Unlocking Puerto Rico: 5 Real Estate Secrets Every Investor Must Know

Michael Stansbury (00:43.886)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Mike Stansbury back with you. Julio Abdiel, how are you sir? Abdiel, see I already messed it up Julio. So we have folks for, know, how the sausage is made here. I always make sure that I can pronounce the guest’s name right. This time I kind of flubbed it, so sorry about that Julio. How are you sir?

Julio Abdiel (00:57.214)
I’m doing.

Julio Abdiel (01:11.111)
Totally fine to worry. Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. I’m doing absolutely fantastic. Thank you so, so very much for having me here on your podcast.

Michael Stansbury (01:19.148)
Hey man, we’re excited to have you. First, we’ve to pay the bills, so we want to talk to you about our sponsor, which is Investor Fuel. At Investor Fuel, we help real estate investor 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 that they’ve always dreamed of. Julio, tell us, what’s your origin story, man? How did you get started in the yellow brick road of real estate investing? What were you doing beforehand?

What made you pivot to this wonderful world of real estate?

Julio Abdiel (01:52.203)
So I was born into the world of real estate. I’m a second generation real estate agent, real estate broker. My family was originally on the banking side and the real estate sides of both sides. That’s my background.

So as soon as I got into college, I got my real estate license when I was 18. And from there, I started selling properties. I knew it was taking a lot of my time, not too much, but it was taking a lot of my time, which made me dabble into some investments. I made quite a few investments in real estate. From there, I wanted to go the real estate brokerage side of the business. And then eventually I ended up finding about assistance and how to automate and systemize

the business so I could go ahead and regain back some of my time because as we all know, real estate agents do end up working a lot of hours if we want to be on the top echelon of our business.

Michael Stansbury (02:50.766)
Yes, that we do end up a lot of hours. So hold on just a second. One of the things is sometimes we have these dogs in the house while we’re doing the podcast, and they bark when I guess we have people come over. So sorry about that audience, but we’re just going to, they’re excited to be here. They’re excited about Julio. What else can you say? So let me ask you this. So you start, this is a family thing. So let me ask you this. It’s like, your dad, mom was in real estate. What did that look like?

Julio Abdiel (03:05.54)
They’re excited. Dogs are excited.

Julio Abdiel (03:20.367)
Yep, so it was very intense, high expectations since a young age of excelling in the business as anybody who’s a second generation or third generation would expect. But it was also very rewarding because being able to be grown into this business, the love for real estate, the love for helping people is just a second nature, a first nature for somebody that is born into the business. Being born into the business.

has its perks, which are, you get to know and understand the industry a lot better than some people who are obviously not born.

Michael Stansbury (03:59.394)
Yeah, so one of the things I think that I have a son and he’s in the real estate business and they benefit from being around it and they just know things that newer people don’t know until they experience it. Well, they’ve already experienced it. They know the ups and downs. They know some of the things that you need to have when it comes to it. And you know if it’s for you or not. You know what kind of backbone you need. You know how much heavy lifting is involved. So, and one of the things that’s really cool about

I love the fact that you’re kind of second generation is you see some holes sometimes that mom and dad may not see. You see some things like, hey, you what? You spend a whole lot of time doing this one thing when we can automate it and fix it to where you’re not having to spend that many hours on it. So tell me about the how are you buying back your time and how are you helping other agents buy back their time?

Julio Abdiel (04:32.219)
Yep.

Julio Abdiel (04:49.488)
Definitely. I think that every single man real estate agent and every single female real estate agent has had that moment where they’re either on holidays or where they are with their families on a family vacation and their phone does not stop ringing and they need to pick up because it’s the source of income. It’s what’s paying for the vacation. But I really do believe that we need to have our family time be our family time, our work time be our work time.

so that we can live much better, much more fulfilled lives. So the way that I’m myself and my family, helping my family and myself and other real estate agents is by creating systems and those systems comes with virtual assistants. So any task that is not, you do not require a license to do is something that you should go ahead and delegate onto somebody else. You need to focus as a real estate agent on the tasks that only you can do

and nobody else can do. Whether that’s showing the houses or making sure the transactions and the negotiations are right, that’s what you should be focusing on. Not on the day-to-day administrative tasks which can be handled off to somebody else. So purchase your time, figure out what your hourly rate is worth, and anything that is below your hourly rate is something that you need to delegate. Whether that’s scheduling appointments for initial consultations,

or pre-qualifying clients to make sure they’re actually a good prospect for us to go ahead and go into an actual meeting with them. All of those additional tasks get done by a virtual assistant or an in-house assistant.

Michael Stansbury (06:33.24)
Yeah, it’s one of those things where there are so many things that sometimes it’s our pride, sometimes you don’t think we can, no one can do it as well as us, and we’re so hard to give up on those things. But one of the things I think that makes you have a superpower is growing up in the business and knowing that, hey, the most valuable thing I have is time. And I can imagine being a kid and having a mom or a dad as a broker and knowing the amount of…

Julio Abdiel (06:49.708)
you

Michael Stansbury (07:01.122)
the amount of Lyft and the amount of people calling them. So brokers just, they do brokerage, right? They’re also real estate agents. So they have guys and girls that are under them calling them on vacation that work for them to help them solve problems. And I can imagine you sitting there going, you know what? There’s probably a solution to this. But we get used to doing the same thing. And we get used to not letting those things go.

