Adam Torres and Darius Ross discuss real estate investing.
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Show Notes:
What does the future of real estate investing look like? In this episode, Adam Torres and Darius Ross, Executive business consultant, author, philanthropist & certified broker, explore real estate investing and entrepreneurship.
About Darius Ross
Speaker, author, Executive & Personal Coaching, Life Re-engineering master specialist, seminar & conference producer & promoter, corporate turnabout artist, and platform acquisition sponsor. American arbitrager and commodities trader, philanthropist. Certified business broker, merger and acquisition intermediary consultant, corporation valuation consultant; licensed real estate commercial broker and appraiser.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Darius Ross. He’s an executive business coach, an author, philanthropist, and a certified broker.
Darius, welcome. Welcome to the show. Pleasure to meet you Adam. Looking forward to talking. Good to meet you as well Darius and just to get us kicked off here we like to start with what we call our Mission Matters Minute. So Darius at Mission Matters our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts.
That’s what we do. Darius, what mission matters to you? I think the greatest thing now is for folks to really appreciate that In the next five to 10 years, we’re going to be in a guerrilla state of being as far as mindset, and it’s very important for entrepreneurs and individuals that are looking to be successful in business to adapt that guerrilla mindset to be prepared for anything, because this is the greatest time in history to take advantage of financial gains.
But it’s also one of the greatest times for financial losses, so you have to be prepared. Hmm. That’s great. Great. Great having you on the show. And I want to go further into that concept. So, what does that guerrilla mentality or that that mindset mean? Like, what does that mean to you? It means that sometimes you have to be prepared for just about any situation that’s going on in your business.
Whether your employees all of a sudden decide they want to go renegade and go rogue and decide to join another company. Hmm. Yeah, and that happens quite often and or whether you’re in a relationship and you have to prepare for the relationship to go left on you and you can’t get depressed because something happened.
You have to adapt and be like, okay, now this is just another clog in the wheel and I got to keep moving. So it’s just being prepared for anything at all times and being adaptable to dealing with the situations as they come across because they’re going to come across. How did you develop that or how did you come up with that, ideology?
I was a kid, and one of the things I’ll, for those of us that are, say, over age 50, they didn’t Remember McGillicudrilla, and the cartoon, and funny thing of it is, at that time there was Walter Conrad coming on TV and he was showing the Vietnamese gorillas in combat. So I thought for all those years, I’m like, wow, these are real gorillas.
So this is interesting. And, you know, playing in the 1870s on two in the afternoon movies. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah. So I was confused what was going on, but the funny part about it was, Was just realizing how they adapted to strategies and I’m looking at how they’re adapting constantly underground and so forth.
So I started realizing, reading everything I could about the military and I’m like, you know what, if you adapt strategies in life to that same concept, there’s nothing that you can’t get through. I mean, it’s going to be difficult and be agonizing, but you can get through it. So just that adaptability, you know, being able to realize, okay, ground gets unshaking.
What do you do? You know, you stand still and try to figure out where the soft spots are and you know what to walk past. So it’s just adapting. When did you start your entrepreneurial career? Like how did it begin for you? It began actually about six years old. My dad used to, I realized I liked to read the paper.
So he would come in and just throw the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, just throw them on the floor. And I just started reading them. And his thing was, the curveball was that every single day he’d ask me who the executives were. And this was like a game we played, who the executives were, what we were doing.
Companies were going up and down the stock market. What was happening? What was the news? And so everything from knowing who Henry Kravitz was to what KKR did to what Henry Kissinger did, I had to know it and I had to know it in detail. So it began about six years old. Wow. What do you think that did for like just developing your mind and just that thought process?
That’s super interesting to me. Because I had to be prepared when he would come home and if I got it wrong, it was like, okay. There’s gonna be a problem. And the problem was it was legalization. He takes something away that I liked. So I was like, you know, you’re not gonna take anything away today, you know, and it got so competitive, even in checkers for 30 years, he beat me in checkers.
The one day I realized, like I said, I got to play with the masters. So I would play with everybody I could to learn how to play. Beat him strategically at the checkers. So it was always competition. And so that competition was so driving that it drove me to be successful in everything, you know, Such thing as loss, you know, you can’t lose, you know, second best didn’t count.
How’d you get into real estate? Where’d that come about? I ended up losing a job. I was working at a bank and I lost the job because of layoffs. And so as a result of that, it was like, you know, there was a neighbor that was actually doing real estate. And I’m like, eh, what the heck, I can do that. And I had a good mouthpiece because I could talk my way out of anything.
