Empowering Women in Real Estate: An Inspiring Journey

Stephen Schmidt (00:02.374)
Welcome back to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs. It’s your host Stephen Schmidt. And if you’re joining us for the second, third or hundredth time, you’re in for a real treat today. I made the critical mistake, which for you regular listeners, you know that I accidentally forgot to ask how to pronounce my guests last name, which I continuously forget to do. Is it Boultbee? Boultbee, I was like so close there.

Patricia Boultbee (00:12.495)
Okay.

Patricia Boultbee (00:25.931)
speed.

Stephen Schmidt (00:29.912)
Well, I got Patricia Boultbee in the house. Patricia’s been in the real estate game as a licensed agent for over seven years. She’s been investing for way longer than that. She’s also got an equine business is into some horses and we’re going to go all over the place and talk about real estate as we usually do on the show. So just before we get into that, remember at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers and real estate entrepreneurs, to five X their businesses, which allows them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted.

Patricia Boultbee (00:42.159)
Thanks.

Stephen Schmidt (00:59.938)
live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. With that being said, Patricia, welcome to the show today. I’m glad to have you here.

Patricia Boultbee (01:05.599)
to be here. Thanks for having me.

Stephen Schmidt (01:07.406)
You bet. So just for our listeners sake, I know we had a little bit of time to chat pre-show and get to know each other a little bit, but can you give us a little background on what got you started in the business and what got you to where you’re at today and what’s looking for the future?

Patricia Boultbee (01:23.695)
Actually it started when I had a finance company with partners and we started buying investment properties in LLCs or personally. It got to the point where we would have…

time residential and we owned them in all different parts of the country and I growing up fairly poor got the epiphany that real estate is truly a girl’s best friend.

And I’ve started to believe that every woman or man should have real estate in their portfolio just running in the background while the rest of their life was going on. And it’s something that’s worked out for me over the years. And I strongly encourage anybody, wherever they are, in their life, whether they’re just starting out or they’re looking at retirement, to look at real estate.

Stephen Schmidt (02:13.006)
Now, when you say that, one of the things I get a lot from folks is, let’s say they’ve got,

six to ten properties and they’re actually looking at divesting in order to focus on the main thing that they’re doing now. Like for instance you you have the background in finance right maybe they’re a you know a lender that has a lending company they’re now the sole owner of and so they’re looking at well I don’t want to have any of my real estate anymore because it’s too much of a time suck. Why do you think for the long-term play that it makes sense for most people?

Patricia Boultbee (02:43.769)
Well, to address the first problem you brought up, it might be that they’re just improperly positioned in how they’re investing in real estate. There’s real estate that can be very time consuming and can take up a lot of your time if you’re always running over to repair things, et cetera. And there’s other real estate that can be really…

Stephen Schmidt (02:51.566)
Mm.

Patricia Boultbee (03:03.595)
easier to manage and take less of your time. So my first question would be what is taking so much time if it no longer fits your lifestyle then why don’t you actually does that would be yeah

Stephen Schmidt (03:17.646)
That’s a great point. Now so when you were working in finance and decided hey we’re gonna start buying these properties and all this like what what instigated that?

Patricia Boultbee (03:30.079)
One of my business partners was actually 15, 20 years older than me and he and his wife had always owned real estate and as the finance business was throwing off cash, we needed to put it somewhere. And it was partly a great idea tax wise and it was nice and passive income. Some of it wasn’t so passive. Rental properties can be a challenge. And it just made sense at the time. We bought our own piece of land and built our own office

building, a 30,000 square foot office building, and rented out some of it. We bought extra land and leased it out to a company nearby. It just fit what we knew.

Stephen Schmidt (04:13.58)
And so what was the goal with all of that? Because do you still own some of those properties? Have you primarily sold most of them? What was the end game for you guys with that?

Patricia Boultbee (04:13.743)
And so.

Patricia Boultbee (04:27.189)
The end game was to again have real estate running in the background. know, almost a retirement strategy or I guess an exit strategy. When I sold my shares in the business, we sold off the properties that we all owned in common and I did 1031 exchanges and put them into portfolio of my own and that’s what it did. It ran in the background for me as I was raising my daughter.

cash flow, if I had something big coming up like I wanted to go back and get my masters, I sold one of them for my tuition. It’s kind of that, I guess a savings account that still pays you if you structure it properly.

Stephen Schmidt (05:09.262)
So what’s your specialty or niche within the real estate world now?

