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Business · Episode 33

Investment & Wealth Building Strategies for Entrepreneurs with Lane Kawaoka

with Lane Kawaoka

Jun 13, 2025 · 00:34:18

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Investment & Wealth Building Strategies for Entrepreneurs with Lane Kawaoka
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Business00:34:18Episode 33

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Real Estate & Investing11
John Torrens

Today's guest is Lane Kawaoka, a renowned real estate maven with a track record spanning over a decade steering a remarkable portfolio of 10,000+ units. He stands at the helm of the Wealth Elevator. He's a licensed PE, both civil and industrial engineer, and his expertise extends to orchestrating capital construction projects surpassing $250 million in both public and private domains. His departure from traditional wealth-building paradigms after a triumphant corporate career spurred him to ignite transformation among fellow professionals, notably through his influential top 50 investing podcast on The Wealth Elevator and the inception of the groundbreaking HUI Deal Pipeline. Welcome to The Total Entrepreneur Mind, Body, Spirit, where we turn cutting-edge science into practical strategies for entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Dr. Jon Torrance, Entrepreneur Inc. 5000 honoree and professor of entrepreneurial practice at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. Each episode, we dive into mental, physical, and spiritual health with expert guests offering actionable insights to help you thrive and perform at your highest level. Let's get started. Lane Kawaoka, thank you so much for being here. Really excited to talk to you.

Lane Kawaoka

Hey, thanks for having me. Aloha, everybody.

John Torrens

So you've got an interesting background in that you, you're a professional engineer and you started out your career that way, and then you made a shift into real estate and wealth management. And I think that's an interesting inflection point in a lot of entrepreneurs' lives. So tell us about how that happened and why and what was going on.

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah. So up until this point, I was kind of taught to go to school, study hard. I became an engineer out of college and just started to work for the man, but it wasn't a really good fit for me. I mean, I guess who does, right? Like I'm profiled as a maverick from the Predictive Index and folks like us are We have a hard time in the early career because we just maybe call us cocky or we don't really like to do those beginner jobs per se. And that's what I did. I was like a construction supervisor, was kind of my first role. I traveled all over for work and I got paid pretty well and I was always good with my money, pretty frugal. So I saved up $80 grand to buy a $350,000 house in Seattle. In my early 20s. And because I was traveling all over for work, I was never home, only on one Saturday. So I just kind of decided on a whim to rent it out. And that was back in 2009, 2010. And that was kind of where I got this taste of cash flow and realized like, wow, if I just kept doing this a bunch more times, I'll be able to quit the rat race and fire my boss. So that's what I did. I bought another couple units in Seattle a few years later. Then by 2015, I had 11 rental properties scattered throughout the United States. And then that was, you know, went off from there and did more entrepreneurial things, started syndicating apartments. But that was kind of how I started, just by chance, right? By just kind of fell into it in a way, accidental landlord.

John Torrens

So you mentioned that you didn't make a great employee, and I totally connect with that. You know, my ADHD brain just, makes me a pretty bad employee. So dig into that a little bit more. Like what was it about you or the situation you were in? 'Cause I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't all my fault, right? You know, I mean, I think, you know, I was working for a Fortune 50 company. Quality of life there was horrible. I mean, everybody knew you were there and you got paid well, but you were never to see your family really. I mean, it was one of those companies. Luckily I was single, didn't have a family, so it kind of worked out well. traveling all over all the time. It was in the transportation industry, so it's 24/7. And I think the people that were there, the work culture was very militaristic, right? I mean, it was a railroad company, so very old school. I remember we'd be in meetings and you were not allowed to speak unless your manager or director gave you permission to speak. You know, those kinds of things. And this is like in 2000, you know, I graduated college in 2007, right? Like you, they, you know, I'm sure they still operate in some similar way today. It wasn't a good environment, but I did learn a lot, right? Business processes, why, how big companies operate, SAP, things like that. So I am thankful for that. But, and they paid me well, right? I mean, I think that's the thing about investing and starting a business. It is capital intensive. So he who do not have the money does not have the choices.

