Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Think it's just a really powerful strategy to come out and be like, look, I'm not promising people can become financially free with five homes, but I am saying you can get pretty dang close, obviously based on your lifestyle. I'm not making an earnings claim on this call, but I'm saying that the power is there with this strategy. And five homes is doable. Like, anybody can get five homes. Like, you can buy five if you're willing to move five times in five years. You can get five homes for 5% down and do a primary residence for five years. And that could be your retirement plan. You have five Kobe homes. They're each making two grand a month. That's 10 grand a month. That's $120,000 a year. You're in the top 20% of earners in America. Congratulations.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Trust this. I'm Joe Siegel, your asset protection lawyer here in Florida, helping out people hide their ownership of what they own so that when they do get sued or if they ever get sued, it'll look like they really don't own anything. So wonderful to have everybody back today. And I'm here with Sam Weigert, who is known as the co living king here in the United States, lives up in Charlotte, and we're going to talk with him today about the co living world. And Sam, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell everybody, you know, sort of what you do, how you got started.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: Yeah, man. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. Super big honor, I gotta say. Your intro, you know, I've talked to a lot of lawyers and it always comes out as lawyer speak, but that was like, very clear, concise, like, I hope you hide what you do. I just love that I'm, I'm, I'm stealing that concept for how I explain what we do. But yeah, man, I'm, I am all in on this asset class of co living. And I feel like it's my job to share this message with the world about how, how you can actually get cash flow in real estate with interest rates being where they are and prices being where they are. Like, surprise, surprise, that's still possible in today's market. And at the same time, you can do what I believe is a really good thing, and that is to put units for rent. Rooms for rent is really what a co living house is on the market that are, that are at 50% or 60% of what normally the cheapest thing would be in any market. So I think of myself as an Inventor. I just like that term. I always wanted to be an inventor growing up. And I'm like, with co living, I get to invent new price points and introduce them into a city that did not previously exist. And so in that way, we're just providing lower cost housing in every city we decide to open in or my students open in. And so it's a really cool thing. Yeah. And, and, and, and I got into this not because I wanted it to be some crazy big business. I just lived in co living homes myself for 13 and a half years and then realized like, wait, this is, I'm doubling cash flow on these homes that I'm buying. Right? And I was living in homes that I owned, but I was having a bunch of housemates and roommates and I was single at the time. And I realized I'm doubling the cash flow. And so I started to push the envelope a little bit and say, well, what if I had six people living instead of four? You know, could that work? And I created systems and it worked. And then I was tripling the revenue that I would normally get, you know, versus renting it out as a single family home. And I was like, holy cow. And then I had this chance meeting with Robert Kiyosaki one day. We brought him into a mastermind that we were in part of. And you know, he's, he's the godfather of passive income, so to speak. And I walked up to him and I was like, hey, Robert, I don't know anybody else doing this strategy, like, what do you think about renting rooms? And he just gave me that, like, you know, like there's times in your life where you just need a vote of confidence. That was all I needed. He just said, it's the wave of the future, Sam. Like, keep going. I was like, okay, I'm all in. So we can dive into any part of that you want. But that's, that's in essence what I do. I rent rooms in homes. I help solve affordable housing. I help investors become financially free through this asset class by getting, by getting great cash flow out of real estate again.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: How many have you got now? How many, how many of these properties do you have either under management or your own?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Yeah, my wife and I own 197 of these doors and we manage probably another two hundred and fifty or so. And then in my community, I have 400 members. In our community, we probably have another thousand. I don't, I don't have the exact number, but. Thousand, fifteen hundred rooms. Yeah.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Are there any particular types of Neighborhoods where these work better than not.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Yeah, we always teach this concept. We teach two concepts around types of neighborhoods we teach. It's a very technical term. It's called nice enough. So there's this luxury co living kind of thing going around where everybody's like, well fine, this cash flows so well. I will go buy a million dollar house or like a really fancy nice house and I'll co live that. And, and while that can be cool for someone who wants to own really great real estate, you know, I think there's, we always drive the neighborhood, whether it's on Google Earth or in person and we just say like, does it fit the neighborhood? So you're looking for a neighborhood that doesn't have an hoa you're looking for. If anybody here is really familiar with real estate, which I guess your audience probably is, we're looking for a B plus or a B minus or maybe a C plus, you know, neighborhood. And I had a student the other day, he, he shared with me this one home and it was in a really, you know, you drive into this neighborhood, everybody's got their white picket fence, their yards are really still no hoa, but like it just looked popping. Everybody's yard was perfect and driveways was perfect. I said, man, this co living home, if you put seven people, I think you wanted seven people this home, maybe it's gonna stand out, there's gonna be a few extra cars in the front, you're gonna have people's parking on the street. And I said I would, I would walk away from this one.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: He.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: So he took my advice. He did. And then the next week he goes into a neighborhood, it's in Charleston, South Carolina. And he sends me this picture of a, of a, of a, of a goat in somebody's front yard. And he goes, Sam, this fits the neighborhood nice enough. And I was like, you're right. And of course he was a little exaggerated, you know, being kind of funny. But if you walk in a neighborhood and someone's grass is a little bit long and somebody's got a work truck in their yard, like that's, that's usually a neighborhood that, that we feel co living is going to not be the biggest problem to, you know, neighbors and get complaints and things like that. So yeah, you definitely want to make sure you does it fit the neighborhood and it's just nice enough. You're providing workforce and affordable housing, not luxury housing to people.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Yeah, you said workforce housing. That's a big buzzword I've been hearing lately. A lot of People, they had this negative connotation with affordable housing as being like government subsidized housing. And then there's workforce housing, which is, it's people who all have jobs. It's just jobs that don't pay. You know, school teachers and, and custodians and crossing guards, people like that, they have, they have jobs, they're just not high paying jobs.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: What is, what would be a typical tenant or is that, I mean, do you call them tenants even or how do you.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: We call them members because we use a legal strategy that gives us a little bit of flexibility. It's like a subscription service is basically what they is very similar to some of the tech companies that are out there kind of using this model and that membership agreement kind of gives a little bit more flexibility when we're operating in different jurisdictions that have really low unrelated people in a home, kind of zoning restriction. So it helps us, it helps us around that. And I can go into that, maybe offline, I'd even love your opinion on that as a lawyer. But anyway, that's the strategy we use. But I did, you know the, the difference between affordable housing, workforce housing I frankly didn't understand until I was, I was thinking about buying a hotel and converting it to rooms. And I called the town, it was the town of Monroe, it's like 15 minutes away where I'm sitting right now. And I said, hey, I want to create this hotel. I was just calling the city to see if they'd let me do it. And she was like.
