Hidden Risks of Real Estate Syndication They Won’t Tell You (Real Estate Investing Success Tampa with Kenneth Gee)

Transcript

Antonio (0:00): All right, Kenneth, are you ready to talk some real estate investing with me today?

Kenneth Gee: I am totally ready. Yes, sir.

Antonio: All right. So wait, but before we get started, let’s get a little bit into your personal life.

What do you like to do for just relaxing or fun, things like that?

Kenneth Gee (0:19): Yeah, relaxing. I love to hang out. My kids are older now, so it’s a real treat when I get to see them. They’re all moved out of the house. So I do love when I get to spend time with them.

I love to read. I love to learn. And honestly, just growing my business is just—I mean, it’s kind of merged my personal and professional life, but it really doesn’t feel like work. It’s fun. It’s fun. And then, of course, spending as much time, you know, at the pool with my wife and just, you know, taking a little bit of time to appreciate what you’ve worked hard for.

Antonio (0:52): How many kids do you have?

Kenneth Gee: Well, I have two children and a stepdaughter. So a son is the oldest. I have a daughter and then a stepdaughter.

Antonio: All right.

Kenneth Gee: Daughter and stepdaughter are basically the same age.

Antonio (1:06): I was going to say, are they gravitating around the same business industry that you’re in?

Kenneth Gee (1:14): Yeah, believe it or not, my son—no. So the answer is one, maybe a little bit. So my son’s in I.T. So he’s—he has nothing to do with real estate. My stepdaughter is more in the fashion merchandising e-commerce space. And then my daughter does work for a private equity firm.

So she’s probably the closest to the real estate world, because that’s what we do. We raise money, go buy deals. It’s kind of the private equity model.

Antonio (1:41): That’s good. That’s interesting. It’s always good to have at least one child close to you in the business, man, because, I mean, it’s all about the generational wealth and the generational knowledge. That’s what I’m here for.

Kenneth Gee: Yeah, no, I agree 100 percent.

Antonio (1:54): All right. So your company, KRI Partners, is part of a KRI Group. OK, it’s a real estate syndication. For those who may not know what a syndication is, can you explain what a real estate syndication is and why people should consider investing in a syndication and why they should work with your company?

Kenneth Gee (2:20): Yeah, great, great question. So typically syndicators—so let’s talk about a syndication and a fund. So a syndication is somebody who’s been doing this for a little while. They’ve now kind of figured out the business and they say, OK, I want to grow. Takes a lot of capital to grow in this business.

I want to start raising money from other people and putting that money to work alongside my own to buy property. So that’s what a syndicator does. So they have some experience. Hopefully, they go out, they find the deal, they lock it down. You know, we put it under contract. We then use our own money to do that, by the way.

And then we go out, we raise money to get the deal done. Then, you know, within 45, 60 days, we close the deal. So that’s a syndication. The alternative to that, which we’ve actually migrated to over time because our markets are so competitive that we operate in, there’s so many syndicators already in the market. We migrated to the fund model. So remember, I said, syndicators go find the deal, then raise the money, flip that around in the fund world, basically the private equity world.

We raise the money first, then go find the deal. Makes us massively stronger buyers in a very competitive market. And so we’ve now—and we can still do syndications, but we have tended to do the more, you know, move closer to the fund model just because it makes us so much stronger of a buyer.

So now why should someone invest in syndications and funds like ours? Well, it’s really the money. I mean, it’s the whole real estate money thing. You cut out all those middlemen and middlemen and middlewomen that would, you know, be kind of eroding your returns. So, you know, for example, our fund that we’re raising money for now is a 6% preferred return. So that’s the goal is the cash distributions quarterly, annually is 6%, but we do it quarterly.

And then the goal here is a minimum of 15% annual return on your investment. So it’s hard to get that on a consistent basis in the market. It just is. We tend to beat that. We try to be super conservative. So, you know, it’s usually 20, 30%. There’s no guarantees there, but, you know, if you can find a way to make 20, 30% with a basic asset like apartments, you know, it’s just really is a fantastic way to build massive wealth for yourself.