John Torrens

Yeah. So you're lucky in that you had a high-paying job where you could save away some money to buy your first property, right? So that was an advantage. So for listeners who are, they feel like they're stuck on this corporate ladder, like what's the first step you'd recommend they take toward a more intentional freedom-based life?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah. I mean, the first thing is you got to save money. I would say when I was starting out, I was able to save maybe $30,000, $40,000 per year. It's all income minus expenses at the end of the day, whether you are a W-2 employee or a business. And the more that you can create a delta there, the better you're going to be able to buy rental properties and start on your own path. Money gives you options, as they say. So a lot of my clients today, they're able to save $50,000, $100,000 per year. When I started to rent out my house and essentially live on the road, I was saving 6 figures, and that was kind of what helped me buy that next tranche of rental properties. So I would say the first thing is, and unfortunately it may be working at a job you don't like, just suck it up and make the money and save the money. And there's any business with some moat around it, you're going to need a pretty substantial amount of capital. Residential real estate rental properties is probably one of the easiest businesses to get into. I mean, you're just renting boxes out to people and getting a property manager, but it is probably one of the most capital-intensive businesses. Like to buy a little rental property for $100 grand, you're going to need at least $25, $30 grand to get going, you know, the down payment there. Yeah.

John Torrens

And in addition to that, you need a pretty decent credit history and that sort of thing, right? In order to access leverage. Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

Right, right. It's, I mean, I think that's what's nice about real estate. There is a barrier to entry for that, right? Yeah.

John Torrens

Yeah, for sure. So comparing what you do now to the job you had, I mean, both have an element of stress, but I suppose it's a different type of stress, right? So now you're leading a $250 million plus portfolio. So how do you manage stress and decision fatigue and those types of things now compared to how you used to deal with it back when you were working for the company?

Lane Kawaoka

I don't know. I mean, I guess stress is stress. I mean, you have to be able to have the skill sets to manage things, right? So project management skills, I think I did learn a lot about that and I was essentially a supervisor of a traveling work crew. So a lot of personalities, you're out there in the elements. People would be away from their families, cranky all the time. So I had to manage that. And machines would catch on fire. You have to get the daily work done. And I mean, it seems a little esoteric, but stresses are stresses. And It's just distractions at the end of the day. Easier said than not when you're in it. But I think if anything, I do think the job is a great place to hone these skills and practice on somebody else's dime.

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

Whether you're having to manage other people, you're trying to find your own leadership skills. There are certain ways that I do things today that is a little bit more firm-handed that came exactly from the place I developed my first decade being a manager, leadership. I'm not saying that's the right way or the wrong way, but I mean, it's obvious where it comes from. And I think that's, you have to develop your own style and find what works for you to work under these multiple, these stressful situations.

John Torrens

Yeah, I think it's really valuable for young people who want to get into entrepreneurship and start their own companies just to understand that you don't have to do it right away. You can't— there's definitely value in working for somebody else and developing contacts, saving some cash, learning processes. So yeah, I think that's really important.

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I'm a huge proponent for that, right? Like, I think all too often you see on social media, you know, the guy who says, I'm going to burn the boats and go all in on this. That's totally different than what you're doing, and you don't have very much money to back you up.

John Torrens

All right.

Lane Kawaoka

I think that's cool, right? I'm all for you, right? But like the way I did it, just speaking for myself, I worked as an engineer for more than a decade, saved up my money, and I probably would be still doing that job today if we wouldn't have taken that next step at doing larger deals with other people. I probably still have, if I probably would just be doing this today, You know, I quit my job around 2018 to go full-time into this real estate stuff. But if I would be still doing that today, you know, I'd probably have several dozen rental properties cash flowing, maybe a bunch of 'em paid off, and I'd just be hiding at work essentially. Because it's like, I mean, I probably didn't know, I probably wouldn't know what to do with myself all day. Yeah.

