Transform Your Investments: Networking Secrets for Real Estate Success

Ed Weinberg (00:00.502)
Ahem.

Dylan Silver (00:01.015)
Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel, the nation’s premier real estate mastermind. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the podcast, we have Ed Weinberg. Ed has been a real estate investor since the mid 1980s and invests in syndications and is going to talk with us as well about creatively buying businesses from tired business owners, something I’m very interested about. Ed, welcome to the show.

Ed Weinberg (00:30.808)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (00:32.171)
Absolutely, it’s a pleasure to have you. I’d like to start just from the top, a little bit about your background and how you got into real estate.

Ed Weinberg (00:41.018)
well, I read some books that, that talked about real estate investment. was really a while before I got into it. in, I got into it in Connecticut. I’m in, I’m in, Florida now. Real estate down here is a lot different locally in all the major cities in Connecticut. There are plenty of multifamily houses. Most of them are.

Some twos were turned into threes. Most built be in the first two decades of the 1900s, which means today they’re over a hundred years old. They really didn’t build any multifamilies after the forties. So there were lots of them. I could get into it at the time with five or 10 % down. And that’s what I did.

Dylan Silver (01:27.042)
Thank you.

Ed Weinberg (01:37.344)
I bought a house, multifamily. The value of it went up. I refinanced it. Of course, they didn’t give me as much money or the loan to value ratio that they promised me originally. But from that, I bought another one and continued on. I did specialize basically in

Dylan Silver (01:43.234)
you

Thank

Dylan Silver (02:01.536)
you

Ed Weinberg (02:06.05)
in at the time in long term, something happened around 1990, the collapse of the of the savings and loan associations. So all of a sudden, something like 25 % of the real estate in these large cities were owned by organizations with three and four letters like FDA or FDIC. So at that point,

Dylan Silver (02:13.452)
Thanks.

Ed Weinberg (02:35.566)
And they really had a very good way to dispose of real estate then. The government decided that they were going to do auctions and quarterly I could go to an auction in a room with 4,000 other investors and that day they would they would auction off seven, 800, maybe 850 houses. And then you go in the back of the room or in the next room and there’s very easy financing. So

Dylan Silver (02:39.938)
Hmm.

Dylan Silver (03:03.808)
Mmm.

Ed Weinberg (03:04.888)
During that, we’d go quarterly, we’d buy some single family houses, we’d fix them up, and we’d sell them. I today I call it real estate redevelopment. A lot of people call it flipping. I’ll tell you, we didn’t know that it was called flipping. You know why? There were no TV shows. Right, and it’s the TV shows, flip this, flip that, flip this house.

Dylan Silver (03:20.341)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (03:26.068)
Why?

Great.

Ed Weinberg (03:34.87)
Anyway, today I mostly join venture with people. lend money from my IRA. I’m involved in some real estate commercial and mostly commercial real estate as a limited partner syndications. And I am a partner in a syndication that buys creatively buys

Businesses from tired business owners.

Dylan Silver (04:07.105)
I have lots of questions about the tired business owners. And in fact, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this woman, Cody Sanchez, but she wrote a book that I’m reading. And basically, the whole book is centered around that idea. But before we get into that, and I do want to touch in on that, before the podcast started, you mentioned electrical engineering background. Were you, when you got your first deal and then when you got your next couple, were you…

full-time engineer at the time or how did that work? Because I know a lot of folks who are newcomers will be listening to this and they may be asking themselves, well, you I’m not an engineer and I’m not in the real estate space, but I’ve heard that real estate is how you can build wealth in America. But, you know, I don’t know how to get in. It seems like everyone, you know, is going to the next fad that they see online. And you were there before, really, that was a resource.

So how did you manage to do both and what was that like for you?

Ed Weinberg (05:10.478)
Well, okay. So when you say a resource back then, I read lots of books about real estate, uh, rather than go the rather than going online and, um, and, and, finding courses there, uh, there’s a guy named Marco Haraldson who had a, I’m trying to remember what they call it financial freedom, uh, get togethers.

once a year down in Orlando and I’d go to those. I’d hear 10 different speakers. Maybe I’d buy two or three tape sets. Yeah, they were on cassette then. I mean, they went from cassette to CD to DVD and now they are online. you might go to your, to your local RIA.

