Today’s guest is Dr. Jeff Anzalone
Dr. Jeff is a full-time practicing periodontist in the great state of Louisiana, author and founder of DebtFreeDr.com. His focus is on helping doctors and other high-income professionals create passive income from real estate. Join Sam and Dr. Jeff in today’s show.
————————————————————–
Content Creation [00:00:00]
Changes in Real Estate Investing [00:01:26]
Using AI for Real Estate Analysis [00:05:52]
Vetting Sponsors [00:09:22]
Using AI for Content Creation [00:11:11]
Repurposing Articles into Videos [00:16:41]
Content Creation Hack [00:18:06]
Fund to Funds Model [00:20:01]
Finding Small Sponsors [00:21:46]
————————————————————–
Connect with Dr. Jeff
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DebtFreeDoctorJeffAnzalone
Ebook: https://www.debtfreedr.com/doctors-passive-income-guide/
Connect with Sam:
I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/
Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com
SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f
————————————————————–
Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
A
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:00:00]) – So there’s tons of different ways you can do content creation. Uh, ideas co uh, help writing emails, help writing blog descriptions, YouTube to, I mean, just you name it. Um, it, and again, if you want to research a particular type of investment, you wanna research particular type of area, uh, you know, there’s hundreds and thousands of chat G p t prompts, you know, that, that you can use. Welcome
Intro ([00:00:28]) – To the How to Scale commercial real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we’ll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.
Sam Wilson ([00:00:41]) – Dr. Jeff Anzalone is a full-time practicing Pero Donis in the great state of Louisiana. He’s also also author and founder of debt free dr.com. If you don’t know, Jeff came on the show last on March. What was that March 4th, 2021 recording. This now May, I can’t believe it’s may already, May 2nd, 2023. So it’s been a whole whopping, that’s 26 months. Jeff, since you’ve come on the show, I’m sure a lot of things have changed. Welcome back to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:01:07]) – Yeah, thanks for having me back. Uh, honored to be back, hopefully provide even more value to your audience and, uh, two years ago.
Sam Wilson ([00:01:14]) – Absolutely, Jeff, I do do this as a recap though, for every single episode, every guest that comes on the show in 90 seconds or less. And you tell me where did you start, where are you now, and how did you get there?
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:01:26]) – Uh, started, uh, as a periodontist trade in time for money. Got about eight years ago, had a snow skiing accident, fell injured my wrist. That was my wake up call to basically I needed to do something to bring in other streams of income besides something that uses my hands. And long story short, started researching, found out wealthy people have multiple streams of income, wealthy people on real estate. That, that led me to focus that because I’m busy guy, like most people on this show, um, didn’t want to be an active investor, which I’m actually now kind of dabbling into that now, but started off as a passive investor and syndications. And, um, here we are, started educating people on my website. And then it’s grown to, uh, leaps and bounds and, and love educating people and connecting with people.
Sam Wilson ([00:02:24]) – Man, that’s cool. I love, I love that, uh, that journey there along the way. And that’s also fun to see, see that you’re now getting more into the active, uh, active investing side of things. I, I always say that there’s no such thing as true passive investing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but even, even as a passive investor, figuring out who you want to write that check to and tracking those investments. There’s still keeping up with the K one s and all that stuff. There’s still some work involved, even as a passive investor. But tell me, you know, in the last two years, like what, what are some things you’ve been working on? What has changed? Where are you
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:02:58]) – Now? I, um, let’s see. When we spoke, I started raising some capital for deals around September, 2020. Mm-hmm. . So I’d been doing it for, what, about seven or eight months when you and I spoke. Yep. And that, that has really expanded because I’ve gotten to meet a whole lot more groups to work with some good, some bad, some in between. Uh, so now I, I, now I’m starting to focus more on what my, you know, my, my target audience. The people that come into my group, you know, these are mainly physicians and dentists, but there are other high income professionals, engineers, nurses, attorneys, et cetera, that are too busy to really do this themselves. So as, as this, as this group has grown to now I’ve got, um, about 1800 people in my investor group and growing it, it, it, it actually puts more pressure on me to be a steward of people’s money.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:04:04]) – So it actually makes it even more important to go out and really find these groups, these people to work with, you know, so for instance, I went to, and I’ve never been to Vegas before. Went to Vegas a couple weeks ago with, with a, uh, a smaller group that are doing mobile home parks. We went out there, there was a convention. I got to meet with them. I got to see how they work with brokers. We got to, you know, look at property. So I’m really getting involved with it instead of just somebody emailing me going, Hey, you wanna raise capital for my deal? And that happens a lot and people will, you know, unfortunately, people will take people up on that without even getting to know them. So, am I perfect? No, but I do everything I can because I’m, I’m putting my money with these people as well, so I, you know, I don’t wanna lose, you know, money.