate investments are going to work very well for you in the short-term, mid-term, and long-term, and then you could be successful. So I hope that’s a long, sorry, long-winded answer. But yeah, I made some pretty good mistakes. And so now I’m more about proper leverage, proper growth, keeping your goals in line with your life.
Tony (29:41):
Fantastic. Now there’s a couple of things I want to touch on. I took a couple of notes here of things that you touched on that I kind of want to reiterate as we wrap up here. But you did mention Elon Musk. So we talked about lessons. I mean, think about this – Elon Musk at this point is, is the richest man in the world. Right. And it just happened literally in the last, I don’t know what it’s been last three months or something like that, but you know, something that’s been publicized lately is that he almost went bankrupt. What a year, two years ago, whatever, you know, whenever that was like recently. So he went from potentially bankrupt to the richest man in the world. Now, obviously, that’s extreme. But the point is, is that we go through things. We know, we hit rock bottom in certain, in certain instances, we get over-leveraged on properties.
Tony (30:25):
I’ve been there before and had to sell up a bunch of properties to make up for other properties. I’ve been there, so we’re going to have lessons, right? So if anybody’s down in the dumps right now, it’s not something that’s going to stay forever. There’s always going to be a lesson to it. And then the other side is, is that, you know, looking at your bio, if anybody looked at that, they would be like, man, this guy is just wanting to be the biggest and baddest, you know, commercial real estate, you know, the person out there. But, talking to you, you’re very balanced. I mean, you have five kids, you obviously, you know, you’ve done something right there. It’s not easy to raise five kids. I just had my first couple of years ago and I downsized my business a couple of years ago, I had 15 employees and I downsized to three, three employees and I couldn’t be happier with that one business. It just is very lean, makes just almost as much money as the 15 employee business that I had. And now it allows me to concentrate on, you know, the other businesses that I’ve started over, over the last several years. And I feel more way more balanced. So I think those are two good things, you know, there’s always something good and the bad and you don’t always have to be the biggest and baddest to be successful. Right. So awesome.
Mark (31:41):
How do we measure our success? Right. So I think that’s really what it comes down to, or how do you measure wealth, right? And so each of us has our own, our own way of measuring it. And I think, you know, our culture wants to measure it with the Lamborghini near the private jet or maybe your bank account or whatever else. And for me, it’s just, you know, at this stage of my life, it’s not how I measure wealth. I get to work with two of my kids here in this business, and I’m lucky to have five adult kids now. The last two are in college and married for, I don’t know, almost 35 years to a fantastic partner who has been through all of it with me, that’s all of my wealth. And I’ll take all that wealth over everything else in the whole wide world. So those are kind of some lessons from a middle-aged guy that, you know, yes, I love, I’m a doer and I love, you know, it’s great knocking out, you know, great production every year and it’s nice having a portfolio and all that stuff. But I think that we really got to keep our eye on the real prize. And so that’s what I try to do. And I’m, and, you know, congratulations to you and your, your two-year-old, is that right Tony?
Tony (32:49):
Ready to turn two here in a couple of months. Yeah.
Mark (32:51):
Well, that, that’s, that’s as good as it gets to me. That’s, that’s the richest part of life is right there. So there’s not a property or a cap rate in the whole wide world that can touch what that two-year-old brings to our lives. So I hope you’re just sucking up every minute of that. Yeah.
Tony (33:09):
Yeah. It’s going fast. It’s going fast, but no, I appreciate you Mark great guy. And you have a Results in Real Estate, a YouTube channel, correct? Is there anywhere else you’d like for people to go learn more about you?
Mark (33:24):
Yeah, thank you for that, Tony, but quite honestly, you know, we, we just started doing our YouTube channel Results in Real Estate because I want to take so many years, decades of real estate experience and start sharing it. Okay. I’m not selling anybody anything today. Resultscommercial.Com, our website – resultscommercial.com is a great place to go to because videos are on there. They’re going to send you over to our YouTube channel, but anyone who’s interested in investing, I think that you’re going to find I’ve loaded up a lot of content on there. And we’re, you know, tomorrow we’ll shoot eight more videos. We’ll have a hundred videos on our YouTube channel here by June 1st. And it’s kind of a balance between both investing videos and then working within the commercial brokerage, commercial investment brokerage world. And so whether you bounce to resultscommercial.com or find us on YouTube on Results in Real Estate I think some of your audience might, especially for the newer or intermediate investor or somebody who wants to, you know, work within commercial investment real estate. There’s some good information on there for everybody.
Tony (34:25):
All right, good stuff. Well, congrats Mark. On all the success and surviving five kids and 35 years of marriage, that’s not an easy feat, being successful in all those things. So I appreciate your mark and look forward to connecting with you again soon.
Mark (34:40):
Oh, Tony, thank you for this. It’s wonderful to meet you and keep up your good work with your young family. And I can’t wait to talk to you again.
Tony (34:47):
Thanks. I appreciate you.
Mark (34:49):
Thank you.