Brilliance of Building Wealth, Reclaiming Time, and Transforming Life with Bridget Potterton

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing. Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors. Ready to level up?

Let’s do it. Welcome back to the REI Agent. It’s Mattias here.

We have an interesting guest, Bridget, today. Bridget is a top producing agent out of the San Diego market. And it’s funny talking to somebody there that our worlds are very different.

Our real estate sales worlds, our investing worlds are very different. And she mentioned a couple of times that it’s just hard to invest in something. And really, honestly, it doesn’t make sense unless you’re just really playing the long-term game of the appreciation, which I think is an advantage.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about how you really need to find out what your advantage is. And I think that can be true in so many different aspects of life. And to get stuck in the problems and the why it doesn’t work is just there’s no point in it.

And it really will not get you anywhere. So, if you’re just focused on why you can’t have what you want because of the area you live in or the climate or whatever, you’re going to be stuck forever not getting anything because you always think there’s something holding you back from getting that thing. And so, in this circumstance, she is in a high-appreciation area.

And so, what usually that means is that you will not get cash flow. You’ll be negative cash flow, especially with these interest rates. So, if you buy a house to rent, you’re going to be paying additional above the rent to own that property.

And that seems like a bad deal. And in some ways it is. Traditionally, that would be not one that I would recommend doing.

But if you are living there and you really want to invest in your area because it’s comfortable, you understand it, and you can take advantages of being owner-occupant, it is not necessarily always a horrible thing. And she gets into her story as to how she got her rental portfolio, which number of doors-wise isn’t huge, but value-wise is very huge because she’s held on to everything so far that she bought to live in, kept it as a rental, it is now cash flowing, and it has tripled in value. And those values would have been a lot bigger than they would have been in a lot of other markets to begin with.

So, there’s definitely advantages to wherever you’re at. Now, if you’re in the middle of the country, typically that’s how it works, you might be in a better cash flowing area. And that’s definitely an advantage as well.

And no matter where you’re at, you can always invest in different areas. You don’t have to focus on where you’re at. But I do think that the advantage of getting started with low and no money down, a lot of that comes with being an owner-occupant, because you can get that FHA loan, you can get that 3% down conventional loan, you can get that USDA loan, or you can move in with little money down and do a house hack where you’re letting people come live in that house with you, whether that’s a separate unit, because you can buy up to a fourplex with a FHA loan or USDA loan, or if that’s just renting out rooms. And you can find a way to make it all work.

And if you’re in a cash flow heavy zone, you’re not going to have very much appreciation, but you might be able to start building up a base of cash flow. So, you are looking to, let’s say you need to have, you want to get $10,000 a month in passive income to really feel like you can get somewhere and you can start investing in other areas, you can do so. You can build that up a lot easier than somebody in San Diego could.

I mean, it would be very hard to do that in San Diego. It would take years and years. But then you can then figure out, okay, let’s look at my portfolio and I see that I have a bunch of properties that are getting me good cash flow income, which is great.

I can offset my mortgage, I can offset my other living expenses with this cash flow, but they’re not going up in value very much. And the real wealth gain is going to be if they go up in value. Well, you can then decide, well, I’m going to buy somewhere else.

I’m going to buy a different market. Usually that’s more on the coasts. The coasts are going to be a little bit more appreciation heavy.

And so, you can think, well, I’m going to do that. I’m going to go to a city that I like a lot and I’m going to figure out what the strategy is to get into a property there. And you can do a short-term rental in a high appreciation area.

You could do a midterm rental. Those are really interesting now. And we had somebody here recently that was talking about how you really, if you can find a consistent stream of people coming into your midterm rental, like at least month to month, that could be traveling nurses.

If you go directly to the source and ask them to provide you, you’ll provide the housing. If they provide you the flow of people, you can start figuring out how to make these things work. And you can start getting into markets that are going to get you better appreciation.

And so, you can almost look at it like a pyramid. What are you doing? You’re going to getting more complicated, more complex, more bigger purchases as you go, as you move up until you’re ultimately maybe just investing in syndications, deals that you start coming across of that are better and less hassle for you than managing 30 rental units in a cash flow heavy area.

So, just some food for thought that I would say, look at what you’re comfortable with, look at where you’re at, and figure out the advantages of it. And figure out if there’s a way for you to get into doing this from where you’re at. And don’t look at necessarily it being a bad thing that you’re in an area that appreciates really well.

It could be a really good thing, even if it’s just your primary residency. You could invest into another market, find a good team in Ohio somewhere, and start investing in single family units, duplexes, that kind of stuff for a lot less money down than you would need elsewhere, even if you’re not being a primary occupant. And start building up that cash flow that maybe would allow you to qualify for a mortgage in that San Diego market that could be hard for otherwise.

So, no matter where you’re at, there’s a way. Don’t give up. Don’t say that it’s just not going to work for me because I’m here.

Think about how you can make it work for you and how you can take advantage of where you’re at, what advantages there are. And if you really need to start somewhere else, like I just described, then do it. There’s a way.

There are people that are doing this all the time. So, don’t be discouraged. And without further ado, let’s get into Bridget.

Bridget Potterton is coming out of San Diego, like I mentioned. She is a top agent and has formed some teams, has a brokerage at one point, but ultimately decided that she is more into the solo thing with an admin support. So, she has figured out how, even though she doesn’t have a team, how to free up some of her time to have her weekends off because she also values spending time with her family.

Without further ado, though, let’s talk to Bridget Potterton. Welcome back to the REI Agent. I am here with Bridget Potterton.

I said that right, right? I just second-guessed myself there for a moment. Thank you so much for being on here, Bridget.

You are actually from San Diego, but you are on the East Coast right now in New York City. So, thanks for joining us over here.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us.

[Mattias]
Yeah, you’re here for something fun. You’re going to see a special showing of Wicked, right?

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yeah. So, last week, funny story, it was a busy week in real estate last week. Normally, this is kind of my slower time, but I was busy and I was like, oh, I’m going to go see Wicked, and I couldn’t get anybody to go with me in the off hours where I wasn’t opening escrow or doing inspections.

So, I was talking with a friend of mine here in New York who is a realtor and an actress, and she is part of the Screen Actors Guild, and they get to do these private screenings of movies where sometimes the actors will come in. And so, the actress, Cynthia, who plays Elphaba, who is the green, you know, the witch in it, she’s actually going to be there tonight. So, it’s going to be a really intimate screening.