Antonio (4:48): Now, I have a question that I was going to kind of piggyback onto another one. Now there are investors out there who feel they think they feel more comfortable doing everything themselves and not bringing in someone else to partner or mess around with their money. Or some people will say play with their money, but going through your bio info, you have a few things to consider and to look out for that help people choose the right syndicator or fund to be a part of.

What are those?

Kenneth Gee (5:25): Yeah, so let me just make a quick comment on what you said. A lot of people like to do it themselves and, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you know the business, you understand it, you have the time.

I mean, I encourage people to do it themselves. That’s no big deal. I don’t discourage it. What’s going to happen to you over time is you’re going to be limited by the amount that you can grow because this is such a capital-intensive business. Unless you’re already extremely wealthy, you know, you just need to get some capital from somewhere. Now, if you’re going to go out and do this and invest with other people, I want you to find—I think you’re referring to—I always talk about I have four rules here that I want investors to follow because if you think about it—alright, so let’s say you’ve got a great day job, you’re a family, you don’t want to be the turbine, toilet, you know, tenant kind of guy.

You want to let somebody else do all that for you. So now you go look at a firm like ours and say, maybe I should invest with KRI and let them do everything. But there’s a lot of us out there. So what I want you to do is follow these four rules because if you do, you’re going to reduce significantly the chance that you have an unsuccessful investment with a firm. The first thing I want you to do is make sure they have experience. There’s a lot of people doing this that don’t have experience.

I don’t think that’s right. The reality of it is we don’t know what’s coming around the corner next and these are businesses. They just happen to be apartment complexes. So what you want to do is make sure that the senior management team that you’re investing in has enough experience that they can make good decisions to navigate whatever’s coming around the corner. We didn’t know there was a pandemic coming. We didn’t know there was going to be hyperinflation and we have to figure out how to deal with that.

So you want smart people, experienced people in your senior management team. You want them to have a good track record that kind of goes along with that, but you want them to have a track record, be willing to share that track record. And we’ve even gone so far as to have a third party vet our entire track record called Verivest.

So it’s out there for the whole world to see. You can see what we’ve done on every single deal that we’ve done. I think that level of transparency is really important. Third rule, I want you to make sure that investment firm puts the investor first. Now this one gets a little trickier because there’s all kinds of different terms in these funds and these syndications. There’s just all sorts of terms that you got to be aware of, fees and things like that.

If you just boil it down to one question, is it possible for the real estate investment firm to do well and the investors not do well? If the answer to that is yes, wrong answer. You don’t want that situation. That means they didn’t really put their investors first. And look, if I’m going to ask you to invest in my deal, you’re not controlling the deal. I am.

The least I could do is put you first. That’s only fair in my opinion. And the last thing I want to talk about, the fourth rule is transparency. Now you’d be surprised how many people that I talked to that said, yeah, they invested in this deal and they haven’t heard from the people in two years, right? There’ll be this ridiculous stories like that. So you want to make sure that the firm you’re investing with does regular reporting.

You’re able to actually call them on the phone, email them, text them, do whatever to get the answers that you need. But hopefully, like we share all this information quarterly, we shall share our

profit and loss, our balance sheet, our rent roll. I write up a little narrative on every single property that we have that talks about where we’re at with our renovation projects, where’s occupancy, where’s our delinquencies.

All the stuff that helps you as the investor understand, yeah, this thing’s going well or oh, I’m starting to get stressed out, right? You want them to be transparent. So experience, track record, make sure they put the investors first, and make sure that they’re transparent.

If you follow those four rules, you’re going to take a big chunk of the bad guys out of your equation and really, really increase the chance that you’ll have a successful investment.

Antonio (9:30): Excellent, excellent. I love those, man. Actionable steps that people can start to look into today. That’s great.

What’s the one word or phrase that you would use that describes the reason why you got into real estate investing?

Kenneth Gee (9:47): Because I wanted—there was one word. Alright, let me boil this down. There’s a lot of reasons.

