Why Knowing Exactly What You Want Is a Real Estate Investor’s Superpower | Rob Powell

Rob Powell (00:00)
You know, I think one of the things I constantly coach, whether brokers or investors, is it’s a superpower to know what you want. And that’s really easy. It’s kind of like a headline that everyone gets bored with. But the reality is we really don’t know what we want until we ask our spouse, what do we want?

Scott Bursey (01:52)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host Scott Bursey. And today we’re joined by a true market mover, a guy who isn’t just watching the commercial real estate landscape. He’s helping define it. Rob Powell of RESOLUT RE is in the house and he’s bringing the ultimate fuel, that high octane analysis and brokerage savvy that separates the pros from the pretenders. Get ready to level up because we’re diving deep into the commercial world. Rob.

We’re fired up to have you here today. Welcome to the show.

Rob Powell (02:26)
Well, Scott, I am honored and fired up to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the invite and looking forward to our discussion.

Scott Bursey (02:33)
Absolutely. And for all of our listeners who may not be familiar with your journey, please tell us how did your career begin and what’s your main focus now?

Rob Powell (02:43)
So ⁓ out of grad school, I started out as a consultant. I was in healthcare consulting. And ⁓ probably around the late, no, early 2000s, I lost my job. And ⁓ I was looking to, I actually took a job with a consulting firm out in Boston, but I didn’t want to travel anymore. And I had that entrepreneur bug. Picked up a book on investing, a simple book.

I realized it was hard and I went to a boot camp and I started out in residential investing. I found out, or everyone found out I was great at it and the guys that wrote the book hired me as a coach and I started going across the country coaching and I did the monopoly thing. I traded in the homes and then started investing in shopping centers and different commercial real estate. And 2008 hit, things froze up.

I was kind of floundering, gotten into some financial trouble, and I thought I could increase my deal flow by being a broker. I became a commercial real estate broker. I was wrong. But, ended up doing well in commercial real estate broker. It took a while. Actually, I was really bad at it and decided to get good at it. And I’ve been to brokering and investing ever since, and it has been my lifestyle. ⁓

I have been coaching for a Massimo Group for almost 10 years now. I’m a CRE investor coach with Brad Ahrens, going on two or three years now. And enjoying it and continuing to invest, I syndicate. I focus here in New Mexico, but I invest all over the country. And I think that’s a good cap. And that was fast for me. Usually I would take a lot longer to explain that.

Scott Bursey (04:34)
Well, you explained it very well and what I admire about your journey is that you were willing to work, hone in on your craft and improve to get to the level that are today. And it sounds like you’re continually to continuing to strive to improve as well. So that is awesome.

Rob Powell (04:51)
Well,

I appreciate you say that, but I do have to give credit. Early on, being married and I do have six kids, all with the same woman. I’m not Mormon, I’m not Catholic, but having that pressure to succeed ⁓ was huge. So yeah, I had to hone in my craft in order to put food on the table. So definitely.

Scott Bursey (05:58)
Absolutely, and we certainly can respect that. Rob, let’s dive right in. What’s the unique strength that currently defines RESOLUT RE’s market advantage in brokerage in your view?

Rob Powell (06:13)
Well, I think the number one thing is I’m dedicated, we’re dedicated into coaching. We coach our younger ⁓ brokers, we coach each other. ⁓ I use the Massimo methods and the way that I approach things, the way we do one thing is the way we do everything. And so we have, we focus on foundational guidelines, ⁓ principles in order to accomplish what we need to do. ⁓

We’ve always done that in implementing those things. They’re hard to implement, but coaching is fundamental to our specific office and our success. And it’s constantly available. It’s hard to do and it’s hard, you know, there’s a lot of… ⁓

The knowledge of it doesn’t mean it’s being implemented. And so we’re constantly harping on that. And it’s great to hear the younger brokers or my partners bring up what they’ve learned from the coaching over the past 10 years.

Scott Bursey (07:21)
Absolutely, that’s some laser focus. What’s the biggest internal weakness a high volume brokerage needs to proactively manage in a rapidly shifting economic cycle?

Rob Powell (07:35)
Well, I think it’s keeping keeping it together in the sense that, you know, there’s always times where you have turnover. And I think a lot of you just saw this recently in our market where a lot of brokers moved to different brokerages. It happens every so often. And I think that does stung sting a little bit. It stuns a group. We have not had that problem. But again, it is the coaching. It is the.