Dylan Silver (05:53.394)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (06:02.099)
Right.

Ed Weinberg (06:08.196)
which is, I, first of all, there are two things I recommend for anybody starting out. First of all, make sure that you join your local RIA. RIA is real estate investment association. There is one in just about every major city. the other is on, on some online service that you use. Maybe it’s Facebook, maybe it’s one of the others. I’m more on Facebook than the other, social media.

join a group and I’m a member of both local groups in that that concentrate in in certain states or if the state’s busy big enough in certain cities and I’m a member of some national ones too. As a matter of fact, I have a Facebook group for real estate investors in Connecticut, which has over 12,000 members and I started it and it grew so if

Dylan Silver (07:02.527)
Mmm.

Ed Weinberg (07:06.19)
If you live in a certain area and there isn’t one, maybe you could start your own. Yes, it takes years to get up to where you’re going to have multiple thousands. well, number one, it’s a good way to network. Number two, you can ask questions there. And the questions that you might ask in a national forum are different than ones that you’d ask in a local. If you have, for instance, every single state.

has different laws with regard to say eviction. So if you went into, I see this all the time, people go into a national group and say, they haven’t paid in two months. How do I evict them? And the answer is, well, you didn’t even tell us what state you’re in. If you said you were in a state I’m familiar with, and nobody can be familiar with all of them, but if it was a state I’m familiar with,

Dylan Silver (07:50.973)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (07:55.346)
Yep.

Ed Weinberg (08:04.844)
then I would, you know, I might be able to answer that question. mean, the first thing I’d recommend doing is finding an attorney who knows how to do that. And by the way, I am a real estate agent in Connecticut with Keller Williams.

Dylan Silver (08:21.202)
have a soft spot for Connecticut because my family is actually from

Ed Weinberg (08:25.046)
I’m sorry, I’m a real estate agent in Florida with Keller. I was a real estate agent in Connecticut when I lived there. moved down here about six years ago.

Dylan Silver (08:35.006)
I said before the podcast, said I love Florida. I love me some Florida. go to the Dominican Republic. I eventually would love to move there, honestly. But every time that I go, I go through Fort Lauderdale or Miami. And then I’ve had a relative who lived in Tampa. And of course, I’ve been to Orlando. They’re just beautiful, beautiful cities. But I was saying, yeah, my family way back when was from Connecticut. They were the Griswold clan. And there’s apparently a Griswold Connecticut.

have a soft spot for Connecticut. But what you said, you know, resonates with me as someone along this journey and I think will resonate with a lot of people because I started with the RIA, you know, and I don’t even really know how I stumbled into it, but it ended up, I got to the RIA, I ended up going to a conference. From the conference I saw people who were doing what I wanted to be doing and I said, you know, there’s something here, it’s not just

fluff, I can see myself as these people coming from a similar background. what stopped me initially was what I think stops a lot of people is kind of this analysis paralysis. And so from the time that you saw the Marco Harrelson tapes and the get togethers, was it like you dove in head first and you did your first deal or was it like

More of a, let me do all of the due diligence.

Ed Weinberg (10:05.674)
Okay. So I was living in, after I got out of college, I was in the Baltimore metropolitan area. and, then I got a job. I changed jobs to a different engineering, a company, different company in Connecticut. I moved there and I had this sticker shock when I saw what it cost to rent an apartment.

So I looked around, I saw what it cost where I wanted to live. And then I saw where it cost in one of the major cities and found that not, they were all, was a lot less than a major city and that I could afford to buy something. But generally all I’m going to be able to afford to buy is a multifamily. by, by the way, the, the, the, the amount of money a bank would lend me had nothing to do with what I felt comfortable in paying.

Dylan Silver (10:55.036)
Mmm.

Dylan Silver (11:04.443)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (11:05.078)
So, you know, the two things where they, they would let you borrow up to X percent of your salary. And I thought that was, I think the thought that the interest rate I’d been paying was too much. So I, I bought a, I bought a three family and I moved into one floor. The other two floors were already rented out and it was, it was actually a very different lifestyle.

Dylan Silver (11:29.434)
huh.