I said it's for affordable housing. She goes, affordable housing? How much money do the people that are living there going to make? And I was like, I don't know, like just 15 to 20 an hour. She's like, that's not affordable housing. She gave me some very technical definition of like it has to fall under so much money. And she's like, what you're trying to do is workforce housing, right? And I think, I think that is probably a little bit more accurate in terms at least what I focus on with my company. And that is, yeah, it's people who make 15 to 25 dollars an hour that after tax just cannot afford a studio apartment, which is normally the cheapest thing in every city in that city. And it's like airports have tens of thousands of these employees, literally tens of thousands. Between all the service, between all the restaurants that are in apartments, tens of thousands. You have Amazon distribution centers, you have Walmart distribution centers. Just think about anybody you interact with, the person that puts the Tires on your car, the person that serves you at Starbucks, the person that serves you as you walk into Target checks you on the groceries. Like there are hundreds of thousands of these people in every city in America. And it's, and it's kind of this weird middle ground of like they need, they need some alternative options. So a typical member for us is going to be, you know, vetted very similarly to anybody that would rent a normal apartment. Right. We're going to do a background check, we're going to do an in person screening on them, we're going to walk them through the home, we're going to do a showing just like they would rent an apartment. And then they, you know, we do have income verification of three times the monthly rent. But monthly rent in Charlotte, for example, could be anywhere from $700 a month to a thousand. So you know, you make $2,100 a month you got approved for, you know, you can get approved here to, to, to live. And so we are looking for those people now. We don't accept vouchers, but the U.S. department for Housing Urban Development did just come out, I guess back in 2021 and just came out and said, look, you can now use housing choice vouchers. Right. Previously known as Section 8 for rooms, not just apartments or homes. And so that's a big thing that people can do. And you can get guaranteed government rent for renting out your rooms. Like it's a thing and it's not cheap like in Charlotte, the voucher price right now, and don't 100 quote me on this because I think it changed in 2025 from 2024, but I think it's like 850 for a room if you include utilities. We always include utilities. So it's, it's significant in what the government will pay you if you're willing to kind of play by their rules and fill out their forms and, and accept vouchers. So yeah, huge need though.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: So when you set up a house, let's say you find the house, it's in the good enough neighborhood.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: And you've got the right tenant mix in that area. What kind of work do you have to do to a house to get it prepared for, for this?
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Yeah, man. I think it's co living is usually a matter of adding walls, doors, closets, and maybe additional bathrooms. And it's, it's always a puzzle piece engineering. Kind of like we always start with a floor plan. So we use this app. I don't know if you ever use this app. It's called Kubicasa. It's the coolest app in the world. You walk through a home with your camera on and it spits out a floor plan with measurements that is insanely accurate. I don't even know how it does it. It's some AI like crazy stuff. It's amazing. So then we take that floor plan and we just play like, we just play engineer. We're like, what if a wall was here? Does the home still flow? Well, because we're still trying to create a flow, right? What if the door was here, what if we added a closet here? And we're always kind of thinking in the back of our head and a decade ago when I was doing this, I thought about this a lot more. What if I had to convert this back to single family. Now I don't really think about that that much because the truth is like there is actually a market for co living homes. So Joe, if you had a co living home, instead of converting it back to single family and selling it and it was a good co living home, I would buy it from you today, no questions asked. And I'd pay a premium because it's, it's a real market now, right? Same way people pay a premium for a turnkey short term rental. So that's, that's coming to this market as, as this kind of wave expands.
I forgot where I was going with that. I, I had a point with the original question. Oh, what work do we need to do to the property? So yeah, so we, we're adding, we try to keep a three to one bedroom to bathroom ratio. There's some companies out there that say a 4 to 1 is fine or a 5 to 1 I've even heard is okay. And it's like, man, we're trying to, trying to create a space.