Patricia Boultbee (05:13.811)
Mike, I feel my calling is to educate women and investors as to how to do it properly. Not, I mean, with all the properties we had, of course we made some mistakes, right? And there’s some things that happened that you have no control over. You know, like I can tell you, we had a kindergarten teacher with perfect credit that’s trashed the condo. We rented her and ended up in jail on drug charges in Vegas.

over Christmas. I don’t know how that stuff happens, but you have to. We made some mistakes and we definitely had some wins. And so I feel my calling is to get people into the right investments. Even if it’s their kids first condo, it’s going to college or university condo, new university. You’re going to be there for years. You might as well be building equity and renting out rooms, right? Then you have control over your kids environment, things like that. I.

I love working with investors and I like working with land developers because they have their eye on the price. the great thing about real estate is you can also be a little emotional about it, right? You can fall in love with a property because you can fix it up and you can put creativity into it. But basically, would say investors is my favorite place to work.

Stephen Schmidt (06:35.342)
You know you

Patricia Boultbee (06:36.207)
But I see everybody as an investor. I see the first time homebuyers an investor.

Stephen Schmidt (06:41.326)
And you mentioned investing properly, right? First of all, welcome to school kids, right? What a crazy story. But when you say educating people on how to invest in it properly, what does that mean? What’s the proper way to invest in real estate, would you say? Or is that different for different people?

Patricia Boultbee (06:47.535)
Right.

Patricia Boultbee (06:56.377)
Well, never ever. Right, well, one of my biggest lessons was never buy a negative cash flow property. There’s just no point. A lot of people do, thinking that, well, the market’s just going to keep going up, and I’ll build equity even though it’s costing me a little every month.

Stephen Schmidt (07:09.261)
Hmm.

Patricia Boultbee (07:18.701)
That’s one of the classic mistakes that just puts people behind the eight ball if anything goes wrong. And you know how real estate is. Yes, over historically over time, it will go up. That’s kind of how it’s happened and we can count on that. But if you’re thinking it’s going to go up a certain amount over five years, but there’s a big dip in year three and you somehow need the money, you don’t want to be in a negative cash flow situation.

It should be structured so that if it’s your lifestyle, your comfort level with how much you’re investing, that you have enough money in it or that you get enough cash flow out of it that you can survive dips in the market. You can survive a vacancy.

if you can buy a multi-unit, then if you have a vacancy but you’ve got a four-unit, you only have 25 % of the problem you would have if you owned one and you were 100 % vacant. know, a lot, this really depends on what people have to invest, what their bandwidth is for what they’re, I guess, it’s it’s a, what they’re willing to do, what they can do and what they, you know, what they feel they want to do.

Stephen Schmidt (08:30.35)
So how do you decide which opportunities are worth pursuing?

Patricia Boultbee (08:36.047)
first I look at potential cashflow. That’s always the first thing I look at. If it’s going to be negative cashflow, it’s immediately a non-starter. then I take a look at

the comps in the area and how much they’ve changed over the last six to 12 months in certain areas, especially like there’s a small resort town near me where the prices remain fairly steady. Good market, bad market, they remain fairly steady, which means that if you’re buying something there, you’re not necessarily buying it for equity, you’re buying it for cashflow. You just need to know that. The next thing I…

I check into is what my my buyers assets are, their abilities and their expectations. What do they think they want to get out of it? Some people it’s just not the right time because they’re not quite ready. You know, if they don’t any extra cash or they just or they don’t have, you know, if they’re working 80 hours a week and they can’t have time to look or make the right selection or get educated, you know, then they need to free up some time. Those

That’s kind of the, that’s part of the process I go through. But as we all know, it’s like a Venn diagram, right? If it’s like, this is a yes, you go this way. If it’s a no, you go that way. There’s a bunch of decisions that are made as we move along.

Stephen Schmidt (09:57.326)
What’s changed in your approach over the years?

Patricia Boultbee (10:02.767)
Well, I mean, it’s real estate, tons have. You know, the low rates created a whole bunch of opportunity, right? When the rates went back up, that changed our landscape a lot. You know, it became, when the rates went up, it became a cash buyers environment.

Just plain and simple, if you weren’t able to do mostly cash, you couldn’t create good cash flow opportunities in Southern California with those rates. When rates were low, it was a much different story because less of your money was going to interest. That’s a big change. Rates are starting to level out.

Prices are holding steady, so it’s still not the easiest investor market if someone wants to get into it. But as always, lenders tend to, once they see those obstacles, lenders tend to create new products to help people get over those humps because the lenders actually want you to borrow.