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:04:53]) – So, uh, that, that has changed now, um, with trying to really find these groups that are up and coming. That’s one difference. Uh, second difference is, um, I’ve become a fund manager because a lot of these groups now are wanting to do real estate funds instead of just these one-off syndications. So I’m able now to go to these groups and go and leverage my, my network investor’s size with having a fund to, to get potentially better returns. You know, basically, you know, like, so for instance, I start, I started, I started a short term rental fund last year, and I, and I started another one this year. Well, I went to the group and they were paying, I think a seven pref with a 50 50 split. And I was able to negotiate better terms, uh, an eight pref 70 30 split, or a nine pref with an 80 20 split, depending on how much money you invested.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:05:52]) – Uh, hard to do that without having a fund and without having a group like that to leverage. So that’s number two. And then number three is, uh, November, 2022. Chat, g p t was launched, uh, openai.com. Uh, I use it all the time now to, to help analyze, steals, create content, um, check for Market Con, you know, if, if I’m looking in a certain area like Sarasota, Florida, you know, you can get all kinds of stuff. I mean, the, the, what I’m telling you right now, probably in about two weeks would probably be obsolete, you know, cuz it, it changes so fast. So it’s, it’s, it’s amazing the, um, what you can do. It’s amazing the people that are using it. And, um, so those are the three main things that have changed.
Sam Wilson ([00:06:42]) – That is a lot, uh, uh, of moving pieces. Let’s, I want to hear how you’re using ai. Let’s get into that here in a minute. But before, before we do that, let’s, let’s kind of go back. You said something earlier, you said good, bad. And in between those were the three words that you had used to describe the various sponsors and or deals that you’ve been looking at and reviewing as a passive and or maybe even a fund in Vater. What, what does that mean to you and how are you, how are you, how has your strategy changed on vetting sponsors?
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:07:18]) – I think the number one thing is I’m getting, as I mentioned, I’m getting a whole lot more involved. Plus I’ve met people that are very wealthy, 5,000 plus million net worth people. And listening to those people who they invest with, what they’re investing in, who they’re avoiding, that has helped, um, a lot. And, and I, and I understand these people can take risks, but a lot of times they’ll say, you know, a lot of times they don’t wanna take risks. They just wanna not lose money, you know, even though they can afford to lose a lot. So, uh, and I, and I’ve gotten, uh, actually I got my mobile home park group from one person like that. And so networking more has helped, uh, finding out the people to really stay away. E even though they have a great website and, you know, they have all this stuff, the bells and whistles, they look great, but really digging deep in finding out about, I’m doing a background check, you know, anything I can, talking to their investors, um, to figure out, again, it’s not a hundred percent foolproof, but I, I’m, I’m focusing on that more and, and talking a whole lot more, spending more time before I even consider working with them.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:08:34]) – Uh, because, you know, before I’d only been working for, what, seven, eight months raising capital. Now it’s, you know, it’s been almost three years. So, um, you know, you learn a lot, you make mistakes. Um, but, uh, but you know, my main goal is to not lose, you know, every deal looks the same almost on social media and everything’s a five year hold and a two x equity multiple and a seven or eight president. It’s like, well, how do I tell if everything looks the same? I’m like, well, I always tell people I graduated with 58 dentists, but I want, I would only let about four or five of ’em work on me. But they’re all dentists, right? Meaning there’s a lot of syndicators out there. But those just a handful of ’em that I would work with. Right. And, and, and the the million dollar question is how do you find that? And, and that’s what I’m trying to do,
Sam Wilson ([00:09:22]) – Right? Yeah. And I don’t, I don’t know that there, I mean, there, there are the, the checklist items you mentioned background checks, you know, references, investor references, deal performance, how close to their, how close to their deals perform relative to the shiny brochures that we all put out when we’re launching a deal. Did they meet their cash flow projections? You know, how many exits, if any, have they had those things? You can, but then there’s also, there’s also I think, the finer art to that, the more subjective side of it, which is the, do I wanna work with these, with this group? What’s the communication style like? Is, are we, are we philosophically aligned? Um, you know, those are important things too that I think maybe, like you said, it just takes some of that massaging and that time it’s really just time, maybe mm-hmm.
