Hello and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli, and I am glad you're joining me today because I do have a special guest, someone who's very interesting, and I just had a lot of fun with him over the last hour being a guest on his podcast. And we had a great conversation and we were all over the place, and that's what, you know, helped make it a lot of fun.

My guest today is James Nelson. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book called The Insider's Edge to Real Estate Investing. He's also a podcast host, which I believe is of the same name. He is also a principal and the head of Avison Young's Tri-State Investment Sales Group in New York City. And he's had a career that has lasted over 25 years. He has sold more than 500 properties and loans totaling over $5 billion.

James is also a serial real estate investor, and he has launched two real estate funds with total capitalizations over 350 million. This might be an old stat, but you can correct me on it and has many accolades, including being named the number one broker at Avison Young Globally, a Commercial Observer's Power 100 CoStar's Power Broker, and a REBNY, he'll have to explain this one to me, Deal of the Year award winner. And he regularly lectures at Columbia, Fordham, I believe it is NYU Wharton and his alma mater Colgate.

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So with that, James, welcome to the show.

Marco. Thank you so much for, for having me on. And yes, that was so great to spend the last hour and hearing your story. And just thank you for all the incredible content that you put out there and share for the real estate community. So, th this is, this is a lot of fun to now be on your show. Yeah,

No, it was a blast and it's great to do these back to back 'cause it just feels seamless, like it's just going from one to the other . But, you know, I, I tried to cover as much as I could in, in introducing you. It was kind of the bio I constructed. As I mentioned to you before. Why don't you take, you know, a minute or so and just tell us a little bit more about yourself so you can kind of flesh out what I've either missed or skimmed over.

Marco, that was perfect. And yes, as, as you mentioned, I've been doing this for over 25 years, and I know you are also a lifelong learner, and that's something that I certainly love about this business is every day we're, we're learning things that, that are new. But look, I didn't know about real estate when I got into it. I was an English major at Colgate. I didn't even know real estate was a thing. I was very lucky that the founder of Massey LER Realty Services was a Colgate along. They gave me a shot and started off as an investment sales broker, which is still what I do today. I sell apartment, buildings, office, retail development, industrial, pretty much everything except hotel. We have Avis and Young has a hotel business as well. But I've been doing that all along and I was very lucky early on my career to have the opportunity to invest in real estate and understand all the benefits that you talk about. And so that's been an incredible thing, was involved in two real estate funds as well that you mentioned. But the real passion, again, I love giving back, I love sharing, and I'm hoping that someone's listening to this today and will inspire them to, to jump in as well.

Yeah, it's great interviewing people like yourself that do like to educate and talk about real estate and the benefits of it and how to get involved in it at any level, you know, just to share what we've learned and the successes that we've had and carry it forward. So this is great. You know, I I have kind of a wide range of thoughts, topics, and questions that I want to ask you.