One Basketball Coach’s Leap of Faith Evolved Into a Life of Real Estate Mastery with Cory Jacobson

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it.

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. Erica, always lovely to see you.

[Erica]
Good morning.

[Mattias]
On and off the screen. We had an awesome guest today, Cory Jacobson. Cory and his partner, they do podcasts.

They have a coaching program now. They’re investors. So it was a really good episode.

He’s a motivating guy. You can tell he just is passionate about coaching and this phase he’s in. So it was really a fun conversation.

[Erica]
It was. And we realized we have a lot in common with him. We talked quite a bit about voluntary adversity and doing some of the hard things.

Even though they make you feel pretty uncomfortable, they help you move to places where you’d like to be. Which is something that we talk about all the time. We haven’t mentioned it a whole lot here recently, but we talk about it some in doing our cold plunges, which I haven’t done as much in the winter because it’s just.

[Mattias]
It’s time to get that adversity.

[Erica]
Terrible, which maybe I’ll have to do one today. But we also have the CrossFit Open coming up starting this Friday as the first official day for the workout.

[Mattias]
Yeah. Of the recording of this. By the time this comes out, it might be already done, but there’s three weeks in a row.

If you’re not familiar with the CrossFit Open, it’s basically the whole world that does CrossFit will do the same workout at the same, over a weekend. It gets released, announced on Thursday, and you have until Monday at five, I believe, to submit the score if you’re going to submit to CrossFit official. When you do that, you can see how you stack up amongst your peers, so your age group.

It could be your gender, your age group, your location. You can put custom filters in like Swiss, Mexican, Americans. How do I stack up against them?

Usually pretty well. But it’s really the first taste of what I think an organized sport would have been like for me if I had done them in like high school. Because you have to do this.

You have like a heat. There’s like an event, Friday Night Lights, where you show up and you have a time you’re going to do your exercise. Then there’s people cheering and you have all that pressure, all that adrenaline.

I feel like that’s the first taste of that kind of world I really had. You did some sports, right?

[Erica]
Yeah, I played volleyball in high school and had some of that, but it was also a group of girls in high school. I feel like CrossFit now as an adult is probably the most supportive athletic environment I’ve ever been in.

[Mattias]
Yeah, we do have a really good culture of people just cheering you on and wanting you to do well. There’s competition too. We all want to do well and we want to improve ourselves.

But at the end of the day, it’s just an exercise.

[Erica]
Yeah. Last year, you had COVID at the beginning of February and that lingered for a while, which was really unfortunate timing with the open. This year, you are healthy and ready to get into it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I only had pneumonia. I think I’m mostly better from that, but that was a whole month. That is one unfortunate thing about the open is that it’s at the end of February.

Especially if you have little kids, you’re just coming through the winter where they have not learned to wash their hands or do all the things that are needed to stay healthy. There’s this sickness going through our house constantly, it seems like. Knock on wood that we stay healthy for the next three weeks so that we can show up.

I don’t know if you’re going to, I’m not sure if I’m going to sign up for the official CrossFit part of the open, but it’s just fun because we have been working on these things, these skills, these movements, all that stuff all year. This is the chance you get to perform and show what you’ve been working on.

[Erica]
Yeah. Last year, I squeaked in the, I think I was in the 75th percentile. I squeaked into quarterfinals and got a t-shirt.

I feel like that era of my life is, I’m okay if that’s where it ends. That was really fun last year. It was fun to do it with the other athletes that were also in the quarterfinals that did a whole lot better than I did.

Going into it this year, I’m hoping I have a little bit less anxiety, which always sets in Thursday when they release the workout until I get the workout done. I’m also feeling a little bit injured. I’m just hoping that I can go in there and just have fun.

[Mattias]
Yeah. Well, I’ve noticed too that sometimes when I do exercises that are really hard, we’ve been doing former open exercises every Friday. If I go in there with a more cavalier attitude about it, I maybe perform better.

There’s a million factors. Yeah. I definitely have retested multiple times.

I don’t know how that’s going to be this year. If I don’t sign up, maybe I won’t need to do that. That might be nice.

[Erica]
Yeah. Regardless, the years that we’ve done it, which I guess I’ve had two opens now. You’ve had three.

This will be my third.

[Mattias]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Erica]
It’s three weeks of pretty hard focused training and performance. It does come with some anxiety, which is also partly why I think we do so well or we try to- It’s motivating. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s fun. Then when it’s all done, we usually end feeling pretty motivated to train through the summer.

Yeah. We can recognize our weak points and what we need to work on for the next year. Then it sets us up for the next couple of months.

[Mattias]
Then it all falls apart again in the winter.

[Erica]
In the winter, we get sick. We get weak.

[Mattias]
To go back and explain a little bit further with what you were saying about getting into the quarterfinals, how it all works is like you are, like I said, competing with everybody in the whole world. You’re competing against the Michael Jordans. You’re competing against the professional athletes as well.

Not really. I mean, they’re way ahead. You can make it to the next level quarterfinals.

You can make it past that, all that until finally you would end up at the equivalent of the Super Bowl for CrossFit, which is the open or I’m sorry, the games. That usually gets publicized somewhere. It’s on YouTube or ESPN or whatever.

