Bonnie Galam 0:03
Hey there, and welcome back to the good bones real estate investing podcast, I am your host, Bonnie Galam. And thank you for tuning in. As y’all know, if you’ve been around here for a while, that I have structured our real estate investing business in a way that we have a very cyclical turnover period, meaning basically 100% of our turnover is either happen August 1, or September 1, assuming we can control that. And the reason I kind of just put that little asterix there is that we also tried to avoid evictions at all cost. And so if someone’s like, Hey, I lost my job, or I need to relocate or whatever the case may be, is, sometimes we end up with like a middle of the lease turnover. But that’s few and far between. If that happens maybe once a year, across our portfolio, that’s it. And so, by and large, everything’s going down July 1 and August 1. And so we are coming up on turnover season, we are, you know, currently reaching out to our tenants to see like, who’s staying who’s not staying some of the stuff we’ve already kind of known in advance. The more notice I get on turnovers, the easier our life is. And usually like tenants, especially like college students, who we have a lot of and young professionals, like when they’re in a place where they’re going from a rental to maybe purchasing their first home, they know this stuff in advance, this is not like a last minute, 30 day type of situation where they don’t know what their housing is going to be. And so, quick tip right off the bat, if you don’t give yourself a long runway for turnover notices, go ahead and give yourself that grace, put that in your lease, stretch it out, make everybody’s life a lot, lot easier. But the reason I bring up turnover period, is that when we’re not in turnover period, it’s really, really easy for us to kind of fall off the organizational life bandwidth in the winter, because we can, you know, do you know, the routine stuff like the bookkeeping and the bill paying, and we’ve got that kind of all organized. But when it comes to turnover time, it is like all hands on deck to make sure that not just like the real estate business gets the attention that it really needs during this period. But also that like everything else in life doesn’t fall through the cracks when you know things get busy when you’ve got you know, a rehab going on. Or if you’ve got turnovers going on, you know how much more time that that can take from you than when you’re just kind of in that purgatory is perhaps not the right word, or that sounds a little bit too negative. But the that like intermediate zone where it’s like, alright, we’re just kind of coasting here collecting rent, and you know, if something pops up in terms of a CapEx issue or repair issue, then you you know, you tackle it as it comes. And so it’s really got me looking back at what productivity, tools, strategies, rules that we’ve learned to kind of implement, to not just save time, but also save our sanity and keep things going during what is often the busiest, craziest time of the year, which is our summers. And for those of you who don’t know, I’m actually expecting a baby in the beginning of June and so this summer is going to be extra crazy in our household juggling, you know, two kids in summer camp, and the new baby and all of the turnovers that will inevitably happen at the end of summer, thankfully, I don’t know you know, other parents might can chime in on this shoot me a DM or hop over to the good bones Facebook group and let me know but like, we do not do any sort of extracurriculars during the summer. Nada it is like summer camp and then come home and we barbecue and chill by the pool and just want to take it easy go to the beach, sometimes on the weekends. I don’t know how much that’s gonna happen with a newborn. I’ve always had winter fall babies. My kids were born in October and December. And so we’ll see how summer goes i In theory, I’m looking forward to it. The like hibernation that happens during a winter maternity leave, if you will, is kind of boring and I’m you know, I’m really looking forward to like long stroller walks and things like that. So I wanted to share with you guys the three like do not pass go life saving techniques that I use pretty regularly throughout the year, but are going to have to like throw fuel on the fire and really kind of live regimental ly by this over the summer because there is no maternity leave for landlords as you will know that and even for this business look, I’m getting ahead on content. And you know, I’ve got guests all lined up for the summer for scale school. And, you know, I’m a workaholic. And so I’m never going to be completely hands off. But you know, if I have to put in, you know, two or three hours of work a week, then that’s totally functional. For me, it gives me something to do a little bit of purpose in every day, hopefully, there’s no judgement for me, you guys come in. For that, I’ll definitely probably take the entirety of June off, I’ve, you know, been prepping my staff prepping, my VA is prepping everything to kind of step in. So I can step out a bit during this summer. And so, without further ado, here’s the three things that like I can’t function without, as a mom, as a business owner as a real estate investor. And the first one is this concept I came across called Touch ones. And what that basically means is, if something can be done in 10 minutes or less, we deal with it and we touch it once. I don’t know about