Ed Weinberg (11:33.23)
grew up in New York state and I had many, I had contemporaries of mine who lived in New York City and they were in one room apart, they’re maybe making what I make, but they’re in one room apartments. I had a two bedroom apartment with a living room and a dining room. They’re in an apartment

with plaster falling off the walls and cracking, that were built, I don’t know how many years ago, but maybe weren’t as well maintained. And even if they were, they’d never been updated. So I had what I thought for me was, number one, there are several ways that you increase your…

Dylan Silver (12:06.641)
Yep.

Dylan Silver (12:19.772)
Right.

Ed Weinberg (12:31.65)
your equity in a property, one, you move in, do some work on it. two, your tenants are paying off your, your mortgage and three, have appreciation and all of those together means that after so much time, you’re going to make money. Now you could buy a single family house, but the house you live in isn’t an asset. Assets pay, excuse me, assets pay you money.

Dylan Silver (12:53.21)
We

Dylan Silver (12:56.528)
Right.

Ed Weinberg (13:02.146)
Your car isn’t an asset. You put money into your car. Your single family house, if you’re living in it, that’s not an asset. If you retire, you can sell your single family house, but where are you gonna live? Today with the increase in prices and the increase in interest rate, there’s a lot of people out there who could sell their…

Dylan Silver (13:05.68)
I learned this the hard way.

Ed Weinberg (13:27.502)
I don’t know, 2200 square foot house, move into a 1200 square foot house and have the same payment.

Dylan Silver (13:34.864)
Yep. You said something interesting. The multifamily dwelling that you got was actually at a lower price point than the single-family homes. Was that common and is that still the case?

Ed Weinberg (13:48.79)
Okay, it was at a lower price point per unit.

Dylan Silver (13:52.952)
Okay, okay, okay.

Ed Weinberg (13:54.776)
So if I bought one house with what was one unit, then I’d probably pay almost as much, maybe more than, than at that point, the multifamily multi. I’m, by the way, when I’m talking about multi, let’s, we can call them single family because the banks look at anything one to four family as being a single family dwelling. And

Dylan Silver (14:18.469)
single family.

Ed Weinberg (14:21.63)
In some ways it’s easier to get a loan, in some ways it’s harder to get a loan on a single family one to four house. I specialize generally in one to fours. I had a bunch of units in the city at a time.

Dylan Silver (14:29.807)
Ryan.

Ed Weinberg (14:42.592)
Anyway, know, if you don’t have any other questions, or we could get back to your questions, I was talking or I wanted to talk about buying businesses and

Dylan Silver (14:54.309)
Yeah, let’s dive in there. Let’s dive in. Well, actually, first, before we talk about that, what was the growth like? Because I think for a lot of folks that first deal to then buying businesses, there’s a lot in between. talk to us a little bit about the growth and maybe growing pains if there were any to get to where you were today, where you are today.

Ed Weinberg (15:12.334)
Well, I mean, of course there’s growing pains. You buy something, it goes up in value. And at the time, for instance, coming out of the, the, the, the, the real estate collapse, which happened in the nineties, or rather eighties to nineties, then there was another one in what? 207, 208, depending on how you count it where you are.

Dylan Silver (15:39.748)
Mm-hmm.

Ed Weinberg (15:39.954)
I mean, physically where you are in the country. I mean, I, I can tell you lots of stories about issues with, with tenants, mostly bad, some good, how difficult it is in, in, in, in Connecticut to do a lot of things like, evict people and how it isn’t a very landlord friendly state. I was lucky at the time and

Dylan Silver (15:42.256)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (16:08.022)
And I do not want to disparage section eight, because I hear people that swear by it. depending on where you are, section eight may be a good option for you, may be required if somebody shows up and wants to rent you and their money is coming from section eight, depending on where you live, you may be required to rent to them.

Dylan Silver (16:13.656)
Ryan.

Dylan Silver (16:31.808)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (16:35.854)
I’ve had good and bad experiences with them, good and bad experiences, renting to people, families, know, boyfriend moves in, isn’t supposed to be there, pets show up, people, I’m not going to say just, well, I’ve never really had one that was completely destroyed, but I did have one that I had to almost humigate. Then, you you’ve got

Dylan Silver (16:55.135)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (17:05.112)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (17:05.185)
bugs and squirrels in the attic.