And so, I thought, there you go. Here I was complaining nobody would go with me, so I booked a trip two days ago to fly out to New York, and I get to see one of the actresses and learn some of the ins and outs of the making of the movie. So, I’m very, very excited to be able to have this opportunity and take a couple days away from my San Diego business to be able to have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

[Mattias]
Man, that is awesome. I know so many people are probably low-key or high-key, I don’t know how the kids say it these days, jealous of what you are doing right now. That’s amazing.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Thank you.

[Mattias]
And one of the things that you like to talk about is kind of how to free up your time, right? And so, this is a great opportunity or a great example of how you were able to kind of do what you want with your time and choose to go take off for a couple days to go do something that is really like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yes, exactly. And that is a topic that I’m pretty passionate about because I never thought it was possible. I’ve been doing real estate for 21 years.

And I’m a, we’ll call it a recovering workaholic. I still have work to do. But I got in this business when I was 23 years old.

I was single, no husband, no kids. I was a hustler. I mean, I was never good at cold calling.

I was never excited about door knocking. And I had no database. I was a broke 23-year-old just out of college.

Everybody I knew was just as broke as I was. And so, how do you build a database, right? How do you build a business?

And it was a struggle. I mean, it really took me way longer than I ever thought to actually build a solid business. And then, you know, I got married 10 years ago and we had our daughter.

She’ll be six next week. And my husband was a workaholic too, so it was kind of a non-issue until we had our daughter. And then, you know, first year, I definitely took some time off and my business did drop that year.

However, when she had just turned three, I’m getting right into the personal stories here. I hope that’s okay. This is the premise of why I started teaching my class, Leveraging Your Way to Free Weekends, even as a solo agent.

Because I’m a solo agent. I have an admin, but nobody on my team right now is licensed. So, it really is just me.

I am the rainmaker. So, how do you shut off? How do you power down?

And one night, this was actually almost three years ago. It was December. My daughter had just turned three.

We’d put her to bed. My husband and I were talking over a glass of wine Friday night. And he says, okay, well, what are your plans tomorrow?

And I said, oh, I think I’m going to do an open house in the afternoon and maybe some showings in the morning, right? Typical realtor response. And my workaholic husband said, I hate that you work so much on weekends.

And my husband’s about the nicest, most patient guy. And I’ve never heard him say anything like that. And it just crushed me.

It crushed me because I felt like I was failing my family. And I never really believed that it was possible to not work weekends and still be a good agent. And so, that week, I mean, I just, I literally, I talk a lot, as you probably can tell by now.

But I just kind of sat there shocked. Just like, oh my gosh, I am screwing up my marriage. I’m screwing up being a mom.

And I just sat there and then I finally said, okay, you know what, I’m going to figure this out. Give me like a month or two. I’m going to figure this out.

And that week, I met with my coach. And I was like, I got to figure this out. I got I need to figure out how to free up my weekend.

I don’t have agents on my team. So how do I do that? And I can’t believe that that was almost three years ago.

And so that was kind of how I came up with my class about leverage because I didn’t believe I could do it. And then I realized, okay, if I can figure it out, maybe it won’t take other agents 17, 18 years to figure it out like I did.

[Mattias]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we talk about this all the time in the podcast, but you just really need to be intentional with your time and intentional with what you want out of your life or else life just happens to you.

And that’s a prime example. I’m curious if you ever did consider bringing on a buyer’s agent or something like that to help with that weekend time. Is that one of the paths you considered?

[Bridgett Potterton]
Great question. So in 2007, I started my own brokerage and I had several agents. One thing that I realized was looking back, it’s always obvious when you look back, right?

Looking back, I was doing more production than all of my agents combined. And I was doing a lot of babysitting. And I moved to Keller Williams about 15 years ago.

They’re very big on building teams, and there’s a lot of education on it. So I tried it again, probably maybe eight or nine years ago, and went through and recruited some good people. But ultimately, they weren’t a right fit for me.

And so when I was going through this process of trying to quit working on the weekends, I thought about maybe giving it a third shot. And I thought, okay, for the meantime, what I want to do is I’m going to build relationships with agents in my office who are good agents. I mean, in San Diego, we have 20,000 realtors.

Our average agent in San Diego does about one and a half transactions a year. So people think, oh, San Diego, I want to sell there, right? The average price is a million.

But you’re doing one and a half deals a year on average. So that means that there’s a lot of good agents out there that aren’t that busy. And so for me, my brokerage is a bit bigger.

We’re about over 200 agents. And so I partnered with a couple of people. I decided not to have a team.

From that perspective, I’ve got an admin team. But I would partner with good agents in my office that I knew could be a good extension of me. And what I also did as sort of a bonus, because there’s a lot of different ways you can partner with agents, you can pay them a commission, you could pay them an hourly, you could pay them a, you know, per door, I mean, you have to decide how you want to do that.

But ultimately, there has to be perks to I’m a fairly heavy listing agent, I would say this year, about 70% of my business’s listings. And so those agents who are taking care of my clients so that I can get, you know, my sanity back on the weekday on the weekends, they get first dibs at my open houses, they get to be the first ones to do to do the open houses on the weekend as a thank you for, for taking good care of my buyers when they’re out showing.

[Mattias]
Okay, that makes sense. I you know, that’s how I that’s how I got started was I was I was helping another agent that, you know, at an hourly rate, just just showing houses for them whenever they couldn’t, and helping them however I could. And they were very generous and provided me other referrals, things like that as well.

And that’s certainly that that agent has definitely decided not to pursue a team route ever. And I think the main reason is that they don’t want to be managing the team. And that’s a whole different element of work.

So if you’re trying to free up your time, you might find yourself having more work by forming a team. And so that’s interesting that you decided to go that way.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Well, that’s true. And, you know, a lot of self discovery has happened in in my 21 years and in a lot just even in the last 12 months or 24 months, what I haven’t realized is I’m actually a really good leader, but I’m not a great manager. And those two, I always sort of thought were integrated, and they’re really not.

And so so that’s been a big learning curve for me is it’s not necessarily that I hired bad people. I think probably, you know, when there’s blame to be placed is probably more like, you know, looking in the mirror for a lot of times, because when you when you’re an agent or a broker, and you’re running 120 miles an hour, it’s really hard to to take a break and slow down to actually teach somebody. And that’s not, I think I enjoy teaching classes more than I enjoy specifically mentoring at a high level one or two individuals.