You know, this is how we differ from a lot of the, the tech companies doing this. A lot of the tech companies doing co living are furnished rooms week by week rentals. That is not our model. Our model is an unfurnished room. So you move your own things in 1212 month agreement initially similar to an apartment. Now you could sign a six or three at a premium, but same as like an apartment complex would and we furnish the common areas. We're trying to create a home that's a lot longer term of a stay than this week by week thing. I'm renting for a week, maybe I'll move to a different house, rent for another week kind of kind of vibe. That's what we're that's what we're, we're in. So we want to create a clean, a quiet, a safe place that has bathrooms, that flows really well. Still feels like a house, still feels like a home. And so all of our homes like for my company to manage it it has to have a common area. Has to have a common area that's furnished where people can work and eat and hang out. There's some tech companies saying like no common areas because it creates conflict. And, and that's just not really our, our model 100%. So those are some of the things that we might do to a home to make it really work. Well now I want to add one caveat onto this. I'm in the process right now of building two duplexes. One actually in Black Mountain, downtown Black Mountain which I'm really excited about and then one in, in, in Charlotte here. And we're building from the ground up these co living buildings and I'm building a 17 bedroom, 16 bath duplex. So if you can build you, I mean perfect world would be a one to one like everybody gets their own private bath. Right. And so I think I'm really excited about that because I think that'll be like the future future. But in the meantime we kind of have to work within the confines of finding a home, a single family home and then doing our best to convert it to as many rooms as possible while still keeping a common space.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I had the, when I had eon from pads but that's one of the things we talked about is downtown Orlando. They just built the social and it's basically that it's this massive high rise apartment building but every apartment is a co living space apartment and then they have these massive common areas. Like the pool deck is crazy. It has a big club room and a bar and where everybody can come for their, their common area activities. And they have, it's basically like a wework kind of place where you can have, you can come down, you can work at a workstation.
So I, I think it's definitely the wave of the future for affordable housing to, to, for affordable affordability and to provide the supply and it's out there. Do you have, do you, are you finding the in in Black Mountain and Charlotte? Are you finding any push back when you went to the, to the city or and said hey here's my plans and I need my permit.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Give me, give me like 30 more days on that and I'll give you like a final answer because we're in that process right now. On both of them. But we have had preliminary conversations with both city of Charlotte and this and, and town of Black Mountain. And no, we haven't gotten a lot of pushback. I mean, yeah, we're, we are, let's see, we're on a podcast. We're recorded. I, we are presenting it as a duplex is the truth. Right. And then I will deal with, I will deal with occupancy later because I have a strategy for that. We're just getting through permitting right now of saying, hey, it's a big duplex and there are a lot of bedrooms and bathrooms and. No, all of our initial conversations have been really positive. It's just more a matter of like, making sure sewer and water and all of that is taken care of for this and making sure they have the capacity for it. That's, that's been the only hang up so far.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, because I, I, I think that what, what I always think about whenever I have any client who's getting ready to do any kind of multi family.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Traditionally, cities and counties have been focused on parking. Well, we have to have at least one parking space per occupant, plus a guest space or so many guest spaces. And all this, I'm seeing that fall away.
We used to have an office building in downtown Richmond, for instance. It was, it was a, it was an old piano factory built in 1901, four stories. And then when it was developed initially, when it was redeveloped from a piano factory into an office building in the 1980s, they said, well, you have to have a parking lot with this that has at least this many spaces. So we had, we had this building and then we had a parking lot that was one block over, and it had about 27, 28 spaces. But in the mid 2000s, the city of Richmond said, you know what? This is now a transit zone. People can take the bus. There's Uber. They've got E bikes, we've got E scooters. So no longer do you have to have so many parking spaces per living space or per office space.
And when they did that, suddenly, now we could bifurcate. We had the building and we had the parking lot. We could sell them separately. We sold the building separately. The person buying our building didn't want the parking lot, so we sold that. We ended up selling the parking lot for more than we sold the building for because they, they were going to take that lot and turn it into another building. The people who bought that. So I'm seeing that, and I think that's going to help this trend of, yeah, you may have all these bedrooms and bathrooms in this duplex, but we're not going to require you to have a parking space for every bedroom you've got because that's, that's insane to do that anymore. Are you finding that most of your tenants or your members, that they like to use public transit more than driving their own car?
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I want to, I want to address something too. I think every city, like we take a lot of time to study zoning. We, my team goes around the country and like is trying to figure out, we call it co living friendly. Scores of different cities and a lot of that is diving into zoning, calling the housing authorities, all of that. Right. And so what we've found is that every city is trying to increase density to help solve housing. Right. And, and so, so they're, you know, Charlotte just passed this new, you know, this new ordinance citywide that says you can now take a single family lot. And actually what I'm building, my duplexes are on a single family lot because they said you could build duplexes, triplexes, quad plexes, all on single family lots anywhere in the city, like minus like certain areas based on the zoning. Right. But like my point in saying that is like we are, we are getting through co living, we're doing what every city wants, like right out of the gate. We're solving affordable housing, we're increasing density in the same area. And that's just a big, that's very powerful, it's very attractive to cities once they understand it. Right. So there's some initial like wait, whoa, what's going on? But then once they understand it, it can be a really, really, really powerful strategy. So I'm glad you mentioned that because I do see that too. With almost every city. It's like California wants an ADU at the back of every single property. Right. And Charlotte's trying to make sure that the city doesn't have to grow crazy huge to keep the same number of people in it. So I wanted, I wanted to make that note. What was the, what was the question that you just asked? I forgot.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: So do most of your tenants, I mean they're workforce and they can barely afford a place to live. Do most of them have cars that they need to worry about where to park or most of them using public transit anyway?
