In this video, Joseph James, the founder of ROI Muse, will share with you some insights on how to beat inflation by investing in real estate and how you can do it too.
It has been said that real estate is the best investment, but is it really?
Let me show you how to invest in real estate and make money while you sleep.
Transcripts:
Jamie Bounds 00:00
Hi Joseph.
Joseph James 00:00
Hi. How are you?
Jamie Bounds 00:01
Good. Thanks for joining us. Commercial real estate coach and founder of ROI-Muse. I’m sure many of us have heard of that. He and his team of coaches and consultants have trained over 2000 agents and brokers in commercial real estate. So I can’t wait to see how you have utilized technology.
Chris Bounds 00:27
You’re the first guy that came to mind I when I thought of this topic. That you’re right on point, this is what you do. So, real estate investing, it’s a numbers game in all kinds of levels. You’re a numbers guy with a numbers app.
Joseph James 00:53
Yeah.
Chris Bounds 00:54
How are you leveraging technology to improve your clients experience?
Joseph James 00:59
Absolutely. It’s all about the numbers. Like I said, so we do primarily commercial estate, multi-family real estate and we’re also doing syndications now. So it’s all about the numbers, it’s about, you know, not only a lot of investors want to invest with you. A lot of them are looking for single family properties. A lot of them are looking to invest into multifamily, commercial deals or development projects and things like that. We have to underwrite these deals. Right.
It’s based on industry standards and in the industry practices and the best practices. And then the most important thing, Chris is to you’re the person to deal with, in a way that it makes sense to the investor. Right. Before they would want to invest in your deal. So those are literally that’s what we do. We use different data tools and analytical tools.
At the end of the day, you’re gathering information from all the sources you can. Right. And then, once you have all the data and all the analytics that you need to underwrite a deal, then you’ll use one of the tools and go and underwrite the deal so that all the numbers make sense. But before even you can underwrite the deal, we need to collect all the data as much as possible.
Some of that involved, you know, involves boots on the ground, you know, checking out some of the competency properties. Some of that is just looking at market data available. Looking at the comps data, same thing, you know, it doesn’t matter, single-family, residential, single-family or commercial the process is the same. Right. You have to do the current general analysis.
The market general analysis. You have to look at the rehab estimate and you have to look at come up with a business plan. And see, once you put it all together, that’s the deal make sense. So that is literally the process of what we do. But we leverage a lot of tools, a lot of data for to get there.
Chris Bounds 02:29
I remember when he walked me through ROI-Muse, I was like, “Wow, where was this 10 years ago?” Whenever I was looking for that. And yeah, built out through traffic. You can do everything in Excel, if you want. I mean, it can get really complicated, really simple, making it clunky, or it leaves a lot of room for gaps. But I think what you’re done is a very, the cleanest way possible to make an interactive, customizable analytics software for pretty much any investment scenario. The BRRR Strategy, Flipping, Wholesaling and Multi-family. So clients coming from the Excel spreadsheets or maybe the bigger pockets, calculators, which are good, too. And what is their initial reaction whenever they start playing around with those tools?
Joseph James 03:32
Well, Excel has its place. I’m a big Excel junkie, myself. So every once in a while, we revert back to Excel. Right. Because the problem is most people don’t know how to use Excel to its full advantage. Right. So we created something very simple. It serves a purpose for 99% of the people out there. And our philosophy was to create something that’s very affordable and also very easy to use.
And we kind of stuck to that. So you can add all the layout levels of complexity as you want to make your tool do everything possible out there on the wall. I mean, there are tools like that out there. So the problem is it becomes very complicated for anybody to use it. Our philosophy was create something simple, that works for 99% of the time. And keep the solution very simple so that everybody can use it and without a lot of learning curve. Right. Anybody can, you know, with some introduction, go in there and plug in the numbers and see the results immediately. So that was our approach to this.
Chris Bounds 04:27
How do you see analytics evolving? As far as apps and tools and stuff, how do you see it all evolving going forward? I mean, everything’s changing and changing rapid rapidly. We’re all going virtual. I mean, obviously, it’s a web based app. I don’t know if y’all have an iOS system or for something more Intuitive AI, but how do you see stuff evolving with the analytic software kind of like what you have?