So I think you have to know what your strong suits are. And, and focus on those. So I would say never say never, I could build a team, I could have agents at some point.

I think it just right now what I realized is I can make a lot more money and have less headaches doing it the way that I’m doing it now. But I but I would never say never. It’s certainly possible in the future.

[Mattias]
Yeah, and that’s the beauty of of this business is you kind of can make it your own and make it fit your needs and what you want out of your life. So it’s a definitely I think that there, I think I don’t think the team thing is quite as hot as it was. But it’s definitely something that I think almost everybody considers what either to join one or to start one of their own.

And so I think that’s really a good thing to think about is that really what you want to take on is hiring people as is essentially hiring people, right? I mean, is that really something that you want to take on in your daily life? But anyway, so tell us more about this process of freeing up your weekends.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Sure. So it’s nothing mind blowing, nothing you probably have have haven’t heard about. But you know, it really made me think about where my time is spent.

You know, if you’re a realtor, have you actually looked at your calendar and and spent time thinking about what you’re what you’re doing? This actually brings me to one of the questions you asked me about a book, and I’m a reader, I don’t typically I read all sorts of books, but I read a book that’s that’s not quite the trendy one that everybody’s talking about the four hour work week or the MRA or anything like that. There’s a lot of great books out there.

This one I hadn’t heard of. And I am very fortunate to be in a top level mastermind group called Gary Keller’s top 100 agents for solo agents in Kelly Williams. And I was having breakfast with some of those agents before our mastermind with Gary Keller.

And I was telling them, you know, I feel like I’m just wasting time, you know, meeting after meeting. And, you know, I just, I don’t know if that’s a good use of my time. So one of them actually recommended a book called come up for air by Nick Sonnenberg.

And I’d never heard of it before. But one of the things I did from that book was I took my previous four weeks, and I went through my calendar, and I counted how many hours a week do I spend in meetings. Now, some meetings could be client zoom.

So right there, it could be lead generation, or some of it could be networking, it’s not all wasted. But depending on the week, I was spending between 16 and 22 hours a week in meetings. And to me, that felt horrible.

You know, because while meetings are necessary for industry, right, you can’t get listings without a listing appointment, you can’t get a buyer contract sign without a buyer consult, or a buyer strategy session. But that still seemed like a lot to me. So I started looking at how, how can I get out of meetings?

Okay, like meetings that are actually not doing anything for me other than check ins with my with my admin team, we were meeting every Tuesday. Sure, it was 30 to 45 minutes. But what I realized was the whole meeting was, hey, Victor, how’s it going with XYZ?

Hey, Marlene? How’s it going with where are we at with XYZ? That’s not really a good use or the reason you should have a meeting.

And so we started using a couple different systems. Slack, we started using probably about a year and a half, two years ago. If you’re not familiar with Slack, it’s basically like a very organized messaging system for you and your team internally.

This is not for your clients. This is not for your vendors, just for your team. Even if you’re just as even if you’re a solo agent with just one part time admin, it’s such a great organizational piece.

And the biggest thing for me is it cut me out of my email, I still get emails, but I have a lot less to look at. And it’s just easy. So in Slack, you can put different tags and channels.

So we have a channel for every single one of our listings, every single one of our escrows. I’ve got channels for specific to my as I mentioned to you, I’m a certified divorce real estate expert. So a fair amount of my business comes from the family law community.

So when there’s particular things having to do with divorce or events I’m doing with attorneys, I have some channels for that. It helps organize, it cuts out my mess. And then my other secret weapon that we started implementing more recently is monday.com.

There’s a lot of different systems out there you can use. But what we did was we tried monday.com with organizational for listings and that works well too. But with this, I would say probably about 60 days ago, we implemented task boards for each individual member.

So I have myself, I have a full time director of operations, and then I have a full time virtual assistant. So we each have our task boards of things to do. And I can add a task on Victor’s, he can add a task on mine.

But every week we have weekly tasks. So and it tells you exactly, you know, whether you’re are you stuck? Are you working on it?

Is it complete? So it takes the entire reason for having a, hey, how’s that going? There’s no that in meetings, all I need to do is jump on my Monday and see, oh, yeah, Marlene completed that.

That that marketing piece I asked her to do or, oh, it looks like that’s not even on her list. I better add that to make sure she knows to do it. So it’s not it’s not a cheap program.

But for me, the older I get, the more important I realize time is money. And you know, when I was a young realtor starting out, I was poor. The only thing I had was time.

And so those kinds of things, you know, probably didn’t make sense. But if you’re at a point in your life where you value your time, some look into something like that, that can help systematize your business. And then I would say the third thing I did, because I’m listing heavy, leverage is a little bit easier.

But one of the challenges we were still having was if you have a listing, you’re going to get calls on it. Right. So my admin covers the phones nine to five Monday through Friday.

But what about on the weekends? Right. And I don’t really want to answer the phones on the weekend.

So I had to figure out a way to solidify it. I wasn’t quite ready to kind of do something like Ruby dot com where you can have them answer your phones. That’s a cool system, by the way.

If you don’t want to answer phones at all, that’s an option.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Okay.

[Bridgett Potterton]
So what I did was we created a success sheet for all of our listings. So in your multiple listing service, if you have like a document section, we put in a success sheet that we put on all of our listings that tells you, okay, if you’re going to write an offer on our listing, here’s what’s important to the seller. Here’s our title.

Here’s our, you know, we’re a title state, an escrow state. So here’s our title information. Here’s our escrow information.

Think about the things that if you’re a listing agent or even if you just have listings once in a while, what are the things that that agents screw up the most on your offers for us in California, we have to put, you know, Bridget Potterton, Keller Williams, San Diego Metro, and then the license number. We have to put my license number and our brokerage license in most states do. People are always so lazy about looking that up.

And so we put that on our success list. So not only does it save me calls, but it also saves things I have to counter in my listings. And if they don’t do it properly, I know they’re probably not paying attention and probably not detail-oriented, which, you know, if we have 10 offers on a place, which doesn’t happen as often as we used to, but those are things that, you know, we can tell our seller, hey, this listing agent, this buyer’s agent followed the directions.

They did X, Y, and Z. They included the proof of funds. They included all these things to ensure that their offer was complete.