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Ours are about 50%. Yeah. So if we have a eight bedroom house, six bedroom house, three people are gonna have cars, you know, and the rest. And then it also depends though too largely on how close the house is to public transportation. So we'll get people that have more cars to the homes that aren't close to public transportation. But that's a huge plus if you're walking distance to a bus stop or I, I bought a home. We have this thing called the light rail. It's just a small train that kind of takes you around. If you're close to that, like, you're golden. That house will fill so fast because people, it absolutely is a piece of the calculation when people are choosing where they want to live. How close are you to public transportation for? Sure.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Yeah. I've seen that in a lot of the larger cities like Atlanta and D.C. yeah. You know, a lot of these neighborhoods, they fought. They didn't want the, the subway or the, the train to come anywhere near their homes, like up in Georgetown, up in D.C. and now it's sort of, you know, it's, it's, it's an office wasteland. But people, it's like, well, I really don't want to live up there because the train's not up there. But you bring a train into that area, everybody wants to be in that area.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: That's right. That's right.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: It spurs a ton of development. Yeah, we've seen that here too, for sure.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. What.
How did you, how did you decide you were going to scale this and how did you scale. I mean, I know you had the martial arts schools and you scaled that.
Did you bring any lessons you learned from that scalability into the co living space when you're, when you're scaling this business up?
Yes.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Scaling co living.
Scaling co living can be both difficult and can be easy depending on which piece of the co living business you want to scale. Scaling the management is very difficult, and that is the.
Not having good management in place is the number one reason why co living has not taken off even bigger yet. It's because the management is nuanced.
And so to do co living well, you need to make sure you have a good team able to operate your co living. Whether you use a tech company like Alcove or Pad Split or one of these other tech companies, or whether you decide to self manage, you need to have those systems down pat because you're dealing with eight people, potentially seven people, nine people living in a home together. And that just has different nuances than say a multifamily building does where everybody's completely separate and has their own kitchen, has their own bathrooms and all of that. Right. So that part difficult, that part don't invest in co living. And it'll make. Co living will be a nightmare if you do not have the management aspect dialed in. We see that all the time. People go out, I tried co living. Didn't work well. They didn't have the systems in place. Right. And so I think that's really key. Buying homes, you can scale that fairly easily. I mean, if you're, if you're. Unless you're brand new to buying homes. But, I mean, we're finding 90% of the homes that my wife and I bought, maybe more, and 95%, you know, have all been bought on market, just on market. MLS deals that cash flow thousands of dollars a month. And the reason they do that is because it's not a crazy. I don't believe that will be forever. Those homes will disappear faster once more people get into this space. But we're at this space of where co living is right now is where Airbnb was in 2011, in my opinion. Airbnb in 2011. People are like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Wait, wait a second. Someone's going to rent your second home. They're not going to destroy it. And you're going to make $1,000 a night or $500 a night. Like, that'll never work. No way they're going to destroy your home. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And now we have Airbnb, and people print money with it. Depending on where you are now, average daily rates have come down. Airbnb has kind of hit a peak and then come down a decent amount, which is why a lot of people are even looking for alternative investments. Right. And so co living is at the beginning of that. It's poised and ready to rocket as people figure out the nuances of management. So buying homes, not hard to scale. Rehabbing homes, not crazy hard to scale if you have decent rehab experience. It's not that complicated. It's the management that I really try to preach. People need to have the system for or the team for before they go all in on a strategy. So I, I built a chain of martial arts schools across Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. That was my first gig. And if anybody here knows anything about building martial arts schools, it is the hardest business to build because you do not. There's nothing tactical, physical to it. It's all emotion. So it's like, did my kid get better today? Yes, I will keep paying you because I think he's getting better. I feel he's getting better. Right, That's. That's what you're Selling, you're selling a feeling, you're selling an emotion. And so and then, so and then it's all people on people contact. Right. So you have instructors that deal with students that then pay and the salespeople. And so building that times multiple locations is the hard. I would never, I like, I love the experience I got in martial arts but that is a business I would not want to scale and there are very few people who have scaled that past 10 locations. I mean it's just very, very, very difficult and it's not that profitable. It's like super thin margins. So yes, to answer your question, directly scaling a martial arts business directly impacted my ability to scale this business. And I think we're just getting started. I don't even really feel like we've scaled that much. But, but I, but setting the systems up, I mean it's so much nicer to be in a business where what I'm selling is needed, not desired and like is a disposable income kind of expense I'm in something that people need that's way easier to sell than hey, you really should get your kid in martial arts because it will help his discipline and his confidence. Like it's, it's easier to sell the housing.