Sam Wilson ([00:10:10]) – with those, with those deal sponsors that, uh, that you need. So that’s really cool. Thank you for taking the time to share that. One thing that we’ve not had on the show is anybody really talking to us about how they are meaningfully using AI to help them in the real estate business. So I’d love to give you some time here just to, just to share that with us. I had a buddy yesterday that was shooting some video here in our office. And then before the day was over yesterday, he sent me images of people at some of our facilities that were all our logo branded. I mean, they look just like you and me, real humans. And he is like, this is all ai. It’s completely made up. I fed a bunch of words in, and here’s what I’ve got. I’m like, your wait, you’re telling me that this person actually doesn’t exist anywhere in the world? He’s like, Nope, this is crazy. So I want to hear what you’re doing and how, and then that was just kind of for fun, fun gimmick. Wasn’t really using it for anything purposeful, but what are you doing to use ai? You mentioned using chat, G p t for research, for underwriting, for what? Just gimme the, gimme the down and dirty on that.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:11:11]) – Well, you know, the, the main thing that my goal is on my website is to educate people a a about real estate, about different things. And by going through that process, I educate myself, you know, let’s, let’s say I wanna learn about cap rate. Well, you know, going through the process, writing an article, publishing a YouTube video, that sort of thing. Um, that helps me educate myself. But now you can use AI to help with content creation ideas. You can use it for, uh, you know, article, blog, article outlines. I mean, you can get it to write the article for you. I don’t recommend that because, you know, Google will flag you. But just coming up with ideas, you know, 50 different ideas from one topic, you know, maybe it’s a, a multi-family apartment, you know, whatever real estate syndication or whatever you wanna do.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:12:04]) – So there’s tons of different ways you can do content creation, uh, ideas con uh, help writing emails, help writing blog descriptions, YouTube to, I mean, just you name it. Um, and again, if you want to research a particular type of investment, you wanna research particular type of area, uh, you know, there’s hundreds and thousands of chat G p t prompts, you know, that, that you can use. Again, this will, this will probably be outdated when we’re after you listen to this for a couple weeks, but still, I mean, literally, uh, you know, we were, I’ll talk to my brother last night. He’s a civil engineer and he’d never even used this. And, you know, and I, and I got pulled it up on my phone. I was like, you know, give me a difficult problem that a typical civil engineers tries to solve or whatever, and hit it and showed it to him. You know, it’s just spitting out all this stuff. He’s like, man, that’s, that’s unbelievable. You know? So this, you know, whatever you want, whatever you want help with, you know, just think about if you’re like a c of a billion dollar company and you’ve got all these people, all these secretaries, all these assistants working for you, how would you talk to that person to get something done? You know, Hey, I want you to go do this. And, and you’d be very specific and you hit entering. That’s it. And, and it’s mind boggling.
Sam Wilson ([00:13:25]) – Wow. Wow. Yeah. I’ve even seen YouTube videos out there, people using it, um, to solve their Excel issues where they’re like, gosh, I can’t figure out what am I doing wrong if I want to get this, what am I doing wrong? And they’ll put it in, they show you how to use chat g p t to help solve Excel problems. I like the idea there though, of kind of the content creation side of things, cuz I’m not, I’m not real creative, Jeff. It’s why I do an interview based podcast, because I get to ask you questions, then you talk to me. It makes, it makes it a lot easier. I don’t have to generate my own content. So I think, you know, coming up with ideas, like you said, I ideas from one topic that’s brilliant. Like, hey, well
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:14:05]) – Here, here’s a, here’s an example of that. So let’s say you’re gonna interview Joe Smith that owns a self storage facilities and he’s a podcaster, blah, blah, blah. Well, you could go in the chat G p T and go, Hey, I would like for you to help me create some interview questions for a person. You know, do you understand? And it’ll say, yeah, I understand. Gimme information about it. And then you start copy and pasting stuff from podcasts, from his website, and it’ll go through there, and then it’ll give you things to talk about. That’s just one example. That’s wild. And it takes like 60 seconds.