I wanted the life I wanted. I wanted to create the life that I wanted. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll explain that a little bit. Early on, I figured out—I mean, I’m a CPA by background. I was a commercial lender. I did all the right things. I went to school, got two degrees, did everything I was supposed to do. But having done that, I found myself working 80 hours a week. My time I got to spend with my new daughter was in the middle of the night doing a middle of the night feeding.

I’m like, wait a minute, man, this is not what I wanted. This is not how it’s supposed to be happening. So that really forced me into, man, if I want to spend time with my kids and not miss their football games and basketball games and all that stuff, that I need to find a way to take control of it.

The second thing I realized, and it happened early on in my career, I bought three properties, sold those three properties three years later, and they were in Cleveland. I made half a million dollars on those three properties. This is back in the 90s.

I thought, man, I just made more money on the side than I did working like a dog at Deloitte 80 hours a week. I’m like, this should tell me something, right? So what it did was it gave me a path to figure out how I was going to put my kids through school without tons of debt.

It gave me a way to figure out how I was going to quit my W-2 job. And remember what I said, I like doing it for fun. I enjoy growing our investment firm.

Had I not made that leap, had I not made that significant life change, I’d still probably be at Deloitte, still be a CPA, and still working 95 hours a week. I would have probably missed a great deal of my kids’ soccer, basketball, baseball games, all that kind of stuff.

Antonio (11:43): Yeah. Man! Like I always say, real estate investing is incredible, period.

Kenneth Gee: I can’t find a better way to make a living. And as you can tell, I’m a CPA. I could go be a CPA.

I was a commercial lender. I could do that. There’s so many things that I could be doing. No, no, no. This is what I’m going to do forever.

Antonio (12:01): There you go. There you go. What’s your favorite aspect about being a real estate investor?

Kenneth Gee (12:08): What’s the favorite aspect? Well, early on, it was all about me, me, me. I was like, man, I’m making a lot of money.

This is cool. I love this. What happens when you get older? I’m in my mid-fifties, 57 now.

You actually realize that you can have a bigger impact on the world than you really understood. Early on, you’re so self-focused. It’s not about everybody else yet. And now the most exhilarating thing is when I’m able—we have investors in all of our deals. And when I’m able to double their money in two or three years, I mean, that just is cool.

That just makes me feel really, really proud of what we’re able to do and know that I can have such a significant impact. I mean, we just had an investor. He texted me.

He’s like, Ken, I just want to let you know that we’re on the—I won’t name the investor of the property—but we’re on the name of the property cruise. I said, what do you mean? He says, we flew to Europe first class.

We’re doing first class cruise. We’re doing all these amazing experiences. We’re flying back first class. And guess what? It’s all because of part of what we made with an investment with you. I’m like, damn, that’s cool.

That makes me feel good. And that’s a true story. I mean, think about that.

Antonio (13:30): That’s really what it all boils down to. You touched on a vital part.

As you get older, your mind makes a shift. And I mean, depending on who you are, you kind of become addicted to helping other people. And that feeling is so incredible. Oh man, it’s great.

Kenneth Gee (13:52): It is. I love helping people out new in this business, you know, helping get their first deal done.

I just remember how hard it was.

Antonio: And if I can help them, all you gotta do is to get your first deal and make it successful. Once you do that, you’re done, man.

You’re off to the races.

Antonio (14:06): Okay. So this is, everybody probably knows by now, because I won’t stop saying it, but this is my favorite question of the show. So there’s no way that everything has been perfect for you.

I’m just going to take a guess. I mean, maybe.

Kenneth Gee (14:36): No, I learn every day, man.

Antonio: But tell me, tell us, when was that time throughout your real estate investing career when you felt most unsuccessful?

Kenneth Gee (14:36): Yeah. The most unsuccessful—I mean, I won’t lie to you. I remember I’ve been doing this a long time. I was there during 08, 09, 2010.

That was probably the most difficult time. I mean, I don’t know if you were really focused on what went on during that time period, but the credit markets froze up. Nobody could get loans. Unemployment was going through. I mean, just everything was falling apart.