My philosophy regarding that is that if brokers are getting, if brokers from our team are getting recruited, let me know about it. Because that means we’re doing something great. And I want to celebrate that. You’re out in the market, you’re doing well. And if you make a lateral move and move somewhere, that’s on me. That means our culture, something’s wrong here. But if you do, if you make a vertical move and something and it’s great for you, awesome. We’re going to celebrate that.

But we have to focus on our culture. We have to make sure it’s something that is attractive to people and offer the things that make people want it to be here. And I want to know about that. And I want to celebrate it when we’re getting recruited. And luckily, our brokers are getting recruited all the time, but they choose to stay here. We do it differently, for sure.

Scott Bursey (08:53)
And Rob, on that note, ⁓ what is your vision on your coaching over the next, let’s say, three to five years? ⁓ if you could elaborate a little bit more on the core strengths, I guess, of what you bring to the table as far as the coaching is concerned.

Rob Powell (09:14)
Well, I think when you when you think about coaching several people that do coaching out there, they focus on getting the material ⁓ out in coaching material. I take a different approach on that because I think the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And I need to get to the foundation. If your marriage is in shambles, if your financial if your financial foundation is in shambles.

if your relationships are in shambles, chances are you’re not a great broker. Chances are you’re not a great investor. You’re not great at anything. And we start to dive in and we say, hey, what is it that you really want? Right? And then we start lining everything up. And then, you know, brokerage is a tool. A lot of brokers see brokerage. A lot of investors see investing as an identity. But if we have to transcend, we have to move from the identity to a tool because that’s not who you are. You know, you’re not a podcast host. I’m not a broker. I’m not an investor. I’m Rob Powell.

but I use investing and I use brokering as a tool to get to where I want.

And once we separate that, we can work on that. And that’s, think, is how you truly coach someone. And I think you see it in basketball, you see it in football. When a coach is coaching his team, we have to get around the other issues that impact it, because everything, your marriage, your relationships, impact.

how good you are at everything else, right? And if we can get those things and realize what our role is in those things, like you as a podcast host and your family, ⁓ you can’t go in there as an identity as the podcast host. You’re a father, you’re a husband, I assume. Scott, I don’t know that about you, but I’m a father, I’m a husband first. Those are my roles, but you know. ⁓

Brokering and investing are my tools. This is how I provide, but they’re also the tools to help me get to where I want to go. And if it’s who I am, I’m dealing with a whole other ⁓ set of issues and they do interrupt. So I think coaching allows me to help people foundationally. And once we get into the heart of that,

It’s a straight line from A to B on what someone really wants.

Scott Bursey (12:14)
Vince Lombardi would be proud. That was fantastic. What an excellent, excellent breakdown. Let me ask you this, if you could walk us through what is the biggest internal weakness a high volume brokerage needs to proactively manage in a rapidly shifting economic cycle, do you think?

Rob Powell (12:19)
Yeah

⁓ I think you can easily deal with changes if you know your market incredibly well because then you move from a transaction type team member into an advisor. And if you know your market really well, people are going to come to you and they look for you for help. Just like an attorney, just like a CPA, they’re coming to you.

on how to deal with the changes in the market, the changes in the tax structure, what have you. We’re advisors and if we can get that down and know the market, know the numbers, know it really well and go from specialization to micro-specialization, we will always be seen as the advisor and someone at the table, someone, you know, if you think of a boardroom with all the advisors, you are there.

advising on the commercial real estate portion of it. You’re the man or woman and that’s where we need to be.

Scott Bursey (13:36)
So much truth in that Rob. And interested to know in your view here as well with so much flux in the office and retail sectors, where do you see the biggest, most overlooked opportunity for investors right now?

Rob Powell (13:52)
Well, I could focus on a market. I could focus on a type of investment, whether it’s strip centers and so forth. So my thing on the opportunities in in brokering and as investing is grabbing on to AI and implementing AI and using AI to understand markets and so forth. As an investor and as a broker,

⁓ There is more information out there than ever. And it’s not just, it’s not in the hands of CoStar anymore. It’s not in the hands of Crexie, although it’s there too. But it’s getting that information and ⁓ using it to make decisions. And we’re in a place now that we’ve never been. And I think that’s where the opportunities are. ⁓ But I take that in the sense that, you know, lot of brokers or lot of investors will look at the market and say, hey, where do I invest? Do I go into…

Texas, do I go into Florida or whatever? And a lot of people say, I’m not gonna invest in California, I’m not gonna invest in New York. That’s the wrong approach. It’s like, deals work wherever and you have certain parameters in California that might be more difficult, but the reality is there are deals all over the country and just know that market really well.