You know, I started realizing, you know, I said I can sell salt to a slug and I can sell venom to a snake. So, why the heck not get off into something that sales was, you know, good. So, I started off selling shoes and ladies shoes and so forth. And then real estate became the next avenue. So, I was like, okay, this is working.
But I didn’t sell for the first year. I got off into buying commercials. And from that point forward, I started buying from my own account. Hmm. And so, what do you think made you successful in real estate? Like, so you started in real estate, and now, like, why do you think you took to it pretty well? Because I like the fact that it was a people’s business and it was negotiations, you know, I have this thing about being a suave and dapper guy when it came to the lady.
So I said, you know, if you can charm a lady, you can charm a seller into selling you the property. So I was smart enough to realize before this thing became in tandem about being able to do owner financing. Every time I looked around, I’m realizing, okay, now I can give him what he wants and I can get what I want.
Okay, if I don’t have the money, I just give him more money. And create my own terms. So I just realized, okay, I can set the stage as long as I keep on making this thing work and I can balance it out and figure out how to use leverage. There it was. And it’s interesting though Donald Trump’s book, the art of the deal led me to understanding some things, you know, people say what they will and may about the gentleman, but the bottom line of it was he wrote something that was very interesting because that art of the deal is just that you can persuade people to go your way.
You’re in business. Yeah, that makes a lot of money. Yeah, it doesn’t have to be any money. It’s just a matter of how smart you are to be able to persuade them. What markets do you work in? So, with your company, so, and just for everybody listening, we’ll, we’ll make sure to get some, you know, some websites or things like that for D Alexander Ross, real estate capital partners, but tell me a little bit more about your company.
What markets do you work in? What kind of deals are you looking at or for? I acquire in any market, as long as it’s hard pressed and there’s a negotiation room there, and owners are looking to get out, and I’m looking to get in, and especially the pressed properties, you know, they coined me at one point in time to junk man, because I would pick a building with a leg and a kickstand, and I’d figure out, okay, I’d look at it and be like, alright, alright, I can make this work, and everybody would be like, no, this building is just screwed up, it’s just, there’s another word I use, they’d be like, this building is just messed up.
You can’t do anything with it, and I turn around and go in and get some guys, go in there, work it out, and fix it up, make it work, so any market that there’s room where I can make a buck at and people can live comfortably, because my big thing of it is everybody wants a place to stay, that’s a given, it’s like Maslow Hierarchy, now can you give them an affordable place for an affordable price, I don’t want to gouge them, and I can still make some money, and everything’s good, What markets have you acquired in the past?
Like what areas? The Midwest Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin. I have the five the BG companies there. I have in the East Coast all the way from Maine down to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. I don’t do much out West because that’s a different market altogether. Down South Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi.
Do you take on investors or syndication or anything like that? I have not. One of the big things of it is, I’m kind of the renegade. They’ve called me the Wyatt Earp of, you know, being the renegade. Man, you got a whole bunch of nicknames over here, Darius. Hey, hey, you know, there’s a podcast about you.
You have the Duncan, the Wyatt Earp, how come I don’t have more nicknames over here? I feel left out. Hey, you gotta have some fun. You gotta have some fun because I’m that kind of a guy. You know, listen, I’m a renegade, I’m wild, I’m crazy, and the thing about it is we’re partners, right? You have to turn around and please them.
And I just said to myself, Have you ever tried that by the way? Have you ever like attempted to kind of go that route? Or no, you just knew from like right off the beginning, you’re like, nah. I tried a lot of times. That’s why I got divorced twice. That partnership thing with me is a little bit different.
And like I said, I learned that, you know, I have to go it alone. That might mean that I don’t get all the deals that I want. But I ended up going it alone. So one of the things I found out, eh, just go it alone. Now, as I get, you know, to a point where as I realize I gotta do things differently, then I have to adapt my personality.
But so far it’s been like, eh, just, you know, stay the straight and narrow and don’t deal with it. Yeah, I get it. And and, you know, it’s not for everybody. It’s not definitely not for everybody on that one. And so what are you in this market? And just for context for everybody that’s listening to this, we’re recording this December 19th 2024, heading into the new year 2025, looking forward to it.
Darius, what do you, as you go into 2025, whether it’s real estate or entrepreneurship in general, like, like what’s on your mind right now? What are you planning for? The biggest thing right now is we’re coming into the greatest crisis of humanity, if you want to call it that, when it comes down to the loss of jobs, the loss of economic opportunity.
So this is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth in all time, you know, hundreds and hundreds of trillions of dollars. But the thing about it is, and I’ll go back to the election, no matter who is going to win that, we are at a debt crisis point, right? The greatest debt crisis of all time. So for me, it’s like looking at.
