Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this conversation, Bill Faeth shares his extensive experience in real estate and entrepreneurship, discussing his journey from high school basketball to building a $26 million real estate portfolio. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging AI in business, the thriving opportunities in short-term rentals, and the critical role of building relationships. Bill also discusses his unique approach to retirement and life optimization, focusing on defining personal goals and leading with value in relationships.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Bill Faeth (00:00)
So that whole relationship, everything for me, my whole business career, my personal career has revolved around two things. Building deep relationships with my members, my students, my clients. I try to turn my clients into my best friends. And then it’s taking the two extra steps with everything else. Whether it was in the restaurant business and my glow golf business and my real estate business at my hotel. We’re one of the few boutique hotels in New Orleans.that has somebody at the front desk all day, all day.
Q Edmonds (02:03)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. I am super excited about this episode. Begin to know this gentleman. Y’all know, well, you may not know, I love basketball. And so he’s connected to one of the greatest stories like I’ve heard. And I don’t know if he’s going to talk about it or not. I’ll let him choose because what side of the history he’s on, you know, I don’t know how he feel about broadcasting it, but for me, it’s exciting.Bill Faeth (02:21)
ever heardQ Edmonds (02:32)
Excited to get to know him. This gentleman has has done 43 startups 37 exits 30 31 years of experience I mean this gentleman has done a lot and I’m excited for us to get to know him to like peek into his Brian and his mind and his Mindset around things and so I want to introduce you all to Mr. Bill Faeth Mr. Bill. How you doing today,Bill Faeth (02:55)
I’m amazing. Thanks for having me, Q. Absolutely. You just had to bring up that Reggie Miller scored 53 on me and a half,Q Edmonds (03:02)
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Listen, listen is a great story. I’ve heard so much about it. And just to talk to somebody who’s been involved in that, listen, is that’s gold to me. So I’ll just see you as a hero. So forget what everybody else I see. I see you as a hero because man, you played the game and I appreciate the story, man. So Mr. Bill, listen, I want us to dive in.I want you to tell the people what your main focus today is in real estate. I would love for you to give us a little bit of an origin story of how you got into real estate, how you got to where you are now. And then if you don’t mind, tell them what part of the world you’re in, what markets you’re operating in. So Mr. Bill, sir, do you have the floor?
Bill Faeth (03:46)
Yeah, thanks Q. I guess I’ll just start kind of with my origin story. ⁓ You know, I’ll go back to that story in high school. I played high school basketball. My whole family played basketball. It was my sophomore year playing in the Christmas basketball tournament, playing a high school called Glendora out of LA. I grew up in Bakersfield ⁓ and my coach Ron Loria started me. I was a six man. I was the only six foot six guy in the history of my basketball team that couldn’t dunk. I was a three point specialist, kind of like Reggie Miller was.Reggie came in and scored 53 on me. There’s about two and half minutes left to go in the first half and I fouled out and I walked over to the bench. told Coach Laura, I said, I think I’m done. He’s like, yeah, you fouled out. You’re done. I said, no, I’m quitting basketball. I’m just focusing on golf after this tournament. He’s I think that’s a good idea. So the funny part is, you’re I heard a story years later that Reggie went home and he scored ended up scoring like 72 points scored another 24 25 in the second half.
and told his family that how great of a game he had and his older sister Cheryl said, oh, well, that’s nice. I scored 100 tonight. Well, that was me that he scored 53 of those points on that evening. So I have two cool stories that and I’ve slept with Tiger Woods over 100, 100 times. That’s kind of my two stories that when I do a speaking engagement that I lead in with now, I wasn’t with the prostitutes and that type of stuff. Why I him and I were kids. We traveled together. We played junior golf together.
⁓ all that type of stuff. And we used to share rooms when his dad Earl would drive or my mom would drive us, to golf tournaments. But an experience with him is really what set the tone for the rest of my life. was never forget. was June 18th, 1989. I’m 16 years old. We’re in Long Beach. and this is a long story. I’m gonna make it into two minutes. I just played in my first really big Southern California junior golf event. Phil Mickelson was there.
