hands here on the panel, how many of you like to co -invest? Raise your hands.
OK, everybody on the panel, good to know. Joe, I'm going to start with you. How do
you find an exclusive off market or excellent top 1 % opportunity? How are those
brought to you?
Sheldon, are they brought to us? We have to go out and find them. In the mineral
space, we actually end up in courthouses pulling lease records so that we can try
and identify who the big mineral owners are, that we can try and chase. And some
of the larger deals, one in particular that I'm thinking of was three years in the
works. It was getting to know the landowner, the ranch owner, and working with them
over really their goals, what they wanted to do over the course of the next couple
of years, and Eventually, they wanted to sell, and it was a $20 -plus million deal
that we handled over the check, too. And we got to know her real well, and got
immediately reinvested in Phoenix as she retired. But what we find between that and
then also the business -to -business opportunities, frequently it may not be someone in
our network that we've -- someone that we've originated the deal with but it may be
one of our partners that um uncovers something that we're ready to jump on and co
-invest in. Uh same for you David but also a question for you both in the oil
patch are you still able to go look up properties that are in rears on taxes are
you able to still force pool? I don't I don't think anybody lets lets their
minerals get behind on taxes unless they just don't even know they own it but or
it's gone into an estate and been divided up a bunch of ways but yeah there are
opportunities and getting involved with a good ethical company is really important and
I think the other thing I'd like to emphasize is you need to be thinking about
estate planning in all your actions and the best way to do something for your next
generation and even the generation after that is set up generation, skipping trust,
and put assets in there that are at a low current value, so they can appreciate in
there. Once you've made the money, it's awful hard to give it away without paying
that 40 % gift tax, which is real theft. But anyway, I love to talk to people.
I'm exhibiting in the next hall, and estate planning is a very important thing and
I've got some real interesting ideas on how to do that in a big way. Well thanks
for sharing that because I I believe 100 % you're right. I work with I'm a
specialist in family offices the two things they're most considering in talking to me
is how do I keep my family functional and my kids not spoiled and the other is
how much do I how and what ways can I do my well transfer that's boiling them,
right? So that's very important. - Right, but it's also important if children are
gonna come into a lot of money at some point to give them a little money so they
can kind of learn the hard way with the little money. Kind of like that movie,
Brewster's Millions. - Yes, sir. - Where the guy had to blow a bunch of money. So
it was a tiny fraction of what he stood doing here to learn that he needed to
conserve and live within his means. - That That's one of the funniest Eddie Murphy
movies. I know. Oh Patrick your thoughts Well before yeah,
I want to say I definitely This year was the doubling down on the irrevocable trust
to stay planning Fred two and a half year old, right? So for the first time I saw
an actual life That's gonna live past me and my wife and I definitely feel so
great over the last Year of getting all that stuff put together. So working on
that. Your other question, sorry, what was the other question? Well, the question was
how do you source exceptional deals? I got so excited about listening to you guys
and forgot. So exceptional deals. So we have three primary businesses that we're
currently operating in through our parent. And first of all, we educate every two
weeks on alternative investing strategies because Me as an engineer, I didn't know
any of this stuff existed for years when I was doing engineering So every two weeks
we do an alternate investing mastery series now of the ones that we find There's
actually three businesses that we have so we have private credit commercial real
estate now That's incredible opportunity because those unique opportunities are high
interest rates and small -bounds commercial real estate like 600 to 6 million that is
a completely ignored category right now, where people, if the lenders are investing,
they're only investing into the huge, larger numbers. Right now, we're finding
incredible opportunities to lend at very high interest rates, first position in small
-balance commercial real estate, still not multifamily, still not quite penciling more
industrial, we're in certain markets where we're seeing a big reshoring. We're seeing
a resurgence of manufacturing. We're seeing, and even in those markets, We're seeing
retail. So we're seeing incredible opportunities. They're opportunistic lending and
we're also seeing opportunistic acquisitions I went through 2009 and 10 lost
everything now commercial real estate version of that's right now We're buying a lot
of assets and cash and that is different. That's not through our network of known
sources We're actually going through mass Marketing and we're going direct to owner
and why because the brokers are still pricing all the opportunities and if you can't
find those owners directly and set the basis for the price, figure out how eager
they are to sell up front and then potentially end up at the broker. We found
we're just spinning our wheels as it gets overpriced and out of our budget. So
we've spent huge amounts of money and done all of our acquisitions through our
acquisitions fund through direct to owner. And the other side for the litigation, we
do diversified litigation It's single events, small mass tort and those opportunities
are purely relational. It's a novel industry, although it's been around since 1910
and it's the amount of money that goes through third -party litigation. Funding is
the size of the global airline industry. All that said, it's a small niche industry
not many people know about and so my partner said 15 years experience in both the
private credit, commercial real estate, and litigation finance, or different groups,
virtually every single one of those opportunities comes from direct relationships or
referrals from direct relationships. So there's not much secret sauce to that.