I SURVIVED REAL ESTATE 2024
The Norris Groups 7th annual award-winning event, I Survived Real Estate, is Friday, October 25 at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Our 17th annual black-tie gala will benefit Make-A-Wish. Since 2008, together we’ve raised well over $1,000,000 for charity!
In a year of lingering inflation, housing shortage, sticky high interest rates, national affordability challenges, a dangerous war and an uncertain upcoming election are just some of the headwinds we face as an industry and a nation. What will the FED do as year year finishes out? How big will the FED decision loom on this year and the expectation of a better 2025? Oh yeah, there is that little decision the country is going to make as this year looks like a big presidential election in terms of what the economy will look like for the next four years. Our panels are always some of the brightest minds to help us tackle topics we never thought we’d have to consider and how they might impact real estate.
In this episode:
- Expert Insights on Real Estate Market Trends and Opportunities
- Operational Strategies for Success in Today’s Economy
- The Transformative Impact of AI on the Real Estate Industry
- Building a Lasting Legacy in Real Estate: Key Lessons and Strategies
- Inspiring Personal Stories Behind Real Estate Legacy Projects
- Final Thoughts and Acknowledgments from Industry Leaders
Episode:
Narrator  Welcome to The Norris Group real estate podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode, we’ll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever-changing real estate market. continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge, and empowering you on your real estate journey. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends and success strategies. Here’s your host, Craig Evans.The Norris Group, proudly presents, I Survived Real Estate. industry experts discuss evolving industry trends, real estate bubbles, inflation, and opportunities emerging for real estate professionals. We want to thank our Platinum partners. uDirect IRA Services, San Diego Creative Investors Association, White Feather Investments, MVT Productions, Inland Empire Real Estate Investment Club,DBL Capital, Douglas BrookeHomes and Realty 411Magazine. See, isurvivedrealestate.com for event details, information on all our generous sponsors and to connect with our speakers.
Craig Evans  Let’s jump back in. We’re going to finish up here pretty quick. I wanted to bring everybody back up, as we always do. So quick. The question that I want to ask start out with everybody, what’s the top three items that you can think of, whether geopolitically, policy related, monetary issue, market wise, whatever you believe it is, what do you believe that the people in the room, people on the street, people on Main Street, should be looking at from a real estate perspective this next year?
Bill Allen  Three?
Craig Evans  You can give me your top one.
Bill Allen  So most of us are like, I just like to keep things really simple. If like, you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on in the entire climate of the United States, internationally, those kind of things, really, most of the real estate money that you’re going to make is in your backyard. So if you understand supply and demand in your local town, your community, where you’re investing, some of the policies, I love that, like going to town hall, understanding some of the what they’re looking for, where the grants, where are some of the inefficiencies that you can help with. To me, that’s, that’s really where I live. I look at my local area, California, will give me some stuff. But really kind of, we invest mostly Pensacola, Florida. Now in Tampa. I was in Chattanooga for a while, Nashville, and if I understand what’s going on in that area, who’s coming in, who’s coming out? What is the local municipality want and I can make a lot of money there. So most of us, I think, are not national. I would just look in your backyard and really focus on that supply and demand. It was talked about up here. That’s the number one driver of what I do, whether I’m wholesaling, flipping, you know, we’re supplying turnkey rentals, or like the owner finance stuff that we do, buying apartment buildings. But here’s an example. We bought a ton of apartment buildings in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Murfreesboro, Tennessee is a suburb of Nashville. We bought one in downtown Nashville. They started throwing up brand new construction, giving away four months free rent. That didn’t help my old building. I got vacancy, but Murfreesboro, Tennessee has probably shouldn’t be telling all of you guys this, but it has a moratorium on the sewer system, on building there, because the sewer system, the capacity, cannot take new construction multi family. So all of our buildings right now are full, and it’s a great opportunity for us, over the next two or three years to just buy a whole bunch of multi family and Murfreesboro. So took all my money and I put in Murfreesboro. I own a lot of it.
Marck de Lautour  I just believe that operational excellence will overcome any economic hurdles. And so I truly believe that you should be focusing on dialing in to try and get as good at your profession as possible. I have a son who tends to be overly political, and is kind of, you know, caught up in what’s going to happen in the next 11 days. And I tell them, look at the end of the day, whoever wins, you can’t control the national economy, but you can control your personal economy. And so I think operational excellence, just getting dialed in, trying to be the best at what you do, is probably the thing to really focus on is just, you know, operational excellence in your own little world. Is that cheating the question?
Craig Evans  No.
Bruce Norris  Mark?
Craig Evans  Anybody.
Bruce Norris  Mark, go ahead.