Chris Riley, a Ryder Cupper was there. Tiger Woods was there. Brian Smock, a lot of guys I played college golf with. I went to UCLA on a full ride and I shot 71. It my first time to shoot under par in a big tournament. I walk off the green. I signed my card. My mom sees that red 7-1 goes up. She’s crying. I’m in first place in the tournament. There’s only two groups left to go. The next group behind me, there was this little scrawny, skinny kid with a big bucket hat on. He walks up to the 18th green and he collapses on the green.
I’ll never forget Bob Livingston, the director. Then he became the golf coach at Long Beach State, ran over there with some wet towels, gave him some water, got him up. He gets, you know, probably five, 10 minutes getting him revived, right? He has about an eight foot putt. He drains it. And it was the first time that I saw the fist pump and that was Eldrick Woods. It was Tiger. He walks up and we were friends, but I’d never seen the fist pump. never played together. We just traveled, practiced together, that type of stuff.
And he walks over to the scoring tent and he says, Billy, how’d you play? said, I’m leading 71. He’s all had you play. Well, okay. All he said. And then boom, you see three, two, three, red, red, red, red. He shot 64 and won the tournament by, you know, literally seven shots over me. ⁓ but here’s the story, Quentin. This is what I learned. We went inside. My mom sits in the, in the coffee shop. She was a two pack a day.
Marlboro menthol smoker, what I called it the menthol mountain. could smell it. It was disgusting. Earl and tiger come and sit down. Earl was a smoker. He just adds onto the menthol mountain. They’re in there for 15, 20 minutes and then they go to the range and tiger and tiger is literally 14 years old at this time. He hit balls for four hours, hit bunker shots for an hour, worked on his putting for an hour or two hours. My mom and I had already hit McDonald’s and been back at the hotel watching cartoons for
You know, three hours knock on the door. Tiger says, Hey, you want to come over and watch TV? Yeah. Go over and watch TV. It’s like seven o’clock, eight o’clock. No more than 15 minutes in Earl. His dad is start to grill him on what were you thinking when you made that bogey? What was your visualization? What was your thought process? What was your mental preparation? So, but here’s the thing that people don’t understand about guys like Kobe, about like, you know, Michael Jordan, about tiger, about Venus Williams or all these athletes, Usain Bolt.
They have athleticism, but they work harder and they take those two extra steps that we don’t do. Phil Mickelson, Chris Riley, the Ryder cuppers that were there in that tournament. They don’t go hit balls afterwards. They didn’t practice. They were good enough and they would just play and that’s it. So I learned that two extra steps. That’s actually, actually my next bestselling book that’s coming out in June is to do those small things. So that’s what I do when I’m looking to invest into real estate. So I know that’s a long story, but I want everybody to know that my success that I’ve had, I’m not smarter than you.
I didn’t, you know, I didn’t have a silver spoon in my mouth. My mother was a teacher, probably never made more than $35,000. I didn’t have a father growing up. My parents were divorced. I didn’t have it bad, but I was just a regular kid living in a $85,000 home in Bakersfield, California, whose mother was a teacher. Yeah. But I learned that day from Tiger and from Earl, what the two extra steps were.
I’m pretty heavily leveraging the hotels and Airbnb’s and that type of stuff in my real estate portfolio. am a believer that Airbnb still to this day, even though my good friends Ryan Panetta, Pace Morby, Grant Cardone all say Airbnb is dead. It’s not. They’re just the people that are doing it just aren’t doing it the right way. Even Pace said he had 11 Airbnb’s in Atlanta and he didn’t do them right. And that’s why they failed. You know, so that’s why I wrote the book Super Properties, right?
Yeah, even a one bedroom condo can become a super property doesn’t have to be a mega six, eight, 10 or $10 million. $10 million business, but that’s what’s thriving. That’s taking the two extra steps. Every time somebody books with me, like if somebody books with me, if I get a notification on my phone, the second I’m done with this podcast, Hey, Q, thanks for booking Soaring Eagle Lodge in Montana. My name is Bill Faeth. I just want to introduce myself. I’m going to be your host. I’m the owner. Me and my wife are here for you. Here’s two or three value propositions.
for this property, 20, 30 second video. And I send it to everybody else. And you know what it does? It blows them away. And for those of you that are into short-term rentals, I want you to understand, this is the way that I think. I think about sales, marketing, customer retention about everything. So if I send that to Q and Q’s blown away because nobody’s ever done that before, that’s the two extra steps. It’s easy stuff. It only takes 30 seconds. Q stops scrolling.