Remember, the stock market completely got destroyed. And so we didn’t lose any of our investors’ money or anything like that. We hung on through that process.

I mean, that was really, really brutal. I mean, if you ever read the book or watch the documentary, Too Big to Fail, man, when you really think about what happened during that time period, I mean, we came incredibly close to having the whole financial system collapse. And once that happens, man, trying to rebuild that, I just couldn’t imagine it.

So it was during that time that I just remember thinking, man, this is rough. This is rough. I’m glad that I was in apartments because people still needed a place to live.

A lot of companies were dumping out. A lot of the other asset classes weren’t doing very well. And apartments fared the best during that.

And you asked what made me feel the most unsuccessful. It was because during a long period of time, there was really, really hard to make money. So that was probably it.

But I think most people would say they probably struggled during that time.

Antonio (16:16): There’s another part of that I like to ask is, did you ever question what the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this? Maybe I should get out of this and go back to being a CPA.

Did you ever think that way at all?

Kenneth Gee (16:27): Yeah, no, I didn’t. You know, part of my crazy background was that when I was at Deloitte, my office was downtown Cleveland and there is an airport downtown Cleveland called Burke Lakefront Airport. And I always wanted to try new things, right?

I figured out how to scuba dive. I thought, man, I want to learn to fly. So I went to the airport on my lunch hour on a regular basis and none of my colleagues knew it, but I learned to fly on my lunch hour when I was working at Deloitte.

And it was tons of fun. So in May, I think it was May of 01, I had this bright idea, man, this is cool. I could probably make this into a business.

And so I bought the company next to nothing because they had all old airplanes. And I firmly believed that people wanted to fly about brand new airplanes. So I bought the flight school, turned it into what the aviation world knows as a part 141 school.

That means we were a professional training facility. We expanded to like 15 brand new Cessnas and three different airports. But what happened in September of 01?

Antonio (17:38): Oh, 9-11. Yeah.

Kenneth Gee (17:42): Guess what? A whole month. So I had all these airplanes, lease payments to make, you know, blah, blah, blah. And the FAA shut us down for a month.

We were not allowed to fly. And the world was convinced that the flight schools were the reason that, you know, these guys flew

the planes into the World Trade Center. That was probably one of the toughest times in my head, nothing to do with real estate.

But, you know, that did make me question, wow, is that such a good idea to buy that flight school? Now, as it turned out, you know, people will tell you any promotion, any attention you get is, even though it seems bad, is probably going to be good. And holy Toledo, everybody wanted it just because how people are.

They wanted to figure out what it was like to learn to fly. And you remember the airline security was a big deal. So people started flying privately more.

And it actually allowed me to explode that business. Once we got through the really, really rough time, the business really took off. You know, a lot of people bought airplanes.

A lot of people learn to fly. We eventually sold that business. But it was during that time.

I mean, just imagine you have two young kids and this was supposed to be a significant source of income. And guess what? The planes, they’re grounded.

You can’t fly them. Oh, and by the way, you still have to make the payments. So that was a tough one.

But it wasn’t. That made me question, did I make a good decision buying, you know, the flight school and the aviation business? But I’ve never had that feeling with real estate.

Even during 08, 09, because I knew it was apartments, people going to need a place to live. That’s not going to go away. At least I didn’t feel like it would.

And I still to this day, can’t figure out how that would happen without, you know, a really bad, bad thing happening across the whole globe. Right. Then it doesn’t matter what you’re, how much money you got in the bank.

If that happens.

Antonio (19:39): I don’t see a mass tent movement happening.

Kenneth Gee (19:44): I think we’re in good. I think we’re in a good place. And look, if I can figure out a way to make 15, 20, 30% plus annual returns for investors on something as basic as an apartment complex, there’s no reason for me to reinvent this wheel.

Antonio (20:01): What’s the one positive goal you’re focused on today in your real estate investing business?

Kenneth Gee (20:07): Yeah, it’s about growth. Now it’s about growth. We do most of what we do right now in Florida. Excuse me.