As a broker, hey, know your market, know all the numbers, get really good, get…

micro-specialized, as an investor, I say the same thing. Develop your criteria and use that criteria and know the market really well. That’s really it. It doesn’t matter. People just hear things and then they just avoid it and they say, okay, we’re gonna go in Texas. Yeah, great, Texas is great, for sure. But you’re overlooking deals in certain markets that are deals. A deal is a deal.

and know that and just understand the environment that you’re getting ready to invest in. But you’re be fine if you understand it and go into the details of it. And AI is a great tool for that.

Scott Bursey (16:43)
Speaking of AI, what sort of strategy do you have to implement to integrate AI over next 18 to 24 months, short term?

Rob Powell (16:55)
Aggressive. ⁓ It’s changing all the time. mean, and when I’m saying changing, many people might hear me and my age at 55 say, ⁓ changing, okay, two months, six months. No, it’s changing in days. And as a coach and all the people that I coach across the country as investors and brokers, ⁓ they are grabbing onto AI and when they have a problem,

⁓ I have a great example of someone that, a very successful broker that I’m coaching, ⁓ he was using Salesforce and ⁓ he was using another software that connected to Salesforce. Salesforce stopped using or stopped supporting that connector and ⁓ he was at a loss. It was really important to his business. He went to Claude, replaced his Salesforce ⁓ within a month and landed a huge account.

and he used his development, his replacement of Salesforce, and showed the portal in his pitch and won a very big account. And I’m seeing, and then I have another person that does multifamily who’s replaced his CRM with something that he’s done through ⁓ AI. It’s happening more and more. So software no longer is…

is what people are looking for. It’s figuring out how to house their data. In the old days, when I was a consultant, you would help a client develop their processes that matched up with a software product. Well today, what makes a business unique are their processes, and now they can have their processes and go and create a brand new platform that mimics their processes, because that’s where the value is in a business.

and continue the business the way it’s always gone. It’s no longer, hey, I need to change this and change this so I can use this. That’s gone. That’s huge. And the crazy thing is how, know, if you have something big like Salesforce and you need a change or something, you reach out to a developer. A developer does it, comes back, and you’re taking days, right? And a while back we thought, hey, we can hire someone in India, so they do it overnight and it comes back.

to shorten the timeline, well now you have an AI agent that does it instantly, right? You put it in there and it comes back. So all of a sudden the timeline is completely gone. Well, not completely, but it’s dramatically reduced and it’s way cheaper, right? Instead of paying 100, $200 an hour for a developer, you’re paying a membership to an AI like Chat or Clod for whatever it is, 25 bucks a month.

Totally different. And so you’re gonna see this, and for the people that don’t embrace it, they’re gonna be at a loss. For those that embrace it, especially quickly and do it now, they’re gonna be ahead of the game.

Scott Bursey (19:57)
What do you feel is a ⁓ focus in maintaining a highly liquid market? Now, what’s some of your strengths, some of your vision on the macro economics of things?

Rob Powell (20:09)
Well, things don’t change as much as people think they do in the sense that yeah, there’s all kinds of chaos going on. All kinds of chaos. But as an investor, as a broker, what is what makes you valuable? That is how you gotta think about it, right? As an investor, your investments make you valuable to your…

to your investors, right? ⁓ In syndication, people want to invest with you because you’re successful. And so you’re watching all these kind of indicators all the time. But when you know your market really well, you understand it really well, you have confidence in that. Same as a broker. If you understand your market, you’re seen as an advisor and people are gonna come to you and people are gonna continue to do deals. It’s not like things stop.

If the outside world, the macro world, makes it, you start to have some fear. How do you get rid of fear? Knowledge and experience and knowledge is how you remove fear. And so I don’t pay attention too much to macro because there’s nothing I can do about it. What I do is pay attention to my market and see how my market is reacting and adjust accordingly.

and I focus a lot on margin. If I focus a lot on margin, what happens is when something changes that I can’t control, I can stomach, can handle it. I always think about how do I compete with everyone else around me? For instance, if something I learned from my father-in-law is when you buy something, you buy it in order to be able to compete with the people around you. I have a strip center.

