5 Powerful Insights on Real Estate Mentorship

John Harcar (00:01.51)
Right on. Hey, guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Jeffrey Gibson. Jeff’s out of Vegas. And what we’re going to talk about today is his journey in real estate, some attainable housing things that he’s working on, and a really cool nonprofit that we talked about before the show. Guys, remember, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, I mean, all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra business.

by providing tools and resources to build that business you always wanted to have that in turn helps you lead the life that you want to. Jeff, welcome to our show.

Jeff Gibson (00:37.158)
John, thank you very much for having us.

John Harcar (00:39.1)
Man, I appreciate you coming on. I know we talked a little bit before and I’m super excited to share with our audience some of these things, especially that cool nonprofit, which I think is great. But before we get into all that and get into the weeds of some stuff, why don’t you tell our audience about you, kind of your background and how you get into real estate and what got you here?

Jeff Gibson (00:57.164)
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to share. I’ve been in the trades for 28 years. That’s how I started. I started basically working for a boutique general contractor in high school, working through an apprentice program, know, hauling boards, cleaning up a job site, cutting boards, sweeping the floors, kind of like an untraditional but a traditional way of coming up in the trades. And I knew early on in high school that I wanted to take this as a professional career.

John Harcar (01:12.69)
He

Jeff Gibson (01:25.432)
So I got my journeyman qualifications before I graduated high school and went on to the civil side and I love operating equipment. mean, who doesn’t like playing with toys? My wife calls them my toys, right? And absolutely. so I spent a couple of years learning all civil sides and then I met my beautiful wife on a blind date and about six months later we started our general contracting business. That was 21 years ago.

John Harcar (01:35.686)
Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Big boy talkers.

Jeff Gibson (01:53.166)
And we started small and started doing some small projects here, some little additions, some bathrooms, like I guess maybe like a lot of common general contractors start. And, and in 2017, after years of just doing investment properties, we moved down to Vegas and my wife and I decided to grow a pretty large construction company. And so we’re in the process of doing that after last five years. We’re a mid-size general contractor. We’ll do about $50 million of revenue this year in construction.

John Harcar (02:22.045)
Wow.

Jeff Gibson (02:23.022)
So we do quite a few projects and we have a lot of opportunity in front of us.

John Harcar (02:28.136)
That’s awesome. Let’s go back a minute because I love to ask this question to find out with everybody is like you said, you know, in high school you kind of knew that this was a path that you wanted to take. Prior to that, was there any real estate influence? Was there anybody in your family that was doing construction or flipping homes or or did you know, was it from a wood shop class? I mean, I don’t know. Like what was that thing that said real estate?

Jeff Gibson (02:51.72)
well, the real estate investment was always the end goal. I always found that once I, my dad is probably one of the best operators I’ve ever seen. He operates heavy equipment. he’s retired now, but like he could take a quarter and put it on an end and spin it with a D four dozer on a catch basin. mean, just incredible stuff. So I always had the passion of like seeing how things could be built before they’re even built. so I knew I had that.

John Harcar (03:17.788)
Okay

Jeff Gibson (03:19.598)
ability. I could see a finished product before they even purchased the land. But my wife and I in 2008, 2009, really, that’s she actually got a real estate license. And we really wanted to become a real estate investors like control the flow of it, build things, put our stamp on it, our brand on it. And so we started to do that in 2007 2008.

John Harcar (03:43.176)
Okay. At that point when you kind of made that transition to, know, that focus, were there any challenges or struggles or like specific, you know, maybe mindset hurdles that you had to overcome to make it as successful as you have?

Jeff Gibson (03:58.638)
Yeah, there’s a tremendous amount of fears on taking all of the cash that we had. actually, our very first piece of property we bought, we bought a tax auction. And it was a piece of raw land and we saved up, think, like $17,000 and we didn’t know any better. So we brought $17,000 with the cash to the auction. And so we bid it and then we went up to the front. They’re like, hey, we just do cashier’s checks and you just do them in increments.