Yeah. That’s when all the top of the top that rose through all these different levels will finally compete against each other. Then the fittest in the world is dubbed by the winner, both female, male and teams and then different age categories like masters and all that kind of stuff.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s motivating. That’s one of the reasons why it’s motivating.

That’s one of the reasons why I feel like it’s a cheat code. I don’t think you have to do CrossFit. I obviously believe it’s more motivating than a lot of other things for all these reasons.

But I think with that theme of showing up, there’s a long period of time with CrossFit that I would look at the workout. I would dread the workout. I’d be worried about the workout.

I’d be thinking about it. I’d be like, oh my God, this is going to be so hard. But then if I just showed up, I would go through the workout and it would also not be fun.

It’d be kind of hard. But then when I was done, I was like, that was the best hour of my day. And what an awesome cheat code to getting.

I’ve been in the best shape of my life. I didn’t snowboard for 10 years. The first time I got back on my snowboard after 10 years, I felt better at snowboarding than the last time I went or ever because I’d been just in better shape overall.

So I think if you can find those cheat codes that motivate you, that surround yourself with people that are ahead of you. We talk about this in the podcast a little bit more too, about how if you’re surrounding yourself with people that will raise you up higher, it could be investing, it could be mentorship, coaching, masterminds, all that kind of stuff. You’re going to get to a better spot than you were before.

Do I need to rant more about adversity? Because I could go back into that. And that’s another thing about CrossFit or another thing about working out is once you get through it, you don’t want to do it.

And so many people think we’re crazy when we do these things or talk about what we’re doing. But when you get through it, you feel so rewarded and you can feel that benefit, the stress relief, all that kind of stuff that comes along with it. So I’m hooked.

I drank the Kool-Aid. If anybody wants some Kool-Aid, I can send you affiliate links. JK, I don’t even know if there are.

But yeah, I guess without further ado, after that long rant, do you have anything you want to say? Did I cut you off?

[Erica]
No, I don’t feel like there’s anything left to be said.

[Mattias]
I could probably find something else. But anyway, let’s just get into our next episode with Cory Jacobson. Welcome back to the REI Agent.

I am here with Cory Jacobson. I should have clarified that first. Jacobson, right?

[Cory Jacobson]
Yes, sir. You got it right.

[Mattias]
I had that moment of panic.

I was like, is that a weird name? Can I say it?

[Erica]
You did great.

[Cory Jacobson]
It’s pretty easy to sound out there. You got it.

[Mattias]
Yeah. Cory, thanks so much for joining us. You’re out of the Philly area.

Is that right?

[Cory Jacobson]
That’s right. Yeah.

[Mattias]
So you’re not wearing green today.

[Cory Jacobson]
Are you over the Super Bowl victory? First day in like three weeks, I haven’t been wearing green. So you caught me on an off-green day.

I’ve been celebrating the birds for, yeah, literally two weeks straight. We’re having fun here. It’s always sunny in Philly.

They really showed up. That was impressive. If you want this podcast to be about the Eagles, I can certainly turn into that.

I’ve been literally riding this high for so long. I don’t know, man. I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.

That was just too fun.

[Mattias]
That was great. Cory, you have a partner in crime. Ryan, can you say his last name for us?

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah. This one, you might need me to chime in. So Bevilacqua.

It is how it sounds, but people have messed that one up. Ryan Bevilacqua.

[Mattias]
Where’s that from?

[Cory Jacobson]
Do you know him? Well, Ryan’s from actually from the Cape in Massachusetts, but it’s Italian. He doesn’t look Italian.

He looks more Irish, but he’s got kind of half Irish, half Italian. That’s my best friend. We’ve been doing business together for…

I’ve been friends with him for 14 years. We’ve been doing business together for seven. We’re a two-headed monster.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome. Tell us a little bit about your origin story. How’d you get started in real estate?

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah. This is an interesting one. I used to work for the Philadelphia 76ers.

I’ve been in Philly for a long time. I was running their youth camps. I’ll make this not too long, but basically I was making $35,000 a year.

To some people, that may be a lot of money. It’s not a lot of money in my opinion, but I was doing what I loved. I was coaching basketball.

My boss there was like, I’m going to get you a raise. I want you to stay. The raise was five grand.

I was like, this isn’t really going to affect me that much. I’d love to stay, but I’m not sure how. He’s like, you know how you can stay?

There’s all these young people that work here. You should buy a five-bedroom house and rent four of the bedrooms out to some of the people that work here. Then you can live and you can make money while you live.

That can help you stay here longer. This is one of my mentors. I really loved him.

Shout out to Todd. I actually took his advice. I bought a three-bed, two-bath.

I lived in one bedroom, rented out the other two bedrooms. I went from paying $1,000 a month in rent to living for free. It didn’t keep me working there too much longer because I went into sales and I changed my mentality to try to make more money.

That kick started my journey. I was able to save up there, buy a duplex, cash flowed a couple hundred dollars a month. Three years later, I was able to sell it for $100,000 profit.

That’s when Ry and I started to partner together. We’d been friends forever. We started a social media.

Shout out to AtWealthJuice official. That’s our social media. We started a social media podcast and our real estate company in the beginning of 2020 all at the same time and just figured people would probably follow along with our journey.

BiggerPockets is amazing. It helped us get started, but I think there’s a lot of stories of people that have 1,000 units that started in 99. It’s hard.