Sam Wilson ([00:14:38]) – That’s wild. And those, those are, those are pre-programmed prompts, like you asked there. Do you understand?
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:14:46]) – Um, I, I like the, the more information you can feed it before you start asking questions, the better. So I’m, I’m feeding information, you know, hey, it, let’s say you wanted to write a business plan for like a new business or new, you know, new something, or you need, want to do like standard operating procedures, whatever. So you need to feed it information, you know, all about what you’re trying to do, you know? And, um, the more information, the more, the more information you can give it, the better outputs it’s gonna give you instead of being generic. So for instance, my, my, my son is graduating from high school and, and in a couple weeks. So my wife was like, well, can you help, can you help him create like a, a a couple of, uh, you know, he’s getting these graduation presents or whatever.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:15:36]) – Oh, oh, he had a, um, some of our friends threw him a fiesta, like a party, you know, graduation party. So I was very specific and said, Hey, you know, I would, I’m a, you know, 18 year old senior in high school, I would like for you to create a letter to my, um, to my mom and dad’s best friends that gave me a party for graduation. It was a fiesta. And it, and it literally took all of that and it, cr it was perfect. I ma I made a few changes, but again, to get what you want, you gotta put in more information about it.
Sam Wilson ([00:16:10]) – Now that make, that makes a a lot of sense. Let’s transition here. One of the things that you’ve been doing recently is your, your YouTube channel, and you’ve got I think 2000 what subscribers at this point, which is great. Uh, but part of that, you were, you, we talked about this off offline, was taking articles and creating those into videos. What’s a, what’s a meaningful way? We, I know we’re spending a lot of time here on content creation, but I think, I think it’s been the thrust maybe of what you’ve been doing in the last two years is becoming that educator, right? Is that, is that,
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:16:41]) – Yeah, and if you’re like, like if you have a podcast like you mm-hmm. , you can get transcripts and then you can get chat G P T or you can get people that use chat G p t to repurpose what we’re talking about. Repurpose your podcast to blog articles, repurpose your podcasts, to YouTube videos, whatever. So I, you know, the way that I learn now more than ever Yep. Is YouTube videos, podcasts, and then blog articles in that order. Mm-hmm. , right? So I was like, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got these, um, I’ve got all these articles, so why not convert them over to uh, um, YouTube videos? Right. You know, so, um, so I went ahead and I did that and um, I think I’ve got 160 something videos now. I I try to publish one or two a week. Yeah. And, and I can tell if you’re trying to educate people out there, you’re gonna build a lot more trust quicker cuz you can see somebody and you can see how they interact versus just reading a generic article. And I really like that about YouTube.
Sam Wilson ([00:17:53]) – Right. No, I, I couldn’t agree more. So you’re taking these articles, you’ve already written them. How do you, how do you, do you just restructure the video or, I mean, obviously you’re not gonna read it word for word cuz that’s boring, but
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:18:06]) – This is gonna be, this is gonna be funny. I’m gonna give you a hack that I’ve never even told anybody before. All right. You, you, you can copy your article, you can copy anybody’s article and paste it in the chat G p t and go, I, I want you to rewrite this article below. Uh, and I usually do this and you’re gonna laugh, but it really helps. I want you to give this, uh, I want you to rewrite this article for an audience of, uh, either sixth or seventh graders into a YouTube video and give me like a catchy introduction or whatever. And it really dumbs it down for you, like depreciation, right? I mean that’s sometimes that’s hard to explain. It’s like, you know, depreciation is like a gift from the government and, and, and it, it just, it it, it really dumbs it down for you, but it’ll convert it for you. So it, it’ll sound more like a, a, a video than you sitting there reading it, you know, word for word. I do that all the time. That’s
Sam Wilson ([00:19:00]) – Awesome. I love that. Yeah. And you’re so right cuz the, that is again, going back to what you’ve been doing, not just, you know, obviously raising your funds and, and doing that. But, but on the education side of things, I mean I had this very conversation with a very intelligent, uh, attorney friend of mine yesterday that just couldn’t quite get his head wrapped around the idea that he has a phantom loss on, uh, one of his investments last year due to bonus depreciation. He’s like, wait, he put 50 grand and he is like, how do I have a $45,000 write off from this deal last year? I’m like, well ge bonus’s. Like, so wait, but I got distributions last year. Just the whole, you know, how how do you explain that to someone? The, that’s, I love the, I love that that hack that’s a lot of fun. When you talked early on, when you’re now negotiating better terms with your deal sponsors, cuz you guys can come to them now as a single check investor, a large, a large investor, are you doing this on a fund to funds model? Is that, is that the way you’re working that?
