David Dippong - Building Multi-Generational Wealth Through Home Ownership

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE ON:




David is the go-to resource for all things real estate in Los Angeles & Orange County, California. He helps people plan for, create, and acquire a portfolio that meets their investment & financial freedom goals. His mission is to spread a higher level of real estate and financial education, show the benefits of home ownership, guide people to achieve it, and help his clients leverage their homes into multi-generational wealth. We discuss how owning at least 1 property gives you the tools to fight inflation and protect your family from the rising cost of living, and how harmful a short-term mindset will be for people more and more as the average life span reaches 100 and beyond over the next few generations.

In this episode hosted by Mike Swenson, we discussed:

• The Importance of your Full Commitment and Strategic Planning.
• How real estate professionals can effectively navigate income fluctuations and challenges of the industry, especially in the early years of your career.
• How can real estate professionals maintain consistent visibility and relevance in the industry.
• The importance of ongoing engagement and education.
• What are the advantages of real estate as an asset in a supply & demand-driven economy.
• What long-term investment strategies can you consider to secure your financial future in the real estate market.
• What considerations you should keep in mind when selecting investment properties for long-term wealth building.
• Why is it advisable to hold onto real estate long-term for wealth building.
• The importance of a real estate professional who aligns with your long-term goals and ethics is crucial in property decisions.
• How can an investor mindset can help real estate professionals secure better opportunities.
• How Agents and Sellers Can Collaborate for Mutual Benefits.

Timestamps:

1:45- Intro to David's career
3:08- Accelerating Success in Real Estate
5:52- Navigating the Rollercoaster of Income and Staying Power.
7:47- How to Stay Relevant in a Shifting Real Estate Market.
8:55- The value of getting in real estate investment and being part of the real estate market.
12:38- Investments and Leveraging Resources for Homeownership and Wealth Building.
16:57- The Power of Long-Term Planning and Smart Investment Strategies.
19:51- Guiding Clients Toward Informed Decision-Making.
22:13- How does having an investor's mindset impact your approach as a real estate agent.
24:29- Collaborate with your agent,
25:21- How to find David.

FOLLOW DAVID:

https://dippongrealestate.com/

https://www.facebook.com/dave.dippong

https://www.instagram.com/dippongrealestatela/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dippongrealestatela/

✅ SUBSCRIBE HERE IF YOU'RE LOOKING TO BUILD WEALTH THROUGH OPPORTUNITIES IN THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY

📈 GET STARTED INVESTING TODAY AND ACCESS OUR DEAL LIST!

💵 PARTNER WITH US ON BIG DEALS!

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 BUILD YOUR REAL ESTATE AGENT CAREER WORKING WITH INVESTORS HERE

🎙️ LEARN ABOUT REL FREEDOM & HEAR MORE REAL-LIFE STORIES

💵 FREEBIES: DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE FREEDOM FOUNDATION BLUEPRINT

🏠 LOOKING FOR A REAL ESTATE AGENT ANYWHERE IN THE US? FIND A TOP AGENT IN YOUR COMMUNITY HERE!

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦  JOIN OUR FACEBOOK COMMUNITY

🎧 SUBSCRIBE TO THE REL FREEDOM PODCAST 👇
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify

🔗 LET'S CONNECT 👇 
Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
Minnesota Real Estate


Read the full transcript here:

Mike Swenson
Welcome to The Real freedom show where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together.

Mike Swenson
All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Real freedom, talking about building wealth, gaining time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. And today we're going to have a great conversation. So we've got David upon here, David is a real estate agent in Los Angeles, California, in Orange County. And he really has a heart for helping people understand that investing in real estate can be not only helpful, but crucial for your savings in the future. As we get older and older, as we have better and better health care. We don't want to have the point where we outlive our savings, we want to be able to have things within our control, and to be able to make decisions based on that versus investing in one thing. And once we retire, we're just going to pull from that until we run out of money. We don't want to have that happen. And so David really has a passion for helping people understand that understand maybe how the ways you were raised affects how you are now and you've got to do something different if you're not happy with what those results are. So we'll get into a great conversation. But welcome, David, from Minnesota to California. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

David Dippong
Thanks for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here and share with as many people as I can,

Mike Swenson
Why don't you just give us a little bit of a background about your real estate career, how you got into the industry and leading up to where you're at today.