Mark Palim  Oh, should I go first? Sounds good. And the real estate market, I think the thing to be watching. We’ve got this tug of war between the lock in effect and single family versus unaffordability, right? And even with rates coming down a little bit, we’re still close to record unaffordability. So how much demand has does that get tamped down? So watching the inventory, months of sales available in the market. And seeing that dynamic, how that tug of war works out, is going to be, I think, key thing.
Selma Hepp  Oh goodness. I talked about energy, talked about insurance, so…
Craig Evans  You kind of gave your stuff away already.
Selma Hepp  Gave everything away. I had a thought, and it just escaped me, can you go first?
Bruce Norris  I’ll go first, yeah, it happens to me all the time. Matter of fact, it just, no, I’m kidding, I guess I would. I would consider staying in a price range that you know, there’s demand for. I would take less risk for a while. In Florida, if you have a 350,000, $400,000 house, you will not own it a week from now. If you price it fairly, if you own a $700,000 one, you could own it for quite a while. So they’re treating the two different worlds very differently. So stay within a price range that has demand. I’m done.
Selma Hepp  You’re done. Okay, so mine is actually tangential to what I said about insurance and energy. So when we think about affordability, we always mostly think about home prices and mortgage rates. But what has kind of become more obvious over the last year is you have this additional variable cost. This is an important distinction. They’re variable. They’re not fixed. 30 year fixed mortgage is a fixed, fixed mortgage. So your payment is fixed. What you don’t know what’s going to change every year is your property taxes, not if you live in California, but if you live in Texas, for example, and your insurance and your utilities, because again, cost of energy can go up quite a bit. And so for households with fixed income, this can be a significant shock to where they cannot hold on to their home ownership anymore, particularly in areas where you have a lot of lower income households that haven’t built up enough home equity in their home to where can they tap into that equity, or just, you know, are on fixed income. And so I worry about certain parts of the country where you do see these costs sort of increasing significantly to where, you know, households can no longer afford those costs. And the other thing is now, escaped again. I can’t remember what the other thing was, but it’s so, okay, so it was on the fixed and variable cost. And sorry, I think that’s enough.
Craig Evans  Yep. So, you know, we’ve talked about technology, AI, things like that. I don’t want to say hypersensitive, but I’m recognizing that our market is changing daily because of that. I mean, you know where we were at three months ago, compared to now, with the leaps that AI is making, it’s astounding at how fast those things are growing. What do you believe will be the biggest impact on AI, Large language, type of process over the you know, by December of 2025, that we will see in the real estate market as it stands?
Marck de Lautour  That’s deep. But I think how I will take that is, how are we implementing it like from an actual as an operator who’s buying and selling inventory, AI, other than writing script and doing the chat GPT things is now we’re overlaying, not only with follow up sequencing, but there’s software out there that can actually allow AI to go in and analyze sales calls to see when a seller lost motivation with one of our acquisition managers on the phone, and then they can go back and use it as a training tool for acquisition managers to try and get better at their craft. It’s trying AI will predict the personality profile of the seller on the other end of the line and explain in real time to our acquisition manager like how they should be talking to them. Think it easy, like a DISC personality, D-I-S-C, D is a hard charging guy that may want to just, you know, just give me the facts, you know, and let me make, I want to be in control. Let me make the decision someone on the C is like data driven. They want the charts and graphs like these fine gentlemen to my right, so you might. Them charts and data and reason as to why it would be a good time to sell. AI is going to come in and assist and with our team on a sales format in a very meaningful way.
Bill Allen  A lot of benefits of it. I would just say that everybody here, you know, I was talking to my copywriter. Specifically, we write a lot of copy and emails, and basically a digital marketer. Just happened to wear a real estate hat now, and what I find is a lot of people are worried about losing their job from AI. The answer is, who can harness it the fastest and understand it and learn it and use it? And so my copywriter is worried about losing his job. I’m like, man, no, AI is ever going to write you write my voice better than I do. So our emails sound like me. If you guys have ever gotten email from me, I haven’t written. Haven’t written one since 2019 in July, and so he does, but an AI can’t write it for him, but if he understands that, he can take 20 of his hours a week and give it to AI, they can do it in minutes, then he can free up 20 hours to elevate himself and basically delegate stuff to AI. So what I would say to all of us is, if we can figure out how to delegate those things and teach our team to do that, then back to what Mark said, we become the most operationally efficient business on the planet. And that’s where I’d say, I see most of us going. I think, in the real estate world. I don’t know if you guys agree, but it usually takes us, like, a really long time to adopt stuff, like we’re still doing direct mail, like internet marketers haven’t done direct mail in like 15 years, and they laugh at me when I talk about it, but it still kind of works. So, you know, I would say, if you can harness it the fastest, then you’ll start winning. So take some time to learn it and just get educated on it so you understand it and don’t just push it off as disbelief, because it’s common whether you’re ready, whether you’re ready or not.