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:20:01]) – Yes, I am.
Sam Wilson ([00:20:02]) – Okay, that’s really, really cool. Can you give, just maybe shed some more light to that, uh, and tell us kind of how you go about negotiating those better terms, what deal sponsors are typically looking for? I know we’ve got just a couple minutes left here, but I didn’t wanna leave that rock uh, unturned. So Yeah, if you can, if you can break that down for us, I think that would be insightful.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:20:22]) – Yeah. So, you know, sometimes if it’s like, so for instance, if it’s a hundred thousand dollars minimum, a lot of times people are more comfortable with like a $50,000 minimum to get started. So I’ll a, you know, I’ll start there. Can you, can you lower your minimum? Can you, uh, give a better preferred return? Can you, you know, anything that you can nego anything that I can do based on what they’re already offering, whether it’s one, one part two parts or, you know, luckily with the short term rental, it was like all three, I was able to negotiate all different parts when it sells. Um, I was able to negotiate like, hey, if you do, if you invest like a hundred thousand dollars or more within a certain time period, you get a better preferred return versus if you wait later in the year. So there’s all different creative way again, you could, and I’ve never done this, but now that I’m thinking about it, you could basically take, uh, and I’ll probably will do this next time I, uh, are negotiating. I can take the term somebody’s offering, put it in chat G P T and ask it, Hey, what are some better terms that I can negotiate this group based on these returns and just see what it says just to give me ideas, you know?
Sam Wilson ([00:21:30]) – Right. No, that, that makes a lot of sense. What are you finding for those that maybe don’t do the fund to funds model? What are you finding the minimum kind of check size needs to be or sponsored to say, all right, yeah, we can come to the, come to the table and start negotiating better, better terms.
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:21:46]) – The, the smaller, smaller sponsors. Million, million and a half, the larger ones, probably 5 million or more is what I’m seeing. Right. And, and, and another thing, the reason why I like finding some of these smaller sponsors are we can get better returns because they’re not having to pay 5,000 thousand dollars a month in marketing fees to go out and run Facebook ads and Google ads to get investors. Uh, these people aren’t paying anything. So they, they’re like, okay, well if I don’t have this huge budget, I can give more return. You know, like, uh, I found a, a guy that’s an attorney and a dentist together, they were doing RV parks together and now I taught ’em about syndications and I, and I introduced ’em to my s e c attorney. We’re, you know, our IRRs on are like 30, 34% that we’re getting. And it’s, and it’s like, where can you get that? It’s because you, you find these, these people that are, you know, these needle in the haystack people that are just killing it. And, and it’s just from getting out there and networking, you know? And I love finding people like that because they’re excited because now they can expand because I’ve taught ’em how to, uh, do a fun, I’ve taught ’em how to do a syndication instead of just them using their own money, you know?
Sam Wilson ([00:23:02]) – That’s really, really cool. Jeff, you’ve taught us so many things here today. It’s been a blast having you come here back on the show. Certainly enjoyed it. Uh, as much the second time around as we did on the first episode a couple years ago. If our listeners wanna get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
Dr. Jeff Anzalone ([00:23:18]) – Oh, they can go to my website, debt-free doctor.com. Um, I have a, uh, if they want to, um, start getting articles, YouTube videos, that sort of thing, they can go to debt-free dr.com/free, F r e e free guide, download our passive income guide. They’ll automatically put, be put in the system and uh, start getting the emails.
Sam Wilson ([00:23:40]) – Fantastic. We’ll make sure we include that there in the show notes. Jeff, thank you again for coming on the show today.
Sam Wilson ([00:23:44]) – This was a blast. I certainly appreciate it. My pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can, do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.
