Pip Stehlik - The Path From Family Grocery Business To Real Estate Mastery
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Originally looking to build a career as a stand up comic, Pip Stehlik (with the help of his wife) came to the conclusion there was a different path out there to make money and achieve their family's financial goals. He went back to the family grocery business, where he was miserable, until he attended a Zig Ziglar event in Omaha back in 2002. His attention quickly turned to real estate, where he bought 16 properties in 16 months. Since then, he's been able to do lease options, renovations, commercial, short term rentals, creative financing, and many other methods. Taking a page from Zig's book, he believes "You can have everything you want, if you just help enough other people get what they want." He's led from the stage, training and mentoring over 40,000 entrepreneurs in 18 different countries, as well as launching Pip's Path To Property, and company designed to help others achieve their goals in real estate investing.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Why Pip realized that taking over his family's grocery business wasn't the best decision for him
- How Pip's wife helped him determine a career as a stand-up comedian wasn't going to help him hit his financial goals
- How Pip got started by investing in 16 properties in 16 months
- Unlock the potential of assisted living facilities as a lucrative investment opportunity.
- Master the art of lease options and gain a competitive edge in the homebuying market.
- How Pip had to pivot through COVID from speaking in front of large crowds to starting Pip's Path To Properties
- Elevate your real estate career with valuable education and networking opportunities.
- Uncover the growing demand and exciting opportunities in the memory care facilities market.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:05 - Introduction
00:01:13 - Pip's Early Inspiration
00:02:45 - Pip's Comedy Aspirations
00:05:21 - Dad's Reaction and Support
00:12:39 - Exponential Growth through Mentoring
00:14:03 - Transition to Speaking Engagements
00:15:52 - Creating PIP's Path to Property
00:17:24 - Advice on Getting Started in Real Estate
00:23:02 - Opportunities for Newbies in Real Estate Investing
00:23:58 - Lease Options as a Strategy
00:25:08 - Venturing into Assisted Living Facilities
00:26:55 - Assessing Demand and Managing Assisted Living Facilities
00:29:51 - Meeting the Growing Demand for Memory Care
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Mike Swenson
Welcome to the REL 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 REL Freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of REL Freedom, talking about building time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I am your host, Mike Swenson, and today I'm super excited. We've got an amazing guest here, Pip Stehlik. And Pip is the founder of Pip's Path to Property. You grew up in a family owned grocery business, worked there. Obviously you're going to share more about that. Growing their revenue, had 250 employees and then got into real estate. I think if I remember, I was like 16 properties in 16 months or something like that. And now you focus on helping to educate people. So you've educated more than 40,000 entrepreneurs in 18 countries and live in the Kansas City area. So, Pip, welcome to the show.
Pip Stehlik
Great to be on here, Mike. It's a lot of fun. I'd like to know how many times I've told people what I've done in the past, because it seems like every time I do something, I've got to explain a little bit about who I am. So this would just be for the umpteenth time. We'll do that. But, yeah, so I grew up in Nebraska, and so I'm born and raised a corn Husker, went to school at the University of Nebraska, all that good stuff. My parents had a small IGA grocery store. So if you're listening or watching this, listening to or watching this, you probably have to be a certain age to remember IGA grocery stores.
Mike Swenson
But we had one in my hometown growing up.