Craig Evans  Any other thoughts? No, all right, so as we’re coming to the end of the evening, you know, Bruce would always ask a question, and I’m always, you know, caught off guard trying to figure out what it was. But I wanted to ask a question in a little different aspect this year, and I want us to look at things a little differently. You know, we can make all the money in the world. We can, climb to the charts in our craft. We can, we can set all the records for being the best forecasters, and we can be right 100% of the time at the end of the day, what does that get us right? So my question that I’d like to ask each of you guys, and the reality is you guys have to answer. You don’t get to avoid this one, right? But I want to challenge you guys to think about this tonight as well. What impact do you want to have over the next year? Not goals, not any of that stuff. What impact do you want to have over the next year? And then how do you want to begin to create a different legacy that people will remember you by?
Mark Palim  Okay, so the things going through my mind, it was now, it’s great. I’ve been like sitting here on the end listening. I guess something that’s going to that, as I move further along, my career has become more important to me is to help the people on my team develop their careers and try and find the right challenges for people at a certain moment that fit with what the team needs, right? So you got to have both them come together. You can spot someone who this is a great growth opportunity, and it’s a gap that we need filled, or what have you. That’s the thing I think I’d be focused on.
Craig Evans  Okay.
Selma Hepp  It’s a difficult one, but so, you know, I we have a lot of false narratives out there. Whatever you think about, even if you think about it, the economy, you know, one side will say it’s really, really bad. Another side will say it’s really, really good. In, you know, that’s just not about the economy, it’s about everything. And my job, you know, I’m an economist, but my job is really to be an educator. When I go from conference to conference or speak to clients, I’m educating them on what the data is showing. So, you know, data, ie facts, and so my objective is to always leave somebody more informed and in search of better information when they’re seeking to develop their own narrative and to develop their own narrative, not to go with the narrative that’s easy because somebody’s told them that it’s so that, you know, one should always question what they’re hearing and, you know, seek their own data and confirm, you know to what to develop the narrative that conforms to their beliefs, obviously. But also that is true in data.
Bruce Norris  All right, I’m going ask answer a question that I think you were you were saying what I had dreamed up before, what’s the same one thing that I would really like to see next year? I attended a baseball game after 911 and it was really eye opening, because the national anthem, everybody stood up and sang, and I looked around and I thought, You know what, there’s there’s nobody that’s a different color. There’s nobody that’s male or female. We’re all Americans today, and that’s what I hope for, is I hope that at some point we stop being Democrats or Republicans and we do what’s best for America, and that includes everybody that we’re elected. That’s what I’ve done.
Bill Allen  I think I should let Mark go after that. Well, I think this is our last question. So before I answer, I just want to say thank you guys for having me. Bruce, amazing an event. It’s absolutely incredible. Many I don’t know if anybody in here knows, but Lucy and I are Make-A-Wish parents, our son, James, is just turned eight on Monday. He’s had five open heart surgery, six heart catheters, and we spent most of our like young life as parents with him in the hospital. And he got a wish trip just a couple years ago, and it was the most amazing week of my life. It was the day I gave up my phone. I did not, I didn’t carry a phone for nine months after that, and built a system around not having a phone, but I took like, 2000 pictures with a phone that didn’t have a SIM card in there, and I was totally present with him for that week. It was, we doors opened for us that I’ve never seen before. Every time that little boy doesn’t talk that well, but every time he sees a Southwest jet now he says, My plane, my plane. And it’s just, it’s an amazing organization. If you’ve never seen it, we lived it for a week, and there’s nothing better. So I’m totally blessed to be here and be on stage with you guys to raise that much money for Make-A-Wish. It’s near and dear to our heart. So I think for me, kind of James really got I think God put James in my life for a reason. I was thinking really big and going really fast, and he, James slowed me down a lot. He’s like an autistic kid, almost. He can’t pay attention to the big things. But we’re on a walk, he’ll see the little bug, and he can pay attention to the little things for like, a half an hour. And I’m on Mars, and he’s on planet Earth looking at the grass. And so if God played a total trick on me and put him in my life for a reason to give me some like direction and purpose. And when I look at we got three boys, 10, 8 and 6 now, and I would say my legacy 100% will be motivated and inspiring the next generation of kids in business and money and finances and real estate. We have a program that I built called teenage tycoon for kids and families to learn all of these things. And right now we’re filming a TV show called Kids Who Flip it’s kids flipping houses ages 12 to 17. There’s six kids around the country right now flipping three houses. We got a girl who just turned 18 has done nine houses, a boy who just turned 15. He’s done four houses. He made $70,000 on his last deal, y’all. And so today I had the opportunity to stand right there on the beach, get on FaceTime with a crew at 25 that’s in Washington, and FaceTime these kids to give them some inspiration, because their boiler just blew up. And so it’s like, they’re like, Bill, what should we do? It’s going to be $10,000 you suck it up and you make it right, and you spend 10 grand and make that family have a have a house, and do it right. And so I get to fly back there to Washington and mentor these kids. And it’ll be on, like, big TV with the Warner Brothers contract next year, in probably March or April of 2025, so Kids Who Flip, I think, will be a big thing for families to actually have a show where you can have co viewing in your home again, where we talk about, like stuff that parents and kids can watch together, versus all the crap that’s on TV right now that my kids are watching YouTube and I’m waiting till they Go to bed to watch my own TV. So I want to bring back TGIF on Friday and put it back on TV and really motivate and inspire kids.
