Several factors lead successful real estate investors to astronomical wealth. 

On one side, you have the fundamentals of real estate like leverage, appreciation, cash flow and tax efficiency. On the other side, you have the business aspects of real estate like operations, marketing, technology, efficiency, revenue management and more.

Commercial real estate, above all else, is a business. Contrary to popular belief, it is not one of those set-it and forget-it passive income streams where you sit on a beach and collect checks. That is unless you've automated (or outsourced to) a management company that can operate your real estate for you while you sit on a beach and collect checks.

When you utilize both the fundamentals and the business aspects in an optimal way, it's the perfect storm. And the wealth comes quickly.

The thing about real estate is that it is incredibly tax efficient. This allows many investors to keep nearly every dollar they make. In this course, we will talk about how they do that.

Banks and lenders love the security of physical assets with bricks and sticks, so they lend more aggressively than most other asset types. We will go over debt structures and how to utilize leverage in the coming sections.

In commercial real estate (and some types of residential), the value is determined by how much money a property makes, not what you paid for it. If you can run a more efficient business and cut costs or increase revenue, you can quickly add a lot of value (and thus make a lot of money). 

And the most appealing part of real estate in the eyes of an opportunist is the competition. The competitive landscape is highly fragmented, with many different operators in different towns with different ways of doing business. And this is good for us - because a hell of a lot of them do business like it's 1985.  

All of these factors make real estate a great way to get wealthy. I'm not talking about the big sexy wealthy we read about online, I'm talking about the incognito wealth that allows you to spend your time doing what you want to be doing. I'm talking about financial freedom.

When I was 28 years old, I got $2,000,000 wired into my checking account from my first deal. Is that enough for you? All it takes is one deal to change your life!

There are three ways to make a lot of money in real estate:

If you have no capital, you better be willing to take a lot of risks. If you have a lot of money, you can mitigate risk down to almost nothing. If you can operate a business better than anyone else, you don't HAVE to do either of the first two.

I like to attack it from all angles. Let's take a healthy amount of risk to get outsized returns while starting with a significant amount of cash and getting really good at operating real estate.

And in this course, we'll talk about all three - risk, capital, and operations.

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The big takeaway:

When you learn to walk around your town and think about property and real estate in a different way (which this course is designed to teach you), you'll learn one very important fact:

The amount of real estate in the world with sub-market rents is astounding.

Hundreds of billions in revenue to be collected and value to be created.

Market rent is $2,000 per month but the tenant is only paying $1,200. Market rent is $139 for that unit but the tenant is only paying $79.

We see two storage facilities with the same amenities and same square footage in the same town and one is generating $300k per year in cashflow and the other is generating $150k per year in cashflow.

Both owners think they're doing a good job. But one, the better operator, knows how to get that $139 per unit while the competition is happy with their $79. One property is worth $5m while the other is worth $3.5m.

Sounds easy to charge market rents and keep your tenants there once you have them and market rent increases - trust me when I say that it isn't and only the best operators can do it.

The fact is that most real estate investors are already wealthy. With that wealth comes two things:

1. Laziness

or

2. Severe risk aversion

They either play golf all day, got the real estate passed down from their parents and are off doing other things or pursuing other careers, or simply have enough money in the bank to not worry too much about it....

Or they've become afraid that if they change anything it could all come crashing down. Once you have a high net worth it's easy to develop a serious fear that it could all come crashing down. A constant paranoia.

Very few can think about their properties unemotionally and make clear, logical decisions and actually do the work to optimize their real estate.

The stories owners tell themselves can be compelling:

The downside can be scary. The upside could seem like it isn't worth the hassle. Turning over tenants is uncomfortable.

And that is why owners tell themselves stories that justify leaving tens of thousand per month or millions of dollars on the table when they go to sell their property.

But those stories are all lies.

The fact:

A lot of really dumb people have gotten rich in real estate.

That is why there is opportunity for us. We do the work to optimize our properties. We do the work to study the game and make decisions that will make our businesses more valuable.

So we're in a world where hundreds of properties in every small town have a lot of meat left on the bone. Under-optimized performance. Profit that should be there but isn't.

All we have to do is find one or two of them to change our lives.

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Real estate isn't the best way to get rich. Read that sentence again, but slower. Real estate isn't the best way to get rich.

If you have nothing and you're trying to make something, there are 100 better ways of making money than real estate. Wholesaling, brokering, syndicating are all acceptable ways to make money. But they aren't the best ways.

You make money in real estate by putting your capital (cash) to work in real estate. That is how you generate real money over the long run. Have no cash? My advice is to do something else to make some cash and forget about real estate for now.

Real estate is like rolling a wealth snowball down a hill. If it starts out the size of an acorn, it won't pack on much snow, and it'll take a long time to get things rocking.

But if you start with a big old chunk of change and roll a snowball the size of a car down the hill, that damn thing is going to pick up a lot of snow and be insanely powerful by the time it reaches the bottom.

How much cash is enough?

I talk to a lot of folks in paid consulting sessions in a variety of different financial situations. Many folks with small businesses or good W2 jobs earning $100k a year try to hire me to show them how to buy a self-storage facility. They have $20k in the bank and want to get started in real estate.

I tell almost all of them to wait. Learn, study, gain knowledge, look at deals, hang out on Loopnet, Crowdstreet, Yieldstreet, sure, but focus your time right now on MAKING MORE MONEY.

Do you have wealthy family members or friends who you could talk into doing a deal with you?

That changes everything, and you may be ready to do a deal.

In my opinion, to break into commercial real estate, you had better have access to $250-$500k. You can do it with less, or you could take a lot of risks, but I don't think it's the best way.

Through this course, my job is to give you the knowledge of how it all works: how to structure deals, a basic understanding of the fundamentals, tax treatment, risk, and leverage. 

If you trace back the lineage of the great real estate families who hold millions or hundreds of millions in property, you'll always find that one person who started it all. 

That person didn't have the capital but created some through entrepreneurship. 

That person didn't have the knowledge but took a chance, made the best decisions they could given the information they had, made a lot of mistakes, but found a way to build wealth through real estate. 

That person took what they learned and slowly but surely multiplied it over the years. Rolling the family wealth snowball down the hill.