Pip Stehlik
Yeah, there you go. So independent Groceries Alliance. And so that's what my dad had. It was called Norman's IGA in a little town called Nebraska City, Nebraska. It's a town on the Missouri river, about 7500 people. And so we definitely are in a flyover state. Nobody knows where Nebraska is. When I go to other places, it seems like, but it's right in the middle of the country. And I saw my dad working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And I said to myself, I don't want to do that. But yet he had me working there on the weekends, had me working there in the summertime, and I literally hated it and it wasn't for me. And so I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And kind of the background is, when I was twelve years old, my dad took me to an IGA grocery store convention and we went to Chicago. Now it was the summer I was twelve years old at that point. And so I'm thinking we're going to Chicago. Maybe we're going to a Cubs game or a White Sox game because I'm a sports fan. And he says, no, we're going to an IGA grocery store convention is what he said, Mike. And I'm like, well, that sounds like fun for a twelve year old kid. But I didn't know is that weekend would shape the rest of my life. You just don't know when that whatever is going to happen that really shapes your life is going to happen. It's not like somebody says this is going to be the big time. And so I went there. I was twelve years old. And even though he's been ridiculed now, I think he's out of jail. I'm not making a joke of this, but we got to hear Bill Cosby speak or do his stand up comedy on the Friday night that we got there. And I didn't even know that was a job. I didn't know that's something you could do. And I was mesmerized by that. And so that was pretty cool. And there were like 4000 people at this convention. So it wasn't like it was a small thing. And so this is 1980. So it was before the Cosby Show. It was before all that kind of stuff. It's before all the trouble that he's got into lately. But anyway, so I thought that was pretty cool. Well, then the next morning, and if you're a football fan, I don't know if you're a football fan, Mike, or not. We're college football fans in we big college sports town in Nebraska because of Lincoln and all the Cornhuskers and football and all that. Well, that next morning, Lou Holtz, who was the coach at that time of Arkansas, he had just won a national championship. And I would always recommend when somebody says, who would you listen to? Go YouTube, Lou Holtz, and listen to 30 minutes of him talking and not now because he's a little bit older, but 30, 40 years ago, he spoke for 30 minutes. And I felt like I could run through a brick wall after hearing him talk. And I thought that's cool. How do you motivate people? How would I do that? And so I'm thinking I want to learn how to motivate people. I want to learn how to make them laugh. And those were like my two reasons why I wanted to do something. So I kind of made a decision right then. And there I wanted to become a stand up comedian. I didn't really say it to anybody. I was the youngest of six. I always could make my brothers laugh. I did a lot of the voices from the cartoons and the movies, and it was cool for me because I'm the youngest of six, and that's where the name Pip comes from. It's a shortened version of Pip Stehlik. My real name is actually Mike, just like your host here today. But in fourth grade, there were six Mikes in a classroom of 25 kids. And so teacher asked me if I had a different, if I went by anything else. And I said, my family all calls me Pip. From then on out. Every teacher called me by Pip. By the time I was in high school, nobody even knew my real name anymore. So I've always been Pip. And it worked out really good because when I got done with college, I went to the University of Nebraska. I stayed in school and got an MBA. And I literally thought MBA stood for massive bank account. That was the reason I was staying there for that. And anyway, that's a dad joke for all the dads out there. But either way, I was just about done with my MBA and I knew what I wanted to do. And my mom and dad were having a conversation with me. Like I said, I'm the youngest six. My dad and mom are now empty nesters, and they're asking me, what companies am I interested in, what industries would I like to get into with my MBA? And I said to my dad, the typical 23 year old answer. I said, I don't know, because when you're 23, what do you know? You know nothing. You think you do, but you don't. Maybe when you're 16 or 18, you know everything, but by the time you're 23, you know nothing. And so I told him, dad, you know what I really want to do with the rest of my life? And his eyes got real big and he kind of leaned in and he said, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to be a stand up comedian. And he wasn't real proud of that answer, I don't think. And so for the next ten or 15 minutes, he told me what a stupid idea that was going to be and that I'd probably be living at home with him. And for 15 minutes, I don't think my mom said a word. And it was kind of funny because after 15 minutes, I looked over at my mom. I said, aren't you going to say anything? And she said, well, you're not going to cuss on stage, are you? And that's all she was worried about, if I was going to get on stage and curse and cuss and all those kinds of things. And I said, mom, you could go to any show I ever do, and you'll be just fine. And so for the next seven years, I went around the United States doing stand up comedy. I was young, I was dumb. I was having a good time, but I was enjoying it. But I wasn't making a lot of money. And so I'd been all these places that nobody had ever heard of and all these small clubs across the Midwest and stuff. And so then I met my future wife. Her name is Jennifer. And six months into the relationship