It’s not relatable to buying today. Hopefully, people started to follow along. We started when we had three units.

I had my house hack. I had one duplex and Ry had his primary residence. We just said, hopefully, people listen in.

We were able to brute force our way to eight units between the two of us in the next couple of years. Then the podcast and the social media really is what springboarded stuff. Partnerships formed.

We got into rooms with people that we never had any business being in rooms with. We started to really network and organically create those partnerships. Eight units turned to just over 80 units, some between me and him, some between general partnerships on an 18 unit, a 43 unit, a 7 unit.

Most recently, we have a 10 unit under contract in different markets. That was really how we started, but it was connection and putting ourselves in the right rooms with the right people. I gave you the last six years in, I don’t know, what was that, two minutes?

That was very concise. Thanks.

[Erica]
That’s amazing. You guys were both still with your W2 at that time, right?

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah. I left my W2 job. I don’t know when this podcast is going to be released, but I left my W2 job in September.

Six months ago, really. We were all building this up through us saving up money with our W2 jobs, both of us. Ry still has his.

We use it for getting loans. He has a family. I’m not single, but I don’t have kids.

I think that the partnership aspect has been amazing for both of us. That’s how we’ve been able to parlay ideas off of each other. Yeah, that’s how it’s gone.

[Erica]
Wow. Congrats, man. How did you come to the decision to leave your W2 finally?

[Cory Jacobson]
We talked about this pre-recording, this whole voluntary adversity thing. I think that I don’t believe that my full potential was able to be realized unless I went all in. I put it off for a long time.

I’m 33. I was doing all this on the side. I worked for my family’s business.

I loved my family. If you know about family businesses, there’s pros and cons to that. I was in sales.

I was making good money. I just thought I’m not going to be able to really drive this thing forward content-wise, buy more real estate, create our coaching program, and get it off the ground unless I’m full-time. I just said, no one’s going to come knocking on my door telling me it’s the right time.

That’s just not how it works. I have a pretty high risk tolerance. I didn’t burn the boats day one, but after four or five years of doing this, I was like, you know what?

I’m never going to know. I’d rather have, oh shit, I messed this whole thing up, rather than regrets. I just said, let’s do it.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome. I think there’s a lot of things to unpack. We should definitely get into the adversity.

[Erica]
We have to. We talk about this all the time.

[Mattias]
I wanted to also ask you, one of the other themes that I’ve been thinking about a lot here recently is showing up, just a super simple concept of showing up. You said you have a high risk tolerance, but I’m sure you have some legs. You’ve obviously built some legs at this point.

You should be able to jump in. You know you could take it further. There is some proof of concept there, right?

[Cory Jacobson]
100%. Yeah. The whole burning the boat strategy is like, I haven’t been investing for a long time in real estate.

We always tell people that it takes 18 months to two years for your properties to season anyway. We’re a general partnership in a bunch of projects. We didn’t see any dollars as general partners for 18 months.

Now they’re starting to really make us the money, the depreciation. We’re saving all this money on taxes. I said, if not now, then when?

When is the right time? When I have three kids? Am I going to feel more comfortable diving all the way in?

I want to build this foundation. Ryan and I invested in the 401k with work. We invested in the brokerage accounts.

I have some, as you mentioned, legs to the table to stand on a little bit. Then my thing is I love creating relationships and connections and selling and trying to get people to buy into us and our vision. That’s the coaching program.

That’s mainly what I do full time. The real estate is now parlayed on the side of that. We teach people how to buy their first and next rental property because of how much that first one changed my life.

I was like, if I can help people do this, if I can help people see the light and one property can change it all for you. It changed everything for me. Just as an example, that property that I bought, three bed, two bath for $250,000 that I thought I was overpaying for at the time, is now worth $400,000.

My mortgage is $1,500 a month and I can rent it for $2,700 a month. That’s one property. That’s a big deal for somebody.

It was for me until we got into larger projects. Everyone thinks that everything is so expensive. You hear that all the time.

People say that in 2017. What are you going to think in 2033? Get in the game.

Let’s show you how this can change your life just because it really changed ours.

[Mattias]
I think it’s a very true rule of thumb. I experienced this as well when I buy still, even though I know this. I always feel like I overpay.

Every time. Every time. Even if we’re getting a slamming deal, I’m like, oh, if I could have just gotten it.

[Cory Jacobson]
I remember saying to my agent at the time who I didn’t use after that because I just didn’t know. It was just a one-time transaction. I was splitting the $4,000.

I almost was like, I don’t want to spend $4,000 more. Meanwhile, that appreciation happened in about four months. There’s this psychology and this analysis process that people have to get through.

I think the best way to get through that is to surround yourself with people who have done it a few steps ahead of you, who’ve just seen it. That is what changed the game for us.

[Mattias]
I like to point out that my parents, we just sold the family home 30 years of that appreciation you’re talking about. Would they buy it for $85,000 or something when they bought it? It was like $85,000 and sold for, I don’t know, three something.

All I have to say is they were probably squabbling over 50 bucks or $200 at the time.

[Cory Jacobson]
The joke is you can buy something for three raspberries back then. Very similar story. My parents bought a property for $300,000.