Joseph James 04:58
I think at the end of the day, it’s leverage. Right. So we all want to do a lot of deals. Right now, I’m underwriting, at least couple of deals every week on multi-family side. I mean, you want to be able to bring somebody along and train them on a system. Right. So whatever is in your land or your number of years, you want to be able to claim somebody who can help you with some of your processes. Right. That’s how you can scale.
So that is literally where I’m looking at right now is to see how can I train how many people I can train on underwriting multi-family deals or commercial development projects. So they can do the heavy lifting for us. And then once they’re done with their analysis, we can literally look at it and say, “Okay, you did it correctly.” Or maybe I would have done it slightly different, and then coach them on that. So that’s literally where I’m doing most of the time is bringing other people along on how to do it the right way. Right. So then we can leverage or we can leverage them in our business and also partner with them in the future. Right. So we are always looking for people to come along and help us with our journey as well. Right. So and we can also contribute and help them develop their skills.
Chris Bounds 05:56
How do you feel? We could probably talk about this for an hour. How do you feel AI is going to – I mean, AI is knee deep right now already in analytics with big tech, but for individual operators, I want to go look at a multi-family units, 300 units and put all the data in. How do you feel AI such as it highlights, “Hey, this line, our mix of expenses seems out of industry norms.” or B “Hey, if you hold it for seven years, as opposed to your proposed five years, you’ll get an extra 7% return.” How do you feel that can be or that’s going to evolve with operators on our level? I mean, I’m a bottom feeder. I’m not Blackstone. I’m not Google. I’m not volunteer.
Joseph James 06:51
Yeah. I think you know, I wouldn’t necessarily call it AI because AI to me, it’s like little bit more high-level robotic, you know, some artificial intelligence. Right. But we can add analytics to our data very easily. Right. So for example, we recently launched an app called Multi-family Procom. So basically, you can take your TTL data, which is your P&L for the last 12 months, and load that data in like few seconds. And once it as the data is being processed, it already highlights the cells they should pay attention to, right. So literally, in so looking, you know, 300 lines of data across 12 months or 24 months, you can literally look at, you know, handful of cells to say, “Okay, now this data doesn’t look like there is something happened here.” Right. And a lot of times we look deeper, why it’s a plumbing expense $5,000 this month, you know what happened, a plumbing leak or whatever happened. Right. It makes it easier for you to read the data, we also summarize the data to say, “Okay, now this is the key to all this is a T63.” These are all analyzed some line numbers, so they can see the trends.
So all of that can be done very easily in a tool. When you don’t have the data, literally all of this takes about five seconds to load the data. In five seconds, you have all the summary that you need to look at the data. Right. So now once we collect data like that, then the second phase would be doing some analytics on that also doing some AI on that. So where we can say that, based on all the data we have in our system. Now, what expenses you’re seeing in this property is not in line with the industry standard. Right. Because it just either is too high or too low. Right. So those are things that we can add, once we have more data. But we are actually doing things that are going to make it easier for somebody who’s doing analyzing the deal. So they can easily zero in on the important data that they should be concerned about. Right. And then as we collect more data, then we’ll figure out how to make it better for everybody.
Chris Bounds 08:41
Last question, 60 seconds, what app have you used in the last four months, new app that you didn’t use before, it’s been just kind of game changing for you? It can be personal or business.
Joseph James 08:51
I’m in the business side, I’m learning something every day. We came from the tech background. So not a marketing person, you know, so now we are learning marketing, because in order to run a company, now we know people are not going to buy your product or they don’t even know your product exists unless you know how to market. Right. So we are spending a lot of time learning the marketing technology out there. Or one of the things I’m looking at right now is I’m in the chat, which is I think the previous guest talked about, Tax Automation and Messaging Automation.
So that’s one thing we’ll be looking at right now. We use ClickFunnels and Kartra, a bunch of different tools for our funnels and things like that. But literally, I think messaging is the way to go for marketing in the future, whether it’s SMS, or different kinds of messages, and also desktop notifications. So those are the things that we’re focusing on by now. I’m no expert by any means or any of those, but we’d be able to contribute more on that in the next few months once we learn more.
Chris Bounds 09:45
Awesome. Well, Joseph, it was a true pleasure. It’s always nice to talk to all of you and look forward to talking to you again.
Joseph James 09:52
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Chris and Jamie. Bye.