Because when Q looks with me, all it is is a reservation. Q can get out of that reservation within the cancellation policy. So most of us are still looking for better opportunities. We’re just reserving what we like. And if we see something better, we’ll cancel and we’ll move over to the other thing. Now, if Q stays on and he continues to book, I have about seven or eight other messages that go out before check-in. You know, where to get the best sushi, where to rent your skis, where to see the best sunsets, whatever it is, best hikes, all that stuff. I’m building rapport in a relationship with Q.
I’m setting the tone, I’m priming Q because the second he checks out, I’m hitting him with a funnel to bring him back or introduce him to my other properties. The second he checks in, I tell a story, I have a property down on the beach and literally a guest checked in like on 4th of July, the most expensive week, it’s like $45,000 for the week in the Outer Banks. I see the ring camera, they arrive, I get the Schlage lock notification. No less than three minutes later, I get a message on Airbnb with a photo. It’s a female that booked.
I think her name was Megan and it’s a picture of tidy whiteys hanging on the back door of the master. I fully believe that if I hadn’t built rapport and relationship through the video, through the messaging, through the personalization before that, I could have ended up with a three star review to something that would drastically impact my business. I ended up getting a five star review. We were able to recover. She was cool. She’s like, you know, I understand things happen, blah.
Q Edmonds (12:38)
⁓Bill Faeth (13:02)
So that whole relationship, everything for me, my whole business career, my personal career has revolved around two things. Building deep relationships with my members, my students, my clients. I try to turn my clients into my best friends. And then it’s taking the two extra steps with everything else. Whether it was in the restaurant business and my glow golf business and my real estate business at my hotel. We’re one of the few boutique hotels in New Orleans.that has somebody at the front desk all day, all day.
We’ve got all the technology like other boutique hotels. They can go straight and check in, know, Schlage locks, blah, blah. But we want somebody at Southern hospitality. We’re in New Orleans. We want somebody to greet them when they walk in. You know, when we do our marketing, we use ⁓ Morgan Freeman voiceovers for our reels and for stuff like that to get into that theme. You know what I mean?
So we are all in, we’re taking that two extra steps with everything that we do, but it’s these small things that any human, even the average human being can do to win.
Q Edmonds (14:05)
Mr. Bill, sir, thank you. I love stories. The late Kobe Bryant said before he passed away when in his final interviews with Louis Howells on the School of Greatness podcast, Louis asked him, what have you yet to do that you want to do? And Kobe said, tell the perfect story. He said, nothing in this world moves without story. And so, man, I love you for the story that you just told. I mean, I think the way you put it into⁓ the lens and the frame was beautiful for us. It gave us a lot of nuggets and I often say destiny has no wasted moments and Mr. Bill you have had some moments throughout your life. You’ve had some incredible moments where destiny has really like shined on you. But what I want to take you back to is
Bill Faeth (14:52)
Can I interject with that Q? I am seeking those moments out. My grandfather, I didn’t have a father growing up and my grandfather was hurt when I quit playing basketball. He was a basketball coach at South Dakota State. He played professional basketball. My mother played basketball. We’re an athletic family. And he said, I’m disappointed that you’re quitting playing basketball,Q Edmonds (14:53)
Absolutely, yes sir.Bill Faeth (15:59)
You know, I see how good you are in golf, and I you need to seek out to become the best and you need to surround yourself with the best people. So that’s like when I was playing professional golf. I sought out the guys that were kicking my ass every day. So I could learn from them. I seek out business owners, entrepreneurs, you know, I mean, I reach out to guys like Grant Cardone when I have no business when he has no business interacting with me.and have conversations with him. And I do things, I put myself in places to where I can gain access. Right? I’ll just give you a really quick example. I built the second fastest ground transportation process, second fastest growing ground transportation company and the history of the industry from 2006 to 2010. And at the time in downtown Nashville, there was a restaurant called Houston’s and there’s still some around the country, right? And it was on West End Boulevard and that’s where all the heavy hitters in the music industry, the healthcare industry were.