Dylan Silver (17:11.738)
Do you think that there’s a way for folks who hear this, and I think a lot of people will, and they say, you know, that sounds like something that I wouldn’t be capable of dealing with because I’m working and I have a family, or even if I don’t, and I don’t know how to navigate, you know, an eviction or dealing with these type of issues, and it seems like a lot of liability if they destroy the place. Would you have any?

general broad strokes advice for or guidance for those folks based on your own experience.

Ed Weinberg (17:43.404)
Okay. I never learned how to evict anybody. the reason is because if you pick an attorney who knows how to do evictions, he knows what then, and by the way, what the, what the court is looking for and likes or doesn’t like changes over time. Not only that, but, a judge in Bridgeport, Connecticut might

be looking might, might, might kick it out in it for different reasons than a judge in New Haven, Connecticut. And, I’m, by the way, I’m picking two different things that are in the same state specifically because it’s going to be completely different in Massachusetts or, or Florida or say Texas, where it’s, it’s much easier to evict people. So, when it comes to not to, if you don’t know how to do something,

Dylan Silver (18:20.108)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:32.032)
Ryan.

Ed Weinberg (18:36.898)
You have to hire someone that does. And I got to say that one of the things that I didn’t do early enough was hire other people when I should partner with other people when maybe I should outsource management to someone else more quickly than I should. And,

Dylan Silver (18:40.552)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (18:51.96)
Mmm.

Dylan Silver (19:00.493)
This is actually the first the first time that I’ve heard that feedback specifically. And it’s really important for listeners to hear because I’ve said on earlier podcasts that for newcomers it may seem like you just need more knowledge and more knowledge and more knowledge and more knowledge before you dive in your first deal. But I’ve said you know just being a fanatical network or kind of like a networking junkie can really get you across the finish line to your first deal. But then

having relationships can save you, you know, because if God forbid you do have to unfortunately evict somebody, which can happen, you know, they’re squatting on your property, you have to know how to handle that. And it can be scary when you don’t know who to turn to. So part of that networking is realizing, hey, let me build a strategic relationship with somebody. I don’t necessarily need them now, but…

Maybe I’ll need them to help me manage some of these deals when I have, you know, 10 of them. Maybe I’ll need this attorney in my back pocket when I have a legal issue that is going to require a lot of attention.

Ed Weinberg (20:10.924)
Yeah, well, I, I eventually did that. most, just about everything I do at this point is, is, is in partner. Like for instance, let’s say that you wanted to do things with, with, buildings that were five plus units. So with five plus units, they’re commercial. You’re getting, you’re definitely getting a commercial loan with one to four.

Maybe you’re getting a commercial loan. You have to decide if you’re buying it individually and I’m not an attorney, so I’m not going to tell you whether you should. I think it’s a good idea to use an LLC, but you ought to figure you ought to go talk to experts so they can explain to you why it’s a good idea. If you’re doing it with an LLC, you’re always getting a commercial loan. If you want to work on buildings that are larger than one to four.

The best thing that you can do, and I was really late on doing this is to partner with someone who’s already buying those buildings. So what can you do to help? Maybe you can help raise money. Maybe you can help, help with going out and there are, there are, are many, many, many jobs that happen between think saying you’re going to find a building.

Dylan Silver (21:12.976)
Yep.

Ed Weinberg (21:38.24)
closing on the building and then managing the building. if the bank may be very likely to lend you money for a five, for something with five units, maybe even if you don’t have any one to four units, maybe they’ll lend you money on 10, but there’s a certain economy of scale you get when you get over 20 or 30.

Dylan Silver (21:42.241)
Yeah, yeah.

Dylan Silver (21:57.59)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (22:05.59)
Speaking of economies of scale and doing things a little bit differently, let’s dive into creatively buying businesses. First of all, what is that to our listeners who may not know?

Ed Weinberg (22:19.02)
Okay, well, you can go out and start a business and you can look up online how many businesses that start are still in business after three years, five years and 10 years. And you’re not going to be really impressed with that number. If you find a business that’s been in business for five plus years, that is in some sort of an industry where

Dylan Silver (22:36.001)
Thank

Dylan Silver (22:41.943)
Good.