That’s their job. If their money sits, it doesn’t make them any money. So it’s interesting to see what new products are coming out. The adjustable rate mortgages and interest only loans making a bit of a comeback. I’m seeing reverse mortgages being used for purchases, even for the purchase of the primary residence right out of the gate, versus using it to pull it out just to stay in the same residence that they’re in.

There’s been a lot of, yeah, it’s getting more optimistic, I feel.

Stephen Schmidt (11:37.112)
What are you seeing in the market right now that others might be missing?

Patricia Boultbee (11:43.065)
Well, I always look for opportunity. I think in every situation there’s opportunity. What I’m seeing is the, there’s some pressure on…

condominiums and townhomes right now because HOAs are having to raise their monthly fees because their fire insurance and other costs have gone up, which has affected the affordability. But on the other hand, we have builders that are trying to take advantage of density bonuses and building more multi-units. So I think that competition will hopefully drive those HOA fees down. That’s, you know,

But what other people might not be seeing is we should have a lot of inventory coming on the market in the next few years. I don’t know that we’ll ever catch up with our shortage, especially in Southern California because everybody wants to live here. But I’m seeing opportunity for first time home buyers.

because there’s now grants and other incentives like silent seconds that they can get, which is great if somebody wants to buy their first property and they can live in it for five years as the usual, they want you to stay in it before you get the full grant. Yeah, I’m seeing things like that.

Stephen Schmidt (13:07.278)
So let’s kind of transition a little bit to talk about your passion and your purpose of educating people. I specifically, you you mentioned investors and then like, then, and then women that are wanting to build wealth, create security through the real estate avenues. What are some of those things that you tend to focus on when you have those conversations with people or how does somebody generally come to you to even find, you know, your knowledge base? How does that usually work?

Patricia Boultbee (13:35.885)
Well, I do a lot of networking and so I try to get the message out there all the time. I’ve got a course that’s in process. But what people don’t know and once they hear it, they get very interested in talking to me is it’s a Wall Street Journal statistic that in the United States, more women own real estate than men. And when women hear that, they go,

Stephen Schmidt (13:38.253)
Mm-hmm.

Patricia Boultbee (14:05.635)
I’m like, right, it’s not that hard. It’s not exclusively something that a man does. And women own real estate. think there’s a part of the reason for that is they’re naturally good at seeing a space and seeing its value and seeing its potential, you know, where I think they just, you know, I think just the female brain might work a little better at that. Men.

Men see things differently too though. mean, I’m not just saying that as an exclusive thing, but I mean, I think it’s an untapped potential that women don’t see that they have a natural ability for it. It’s not hard to learn. You just gotta be brave and try it. It just feels bigger than it is. As you know, it seems like this really big thing that you’re doing, but it’s actually not.

Stephen Schmidt (14:43.491)
Mm.

Stephen Schmidt (14:49.678)
Sure.

Stephen Schmidt (14:56.686)
Can you dive in a little bit about what your course is actually going to teach? Who’s the perfect person for that?

Patricia Boultbee (15:03.039)
The perfect person is actually, I’m trying to gear it for someone who is just more mentally ready. It starts with, know, how do you, first of all you get yourself prepared. You got to know where you are, know, financially, credit, et cetera, because all those things are really important. And if you got to fix something, you got to take a few months, then take it and do it, but at least you know. And then it goes into what the different types of income properties are.

the pros and cons, how they work.

the typical demands that they’re going to have for you. Some are going to take a lot more work and some are going to take a lot less. It depends. If you want to have an Airbnb, you’re going to be cleaning it, maintaining it, fixing it probably a little more often, but you’ll get more return on your dollar. And for some, that’s the only way to go because some people don’t want to be landlords. And then as I explore that, then we move into, now here’s some examples of how it’s done. once you’ve identified, once I get people to the point where they identify what type of investment they think will work best for them,

Then it’s studying and learning how it works. And as you and I talked about when it comes to real estate or any business that you have, you should never start the concept without the idea of what your exit strategy will be. So we craft that vision with the reality of where they are in time and then move them into going out and finding the property that works right for them. That’s the purpose of the course.

Stephen Schmidt (16:32.546)
Yeah. So what means you decide to build it?

Patricia Boultbee (16:37.655)
I saw so many people didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it. I made my mistakes. Overall, I had wins, but you know, I had those mistakes. I made the mistake of buying a property with a adjustable rate mortgage interest only with a negative cash flow.

Took me forever to get rid of that thing. You know, it was, you know, and I barely broke even, you know, luckily I only did it once, but man, it was, you know, that was an education. So I would like to, I also too growing up not wealthy, I wanted people to see that real estate can be the big wealth equalizer. You don’t have to have gone, you don’t have to have a master’s in anything. You don’t have to come from wealth.

