Episode Transcript:  

 Is it luck or is it smarts that actually makes an investor successful or is it a blend of both? We're gonna talk to one of the smartest people I know around and find out, let's get REady2Scale.

Hey guys. My name is Jeannette Friedrich. I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at Blue Lake Capital. Joining me today is Norm Miller. Norm is the Vice President of the Hoyt Institute of Real Estate, which is a think tank of top scholars, researchers, and real estate professionals. In addition to that, he also does a multitude of other things.

He's a strategic advisor and consultant. For Hannah Pepe Investments, as well as a strategic advisor for Home Key, which is a gen AI marketplace for real estate. In addition to that, he's also a strategic advisor for Boss Cat, which is a real estate technology platform that actually makes home repairs, renovations, and lifecycle services hassle-free for home buyers, sellers, real estate professionals, and even institutional investors.

He was previously the professor and Ernst Han chair in real Estate Finance at the University of San Diego, while simultaneously working as the VP of Analytics at CoStar. He has his PhD in finance in real estate from Ohio State University, as well as his undergrad in Urban Analysis, and he is joining us today from Encinitas, California.

So Norm, welcome to the show. Thank you, Jeanette. That is a very impressive bio. So I'm super excited to get to pick your brain today. So let's just dive right in. You have over 40 years of research that you have conducted in real estate, and so I would love to know what do you believe is one principle that every investor should actually live by?

This is a principle for economics. If you. Know something bad is going to happen. There'll be something good someplace else. Or if something good is happening or some disruption that is positive for one group, it'll be negative for another group. And the point of that is there will always be opportunities.

So there are people that love it when real estate is going up and everything is great. And there's also people that love it when we have a deep recession and there's foreclosures and distress and everything is going bad. And so I think that's the one point. There are always opportunities.

You just have to be willing to pivot. 

Yeah. That is excellent insight. Now I'm curious to know if you had to make maybe say, one bold call for the next couple of years, what is on your radar is what you think the opportunity is? 

I've been investing for quite a while in self storage and multifamily, but I think the leading asset type for the next decade is probably without a doubt, data centers.

And, 

We can't build enough of them. We can't build them fast enough. And and that's the one big dominant play, but there's lots of other good opportunities out there. As I said, multifamily, self storage, certain types of warehousing self surface parking lots micro fulfillment centers, ghost kitchens.

And there are a number of opportunities. They're just not, maybe the big food groups of office or the shopping centers that we're traditionally used to. 

Yeah, that is a good observation and I know that there is a lot of hype around the data centers. It's going to be, in my opinion, very interesting to see how that is going to play out.

I am curious to see if we will be able to meet the energy demands that will be associated with having those data centers. If technology will be simplified, much like it was in the case of China, where they were able to create their ai, with a much lower energy pool. So it will be interesting for investors that are potentially considering looking at that.

Do you have any little piece of wisdom that you might wanna share with them that they need to learn to take into consideration before they make that final decision and actually sign on the line? 

Data centers are capital intensive. I don't have a favorite vendor or player at this point.

What I do know is that energy costs matter and so most of the data centers are going to be built places that are cooler, where there's water that can cool the system, where energy costs are low, or where you can set up your own solar, wind farms energy production. Like Amazon and Google are thinking about.

So it's not something that we're going to see everywhere. It'll be concentrated, but keep in mind it doesn't really matter if you invest it and then they build it, far away. We can connect unless you're doing stock trading where speed matters. It works for your Amazon purchase.

It, it works for. Our sensors that store our data, it works for everything fast enough, so it doesn't matter where it is. I do know something about the product type and it's a very capital intensive product type. So you want to find somebody that knows that has experience, that knows how to set up redundant power that knows, a lot about the product type 'cause it's evolved now. And just think about the intensity of it. I can have a space that's four by four, and I can get more rent from that space than I can from an office that's 40 by 40. It's a really capital intensive, specific product type, just like life science and biotech, but there's really good players out there.

Yeah, very good insight. It's out of our wheelhouse here at Blue Lake. We just, focus and specialize in multifamily, but I just thought it would be a good, a wasted opportunity not to ask you for the, your 2 cents, since I know that it is becoming popular and interesting to people.

But nonetheless, getting back to real estate in general, I am curious to know, how do you distinguish between. All the noise that we tend to have in the market. And, when you're looking at the market today, how are you determining, okay, this is simply cyclical, or hey, this is a real structural shift that warrants, extra attention.

So how do you balance that? 

Let's start with stocks, because that one's easier and then we can apply it to real estate. But in, in the stock market, we have technical indicators like volume and bid spread. And then we have fundamental indicators like earnings per share and sales growth.

It's the same thing in real estate. In real estate, we do have technical indicators. We have leasing volume, we have spread between buyers and sellers, and I think the good investors and managers pay attention to those technical indicators at the same time. The dominant factor that will deter, determine how well you do in real estate, the fundamental factors, and given the ha the high transaction cost and the long holding period.

You already know this, it's location. That's gonna drive your returns more than anything else. Picking out the right markets or within a metro, the right neighborhood. And so I need experts to work with me that know their local markets. I don't wanna invest in Denver or Seattle without having a local person that knows that market.

They can tell me where. So that's the fundamental part of it. And in the long run, it's gonna be, rental growth managing operating expenses the fundamentals matter now, in terms of the noise that's out there right now, we have so much uncertainty over inflation rates and interest rates right now.

I would say in this point in the cycle, there's so much uncertainty that as an investor I want to work with a group that's going to put in a little bit more equity in the capital stack and have a little bit lower loan to value ratio just in case we have a rocky road or we have to refinance down the road that we can do it because as you probably know.