Ed Weinberg (22:47.822)
For instance at the turn of the century you would not want to You would want want to invest in a company that made horse-drawn carriages So we want something that’s been around Now, who do you want to buy from in real estate? the the the You get the best deals from someone we call a don’t want her You’ve heard that term before I’m sure

Dylan Silver (22:57.489)
Yeah

Dylan Silver (23:16.746)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (23:18.144)
Why would we not buy a business from someone who doesn’t want it either? So, one thing that many people do in order to find, to, find people to buy their houses from, or their multis from is to figure out a way why they’re not a, why they are a don’t want, or maybe somebody died and they just inherited the house. Maybe they’re going through a divorce.

Dylan Silver (23:22.774)
Mmm.

Ed Weinberg (23:43.694)
maybe they’re a landlord and, and you look at the eviction notices and you see that this landlord has one or two evictions in progress. Now, maybe there’s someone who might decide they want to sell this week. Maybe it’s someone who’s been advertising for a part of the, to fill an apartment for a long time. Well, we do the same thing with real estate. I’m sorry, with businesses, but, in businesses, there’s this, there’s this hump.

Dylan Silver (23:48.438)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (23:58.644)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (24:10.517)
you

Ed Weinberg (24:13.998)
in birth that happened. there’s a certain generation that’s called the greatest generation. And the next one after them is called the baby boomers. Then comes X and then Y, then Z, et cetera. But what we have right now are a lot of people who may be the greatest generation, may be baby boomers who want to retire. Maybe they

Dylan Silver (24:33.597)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (24:42.635)
Yep.

Ed Weinberg (24:43.778)
sent their entire, they last 30 years building this business. They have a legacy. The kids don’t want it. They want to do something else. me, I would be, third generation in direct mail advertising if I wasn’t the black sheep of the family who went to school for engineering. And then of course, over the time

Dylan Silver (24:50.07)
that kids don’t die.

Ed Weinberg (25:11.138)
between I graduated and now all direct mail advertising has a computer component to it because they weren’t using the computers then they are using computers so they’re mailing lists now. Anyway, what’s that?

Dylan Silver (25:18.087)
Right.

Dylan Silver (25:24.404)
They might need you now Ed, they might need you now to come in and modify their systems.

Ed Weinberg (25:28.91)
They might need me now, but so where was I? So they want to sell. There aren’t enough people who want to buy. Supply and demand says that the only way they can sell is to drop their price. how many people, I’m just pulling up my notes here. So how many, there are literally trillions of dollars that are going to change hands over the next 10 to 15 years.

And it’s like I said, because there just aren’t enough people that want to buy these businesses. so there’s a site called BizBuySell. BizBuySell is one of the websites that’s the equivalent of the Zillow for businesses. There’s another one called CXRI. They’re similar to each other.

Dylan Silver (26:20.661)
Mm-hmm.

Ed Weinberg (26:27.438)
80 % of the businesses on BizBuy-Sell won’t sell in a year. Even though, then I’m talking about profitable businesses and there’s lots of different reasons. They say 50 % of all SMBs and franchises are owned by founders who are at retirement age or older.

Dylan Silver (26:32.767)
Hmm.

Ed Weinberg (26:53.134)
75 % of all Baby Boomer businesses are profitable and Baby Boomer’s own 2.3 million SMBs, small to medium sized businesses. So if they can’t sell them, either the price comes down or you either get price or terms. I mean, this is, we’re talking everything you know about real estate.

Dylan Silver (27:05.97)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (27:09.716)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (27:15.838)
Business closes.

Ed Weinberg (27:22.196)
is very easily transferred into this space because we’re using the same techniques that many people here have been taught to how creatively buy real estate. We’re getting, we’re, doing a syndication where I syndicated fund. Fund means that we’re buying multiple businesses rather than just syndication typically buys one.

Dylan Silver (27:45.679)
Mm.

Ed Weinberg (27:50.606)
typically buys one thing. We’re, like I said, we’re buying multiple. And what can you do with the business? There’s a whole bunch of things you can do that we can do to make our business more profitable. First of all, we’re only looking for businesses that are profitable. We don’t want, in real estate, you might call it an alligator.

Dylan Silver (27:58.0)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (28:01.779)
Thank

Dylan Silver (28:08.327)
Right.