So I hope that kind of answers your question. I kind of answered that in a roundabout way but yeah, I brought a lot of those lessons in for sure.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: You've scaled the management though. How did you have you scaled the management even dealing with, you know, difficult tenants? What are, what are some of the big hurdles in the management side of multiple. I mean you've got hundreds of co living spaces. It's and basically lots and lots of people living together in very close quarters. How do you handle that?
The arguments that may arise or the dis unhappiness that may arise with those people living together?
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a super valid question. I lived, I think it helps me, it helped me to scale the management of co living because I lived in co living homes for 13 and a half years and I understood a lot of, lot of what could happen in a co living home. So I'm just going to read off a little list here that I just quickly pulled up while you were asking this question. Of all the things that could go wrong in a co living home and these are just a few, I won't even go all of them. But I think this will give people the balance to what I'm saying like the pro of co living, you can actually get a single family home to cash flow 2, 3, 4. Somebody in my course told me the other day that they have one home and a cash flow is $5,000 a month, one home. And I was like, holy cow, I haven't even heard. Like, it's insane. The con of co living, what I'm about to redo is the con, right? So someone could be smoking in the house and they shouldn't be smoking, they could be doing drugs in the house. So you have to have a system, a flow for that. We have a flow that includes a warning, a fine and then termination of their membership agreement, right? Someone could be, someone could be having too many guests overnight because we limit it to five. So someone could be complaining, hey, Johnny in room three is like having his girlfriend over every night. And I thought that wasn't part of the rules. So you got to have a flow for that, right?
Someone could be being too loud and we have a. I'm literally just reading off of like our systems of like the fines we have and all this is obviously written in the membership agreements. So I'm giving people the real, real here for a second. Someone could be, and this is going to sound crazy, someone could be stealing someone else's food.
Not you have to deal with in a multifamily building, right? Like, but we have a freaking flow for this and in extreme cases we terminate membership agreements for this, right? These are the things you just, when someone complains about pests that, that I guess could be in a multi family building, obviously. And I'll just go through a couple more because I really want people to understand, right? But this, these are the things like it takes some work to figure out and if we, if you figure it out and you're willing to kind of learn it, then you have, there's a risk, reward to life, right? And that's what we're able to do. I have a whole flow here for WI fi issues because we provide the WI fi and as you can imagine, if WI fi is down, like people work from home, it changes their life. And guess who has to deal with WI fi issues, right? So these are just a few of the things and I have a whole flow, whole, whole flow for violent behavior, someone getting aggressive.
I laugh and I say this because I want people to not just be, walk away from this, hopefully inspired and like, well that sounds cool, I could do this. But like there are nuances and systems and things you've got to figure out to make this work. Now if you figure those things out, you have a beautiful business model. But though I think Coming from the martial arts world, I was able to implement flows and systems. One of my mentors taught me this phrase in the martial arts because I had a really good business mentor in martial arts and he would, he'd be like, every time I'd bring him a problem, like, I'd be like, I have this new problem. You've probably never heard of it before. This student is, this was in the martial arts, he would say this thing, he'd be like, Sam, the salt goes here, the pepper goes here and the menu goes in the middle. And his, that was his way of basically being like, I don't care what the nuanced issue is. There's a system refer back to the SOP manual. So we've kind of brought that into the co living and that's. Just had that talk last week with my team. Yeah.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Now, do you, do you manage properties for other investors? Maybe they just buy it and they're. Maybe they're a lawyer, maybe they're a doctor, a CPA or whatever. They're already busy, they've got other business and they don't want to deal with that. Do you handle that for them?
[00:28:34] Speaker A: So, so we have. Yeah. Again, I laugh because we get this question probably five or six times a week. I mean we get emails like, would you please manage my co living property? I have one in Charlotte. Or I'd like to have one in Charlotte, whatever. And our, and our typical answer is no. And so we will only right now, now I'm not saying this won't change. We're building a great team where we are trying to scale even more, but we are, we will only manage for our highest level clients. We have a program called Inner Circle Platinum where we actually like it's a done for you service. So our team finds the home, rehabs the home, decorates the home and then manages the home. So we only allow those homes into our portfolio or the, or homes that my wife and I buy right now. So it's like my, our homes and our students portfolio homes just because it's hard.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: We could have another 200 doors tomorrow if I change that. But it's just not like we're, it's. It's a lift.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: Well, and that, that makes sense. I mean there's a for instance here in Orlando. I've got a big yard and I kept going to this one landscaping company. I saw they had beautiful yards all over and I kept going to them and I said, would you please take over handling maintaining my yard?