My dad lost a bunch of money in 08 in real estate, but he has two properties now. One of them, it was the place I grew up in. He bought it for $300,000, sold it for $850,000 and he made all this money off of it just by holding it for 25 years.

Now he has a shore home that he bought for $450,000 that’s worth $1.3 million. Two homes, two properties. He didn’t even rent these out.

He just had them. Obviously, the thought is yes, there are liabilities when you live in them, right? He had somebody approach him one month down the shore and he was like, I want to rent your place out in August.

I’ll offer you $25,000. He was like, I’ll see you later. All right.

You can have the place, right? The opportunity to have that is based all in just owning cash flowing assets or even just assets that we’ll appreciate over time. 100%.

[Mattias]
Yeah. I think to your point, yeah. If you get in and you have time, if you’re not forced to sell, it’s been a winning formula for a long time.

[Erica]
Yeah. This voluntary adversity piece that you’re talking about and the risk tolerance, is that something that’s always been a part of who you are or has that been something that’s come up recently in the last couple of years?

[Cory Jacobson]
Sports are the best metaphor for life, I think. Growing up, I was a decent athlete, but I was really intense about it. I always took it so seriously.

Sometimes I wish I took it a little less seriously, but what it trained me to do is team atmosphere, putting yourself through hard things in order to push through on the other side. Since high school, I feel like I’ve always been like that, but there’s been a few influential people that have changed the way I’ve thought. Ed Milet’s one of them.

He says, I have this tattooed on myself. I love it so much. He says, keep your promises to yourself.

What it really means is that in order to build self-confidence, you have to keep your promises to yourself and you have to do the things that you say you’re going to do over and over again so much so that you build up so much confidence in yourself that you’re really not concerned about the opinions of others. That comes through in involuntary adversity as well, where it’s like, if I put myself through this thing, I trust myself so much so that I know I can do this thing, you don’t really have a chance to knock me down. You can’t say anything that’s going to affect me.

I already did this. I do the work. I go to the gym five days a week.

I make the prospecting calls. I help the people that I say I’m going to help. Even as simple as, hey, I’m going to send you an email after this.

You know how many people just don’t do it? It’s like, how can we trust the word of somebody if you’re not going to do what you say you’re going to do? I think those two things go hand in hand.

I haven’t always been like this. I think a lot of people have this wake up call when you turn 30 and you’re like, am I trustworthy? Am I the person that I say I am?

When I look in the mirror, am I happy, physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever, all of those things. I think voluntary adversity trains you to say, if the hardest thing I’m going to do today is something that I put myself through, then whatever comes next is pretty simple to me. My house burned down.

One of our rental properties burned down, but I did a really hard workout this morning. I’m glad I did that. I’m like, you know what?

This is real estate. You just deal with it. I think it trains your mind to think, if somebody else has went through this and dealt with it and came out on the other side, don’t you think I can?

That’s a mouthful there. That’s my take on voluntary adversity.

[Erica]
No, I love that. It sounds like over the years, especially recently, it’s more so you’ve honed it even though it sounds like it’s been alive and well inside the whole time.

[Cory Jacobson]
I haven’t really talked about it a lot on a podcast. Thank you for bringing it up. Maybe you’re confirming that I’ve honed in on it.

I don’t know. I love the topic, but it feels good to talk about it. I think people are missing out on not putting yourself through those things to train yourself because your life and your world is habits.

[Erica]
Totally. I always say you never crave what you need. You always crave what you want.

The things that you need are usually very uncomfortable when you go through them, but you feel a million times better when they’re done.

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah, absolutely. I’m not a big cold plunge guy. I’ve done a few.

They’re cool. But doing that and having that really hard three minutes, it allows you to be like, are the things that are going to happen mentally through the rest of the day, are they going to be as hard as that? Probably not.

I think that’s the point of it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, we built a cold plunge out of a freezer. One of the things that got me to take the… I had been thinking about this.

We flipped a house that had a stand-up freezer. I was like, that’s going to fit better in a garage anywhere. I could use this chest freezer for a cold plunge one day.

Then I heard Dr. Andrew Huberman say that one of the things that he likes to do is do something really difficult before he has to take on a challenge that is what otherwise he would probably procrastinate on. In my mind, I was like, oh, that’s perfect. You get in the cold plunge, then you immediately start a task after that, that you would have procrastinated on otherwise.

I haven’t done that a lot. But the cold plunge has definitely been a really… People might argue a little bit about the benefits.

I think the health benefits are there. Some people I’ve talked to argue that there’s not a lot of longitudinal studies about it. But I do think if it’s only that mental training, that is something.

That is definitely something. You have to get in. It’s hard.

If you get through it, you have just, like you said, strengthen that habit. You’ve gotten yourself further along to the, I’m doing things that are hard that are good for me. You’re exercising that muscle.

I wish I was in the high school athlete world because I feel like I would have gotten a lot more of this discipline stuff earlier. Something I’ve always thought about. I did work a lot in high school, but I never had that.

I feel like physical exercise really is more tangible. You see the results. You feel the results from putting yourself through something difficult and then seeing progress.

It can be a little bit less tangible when you’re just showing up to a podcast for many years, which I’m sure… I was going to say earlier, we have that show up phase where you’re just going to show up and grind through it. You’re not sure if it’s going to get anywhere, but you’re going to keep showing up, keep showing up, keep showing up and eventually progress happens.