you guys, especially with emails, I get, you know, really kind of tied up sometimes in emails, the amount of emails I get in a particular day, is, frankly offensive. But when I kind of know, like, I’m touching this now, or I’m dealing with this later, it allows me to kind of triage a lot of things. But then also, if there’s things that I can just clear and be done within 10 minutes or less, I’m doing it now. And I don’t mean like immediately, because I also have set times in the day where I’m in my inbox that way, I’m not constantly looking for distractions, because that’s how my inbox really is. And so I usually check my inbox around 10am. And again, around 2:30pm. And once I’m doing that triage, I see, okay, can these emails be responded to dealt with in 10 minutes or less, if it’s going to be something where I’m like, hey, I need to carve out some time to go through all these documents that have gone through, then I will calendar and set aside time to do that. And so touching something once and not picking it up over and over and over again, has really saved my sanity, and saved a lot of like repeat work that just never ever gets done. Number two, which goes alongside this touch one’s mentality is batching my days. And so I have not only basically filled up the entirety of my day of how I’m going to spend it, which gives me a lot of clarity and control over my day, which is something that as an attorney back when I was, you know, filling my day more with firm stuff was really kind of easy to get taken over by things that felt urgent, but necessarily were not. And so I needed to make sure that I was always staying on top of like, not just like the reactive parts of my business. And same thing as like a landlord, you don’t want to always be in this reactive whack amole part, if you’re not calendaring moments for you to tackle the business to be proactive to get ahead of the game, then it’s frankly never going to happen. And so that’s how I created things like I do marketing Mondays, Tuesdays are a call day, Wednesdays are by content creation and recording days. Thursdays are kind of a flex day, I like to kind of keep that open, a lot of times I get closings on Thursdays. But then I also like to leave Thursdays as just like flex and available for what I need it to be often just access desk day. And then Fridays are what I call finance Fridays. And so that’s where I review my bookkeeping and go through all different metrics. And by being able to calendar that when something doesn’t fall within that touch once 10 minute or less bucket, it goes into its batch day. And so if it’s a call that I need to schedule with the client, then that gets scheduled for Tuesdays or Thursdays, if it’s something where I need to go out to a property, that’s usually Tuesdays or Thursdays, if it’s something where hey, I need to look at this bill or I need to revisit, you know, something that my CPA sent me that’s going on finance Fridays, and so that makes sure that I’ve got space in my calendar to handle everything that needs to happen to not just like, be in this relaxed reactive mode of being a entrepreneur, which is as you know, what we as real estate investors are, but that way we can actually handle the business stuff as it as well. And so if you’re not batching, your dates, I highly, highly recommend you do it. It’s something I teach about inside of landlord scale school, because it has been so instrumental in me actually moving like in tackling the big rocks that are on my to do list. Like it’s so easy to just fall into this space where you’re just kind of letting the days happen to you, as opposed to saying, Hey, I’ve got time every single week where I can tackle these like big pillars in my investing business. And so what I would suggest doing is figure out like what are the things you need to work on all the time, I realized something like marketing may not be something you actively need to do. But if you think about it from the lens of like, hey marketing is the day where I’m allowed to do like Zillow zooms, Doom scrolling. Or maybe I tried to go out and see properties where if that’s the day where I’m going to work on creating a direct mail campaign, like those are all marketing activities that we do as real estate investors. The other thing that helps me control these batch days is using my proactive management software. I personally use Asana, I know a lot of investors use different types of programs like Monday or podia, or click up Arab table like they all run the gamut. The good news is that they’re almost free or have a really robust free option. Inside of scale school, I offer my members literally a copy and paste version of my productivity management software. But this has really been a game changer for me, because let me just rewind a bit and share with you our technological journey as real estate investors, which was we were the opposite of tech savvy for a very, very long time, like, wait too long. When my husband started investing, he was learning how to, you know, do Property Management from his grandfather, who was also an investor in Philadelphia. And he literally had like printed clipart versions of like Excel sheets, I don’t know how to call it, I swear it was in like Comic Sans. And he would just have like a checklist he would go through to like see who paid rent and who was late. And it was, you know, he hand wrote it in, it’s like, he had a little workbook and he filled it out. And that is no joke how we did things