Strategies for Navigating Investment Real Estate with Calvin Hexter & Keaton Kirkwood
Calvin: I am here with Keaton Kirkwood and Kirkwood and Brennan for financing. Keaton, you’ve gotten a lot of people out of trouble. I think there’s a lot of realtors. A lot of realtors will get their clients into trouble. And then you’re kind of like the monopoly guy that’s like handing out the get out of jail free card. And I know it doesn’t always work, but you do a pretty bang up job of getting people out of trouble. And for those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about, financing is probably one of the biggest areas that create challenges in a deal going through.
And true or false, Keaton, I’m going to give you a question along the way. True or false, does it matter what mortgage broker or what mortgage specialist you use?
Keaton: I would say so. It’s no different than which professional, like which realtor you work with, which contractor you use. There’s good people and there’s bad people in these industries. So the biggest, interestingly, the biggest pitfall I see people get stuck into is that what worked two, three, four years ago does not work now. So we see a lot of experienced investors actually get caught into these traps where they’re like, well, I’ve done this three times over the last 10 years, I should be good at fourth time. But it is changing literally month over month, year over year. So we want to really show people how they can adapt and shift and keep their business. And that’s the key thing. Your real estate investing needs to be a business. It’s not a hobby. It’s not something you do for fun. It’s a business. And we want to show you the tips and tricks so that you can improve and set it up so that you can succeed in this environment, because there are investors that are making a lot of money and getting ahead. And they’re using all sorts of advantages and benefits that I’ll be blunt, they’re just not public knowledge. Because the interesting thing about real estate investing is that we have an overlap of taxation, investment, real estate and estate planning with finance mixed in the middle. And the biggest misconception is the best mortgage, the best tax advice, the best financial planning, no, no, no, no, no. You need to know what you’re trying to achieve, your why, and we need the best compromise of everything to get towards it. And that’s what I’m going to show you guys at REIcon. We’re going to make it happen.
Calvin: I love it. I’m excited. I know everybody else is excited as well. Keaton, one of the things that I’ve noticed about you, and I’ve known you for some time is your care factor. And I think a lot of mortgage brokers or specialists could have a lot of valuable information, but if they don’t have the care factor, it doesn’t really get put together and it doesn’t get applied to the client. Now, do you have any recent stories where you’ve been able to help a client in a massive way?
Keaton: Yeah, we recently had someone reach out and they were just getting a second opinion, courtesy to their realtor. So thank you, realtor, for encouraging the second opinion. But we were able to look at the plan that they were working on. They had a home that they owned and they’d paid off. They were going to pull equity from it and buy a new primary residence. They were only pulling $170,000 out of this home and we were able to restructure that in a way using… Now, my big thing is the overlap of taxation, financial planning, investing, and mortgage. We were able to restructure things with an accountant to save them over $400,000 just simply through taxation, efficiency in the interest, and structuring things correctly because it’s all about the order of operations. And I think that’s where people really get screwed up because often, and I’m guilty of it, I know you are too, Calvin, we act. We take action, we do big things, then we try to optimize it.
But that’s just… Things are changing. More expensive, there’s more rules, more disclosures. We have to build a plan and we can save hundreds of thousands of dollars if we do it.
Calvin: Amazing. Amazing.