now, when I met Jennifer, it was love at first sight. Jennifer, on the other hand, she's a bit of a slow learner, is like what I like to say because it took me years to kind of wear her down. But six months into the relationship, she says, Pip, what do you want to do with the rest of your life? And I said, well, I really want to be a stand up comedian. She looked at me, she says, Pip, I've seen your act. What do you want to do with the rest of your life? And so it was really kind of an aha moment. I mean, she'll tell you, it didn't go down just like that, but that's how I heard it. And so in 1999, we got married. I quit doing stand up comedy. I went back to work at the family owned grocery store full time, and I hated it. And I was just trying to figure out how to make more money. My wife wanted to be a stay at home mom. She wanted to have kids. I wanted to make money. And so I'm reading all these books like Rich Dad, Poor dad, and all the different books that you can even think of. And I guess I truly believe everything kind of happens for a reason because I'm reading all these books, and in 2002, my wife is pregnant with our first baby, and I read this book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Somebody told me to read this book, and so I bought every purple book I could ever even find at that point, although rich dad books are purple for those of you guys that don't know what I'm talking about. And it was, sure enough, I do believe things happen for a reason, because about four months later, on the back page, this is 2002, so it's on the back of the newspapers where people were advertising back in 2002. Not a lot of newspaper advertising, probably in today's world, I'm guessing and Mike's going, man, I don't even have to talk with this guy. I can just sit here and let him talk the whole time. So anyway, 2002 I see this newspaper ad, Zig Ziglar is coming to Omaha, Nebraska. And I'm like, well, now that sounds pretty cool. I like Zig Ziglar. I had some cassette tapes of Zig Ziglar, which is kind of interesting because quite frankly, cassette tapes, obviously, most people don't even know what those are anymore. If you're a kid, you'll see it in a museum one day. But a cassette tape is what I had called See you at the top. And I listened to a bunch of his stuff because he was very motivating. And so when I saw he was coming to Omaha in 2002, I wanted to go see him. And so I did. And it was at the Omaha Civic Auditorium. There was this big stage event and there were probably 3000 people in it. And Zig Ziggler wasn't the first person on stage. Obviously there was other people that they brought out. And this one guy came out and he talked about real estate. His name was James Smith and he talked about doing real estate. And he said, come to this three day class we're going to have. It's $99. And it was for two people. So my brother and I got up and we paid $99 and three weeks later we were in a class. Four weeks later we were in a class in Omaha, Nebraska, attending a three day real estate seminar. And you got to remember, we're working 60, 70, 80 hours a week now at the family on grocery store. We hate it. We're trying to figure out how to make more money. Both my brother and I had infant daughters at home. My wife had now had our first baby. Her name is Riley. My wife's name is Jen. So when I went to this class, my wife was at home with Riley, nursing a one month old baby. My brother Jim, who was at the class with me, had a three month old baby at the time. So we're trying to figure out how to make more money. And it was kind of interesting because, you know, we're, we're running this grocery business and we're not making a lot of money. We're making a whopping. We're each pulling $36,000 a year out of the business. I had another brother that was in it, and the only way we could figure out how to make more money was to kill off one of our brothers. That was the only way I could figure it out. And I didn't think that was a good exit plan. And so we're trying to figure out how to make this money. Read all the rich dad books, go to this zig Ziggler thing. He says, hey, get into real estate. It's a great game. So my brother and I are sitting there at a three day training, and we invested a bunch of money in ourselves. We spent back, and this is not adjusted for inflation, we spent $35,000 on additional training back in 2002. And so people are like, that's insane. Well, you can call it insane if you want. We bought 16 properties in 16 months using other people's money. And so to me, that was a good investment, because then we just catapulted that from there. And the cool thing for me is, when I was sitting in this three day training, I'm listening to this one guy speak. His name is Tim Beeler, for three days. And I'm thinking, I'd like to do what that guy's doing, because he motivated me. He was funny, and he taught me a whole bunch of stuff about real estate. So my thought is, I'm going to go out, build this really big real estate portfolio, because I wasn't interested in doing the grocery business. We were worried about when Walmart was coming to town, not if they were coming to town. So we knew we needed to have a plan B. So that's what we did, is we got this real estate knowledge, we bought a lot of properties. And then to my surprise, about two years after getting our real estate portfolio up and going, the company that I bought the training from, they were affiliated with Robert Kiyosaki. Rich dad, poor dad. They asked my brother and I to come on as mentors. And I literally said to the guy, I said, I don't want to be a mentor. And he said, I've never been turned down. Why do you not want to be a mentor? I said, well, I'd rather teach people in groups rather than one on one. I said, my wife even says, I talk better to 50 people than I do one to one on one. That is not a compliment coming from your wife, by the way. I'm