John Harcar (04:00.306)
He

John Harcar (04:18.802)
Nice.

John Harcar (04:24.36)
So did you walk up with a briefcase and be like, there you go?

Jeff Gibson (04:27.998)
who literally walked up with like an envelope of cash and we’re just counting them out. the teller, I mean, there’s a lot of experienced buyers in that room. This was our first property we ever bought. And they kind of looked at us like, all right, you got the cash, you own the property now, but bring cash to your stack next time. I don’t want all your cash. So that was fun. It was absolutely terrifying. We made a couple of dollars on that piece of property. And then 2011, we really wanted to do it full time. So we met a couple of investors.

John Harcar (04:43.304)
Hahaha

Jeff Gibson (04:55.566)
They saw our capability of actually doing a project from start to finish. you know, they entrusted us with about a million dollars right up front. And we went out and sourced a property. We told them the timeframe, we told them the budget, and we worked night and day to make it happen. We were successful on it. you know, like 60, $70,000 and the investor was happy. And then we kept on evolving that.

turning it and turning it. And now we build, we actually have a speculative home up for sale right now for 4.75 million. And we have some commercial properties online that we’re building internally. And so the product needs to get bigger. But the comfortability of understanding the market is, it’s kind of really important understanding your market and knowing that you can be successful in it, whether we have this tumultuous economy or not.

John Harcar (05:47.836)
Yeah, and I think that’s a big mindset part that a lot of people deal with, is just having that belief. What mistakes? Looking back hindsight, I like to pull these out because it could be some mistakes that someone else doesn’t make. But what mistakes do you think you made in the beginning that if you look back and said, man, I definitely would have done that different, or I would have learned how to do this better, or whatever?

Jeff Gibson (06:11.278)
I would have scaled faster. It’s really, we had a really good flow in about 2015, 16 when we were having about three to five properties always under contract and some phase of it. We were purchasing something, we were renovating a couple and we were selling a couple. And in that market, it was a really good market. So we didn’t sit on inventory very long. So I would have just wished that we would have taken that five project and turn it to 10.

The thing that we are doing right now, we are doing more projects. we’re actively trying to put in about, have actively LOIs out on properties that we could put about 110 homes up in the next 18 months. And so I would just scale faster because numbers help. There’s that concept of if you own an apartment complex, it’s a tenant leaves, no big deal. You don’t even notice it. But if you only own one house and a tenant leaves, ouch, right? You notice it. So scaling.

John Harcar (06:52.77)
wow.

John Harcar (07:07.004)
You noticed it. Yeah.

Jeff Gibson (07:10.286)
Getting your systems down, I’m absolutely really fortunate. I’m a kind of like a driver pusher, but my wife, which is the president of our company and also a real estate broker, she is very conservative. So she goes into and looks at every deal. I might think I could take on every deal. And then she looks at it and she’s like, this one makes sense. And with having that balance of, somebody can go get it.

John Harcar (07:28.356)
Of course.

Jeff Gibson (07:37.024)
And then having the understanding of like, is where we’re conservatively need to be. I think is a very powerful thing. We’ve always made money on every single project that we’ve ever done. We’ve never lost money. Our investors have always made money. And so that’s, think, the key. You got to have both.

John Harcar (07:55.826)
Checks and balances, right? You gotta, know, us as drivers wanna go and just, yeah, make a deal work. We’ll make a deal work. But then you gotta have some look at that numbers and that’s incredible. So what does your business look like now? Like as far as, you know, I know you mentioned residential, I know you mentioned doing commercial. When you say commercial, are you talking about commercial industrial or are you talking about commercial multifamily?