David Dippong
Great. So my company's called upon real estate, I work with the compass real estate brokerage, I got into real estate because 10 years ago, I was a private chef. And there wasn't really any way for me to leverage my time, I would make a good amount of money, and I would have one day off. And I guess what I did on that day I slept. So I really wasn't thinking about what my life needed, my quality of life would be what my stress level would be. And so I switched to a career that I felt and leveraged my strengths, working with people working with potentially high net worth clients, and still being able to help as many people as possible each year, while also being able to take time for myself, to have the dog, have the home, have the wife and make sure that my quality of life for hopefully the entirety of my life is something I would want.

Mike Swenson
So talk a little bit about those first steps in real estate. I know, you know, kind of flipping to the agent side here before we talk about investing. But I know first for some agents, especially agents nowadays, it's tough out there, it's a challenge. And coming into the real estate industry. There's there's transferable skills, like you mentioned, but things that you run into that maybe you didn't anticipate. So talk about kind of those early days, finding clients getting deals, and that what was you know, crucial for your success.

David Dippong
So in those first few years, it's crucial that you commit, meaning real estate can't be a part time job, because likely within your first three years, you're not going to know how to deal with most of the situations that you come across. And so working for a broker who's more experienced than you or is already achieving the results that you want can give you a leg up. Whereas you can spend one or two really hard years learning from the best and committed to it and becoming successful faster. Or you could spend seven years trying to figure it out. And really not making a consistent income, I'd recommend the former even though you're gonna have to share some of your income with them. I'd also recommend having at least a year's worth of payments in the bank before you switch because you might not make money in your first calendar year. Or you might decide it's not for you. And during that entire time, you won't be bringing any income. And so it's actually a lot of financial planning and long term planning to even get into real estate. That I mean, if you want to succeed, you should really sit down with yourself or your partner depending on what how your life is, and really suss out before you get into it.

Mike Swenson
It's interesting, you mentioned you know, the commitment piece because there's so many people that say, I'm just going to try real estate. And you know, it's one of those kinds of Freudian slips. Like if I say that I'm just trying real estate, I'm not all in. And what I tell people is, you know, you can do real estate part time, you can't expect to have let's just say it's halftime, you can't expect to have half the results. Putting in half the time at the beginning. It's going to take a lot of work. It's like pushing a rock up a hill at the beginning. You're gonna have to do a lot of work to get those results. Now once you've been in the industry for a while you'll explore means kind of the fruit of that labour and that hard work and that knowledge that you've built and grown. But it's really tough to do it at the beginning part time, without having some sort of commitment or some sort of date where you're gonna come in full time. Otherwise, you're just kind of one foot in one foot out, and it's like, Ah, this thing's getting kind of hard, I'm gonna go back to my other thing, or they compare, you know, year five, or 10, in their previous career to year one in real estate. And it's like, well, I didn't make as much money, I'm gonna go back and do that instead. And so I truly believe that real estate has an immense amount of opportunity, and an unlimited future growth, you've just got to get here and get it figured out. So you can experience that benefit. And so many people kind of sell themselves short, or get out when it's challenging. And they don't get to experience the full benefit of being in here and taking advantage of all the amazing opportunities of being in real estate.

David Dippong
Absolutely, I agree. A people will compare their six figure salary their old job to their first two years in real estate. And if you made 25k In the first year, and 50k, in the second year, that's an 100% increase in profits you have, you're often working on a cycle that's six to 12 months from when you meet a person to when they might actually need something. And many times longer in our market. Because every purchase is such an investment at the prices of the properties are in California. So I'm working on a two to three year timeline, I'm always working with 100 or 200 people at any given time. And in years like this, when the markets slow when we've gotten barely half of the usual home supply, due to the fact that everybody wants to keep their low interest rates. If there's only half the sales, there's only half the paycheck, so you have to be in it. And you have to plan for these types of contingencies. So that you can succeed, while just as you said, many newer or less experienced agents will drop out this year or next year, because they just, they can't handle the rollercoaster of it. They haven't committed in the right way to make this work for them.

Mike Swenson
And to be honest, I think the real estate agent side was a bit saturated. So it's okay that there's a thinning of the herd that's happening. Because for people that I've known my first team that I joined, was a team that had been in business for 3540 years. And they talked about the last economic downturn. It was a few rough years. But then when things started to get good, there weren't as many agents in there. So you had more opportunity, you had a chance to grow your market share, because you survived. And so yeah, I think that'll be something we'll see here moving forward. As interest rates get better, and inventory gets better, those that were able to survive are really going to thrive here.

