Welcome to Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host Marco Santarelli. One thing I haven't done for a very, very long time is a client spotlight. Every once in a while I like to have a real estate investor, whether they're a client of ours or not on the show, to talk about themselves, their journey, their experience with real estate investing, their trials and tribulations, where they have succeeded, where they fall, and, you know, just talk about things that they've learned and, and maybe it'll be something that can help inspire you or get you to that next level in your real estate investing journey.

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So with that, I'd like to welcome Scott Saunders to the show. Scott, welcome!

Marco. It's great to be with you today. Thanks.

Well, I'm glad you're on. We've been talking about this for literally months. I mean, it was, I remember it was last year I was driving up to Lake Tahoe for one of our Power Room mastermind meetings, and we were discussing things that you were working on as far as kind of an educational platform and your investing journey. Now, full disclosure, you are a client, a Nora real estate investment, and you've been doing very well on your own as well as through us. And I don't have an official bio for you, but I'm gonna throw it over to you and just say, Scott, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Great, Marco. I appreciate that. Well, I, I wear a couple of hats professionally. I'm in the 10 31 exchange space. I'm a senior vice president with a company called Asset Preservation. I've done 10 31 exchanges, Marco, if you can believe it or not, since 1988. So I've been doing that a long time, helping people defer capital, gain taxes, build their real estate portfolio. So I do that professionally. Then on the side, personally, I'm a real estate investor. I started probably about 20 years ago or so investing in real estate. And then at the last few years I've really kind of accelerated that and been acquiring more assets and really growing that side. And so it's really been a journey like it is for everybody. Like you said, it really well you, you've got ups and downs you know, a few, few painful learning experiences and happy to kind of share some things that have gone right and maybe some things I would've done differently that might be benefits to other investors out there.

So for me, I wanted to jump in and said, you know, I want to, I wanna start swimming in that pool, not just watching other people do it. So my first investment was probably about 20 years ago. It was a little fourplex in town, kind of what I call a c class fourplex. And I did everything wrong on that. Right. I, I bought it, I was gonna manage it, screen the tenants. I'm not handy at all. I can barely change the light bulb, so, right. I thought I could paint the walls and take care of it. I was naive. I bought a C-class building and I thought, you know, I'm gonna make this nice. I'm gonna landscape and make it pretty. I'm gonna repaint, I'm gonna put in some fence for kids to play. And the reality is I put all that time and effort in.

It was still a seaquest building on a seaquest street. It didn't change the quality of 10 at all. And yet I put a lot of, you know, blood, sweat and tears in. And then I just learned the hard way. I'm not good at managing properties. I'm not good at maintaining them. I'm not really excited about screening tenants when I work full-time. And so at the end of the day that that fourplex was sold, now it's probably not wise. I probably should have gotten a property manager done something to hold onto it cuz it's now tripled in value from where I bought it, you know, in the early two thousands. So that was kind of a, a first experience and it really now guided me to doing things much more passively. You know,