And if I can lower my rents, know, if taxes go up, insurance goes up, vacancies go up, and someone has to lease out at 20, $25 a square foot, can I get in there at 18, 15 and still be okay, right? How much margin do I have in the deal so I can take a punch? And that has served me well. And I thank my father-in-law for that advice is I need to be able to compete. And how do I do that?

by making sure I have plenty of margin in the deal.

Scott Bursey (22:31)
The coach and you just came out. What a well drawn up game plan. That one is sure to score. Beautiful. And let me ask you this too. Is there anything that you’d like to leave with our audience today? Any advice? ⁓ Golden nuggets, things of that nature,

Rob Powell (22:37)
Thank you.

You know, I think one of the things I constantly coach, whether brokers or investors, is it’s a superpower to know what you want. And that’s really easy. It’s kind of like a headline that everyone gets bored with. But the reality is we really don’t know what we want until we ask our spouse, what do we want?

is this, what is, in the next five to 10 years, what does our life look like? Because if you know exactly what you want,

or if you have a really close idea of what that bullseye looks like, you have a superpower in the ability to say no. When you don’t know what you want, you start to say yes to things that distract you, shiny things, shiny objects. There was a book written years ago by Cunningham called ⁓ Keys to the Vault, and it talked about how when people are on track and they get distracted.

and then they move over. It was kind of like a line through a grocery store. You have your cart, you’re going through a grocery store and you see a line moving faster so you get out and then you realize if you would just stayed where you were, you would already been out. And it’s the same as an entrepreneur. People jump around, go 1 MLM, go to real estate, go to stocks. They just kind of jump around versus staying somewhere and learning it and learning your craft and learning your market and doing all the things that you go and just stay the course.

But if you don’t know what you want, you’re not gonna have the power to say no. And when you don’t have the power to say no, it’s gonna take a lot longer to get to where you want, if you ever get there. But if you know exactly what you want, you know exactly what to say yes to. Does this align to where I’m going? And it is a headline, it is very boring, it’s very simple.

but it’s a question that you will not answer in 30 minutes, three months, or six months. It’s a question you ask yourself, ask your spouse, what do we want? What do we want? What do we want? And it can change, but as long as you know, the bullseye gets tighter and tighter and smaller and smaller. You know, what’s the term? If you aim small, you miss small. That’s what we’re talking about. And I think the ability to say no is a superpower.

Scott Bursey (25:03)
Super, superpower, yes. Rob, what allows you to close the deals that others thought were dead?

Rob Powell (25:12)
knowing the knowledge and knowing what’s going on, having knowledge that no one else has. ⁓ And it’s not just knowledge in my head, it’s the team that surrounds me. I have a great team, I have great partners, I have great investment partners, and that in itself ⁓ allows me to get deals that no one else sees coming, right? And I don’t take that credit, I’ll give you example, last two deals we did, it was information that…

A lot of people pass by, I thought it was a dud. ⁓ One of my partners said, man, there’s something here. We dug in deeper, we dug in deeper. It’s having great partners, having people around you that have knowledge and have ⁓ strengths that you don’t have. ⁓ No man is an island. You gotta surround yourself with people that have some strengths that levy out your weaknesses. And I have tons of them. So the people around me have a lot of strengths and we do okay.

and okay is great.

Scott Bursey (26:13)
Absolutely, Rob, you have dropped some serious value bombs here today. For our listeners who want to reach out, follow your journey, collaborate with you, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Rob Powell (26:26)
LinkedIn. I’m not on any other social media except LinkedIn. I’m active there. I post a lot there. Rob Powell, RESOLUT RE. ⁓ You can find me on LinkedIn.

Scott Bursey (26:41)
Rob, thank you so much for joining us today.

Rob Powell (26:46)
Thank you, Scott. It’s an honor to be here.

Scott Bursey (26:49)
It was an honor to have you. And to our listeners, we appreciate each and every one of you. If you got value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ve got a lineup of exceptional guests, just like Rob, who are making huge moves in the market coming up soon. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you on the next episode, everyone.