5 Crucial Lessons from the 2008 Financial Crisis for Real Estate Investors

Michael Stansbury (00:29.9)
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Mike Stansbury today, my special guest all the way from Dallas, Texas. Rob Anderson. Rob, how are you, sir?

Rob Anderson (00:52.849)
I’m great, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael Stansbury (00:54.082)
Well, good. Yes, sir. We’re excited to hear a little bit about your superpowers there in Texas. But first, we got to let everybody know about Investor Fuel. At Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs 2 to 5x their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Sorry about that, folks. Sometimes you get tongue-tied. You do this a little bit, a lot, and then you’re still not that great at it.

Rob, let’s talk about your origin story. what were you doing before you pivoted into real estate or got into real estate? What were you doing beforehand and what made you get into real estate as an investor, as maybe an entrepreneurial endeavor? What did that look like for you?

Rob Anderson (01:41.875)
Well, those are two different things. And you can blame Robert Kiyosaki because I read that book 25 years ago, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and I bought my first rental house in 2003. I’ve been married one year and I already convinced my wife to let me go buy a rental house. I was rather proud of that one. Now, mind you, that wasn’t a day job. I was working on a Wall Street-like career. I was selling investment products to financial advisors, the Morgan Stanley’s and Merrill Lynch’s of the world. And I did that for about 20 years.

for the day job, but my personal money, pretty much half of it was going into real estate. And so I was a little bit of a hypocrite there, you know?

Michael Stansbury (02:20.472)
So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So during the day, right, you’re working, but you also had this side hustle of you read the book, it affected you in a way you saw that assets can pay for your liabilities. And so at a very early time in your career, you just got after it with regards to real estate. And I get the dichotomy, right? They’re like, hey, what do you personally invest in? Stocks? What stocks are you picking today? And you’re like, I got all this residential real estate that I’m buying. How did you deal with the dichotomy there? Did you ever have to

know did anybody ever call you on the carpet on that or what

Rob Anderson (02:54.67)
No, I mean…

I owned a million mutual funds and other things at the time, right? Because you just do, it’s easy. you’d be surprised. I I’d say, gosh, I got to think, a large percentage of my financial advisor clients all had rental houses as well. So it wasn’t this, I joke about the hypocrite thing, but no, was pretty, it got pretty common. You know, in the 2000s leading up to, I mean, 08 changed some things, obviously. But I would say it wasn’t that uncommon.

also wasn’t something that you talked about a ton either unless you, you you gotta get to know somebody first and then you kinda, okay, here’s what I’m doing, you know.

Michael Stansbury (03:29.453)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (03:34.606)
Yeah.

Yeah, they got to have a little equity in your life and personal lives. I hundred percent. So tell me about, I always like to hear about what happened in 2008 because every real estate investor, everybody, every human being that was going through that time, it’s 2008 and then COVID is when like things changed and somebody pivoted or, somebody, somebody maybe lost it all or saw the opportunity to do a lot. So what, what did that, what did 08, what did that financial crisis, how did that

Rob Anderson (03:38.884)
Sure.

Michael Stansbury (04:05.156)
color or filter how you invested at that time and going forward.

Rob Anderson (04:09.266)
Well, I’ll tell you if anything, it taught me diversification and what that truly means. So being in that financial world, you know, there’s a lot of preaching on diversification, but what was interesting is back then diversification, I got securities license in the nineties. Okay. And so back then diversification was you spread your money across financial stock baskets, large cap value, growth, small cap, you know, some bonds.

balance funds, maybe a REIT fund if you’re really out there. You know, sector funds really weren’t there. That was diversification back then. Well, in 08, everything fell together. You didn’t have this benefit of diversification. I came up with this thing, I go, this whole thing about not having all your eggs in one basket was turned out to be an issue because people thought that was the case, but all those eggs were in the same basket. They were just spread out inside that basket.

Well, when that basket fell, they all kind of fell. I’ll never forget a financial advisor crying in 08, literally crying. Very successful lady. Because she didn’t know how to tell her clients that their bond portfolios were down 30%. Bonds, they should not fall 30%. That’s what happened back then for those of you who don’t remember. It was a brutal time. I personally was at a company, and as you do well at a company, they give you private stock. I had stock that invested. Crazy story, I can’t even about to tell you this.

I had a sale order at $104 because that thing was doing really well, right? It got all the way to 103, stopped, and fell to three bucks. Yeah. My rental homes didn’t do that. Obviously, that was a unique time. But I really appreciated having my portfolio of houses at that time.