Who’s sitting over leveraged and in the commercial market, there’s tons of people over leveraged in the rental market. There’s tons of people over leveraged. So just being in a situation where you’re cash right and your credit, right. And you’re not in debt and you can take advantage of all the opportunities that are out there cause there’s tons of them and they will be tons of them in the next five or 10 years.
So it’s just a matter of, you know, how to take advantage of that. And I’ll add one other thing, this alpha generation, which are those born in a little bit after 2020, that generation is going to be 5 billion. Okay. And we’re talking about Africa, Latin America, and so forth. So with that in mind, this is a huge generation that’s not going to be used to owning a home.
So multifamily is going to be in, I would say, at least into 2050. So don’t be unrecognized. You need to get into buying multifamily. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard similar things too. Like, like this, the generation, do they, do they want to own? Do they not want to own? How do you feel about that? It’s, it’s an interesting concept because you know, some of the generations, depending on when you bought, depending on when you got in, depending on like, Where the market cycle, was that like for, I’d say for some of the later millennials that may maybe bought before 2008 or otherwise, like some of those were wiped out really, you know, really early, really early when they got out, like that was, I remember.
So there’s a generation that kind of got jaded by that. What do you think about this next generation in terms of like, in terms of owning versus not owning versus, you know, American dream versus not, does that even matter? What are your thoughts on that? It’s the American nightmare right now, because unfortunately speaking the boomer generation, which is a generation before mine, I’m an excerpt, and unfortunately speaking, their drive for success and wealth and so forth drove the prices astronomical.
So now for a Zier or a millennial, you can’t afford a home. Because as a boomer, I need this money for retirement. Not necessarily need it, but they’re sitting in a situation where they want it. So they’re not going to go away for nothing. What’s going to have to happen is for them to wake up one day. And I’m saying this right off the bat, and this is a quote that we’ll be able to use real estate’s going to be on sale, not for sale, but on sale.
And I’m predicting market price is going to go down 50 to 75%. The stock market will take a hit to somewhere around seven, 8, 000 points. We’re going to lose a lot of markets. So. Basically, when all these things come to fruition between 2025 and 2030, you will begin to see that there will be nothing more than a generation lost in apartment living.
So, the next 10 to 15 years, there’ll be an apartment. But, for those landlords that, and those individuals that invest, that are willing to put some money aside, not be debt heavy, they can pick up bargains. This will be the generation of trillionaires made. I guarantee. The first trillionaire will pop up by 2030.
Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s going to be interesting to see how that, how that all plays out because yeah, is that even just, you know, I talked to a lot of people and I, most don’t really want to own a home. Like they’re just not, they’re just not into it. They don’t want the, they’re, they’re okay with the, you know, with the with, with renting, they’re okay with not having that other responsibility, even if they can’t afford it.
Many people, it’s just like, they don’t, they don’t want to deal with it. They want to, they want to be flexible. They want to, they want to go different areas. They don’t want to just not Like something they want to be tied down to, which is super interesting to me. I don’t know. And there’s, I feel like I’ve seen a couple of different models, like fractional type ownerships and all these other things and membership things and like a lot of different models coming up.
So I feel like there’s also going to be some room For innovation in terms of how we own real estate, what concept that looks like. And the, you know, the traditional model versus, you know, what, whatever comes up next, is it going to be like a you know, just like the same way Uber displaced, right.
Taxis and things like that, like the same kind of concept, but it does something else. Does some new model that we haven’t even considered come up, that becomes the norm at some point, who knows, right? Absolutely. I mean, it’s going to be there because the fascinating thing about it now is, young people with this whole thing after COVID when that process of, I don’t want to work anymore for the man, so to speak, I don’t want to go through these hardships and aggravations of being told what to do, that is becoming a mindset.
And that very same mindset Is going to stay on the table for at least another two generations, you know, another 10, 15 years. Yeah, that’s going to be interesting. That’s a whole, that’s a whole another can of worms there, Darius. Come on, man. What are they going to give you? That’s why they call you the Renegade, right?
I forgot your nicknames. Renegade, Wire, what else do you got? Oh, man, it’s too good. Too good. Well, well, Darius, I just have to say it’s been great having you on the show today. Learn a little bit more about your background, of course, about the work that you’re doing. So Darius, how can people like, how can people follow up?
How can they learn more? How can they follow you? They can find me on YouTube for all the videos I also have a website, it’s DariusARoss. com, that’s D A R I U S A R Oss. com, they can send me an email message at Darius, at DariusRoss. com. Fantastic. If everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the The links in the show notes.
So you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters, and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully a new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Derek’s man. Appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you. Definitely. Thank you, Adam. I appreciate it so much.