for years, like I’m talking about until we had probably close to 50 doors, we were marking things off. Now, granted, 10 ish years ago, there wasn’t a lot of consumer level property management type of software, these software’s that are out there now like avail and apartments.com, and building them and AppFolio, which is not what we use. They just weren’t available. Or they were kind of limited to AppFolio levels of door requirements, they require over 100 doors. And so if you were looking for some sort of technological property management software, it was really relegated to the commercial real estate investing space, or you were doing like a hodgepodge of type of things like maybe you had Docusign. Or maybe you had QuickBooks, but you didn’t really have something that was like an all in one communication portal, a way to list your rentals through these programs, like it was all very, very, very, very manual. And if anyone’s been investing for, I’d say, 10 years or more, you’ve probably seen this shift of being able to either pay an arm and a leg for really robust property management that was maybe overkill to something where it’s like, oh, for like 30 bucks. Again, you know, do everything that you really need to do as a real estate investor from a property management standpoint, which is just huge, huge opportunity for like leverage in terms of your time. But the limitation of property management software is that it’s really just externally facing meaning that property management software doesn’t do anything to kind of help you run your business. Aside from maybe deal with some bookkeeping, I know that some software’s out there do have that feature. But it’s designed to collect rent, it’s designed to collect tenant applications to deal with repair requests, all of those types of things are what property management software’s there, none of real property management software is designed to help you get new properties to help you scale to help you organize your SOPs to help you organize your goals and like break down actionable steps to make sure you as a business owner, are reaching your you know, steps in the moving those big rocks that you need to do in order to actually be able to scale your real estate portfolio. And so what often happens is that this stuff just doesn’t happen. You’re never in this place where you’re like, Oh, this is the date where I’m going to review my lease to make sure it’s up to date. Or this is the date where I’m gonna go through all of my subscriptions. And make sure that I’m not overpaying for anything, or this is the date where I’m going to look at my bookkeeping. Because just waiting until, you know, April, mid April, as I’m recording this, to look at it, when you send everything to your CPA come tax time, it’s like not the right time to do it. Like we want to be able to use all of this data that we’re collecting from our bookkeeping to be able to make financial decisions on behalf of our businesses. And so all of these types of business activities. I mean, they say all the time, as you know, real estate investors, we got to treat it like a business. Well, what the heck does that even mean? Well, some of that means creating a system that allows you to organize your business tasks and property management software doesn’t just do that. And so that’s why I’ve created my proactive management system. It’s Out of Asana, like I said, you can do it wherever, like you’re comfortable. And you know, familiar with technology, it can be, you know, as simple as a to do list. I don’t love doing that, because I love, you know Asana because I can invite other people who we interact with, you know, me and my husband are both in there. We can also add contractors and share plans and share resources, like it’s just a little bit more of a robust dashboard for being, frankly, a free software. And so that helps me tie in with the other two productivity rules, right? And so on batch days, I know that when I’m making these tasks that, you know, we’ve talked about in terms of, you know, reviewing the bookkeeping, or doing the bookkeeping, like that stuff goes on Fridays, and when I’m looking at Tech, that’s, you know, on maybe the Flex Day, and Monday is the marketing day. And so you also see these holes, right, like when you’re looking at a calendar full of tasks, and you’re like, I’ve never done anything for marketing. Well, that’s probably a reason why you don’t have a deal pipeline, right. And so, marketing tasks, you know, if I was to give you one right now, off the bat, I would say, tell someone to do box, review your deal box, make sure it’s truly up to date aligned with your Northstar property, that’s going to get you to a scalable portfolio. And then from there, tell people about it calendar every single Monday, I’m going to tell three people, my deal box and ask them if they know anything available in it, you will be surprised what happens in 3060 90 days, when you start telling three people every single marketing one day, what you are looking for, be prepared lineup your private money lenders, your hard money lenders, your commercial lender, because deals are gonna start coming your way I can guarantee that. And so these three things the touch one’s batch day is proactive management software are three productivity rules that I can’t live without. And I need to remind myself to rely upon as we are going into probably what will be the busiest season of our lives. And for anyone else out there, I know that there’s a few of you because we’re friends on Instagram are also kind of entering this stage of being a first time parent or adding another kid to their life on top of, you know, adding properties. And so if you’re in that stage of life, I am walking alongside you,