And so I think it does help weed out, you know, the good agents. I guess you could say the good agents from the great agents.

[Mattias]
Right. Now that makes a lot of sense. Are you all pretty much only showing services as far as scheduling showings go?

Is that pretty much a standard across the board?

[Bridgett Potterton]
We do. That helps a lot as well as far as the showings. So when we do get a call from an agent to show a property, we know they’re not reading those instructions either.

Showing time is particularly valuable for my type of business. As I touched on before, I kind of specialize in complex transactions. I work a lot with attorneys, and attorneys like data.

While we won’t talk too much about my space in that, one of the things that an app like showing time or something along those lines can help is it provides a lot of data and a lot of reports if you ever go and look at them. And in my case where I deal with a lot of high conflict, the attorneys like to bring me on the tough ones to see how I handle them. And, you know, if your party’s going through a divorce, there could be one person who doesn’t want to sell.

And so maybe they delay putting the home on the market, or they delay the showings, or they say no to all the showings. Sometimes I have to write reports that go to court, or sometimes testify in court. I need to be able to have valuable data to provide that is not emotional.

You know, your client is not doing XYZ and I expect them to do better. No, it’s just, you know, Mr. XYZ had 10 showing requests and he rejected 9 of them. That’s not appropriate.

And I think data in general is good for all types of clients, not just the complex ones where I might have to go to court over, but even just to say, look, when you’re on the market, you’re on the market. I’m not saying you have to be available 24 hours a day, but we don’t want to work. This tool is fabulous to block out those times.

If you know your kickbacks between 1 and 3, I can block out those times. But that means, you know, in the morning and in the afternoon, after 3, we need to have the house available. And so it sets the expectations for all sellers to say, okay, yeah, I get that time where I’m not going to have anybody traipsing through my house, but after that and before that, I need to have the house show ready.

[Mattias]
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Do you remember when that took over?

And was that resisted in your area for a while? Did agents have a hesitation to use it and a fear of being taken out of the transaction?

[Bridgett Potterton]
Of like using an app?

[Mattias]
Yeah. Instead of calling your clients directly.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I’ve probably only heard one agent who complained to me specifically about it. Maybe some of them do. But I think, you know, like with all new things, they can be a little bit scary.

Most of us are bad with change. I’m not great with change either. When I first started using Slack, I couldn’t stand it.

I was like, oh, I should just go back to email, right? I think that’s reality. But once you understand it, it actually is so much easier because, for example, let’s say I want to show one of your listings and it’s 8 o’clock at night.

I don’t really want to call you at 8 o’clock at night. And I’m sure you don’t want me to call you either at 8 o’clock. So I can just go into showing time and either you or your client can approve it without us having to have that conversation.

And I understand a lot of agents want to call to build some rapport. But you can still do that after the showing if you need to.

[Mattias]
And or not have the notification go to the client. You could get the showing time request and then you could ask the client if it works for them. And that does still save you steps.

I mean, that is still easier than having to go back and forth like for three different times of, yeah, this time doesn’t work, this time doesn’t work, this time doesn’t work. So yeah, like I told you, off air, I’m in a tertiary market and it is all around us. And there are people like myself that use it all the time.

But it has had a lot of resistance. And I think there’s some, like you said, fear there. And I think people don’t want to be taken out of the transaction.

And it reminds me a little bit of the stories I’ve heard. I wasn’t around for this, but people, when lockboxes came in, how before lockboxes, people had to drive to the broker office to pick up a key, go show the house and bring it back. That sounds horrible.

That sounds terrible. And I’m sure there was a lot of resistance to lockboxes and how they were going to be not be safe and all that stuff. But oh, man, I could not go back to that.

And I’m sure that’s how these shows will be.

[Bridgett Potterton]
And the MLS too, right? Before the MLS, I think would get one book a week, the whole brokerage. And so you’d go to your office and look through the book.

Yeah, it is. And I think there’s always change. That’s the only thing you can guarantee in real estate is there’s going to be change, whether it’s documents, whether it’s from a litigation, whether it’s from just changes in the industry.

I think that’s the one thing we all need to be prepared for is change is inevitable and you may not like it. Sure, it’s kind of annoying sometimes to have to learn something new. But the reality is there’s good and bad with the change.

Like with showing time, I think when you get a call still from, hey, can I show your listing tomorrow? It’s just a matter of training. I’m not sure.

Can you go ahead and link into the showing time? I put it right there in the MLS for you. And you almost have to train them a little bit that that’s what you do.

And I think it’s almost a little bit of that tough love too because it’s good for them too. It’s good for the agents in general. I understand there’s some hesitation.

But even clients, let’s say you have a client that doesn’t want to download the app. That’s okay. They don’t have to.

They can still get the text messages and confirm yes or no that way. So even if you have, and I do work sometimes with mature adults and they’re hesitant to do the technology, which I get. Maybe they don’t want to do DocuSign or electronic signatures.

So we go over and fill out the paperwork. But if they have a cell phone, they can do text. Every once in a while, I do come in with a client that does not have a cell phone.

And you can do it that way or you can have showing time, contact them directly. Most of the time, my team or I will call them. But that’s so rare.

Even mature adults, I think some of them appreciate the ease of it once they understand it. And when they have hesitation at the beginning, you just tell them, how about we try it for two or three days? And if you don’t like it, I’ll just call you for every showing.

And most of the time, they get used to it and they’re like, oh, okay, I can do this. Yeah.

[Mattias]
Yeah. Yeah. It is a changing field and I think that we do have to adapt for sure.

And yeah. Almost every time, I use it for every listing and I think I will get almost as many calls about setting up a showing as I do people just going directly to showing time still. So we’re getting there.

But I’m a member of our board and we’ll have it rolling out to the whole public here soon. So hopefully, it will change a little bit. Good.

But yeah. So I know that another thing that we talked about too off air a little bit is that another way to free up time or to kind of get yourself in a position where you can have some more liberties with your time is to also invest in real estate. And it’s something that I’m a big believer in.

And I know that you were talking about how it’s got to be really difficult or it is really difficult in San Diego to make the numbers work. I mean, the prices are high, the interest rates are high. If you’re buying a $1 million property, what would the rent be?

I mean, I know it’s not going to be perfect exact, but like roughly ratio. Because we talk about the 1% rule a lot, right? So if you buy a $100,000 property, it would rent for $1,000 a month.