[Cory Jacobson]
I coach high school basketball because of the love of it really. We’ve had a few guys go to the NBA. It’s really high level stuff.

I think about it from a standpoint of if most 15 and 16 year olds and 17 year olds are trying to figure out if they can get high or play video games or whatever, which they do and maybe these kids do as well, but if their day is filled with practice and really, really tough practices and lifting weights and then the pressure that these kids are under to perform. We play in front of 3, 4, 5,000 people. These kids, they’re kids.

If you can train that in your head early, I can see the anxiety and the pressure. If you’re doing that at 16, 17 and you repeatedly do it, you can’t convince me that by the time you’re in the working world, because not everyone’s going to play professionally, that that’s not going to give you a leg up if somebody who doesn’t put themselves through that. Even if you just play high school basketball at a public school and you don’t play in front of thousands of people, you are putting yourself through the work.

I think it carries on. Obviously, you don’t need to be an athlete to be successful, but I just think that it’s this cheat code in a way early in life to show you what the real world is like. You have to win early.

If you’re not being given participation trophies, you’ll feel what it feels like. Once you leave college, you’re like, what am I doing? No one’s teaching me what to do.

No one’s coming to save me. That to me was like, I never really realized that until later because I didn’t play at a super high level, but it helped me for sure.

[Erica]
Yeah. Cory, you talk a lot about giving back and teaching other people and trying to share the knowledge that you’ve built. You also mentioned earlier about building a community or being in touch with people who are doing the same things you are or who have done more and learning from them.

I’m just curious how your community has changed since you guys got into the investing world six years ago.

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah. Brian and I have been putting out the free game, free content for five years. We do a podcast every week.

Now it’s twice a week. We’ve ramped it up. We put out content on Instagram.

What I found that people are lacking is that there’s an abundance of information out there. All the strategies work. You can flip.

You can wholesale. You can do Airbnb. You can do short-term rental.

You can do long-term. You can do all this stuff. They all work.

What is the clarity behind what is going to work for me? Can somebody hold my hand and show me? I live in California.

I live in Michigan. I want to do this. This is how much I have saved up.

The community aspect of watching people that are a few steps ahead of you, not 30, but a few, that have seen what you want to see, that can look over your shoulder and say, yeah, Jamie or yeah, Trish, whatever your name. This is a good deal. You should make an offer on this.

I’ll tell you because I looked at a property like this and now I’ve owned it for 18 months and it’s done X, Y, and Z for me. That can blow analysis paralysis out of the water for you. I think people came to us and said, what’s the next layer to this?

The free content’s amazing. Do you guys teach? Do you guys coach?

I’m a coach at heart. I love to do it. In August, we started our coaching program teaching people how to buy their first and next rental property.

If you have 15 units and you’re trying to get to 50, I can help you, but I can really, really hone in on people that are looking to get their first few because we’ve done it over and over and we’ve helped people over and over do it. I found that watching people get the right connections, build the right team, having the people that have helped us in our journey help them, it’s been a world of difference. People sometimes just need that push like that, hey, I’m 85% of the way there.

I’m going to push you out the plane and you’re going to have to build a parachute on the way down. It works because you’ll analysis paralysis yourself to death if you think that you alone with your coworkers or your friends who have no care in the world about real estate, they’re going to tell you not to do it. Until you’re in the rooms with people that are actually doing the thing, I think you don’t get that picture of what it could really look like and how it can really benefit you.

I don’t know if I directly answered your question there, but the community is growing. We got 40, 50 members in a few months and we’re selective. We want to work with people who are go getters, who are ready to take this thing down and who are coachable and who want to change their life.

My goal was one property here for 10 years as an investment vehicle on the side. I didn’t think I’d be doing it full time, but you get around enough people that are doing really high level things, some osmosis kicks in and you’re doing the high level things too.

[Mattias]
So true. I think there’s two elements there, such a good value to have a coach, to have somebody that’s going to be able to help you through, that gets to know you, that can help push you when you need to be pushed and give you the confidence or whatever you need to kind of take that next step because you’re right. I mean, I think a lot of people have that analysis paralysis, but yeah.

And then surrounding yourself with people that are ahead of you, that’s great. I think also just not negative. A lot of people, I don’t know if you went through a phase where maybe people were maybe jealous, envious of you or kind of would hate on you for the moves you were making and kind of, it was just maybe stemming out of their own insecurities.

But you got to surround yourself by people that will lift you up, right?

[Cory Jacobson]
I’ve really never had the whole people hating on me thing. People were very supportive in the beginning. I don’t know why they were, but I’ll tell you the tagline for corporate America is like, we want you to do well, but not better than me.

So that’s the feeling that I got when I was working a full-time job is you’re like, well, I have all these people out there. They’re like, don’t do that. That’s too risky.

Why would you do that? I’m like, because I don’t want to play it safe and I don’t want your job in three years. I don’t want what I’m looking at here.

I don’t want this life and no disrespect, some people just want the safety. And I think that’s great. You can live, there’s a million ways to live a life, live it how you want, but I know I didn’t want it.