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: And they go, no, And I go, why not? And they said, we didn't design it, we didn't install it. If we don't in install it, design it, we're not maintaining it because we, we maintain, we put the yards in, in a way that we can maintain them the most cost effective way, the easiest way we can do it. And it sounds like you've sort of got that same model. It's like, well, if we didn't set it up to begin with, we're not going to jump into somebody else's problem.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: That's 100% true. Actually, to double down on that point. And you guys have those really nice yards in Orlando. That's, that's, that makes sense to me because you have those, like really pristine. A lot of HOAs in Orlando. We got some students in Orlando and they always complain like every neighborhood's in an hoa. You said no. It's kind of funny. But yeah, to double down on that point, I had, when we, my property management company went through a little bit of a crisis about six months ago where I just had the long leadership team, wrong team in general. And the first thing I did when I stepped back in and rehired a team for it was we fired about eight clients. And just like, we don't want to, like, you are not our model. So That's a, it's 100%. 100%, right.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: And I think that's any business owner, they, there's so many business owners are so scared to ever get rid of a client. You know, they're chasing that $1, but chasing that $1, you're losing 10 because you're spending so much time on this. And it's, it's that pareto principle that 20% of your clientele will be 80% of your problems.
And, you know, 20% will be 80% of your profit. So you've just got to find the right 20% you want to keep. And just in the rest, and you talked about you're coaching your students, things like that. How does that program work for you?
[00:31:28] Speaker A: You know, we recently revamped it to where we kind of have three levels of ways that we help people get into this game. We have like, you do it on your own, but you need every system, every process, every script, the things I just mentioned, every video, everything that we do. And so we just give that to people and they go out and they do it on their own. And we have a program where we do it with you. And when I say with you, it means people come to us. And we coach them one on one with, with our coaches and coach them one on one. And we like hold their feet to the fire and there's just a lot of accountability around the done with you. And then they get access to our events and like, it's just a lot more involved. And then we have a really high level program called Inner Circle Platinum that is our done for you. And it's people who are just like, I gotta have a million bucks. And I believe in this model and I don't have any other place I can get 15, 20% cash on cash return plus all the other benefits of real estate. So like, let's freaking go. Your team does it for me. So we go out, we acquire properties, we do the whole A through Z. And they could be in California, but they're buying in Charlotte. With my team and my management, we have a couple of affiliates. We can do Houston and Dallas and St. Pete, we can do a couple other markets as well. A couple of really great market Asheville. We've got a few homes in Asheville, which I know is you got a second home there, which is really cool.
So I say all that to say that's kind of how the coast you do it. We do it with you and then done for you. And we just found that that opens up a place for everybody to kind of get involved in co living if they want to get involved in college. We're not shoving it down anybody's throat. We're just sharing the message of you can't in life. I feel like it's rare. We all have those friends that are profit, profit, profit, profit, profit. And then we have those friends that are like Mother Teresa's that are just like, give, give, give, give, give and never ask. Right. I think this is like this really cool marriage. And I think it comes along once in a lifetime kind of thing where it's like, wait, I can be solving one of the biggest problems in America, at least for a certain income bracket, and I can actually have some of the highest cash flows in the market today. Like that seems like a win win to me. And so that's what we're trying to promote is just showing people like, hey, this can be a really profitable thing.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: And it can be really good and.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: It won't be profitable forever because everybody eventually profitable things become not profitable because big money gets involved and it gets saturated. Right. Airbnb kind of got to that point, in my opinion. So I'm going a little rant there. But that's kind of how we Think about this market and how we're helping people get involved. And I think now is the time to get invol, not five years, ten years from now.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds like a saying that one of my friends used to have. He, he always said to live with the classes, you deal with the masses. And that's really true. What do you find is probably three of the top pieces of advice you're giving to folks who are getting into this or getting into business on their own in general? Since, I mean, now you've done at least two business models. What are three big pieces of advice you find yourself given over and over to folks?
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Wow.
Well, I'll start with maybe a piece of advice that's more business related.
It's so cliche to say it, but I just, I say it because I hope people hear it on this podcast. They hear it on another podcast. They hear it from everybody. Like, I am who I am today because of the people I've hung around for sure.
And so just even getting, I feel like podcasts are such a cool way to do this job because people get, they get to sit with you on this podcast. Like, it's like sitting in your living room. Like, we chatted for 15, 20 minutes before this, and I was like, I felt like I was in your living room. We were chatting about life and I got to know you and I learned a few things just in that conversation. So I, yeah, if someone's listening to this, awesome, congrats, keep up the good work. But you got to get around people whose expectations are higher. I think one motivational speaker says, you know, you will always live up to the expectations, to the direct expectations of your peers. So I think, and I like that way that's worded because a lot of people say, well, you're the average of the five people you hang around. And I don't believe that. I believe you were, you were the average of the people's expectations that you respect. Because I have people I hang around, I spend a lot of time with them, but, like, they make way less money, but I still hang around them and spend a lot of time with them. And I'm not, I don't feel like that's bringing me, quote unquote down. I love these people, but there are people that I look up to in a business world, right, that, that pull me up because they have a higher expectation of what I'm going to make next year, of who I'm going to serve next year, how I'm going to serve next year. So I think just, you know, who, who's around you and what are their expectations of you? And you want people around you with high expectations of you, right? So that's been really powerful, I think just as a general rule for me. And I know that's cliche to say and it's popular in this world, but that would be one, one piece, you asked for three second piece of advice. Co living or business. In co living specifically, I would just say the biggest thing is buy a bigger house.