John Torrens

So your first property sounded like kind of like a happy accident, right? You had the house, you were traveling, you rented it out, and then the light bulb went off, So what do you look for or what are your criteria in a deal to, for you right now? Like what works really well for you?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I mean the way to break it down, I mean we have a full analyzer on my website and we give all the stuff away for free for people getting started on their first rental property. But you know, you look at the numbers first and you, there's this thing called the rent-to-value ratio. So you take the monthly rental price divided by the purchase price, And you're looking for something 1% or higher. So that first property I bought in Seattle, again, I think it was like $350,000. It rented for about $2,200 a month. So $2,200 divided by $350,000, that's under 1%. That's not going to work. And that was kind of where I learned, yeah, maybe you don't buy properties in sexy primary markets in the best areas like Seattle, California, New York, Seattle, Hawaii. the rent-to-value ratios aren't going to work. And that's why the next tranche of properties I bought were in Birmingham, Atlanta, Indianapolis. Today you could, you may be able to find a property that's $100,000 that rents for $1,000 a month. So it hits that 1% rent-to-value ratio. But numbers have been harder to find. I mean, that's why we kind of had to step up to larger apartment deals where the numbers are a little bit better on that side. And we're doing value-add on the properties, renovating units, bumping the rents, Essentially, it's kind of a slow flip game though, is the way that we do it. But that's essentially what you look for. It's numbers-driven, right? And these are the things that I didn't know when I first started, but I start slowly realize that, yeah, sophisticated investors don't invest in the sexiest of places or even the best areas. They don't invest in the— they're not a slumlord, right? But there's a nice little sweet spot in the middle.

John Torrens

Yeah. So one of the things I hear from a lot of people considering rental properties is, oh, I'm not handy. I don't know how to fix things. I'm not going to put a lot of sweat equity into it, or I don't deal with tenants, that kind of thing.

Lane Kawaoka

Right.

John Torrens

But it seems like clearly you've got this figured out. So how do you manage all that?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I'm like the worst handyman. I don't even like to go to the beach here in Hawaii. I don't like to get dirty. So I mean, okay, so here's the thing, right? Like there's a lot of people that are in real estate and they don't have very much money, which is why they have to flip houses, wholesale houses. The way I teach it is a little bit more predicated to people who have good incomes. You make at least $50,000, $60,000 a year, bare minimum, and you have some net worth accumulated. And this is what I wrote in my book, The Wealth Elevator. There's different people on different parts of the journey. Some people come into this world, they're already an accredited investor, net worth $1 million, or they make over $250,000 a year. For those people, it might make sense to just skip over rental properties in their entirety. I mean, rental properties are great when you're getting started, but once you get to accredited investor status, It's just too much liability to own these silly rental properties and they're just not scalable. But if you're somebody under a quarter million net worth, forget I said that, right? You need to kind of do what I did and step up on that first floor of the wealth elevator and buy little rental properties and start from there, start to build some net worth. But when I was starting, I had a professional engineering job that took up a lot of time. I always just hired property management. Now, sure, they take 10% of the rents, some lease-up fees, but they manage all these headaches for you. I'm sure you got to manage that, right? I mean, it becomes sort of a full-time job when you have more than a dozen properties or two, but when you're getting started, that's the way to do it if you're not a completely broke guy, right?

John Torrens

Right. Yeah. Well, right, because in addition to the purchase price and closing costs and everything, you've still got to have some cash flow to pay the property manager and that sort of thing.

Lane Kawaoka

Well, I mean, that's going to come from the rents, right?

John Torrens

The rents.