And you would walk in the front door and you would walk about 20 feet straight to the hostess stand. But there was like an eight foot opening to the bar. everybody arrives between 1130 to noon to get early tables every fucking day. Quentin, I swear to God for probably six months, nine months on there at 1045 waiting for them to unlock the door at 11 in my three piece suit so I can get the first chair because everybody’s packed standing around there till one 30 in the afternoon. And I’m buying people drinks.
Cokes, waters, vodkas, whatever. And I’m meeting the most high powered people that I would never have access to. I got healthcare centers of America as a client. I got Lowe’s hotels as a client. I can run through probably $3 million worth of business that I acquired by sitting at that chair and seeking out the opportunity. Most of us as human beings don’t seek out the opportunities. When people call me an opportunist, I say, thank you. So they’re thinking that is such a negative term.
The fuck it is, we have to see, we have to find our opportunity.
Q Edmonds (17:57)
Yeah, I mean, you’re the perfect example. You not wasting one moment of destiny. When destiny provides you with opportunity, a moment, you are seized at every moment. And I love it, man. I absolutely love it. Let me ask you this. What is the next real goal for you? What are you looking to solve or scale next?Bill Faeth (18:15)
retirement. So I think a lot of people don’t have a definition of what their retirement looks for. They just think Al Bundy or Homer Simpson sitting on the couch with their hand down their pants, you know, watching soap operas or whatever. So I was fortunate enough. Once again, we talk about, you know, seeking mentors out, seeking opportunity out. I sought out and a guy named John Baird in 2015 and he fundamentally changed my life. I’m 20 X my net worth since I met him.I’ve 15 X my income since I’ve met him and I work probably 50 to 75 % less today. Um, I mean, right now it’s winter time, buddy, dude, I just got back from Montana from 14 straight days of snowboarding. My wife gets home tonight. We’re got soccer tournaments for my girl this weekend and Saturday night. We’re heading to Tahoe for five days to snow. I’m going to snowboard 75 days this winter, right? In Colorado, Montana, Utah, all these places because of building out a life plan.
John Baird and taught me how to build out a life plan, define my retirement, define my, what I want financially. And I’m not talking about financial freedom and travel the world. I’m talking about very specific things that you want to have happen in your life all the way down to today. Cause if we don’t have that plan, we can’t distill that down to make sound decisions on a daily basis. Right. So that fundamentally changed my life. And when I say retirement, my retirement is different.
mine and my wife’s retirement will happen when my 16 year old who’s a junior in high school goes to college, right? That just means we’re freed up to travel more. I will do the exact same things that I’m doing right now. I’ll just do more of it. I’ll be able to snowboard, travel more, go skiing in Japan, whatever. ⁓ But the big thing for us is to optimize mine and my wife’s relationship and our life together. So I’ll give an example. Everything we do, people just see the social media part and they say, my God, Bill, you don’t even work anymore. And all these places just snowboarding.
What they don’t understand is I’m doing it with members and masterminds. Like I’ve got a property management client that lives in Sacramento and Lake Tahoe is his number one market. So we fly in Saturday, we’re going to ski Sunday, Monday night and Tuesday night. I’m doing free meetups and boot camps with him and his leads and real estate agents and working for him while we’re there for two reasons. One, to benefit him because he’s a member of one of my programs. And two, because I’m the draw for all these people to come and see, don’t mean that egotistically.
⁓ And three, then I get to write it off because I’m doing business. So I get a free workcation. That’s optimization of life that I didn’t understand until I met John Baird and he taught me how to do that.