just saying I like to talk in groups. I enjoy that. That's something I've always enjoyed. And so he said, mentor for 18 months and you'll be an independent contractor. Then if you want to speak in front of groups of people, you'll have all that knowledge. So not only was I building my own real estate portfolio, I was out helping people all around the United States, building their real estate portfolios. And somebody said to me one time, before I became a mentor, they said, your real estate portfolio will exponentially get better by helping other people build theirs. And I thought it was kind of an OD thing to say, but when you don't know what you don't know, you don't know. And that was very true, because I started mentoring other students, and we were able to do bigger deals, better deals, things like that, because we weren't only solving our problems, we're solving other people's problems. And then, lo and behold, in 2007, I finally get the opportunity to start speaking for owner groups of people. And I started in the United States, going all around the United States teaching classes. I actually got mentored in 2007 by Robert Kiyosaki himself to go out and teach these types of programs around the world. And from 2007 to 2020, I literally went out as an independent contractor for other people, and as Mike said, to 18 different countries. And I've got all kinds of stories for you. But everywhere I went, you learned something new, and you could bring it back to your own business. But what I learned is that we're way more similar across the world than we are different. We're really not that different. We may speak different languages, we may look different, can have different skin colors, different cultures, different religions. But at the end of the day, we all want to, for the most part, be able to have a little less stress in our life, be able to make a little bit more money and hopefully create a legacy and help our families. And that's really what the real estate world is all about. And so that was kind of my life from 2007 to 2020. I got paid to go all around the world and teach people how to do real estate while I was doing my own stuff. And so that was really cool for me. But then COVID happened, and the world shut down, and I didn't have an audience anymore. And I have to admit, doing things on Zoom doesn't feel the same as doing them in person, but that's where the world was. And so my partners and I created a company called Pips Path to property. The reason we did that, and I think this is probably the biggest thing that I learned, is throughout those, what, 13 to 15 years that I was an independent contractor for other people, my contract never said that I had to give out my email or my phone number. But anytime if I sold somebody something, they got my email and they got my phone number. And why did they get it was because I knew if I sold you some training that I needed to be there to support it, even though I knew there were other people that were supporting these students along the way, I felt that it was my responsibility if you were parting with your hard earned money that I was going to support you. And I literally have stories of students from 10, 15, 20 years ago, 18 years ago, we'll go with that now that are still emailing me because they can and they want to. And so in 2020, got the opportunity to start my own company. It was literally based on the fact that I'd been there to support people. And when we started Pip's path, we had one mission in mind, and that was to really have the best customer service out there. And so all of our students that are a part of what we do, they ask us questions, we do Zoom calls with them, we hold their hand, and everybody says, well, how long do you do that for? Our programs are for life. And why are they for life? Because your question may not be ready yet. You may not be ready for that commercial deal. But when you have that question six months from now or six years from now, there's going to be somebody there holding your hand. And so that's kind of how we built Pip's path, is to do that. And I've now got the opportunity to go all around the United States, haven't done any more internationally since, I'm going to say, 2016. 2017. I got arrested in Hong Kong. That's a whole nother story, probably for another day. But that kind of just was like, wow, you could get arrested. And it was that they were always all about the fact that we maybe didn't have the right, what's the word I want to use working visa to be in that country. And so that was kind of a scary thing. I got kicked out of Canada, arrested in Hong Kong, and after that, I'm like, I'm not sure I want to do this international stuff anymore because when I go to Minneapolis, when I go to New York or Florida or Texas, nobody cares because I'm an American. I'm from Nebraska. So either way, that's kind of the background. That's my story. We have now had the opportunity to teach thousands of people all across the United States with Pip's path. And we have some really cool things that we've branched off with that. We have our own podcast now. We have multiple podcasts, and we're going to be recording our other podcasts starting. We already started a second one called the Wealth Debate, but then we have another one that we're starting this weekend, or I guess it'd be on Monday. And that's called Front Row Church. And so we're going to be putting sermons out there. And that's just who we are as a group of people. I want to make sure that we're doing things in a way that we're constantly doing it with the right integrity and the right intention. It's not about getting rich quick. It's about helping people out. And if you help enough people get zig, Ziglar says what they want, you're going to get everything that you want. So that's my story. I could talk for 10 hours on this. Any questions you got for me, Micah? I'll shut up for a second.