Lane Kawaoka

Okay. Got it. Usually they take, if you don't make any rents, they don't make any money, right? So they're incentivized to get a dang tenant in there. But yeah, you're right. You should have some extra reserves. So if you take like a prototypical $100,000 house, 20% down payment, you probably want at least $5,000, $10,000 on the side for reserves. You know, when I had, you know, just to give people a sense, in 2015 I had 11 rental properties. Actually, this was from 2012 to 2015. So a few years of run rate here. People always ask like, what's it like to have 11 rental properties? Well, I mean, the good thing was I had some good cash flow coming from it. Each property cash flow, maybe a few hundred bucks a month. So $3,000 a year off of these 11 things. Not bad, right? It was kind of like a third paycheck, but with 11 rental properties, maybe I had eviction or 2 every year, some kind of catastrophe that happened every quarter. Of course, these property managers are taking care of this, but I'm having to kind of stay on them to get things done. But it's very manageable. But most of my clients aspire to $10,000 of passive cash flow or greater. So now you're talking about 30, 40 properties. So increase that exception rate by 3 or 4 times. And as you're starting to see, it's just not scalable at that point.

John Torrens

Yeah. So for the people who are accredited investor status, what's— so you said they might be looking for something different than rental property. So what would you recommend for that group of folks?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I mean, that's where I came more. I was in 2015, And I write about this in my book, The Wealth Elevator. I mean, pretty much everything in there is things I've learned and gone through the slow way. And in this period, I started to meet a lot of other accredited investors, which was new to me. My parents never owned rental properties. I didn't have a rich uncle. And I started to realize like a lot of these guys did exactly what I did. They kind of slaved away at a job, and made some decent salaries, but it took a long time, you know, decade plus to acquire a bunch of rental properties and get their net worth over that million-dollar threshold. And all of them, you know, kind of came to the same place intellectually and separately than myself, which is great, right? When you have people validate this path, they're all trading in their rental properties and going into syndications and private placements as a passive investor. And specifically they're investing in large apartment deals that were more on the commercial side, a lot more robust, and trading in their duties as the first-person landlord with all the management headaches and the legal liability, more importantly, and becoming a purely passive investor and able to diversify into many, many different assets, but directly in the deal as opposed to like, you know, people talk about REITs. REITs invest in these same deals, but there's a gazillion middlemen and certified financial planners that kind of get in the way that take all your money essentially.

John Torrens

Right?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah. So you have a lot of these sophisticated investors going directly into the deal, joint venturing with the operator and in these sort of country club deals and diversifying this way. And then what I also realized is these guys, they were smart with taxes. Like with these, a lot of these deals, you can do cost segregations and extract more depreciation than you would a little single-family home in the first year. And they were using a lot of these tax strategies to drastically decrease their taxes, more so when they're a little landlord. And, you know, also compile on their life insurance, infinite banking strategies. And this trifecta of strategies, deals, directly investing in deals, taxes, and privatized banking strategies was this trifecta that was like, I was like, why doesn't everybody do this? Right? But it, but then again, It's very opposite than what our parents all teach us.

John Torrens

Right. Yeah. Go to school, get a good job, save your money and yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

401, which ultimately just makes the Wall Street companies wealthy off your fees, right? Hidden fees.

John Torrens

Yeah. So with these syndicated deals, you know, 'cause I've invested in private placements, never in real estate, but varying degrees of success. It seems like with a real estate placement like that, there's maybe a little more security. Is that your experience or is it still super risky? Like any kind of private placement?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I mean, you have different, there's a spectrum of like deals out there and asset classes. So like, I think everybody's sort of familiar with like angel investing, venture capital, right? Things that haven't made any money, super risky, but super high reward, right? I'm not going to say if the risk reward is worth it, but that's on the opposite end of the spectrum of like real estate. And even in real estate, you can have different business plans that are a little bit more risky and higher return. So like for example, building properties from scratch development, a little bit more risky than being on the debt side of a deal, just lending money out or preferred equity. But where I started, we'd buy these little 50-unit Class C properties, eventually getting to larger Class B, 200, 300-unit Class B properties. The business plan in these initially were to just renovate the units, put a little cosmetic renovations and new flooring, new appliances, new paint jobs and playground equipment, and to bump the individual rents up $100 as tenants naturally move out. And then the nice part of that is, is they naturally move out, your cash flow doesn't really go away, right? Because it's not like all the units are dark at one time.

John Torrens

Right.