Jeff Gibson (07:57.346)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Gibson (08:18.702)
We do have some multifamily projects going internally and externally for clients. We do also a industrial. So we’ll do, you know, office up front with a beautiful warehouse out back. We have commercial tilt ups going on right now. We also have restaurants going on. So on the commercial world, we kind of cover a pretty broad stroke on projects. They’re usually around the small side, a half a million, all the way up to five million dollar projects pretty consistently.

And then in the Scottsdale market, have some pretty large TI’s, A industrial or A commercial office space tenant improvements, some 36,000, 150,000 square foot tenant improvements that we got going on there. Yeah.

John Harcar (09:03.912)
What made you guys decide to move into a Scottsdale market or go into a different market and what kind of challenges did you have if any?

Jeff Gibson (09:12.302)
So we just moved to the Scottsdale market. was part of our expansion plan. We kind of fast forward that a little bit by about six months, but we were always planned on being in the Scottsdale market around June of 2025. We just happened to have an amazing partner reach out to us and say, hey, we would love to have you do our projects. And so we came down, we went to Scottsdale in January. So we accelerated that timeframe. So when you have a great client that wants to

pay you to do some amazing work, you just make things happen.

John Harcar (09:43.208)
Right you just you make it happen. However, it can happen. So we’re what are you holding property? Are you just do it fixing it to resell? What are you guys doing on that regard?

Jeff Gibson (09:56.526)
Both we always have an exit strategy. So I would say to all your listeners have an exit strategy How do you are you to get out of this property or what? is your end goal? We like to build speculative homes in Salem We actually also like to build speculative commercial and sell them, but we also like to make sure that we can hold them to Long-term wealth is created by long-term holdings. I really that’s one of my passions I want to have a lot of property that it has great tenants in it and pays us really well

John Harcar (10:26.012)
Yep, now I got it. Before we kind of get into some of our topics that we talked about, what trends are you seeing right now or do you see coming down the pipe in the real estate game, whether it’s residential, commercial?

Jeff Gibson (10:36.462)
So I’ll speak of just like the Vegas Valley market and like the Scottsdale market. That’s the only two markets that I really fully understand. In the Vegas market, it’s really interesting. In 2024, the total top line revenue for real estate that was sold actually increased year over year. But the number of units, it was one of the lowest units that we’ve ever had. And that tells me that more people here with a higher net worth is buying higher quality products. And then I got a report the other day.

the houses from like 1.2 million to 2.5 million are not even, if they’re a decent product, they’re not even staying on the market for 35 days. And so that tells me that there’s a big need for somebody that needs a little bit larger property that has some more rooms. Maybe they’re putting two generations or three generations in that household. And they’re just looking for that upgrade and maybe they’re coming from California or the East Coast and they’re looking to extend their dollars a little bit more.

John Harcar (11:14.563)
wow.

Jeff Gibson (11:33.238)
and putting multiple generations inside of a household.

John Harcar (11:36.232)
Got it. Okay.

Jeff Gibson (11:37.772)
The other one market though is the attainable housing. And I really see that being a big play over the next decade. We need more houses and we need our youth to be able to afford a house. Vegas is becoming one of those markets where I think our average medium income or average price per house is like over $450,000. And that gets a little steep for somebody just coming out of high school or just college. That’s a pretty steep mortgage to do. So if somebody can…

conquer that obtainable housing. I think there’s a huge play over the next decade on that.

John Harcar (12:11.522)
And what are you guys doing within your business to try to combat that attainable housing issue?

Jeff Gibson (12:18.082)
Well, it was a byproduct of a, actually I’ll give all credit to my wife. We started a nonprofit three years ago. It’s called The Shop Class. You can look it up on social media. have high school seniors come to our facility. We have a $25,000 equipped facility. They learn from A to Z the industry, the construction industry.

And their curriculum is to actually build a tiny house from scratch. So we have blueprints, they get to learn how to read blueprints, they get to learn how to use power tools, and they build it from scratch. It’s actually, we just pulled one of the tiny houses out outside, because our facility doesn’t have a high enough roof, so we got to put the roof on. We pulled that out yesterday. And that house is actually by one of our sponsors, Baylaw.