Michael Stansbury (05:50.252)
Right, right.

Rob Anderson (06:02.234)
And out of that, the company I’m with now, my partner founded the company out of the Great Recession, as a lot of good companies came out of. Top real estate lender in the country. As you’re going through issues, especially back then, what are you doing? What’s going on? Are you guys okay? Are you guys okay? And funny, my company was sold about three years later. I was sold with the company about three years later. That’s how much of a tail 08 had. People forget. It took a while to get through that thing.

What’s going on now is nothing compared to that, right?

Michael Stansbury (06:32.684)
Right, yes, different, totally different parameters, know, you know, if you, if you would had the amount of short sales that were going on now that you had and…

10, 11, 12, 13, then you could probably think and talk about that, but we have nothing like that. The inventory is still, there’s still good inventory out there and people aren’t, people have a lot of equity in their houses. And so we don’t, yes. And that as well, everybody’s got, nobody’s moving from a 2 % mortgage. In my market specifically, I’ve talked to people like, yeah, I got this job opportunity to move, but I’m just gonna make a lateral move and keep my job

Rob Anderson (06:58.096)
Yeah. I think I could do that.

Rob Anderson (07:05.17)
That’s right.

Michael Stansbury (07:15.3)
I’ve got this great interest rate so we see a lot of that in our market that’s not the first time I’ve had conversations like that people are just staying because they’ve got great debt ratio on on their houses and so all right so wait you learned something you you know and so basically you got new information right we’re not diversified when everything when everything’s connected in that market where it goes down except you know you had your real estate at the time and you had your rental houses and you knew that those were they may have dropped in value but you had rental income

coming in. And so you got that information. And now let’s fast forward to today and maybe you could talk about what got you here in 2025 and what is it that you’re doing today in the market that’s helping the most people.

Rob Anderson (07:59.985)
Yeah, so I mean, there’s a lot of story here, but I basically help people add a passive investing component to their active investing component when it comes to real estate. I’ve since sold all my rental houses in now I’ve bought a few more since then. I think I shared with you my Airbnb that I have at colleges in here and there. But I sold my portfolio because I started investing with my friend who founded the company that I’m part of now. And I was really amazed because the problem is I love real estate investing.

Active real estate investing is a great thing, but I had a great job. I didn’t need another job. And as you scale up, there’s a time commitment there, right? And so I kind of, okay, this is working out, but I didn’t need another job. I was running out of time and the wife sure didn’t want to participate at the level I was trying to get her to. I, you know, I’m all into marriage preservation, if you know what I mean. And so, you know,

Michael Stansbury (08:50.476)
Right, that’s the best preservation, yes sir.

Rob Anderson (08:55.282)
I started investing with my partner who founded the company on a passive basis in his commercial real estate deals, which I’d never seen or heard of before. Mind you, I’d been in the financial industry, I would even argue one of the top or ends of the financial industry for, gosh, 15, 16 years at that point. And holy cow, I made really good returns with him and I didn’t have to do a thing. I didn’t have to apply for a loan, I didn’t have to scout something out, I didn’t have to deal with tenants, I didn’t have to take any phone calls.

I was like, okay, I’m kind of sold. Tell me what I’m missing here, right? And there’s risk parameters and you’ve got to evaluate and do diligence and we do that for people. But long story short, Michael, I’m helping people understand the passive markets and how they can participate. And unfortunately, the way that the rules are written is you have to be an accredited investor for most of what’s out there, not everything, which means 200K in income or a million net worth, but your homes count, your retirement counts. There’s a lot of ways you can get there.

but there’s so many more options. And this is funny. So I have a lot of friends in the financial services industry. I’ve got, and I’d say a ton of them have invested with us. Every big name on the street, somebody who works there is probably invested with us just because that’s where I came from, right? And it’s funny, they have their own product, but it’s different because the large scale product gets watered down. You don’t have the immediacy, the direct access.

If you will, was talking to a friend at a major firm. I’ll just tell you he’s in Vesco because you’ll never tie back who this is. Great shop. They got a lot of good stuff there. And I’ve got a lot of friends over there and he’s like showing me his product and I’m like, well, you know, you could do this, this or this. No idea. No idea. And not to pick on him for a second, but that’s just they create product for a certain thing. If I’m saying that well.

Michael Stansbury (10:47.776)
Yes, yes, I’m following it.