David Dippong
In the future, youcan have two good years and a race for bad ones in real estate, but you have to be there otherwise, they will forget you exist, unless they're your friend or your neighbour. And they will go to the person they see working every day, releasing content every day out there educating people every day on the current market, and not the market you walked out of two years ago, or one year ago.

Mike Swenson
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit then about investing in real estate. And even even maybe before that having a long term view of how you approach real estate. You know, as you mentioned, in California prices are high. A lot of people might just be content with renting or think I could never afford a property and so therefore I'm not even going to consider it. But talk about especially in your market, you know the value of putting your money into an asset like real estate to be able to hedge inflation to be able to grow your wealth. So talk about what you share with your clients and and your potential clients about just the value of getting in the game and and being in real estate and investing in real estate.

David Dippong
Great, I'd be happy to so this one's a two part answer. The first part is it's important to know that in a supply and demand driven economy, like real estate is in California or Austin or Atlanta, one of these growing, expanding metropolitan areas where they just don't build enough homes every year. Inflation actually pushes the value of those products up because there are just as many people who can still afford to buy and the minimum it takes to buy in each neighbourhood every five or 10 years moves in waves with gentrification. So by having a house a an asset with utility, something that you can live inside, that when you pay off, reduces your cost of living by at least 50%. Even if you have investments in mutual funds, stocks, bonds, etc. that will protect you it gives you at least a base protection from inflation and a savings account that you can use for future investments and opportunities or college funds. The second part of that is that when you plan, there's usually two investment strategies. And both are long term. So you have to start as early as possible. But one is a door strategy, where you try to buy 100 doors 100, affordable homes, say for 100 grand each, and they each make you $1,000 a month. And through that you can build a consistent income. And then there's the strategy that I prefer, which is you move into one, you buy one house, you wait five to 10 years, depending on the market, you leverage the equity, keep that house buy a second house, you wait five to seven years, a quicker timeline, you leverage the equity in one of the first to buy a third house. And then you pay them off as fast as possible. So that when you get to retirement age, completely separate from all of your other income sources, like your Social Security, your disabilities, your 401 K's, you're gonna have properties that pay for your cost of living entirely. Meaning everything else that you have is passive income for travelling and high quality of life. And it's less work because you're only managing three doors, three families, three pitches, six bathrooms, you're not managing 100 different rental units, and you're paying a big company to manage them for you.

Mike Swenson
Yeah, and we definitely have based on our different markets, you know, you being in a high appreciating market, you know, like the Los Angeles area, and myself being in the Midwest, you get kind of a cash flow appreciation mix. Now, the appreciation isn't nearly what we're gonna see out in California, but it attracts different types of investors. And I think that's the beauty of what I've seen too is investors want different things. And investors have different strategies, and some are okay with the high number of doors, and some are okay with the strategy of buying hold and get a couple, a couple of good ones, and you're all set. And so it's the beauty of real estate and different goals. So share a couple of stories that you've had, or maybe an example of somebody that has maybe not seen the opportunity, they started out as a renter or something like that. And they're like, Oh, I never realised the value of homeownership because I was raised this way. My parents never talked about it. We always rented talk about kind of that aha moment, maybe for somebody that has gone from renter to homeowner and just been able to, you know, hedge inflation just by by doing that.