Mike Swenson
You obviously have a diverse background in real estate and have done a lot of different things inside of real estate. I work with agents, people getting started investing, and so they all kind of struggle with, what are these first couple of steps, or what type of deals do I look at? Where do I go? Is it short term rental? Is it flips? Is it buy and holds? Is it duplexes? How do you help steer people to help figure out where they should get started inside of investing in real estate?
Pip Stehlik
Great question. When I talk to a brand new student, I talk about three things. I call it strategy, area and property. And what happens is most people, they start with the property. And to me, that's not the right thing to start with, because, in fact, we teach people to quit looking at houses. Because if you're looking at houses, that house is going to tell you what kind of a deal it is. So if you're more interested in a specific strategy, figure out what that strategy is. Is it traditional buy and hold? Is it, as you said, short term rentals? Is it lease option, rent to own type of things? Is it wholesale deals? Because if you're in Minneapolis, the right type of strategy there is going to be different than the right type of strategy in Cleveland, Ohio, which is totally different than what's in Los Angeles. So if somebody says, I want to invest locally, then we have to determine what strategy works locally. So a traditional rental property is not going to work in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It just isn't because you can do the math all day long. And one of the things we do teach everybody is that every real estate transaction is truly a math problem. And it'll tell you, is it profitable or not? Obviously there's risk involved, but if you can solve the math problem, then it tells you, is it a deal or not? So figure out what strategy. You want to do what area works for that strategy and then what type of, then the property would come in third on that. So I think strategy area and property is kind of one of the big take homes that we teach. But the other thing that we teach a lot, and this all comes from Kiyosaki, is just learning how to use leverage. And you talk about that in your podcast on a regular basis, is leverage. And how much can we do alone is so much less than what we can do as a group. And whether that is a joint ventureship, whether it's a syndication, and everybody talks about OPM, and that's kind of this hot putting name. And OPM is not just your mortgage, it's other people's money, like JV partners and syndicate partners. But it's also your tenant paying your rent every day. When you look at OPM, your tenant who's paying you 1000 or 2000 or $3,000 a month, that's OPM paying you monthly so you can pay your mortgage, so that you can pay whatever your expenses are in life. So that's OPM. When we do lease options, we get something called a non refundable option consideration upfront. That's truly OPM that we can use for the current deal to pay the investor for another deal. At the end of the day, when you're even doing a wholesale deal, it's not so much OPM, but the capital that you gain from that, selling that contract for a profit, that's money that you didn't have today. It's earned income, but nonetheless, it is coming from somebody else who's buying that contract from you. So I think a lot of it comes down to strategy and property. So somebody needs to tell me, what are they interested in. Now, I can go through the benefits of each strategy and tell you what I think about them, but at the end of the day, you got to kind of tell me as a student, what's the strategy that you're really looking at? And then do you live in an area where that strategy even makes sense?
Mike Swenson
I agree with that fully because people get so hung up on, there's like only one way to go. And it's like I've got to figure out that right way with where I'm at. And I think it's that balance between you got to start somewhere to get experience, to get better. And I think people are just afraid of choosing the wrong thing right away, too. But I always encourage people to treat real estate investing, especially the early on days. As an education, you're going to go get your MBA. You're going to spend some money. If you go get your first flip and you don't make money on it, well, you got an education, and that's going to help you to get sharper for your next one, too.