They purchased that home and they’re going to donate that home to a veteran on Veterans Day this year. And they promised to do this for the next five years. And so what we’re doing now is looking at Henderson at a small parcel of land, like an acre or two acres. And I could put about 15 to 20 of these tiny homes, 600 square feet-ish, on these pieces of land. And people can purchase them. People can be…

John Harcar (13:10.088)
Very cool.

Jeff Gibson (13:32.876)
the nonprofit can have a place to land this and it becomes a community. And so I think that’s a, it’s a very win, win, win situation. The students get to learn what the trades have to offer all aspects of it from property management, from project management to literally plans examiners to all the trades. We partner with some incredible tradesmen in the Valley here. They get to actually teach the course and they get to see these students that have an interest in the trades and

John Harcar (13:44.456)
Sure.

Jeff Gibson (14:02.71)
You know, I always just tell our trade partners that are in our sponsors, if you want to be a part of this, we have a couple of things we want you to teach them. And then if they actually apply for your company, give them a job and walk them through the process of really what this career looks like. It’s a it’s a longevity career. It’s the largest industry in the world. It’s a very high paying industry. one of the most innovative industry. There’s there’s so many different legs and avenues that you can go down this industry. So. Yeah.

John Harcar (14:17.413)
Yeah.

John Harcar (14:26.93)
Mm-hmm.

Tons. Tons. Are there any restrictions, different restrictions for like a little tiny home? I’m just curious for a tiny home community. I mean, are there any other things that you guys have that you need to have or any other regulations versus if you just built a couple of homes on that same parcel?

Jeff Gibson (14:46.894)
So there is actually a tiny home building code book. I think it’s a 2018 or 2021 international building code for tiny homes. So there’s different codes that you have to follow, different ways that the sprinklers and clearances and stairs have to be abided by. Henderson here is actually probably ahead of the curve on most of them. They adopted all those codes. The plans, the public…

John Harcar (14:58.225)
Okay.

Jeff Gibson (15:17.368)
The plans committee has also adopted those codes where we can actually rezone those areas and do it. We’ll be one of the first developers to do it. So we’re going through some red tape right now and trying to figure this all out. It’s been done in California very successfully. It’s been done in other states very successfully with the track record of, you know, I think over 20 years of it being in place. People just don’t know about it.

John Harcar (15:23.122)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (15:42.908)
Got it. And back to these students, is this like a class that they take and get credit for type of thing? Or is it like they’re volunteering just because there’s an opportunity to learn?

Jeff Gibson (15:55.352)
So we are working on our state accreditation right now. We should have that buttoned up over the next little bit. I think it should be coming in play before the 2025 and 2026 class gets a part of it. The city of Henderson is actually the mayor is giving a proclamation ceremony to these students. It’s really cool. Our community has been, yes, it’s so cool. These students are really tasty and I kind of,

John Harcar (16:14.201)
Really? That’s so awesome!

Jeff Gibson (16:22.494)
a unique opportunity to be celebrated and also to be kind of like pioneers. This is the second class, our first class graduated obviously last year and those 100 % of the graduating class of our first year, they all went into the trades. But what I was so proud of with two of them went into the electrical apprentice program. And then two of them went into the carpentries and then two of them got full scholarship rides to go become a geotechnical engineer here locally at being a rebel.

John Harcar (16:41.032)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Gibson (16:52.204)
And then the other one went into mechanics engineering, got a full ride on that way. So one way or another, the trades affect all parts of our lives and we just need a lot more of them. So this is just a way to introduce students. We’re hoping to have about 20, 25 students next year. And our facility can probably handle about 80, 85 students at one time every year. And we’re gonna put this, we’re growing this so it goes all over the country.

John Harcar (16:56.272)
Incredible.