And that would be a pretty, it would be like a baseline, okay, that might work. But it still may not. But that’s not going to happen in San Diego.

It doesn’t happen in my market.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yeah. I mean, depending on what it is, I’ll give you a range. You’d probably be looking at, for a million dollar property, maybe $3,000 to $4,000 a month.

[Mattias]
Yeah. So that’s a lot under.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yeah. It doesn’t, I mean, if you’re paying cash for a property, maybe you’re less concerned, but you still should be running the numbers. And the numbers don’t pencil out, especially with rates where they are.

As I was telling you before we started, Aaron, I’m actually the last investor buyer I’ve worked with. And that was close to three years ago. I don’t work a lot with short term investors or flippers.

That’s not really my niche. Mine is more my pest clients, my sphere, my database and attorneys. And so that’s not really my focus.

But I think that it’s been hard for them for the couple of years. So if the flip investors, if they’re able to find something a little bit off market, but I still don’t think their margins are where they were. And so I think as an investor here, I’ve had to start looking, okay, well, I’m probably done investing in San Diego, most likely.

I don’t see the numbers penciling out anymore. I’m fortunate. I bought my first property 14 years ago in San Diego.

And that became my first investment. I moved into it, fixed it up. It was ugly as sin, but it was a four bedroom condo.

And I put every dime I had into that down payment and I was broke. I couldn’t even afford to get the carpets clean and they were horrific. I would walk around the house in my shoes because they were gross.

[Mattias]
That’s how our house was when we bought this one.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I painted the place myself, so it’s not a professional paint job. And then I got three roommates. I got three roommates.

With having three roommates, my mortgage that I had to pay was less than what my rent was before. So even though I spent every last dime on my down payment, which back then I paid $320,000 for this four bedroom condo, now it’s probably worth close to $900, but that was every last dime I had. I’d been in real estate for seven years trying to save up for that place.

And what I would do is, okay, I figured out, okay, I’m going to figure out a way where I can make enough money to cover the mortgage. And then I saved up all the money from my roommates. And after about a year and a half, two years, then I was able to start remodeling it.

So I did the floors so I could actually go barefoot and not feel did a basic remodel of the kitchen and one of the bathrooms and things like that. And I remember people looking at me like, you are nuts to pay $320,000 for a condo. But it was in central San Diego and it was a four bedroom.

So I think sometimes we have to be careful of the naysayers. You just have to be careful who you take. You can take advice with a grain of salt, but even people in our industry sometimes don’t know.

And so for me, I wasn’t concerned because I thought I would be a long-term investor, which I have been. I’ve never sold anything before. I just keep them.

[Mattias]
That’s textbook what I preach about getting into rentals. So you did the house hacking method and you did value add to it. I mean, that’s exactly how it can work anywhere.

You might get more rent. You might get more cash flow in certain markets. But in this San Diego market, we’re going to be a little bit more appreciation heavy.

And it sounds like that’s played well for you. I mean, that’s done quite well. You’re going to have to maybe, like you said, just pay less that you’re paying in rent.

You’re paying less for your mortgage and you’re having to live with other people. But eventually those numbers will work out. I’m imagining the cash flows now.

[Bridgett Potterton]
They all cash flow really well. Well, I shouldn’t say really well. Probably not compared to other states.

Our appreciation has been astronomical. But they do cash flow decent. It’s a nice chunk of money we get in every month.

I had a goal when I was in my mid-20s. I was just building my real estate career. I was broke.

I was living off of fast food and even had some tough months where I couldn’t pay my bills. And I remember thinking, setting this goal for myself that I can afford to stay in San Diego. If I can just get four properties in San Diego and I can pay them off by the time I retire, I’ll be good.

I’ll be good if I can just own four properties outright in San Diego. That was my goal from my early 20s because it seemed so unattainable at the time. I was just dreaming at that point.

How am I ever going to be able to find my first place? I think that a lot of people think that real estate investing is sexy. It’s all going to be, let me just throw $100,000 here and there.

It’s like, nope. I’ve never bought a pretty property. That was never the plan.

We bought a second property. Well, I actually married into that one. I moved in with my husband when we got married.

Then my place became our first investment. Then we bought a house together. Then the second place became investment number two.

That third one nearly killed us because we ended up spending more on remodeling. We gutted it, took it down to the studs so we could move into it. That one, just the remodeling of the entire thing cost more than my first condo did.

We literally moved every structural wall and even where the front door was located, we moved. It was a big undertaking. Fortunately, that has paid off in dividends too because it’s worth way more than twice what we paid for it.

Although we still live in it now. Then we bought our fourth property three years ago. Now we got to figure out either whether we’re going to keep those or maybe what you and I were touching on earlier was deciding should we stay in California for the appreciation of it or should I 1031 exchange out to something else and have significant cash flow.

I think that’s the common question that investors – as a Californian, I never focused on cash flow. It was always appreciation, appreciation. It’s done very, very well.

I also know that if I took my condo and say we sold it for $900,000, imagine the cash flow I could get if I bought in another state. The other thing too, and we don’t need to get too much into this much in the weeds, but California is not a very investor-friendly state from a landlord perspective. I would argue we’re probably the least landlord-friendly that I’ve heard about.

There’s that aspect too. Are we better off going somewhere else? I think that’s something that if you own an investment property, you need to think about.

[Mattias]
Another key thing that I was thinking about as you were talking about your goal is the return on equity side of things. I think that often if you’re paying off a place, there is security in there. Depending on your goals, depending on your life phase, all that, it can definitely be good to own something outright.

But if you look at your return on equity, so if you have a million-dollar property and you’re getting $4,000 a month in rent, that’s going to be X whatever percent of – I can’t do the math in my head that fast. Your return on equity is probably going to be a lot larger if you were to take all that million dollars and invest it in something else because you would be getting a seven, eight-plus percent return on your money where you might be only getting a four percent return if you’re getting $4,000 a month. I think that’s another huge thing to consider for people.

But the beauty of what you did and what – I think there’s advantages in every market. Some places are going to have these great cashflow properties. I am in a mastermind where I have a lot of friends that are investing in areas that are more cashflow-heavy, and they all have 30, 40 doors.

I’m like, I’ve got like 10. But my 10 have gone up and value a lot more than theirs. I’ve been able to then tap into that equity through equity lines of credit to do things like flips or the BRRRR method where you are basically flipping a house and then refinancing that money out, getting it all back, and then keeping it for rental.