So I’m like, I think when I started to interview people who were successful, I really noticed that the real estate entrepreneurship game was not this greedy, rich asshole thing at all. It was more so like abundance and giving. And once you’ve made it to this stage, not my stage, but a few stages ahead, the joy you get isn’t in the money.

It’s in watching other people become successful. And there’s an inherent selfishness in that a little bit because maybe you helped them. But I think it’s like, it was eye opening to me to watch, to be around people that really wanted me to succeed.

And really guys, it started from like, I was, Hey, this whole, can I buy you coffee? Can I pick your brain? Can I do that?

And I kept seeing that over and over and I was asking people that and I’m like, nobody wants to do that. It’s like, that’s not the, some people are nice enough to do that, but actually go to them and fill a hole in their life or their business. And then those people are going to pay attention to you because there’s a lot of people listening, probably that are trying to get their start.

They’re trying to buy their first, they’re trying to build their agent business. And it’s like, if you can fill voids for other people that are a couple of steps ahead of you. And some of that is paying for a mentorship program.

That’s the value that you give them the exchange of the dollars and they coach you. I think when you’re, I just, we talked about sports. You have coaches your whole life.

You have professors in college, you get out of college and you’re like, maybe you don’t go to college, whatever it is, but you get out of the school and you’re like, what now? And when the stages and the stakes are the highest, you say that you shouldn’t have a coach, you shouldn’t be taught. So it’s interesting because the internet is like a very, you have to make sure that these people are legit and there’s scams everywhere.

But to put, some people put that down and I just think that it’s never been more beneficial. If we had mentors in the beginning, we would have 300 units. So yeah.

Yeah, completely.

[Erica]
We’ve done this podcast, I guess coming up on a year here in a month or two. And it does seem like there’s themes that keep emerging through all these different conversations. And one is that abundance mindset.

It just really feels like everybody has started from nothing at some point and they’ve learned so much from other people who have done it and they want to share what they’ve learned and they want to help other people succeed. And then that big action, that keeps coming up too. Don’t get stuck in the analysis paralysis.

You want to take big action and don’t let fear stop you, even if it can feel a little scary, but it does take a little bit of courage. And then that just show up and don’t be attached to the outcome. Those seem to be showing up in our podcast over and over and over.

I don’t know about you.

[Cory Jacobson]
I’m not sure what kind of conversations you guys have on yours, but it’s just- I mean, all of the above, right? I think it’s just… If everyone’s saying it over and over again and people are doing it, why not just be scared and do it anyway?

And that was my mantra. It is scary. If it wasn’t scary, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

But if you allow that fear to consume you, then you’ll never get on the other side of where these people are telling you, they’re giving you the blueprint. You just got to do it. And every single person that’s come in, whether it’s through our community or just people we’ve talked to that have just pushed through the fear, I mean, you get through on the other side and then your problems that you thought were problems are just minuscule and then you have bigger problems.

Then you tackle those ones.

[Mattias]
The irony too is that it ends up being a lot safer. I understand the fear of jumping into the unknown and doing something on your own. I totally don’t want to dismiss that.

But once you get the momentum going, once you show up enough that you have the legs that are there, you have some income coming in, it is safer. Obviously, I’m not going to try to get political on this or anything, but government jobs have always seemed to be a very safe route. People are getting laid off.

Working for a good corporate company that you move up, layoffs happen there all the time. You can’t control that. You’re really just learning how to become a functioning cog in a machine.

If you are in the entrepreneurial space, if you’re an agent, if you’re an investor, you’re really understanding the world a little bit more fundamentally where you’re looking for needs that you can fill. Once you unlock that, you can really take that and apply it a lot of different places. Even if there’s a market crash or whatever, and real estate sales are down, if you also have an investment portfolio, you probably are going to be in a better place.

If everything’s down in real estate and real estate’s down, you might find that you could apply that value, filling the need in the marketplace in a different area. But it is really ironic that it seems like the unsafe, the risky move, but really it ends up being way more secure than a corporate job or a government job.

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah, just time makes it safe. That’s the thing. Time in the market makes it safe.

I think that people confuse safety with comfortability, but comfortability is the anti to growth. I’m not going to paint entrepreneurship in this light that everyone should do it because not everyone should do it. But if you’re listening to this podcast episode and you’re having those feelings like, I’m just built for a little more.

I don’t see myself interacting with these people in the same way. I don’t want to play it safe. I don’t want to just waltz through life and let it take me in the directions that it decides.

If you want to take control, then you’re probably, there’s something there. You might be built for this entrepreneurial thing. The only thing that I’ll say is that there are swings left, right, up, and down, and you have to dodge them.

It’s not linear. It can be exponential, but it’s not linear. I think that we learned that quickly in the real estate game.

Our third property burnt to the ground. It’s crazy. Thinking to myself, does real estate not work?

We had the biggest problem that could have potentially happened happen. Do we suck at this? I can’t believe it.

It turns out it worked out fine. That’s why you have insurance. That’s why you’re able to take that cash and move it into a different property.

We’re getting a higher return now. I think that if you don’t have people around you that are telling you, I’ve been through this. It does suck.

You’re going to get through it. If you don’t have that, it can be lonely. Then maybe you do give up and you go back to safety.

I just try to get out of my comfort zone as much as I can because I know that on the other side of it is just better and bigger. Then eventually knowing that there needs to be some sort of contentedness with your life because bigger and better and striving for the highest all the time. There’s always another mountain to climb.