Lane Kawaoka

In fact, sometimes you're able to replace the unit the same day, get 'em into another unit. that you're freshening up. So a lot of different strategies, right? And I think people like real estate because it's a hard tangible asset. That's also where the tax benefits come from, the depreciation of the physical asset. One of the cool things about real estate in terms of how our IRS tax code is laid out. But that's, you know, traditionally real estate's a little bit more on that safer side of the private equity space, right? I mean, today I also invest in kind of similar to you, maybe private, I guess would be categorized as private equity. So you invest in operating businesses.

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

The reason why I like this and real estate, value-add real estate, is it has an existing P&L sheet, right? It's not just some pipe dream like a venture investment is. Like we can see what the income is and we can see what the expenses are. And if you've got any business aptitude, you can kind of drill down into each line item And you can kind of dig into and do due diligence off of existing financials.

John Torrens

Yeah. Is there like a central clearinghouse for these types of deals, or if people are interested in pursuing these, where do they go?

Lane Kawaoka

How do they find you? Unfortunately not, right? Like, I mean, there's some crowdfunding websites out there, but in my experience, it's just a lot of like the deals that can't get funded in the way. That's why they go to these. Those websites are broker-dealer websites.

John Torrens

Right.

Lane Kawaoka

So the broker-dealer acts as the name suggests, a broker-dealer. They get paid to put the deal out on their marketplace. And sometimes a sneaky thing is they're actually putting a different part of the capital stack of the same deal that you as a direct, if you were to be as a direct investor, which is kind of how I've got into this, right? Investing directly with the operator and cutting out all the middlemen. You know, it's just a, I think a better way to going, but it does require investors to be a little bit more, you know, you got to build relationships, right? You're investing with people.

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

You got to do your own due diligence. And that's why I think, you know, building a community of other purely passive investors around you is so critical, which is why, you know, we have events within our group and community to kind of help with that. But yeah, you are getting off the beaten path, right? We're not investing in Vanguard stuff or REITs, right? You're going directly to the operator and you're diversifying over hopefully dozens and dozens of these different projects. But you have to do that. You have to source that. It takes a while, right? It's not easy.

John Torrens

That's been my experience too. A lot of these deals are not, yeah, you're not going to find them in any publication. It's really based on your network and your relationships, right? You'll hear about them from people who are somehow involved in them or know somebody who knows somebody. So I think the message for anybody interested in this type of thing is to make sure you grow and nurture your network, right?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah. And especially with like people being a little bit more socially recluse these days. I call myself out, right? Like I was initially like this myself being an introverted engineer, right? You just want to sit in your boxers on your computer and click buttons. But in this world, you have to get out there and network with other people. And the key thing is to network with the right people, right? Accredited, purely passive investors, which are incredibly hard people to find, which is why I've monetized my group, right? Like that's how we charge people to come to events, right? Because we kind of cater the right people. But that's the, it's not for everybody, right? And I think that's kind of the reason why it's so nice, right?

John Torrens

Yeah. So you mentioned your book, The Wealth Elevator, a few times. So walk us through like the different steps on the elevator and kind of give us just a little overview on the progression.

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah. I mean, the big motivation of writing the book was, I think there's a lot of good financial books out there like Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, but a lot of those are like written for the guys in the basement level of the wealth elevator. that sort of sub-first floor, right? The guys who don't make $50,000, $60,000 a year, or their net worth is negative or under $100 grand, right? Like, I didn't write the book for them. There's so many other things out there. I think mainly, like, as we start at the top, you got to just keep a budget and go from there, right?

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

I'm not a big proponent for college, but that's what allowed me to get paid a nice salary starting out. Which, that's where I started on the first floor. So the first floor are kind of guys like when I was in my 20s, guys who make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. You're not in huge debt and you're moving up in terms of net worth, which is all your assets minus liabilities. A lot of people, they find the syndications and private placements on the second floor of the wealth elevator. when they become an accredited investor, either make over $200,000 a year or net worth $1 million or greater. And that was kind of where I found myself around 2015-ish. And then, you know, we talk about the 3rd floor and then the penthouse level of the wealth elevator. And in fact, I think that's the biggest thing people need to understand, what floor of the wealth elevator they are first, because there's different strategies that kind of are for each particular floor. And that's the thing, like imagine that it's not one size fits all, right?