Ed Weinberg (28:18.018)
We don’t want alligators. don’t want to have, we never want to have a negative cashflow. We want to take something that already has a positive cashflow and do one of four or five things that we can do to increase the value and the income stream from the business. So one of the things that businesses often do, they call it a roll up. In a roll up, we might go out and find another similar business.

Dylan Silver (28:18.227)
Hmm?

Dylan Silver (28:40.019)
It’s all good.

Ed Weinberg (28:46.55)
and tack it onto the business. take for instance, let’s say an HVAC company, they do heating and air conditioning. So you have an HVAC company, I’m in Florida, let’s say that we buy one in Tampa. And after we buy one in Tampa, we see that there’s one for sale in Orlando. Well, Orlando, these are both very good markets. So let’s say that we buy a second one and we…

either leave it as that name or rebrand it, that gives us a larger economy of scale. There’s lots of ways we can save money. For instance, we don’t need, there were two businesses with two call centers. We don’t need two call centers anymore. We don’t need two accountants. We can handle all the marketing from one place.

Dylan Silver (29:18.949)
Okay.

Ed Weinberg (29:43.098)
And they tell me that if you bolt two of them together of a similar size, they more than double. Maybe they go to two and a half or three times their value because of the economy of scale. You also already know how to run one. And if you know how to run one, you probably can figure out how to run another. Now, because we’re going to be buying multiple businesses, the partners are not looking to buy something

Dylan Silver (29:46.053)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (30:08.409)
Right.

Ed Weinberg (30:12.418)
That’s a J-O-B. So we need to buy something that either has a management team today that can take over from the owner. If the owner leaves and the business falls apart, and the owner’s involved in every aspect of the business, it’s probably not one that we want, although we might install our own president or general manager of that particular business.

Dylan Silver (30:35.496)
it

Ed Weinberg (30:40.288)
So other ways we can make money, we might decide that we want to franchise it out. probably not, but it’s a possibility. the next thing we can do is we can add locations so we can expand towards, towards Orlando from Tampa. The next thing that we want to do with everything we buy, we call it a third leg. You might call it another stream of income.

Dylan Silver (31:01.843)
Hmm.

Ed Weinberg (31:09.154)
We want another way that we can make money using either the same equipment or maybe take the same equipment, use it in a different way or something that is allied. Like for instance, let’s say that we bought an HVAC system that’s specialized in homes. We might want to move into commercial. If we’re in commercial,

Maybe we want to make some changes. We want to get our sales trainer in there. Maybe we want to make sure if there’s two or three things that it does, see if we could cross train people so that the teams we send out are more flexible as to what they do.

Dylan Silver (31:45.425)
It’s just funny.

Dylan Silver (31:50.129)
Thank you.

Ed Weinberg (32:04.238)
let’s see. So,

Dylan Silver (32:04.55)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (32:10.702)
What are we doing? We buy a business. Uh, first, what businesses are we looking for? So I’m going to look at my notes here. We, first of all, you can buy any kind of business you want. And if you’re in a certain industry, maybe you want to buy, I know you’re doing real estate, um, maybe you want to buy a home services business. I was talking to somebody the other day who, uh, well, actually I partnered with him on a couple, um, last, last year he bought.

Dylan Silver (32:29.68)
Mm-hmm.

Ed Weinberg (32:40.398)
72 properties if they had that, that were zoned to put mobile homes on. if they, he, he did a knockdown of all the whole mobile homes. By the way, when I say he did, he didn’t do them all one day. This is as he went through, he had a pipeline and as he went through the year, he ended up doing 72. So, he knocked down what was there.

Dylan Silver (32:48.081)
Mm.

Ed Weinberg (33:08.11)
he bought things that were zoned for it so he could put new ones on depending on the age he may have had to, or what was available on the street. He may have dug a well, he may have done septic and he says, look, I’ve done all these septics in the last year and they just changed some, some of this, of the, the code here. So it now costs twice as much to do a septic as it did a year ago. Maybe I should buy a septic company.

Dylan Silver (33:29.796)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (33:38.598)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (33:39.286)
He’s already buying a company that a mortgage company and starting a real estate agency. So I guess you’d call this vertical alignment. So we want businesses. Now, example, you’re in Texas, right? So what was the high year? Did you say Houston or Dallas?