There’s advantages to whatever market you’re in. I think one of the key things, especially like what you just talked about, your story, is that you’re able to get into a property, maybe for less money down, or you’re going to get at least a better interest rate if you’re going to be an owner-occupant. That is an advantage that you can take on, especially if you’re young and willing to hustle and willing to delay gratification.

I think that was the other thing I was thinking about as you were talking. It’s not so sexy to be an investor because often you’re just delaying gratification. You may have millions of dollars in your net worth, but all of a sudden you’re like cash poor.

You’ve got three projects going on that you are just hemorrhaging money and then an HVAC goes out. You’re like, what am I doing? I don’t have money for cereal this week.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I mean, you joke, but it’s so true. We kind of joke that in Southern California, if you’re a homeowner, you’re a millionaire, but you don’t have any cash, right? Because your mortgage is eating you alive.

That’s so, so true. I think you have to decide what’s more important to you with the investment. I love what you mentioned about delayed gratification, and that’s so true.

I think that even if you’re just looking to buy your first home, there’s a lot of realtors I know in San Diego that aren’t homeowners. That breaks my heart because they’re not making enough money to qualify. I think that you have to be willing to be humble with that first purchase.

It’s probably not going to be your dream home. Your second and third home might not be your dream home either. Figuring out what that looks like.

[Mattias]
You don’t need to drive your Porsche to showings. Don’t start with a Porsche lease. Build up the bottom of the iceberg before you’re driving around a Porsche.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I love that you brought that up. Can we all just be honest for a minute and talk about that? I think that social media has ruined a lot of us.

We have to pretend we drive a Maserati. Your co-workers, they know how much you sell a year. That’s a terrible way to spend your money.

For me, my ultimate success, I don’t care what kind of car you drive. I’m very involved in non-profits. My hotel just shut off on me.

They’ll have to excuse. It thinks I’m not here. I’m in the dark now.

For me, I think the ultimate success is what have you done for your community? That can be financial. That can be with your time.

For the last couple of years, my goal was to donate $10,000 a year to charity. This year, I’m on track to probably hit at least $15,000. I go on mission trips.

I’m involved. I sit on a couple of advisory boards. To me, that’s something I didn’t even dream about probably even five or six years ago.

I thought you had to be all gray hair and retire to be able to make an impact at a high level in your community. COVID, I think, really changed my thinking on that of why wait to make a difference. I may not be 65 with all those years under my belt, but I have enough business experience to be able to add value to non-profits and help them run better, help them fundraise.

I go to Mexico a couple of times a year on mission trips and help build entrepreneurs in Mexico so that they can end that vicious cycle of feeling like they have to come to America and not have a great quality of life here either oftentimes. To be able to stay in their own towns where they grew up and build a business, whether it’s the first one we built was a mechanic shop. There’s just so many opportunities.

Here in New York, about an hour before this, I read a fabulous book called Welcome Homeless, which was based out of a non-profit in Austin. These kinds of things can bring so much value to your business, guys. I just sat and talked to a homeless man here in New York in front of the New York City Library for 20 minutes and bought him lunch.

Everybody has a story. You just never know where opportunities were going to be. Now, is he going to probably send me a referral in San Diego?

Probably not, and that’s okay. How great was that, that I got to have lunch with a homeless man in front of New York City’s library and learn a little bit about their story? Because I feel like there is so much to learn from just taking a breath and learning, whether it’s from a mentor in real estate or a homeless person on the side of the road.

I think real estate gives you these incredible opportunities, whether you want to be an investor or a humanitarian. You have that flexibility and you have that at the tip of your fingers. You just have to be willing to take a breath and look around.

[Mattias]
Yeah, absolutely. I love it. It’s really choosing how you want to live your life.

Like we say, a holistic approach to life through real estate. You can choose how you want this delayed gratification, this thing you’re building, the sales, the investing, whatever, to be your ultimate life. We only get one shot at it.

Thinking about where you’re at and what you want to do and what impact you want to make is vital. You got to be intentional about creating that life and taking those daily steps to build it. I love it.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Absolutely.

[Mattias]
Bridget, you mentioned your favorite book, right? Or did you have another one planned?

[Bridgett Potterton]
Oh, gosh. You don’t have to.

[Mattias]
Just repeat it. You said it earlier. I can’t remember what it is now.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I will say, Check Out, Come Up for Air by Nick Sonnenberg. When you’re reading it, it’s not like this overly exciting read, but it’s all about they run a consulting firm that helps businesses strategize and run better. Look at it within your life, your own business.

Take a look at your calendar. I think one of the things is you have to be honest with your calendar. My admin always yells at me because I don’t always put certain things in my calendar, right?

If I’m going to go get my nails done, I don’t put that in my calendar. It looks like I have free time during that time, right? Put everything in your calendar, everything.

You’re going to go walk on the beach for 45 minutes. Put everything in your calendar because you need to have me time. I think that in real estate, we all have to wear or maybe we just all choose to wear a lot of hats and it can be overwhelming.

It’s okay not to be everything to everybody and feel like you have to be on 24-7 because I think that’s where burnout comes from in real estate is feeling like we have to be everything to everybody. Oh, my gosh, my friend didn’t use me to buy a house and so that’s not fair. I should be getting every listing in my neighborhood.

How could they list with somebody else? I’ve been marketing with them for 15 years, right? I think it’s impossible.

You’re not going to get every single one. Real estate is a numbers game and you have to remember that and keep moving forward and just keep improving your business.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I love it. That’s a great resource and really auditing your time I think is something that I don’t think many people do at all. It makes a lot of sense.

When you’re creating your dream life, how do you spend your time? Hopefully, not just TikTok.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yeah, exactly. You’re scrolling through Instagram.

[Mattias]
Yeah, speaking of which, is there a great place for people to reach out to you? Is TikTok or Instagram, where are you at and how could people follow you for more of this wisdom?

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yeah, you can find me. I’m old school. I’m on Facebook.

I’m also on Instagram. You can find me at Broker Bridget. Yeah, I would love to connect and I would love to hear what people are doing in their business to kind of number one, keep themselves sane in this changing markets and changing industry but then also tell me what you’re doing to take care of yourself mentally.

And I’d love to hear what everybody’s doing for investing. I’m always learning about new things. Recently, I’ve been researching like DSTs and there’s just so many things out there.