John Torrens

Right.

Lane Kawaoka

And there's other books like the Rich Dad Poor Dad books, I think great books for mindset, but it doesn't give you any actionable advice on what the heck to do. And it kind of is very esoteric in a way. I mean, yeah, buy assets, right? I think that's a big key point that even I prescribe to, but what kind of assets, right? Like where do you find them? I think that's a lot of things that are missing. And I think the Rich Dad Poor Dad book is mainly written for people that are not accredited yet, right? On that basement level of the wealth elevator, maybe the first floor, right? Startup business. Where to me, the wealth elevator I created for people like myself, right? Professionals or successful business owners already on that second floor of the wealth elevator and moving.

John Torrens

No, that does make sense because it isn't a one-size-fits-all. And it's important to realize that you can still elevate your wealth regardless of what floor you're on, right? There's, like you said, there's just different strategies. So yeah, starting from where you're at. Now let's talk about the, you've got the HUI Deal Pipeline Club. You mentioned that earlier too. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, I mean, what I realize is a lot of the deals out there, it's through private networks, right? You have to know the guy who knows the guy. And when I first started to invest, there were a lot of people that I invested with that I was like, shoot, I shouldn't have done that. Right. But I wouldn't have known, right? Because when you get pitched a deal, you get the shiny PDF and they all look great and they all show the best numbers in terms of projections. It wasn't until like, you know, after I started investing, and that's how you do it, right? You gotta, unfortunately you have to learn by doing a lot of times. You know, I didn't understand what were the key inputs that drove the projections. To name a few, like what are the assumptions for the reversion cap rate or the exit cap rate? What do you think the market's going to be in the future? What do you think the occupancy is going to be throughout the hold, right? You better not think it's 95% or higher. That's just wishful thinking.

John Torrens

Right.

Lane Kawaoka

So there's some key assumptions that I think any passive investor can spot check they're looking at the deal, even though they're not, they're just a passive investor. A lot of this I'm actually writing my new book, right? Kind of due diligence on apartment deals from a passive investor's perspective, things to spot check. But a lot of this comes with people, right? That's also how you find the deal flow.

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

So like I said, unfortunately, accredited investors, they tend to hide a little bit. their targets to get sued, right? Because they actually have something to get sued for. So this is, it kind of makes it a little difficult. And, but I think once you find one or two other purely passive accredited investors, they know people and then it just becomes, then you start to build your own tribe, right? As I did. Yeah.

John Torrens

So what are you working on now or what's next for you?

Lane Kawaoka

Well, I mean, I'd say the last Right now in commercial real estate, it is very difficult. 2022, 2023 was the peak of the market. Since then, things have come down 20 to 30%. So every asset class has market corrections that you can't really predict, although they're usually on 6 to 10-year cycles. I think crypto's a lot faster than that. Of course, I think we may be having a market correction in the stocks world.

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

I don't know because I don't invest in that stuff. I just invest in hard assets like real estate. But I think if you're looking at commercial real estate, now's a great entry point right now. But right now it's hard. The reason why it drops so low is because the, I think people are very aware that interest rates are still very high and that how that impacts commercial real estate is the loans that you can get aren't as high leverage. And it used to be you could get 75% loan-to-value on your loans. Today that's probably down to like the 50s. So you have to bring so much more to the table, which ultimately kills the deal economics, right?

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

Like we don't really pull the trigger on the deal unless it pencils out to be a certain number, you know, with some conservative assumptions of course, right? But Right now, the dang debt service line item is just way too high to make deals pencil. So this is why us and everybody else have been kind of sitting on the sidelines doing very little and why prices are dictated by supply and demand. So if the buyers aren't buying, then the demand suffers and that's why prices are lower, right? But still, we haven't, we've seen interest rates pause and come down a little bit, but where we're still at, at this point, the prices have come down, but the debt service, the interest rates, the leverage hasn't come down to an inflection point where it really makes sense. Now, we found some one-off deals very on rare occasion, but for the most part, the general market isn't to that inflection point. quite yet. But I think what you're always trying to find is that unique deal out there than just general market segment, right?