Dylan Silver (33:48.666)
Hmm

Dylan Silver (33:53.979)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (34:02.811)
Brian.

Dylan Silver (34:06.929)
I’m in Dallas, Dallas area.

Ed Weinberg (34:07.916)
Dallas and how hot was it last summer? Give me a high temperature.

Dylan Silver (34:12.369)
I was told, I was told, you know, can get up to like 115-ish, 120. I wasn’t here, but it gets hot. It gets hot.

Ed Weinberg (34:19.949)
Okay. So, by the way, I was in Houston the summer before last at a conference there and it was 103 degrees. So if it’s a hundred and th want to buy businesses of things that people need, not that they want. So, well, if it’s a hundred and if it’s 103 degrees and the HVAC system goes in your house, how fast do you need it replaced?

Dylan Silver (34:49.594)
Stat ASAP

Ed Weinberg (34:52.078)
Okay. If, um, if you’re, if you’re a seven 11 or a Wawa and your air conditioning goes or the, uh, the refrigeration goes on your food and it’s 102 degrees, even if it’s less than even if it’s 70 degrees. Okay. Here’s a hint. No one’s going to buy your warm beer.

Dylan Silver (35:11.014)
Yeah.

Ed Weinberg (35:17.174)
All right. And if you wait a certain number of hours, you’re going to have to throw out everything that’s perishable and put in for insurance. So if the, if the economy goes south, is Wawa still going to replace their air conditioner or their, their refrigeration? Absolutely. Especially if they’re in Florida or Texas.

Dylan Silver (35:26.904)
Brian.

Dylan Silver (35:40.624)
Absolutely.

Dylan Silver (35:45.518)
Yeah, they have no choice.

Ed Weinberg (35:46.986)
if it’s, if, if it’s, 15 degrees in Minneapolis below zero, how fast are you going to replace your heating? Same thing. Okay. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, established some specific industries we’re interested in HR, IT, marketing, accounting, insurance, and each of those,

Dylan Silver (35:57.174)
Pretty darn fast.

Ed Weinberg (36:13.88)
there’s another reason why we have this for instance if we buy an insurance business who do you think is going to supply insurance for all of our companies that are in the fun

Dylan Silver (36:20.56)
Thank you.

Dylan Silver (36:24.889)
We are.

Ed Weinberg (36:26.038)
We are. We are going to do it, and we’re going to charge them a right size price so that each individual one makes money. HR, recruiting, well, businesses need recruiters. And if they’re doing recruiting, maybe we could tack on HR because it’s similar.

Dylan Silver (36:32.176)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (36:42.713)
Yeah.

Thank

Ed Weinberg (36:54.638)
And if we tack on HR, then we can do HR for all of our businesses. And it’s kind of a roll up of that particular function that all our businesses do.

Dylan Silver (36:54.703)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (37:06.927)
actually have a buddy in San Antonio who’s a recruiter and we’re you know, it’s it’s tough because I want him in real estate and he wants me in in staffing and he’s constantly sending me opportunities. I’m so grateful for he actually showed me how to revamp my resume using chat GPT, which I was grateful for a while back and I told him hey, you got to go to real estate school champion school, which he’s going to. So I think there’s so much there and I could really talk about that specifically.

all day that the idea of not just buying one business which would be tremendous for folks who are listening but buying multiple and then interweaving them so that they’re getting fair pricing and that they’re all more profitable combining them where you where you are able to so that instead of having one you’re able to have two in the same and they’re doubly profitable but we are coming up on time here as much as I would love to talk about this all day with you.

Ed, where can folks get a hold of you?

Ed Weinberg (38:06.702)
Okay, well, the best place to get ahold of me, I’ll give you a telephone number, 321-558-2650. And you can reach me at podcast at letter q number 5, comm.com.

Dylan Silver (38:35.471)
I’m assuming you do you have a podcast that people that people can tune into?

Ed Weinberg (38:40.102)
I do not have an active podcast today. I am probably going to start one. I have had one in the past.

Dylan Silver (38:47.843)
Yeah, I think they’re just great tools. We’ve been doing this now with the real estate pros for three weeks. And I think all of us have gotten the bug, the podcast bug now. But that wraps up another episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel, the nation’s premier real estate mastermind. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. Until next time. Thank you.