I would love to hear more about it. I think you have a lot of experience in investing in kind of like you’re not so traditional ways that realtors would think of like buying or selling a house. I would love to hear a little bit more about what you’re doing and what’s working for you and what’s not.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I mean I can talk quickly. We mentioned about the syndication aspect of what I’ve done and I think that’s something that a lot of agents don’t know about. A lot of people don’t know about these.

They are really it’s an achievement that you can unlock once you’ve hit a million dollar net worth outside of your primary residency or if you’re making $200,000 a year as a solo filer or $300,000 as a joint filer, you become an accredited investor and basically that allows you to invest in some things that are maybe a little bit more high risk or a little bit less. So if somebody wants to take on an apartment complex, for example, like if you want to if somebody’s buying a 300 unit apartment complex, they rarely have all the money to invest in it. And normally these deals are kind of like a flip at a large scale.

So they are needing to get run more smoothly. So they could be that it’s under rented. It could be that there’s a high vacancy rates.

They could be spending too much on lawn care. There could be that the units need to be renovated to get more rent in to make those ratios better. But every single line item basically makes the place more profitable, the business.

And in doing so, if you take that with a cap rate calculator, it just basically increases the value a lot, simply like a flip does, right? If you improve a place, it makes it more valuable. And so a syndication would allow somebody to buy one of these places and have people invest in that property, in that deal.

And so it’s directly investing in real estate. And a real estate professional is able to take more off on their taxes with depreciation than a non real estate professional would be. I’m not an accountant, but I just had one on that was talking about this.

You can go back a couple episodes and listen to it. So they have that advantage. And for example, I was able to invest $50,000 into a mobile home park syndication that is returning me over 10% on my money annually.

And I was able to write off $66,000 off my taxes because of that investment. Now, that’s not something you, those kinds of numbers, A, you can’t really buy a house, especially in San Diego for $50,000 down, right? That’s a huge advantage.

Normally the minimum entrance is about 100,000. So don’t, every deal is going to be different. But then also then with $50,000, with $100,000, you’re not going to get 10% return on your money in San Diego.

And if you do, you might get a pretty good depreciation, but you’re going to have a lot more capital invested in it. So for a real estate professional that is in a high, if you’re making good money in San Diego, it could make a lot of sense to buy in into Arkansas, into a mobile home park or into an apartment. And it’s really about finding those operators that understand what they’re doing and are doing it well, have a track record.

And yeah, it can be quite lucrative. And the beauty of it is I have had nothing to do with that mobile home park. I have not received a single call from a tenant.

I did actually drive out. I was in the area. It’s not too far for me.

And I was out there for a meeting and I did drive by the, I think it’s three different mobile home parks that I invested in. And I saw them for the first time after having owned them for half a year, but I wouldn’t have had to. I just collect dividends every quarter and then collect the K-1 at the end of the year that I can send to my accountant and depreciate.

And then the beauty of it too, is that there’s usually a capital event. So you might have some clarifying questions for me here after this, but I’ll just explain this here quick too. So depending on the strategy, this particular one, the people that are running it, they want to keep this mobile home park indefinitely.

They don’t really have a plan on selling it. So they’re improving it, they’re making improvements on it and getting the rents up and all that kind of stuff to which they are planning to refinance. So it’s kind of like that Burr method we talked about before, where they’re just going to refinance all the capital out.

So I’m going to get my $50,000 out of this deal, maybe in like five years, whenever the numbers work for this to happen. And so in the meantime, I’m going to have earned forced depreciation every year. It’s not going to be as much as the first, but then I’m also going to be earning the cashflow every year.

And then when they refinance it, since they’re keeping it, I will still have an ownership in this, even though I have all my capital back. And so that’s just gravy from there and on. And when they ever sell it, if they ever sell it, I’ll have that ownership in it that I’ll get that profit as well as that quarterly dividends from here on out.

So I can then take that $50,000 and redeploy it somewhere else in a similar kind of deal. The other way this can work is if they are planning to sell it, so a lot of times multifamily people will do this, is they will get the power of cap rates really. They will make these properties more profitable and then they will be worth millions of dollars more and they will sell at that stage.

And typically those are structured that you can get more than your initial investment back. So you’ll probably not get quite as much cashflow as you are sitting in the deal. But if they’ve done everything right, you might double your money when they sell it in a few years.

So it’s really interesting. There’s definitely risks. Here recently, there’s a lot of people that were not paying out dividends and they’re actually doing capital calls.

They’re asking for more money because of these interest rates hikes. A lot of people underwrote these deals, which basically means they were doing analysis on this deal and saw that it was going to be profitable. And they had what they thought was very conservative guesses as to what interest rates could possibly go to and they went higher.

And so the deals no longer worked with that type of. So there definitely can be risk. I think right now there’s less risk of that, but there could certainly be other risks.

So I think finding experienced people in the field that aren’t just gurus that have done this and have a track record, have not had any capital calls or maybe no capital calls, that’s when they ask you for more money to keep the deal going. Those are all criteria that is probably a good thing for another episode to get into, but they’re beautiful because you don’t have to do much and they often provide a better return than what you can get even if you do all the work in your traditional investment down the road.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I love that you brought that up. I mean, there’s so many directions we could take this and I know we don’t have a lot of time, but let me ask you this. So for somebody like me, who maybe has done a little bit of investment, but our investment has been primarily in the residential real estate space, for people like me who maybe don’t have that experience, but maybe they have the money to do this kind of investment, what kind of due diligence did you do before you pulled the first trigger, the first time?

That was probably scary, your first investment in the space. What did you do or what did you learn from that?

[Mattias]
Well, to be honest, I went with a friend and it’s going to be rare. This is a business partner, somebody I’ve done flips with, somebody that I’ve done different investments with, I’ve known for many years and I know they are very, very conservative and very careful about these kinds of things and so I had a high level of trust. I also was looking to get more into the space, so I definitely took…

I ran the paperwork by my lawyer, made sure that all that looked good and I took a bit of a gamble, took a bit of a risk. I can’t say that when I signed up for it, I understood everything 100%. I’m not saying this is the right answer here, but there are books and there are plenty of resources out there if you really want to learn more about it.

Again, be careful, there are people that will go out and basically, there’s a fee. A person that gets to put together a deal, let’s say they have this $60 million apartment complex, they may get a couple hundred thousand dollars to put this all together at closing and there are people out there that will try to keep their business rolling by just picking up those kind of checks. Understanding how much they are investing in the deal themselves is another area that I think is important.