We’re doing two things at the same time. One we’re growing geographically into other, some of the other Sunbelt States and what we’re trying to do while we do that. And we do that with local people who are trying to get the early on in their investing career.

And we can provide an enormous backstop for them and be their partner. And so it is my goal that we can not only grow our company, but at the same time, help a lot of people get into this business and really start to take off. Because again, 25 years of experience in this business is helpful when you’re first starting out.

Right. And somebody on the ground in say, Dallas or Nashville or wherever, that’s really beneficial to me. So I feel like there’s a good reason to put a partnership together.

So I’m kind of focused on that right now, because I feel like we can have the biggest impact on not only our investors, but just, you know, people locally by doing that.

Antonio (21:14): Currently, what’s your favorite piece of business technology you find yourself using pretty much every day?

Kenneth Gee (21:21): Yeah. Wow. There’s the, you know, this business has become so technology driven.

We’ve actually just—we’ve really focused on trying to leverage technology to make us as efficient as we can. Probably, I mean, you know, probably the—everything we do really revolves around our CRM now. I mean, we have our property management software and all, it does all its reporting and everything else.

I mean, it’s probably what we use the most because, you know, it’s the foundation of our whole, you know, operations side of our business. But on the investor side and the relationship side, I mean, we spend a lot of time with our CRM, just, you know, developing relationships with people and making sure that we do our best to, you know, to take care of them and give them what they need. So technology-wise, it’s, you know, the CRM world because we can do things now we never could do before.

Antonio (22:19): What CRM and what management software are you using?

Kenneth Gee (22:23): Yeah, ResMan is the management software that we use, R-E-S-M-A-N. We use it because we can—it’s what they—I’m not an IT guy, but they call it an open architecture. So you can integrate this thing with all kinds of different other software programs that people develop.

So that’s why we liked it because we could then continue to have technology evolve along with us, right? Because the system allows for that. And on the CRM side, we use HubSpot.

Okay. It’s really—actually, it’s an amazing product because the training that they give you, I mean, anything you want to figure out about, you know, marketing and CRM-related activities, they have videos on it. I’ve learned a lot, right?

So being a CPA and a lender by background, marketing was not something that just came natural to me. It’s just the way we were. We sat at computers and desks all day.

And so, you know, it’s gone a long way to help me understand that side of the business.

Antonio (23:23): Currently, what’s the KRI portfolio look like?

Kenneth Gee (23:27): Yeah, we, over the last 25 years, we’ve probably done about $125 million worth of deals. We’ve probably raised from third parties about somewhere between 35 and 40 million. We currently own several hundred units.

We manage a couple thousand. So our business model is a value-add business model. So we’ve never been accumulators of units.

We want to go in, identify the upside. We want to renovate our property, prove our upside, leave some for the next guy, and then go ahead and sell it and let the next guy continue to finish. But we do this.

So we’re usually in and out of these things within three to five years. We like to add our value and then leave some for the next guy and then move on, right? I don’t want to outlive my improvements.

Think about this, right? If you renovate your kitchen, if you hold on to it too long, guess what? You’re doing it again.

And in our world, that means a whole lot of capital. And we don’t like going back to partners for round two of renovation money. That just doesn’t work.

Antonio (24:29): You guys like to keep it short and sweet.

Kenneth Gee: Short and sweet. Yeah.

And you know what? As it turns out, some people say, oh, the tax friction, you’re constantly paying tax. I mean, look, we’re paying tax 15%, 20%.

I mean, that is not ridiculous. I mean, it’s half of the ordinary income rate. The other thing, and more importantly, investors really like to know that they got into the deal, the deal exited, they have their money back, the deal’s done, it’s gone.

There’s no question. Did they make money? All they need to do is look at the cash that they invested, look at how much they got back.

And it’s obvious. There’s no smoke and mirrors. There’s no way for anybody to manipulate numbers or do anything.

I mean, cash in, cash out, you can’t argue with that. And so what I think they like is that ability to say, okay, am I still cool with this business plan? Did my life change?