Once you have your basic needs covered and you can really pursue the passions that you want to pursue, I just think life gets more fun.

[Erica]
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I guess I have two questions.

First, what you just said that piqued my curiosity. What are the passions that you’re wanting to pursue?

[Cory Jacobson]
I’m doing it right now, which is cool. It’s fun. I love to coach.

I love to teach. I’d love to travel a little bit more. I’m in a phase right now where I’m like, my head’s down.

I’m in the work, but I love the work. I think my passions are really surrounded by, I love connections. I love people.

I love creating relationships. I love watching other people win and grow and having me be a little piece of that pie. Coaching, I love doing that.

I love to travel. I think that that’s like you live your life in seasons. The last three years I’ve been, it’s not like I don’t travel at all, but I’m not 100% fully abundantly financially free yet.

I have some freedoms. I got to take gratitude in that. I think the passions are really coaching, teaching, and mentoring.

I like real estate. I don’t love buildings. I think that people get that confused.

My passion is real estate. My passion is, I do love the design and the Airbnb space and creating a cool experience for someone. That’s a passion of mine.

We have a few Airbnbs. I think it’s really like I’m doing the things that I’m passionate about already. I just want to do them at a grander scale.

[Erica]
I was also curious, can you tell us about the deal that you had the most fun with?

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah, for sure. The deal I had the most fun with. The deal that went the most south ended up allowing me to pursue the deal that I had the most fun with, which isn’t that.

That’s like the moral of this podcast right here. Ryan and I, I have a couple. We just got a 10-unit under contract in Cuici, Vermont that we’re turning from long-term units to mid-term because we’re very close to Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Health.

That’s fun because I’m doing it with a partner who we met through the podcast and we met through social who has become, we’ve done multiple deals with him. He’s boots on the ground. Ryan and I the marketing, investor relations, deal underwriting, capital raising, that’s what we bring to the table there.

That’s a fun deal. The most fun deal is my girlfriend went to University of Tampa and she brought me down there just to visit a couple years ago. I was like, I’d love to own a property down here.

I live in Philadelphia. It happens to be 50 degrees today, but yesterday was 26. I just want to be able to live in multiple areas.

I put my head down. I went to work. I tried to find some properties down there.

I flew down there a couple of times. I met with the right people. I created a relationship with somebody who’s now is a lifelong friend who found me this property with a beautiful backyard and a pool.

I was able to roll some funds from a project into this. It’s a three-bed, two-bath. I use it as a short-term rental.

I furnished it. I spent a bunch of money. I’m recouping those dollars now.

It did $110,000 revenue in 2024. At any time, I can say, hey, I want to go down there and enjoy it. I want to go down and spend time there.

That, to me, has been so fun to be able to be like, I can snowboard at 33. I’m not special. I’m not.

I’m telling you. This isn’t a rags to riches story. I didn’t come from nothing.

I grew up in middle class. There was something that I thought, why could I not do this? If somebody’s done it before who’s my age, why couldn’t I do it?

Now I have this place that I go down a few times a year. Talk about fun. We were just down there in January.

I’m like, it’s 67 degrees. I’m not freezing. That’s fun.

Yeah.

[Mattias]
Totally. That’s awesome. We haven’t delved into the short-term space at all other than my sales hat.

We’re looking at turning a property into a mid-term rental now. We’re having a lot of fun with that. We’ll see where that journey leads.

But it’s just amazing how more and more opportunities will present themselves if you’re in the game. If you get that first rental that you overpay and you’re like, how am I going to afford this mortgage? Then fast forward a few years, you all of a sudden have equity that you can play with, with an equity line or selling it or whatever.

It’s just more and more doors open. To your point earlier, with time, it just becomes a lot more safe and it becomes a lot more fun.

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah. Then you can really have the options to pull money out of projects. I took out a home equity line of credit on my primary residence to invest in another project.

I think you can’t buy your second without buying your first. I think your second becomes a lot more scary. It took us two years of searching and working through that analysis process.

Maybe not that long, 18 months of working through that analysis process about the first, about my second a year later, about my third four months later, about my fifth. It’s like you just get better. It doesn’t really get easier, but you get better.

I think you got to dive in head first. Unless the world turns completely upside down, I know it has over the last five years, but not enough so that if you buy a property in 2025, if I’m talking to you into 2045, if you don’t have equity and you don’t have a nest egg from that property, then something went drastically wrong. I mean, globally, maybe we’re not here anymore.

That’s what real estate can do for you.

[Mattias]
Yeah. A hundred percent. Then you get into fun things too, because this property, we don’t have the appraisal back end, so we don’t know exactly what we’re getting with the cash out refinance, but we’re able to float the whole project on equity lines and then cash out more than we put into it.

We got a pure BRRRR strategy, tax-free income from whatever extra we got off the top, and then hopefully it will perform well to be determined.

[Cory Jacobson]
You guys are BRRRRing in 2025. Everyone says you can’t do that. Look at that.

You’re doing it. I think it’s a BRRRR midterm rental. That’s what it is?

[Mattias]
Yes. That’s the key there, because I don’t know if it would work long-term. It would be very close.