John Harcar (17:20.338)
That’s about to say, do do? You have future plans to grow outside of Vegas and maybe make this into different areas. And obviously just you did.

Jeff Gibson (17:28.204)
Absolutely, I think it’s a huge need. mean, think about it, local high school students get to build attainable housing for the local community. How much more of a win-win-win situation than that?

John Harcar (17:38.662)
I don’t know if you could find one.

Jeff Gibson (17:40.556)
Yeah, so that was my wife. I’ll give my wife credit for all that.

John Harcar (17:41.98)
Pretty sweet. Well, yeah, that’s that’s a bro. How did she come up with it? mean, obviously, you she being in the business probably knows the prices of housing. What made her kind of think about, let’s do something with for attainable?

Jeff Gibson (17:52.152)
Yeah.

Jeff Gibson (17:55.82)
We were actually sitting on our lot before we built our custom home. were having a conversation and she, I went through wood class, wood shop. think we probably, lot of people on this podcast has probably went through wood shop. It’s a lot of fun. That’s why we call it the shop class. But she didn’t want to just build like, you know, bird houses and pens and bowls. She wanted a product that can actually sustain a nonprofit without actually going to donors every year and say, Hey, we need more money. So,

building a product that’s actually needed in the local, she thought about it, she’s like, hey, this is a high demand. these, whether it be for like properties in like Duck Creek, Utah, like somebody just buys this and takes it up there or in Montana or something, or actually a better need than for like the attainable housing aspect locally, in all of our communities throughout the country, all of our cities need better attainable housing. And so this is a product that itself sustained the foundation can grow it.

And I don’t have to go to, or we don’t have to go to donors every year and say, hey, we need more money. Could you give me more money? This is a way that they can produce something that actually feeds the nonprofit and the nonprofit is self-sustaining.

John Harcar (19:04.776)
God, that’s awesome. Yeah, had podcast with another guy that he does a charity. They build beds for child bedlessness, because there’s so many kids that don’t have beds. And they do the same type of thing where they have local youth that come in and do it, like lower part of teenagers come in and do it. And it’s just awesome the way he described it. bless your heart.

Jeff Gibson (19:16.504)
wild.

John Harcar (19:30.032)
What do you think in your whole overall journey, your keys to success have been? Like what are some main things that got you to where you are right now?

Jeff Gibson (19:39.054)
Never quit. You only fail when you decide to quit. So you have endless opportunities to get up the next day and continue on. It’s hard. It’s not going to be easy, but the minute you decide to quit, that’s when you fail. You don’t fail until then. And then seeking out people. As a general contractor, I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded with some pretty amazing people, but

Other very successful general contractors out there don’t have the time, energy or effort to go help train other general contractors. One of my passions is I really want other general contractors to be successful. I’ve learned this kind of like the old school way of like trial and error, like, don’t do that. Hey, do this. And I want to be able to give that knowledge back. whatever industry you’re in, whether it’s just investing, find an investor that’s doing it, that’s in it and will you can mentor right next to them or

John Harcar (20:24.401)
Right.

Jeff Gibson (20:37.602)
pay them to for the information and so that you can collapse that timeframe and you don’t make some huge mistakes or fall in those big potholes. So find the people that know are actually actually doing it. I have one of my mentors. You said, hey, how do you select a mentor? And so so it’s like ask them what’s the biggest thing they ever built? So if it’s a real estate portfolio, you’re looking to acquire and you’re looking for a real estate. How big is a real estate portfolio? What’s the biggest thing you ever sold?

John Harcar (20:45.97)
Hmm.

Jeff Gibson (21:08.238)
because sometimes building a business, you want to maybe exit out of a business one day. Not necessarily I do. want my kids to take over this business. But some people build the business, exit out of it. So if they’ve never exited out of the business, you probably need to find a mentor that has done that. And how long ago was it? Are you actively doing it? Or was that a decade ago in a whole different market cycle that has no bearing on what today is with chat, GBT, and everything else? So it’s got to be relevant to here and now.