David Dippong
I'd be happy to so I'll tell you about myself. And I'll tell you about one of my clients so myself, I bought a fixer townhome, a townhome that needed to be completely gutted back in 2019 when people were avoiding condos because they wanted to buy single family homes here because they wanted space, of course due to COVID. And everybody started being able to work from home. So because we bought it and remodelled it, our property taxes are lower, because we bought it at a lower price. So we could leave today, within a few years and we could cash flow on this property, meaning it would only contribute to the next property we get. And we can stay here until we save up enough to buy that second property. So now at the very worst, we're living in a home that we love that's being paid off aggressively, or we get to buy another home that we love when rates take a turn and when my financials match up. And when I find the right investment, those three key things are important, and I can expand. And on the flip side, the people who might not have been able to earn the downpayment that they think they would need. So it's important to know that high conforming and conforming loan limits are much higher in Los Angeles. So you can get up to 1,000,089 loan so the loan itself is 1,089,000 before it crosses the threshold into a jumbo loan, meaning every thing under that price, you can put 5% down or three and a half percent down or 3% down on to purchase. So I connected one of my clients a few years ago with a downpayment assistance programme, the NACA alone the neighbourhood Assistance Corporation of America, which typically has a one to your waistline because of how many people that need it, but then it provides the entire down payment and closing costs. The most the buyer needs to do is paying for some repairs that they might require, like an FHA loan, so the buyer gets to come in with extensively less than 1% of the purchase price of a property up to a million dollars and become a homeowner as long as they leverage this downpayment assistance programme. Do They have to purchase at that price. Now we could get them something closer to 500 or 600,000. That's in a place in an area that they might not want to live, but would be a great investment for the next 10 years. And what happens from that point is, during the first 10 years, they use this restrictive loan to buy a place and build equity. During the second 10 years, they either keep that home and buy a second one, or they sell that home and buy a larger, bigger, better investment as their forever home. And then within the next 10 years, they use that one to buy another one. And even though you've never saved the money for a downpayment and closing costs, you never were able to earn that based on your own living situation. Because you leveraged your you leveraged your most important resource, which is time, you still got to the same conclusion as the people who had the money and we're investing upfront, it just took you a little longer. And what you did was spend time to make up for that.

Mike Swenson
Well, and the example that I love to give is, you know the the value of leveraged appreciation, because in your example, let's just say for good clean numbers sake, you buy a home for a million dollars, if they're putting 5% down, they're putting down $50,000. Right, let's just say for conservative, safe, safe estimates, there's 10% appreciation that happens on that property, I'm now getting a $1.1 million property after a year because of that 10% appreciation. And the beauty is the banks not going to ask for a chunk of that, right. So the banks giving you 95% of the loan, but they're not going to ask for 95% of the appreciation, that's all you so you get to put in $50,000, you get the benefit of that $100,000 appreciation in one year. And right there, you've just doubled your money because of the value of that leveraged depreciation, especially on something small like a 5% down payment.

David Dippong
And unless you have to sell never sell, because when you sell you pay taxes, when you 1031 Exchange or when you put a property into a trust, and you name your kids, the beneficiaries, or you do some other advantaged way of moving the property around, you never pay taxes on the a million dollars that you've made by paying off this property over 20 years. Over the last few years, we saw almost a 9% year over year appreciation, the people I helped buy with those loans several years ago, only put 25,000 of their own money into it, they only paid another maybe 20,000 of the loan off in that light in the last four years. And yet they've made 100 to $200,000 on appreciation. So will the market be that fast for the next few years, probably not, we're gonna go through a bit of a slow period. But the goal is never sell unless the market is right for you to get something better or more properties with the same amount of funds that you're going to take away. So you don't buy homes with short term planning, you buy and with long term planning, say I'm gonna keep this home, and within the next 10 years, based on how my income salary, everything else in my life goes, I'm gonna leverage it to get a second home. And then we'll decide what to do with the first home knowing that in that 10 years, we were able to make changes as the rents rose around us so that somebody could come in and cover our entire mortgage, possibly even cash flow from day one, when we leave. Now you've got passive income, you've got equity, you've got somebody else paying your mortgage, and you're free to go buy another property. It's one of the easiest ways to build wealth because it requires very little from you as a person, besides hiring a handyman to do some work here are there stocks and other active investing tools where you might have to deal with an advisor monthly level. In my experience, those are much harder for people to double, triple make a million dollars out over 10 years, or at least the average person.

Mike Swenson
And I think to just the control piece, you know, there could be some sea level employee at the company that you've invested stock in that does something dumb, and your stock price goes down by 20% You have no control over that, at least with real estate, it's a tangible asset that you have control over you get to control the quality of the finishings, the updates that you make the potential future equity by updating it, and you get to control you know, who you're putting in as tenants how you manage that property and so you have a lot more control versus something like stocks where some guy could do something dumb and all sudden now your your all your money you've poured into it tanks as a result of something like that, that's completely out of your control.