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

But that's kind of why, and I also think that interest rates aren't going to come down. The Fed rate isn't going to come under 3, 3.5% anytime soon. So this era of free money that real estate was in from my inception, from 2010 to 2022, is gone.

John Torrens

Yeah.

Lane Kawaoka

You know, if people want to speculate on interest rates, don't speculate. Use the CME and the Chatham Financial Curve. You Google those things, Chatham Financial Curve. These are the cap rate providers. These are the guys who make predictions for a living, essentially. They have skin in the game. So those are, you can see where the predictions on interest rates are going to be in the future and The thesis, my, at least my investment thesis is we've left a period of free money behind and it's not going to be free money anymore in terms of loans and interest rates. So I think real estate lost a big trade wind to help it out as an advantage. So I'm still a real estate fanboy, don't get me wrong, but it's also kind of required me to kind of look for deals elsewhere. And it also, you know, into private equity, even angel investing too.

John Torrens

Yeah. And I think everything you talked about just reinforces the thought that you got to start with saving money, right? You need cash and you're able to do anything to spend nowadays. It's going to require more to do the same deals you were maybe doing a decade ago.

Lane Kawaoka

All right.

John Torrens

Well, Lane, this was a great conversation. I think you gave some good tidbits of knowledge, so thank you for that. If people are interested in learning more about you and the work you do, where can they find you?

Lane Kawaoka

Yeah, they can go to Amazon, check out the book, The Wealth Elevator. I think we're well over 100 reviews there. If they buy the book and they send us a little screenshot, we'll hook them up with the audiobook version or the PDF version. The PDF version has cool charts you can cut and paste out of there. So I guess if you buy it from Amazon, you technically on it, so we don't have a big problem with that. But if you do that, email us at team@thewealthelevator.com. And yeah, if you also check out the podcast, I do that biweekly now. I was doing that since 2016. But yeah, thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it.

John Torrens

Yeah, of course. And the podcast is called The Wealth Elevator?

Lane Kawaoka

That's correct. Wealth Elevator.

John Torrens

All right, excellent. Super cool. Well, thanks, Lane. Thank you so much for listening to the Total Entrepreneur Mind Body Spirit Podcast. If you liked what you heard or heard something interesting today, please give us a like, share a comment, or better yet, subscribe to the podcast. Thank you.

More from Lane Kawaoka

About This Episode

In this episode, Dr. John Torrens sits down with Lane Kawaoka, CEO/ Author/ Renowned Real Estate Maven. Lane shares his journey from a corporate career to becoming a successful real estate investor. He discusses the importance of saving money, the criteria for selecting investment properties, and the role of property management, highlighting the transition to passive investing for accredited investors and the current market trends in real estate. He emphasizes the significance of networking and building relationships in the investment community, as well as outlining the steps in his book, The Wealth Elevator, which guides individuals on their financial growth journey.

Takeaways

Lane Kawaoka transitioned from a corporate job to real estate investing.

Saving money is crucial for financial freedom and investment opportunities.

Real estate investing requires understanding the numbers and market dynamics.

Property management is essential for managing rental properties effectively.

Accredited investors often seek passive investment opportunities in real estate.

Networking is key to finding investment deals and building relationships.

The Wealth Elevator outlines different strategies for various financial stages.

Investing in real estate can provide tax benefits and cash flow.

Current market trends indicate a shift in investment strategies due to rising interest rates.

Building a community of investors can enhance opportunities and knowledge sharing.

Visit https://thewealthelevator.com/ for more information about Lane Kawaoka.

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About the Host

Dr. John M. Torrens

5× Inc. 5000 entrepreneur, Professor at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, author of Lightning in a Bottle, and TEDx speaker on ADHD as an entrepreneur's superpower.

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