Stephen Schmidt (16:58.798)
Sure.

Patricia Boultbee (17:25.103)
All you have to do is just apply some basic principles and be aware of what’s going on. And you can be a school teacher, you can be a janitor, you can be a doctor. It doesn’t really matter. Everybody has a point of entry into real estate.

Stephen Schmidt (17:44.578)
Yeah, I agree with that a ton. Now you also are somewhat of a serial entrepreneur, so you’ve got a lot going on. How do you manage to stay organized between everything?

Patricia Boultbee (17:57.527)
ADHD, I’m just kidding. I do best when I write things down, but I also need electronic reminders. So I’ve got a day runner or a written planner that works for how I like to brain dump. And then I put things that I need to be reminded of in my electronic calendar. I run a CRM that is fairly simple.

Stephen Schmidt (18:08.142)
Hmm.

Stephen Schmidt (18:20.323)
Mm.

Patricia Boultbee (18:27.001)
but easy to use because I didn’t want to take a ton of time to learn a complex CRM. And then I pull in other tools as I want to add how I connect with people. And I’ve tried out different platforms. Anything that takes too long to learn, it’s not my cup of tea.

Stephen Schmidt (18:46.305)
I get that.

Patricia Boultbee (18:46.797)
allows me to extract data to put it somewhere to get something in front of a core group of people that have got identified by certain criteria is what I want to do. So I don’t use a personal assistant at this point. Probably should.

Stephen Schmidt (19:02.21)
I get that. I think we all should, right?

Patricia Boultbee (19:04.343)
It’s hard to hand it off though. so, you know, it’s hard to relay the vision. My friends tell me I should. Maybe one day I will.

Stephen Schmidt (19:15.662)
So if you could go back to the beginning of when he first got started, what would you do different and what would you do the same?

Patricia Boultbee (19:26.235)
Um, let’s see, what would I do different?

Patricia Boultbee (19:34.799)
That’s a good question because I had really good partners and I learned a lot. Of course, you know, learning to not buy anything with a negative cash flow. I had partners that were really good at knowing when to sell.

and went to roll that real estate over, sell it, and buy something else. What would I do different? I would have held onto some of them longer than I did. Yeah. I guess I would have not sold some too soon.

Stephen Schmidt (20:16.504)
Why is that?

Patricia Boultbee (20:18.511)
I felt I wanted to move the money into a different business. but in hindsight, I could have done that through financing without giving up the property. You know, could have just taken a loan out on it instead of selling it outright. At the time I was really busy with my daughter and another business and I just wanted a quick solution. But in hindsight, I should have done that one different.

Stephen Schmidt (20:48.586)
Yeah that makes sense. So what’s on the docket for you in the next 12 to 18 months? What are you really looking forward to? What’s kind of the plan? What’s your takeover goal on top of your course and some of the other stuff you’ve already have going that you know is more maintenance than anything? What does that look like for you moving forward?

Patricia Boultbee (21:07.801)
do want to get my course finished because I think it’s going to be relevant. finding the right platform. I mean, it’s written. It’s just not in a platform that maybe that’s where I need my personal assistant. do my sphere of influence and my CRM and my marketing is starting to pick up. So I don’t want to keep picking out what’s working and leverage into that and let go of what isn’t.

If my goal is to have 300,000 gross commission income this year out of the real estate, not the other businesses. so I’m, you know, I’m like I said, it’s just starting to all click. So again, you always keep an eye on what’s working and what isn’t and constantly focusing on what works. That’s yeah, that’s my goal for the rest of the year.

Stephen Schmidt (22:06.136)
you bet. So if people want to reach out to you, find you on social media or just connect with you for more, where should they go for that Patricia?

Patricia Boultbee (22:15.047)
I am on Facebook and Instagram. I even do some on tiktok. they can email me or phone me. The one thing that I, I pulled down my website cause it needed to be updating updated. And then I never really put it back up again. Cause I don’t know that it’s, I don’t know. It’s really great marketing tool for me to be honest for the way I connect with people. I’m also out networking in person. yeah.

I should be pretty easy to find. I hope I’m easy to find.

Stephen Schmidt (22:49.442)
You’ve got, well go follow her folks, give her some love from the Investor Fuel family. And I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks so much for being here, Patricia.

Patricia Boultbee (22:58.777)
Thanks for having me.

Stephen Schmidt (23:00.526)
You bet.