Pip Stehlik
Oh, definitely. And Kiyosaki says, work to learn. So you're working as you're learning through all those different environments. And I think that's a huge thing, a little thing that I tell, and I'm sure you've heard of this and maybe done it on your own. I try to talk my wife into it. She said, no. When I first started in real estate, one of the things I heard from one of my trainers was, hey, why don't you buy a duplex? Live in one side, rent out the other side, and that mortgage can be paid by your tenant or a portion of it. Well, my wife wouldn't go for that, so I didn't get to do it. But a lot of young couples and young people, I will say the process to buy a two or three or four unit is the same as the process to buy a single family. There's really no different. And even the mortgages can be treated the same way because it's still a residential property. And if you're living in one unit, it's owner occupied, so you can get a lot of the same benefits. And even if you're a vet, that VA loan will work on any residential property. So you can do a single family, a duplex or a three and literally get your tenants to pay a large portion of your expenses every month and learn a lot about property as you do it. I mean, it's a great stepping stone for a lot of young people, new investors that are doing this.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, that was something that we had focused on early on, but we ended up buying a townhouse right away and right during the market crash, and then we were underwater, and so we had this grand idea of wanting to do a duplex, but then it didn't work. And I was working for a nonprofit, but I was actually just talking with somebody yesterday that hasn't yet bought their first property, a younger guy. And I said, hey, if I were you, I think there's a lot of value there. Looking at that duplex, Fourplex, and doing an owner Occupy and getting in there, it's a great opportunity for newbies if it works in your life. Now, as you're analyzing deals and looking what are some of the areas that you're excited to invest in or excited to dig deeper into?
Pip Stehlik
So one of the things I've always been a fan of is lease options, rent to own. We're seeing a huge influx of people that need that because the mortgage payment they could afford is now buying them less house than they could have even imagined two years ago when interest rates were half of what they are today. So lease option is always a strategy, and once again, it's a math problem. If the math problem works, you go forward with the deal. If the math problem doesn't work, you either change the property or you change some other dynamic of it. But truly, we want to set people up for success, and that's what we do through our lease option, rent to own program. And if I have what we call, they're called tenant buyers, somebody who's a tenant with the option to buy in the future, we've got to be able to put together a path for them to get qualified to buy the house. So if somebody comes up to me and says, Pip, I got $500 to put down on our property and I can afford $500 a month, what kind of house do you want? I want a million dollar property. Well, you're in dream world there. You're in fantasy land because those numbers just don't add up. So we've got to make sure all the math works. So lease option has always been a strategy and it's worked for me in up markets, down markets or sideways markets. The most recent deal I'm working on is we're just getting ready to break ground down in Texas on a 16 bed assisted living memory care facility. And if all goes well, there's room to put three more buildings or 64 units in there. But it's going to be more of every room is individual person in there. There's no shared rooms. Each building will have its own chef, and so they'll have specific meals, plans, and things like that. So that's the first time I've ever ventured into that world. I've done a lot of other types of investing, but that's probably the first. Well, it is the first time I've ever done assisted living, and I really believe that with assisted living, literally, our population base is so ripe for that, because I'm not even a baby boomer. I'm still whatever the next one is, Gen X underneath that. But that baby boomer group from 45 to 64, they're obviously getting to the point where a lot of the older ones need to be in assisted living facilities if they haven't passed away yet. And the kids that are my age in their 50s are having to put mom and dad in these places, and they want something that's close. They want something that the mom and dad can have dignity. And if you can specialize, and ours is going to be memory care, that's probably one of the bigger growth areas that we see out there. I think we've got a large opportunity to not only make money as a real estate investor, but to help a lot of people in their later years in life and the families that are a part of that scenario.
Mike Swenson
So, out of curiosity, because I saw one of those pop up the other day where it was previously used for assisted living, and it sounded like it wasn't getting the occupancy that they thought. And so that's why this property is on the market where my head goes there. So for memory care is, as a real estate person, I don't necessarily know, how do we find the skilled labor? What's the plan? How do you go through that to figure out, okay, as I'm running numbers, what do I need to budget for to make sure that's staffed properly, to make sure, if you've got the full time chefs there, that's going to cost some money. So how do you figure out what's needed there to be able to decide if you can get the numbers to work?