Did something happen in my life that made me—they like to be able to have that ability to make that decision. Most people reinvest all that money. They just do.

And that’s the right thing to do because you’re going to earn more money. But I think people love that ability to make that decision. Whereas sometimes in the higher quality assets, people get in and you’re going to be there for 10 or 15 years.

And sometimes people get stressed about that. They’re like, man, once I’m in, I can’t get out for 10 or 15 years. They get stressed.

So I think our business plan lends itself well to new investors, especially ones that like to be in a little bit of control. They don’t want to just put their money away and not see it again for 15 years.

Antonio (26:14): Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is about the long-term game, which tends to be the better play for long-term wealth. But like you said, there is a group of people who do not want to be tied down for 15 years. So that’s understandable.

Kenneth Gee (26:28): Yeah. I will tell you, I did the math one day.

Our average return, let’s pretend we underwrite to 15%, right? We can’t guarantee that, but that’s our goal when we go in, annual returns. So I did the math one day.

If you take a hundred grand and every five years, that asset got sold and you assume an annual return of 17% and you paid the tax every single time at the top tech capital gains rate. If you just did that four times, that a hundred grand turns into over a million two. So now think about that.

If you did that a couple of times, I mean, this is obscene amount of money

. It’s just crazy amount of money. So I was really—it’s compounding, but you’re compounding at 17%, right?

I mean, we’ve got plenty of deals. If you look at our track record that have done considerably better. And in fact, most have, again, there’s no guarantee, but you have to make an assumption when you’re going to do a calculation.

So I said, look, let’s just assume we’re going to outperform our minimum goal by a couple of points and what happens? And what happens when we pay that tax? And so I was just dumbfounded by the numbers.

I mean, one of our investor relations ladies, she’s like, oh my God, this just sealed the deal for me. She’s like, these numbers are just unbelievable. Like, how can you not do this?

And I would agree.

Antonio (27:52): On a—this is kind of a quick side note because at this time, I don’t know if it’s just Miami, but I kind of think that Florida overall is being looked at as being the hottest real estate market in the country right now. A lot of people are slow. A lot of markets are slowing down.

Florida doesn’t seem to be slowing down, particularly Miami. What’s your opinion about that? What do you think?

You think that’s accurate or what do you think? Is it just market-specific? Is it statewide?

What’s your opinion?

Kenneth Gee (28:24): Yeah, I think you’re dead on. So you’re right. It’s not just Miami.

We’re all throughout Central and Northern Florida. We don’t have anything in South Florida right now. We’d love to.

We’re trying. It’s just deals are tough to find. Here’s why Florida is doing so well.

And when I lay this out for you, you’re going to be like, dude, I don’t know how this changes. So we know that about 900 to a thousand people are moving in the state of Florida net every day, right? We know that the census tells us that.

Now, it stands to reason that some of those people are wealthy, but most of them are probably not, right? I mean, this is just the way the world’s made up. Well, people tell me, well, Ken, they’re building and building and building in Florida.

I said, but wait a minute, the building that they’re doing accommodates those wealthy people. What aren’t they building? They’re not building anything for those.

Let’s pretend like it’s a 75, 25 split. That doesn’t seem to me to be a stretch. So now you have 75%, we’ll call it 750 people a day moving into the state of Florida, and there’s no new housing for them.

So now you have a—because they can’t build it. They can’t build B-class properties, right? They just can’t.

They can’t afford to. In order to build with the cost of building, they have to be at the high end. They have to be very high rents in order to make the whole project work.

So now you have a situation where you have the B-class asset, it’s stable. It’s not going up. It’s not going down.

Guys like us come in and make it nicer, but nobody’s making more of it. And they have this demand situation that continues to outpace—well, there’s no new supply. What happens?

That’s demand far outweighs supply. That’s a bull market, right? Think about it.

How does that break down? Well, you have to figure somehow the state of Florida has to become just a place where no one wants to be. I mean, think about it.

Sunshine, no taxes. I mean, just look at all the reasons that people want to be in Florida, and you would have to screw that whole thing up in order for them to not want to come to Florida. And it’s even more exacerbated by the fact that now they don’t have to work in an office building somewhere in New York or somewhere, right?

