Episode 14: Picking Your Advisors To Help You Succeed As A Real Estate Investor
In real estate investment, you are as strong as the team supporting you.
In this episode we support the supporters! What is an advisor and why do you need one? What do you mean by advisors - who are these people and what value will they bring to me? Is the relat ionship with my current advisor(s) working? If not, how do I replace them? This podcast is about making sure you have the right team members on your team!
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Full Episode Transcription
Welcome to my Life as a landlord, where we untangle all things housing and educate the curious. If
you're looking for some entertainment with some honest, awkward conversations, you've come to the
right show. I'm your host, Dr. Jennifer Salisbury. This is my life as a landlord. Welcome to it. 1s
Welcome, welcome. This is another episode of my Life as a landlord. In this episode, I'm helping all of
you as real estate investors, picking your advisors. For those of you who have been listening for a bit, you
know that I have five different topics I talk about, and I rotate each one each week. I start with landlord
issues, tenancy issues, and then we talk about real estate development. This week's episode is real estate
investor items. And then next week will be other Salisbury adventures. So I get asked quite a bit of how
do I find an accountant? How do I find a customs broker? How do I find all these folks? As a real estate
investor? How do I get the people around me to help me with my business? And these are advisors. So
this episode is all about picking your advisors. Okay, so let's jump in right to it. Number one, what is an
advisor, and why in the world do I need them? So an advisor is an industry expert in their fields. 1s
They're an industry expert in their field. They will help you as a professional when you need guidance.
And I will tell you these advisors do not work for free. This is their business, is to provide consultation
expertise to folks like you and beyond. So please don't expect every item to be free because they're not
right? Prices perceive value. If you find value to pay for that value. So what is an advisor? An advisor is
an industry expert in their field. And why do you need them? Because at some point you're going to run
into a pickle of some kind and you're going to go, I have absolutely no idea what to do. And you need
someone to call on, someone to ask and say, what do we do in this situation? Okay, so number two, what
advisors exactly might you need as a real estate investor? There's a bit of a long list. And this is not all
inclusive. There are other people that you might need on hand. Depending on what you're doing. You
might need more people. Sometimes you might need less. You may not even need all these, but this is a
pretty standard list. 1s You need an insurance agent or broker, at least one lawyer, very likely a
bookkeeper business strategist or a coach, which, by the way, I would count as that for you for now. You
need an accountant. You might need a realtor, maybe you might need a lender. You might need an
environmental consultant. There's a lot of people as a real estate investor that you might need that's not
on that short list. And if you're listening to this podcast, I bet you have already some of the advisors that I
mentioned. So let's dive into each one. So an insurance agent, what kind of insurance are we talking
about? Are you talking about insurance for your properties? Do you need insurance for your business?
Do you need insurance for your building? These are very different types of insurances. And depending
on what your agent or your broker, they may not have the ability to place all of that insurance in one spot.
They may have to go and shop it to several carriers. And if your insurance agent is only, say, doing
residential but you've got an apartment building, you might need to have a second insurance agent. You
might have a couple, it just depends. Ultimately you will probably find an advisor that works for you and
then they will get all the business, especially in insurance, which is good. Okay, a lawyer. You will need
a lawyer as a real estate investor. For one simple thing, when you do real estate transactions, you need to
protect your investment. Meaning you need documents signed at closing. You might need a mortgage
registered on title. That is all for you and your protection. But you might need a real estate contract
attorney. You might need a litigation attorney. Mike and I in the past have hired a US canadian tax
attorney. There are super specific ways, super specific genres of lawyers. And I equate it just to like
doctors. You've got doctors who specialize in heart health cardiologists. You've got people who are
general practitioners, but then you've also got people who specialize in, say, feet health. So lawyers are
very similar in that they have specialties. You might have to find a lawyer that has a specialty either
based on what you need or what you might need. 1s Over the past 15 years, Mike and I have use
probably six or seven different attorneys with different specialties. So it just depends. 2s Now having a
bookkeeper. Even if you use someone if you use someone locally, or even if you use someone remotely,
you might need someone to help with your payables, with keeping all of your items straight. I'm
particularly talking with folks who are self managing their investments. If you've got someone who is
working with you and they're managing the investments for you, much like a landlord, if they had hired a
property manager as a real estate investor, you can do something similar. You might not need a
bookkeeper per se, but I think that it's probably pretty safe to say that a bookkeeper is not a bad addition
to your team. You might consider it business strategist or coach. There is usually some local folks. If
you're in business networking international BNI, or if you're in some of the local chambers, there's
usually business coaches that are working as consultants in your local area if you're needing some help,
and that's a good thing. Tony Robbins defines happiness as progress. And if you need to better yourself,
especially as you are expanding your real estate investment business, you want to better yourself. And so
I highly encourage you to hire a business strategist or a business coach. If you want a local one in your
area, you can. If you want a remote one, you can. If you keep listening to my podcast, you'll get some
lessons learned and some nuggets from me as well. But let's keep going with your list of advisors.