Pip Stehlik
We actually have, and this is where the leverage is so important. Two of the partners that are going to be in that investment with us are actually going to be working there. They're actually owner occupied, meaning they're going to be there managing the facility on a regular basis. And so there's a lot of people out there. I don't care what the business in. I've had franchises in the past, and they want to own stuff, but they just financially don't have the ability to do it. They have the skill set to run it. They have the skill set and the desire to be in the business, but they don't understand the financing part of it. And so I think as a real estate investor, when you understand the numbers, and if we get all the numbers to work, if I can bring somebody who's an expert in all those things that you just mentioned, hiring the right people, being there, the boots on the ground, if you will. This is in Texas. I live in Kansas City. There's no way I would want to do a property like this where I didn't have somebody who was in the ownership group with boots on the ground. Because when it comes down to it, any business is a marketing business, totally what it comes down to. And so the facility that you're looking at, obviously there isn't either enough demand in the area or they're not marketing, as well as the other people in that area for assisted living clientele. And so we want to make sure that there's, first of all, a demand. And so we've gone through and we've seen that demand. You want to make sure that there's waiting lists for all the other facilities in the area that are similar to yours. And if you can offer something that's a little bit more specialized and know that there's a waitlist for that, then that gives you at least a little bit of an advantage. There's still risk. I wish there was no risk in that deal, because it's a multimillion dollar deal. But at the end of the day, you're going to take risk. But hopefully they're calculated risk and we're building one at a time. We could have gone in and built four units at 16 beds per unit because we bought the land for the whole thing and it's zoned correctly to do that because we're buying it with the intent of the future. But when it's all said and done, if that first one doesn't go up to plan, we're not out. Because I'd rather have four empty on a 16 unit building than 25 empty on a 64 unit building or whatever the numbers end up being.
Mike Swenson
It's interesting that you're talking about that balance of demand with kids wanting to be close to their parents. I remember with my dad and his mom grew up in a small town, so there wasn't a lot of options. His preference was to keep her in town versus going somewhere else. There was an assisted living facility there, but it wasn't locked. And so my grandma was going through dementia, and so she was slowly starting to kind of deteriorate. But there was a memory care facility being built that was opening up soon that was locked. And so that was the end plan. And so because the facility she was in wasn't locked, every couple of weeks or whatever, Grandma would kind of work her way out the door, and a neighbor down the street would give a call and say, hey, here she is. And they'd bring her back in. And then for us, I know there was so much relief for my dad when we finally got her into the memory care facility where she could, number one, get the care she really needed. But because it was in town, then he didn't have to go to the next town over. And so that demand is going to keep growing and growing and growing as we have that aging population. And so, yeah, somebody's going to figure that out, and somebody's going to put together those facilities and make a great plan. And so if that's something you're interested, why not you be the person that solves those problems and reaps the reward out of solving that problem for other people?
Pip Stehlik
And I think a lot of it comes down to Kiyosaki talks a lot about OPM, other people's money, but other people's time is huge, but other people's other assets, like their skill sets, other people's energy, all those types of things, because I don't know anything about memory care. I know nothing about the assisted living world. But if I have somebody on my team that's part of that ownership group does, then obviously they're going to have a vested stake in that property to make sure that it's going well, because their salary is dependent upon the profit and loss, basically, of that facility to a certain extent or a portion of their salary. And so they want it to grow as well. And so I think there's just a huge opportunity in that world. How long will that opportunity persist? I have no idea. But I always make the comment. Everybody's like, talking about AI this, AI that. At the end of the day, no matter what AI we have out in the world, we're still getting a place to rest our heads. And so that's why I like real estate. It's not political. I know some people will think I'm crazy when I say it's not political. I've been buying properties, no matter who the president is for the last 21 years. And I'm going to keep buying them for the next 21 years or longer. And I don't get to say who and who the president is. I get a vote. That doesn't mean that person is going to be the person I want. So it doesn't matter if there's liberals or conservatives in the offices. People need a place to rest their heads. And I'm all for real estate as that one thing that we all need. I mean, we all probably have some type of smartphone, iPhone. I mean, if I asked the dumb question, how many of you guys have a BlackBerry? And most people would say no, they don't have one anymore. But back in the, at some point, 2006 to 2008, they were the hottest phones out there. I don't know what kind of phone we're going to need 10, 12, 15 years from now, but I do know we're all going to need a place to rest our heads. So I think real estate, whether you like it or not, we all need it. And that's why I find it to be a logical thing. Not to mention there's great benefits with taxes and leverage, and you already know all those things, Mike, and that's a huge win for us as an investor.
Mike Swenson
Pip, I've appreciated the conversation here today. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your insight here. For people that want to learn more about Pip's path and what you're doing. How can they do that?
Pip Stehlik
We have a website go to literally a ton of free content on there. You're more than welcome to go absorb all that free content. And then if you want to email us with a specific question on anything, it's [email protected] we appreciate you sharing your.
Mike Swenson
Story and best of luck to you in the future.