I get these people that'll go into the co living world and they'll be like, okay, Sam, like I found a 1500 square foot house and it's gonna have four rooms. Like that's co living, right? And I'm like, hey, the minimum we look at is six. We won't even touch a home unless it's six. And right now I can't tell you the last time I bought a 6 or a 7. It's 8, it's 9, it's 10. And I know that sounds crazy to people listening to this and they're like, there's no way that works. How's that legal? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like there are people doing this times thousands of I'm doing it times hundreds. But you mentioned you had E on the podcast. He's a good friend of mine, he's a pad split guy there. They just hit 16,000 rooms, right? So my point in saying all this is you gotta, you gotta kind of go bigger. One of my, one of my good friends just bought his second home in LA and he paid, you know, he paid a lot of money for this house the height of COVID and he was going to start with a four bedroom home. And his mentor at the time just said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Go all out by the biggest dang home you can find in la. So he did and he turned it into he's got a nine bedroom home and he's got a 10 bedroom home. And from that he nets like $6,500 a month from these two home.
And he quit his like big corporate job that was making him like six figures. And so it's like a really cool story. He's 29, I think, 29, 28, like this young kid, right? So it's like there's a, there's a story of someone who was going to go small, but then got mentorship and decided, hey, this can work with the right systems at a bigger level, right? And so the cash, the cash flow difference between a four bedroom Home. And an eight bedroom home is insane, right? The net. Because the last three people are all your profit, the last four people are all your profit. First three or four pay all your bills. Right? So that's, that's one thing we kind of consistently kind of push people on. Like, hey, it's okay to have a little bigger house. And some people aren't comfortable with 7, 8, 9, 10. I, one of my students just launched an 11 bedroom home and it's full. It's crazy. But like even that blew my mind, right? So it can work at these bigger levels. Some people are more comfortable six or seven. But that's another piece of advice. And then if I had a third piece of advice, co living, you know, I'll go co living. Since we're kind of deep diving into that. I would just say beginners in real estate never underwrite a home accurately because they don't put in enough cushion.
And so one of the things I feel like I'm coaching people on a decent amount is like, hey, you need capital expenditures. What happens when a roof goes out or fridge goes out? You're gonna need just miscellaneous repairs. Like let's stick a budget in for both of those. Your vacancy is not going to be 3%, it's going to be 8 to 10%. Right. Like just adding in this cushion where the numbers are, are accurate and that way if something crazy happens, you have a cushion, you're protected a little bit. And so that's a lot of what we coach people on is just making sure they're making good decisions. They're not doing it wrong. They don't. We're trying to keep people from having to go for a decade to the school of hard knock. Same thing you do, Joe, for people that want to protect their assets. And like, yeah, I could go figure all that out. I could have chat GBT tell me and like, but like you're still probably going to do it wrong, right? Like so better to pay the money and just do it right from the beginning instead of going to the school of hard knocks like I'm sure both of us have for a decade. Plus plus, plus, Right.
So that's my, that's my advice.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Okay, well you've said that you can, as an investor, you can make a go of it. Once you get to five homes, you're, you're set. Why, why five? What, what is that magic number? How did you come up with that?
[00:39:33] Speaker A: So I run, yeah. So I run these things called five day challenges. And in these five day challenges kind of A free event I just put out there. Anybody's interested, they can just join my next five day challenges. I do an hour and a half to two hours of training on co living every night. I do them once a month. Once every month, you know, it's kind of whatever. And in that we have this exercise, we have them go find, we teach them how to find a co living home. Then they go into their market on one of the days, like day three of the challenge, and then they go, then they do some numbers on it and they tell me what it cash flows.
And based on that. Oh, and then I forgot to tell this part. On day one, we have them go figure out how much money they need to become financially free at the lowest level. So we have three levels of financial freedom that we teach. We've got the ramen noodle level. Like, you're not making any more money. Maybe you're eating ramen noodles, but you're surviving. Then you've got comfortable, which is probably what you're living on now. And then you have what we call baller, as my Australian coach says, balla. But it's the baller number is you're flying private, you're doing everything you want to do, right? And so there's levels to financial freedom. And I wish people would understand that there's levels to this because you need to celebrate along the way. You can't just make it, such as someone the other day, what it takes for them to become financially free. And they were like 100,000amonth. I'm like, you're living on four. A hundred is not like, what? No, like, let's start at 4, right? So I'm trying to get people through. Sometimes people make this financial freedom goal just so big, no one's ever going to start, right? So I try to break it down for them. And then on day three or four of this challenge, I asked them, based on the cash flow from these homes, how many would it take to get to your first level of financial freedom? Your ramen noodle number. And it's crazy. We'll be, well, a couple hundred people on every challenge. And I'll see in the chat, I'd be like 1, 11 and a half, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5. Every once in a while I'll have someone be like seven. I'm like, that guy's living high already. He's living on a lot, you know. But these are homes that cash flow anywhere from on the low end, a thousand to on the high end, three or four thousand. You don't need a hundred of these homes to retire. Like, not unless your goal is to fly privately. Right. Like so, so, so when I just think about the average person, and I could tell you story after story of people who have gone through, have a home, have two homes, have three homes, and that's comfortable enough for them to live where they're living. And it's a really beautiful thing. But I grew up in real estate. All my real estate mentors were like, Sam, you got to get about a thousand multifamily units before you retire. And I'm like, a thousand multifamily units? Like, okay, do you got to get 300? Whatever the number is? You know, everybody's got different numbers. So I think it's just a really powerful strategy to come out and be like, look, I'm not promising people can become financially free with five homes, but I am saying you can get pretty dang close, obviously based on your lifestyle. I'm not making an earnings claim on this call, but I'm saying that the power is there with this strategy. And five homes is doable. Like, anybody can get five homes. Like, you can buy five if you're willing to move five times in five years. You can get five homes for 5% down and do a primary residence for five years. And that could be your retirement plan. You have five Colby homes. They're each making two grand a month. That's 10 grand a month. That's $120,000 a year. You're in the top 20% of earners in America. Congratulations. And anyway, I get passionate about this subject, Joe, so I'm ranting and raving now, but that's, that's kind of how we got to that number. And it's a little hook for people to understand, like, whoa, okay, let me. What is this all about? And it's not, it doesn't have all the management. I mean, it does have a lot of management, but it doesn't have as much manage as short term rentals. Right, right. It's still a long term client or member that's in that home. It's not a hotel that's cycling through every week. So I think there's, there's even that play of like, it is more stable income than short term rentals. Right.