Rob Anderson (10:49.202)
When you’re at that level, it’s just watered down because it’s meant to feed the masses. You don’t get the direct access anymore, and I love helping people with the direct access. That and tax advantages. Tax advantages are the biggest thing. Tax advantage real estate is one reason you do it, you should do it. And then lastly, I help people retire. Once you get them fat and happy, and they have, I don’t know, what number of homes or cash flow is a successful number in your eyes?

Michael Stansbury (10:55.212)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (11:18.38)
Well, mean, so I think it varies with the individual. If I have no debt and I’m making $12,000 a month on my rental income or

after all expenses, then I’m a happy camper. I’m perfect, but I think it’s just different for everybody. I’ve done this with, know, and what’s it cost for you to live? In Memphis, the cost of living’s not that great, but if I’m in Miami or wherever, it’s just, it’s different across the board. I met a gentleman the other day, and he makes $50,000 a year at his job, but he’s got $150,000 of cash flow coming in every year from his rental property.

Rob Anderson (11:31.954)
Sure.

Michael Stansbury (11:55.681)
and he just enjoys his job. so, yeah, but for me, it was just for me, it’d be okay, zero debt on my property and $12,000 a month in cashflow after expenses.

Rob Anderson (11:55.878)
Nice.

Rob Anderson (12:07.846)
There you go. So whatever number of homes that is, right? Once you get to that level, at some point, depending on how good you are as an operator, some people can just handle it and it’s not an issue. I wasn’t one of those. I had issues. I evicted three times. my gosh. Fired property management companies left and right. I got tired of fixing stuff. I’m going to stop. But I made good money on it. Don’t get me wrong, I did. The… Holy…

Michael Stansbury (12:29.324)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (12:34.712)
but you were active, your phone was on, you got text messages. It’s eight o’clock at night and you’re getting a text message about a toilet.

Rob Anderson (12:37.926)
Fully.

Rob Anderson (12:41.554)
That does happen, yeah. That absolutely happens. And so at some point, everybody wants to retire from running their real estate. But how do you do it in a tax-efficient manner, right? And that’s what we help a lot of people with. It’s a combination of passive 1031 exchanges, opportunity zone opportunities, and other ways that you can transition to let big professional firms manage it, give you the cash flow. And because you’re pulling out all that equity without taking

unless you’ve done some refis, but a lot of times you’re pulling out 100 % of the equity without paying tax on it, we can generally raise your income as well while taking away all of that work. You’ve got to be ready to kind of like let it go though at that point. Not everybody is and would totally respect that. But that’s a lot of what we’re helping people do.

Michael Stansbury (13:28.896)
You’re letting them get the returns.

from real estate in a capacity where they’re not active. Does that encapsulate it? Yeah. And so you’re giving them all the good stuff with nothing to negativity. And I’m sure what that does is it’s just like anything. You’re talking to your friend that works in Invesco and you’re probably blowing his mind. What I do, what I run into people when I’m trying to educate them on real estate, unless they’re coachable and teachable about something or open to it, they can’t wrap their mind around

Rob Anderson (13:37.298)
Correct. That’s correct.

Michael Stansbury (14:01.102)
and even some of the simple stuff because they’ve been used to what they’ve been marketed to forever. So I’m sure what you do a lot is educate your clients and then they go like, okay, we trust you and then you perform for them. that about, yeah.

Rob Anderson (14:07.733)
yeah.

Rob Anderson (14:16.242)
It’s a lot of education and sometimes in the education process I’ll have to say, you know what, this isn’t appropriate for you. You need to go A, B, and C and then we can talk or whatever it is. I’ve had to do that a few times this year already. Happy to help people, but not everything is right for everybody.

Right? You know, they’ve got to get their affairs in order, et cetera. But absolutely, there’s a ton of education. There’s so much. I mean, have you guys ever seen how big the Internal Revenue Code is? They can’t put it in a book because they can’t bind it. OK. And CPAs don’t have every piece of it, you know, down. That’s why people specialize, because it’s so large. They can’t even come out with a bill without calling it a big, beautiful bill. Right. That’s more of a joke because of what they’re calling it. But there’s so much in there that it’s hard to know.

Michael Stansbury (14:50.19)
Yeah.

Rob Anderson (15:08.948)
So we kind of focus on this. There’s also another aspect of it. A lot of business owners when they go to sell their company, we always preach if you own that building or you own that land, you got to separate the sale from the sale of your business. Have them buy them separately or don’t sell them your property. You keep that property and you either be the landlord, sell them the business, or you sell them the business and then we go sell that property separately so you can then do a 1031 exchange.