Julio Abdiel (07:16.304)
So it is all going to go ahead and depend on what stage is the real estate agent on.

Michael Stansbury (07:29.91)
So on an average, tell me, what does a VA do to free up time? What does that look like? Quantify that for me if you could.

Julio Abdiel (07:44.15)
Every real estate agent is going to have different needs. A brand new real estate agent might probably not need a full-time virtual assistant, whereas a CSUN veteran is going to need a whole battalion behind them. A real estate assistant can go ahead and start taking care of scheduling calls, taking the initial consultation, doing the initial pre-qualification of the client, and then passing on to the real estate agent if it’s actually worthwhile for that real estate agent to go ahead and meet up. Otherwise, they can go ahead and place them on the database

so that they are constantly followed up on by the CRM, by whatever system you guys use to go ahead and follow up with the client. They can also go ahead and create promotional materials. So oftentimes we get, we want us to create stuff for our social media posts, LinkedIn, that is things that we are not, I mean, we don’t need a license to do that, but we shouldn’t be doing that because our best time is made creating new connections. So we hand off that.

content creation onto a virtual assistant so that they can handle all of that while maintaining compliance of whatever rules and regulations laws there are for the specific state that everybody is. And that is going to allow you to start creating higher and more amounts of marketing campaigns without actually taking away from your time. And the follow up with the transaction, once a property is under contract.

sending the documentation to the lender, following up with the lender, making sure that everything is up to date, making sure the inspections go through, making sure that the inspection, we get it on time, that the closing is scheduled on time for on time closing. If for some reason the property needs an extension, then notifying all of the parties so that we can go ahead and get an extension on the purchase on the contract. And then we just go ahead and sign the contracts.

I do have my virtual assistants draft the documents so I just go ahead and review everything is okay. And if everything is okay and there’s no mistakes that need to be fixed then we’ll go ahead and just go ahead and sign them. So you can go ahead and delegate every single part of the business as long as it does not require a license for somebody to do. Yep.

Michael Stansbury (09:56.014)
There’s the rub, right? Well, great. So let me ask you this. Some people may be interested in this or what not. So where are most of your VAs located? how did you get into this business? What was the origin story there?

Julio Abdiel (10:10.168)
So I was one of Puerto Rico’s largest CELU advertising buyers. We were getting probably about a thousand leads a month covering most of the island. And I found myself that I was on the phone negotiating an offer with a client while drafting an offer on the computer while driving, definitely not safe at all. And…

I remember almost crashing my car quite a few times, one of them with one of my best friends and he was like, yo, Julio, what the are you doing? You need to go ahead and figure this out. And that’s when I realized I definitely do need the help. I definitely advise for anybody looking to scale their business. Don’t wait till the critical point to scale. You need to start scaling and implementing systems before you get to a critical point like that, because then you’re exposing your life.

Michael Stansbury (10:49.485)
Right.

Julio Abdiel (11:07.937)
the lives of others and placing other people in danger.

Michael Stansbury (11:08.921)
Yes, Yeah, bad habits. So once you know you have a bad habit, it’s not like, oh, I’ll continue this until it gets really bad.

Julio Abdiel (11:16.61)
Yep, so from there I went ahead and I found, I have contacts in Venezuela. That’s where most of my BAs are located. They’re both fully bilingual. Generally they come with a bachelor’s, master’s, or even doctorate’s degree based on the position that they’re gonna be hired for and started hiring the people that we have over there through the contacts that we have over there in Venezuela.

and that’s how we go about the hiring process. Well, we do a whole interview, multi-step interview process. do analysis on the desk personalities, IMBTI, 16 personality traits, amongst other things to make sure that whatever VA we hire for a position matches with the personality for that job description.

Michael Stansbury (12:11.022)
OK. so your main market is Puerto Rico, correct?

Julio Abdiel (12:16.991)
My main real estate brokerage and agent market is in Puerto Rico.

Michael Stansbury (12:21.966)
OK, so let me ask you this. I know we go off on tangents here. Do you have any real estate investors that are also clients, as in guys that do fix and flips? I’m always interested in other markets and what maybe real estate investing looks like in Puerto Rico. A lot of our audience are. They do a lot of fix and flips, wholesale, other asset classes as well. So what does that look like at all, Julio?

Julio Abdiel (12:48.109)
We have very interesting and very attractive benefits for the investors. Puerto Rico right now on the hotel site has tax credits. They can go either at a 30 % or a 40 % tax credit. With that,

tax credit, when you purchase a property, you can get either 30 or 40 % back in tax credits. Those can be sold on the secondary market for about 90 % of what you purchased them, which means if you purchase a property for a million dollars, then you can get up to $400,000 back and then you can sell that for 90%. So essentially you can recap down payment and closing costs within just two years or something like that, which is generally about how much it takes depending on some.