Q Edmonds (20:54)
So it’s it’s suffice to say because I and I and when we wanted down a podcast I always end on relationships So it’s suffice to say that relationships have served you well So let’s put a bow on this and talk to the people about how important it is to build really good relationships You’ve said it before throughout the podcast, but that’s put a char you on top. How important is it to build these good relationships?Bill Faeth (21:18)
Yeah, there’s there’s nothing more important, right? So I my goal has always been in business is to take my top 10 % 10 to 20 % of my clients and turn them into friends and I can turn like my top 5 or 10 clients into what like my BFFs, right? They trust me. They know I’m where I’m treating them exactly how I treat myself all of these different types of things. It’s critical and that happens through awesome tis authenticity and effort efforts the big thing most of us don’t make enough effort.Right? Most of us just as older adult human beings don’t have enough friends. I could tell you that I have probably 10 to 15 really close friends. have my core four or five in my inner circle, but man, we travel with friends. Our best friends, mine and my wife are from California, Bakersfield, California. We left there 23 years ago. We hadn’t seen them for 13 years and they came to Montana to ski with us last winter for like four days. And it was like nothing had ever changed.
And that’s what I think is super important about the effort. We DM each other, we text each other, we send pictures, we stay in communication, leverage technology, but we’re still super close. Relationships is what opens doors. It’s the key. mean, if you don’t have a relationship with God, is he going to let you in? If you don’t have a relationship with the decision maker, the business that you’re trying to acquire their business, are you going to really be able to
When they’re business, you’re leaving that up to a gatekeeper at that point. Right. So I have tremendous relationships with real estate agents. I have tremendous relationships with wholesalers all over the country. I build relationships when I go into a new market. The first thing I do is I go straight to planning, zoning the health department. I start building relationships with people in those markets because if they don’t know me, I’m just anybody else submitting an application for a permit. Right. And that’s what I’ve done. And most importantly, Quentin, I’ve taught that to my young girls.
Yeah, especially my oldest daughter. Man, she’s in college. You know her who her best friends are in college. Her professors. ⁓ Just had dinner with her last night. They see it every day. I just walked into the number one restaurant in Nashville, which is like a top three food city. And. Literally, the owner sits down with us and basically eats with us because I made the relationship with him on the very first night that I went in. I did the two extra steps.
Q Edmonds (23:22)
Oooooh!Bill Faeth (23:43)
My wife took me there for my 50th birthday two and a half years ago. And I go up and I see the nice bald headed, you know, $3,000 suit guys from New York, introduce myself, tell them how amazing everything is. We go back two nights later and I’m a big wine guy, you know, just outside my studio here. I’ve got about 900 bottles in my wine cellar. I take them a $900 bottle of wine, one of my best wines in my cellar. Because I know he’s the wine guy because I found him on Instagram, found him on LinkedIn, found him on Facebook.researched him, googled him. He was a celebrity chef from New York. Long story short, now we’re friends. I have I had the largest Airbnb conference in the world 4000 people last year in Nashville, and I brought him in to speak. And it’s about leading with value, right? So I led with value with him. But you know what I did for him? He was the official restaurant for the conference. And I logo, he was my very first I interviewed him, I worked in a spot, he wasn’t a speaker, right off the bat beginning of the conference.
because I wanted him on the first day, 20 minute interview. Told everybody this is the best cheesecake in the world. If you go to the logo and you don’t like the cheesecake, DM me and I’ll pay for what you send me the receipt. I’ll pay for your dinner and give you an extra hundred bucks. Yeah. He was sold out for five straight days, did over $400,000 in revenue from my conference. didn’t want nothing in return leading with value. Right? So that’s the big thing about the relationship. If you want to get a relationship with somebody that’s above you in business, a mentor, you’ve got to leave with value.
My good friend, Pace Morby tells a story. was in Dean Graziosi’s masterminds for years. Two things here. Dean Graziosi says, I’m putting a new program together with Tony. And immediately Pace says, I’m in. And Dean’s like, well, you don’t even know what it is or how much is. I don’t care. I know how much value. And it was a $250,000 program and Pace was in. Pace was the student. Dean was the teacher.
It took pace, I think it was 13 or 15 years to figure out something of enough value to Dean that he could present to him to crack that into moving from student to friend and confidant and peer. And he did it and he immediately flew to New York because Dean was in New York, like jumped, figured what it was, jumped on a plane, went there to meet Dean. And then what do you know? He’s working with Dean and Tony and Russell and all those things because he led with value. think too many people cue.
reach out to people, start relationships with intentions and not leading with value. They’re takers as opposed to givers. And I’m a big believer that we have to give more than we expect to receive. And when we do that, it comes back tenfold.