Helene hit Asheville and I didn't have a short term rental booking for the next three months, man. Like, it was rough. And we got eight of them. So I was like, this is gonna hurt very badly. And like. But our, but our co living homes in Asheville were fine, like, so I think there's a. There's a lot of power in producing that stable income through co living.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: I want to talk to you offline about the water situation, Nashville. Whenever you lost water at those co living houses, how did y'all handle that? That's going to be interesting to do that.
Couple of things. Number one, we.
Our mission is to help people aspire to a better life. And so we're constantly trying to give people ideas of what they can do to improve their life. You know, put ideas out there for them and the reason. And a lot of people ask me, they go, why do you do this, Joe? Why do you have these podcasts? Why do you do this? You know, because this isn't really legal related.
And I go, it's sort of the, the old thing that I would set people's businesses up, I'd set their LLCs up, I would handle all their real estate, asset protection and financing, everything they had to do with it, title to get it right. But I kept seeing them fail because they'd bring in partners or they even their family, and everything would just sort of fall apart into entropy over time. So I felt like, okay, well, I've got to give them the tools to succeed in. In business and life, too. Not just, not just this one tool of, okay, yeah, I can give you asset protection and I can, I can fit this here. I've got to help you succeed. So you do aspire to a better life. So that brings me to my question that I ask all my guests before we're done is, who is a person who has helped you aspire to a better life?
[00:45:00] Speaker A: Yeah. I first want to say, dude, I admire the hell out of what you just said, because I think it's like, it just takes a niche that you're in and just expands it. And I really believe that. I, I feel you'll be blessed because of that mission. I just think that's amazing. So, yeah, it really is inspiring to me, too. Who. Who's helped me have a better life? Man, the. My first thought, obviously, my mom and my dad and I love my mom and my dad to death. They were.
They were limit pushers in their own way. My parents homeschooled before. It was cool. They were juicing carrots and stuff. Like, they were health nuts, man. Before, it was like a juice shop was on every corner. Like, they were. They were pioneers in a really cool way. But I think if I had to give a big shout out on this podcast, I would just want to give A shout out to. I had two martial arts instructors, we called them Master Clements and Master Arthur. Just two men in my life who my life would be radically different if they'd never entered it. And they, they pushed me.
They turned me into an amazing martial artist, but they turned me into an amazing leader and someone who I was an introverted kid who couldn't look you in the eyes and shake your hand at the same time. And so even to be on this podcast is a miracle. And it's directly related to these two guys who built my confidence, who believed in me when I was young. I mean, I was running a martial arts school when I was 14 years old, 15 years old, and so these guys just came alongside of me and said, you can do it. And so I hope by hearing this story, my life is forever different because of that. And so I hope people hearing this, you know, some people need that in their lives and some people need to be doing more of that and bringing people up around them and saying, hey, I believe in you. You can do that. Because just those words radically transformed my life, you know, 18, 19 years ago. And so I'm really grateful to Master Arthur and Master Clements and them pushing me in business too. It's really beautiful.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Well, and what I've been hearing, Sam Weigert, Level 5 Black Belt Co living expert, Think bigger and bring those up around you. I think is, is the lesson I'm hearing here. Think, think big and be confident, but also be a little careful because there's some landmines.
[00:47:12] Speaker A: Spoken like a true lawyer, Joe.
[00:47:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Always, always be a little careful. How can people get hold of you if they want to follow you and, and learn more about you?
[00:47:23] Speaker A: Yeah, man, I put a ton of stuff out on Instagram, so just Instagram at my name at samwegert. That's pretty easy. Or if people are interested in learning more about co living, absolutely. The best way is to get on the waiting list for our next five day challenge. Super simple. They can just go to scaleyourrealestate.com www.scaleyourrealestate.com and just register there for the next challenge.
[00:47:44] Speaker B: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. I think it was great for our audience. I think people learned a lot here. And until next time, everybody trust this.
Thanks for listening to this edition of Trust this. If you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next time, keep aspiring to a better life.