Marck de Lautour  Just follow that Marck. So I have given thought to this, and our company exists for two reasons, and that’s to simplify real estate investing and elevate communities. So I think the real estate industry has done a terrible job over the last couple of decades allowing people to. Invest in real estate. I mean, it’s really, really hard to find a house with a realtor and find a contractor, and then, you know, all the contractors that have to come and do it, there’s everyone cuts their teeth and loses money on the first or second deal. We’ve tried to simplify real estate investing for those that don’t want to get into it. So I that is inherently what I want to try and do is inspire more people, instead of just hitting the easy button and gambling in the stock market, to be able to simplify real estate investing and do it as easy as clicking on a button and saying, Yeah, let’s go. So that’s kind of our purpose. But as far as a legacy, obviously, you know, it brings family connotations to that question, but our team is getting incredibly close at the office, and I was inspired recently by reading a book called The Dream Manager by Matt Perry. I don’t know if anyone has read it, would encourage you to it is a parable written kind of in a Patrick Lencioni style, where it’s a very easy read, but it talks about how leaders of organization need to grow leaders below that care about the dreams and aspirations of the team members that you have working with you and your organization. So where I sit, hopefully 12 months from now, back on the stage, I hope to have changed the lives, quite literally, of the people that work in our organization by making their dreams come true. And you start by actually getting in the weeds and understanding what their dreams and wishes and hopes are for the organization. And so that’s kind of the legacy that I hope to leave is actually, you know, changing the world is it’s super hard to do. We’re not all Elon Musk, but I think we can all change our own little part of the world, in those corners that we live in. So Kansas City will be be impacted by the way that our team is transforming the homes and the distressed homes in Kansas City. But also, I think the lives of my team will be greatly impacted, hopefully through the leadership that we observe.
Craig Evans  I guess that leaves me.
Bruce Norris  I was gonna say you’re answering your own question, right?
Craig Evans  So I will first of all say it is an honor. Thank you guys for showing up and continuing a legacy, as we’re talking about legacy, a legacy that the man beside me and his son, the Aaron, started years ago, that means a lot to me that you continue to show up and support this event that is not here to puff these people up. You know, there are a lot of people that are giving a lot of their time to be here when they could do a lot of other things on a Friday night. And so first of all, I’m thankful to you, to you for being here and to everyone on the stage for giving of their time. In answer to my own question, I put a lot of thought to that, and I’ve read a book recently that is entitled The family. Now my mind just went blank on my own book. I caught your disease there, right the The Family Board Meeting, and I was intrigued by that when I first read it and it but really what he’s talking about, Jim Sheils is talking about the process of he’s recognizing that he’s only got 18 summers with his kids, and so that hit me as a dad of two. But then I had to start looking, you know, I’ve got a family that I’m responsible for. I mean, I told you, first and foremost, you know what I stand for? I’ve got a family that I’m responsible for, leading a legacy for them. But at the same time, you know, with the amount of employees that we’ve got out of the companies that I own, I’ve got a responsibility to lead and with people that put their trust in us to give good data and make wise decisions of giving responsible answers. We’ve got a responsibility to that. So my prayer is that I leave a legacy that betters the people around me in the sphere of influence that we’ve got. And my goal, my process for next year is that I, as we come back next year for 2025 for I Survived Real Estate, I hope to see a group of people that have chosen to change the world around them through their sphere of influence, and I that starts with you, your family and the people that you can affect. So again, thank you so much. Thank you for coming. I hope you have immensely enjoyed this event, and I look just forward to seeing you all next year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.
Narrator  We’d also like to thank our Gold Sponsors, Inland Valley Association of Realtors, Keystone CPA, NorCal REIA, NSDREI, Pasadena FIBI, PropertyRadar, The Collective Genius. Thompson Group, Aloia Roland, Coldwell Banker Town and Country. See, isurvivedrealestate.com for event details.For more information on hard money loans, trust deed investing, and upcoming events with The Norris group. Check out thenorrisgroup.com. For more information on passive investing through the DBL Capital Real Estate Investment Fund, please visit dblapital.com.
Joey Romero  The Norris group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE license 01219911. Florida mortgage lender license 1577 and NMLS license 1623669. For more information on hard money lending go to thenorrisgroup.com and click the hard money tab.