Michael Stansbury (15:23.171)
Right?

Rob Anderson (15:37.811)
was talking to a business owner the other day, runs a steel kind of fabrication type business, and he was looking at diversifying because all of his eggs are in his company’s basket, speaking of that, and he’s got all of his net worth tied into that company, and he’s 63. I said, at some point, you wanna do this on your own terms, right? Well, he bought his land for a million dollars, but it’s probably worth five million now.

that’s a lot of tax to pay. And so what a lot of people don’t realize, and I know you probably do Michael, but it’s not just the capital gains. Depending on your income, you got that net investment tax, which is, they used to call it Obamacare. And so that could take you to 20 to 23.8 on your capital gains. You also have 25 % recapture on all the depreciation that you’ve put on that property the entire time that you’ve owned it.

That’s a lot potentially sometimes. Plus it lowers your basis so more of the property is taxed. And depending on what state you live in, you’ll have a state income tax on top of that. And so you look at your portfolio and go, I could sell this and make X amount of money, but that’s not actually the case. You gotta take 30 to 40 % off of that depending on where you live. And that’s when your income all of a sudden changes. But if you didn’t have to take that 30 to 40 % cut, haircut,

and you moved it all into passive vehicles with large companies that professionally manage this for you, even though you’re only earning, say, I don’t know, 5 % or 6 % on that amount, it’s the equivalent of, you know, 9, 10, 11, 12 taxable.

Michael Stansbury (17:08.163)
Right.

Okay, that’s very, very interesting and exactly right. I’ve seen the same. It’s just there again, everybody’s every as a business owner, if you’re an operator, you’re just going down the path of what what’s always been done. And I’ve seen this happen where they’ve sold the business and the property. And then it’s later that they realize that there are some other advantages they missed out on and they they’ve been taxed. You know, and they just don’t they just don’t know what they

Rob Anderson (17:36.274)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (17:40.842)
know and so what you did to Rob is a great job of educating those folks. Were you able to help the guy with the five, how did that turn out or what’s best case scenario for him?

Rob Anderson (17:52.295)
Well, I have friends who’ve been there, done that, that are in that business that can help him. And I put him into contact with a trusted resource, which many of your audience wants that I’m happy to do it too. Because just as you said, education is important. When you’re going to go through potentially one of the largest transactions of your life, you can’t talk to enough people.

Michael Stansbury (18:12.195)
Right?

Rob Anderson (18:12.272)
I mean, let’s face it, you need good counsel and advice to make sure you maximize that because nine out 10 people who sell their company do not maximize the sale of that company. Sadly, that is what it looks like right now. And if we can help just a little bit, we’d love to, right? Just to help them out. It gets some more investable assets, which is something we can help them with, But at a minimum, the hardest thing to real is to have that regret of, got one over on me.

Michael Stansbury (18:39.406)
Right, so Rob, you would be a good person to talk to before they talk to a business broker. You’d be a good person, yeah.

Rob Anderson (18:45.286)
We could help, yeah, because you never, I have no invested interest in this. I really don’t. The business broker does. I can help vet that business broker or give them an alternative and they can compare. Cause a lot of people find one person and they talk to that one person. And I’m sorry, basic MBA school. You gotta go three at least, right? I mean, you can’t just do that. So, and there’s other nuance things we probably don’t have time for here, but.

Michael Stansbury (18:49.42)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (18:53.806)
That’s right.

Michael Stansbury (19:05.528)
Can I go three?

Rob Anderson (19:13.126)
We definitely, I’m big on helping people understand what their options are, because a lot of this is Greek, a lot of this is foreign. They don’t really understand this. This isn’t where they made their money. And so you definitely want to help people out.

Michael Stansbury (19:26.41)
It’s the same thing when I teach or when I talk to somebody about depreciation and in our market, so it changed about five years ago because of COVID, people buy residential real estate in Memphis and they used to buy it for cashflow. They still cashflow here, but the turnkey operators are still selling like hotcakes because people now buy for depreciation. They buy because they’re making a ton of money on their income and they need that depreciation. The cashflow is just a bonus. It’s wild how that flips.

But yes, yeah, might get a little better too. So Rob, if some of our audience, some of the folks that are watching this want to get in touch with you, where’s the best place to find you on the web and on the internet? What does that look like for you,

Rob Anderson (19:57.425)
Well, that might get a little better here soon too.