It’d be very tight long-term. That’s why we swifted it over into midterm to make more money with the higher interest rates to make that all pencil out, because it’s a cool property close to downtown that we wanted to keep. You just got to figure out a way.

[Cory Jacobson]
You got to get a I think that’s probably the most advantageous strategy of 2025, 2026 is midterm. My partner is buying, he’s 400 units, and he never buys a turnkey property. How can you make it work?

You got to force it. How can you raise money from investors if you buy a turnkey property, because you’re not going to be able to pay them back? We found a recently flipped 10-unit property, and we were looking at the numbers on what it rents long-term, downtown, bars, restaurants, 15 minutes from healthcare, tech institutions.

It’s in the spot. It’s on a country club. We haven’t closed yet, so maybe I shouldn’t be giving this whole thing up, but we’re under contract.

Turning the $2,000 a month rents into $3,000 a month rents times by 10 each of the units. It becomes a home run. We only underwrote it with turning six of them because we just figured maybe the demand isn’t there, but it’s a 0.4% vacancy rate. I say all this to say, you can do so many different strategies in 2025. You can buy turnkey properties. You can change the way that your customers are your tenants.

Who are your customers? Are they long-term? Are they short-term?

Are they medium-term? I think with COVID and having people work in all different areas in all different capacities, remote, people are traveling to work. I’ve done it.

I’ve gone down to Tampa and worked for a month. If I didn’t have a place down there, I’d do it and I’d rent. I love the midterm strategy.

I think it’s one of the ways you can make properties that otherwise wouldn’t pencil out, especially in a market where people think everything is super, super expensive. Yeah.

[Erica]
Man, I love how you talk about this Cory. I can tell you’re really excited about it. I can tell you really like it.

I feel like anybody listening, it will make them feel really excited about it too. So often, I think it’s really tough to do that first property, to figure out how to do it, which I love that you pulled the coaching piece of it in there because I think that could be so helpful for somebody to just give you the little bit of a push that you need. I love that you guys are offering that.

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah. Thank you. I hope you can feel that it’s a passion of ours.

You don’t need to hire us as a coach. There are tons of coaches out there that can help you, but I do feel that we bring a unique perspective based on our journey and what we’ve seen and the people that we’ve already helped. I don’t win unless the people that come into our community win.

If they’re going and telling other people that we’re doing a great job and we’re helping them every step of the way, then I’m winning. If they’re not getting the value, then I’m doing something wrong. So I just want it to be known about that in really anything.

You got to bring it. You got to bring the value or you can just be labeled as a coach that doesn’t actually really help people. I don’t think that that helps the overall sentiment about coaching and mentorship in 2025.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure.

[Mattias]
I agree with that completely. Do you have a book that you would say is fundamental for everybody to read or one that you currently really like?

[Cory Jacobson]
Yeah, there’s a bunch. I just recently read 100 Million Dollar Leads and 100 Million Dollar Offers by Alex Ramosi. I’ve really been getting into his content recently.

It’s funny. It’s like we’ve been doing some of the things that he’s talking about in this book. I didn’t even realize it, but now we’ve put gasoline on the fire.

That applies to any business with anyone. 100 Million Dollar Leads, 100 Million Dollar Offers. I think you want to read offers first, offers then leads, because you need to decide what your offer is.

This applies to anything. If your offer is to go, you’re an agent, you need to sell homes, you should be building content around that. That is the 2025 business card.

That is the virtual resume that people want to see. If somebody hands me a business card, I’d lose it. It doesn’t work anymore.

If I can say, hey, go check out our social or go check out our website, and you can be like, wow, this is … You guys are putting really time, energy, and effort into bringing the value, the free content. It is the foundation of what our real estate portfolio has been built on.

Those two books spell that out, exactly how to do that. I would highly recommend. You’re not too late.

You’re not too late to the game. It takes doing content and being … It’s a part-time, full-time job.

It should be, but you can do it part-time. So, yeah.

[Mattias]
Alex is brilliant. He’s amazing. I think I’m halfway through offers.

I have so many books from this podcast that I’m reading at the same time. Then I go in spurts in different ones, but yeah, I love that book so far. It’s been really good.

I’m excited to read leads as well. Cory, is there any place that people could reach out to you? Is there a website, social media?

What’s the best place for them to find you all?

[Cory Jacobson]
The best place to find us is our Instagram, and that’s @atwealthjuiceofficial. You’ll see Ryan, my ugly mug on there. We do this, the two of us together.

He is the integrator, the behind-the-scenes guy more so, mainly because he has a full-time job, and I’ve become the visionary, the face, but we have podcasts twice a week. We release podcast episodes Wednesday, Saturday. We post content every day, multiple times a day, really to try to educate people on what they might be missing if they’re going to let real estate and the opportunities pass them by.

So, @wealthjuiceofficial on Instagram is where we’re most active. YouTube, we’re trying to build up as well. You can check out our podcast, The Wealth Juice Podcast.

Then, yeah, those are the best places to get in touch with us. If you DM us, it’s me responding, so would love to chat with anybody who’s really about anything, but anybody who’s interested in trying to get in the real estate game for sure. I love it.

[Erica]
Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you, Cory, for joining us. It has been a pleasure.

[Cory Jacobson]
Thank you for having me. This is awesome. You guys are great.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit reiagent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.