If they’re not really putting any of their own money into the deal, that might be a red flag and so it is a bit complicated. It is kind of taking things to a more complex level, but there are a lot of good players out there. There’s a lot of people that have done very well in this space and it’s a really cool way you can diversify without having to understand everything.

If you start knowing what questions to ask, you don’t have to be an expert at mobile home parks. You don’t have to be an expert at, there could be all sorts of different types. It doesn’t have to be just real estate even.

I think there are people that do different types of businesses that you could invest in these kind of things. Once you understand and how to vet those operators and to review the deals, it can be great.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Interesting. Gosh, so many questions are running through my head. So much information in such a short period of time.

I guess my thought is, when you invest in something like that, how do you keep your expectations when it’s not kind of the simplicity of real estate? Because you’re talking about not just mobile home parks. It sounds like you’ve invested in multiple different things.

So how do you set the right expectation when you’re investing of, I’m going to see my money back in 10 years or I’m going to get quarterly dividends? How do you prep yourself for that because it is such a different world?

[Mattias]
One of the reasons that you need to be an accredited investor to go in this route is that the point of that regulation is that they don’t want Joe Schmo to go get all of grandma’s life savings that she’s trying to live off of for the rest of her life and put it into a deal that doesn’t work out. That is definitely something that should be money that you can do without. You shouldn’t be trying to live necessarily on this one investment that you make.

And so it shouldn’t make or break you, in other words.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Gotcha.

[Mattias]
This isn’t YOLOing everything into Bitcoin at an all-time high. But yeah, so I think that the numbers, they project their numbers and they give you a sheet that you can review that will say, this is the plan for how we are going to get the cash flow that we are promising you or that’s what we’re projecting. And this is how we plan on increasing it over the next few years.

These are the capital improvements we’re going to make on the property to help defend or to be able to justify those increased rents or we’re going to build more paths for the mobile homes to go into. There’s all sorts of different strategies as to how they can really increase the value. There’s never going to be, it’s very rare that you’re going to find one that is just like, you know what, we’re going to buy this and just sit on it.

There’s usually a plan to make it better. And so they usually have a lot of supporting data or the good ones will have supporting data as to why these surrounding mobile home parks have this rent and we are at this rent and we think we can get to that rent and this is how we think we can do it. There’s going to be more information, there should be more information when you are looking into these that help support, that help make sense how this is all going to work out.

There’s also like trends, like you know, is it an area that people are moving to or is there a need for this? There’s things like that as well.

[Bridgett Potterton]
So when you invest in these, you had kind of mentioned like with the mobile home park in particular, you didn’t have to do a lot. It was what we’ll call a quiet investment whereas, you know, owning residential property is a very loud investment where you’ve got the toilets, taxes, trash, all the things, right? So with a lot of these, would you consider them pretty quiet investments where you’re not very involved or are some of them you’re more involved than others depending on what it is?

[Mattias]
Yeah, definitely quiet. So there are two sides of these syndication deals. There’s the general partners and those are the people that are running the deal that are operating the whole thing.

And there’s the limited partners and that’s what I’m talking about. I did. As an investor, I’m a limited partner.

And so no, I don’t go to any meetings to help decide what’s going to happen, the direction. I don’t have any kind of involvement with collecting rent, getting calls about, you know, backed up toilets, et cetera. There’s none of that, which is the beauty of it.

And I think that some people have a strategy of, you know, investing in real estate, maybe in an appreciating market like yours and building up this capital to deploy onto something like this eventually when they want to be less involved. And when they’re not in the building phase, they want to just kind of be in the maintenance phase. And then it’s funny for me because that’s kind of where I’m at.

I’m in the building up, you know, my empire kind of phase. Gladiator 2, hashtag. I’m in that phase, but at the same time, I also am like, why?

Like this investment was incredible. If I would have had, you know, a million dollars in this, it would be amazing. I would not have to do anything and I would just get this really great quarterly check that I could live off of.

So it’s really important to know what you’re investing in. So I think it does come with some work, but it does suit itself really well to an investor, like a really busy agent who doesn’t really want to deal with the day-to-day. They might need to know enough information to make a good decision, but they don’t necessarily need to answer the call about, you know, leaking toilets or whatever and deal with it.

And then it’s probably going to be a better return for them. So it’s just a win-win all around.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s incredible that, you know, especially if you are a realtor and your only experience has been in residential, what a breath of fresh air that would be to not have that. And I think that I agree with you or, you know, I still feel like I’m kind of teetering in that. Am I still building my empire or am I just kind of trying to, you know, and I feel like I still am, but I think that something like that is such a huge opportunity for those of us that haven’t had that experience and I look forward to learning more from you about it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It would be great and I can point you to some resources. The book I’m writing is not going to get deep into the syndication world, but I plan on eventually having kind of basically a guide for realtors as to how to vet and get into syndications because I do think that it’s just such a, it’s a beautiful marriage.

You’re a real estate professional. If you’re in an area, if you’re doing really well, you don’t have time to do the sweat equity in property, you know, it’s low work and you’re probably making enough money in the sales that you can do it. So it’s definitely a win-win.

So yeah, thanks for the questions. I don’t get to talk about it very often.

[Bridgett Potterton]
No, I think this is fascinating. You should. You should be talking about this more.

I think a lot of realtors could benefit from that, but maybe they just don’t have a source that I think, like you were saying with your first investor, how it was somebody that you knew and you trusted. I think a lot of times there’s this intimidation factor when people don’t know. And so they would look to somebody like you for guidance, at least on a high level of, you know, from your experience, what can they learn from you?

[Mattias]
Yeah, well, I appreciate that. And we talked a little bit, not to get too deep into this, that we need to have you back on so we can really get into the divorce niche. And you said that it would probably be best if my counselor wife was involved in this conversation too.

[Bridgett Potterton]
I’m sure she would have a lot to add to it. So I look forward to that.

[Mattias]
Yeah, we’ll have to get that rescheduled. So guys, look for that episode to come. Bridget, it’s been so much fun talking to you.

Thanks so much for getting on this call, even though you’re traveling in New York City.

[Bridgett Potterton]
Absolutely. Thanks. It’s been an honor.

And I look forward to talking to you again in the new year.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit REIAgent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.