David Dippong
And much of that should be on your real estate professional. So I'm a big proponent of the ethical responsibilities of my industry. So when I tell somebody If it might be a good time to sell, because you'll take this much money away, and with this bunch of money, you could buy this and this and this, you can see how that's a recommendation based on their goals. And they could make more, they could leverage this money, they can have a better investment by doing this. And by giving them that information, I get to let them decide whether they want to or not, they will decide what is best for them, they will also hire me to rent out their place. And I will give them my professional opinion on the strength and financial quality of the tenant applicants. So a lot of the work you just mentioned, if your real estate professional advisor or guide, whatever you choose to call them, isn't helping you and isn't aligning with your long term goals and is maybe just trying to get this thing done as fast as possible. It might be time for you to find somebody who is aligned with your goals. Because real estate is an outcome based profession. I don't get paid unless I achieving a result. And you have to sign the papers so I don't get paid at all unless I do my job well.

Mike Swenson
Real estate agents are you tired of letting the busyness of life get in your way from achieving your real estate investing goals, I'm super excited to announce we've created the real freedom investor agent tribe, it's a place for you to come get educated and network with others so that you can make sure that you're hitting your real estate investment goals. So find out more on our website, real freedom.com. Click on the store link, we've got a membership, we've got a mastermind group and some private coaching as well check it out, I've priced it super low, the goal is to get you in not have price be a determining factor to keep you from your goals. So come check it out, schedule a call with me. And we're happy to see where your real estate journey is going to take you. So for the last couple of minutes here, we've got let's talk about real estate agents. You know, we had talked offline about becoming investors or you know, having those opportunities and you saw said something great that I hear often is, you know, if I have a listing coming up, I should first look at does that is that something I should buy? You know, have an investor's mindset, as a real estate agent and how you're approaching the business that's coming your way share a little bit more about that.

David Dippong
Absolutely. So when I have my long term plan, like I've already started it with my first property, I'm going to plan to have three or four. When I sell a property in Redondo Beach, or Santa Monica or Newport Beach, when I look at these areas, I first go, would I want to live here? How much money would it make? What's its price, and I make a decision based on whether it would be a good investment for me. And if not, I go okay, great. And I follow my marketing plan, I tell them exactly how we're going to sell the property to get them the most money possible. But if you always have the money on hand to make that next purchase, when the right opportunity comes up, you can talk to the client or you can talk to the homeowner directly and try to structure a deal, that's going to be a great investment. Even if it's something which in today's market should be becoming more common like seller carry, where the seller makes five to 6% on the loan amount in income for several years, while you wait for rates to come down and refinance. Because if somebody's buying us 1,000,002 million $3 million property, and they want a full point and a half off the interest rates, the current average 30 year mortgage, that's a good income for the seller, if they don't have anywhere else for that money to go, they'll get a down payment, they'll be able to put that somewhere else and they can consistently make money on it until they have somewhere else that they can put that money. So by thinking about investor mindset before you start sharing properties with other people, you could decide and possibly get some of the best properties out there.

Mike Swenson
Yeah, essentially, it gives the opportunity for the seller to be the bank. And so it's once again something that most people probably don't even know as possible. And you as the agent have the opportunity and the obligation to tell them hey, there's a there's a way where we could structure this where you could be the bank, I mean, who doesn't want to make additional money, and maybe not have some sort of capital gains tax or whatever that might be depending on how you you're using that property. But yeah, there's a tonne of great opportunities out there and so as the agent helps show them those things to help put more money into their pocket.

David Dippong
And on the flip side, if you're trying to sell a property and you're working with an agent ask them if they would buy it, ask them if if you want to stay there for another six months have that be a part of the deal. Okay, I'll give it to you at this good rate. I'm gonna get to stay here for the next six months rent free you can structure these deals that show that they work out for both parties, and are great opportunities for both parties. But if nobody ever has the is the the accountability or the mindset to ask and just know Find out these deals don't get off the ground.

Mike Swenson
Yeah, absolutely. Well, David, it's been awesome to be able to pick your brain a little bit and hear your perspective on things and show how you're doing an amazing job for your clients and opening their eyes to different things. How can people get a hold of you reach out to you if they if they want to learn more?

David Dippong
So all of my information is on my website did poem realestate.com That's di PP o n g r e a l e s ta t.com. And all of my social accounts, my YouTube Tik Tok Instagram where I make little videos about this type of real estate education is act upon real estate la like Los Angeles. So even if you just want to learn more, or do you want to get connected to somebody in your area, like Minnesota, who matches the right type of investing knowledge or who has the experience to help you achieve what you think your goals are right now. Reach out I'm happy to have that conversation and you have all my information, phone number, text, email, everything is on the site.

Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on David and sharing and best of luck to you in the future. Great