Michael Stansbury (13:37.102)
That is very interesting. I’ve heard that there’s some really fun things going on in Puerto Rico as far as moving there for tax benefits, but also now buying real estate. then kind of tell us about, again, I don’t know what I don’t know. I know I have one friend. His name is John Hyre, if you’re listening, John. He lives in Puerto Rico. He’s a tax guy and a real estate investor. But he’s kept me up to speed on some things that are going on as far as infrastructure in there.

Julio Abdiel (13:41.35)
yeah.

Michael Stansbury (14:01.164)
What does Puerto Rico look like? What did it look like five years ago? What does it look like today? What are the major changes there in that market?

Julio Abdiel (14:07.827)
So there is heavy incentives for the electrical infrastructure. think it’s no surprise that Puerto Rico has power outages quite often. And to help eliminate that, the government of Puerto Rico also has heavy tax incentives for investors who are looking to invest in renewable energy sources. This can be any kind of renewable energy.

Most people focus on solar panels because, we have about 90 % of our year is very nice and sunny and hot. So a lot of solar companies are investing into that infrastructure. The people who get solar systems in their houses can actually go ahead and sell energy back to the energy company in Puerto Rico. So that does help take up the burden from the big company.

And that is one of the things that has been happening in Puerto Rico with the electrical infrastructure. The current company is also doing a lot of rehabbing prior to the acquisition of the energy company in Puerto Rico. The old company would not do a lot of updating to the system. And now that’s something that has been happening over the past couple of years.

Michael Stansbury (15:24.91)
Okay, perfect, I love it. I love to hear kind of what’s going on in the world. Real estate, again, is always local. We always look at the national market and think that that is a data point. But I always like to kind of find out, hey, really, what’s going on? So is it a buyer’s or seller market in Puerto Rico right now? What does Julio’s take on the market right now in June in Puerto Rico? Yeah.

Julio Abdiel (15:42.06)
So right now we have mostly a seller’s market. We’ve had a seller’s market for quite a long time and we expect to have a seller’s market for possibly the next couple of years realistically. There is no indicators that are showing that we’re going to end up having a buyer’s market for at least two years.

We have heavy incentives for first-time home buyers. Government of Puerto Rico is providing up to $45,000 for first-time home buyers who make up to $55,000 that would allow for people to purchase properties in the average sales price of Puerto Rico, which is $250,000. And apart from that, there are still federal funds for people who lost their houses with the hurricanes, so they can get up to $200,000 for the purchase of primary residence.

So on the residential market for the average consumer for Puerto Rico, it’s highly saturated with buyers. There is not enough development going on in Puerto Rico. So if there’s any developers out there, to Puerto Rico. We really need you guys.

Michael Stansbury (16:56.846)
We need you. Yeah. So we had a real estate agent that lives in Kansas City, but she does a lot of work in the Dominican Republic. And what was interesting, and I know there are two different places, but there’s a lot of development going on there and there’s just not enough. And we have a lot of expats that are going down there and Puerto Rico is obviously attractive. So, you know, if you’re in the development market, consider that. Well, Julio, if, yep, go ahead.

Julio Abdiel (17:22.995)
Yep right now One of our it’s very interesting because the average sales price for new development in Puerto Rico is close to a million dollars So there is a huge difference between the average sales price the average acquisition power for for the people of Puerto Rico and What is actually getting developed so it?

huge market opportunity.

Michael Stansbury (17:47.916)
Yes sir. Well Julio, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, where are you located on the internet? Where can people find out a little bit more about you? Is it just your cell phone number? What does that look like? they wanted to A, I’m in Puerto Rico, I need to buy or sell a property or B, they’re interested in your VA business and maybe buying a little of time back.

Julio Abdiel (18:07.477)
So for our real estate company, you can just go ahead and go into globallista.realtee.com. That’s global in English, lista in Spanish, list with an A at the end, realteet.com. My phone number is 787-462-8343. And then if anybody wants to contact or hire any of the VAs, they can just go ahead and get in contact with me and I’ll forward you the contact information for my assistant and they’ll take care of the whole process for you guys.

from the initial consultation and figure out what you guys need, getting the assistance that you guys need, and then onboarding them with you. And if you guys need systems, KPIs, SOPs, which are very important when hiring employees, not just virtual assistants, but also in-house personal, we can also provide the assistance with that, which is one of the hurdles or one of the biggest challenges people have when hiring their initial hire.

Michael Stansbury (19:01.196)
Yeah, you gotta know what you want and you gotta know what they need to do for you. So that’s very good information. Julio, thank you for being on the Real Estate Pros podcast. Folks, we’ll put all that information in the show notes so you can get in touch with Julio. And if you don’t have a VA, if your time is always, if it’s eight o’clock at night and you’re still working on a confirmation of agency status disclosure or property condition disclosure, what are you doing? What are you doing? Get some sleep. Hire a VA.

Julio again, thank you for being on the real estate pros podcast folks do all the things like and subscribe and comment below and we’ll see you next time on the real estate pros podcast You’re welcome.

Julio Abdiel (19:37.976)
Thank you very much, Michael. Have a wonderful day.