Bonnie Galam 8:23
And then Fridays are what I call finance Fridays. And so that’s where I review my bookkeeping and go through all different metrics. And by being able to calendar that when something doesn’t fall within that touch once 10 minute or less bucket, it goes into its batch day. And so if it’s a call that I need to schedule with the client, then that gets scheduled for Tuesdays or Thursdays, if it’s something where I need to go out to a property, that’s usually Tuesdays or Thursdays, if it’s something where hey, I need to look at this bill or I need to revisit, you know, something that my CPA sent me that’s going on finance Fridays, and so that makes sure that I’ve got space in my calendar to handle everything that needs to happen to not just like, be in this relaxed reactive mode of being a entrepreneur, which is as you know, what we as real estate investors are, but that way we can actually handle the business stuff as it as well. And so if you’re not batching, your dates, I highly, highly recommend you do it. It’s something I teach about inside of landlord scale school, because it has been so instrumental in me actually moving like in tackling the big rocks that are on my to do list. Like it’s so easy to just fall into this space where you’re just kind of letting the days happen to you, as opposed to saying, Hey, I’ve got time every single week where I can tackle these like big pillars in my investing business. And so what I would suggest doing is figure out like what are the things you need to work on all the time, I realized something like marketing may not be something you actively need to do. But if you think about it from the lens of like, hey marketing is the day where I’m allowed to do like Zillow zooms, Doom scrolling. Or maybe I tried to go out and see properties where if that’s the day where I’m going to work on creating a direct mail campaign, like those are all marketing activities that we do as real estate investors. The other thing that helps me control these batch days is using my proactive management software. I personally use Asana, I know a lot of investors use different types of programs like Monday or podia, or click up Arab table like they all run the gamut. The good news is that they’re almost free or have a really robust free option. Inside of scale school, I offer my members literally a copy and paste version of my productivity management software. But this has really been a game changer for me, because let me just rewind a bit and share with you our technological journey as real estate investors, which was we were the opposite of tech savvy for a very, very long time, like, wait too long. When my husband started investing, he was learning how to, you know, do Property Management from his grandfather, who was also an investor in Philadelphia. And he literally had like printed clipart versions of like Excel sheets, I don’t know how to call it, I swear it was in like Comic Sans. And he would just have like a checklist he would go through to like see who paid rent and who was late. And it was, you know, he hand wrote it in, it’s like, he had a little workbook and he filled it out. And that is no joke how we did things for years, like I’m talking about until we had probably close to 50 doors, we were marking things off. Now, granted, 10 ish years ago, there wasn’t a lot of consumer level property management type of software, these software’s that are out there now like avail and apartments.com, and building them and AppFolio, which is not what we use. They just weren’t available. Or they were kind of limited to AppFolio levels of door requirements, they require over 100 doors. And so if you were looking for some sort of technological property management software, it was really relegated to the commercial real estate investing space, or you were doing like a hodgepodge of type of things like maybe you had Docusign. Or maybe you had QuickBooks, but you didn’t really have something that was like an all in one communication portal, a way to list your rentals through these programs, like it was all very, very, very, very manual. And if anyone’s been investing for, I’d say, 10 years or more, you’ve probably seen this shift of being able to either pay an arm and a leg for really robust property management that was maybe overkill to something where it’s like, oh, for like 30 bucks. Again, you know, do everything that you really need to do as a real estate investor from a property management standpoint, which is just huge, huge opportunity for like leverage in terms of your time. But the limitation of property management software is that it’s really just externally facing meaning that property management software doesn’t do anything to kind of help you run your business. Aside from maybe deal with some bookkeeping, I know that some software’s out there do have that feature. But it’s designed to collect rent, it’s designed to collect tenant applications to deal with repair requests, all of those types of things are what property management software’s there, none of real property management software is designed to help you get new properties to help you scale to help you organize your SOPs to help you organize your goals and like break down actionable