Rob Anderson (20:12.69)
LinkedIn is my kind of social media choice. You can find there, I think it’s Robbie Anderson, Texas or something like that. I’ll get it to you after the show Michael, but my website is the easiest way to get to me. It’s bvcapitaltx.com. So bvcapitaltx.com.

The reason there’s, based in Texas, we focus on Texas real estate, we do stuff around the country, but you wanna own your backyard like you’ve mentioned Memphis several times, right? Real estate’s local and your network can only be in so many markets. And so that’s why we do that.

Michael Stansbury (20:41.464)
Yes.

Michael Stansbury (20:47.318)
Okay, a lot of the commercial investments you make, I’m making the assumption that they’re in Texas, they’re in the Dallas, Fort Worth area, or is it all over the state, or do you guys?

Rob Anderson (20:56.262)
We pretty much go around the state. mean, we’ve got over 500 people moving here every single day. It’s ridiculous. And from a traffic perspective, I can attest to that. But it’s a beautiful thing when you have population growth and job growth, right? You’ve got this wind at your sails for real estate investing. And so, I mean, part of it is we’re here, but part of it is where we live just turned out to be a phenomenal economy. And there’s really no signs of that changing. So Houston, Douse Fort Worth, great markets.

phenomenal markets. And what’s going on, just to give you a little thesis, is we had an overbuilding of multifamily in 21 and 22 coming out of COVID. And there was this massive amount of units that hit the market all across the country, especially in the Southeast, because the Southeast was hot and that’s where everybody wanted to go. Well, then what happened? You had a supply and demand imbalance where you had more supply than demand. That is about to switch. That’s switching in high

growth areas, Texas being one of them, in that the amount of building has fallen off a cliff. So the equivalent, we are about 50 % down from our normal amount of construction starts in the multifamily space, for example. But yet people are still moving here in droves. And so that’s an interesting kind of set of economics that we have where you got more people moving in looking for a place to stay than you have.

new units to supply them with. And household formations are so slow nowadays. Do know the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 37 in the United States?

Michael Stansbury (22:32.578)
Yes, I did, because I read it, I think a couple weeks ago, and it just blew my mind. Yeah.

Rob Anderson (22:36.39)
Yeah, and they got to earn over hundred grand to get a starter home nowadays. It’s crazy.

Michael Stansbury (22:40.814)
It is wild. There’s somethings gotta give there. don’t know what. So what you’re telling me is happening is there was a ton of building in 21 and 22 and then it stopped because I guess the cost of building there was not a lot of, there weren’t people coming in but now that’s totally flipped and there’s no, yeah.

Rob Anderson (22:57.788)
Well, the reason is a few fold. Michael, first off, 525 bits from the Fed, that’ll slow things down dramatically, right? And secondly, you had a regional banking crisis, which is what funded a lot of the construction loans. So the banks pulled back considerably because when treasuries fell, all those deposits left the banks and flooded into money markets. So their deposits went down. And so their overall book of business started to look top heavy in real estate loans.

Michael Stansbury (23:05.868)
Right? Yeah.

Rob Anderson (23:28.132)
And so they had to stop. Had nothing to do with real estate. Isn’t that crazy? But until the Fed lowers rates and those funds come back into the bank, they still have that imbalance there. have almost, people don’t realize it, but there is somewhat of a shutdown in funding or lending for commercial real estate. And there’s a lot of people, a lot of shops that have their pencils down. And so deals could not get funded. And so they just didn’t happen. They’re not coming out of the ground.

Michael Stansbury (23:31.488)
Right. Yeah.

Rob Anderson (23:55.93)
And so just because something gets permitted doesn’t mean it’s going to get built.

Michael Stansbury (23:58.53)
That’s right. It’s got to have the capital. So Rob, thank you for being part of the Real Estate Pros podcast. Again, all the information about how to reach Rob Anderson and BV Capital is going to be down there in the show notes. Anything else for our audience, Rob, before you want to talk about the Houston Cougars or anything like that?

Rob Anderson (24:16.306)
Basketball season’s coming soon.

Michael Stansbury (24:18.983)
Yeah, you guys had a good year last year. That was a fun run that you guys had. Rob, again, thank you for being on the Real Estate Pro Podcast. Folks, like and subscribe. Do all the things that the influencers tell you to do. Comment below and go check out Rob and BV Capital down there in Dallas, Texas. Goodbye, everybody.

Rob Anderson (24:37.063)
Thanks Michael.