So that would be my three kind of takeaways on trying to select an out of enter, but you got to find mentors in those areas that you want to excel in life in and collapse those timeframes down.

John Harcar (21:45.224)
I love it. And I’m glad you brought, know, I was going to ask like, did you have any mentors? Are you part of any masterminds? Are you joining any groups? Like, you any things that helped you in your journey that you would recommend to other folks.

Jeff Gibson (21:57.66)
absolutely. So like one of my biggest mentors was a guy that taught me Don’s actually I apprentice underneath him for six years in high school. Just I learned how to be I’m still learning it. But I watched that man be calm in a whole bunch of situations with eight kids and dealing with custom homes and homeowners and stuff like that.

John Harcar (22:17.48)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Gibson (22:19.182)
Currently, for the last almost two years now, we partnered and aligned ourselves with an amazing firm, Cardone Ventures. They have helped us build and scale our business, helped us understand things that I didn’t understand about business. And for 19 years, I was doing a lot of things wrong and they helped us fix that out pretty quick. And then, like this, podcasts. If you really wanna find great information, there’s a lot of information out there.

There’s a of bad information, but you can vet it. I read a lot of books. still, there’s a lot of mentors out there that have been dead for decades or centuries that I read consistently and they help navigate some of those big, big problems.

John Harcar (23:04.616)
That’s awesome. Great advice. mean, seek someone that’s doing something or where you want to go. As far as your business, how do people get in touch with you? You know, if they maybe, you know, want to talk about doing some deals in Vegas, they just want to maybe, you know, learn from you a little bit. How do they reach out and how they connect?

Jeff Gibson (23:26.304)
That’s simple. You can email me directly. My email is easy. It’s jeff at jagre.com and go to our website jagre.com. There’s a contact form. You can fill that out or you can call our office. I would love to schedule a time and I help other general contractors, other investors navigate issues. There’s a ton of resources out there. If they want to do something here in Vegas, we’re actively raising capital right now for several other projects. So if people want to be

involved in that. Obviously, we got to go through the accreditation or anything else like that. I don’t want to get in trouble with the security exchange commission or anything like that. But like we’re actively seeking great collaboration because I think that’s the new currency is collaboration.

John Harcar (24:01.84)
Yeah.

John Harcar (24:09.16)
It is it’s not necessarily what you know now it’s who you know it’s being in proximity of the right people in the right opportunities and I don’t know if I asked it. Do you have any coaching or anything you do? You know, maybe if folks were wanting to learn. OK.

Jeff Gibson (24:15.982)
That’s right.

Jeff Gibson (24:20.014)
We are developing that. would like to be able to coach and mentor a lot of other general contractors and investors. I think there’s a great way to be extremely profitable. And I think most general contractors, there’s a lot of us out there, developers that never crest over a million dollars or $5 million or $10 million is really rare air. And it’s really hard to navigate that.

John Harcar (24:28.306)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (24:41.809)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Gibson (24:42.03)
especially if you’ve never done it and you don’t know anybody that will help you teach it. So my wife and I are actually putting, we have a nine phase strategy on how to navigate that, be successful in it, how to, we’re putting a package together. So yeah, soon, but we would love to be able to give that knowledge to the next generation.

John Harcar (25:00.808)
Sweet. Yeah, I thought if you had it, it’d give you a chance to make a plug on it, but it’s in the process. Guys, take some notes. Make sure you jot down his information, which we’ll put in all the show notes. Jeff, I appreciate you coming on here, man. was an incredible episode, great information. I love the nonprofit thing. I love, I think that’s just killer. Yeah. Yeah, guys, I hope you had a great show. I know I sure did. And I’ll look forward to seeing you on the next one. Cheers.

Jeff Gibson (25:21.806)
That’s awesome. Thanks, John.