They can work out of their home. Or let’s look at the supply side. They figure out how to build B-class assets that are nice and that people will live in.

Well, I mean, the costs would have to come down considerably, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon. There’s no evidence of it. So, I have this demand-supply imbalance that I can’t see going away.

Now, what’s happening right now as we’re doing this—you know, the Feds raised rates, mortgage rates went up. What does it do? That even drives more people into our renter pool.

Because they used to be able to buy a house, but now, you know, the rates went up 200 basis points or 2%. Well, that loan now costs them a lot more money. That house costs them a lot more money, but I can’t afford it anymore or can’t afford the house I want.

So, then they go into the renter pool. So, we just made that demand-supply imbalance even greater. So, you show me how to break one of those two things down, and I’ll start to get bearish on Florida, but I can’t figure it out.

That’s why we’re there.

Antonio (31:31): Yeah, yeah. It all makes total sense when you break it down like that. Yeah, yeah.

I can’t figure it out, man. I’m not leaving Florida. I can guarantee you that.

Kenneth Gee: Awesome, awesome. There’s tons of opportunity there.

Antonio: Alright. So, Kenneth, how can our listeners connect with you?

Kenneth Gee (31:48): Yeah, go to kripartners.com/invest. So, kripartners.com/invest, and just, you know, we’re going to ask for your email because, you know, we’d love to be able to communicate with you, but then you’ll have access to, you know, our latest fund, a little, you know, information about me or some of our investor testimonials.

We even put on that page, I call it the Jacksonville turnaround story. It’s where people always want to know how you really do what you do. So, we did a deal in Jacksonville, and I did a 20-minute video on it that’s, you know, I narrated it. So, it’s not the best, amazing, most exciting thing, but it shows you exactly what we did, exactly why we bought that property, and how we made money.

And so, it gives people a really good feel for what we do. So, kripartners.com/invest. That’s the best way to reach me.

Antonio (32:42): Alright. Since entering into the real estate investing world, what would you say you’re most grateful for?

Kenneth Gee (32:51): Oh, wow. So many things. My family and the fact that I’ve been able to spend so much time with my family.

My kids remember the Disney trips we were able to go on, the cruises we were able to go on. They remember that I was at every baseball game, and basketball game, and soccer game, and you name it, I was there. That’s what I’m most grateful for.

Because, you know, again, as you get older, you realize life—you know, life’s perspective changes, and it’s really all about your family. So, the fact that I’m able—I was able to spend so much time with them really, really makes me happy.

Antonio (33:25): Before I hit you with the last question, I want to tell you, thank you very much for being here today. You really brought the value. You brought some extra value that we weren’t expecting, and I love that so much.

That’s what the show is all about. So, thank you.

Kenneth Gee (33:40): You’re right. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

But it kind of makes me think those last questions are going to be a tough one. So, go ahead, hit me.

Antonio (33:48): Depends on who you are sometimes, you know. Alright. So, finally, Kenneth.

What’s your definition of real estate investing success?

Kenneth Gee (34:01): What’s my definition? Well, wow.

Initially, you do it to make money, right? So, the definition of a successful real estate investment is—it used to be, let me tell you what it used to be for me and what it is now.

What it used to be was, I bought it, I made a lot of money, and I sold it, okay? It was very simple. Now, it’s as much about that, okay, but we need to add some things to that.

And I’ve already alluded to all this already. And that is, during that process, we’re able to help other people. The people that live in the property, are they better off for having experienced us?

Our investors, were they better off for having experienced us? So, I’m telling you, this age thing really just—it caught me by surprise because it really—when I go home at night, I know that I’ve had a positive impact on other people’s lives. I’m cool financially, right?

I got—that’s all good. It’s just that other component of it now is what really, really has become super important for me. So, I don’t know, that definition has kind of evolved over time.

I just thought I’d take you through that. But if you get money and the ability to impact everybody else in the ways that I just described, I don’t know how you do better than that.