Q Edmonds (26:21)
man, you’ve said so many, I’m glad you mentioned God, because you just said so many kind of just spiritual laws that when you put them out there, they work. You reap what you sow. know, healing happens in community. You find that in James 5.16. And I think everything you said proves just that point of how important relationships is, how important for you to add value, and then you’ll get value in return. And so.Bill Faeth (26:46)
I just ⁓ remind people that Jesus was a peasant. And you know, he was not. And you look at the people that he, I mean, you look at what he did. We, and I think a lot of us have imposter syndrome, right? So just think about Jesus and think about what he did for God and what he did for us and the people that follow him. relationship that he built, put it into modern times today. Right. And I’m a peasant.You know, and you know, I have access to these people, you know, like pace Morby. I’ll give an example pace Morby, in my opinion, is the best investor, most likely in all of real estate. Right. mean, a guy that uses none of his own money, no banks, any of that type of stuff. And if you think he’s not real, he is just, he’s the real deal. Believe me, when he’s educating Grant Cardone, he knows what he’s But here’s the deal, right? I mean, he’s, he’s huge in his Faeth.
Pace Morby was up here. Bill Faeth was down here two and a half years ago. only way that I could get to pace was through a warm introduction and then pay him to come and speak at my conference. But then I got to hang with him. I got to meet him. We share a love of Montana. We both have places in whitefish, Montana than that area. We both love Jesus. We both love our families and we found out that we had a lot of things in common and now we’re boys. Yeah. Right. And that’s
kind of how it works because I led with value. And sometimes we have to pay for that access queue. You know that.
Q Edmonds (28:21)
no, no, you’re absolutely right. So I think it’s fair to say one of the most important relationships you and I have is with Jesus. And I’m putting a bow on the head. Jesus led with value. He gave his life first. He showed the value. So if that’s a perfect example for us to follow, it’s to give the value first. And so Mr. Bill, thank you, man. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,Bill Faeth (28:50)
Billfaeth.com, F-A-E-T-H, Billfaeth.com. Build Short Term and Wealth is my educational business. I’ve got 35,000 students in my free Facebook group. It’s Build STR Wealth by Billfaeth. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, I’m everywhere. Billfaeth73 on Instagram. Billfaeth pretty much everywhere else. And if you have questions, just DM me on Instagram. I mean, I’m one of the few guys that will actually answer you personally. No bots, no many chat, no team.⁓ I take pride in being accessible and available and I’ll even pick up the phone and have a conversation with you. I’m just here to help and share my wisdom and experiences, both positive and negative, through practicing Gestalt so it’ll benefit you.
Q Edmonds (29:35)
Absolutely.You mind holding up your book one more time so people can get a look at?
Bill Faeth (29:38)
Yeah, super properties available everywhere you buy books. It’s you know how to generate 250,000 hours of net income off one upfront investment, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. My next book, Two Extra Steps is out in pre-release right now. Also on ⁓ Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Simon Schuster. It’s everywhere. It doesn’t come out till June 9th, but you can be the first one to get an advanced copy. We’ll probably release those in May.Q Edmonds (30:04)
Well,Mr. Bill, let me just sincerely say one. Thank you for your time. You already know you can fit a premium on your time. You know people will pay you high value for your time. So thank you for your time being here today. Definitely thank you for your story, for the impact of your story. Jesus taught in parables. I think storytelling is an incredible way to get a message across. And thank you for your perspective. Thank you for your mindset and bringing that mindset to this platform. I truly appreciate you. Thank you.
Bill Faeth (30:30)
Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.Q Edmonds (30:32)
Absolutely. Now listen, go check out Mr. Bill Faeth, get the books, pre-order the books, get in contact with him, but definitely make sure you’re subscribed here. I keep telling you over and over, we’re going to keep bringing up amazing people just like Mr. Bill. I keep telling you it keeps happening. I keep telling you, call me a liar when we don’t do it. So Mr. Bill, I thank you so much.Listen, everyone else, y’all have a great day.