Somebody's going to be doing your taxes for you every year, right? Your accountant. You've got to have
someone you can do taxes yourself. But at this point, if you are calling yourself a real estate investor, it is
very likely that you've got an accountant who is helping you with your filings and your personal taxes
and such. Now, there are two types of accountants, what I classify as two types of accountants. One is a
mechanical accountant. They will do the work, and they're fantastic to do the work. They are yes no
people, and they will get your taxes done, and there's no issue, right? You hire them, and they do what
you hire them to do. But then there's a second version of accountant that Mike and I seek out, and that's
an entrepreneurial accountant where you can throw scenarios at them. As you can probably imagine, the
Salisbury's are good at throwing scenarios and the what ifs and hey, what if we did this? Or what if I did
that? We throw those scenarios all the time to our accountants. Our accountants know this already. But
our accountants are entrepreneurial accountants. They're not yes no people per se. They are if you do this,
this is the tax implication. If you do this, you have to report that you might have to pay that. And so they
move with you in a more complicated way, especially if you get more creative in your investing as a real
estate investor. So be wise in your accountants. Now, the last one I had listed in sort of the standard list
of advisors is a realtor. Now, as a realtor, you want them to know in the back of their mind that you are
always looking for places to put money for investment. The investment is an expected return based on
this this money that you've put in. And so if the realtor, all they do is single family homes and you want
to invest in apartment buildings or commercial properties, that may not be the realtor for you. So you
need to define who your realtor like, what specialty your realtor should be. If. If you want to find
multifamily homes or multifamily buildings, maybe you like industrial parks, maybe you like
campgrounds, things like that. You want to make sure that the realtor is knowledgeable and
accomplished. And even if they've got some awards, that's even better. But that they are in the same area
that you want to succeed in. So that's really important for finding your realtor. Now, this is not an all
inclusive list. I'm sure there are more advisors out there. You might add a few more. Maybe you don't
need some of these. That's okay. But as a real estate investor, you want to make sure that anytime you are
questioning going, I don't know what to do. Consider figuring out an advisor. That might help you. And
then the third thing, when you're picking your advisors, I always ask the question, is this working? Is the
relationship working between us and our advisors? It's either a yes or no question. Is it working?
Meaning are you getting value for what your time is? For what you're paying for? If their response time
is three weeks, if you're sending them an email, a text, a phone call and they don't get back to you for a
month, if that's not working for. Then you need to consider replacing them. And sometimes that's an
awkward conversation. Maybe the response type is not the way that you want it. You say, give me a call.
I need to schedule a call with you, and you're getting a text. Or they're not communicating with you. The
way that you need or some things that we've had happen in the past is our accountants are filing our taxes
so late that it's impacting our lending. Right. That may be something that you guys have had happen too,
where the accountant comes back and says, we need to file an extension. And we look at them and say,
no, we can't file an extension. I need these taxes done, because we're waiting for financing to buy this
property. And at that point, the accountant goes, oh, my gosh. Right? Because they're overworked. But
this is where the communication has to work between the advisors. If it's not working, you need to have
that awkward conversation. You need to say the words, this is not working for me. And ultimately, you
want to make sure that the folks that you have on your advisor team are providing the value that you
need. Now, how do you vet these? How do you find these folks? Guess what the last two episodes in this
podcast were all about? Or the last three ones how to screen your tenants, how to screen your contractors
and your advisors. Guess what? They are absolutely no different. You want to make sure that their
specialty is aligned with what you've got. Make sure that their credibility. And you want to make sure
that you are checking references if you're bringing on a new advisor. Okay, here's your action item
picking your advisors. Make a list of who your advisors are right now. Write down who's your insurance
agent, who's your lawyer or lawyers, bookkeeper, accountant, realtor lender, any of these people who are
your advisors? And then it, are they working for you? Take a good look at them. I bet there's at least one
on that list where you're like, they're not really helping me. They're not really doing anything. And what
they're not providing, you've got to tell them. You need to have that awkward conversation. Awkward
conversations do not get better with age. You need to talk to them. But that's how you pick an advisor. As
a real estate investor, you need to understand that these are professionals that are paid to guide you in the
expertise that you need. Remember, these are professional industry experts in their fields. Then you've
got your laundry list of advisors that could be longer, could be shorter than what I provided. And then
have a good look on is it working? Next week's episode is all about other salisbury adventures. This is
where I am going to introduce to all of you one of the most dear and precious people in my entire life.
Retired late, retired vice admiral william porter lawrence, who was a prisoner of war, a united states
naval academy distinguished graduate, and he was my sponsor dad at the naval academy. Stay tuned to
next week. I am so honored and privileged to have this person influence my life. I can't wait to tell you
all about him. Stay tuned for next week. We'll see you then. Thank you for joining us this week. To view
the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today's episode, visit our website@www.
mylifeasalandlord.com. If you're looking for educational resources for getting into real estate investing,
becoming a landlord, or even a better tenant, then I have a page on my website to get you started looking
for a solution to the pickle that you're in. I have suggestions for that, too. You can throw your situation on
my facebook group, my life is a landlord, and let our community help you with solutions. Also, before
you go, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're
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up@ www.mylifeasalandlord.com. Thank you again for joining me, dr. Jennifer salisbury, in this episode
of my life as a landlord. I'll see you next time.