steps to make sure you as a business owner, are reaching your you know, steps in the moving those big rocks that you need to do in order to actually be able to scale your real estate portfolio. And so what often happens is that this stuff just doesn’t happen. You’re never in this place where you’re like, Oh, this is the date where I’m going to review my lease to make sure it’s up to date. Or this is the date where I’m gonna go through all of my subscriptions. And make sure that I’m not overpaying for anything, or this is the date where I’m going to look at my bookkeeping. Because just waiting until, you know, April, mid April, as I’m recording this, to look at it, when you send everything to your CPA come tax time, it’s like not the right time to do it. Like we want to be able to use all of this data that we’re collecting from our bookkeeping to be able to make financial decisions on behalf of our businesses. And so all of these types of business activities. I mean, they say all the time, as you know, real estate investors, we got to treat it like a business. Well, what the heck does that even mean? Well, some of that means creating a system that allows you to organize your business tasks and property management software doesn’t just do that. And so that’s why I’ve created my proactive management system. It’s Out of Asana, like I said, you can do it wherever, like you’re comfortable. And you know, familiar with technology, it can be, you know, as simple as a to do list. I don’t love doing that, because I love, you know Asana because I can invite other people who we interact with, you know, me and my husband are both in there. We can also add contractors and share plans and share resources, like it’s just a little bit more of a robust dashboard for being, frankly, a free software. And so that helps me tie in with the other two productivity rules, right? And so on batch days, I know that when I’m making these tasks that, you know, we’ve talked about in terms of, you know, reviewing the bookkeeping, or doing the bookkeeping, like that stuff goes on Fridays, and when I’m looking at Tech, that’s, you know, on maybe the Flex Day, and Monday is the marketing day. And so you also see these holes, right, like when you’re looking at a calendar full of tasks, and you’re like, I’ve never done anything for marketing. Well, that’s probably a reason why you don’t have a deal pipeline, right. And so, marketing tasks, you know, if I was to give you one right now, off the bat, I would say, tell someone to do box, review your deal box, make sure it’s truly up to date aligned with your Northstar property, that’s going to get you to a scalable portfolio. And then from there, tell people about it calendar every single Monday, I’m going to tell three people, my deal box and ask them if they know anything available in it, you will be surprised what happens in 3060 90 days, when you start telling three people every single marketing one day, what you are looking for, be prepared lineup your private money lenders, your hard money lenders, your commercial lender, because deals are gonna start coming your way I can guarantee that. And so these three things the touch one’s batch day is proactive management software are three productivity rules that I can’t live without. And I need to remind myself to rely upon as we are going into probably what will be the busiest season of our lives. And for anyone else out there, I know that there’s a few of you because we’re friends on Instagram are also kind of entering this stage of being a first time parent or adding another kid to their life on top of, you know, adding properties. And so if you’re in that stage of life, I am walking alongside you,

Bonnie Galam 17:21
I know that it is a lot but there’s a lot that we can also do to prepare for it and you know, save our sanity a little bit and keep moving the ball forward. Most importantly in the process. I would love to hear from you which one of these tips these rules is either one that you have never tried before or one that you’re excited to try feel free shoot me a DM on Instagram at Bonnie Galam ASQ. I always love hearing from listeners, both in my DMs and my inbox, it truly makes what can feel like a weird, lonely talking to myself existence, office feel a lot lot more fun and like the community that it truly is. As always, we can connect in the free good bones real estate investing Facebook community. If you’re not already a member of it, feel free to connect with me over there. And that’s it for this week’s episode. I’ll see you here, same time, same place next week where we’re going to be talking about finding opportunity in bureaucracy, if it feels like the government has been just creating rule after rule after rule after rule, both at the state and the federal level. All these loopholes, not even loopholes, all of these hoops for us landlords to have to jump through then I hear you. But I wanted to talk a little bit about actually finding opportunities in the bureaucracy. It’s something that we talked about in my masterclass inside of scale School this past month in April, where we went through President Biden’s housing plans that he released one back in January and one about April, May of last year in 2022. And so through that training, I realized that there’s there’s so much opportunity even in the bureaucracy, but you have to look for it. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that next week. Look forward to it. And that’s it. Bye for now.