There are billions of dollars of multi-family properties out there. Some that you see MBS money, 80 to 90% LTV. They're gonna have trouble refinancing. They're gonna turn the keys over. Now that's an opportunity. I like that on the one hand, but on the investor side, I don't want to do that personally.

I want to go in with a more traditional, more conservative capital stack because of that uncertainty and all that noise out there. 

Yeah. And it's interesting too because I know that you posted recently on LinkedIn and you were talking about, inflation and, how stubborn it is, the tariffs.

And you even alluded to, potentially maybe even a little bit of a crash in the stock market, not a, complete crash, but I believe you specified 10% if I recall correctly. So I'm curious to know what do you think the general public, if you will, or the market is getting wrong right now?

The one thing that we should keep in mind is that real estate is anti-fragile. It's also a good inflation hedge. So if I see inflation becoming more dangerous, I'm gonna shift my allocation even more to real estate away from the stock market. I'm gonna be very defensive in terms of what they're getting wrong right now.

Some of the investment managers have not been honest enough about the property. Devalue devaluations, I think, and I think that investors need to know, Hey, the property value has gone down. The equity's not as much. I'm sorry. But. It's gonna be good in the long run. It's just a cycle You need to hold on, not be a short term trader.

It'll be just fine. But I think in the United States in particular, we've been very remiss that writing down the properties as quickly as some other markets globally. And if you look at the public markets, wow. The REITs went down a lot. 



The private side did not go down as much, and it really needs to reset a little bit.

I think it will, I think it is now, and I think that we're on the rebound in certain areas but I don't think that we've fully recognized certain property types have gone down in value as much as they have. 

Yeah, absolutely. And just to bring this full circle a little bit for the listeners for some of those of you who maybe are, not, living, eating, breathing this sleepiness every day, like Norma and I do, but basically what we have had happen is as inflation.

Has risen. In turn, everyone knows the feds started to raise interest rates in order to combat that imple, that inflation. And then as the interest rates have risen, that has actually caused cap rates to also rise. And and as that happens, that actually drives down the value of properties. And so in plain English, it can mean that an asset that you bought for 50 million.

Three years ago is suddenly worth 35 million or 40 million, or even worse, 30 million. So just so listeners understand what we're talking about, and it's really that pricing correction that we're going through, which is good because it was getting way overheated. In the multifamily market.

And this correction is really a good thing to see in the markets because assets were getting overvalued in a lot of people's opinion, and it was just not sustainable. So this is that healthy correction that we needed to see, albeit painful and also full of opportunity. Yeah I definitely, just wanted to make that clear for the listeners in case they're, not eating the verbiage all the day.

All the day long. But yeah, for sure. I think also what I'm curious to know about is, can I follow up on that point? Oh, absolutely. 

You're absolutely right about, inflation, interest rates, cap rates they've gone up. So for multifamily, we've probably seen 5% to 35% hits depending on which markets you're in.

In the office market, because of the work from home, the downsizing. The renewal of leases at a lower rate or at a smaller size in particular. We've seen a number of properties in LA and San Diego sell for 65, 70% off of their appraised values five years ago. Ooh, wow. That's very steep.

As a discount. And so that creates another opportunity which office properties can be converted to other uses. And again, you're showing me something bad. There's something good out there. I follow Gensler, by the way, the architectural firm because they have some nice descriptions about which properties are convertible to other uses, and there are some good opportunities out there.

But you're absolutely right. Cap rates have gone up, the values have gone down. The conservative investor and multifamily is just fine, but the high leverage guy is in trouble. 

Yep, very much yeah. I also have taken a bit of a contrarian view that I've been holding to the last several months that I really did not anticipate that the Fed would actually cut rates, and I still am very cautious.

And even really believing that's within reach, just given the nature of the inflation that still is in the market and essentially what the function of the Fed is supposed to be. So I'm very contrarian on this even though a lot of people don't agree with me. So I'm curious to know, what is your view?

Do you believe that the Fed is finally gonna want to cut rates? Or are we gonna have to continue to hold. 

In the event that the one board member that has been canned or attempted there, there's an attempt to can her lisa Cook. If that happens and it sways the balance a little bit, then it tilts us towards cutting more so than it did before.

Right now it's right on the balance point because as they have two mandates. One is to keep price inflation down. The other is for employment. If you were just looking at the price inflation, you would not cut. You would say, let's hold them where they are. But if you look at the very soft employment numbers, the last three months.

And maybe next month you would say cut. So they have two totally opposite indicators in the market right now. My guess is even though they probably should not cut, if they're concerned about prices, they probably will cut once or twice over the next six months. And and that will be because of the soft job reports, especially if this next one comes out soft.

Yeah. Is that the right play? If we do any kind of quantitative easing again and it it's possible that we will stimulate inflation again. And if the tariffs go into effect, like the ones from India, if they stay at 50% and we keep these higher tariff rates, absolutely. That will drive inflation over the next several months.

Yeah, I agree. And again, 

I wanna own real estate if I have inflation. 

Yeah. Thank you for reiterating that. I appreciate it. I hope everyone listened to that extra yes, absolutely. Now let's talk too about, so now we're looking at kind of one tangible impact. That the policy coming from up high can actually have on impacting everyday, people.

But let's talk about how it also trickles down into things that people I think don't really take into consideration like. Payroll and rent growth and even asset values. So can you just help us connect the dots on how policy moves all of that?

When you're saying policy, you mean at the federal level, the state level, the local level

Yeah. We could untangle, we, how many hours do we have, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think if we look at it from the federal level, I think that'll keep it simplified. But that's with the caveat of understanding that, local policy regionally based policy, state level policies can also play a huge impact, in these types of things as well.

But for now let's just take it on the federal level. 

The federal level the one thing you have to keep in mind in terms of the economics is that there was a long lead time from federal policies, be it interest rate policies or tax policies. And so when George Bush Senior said I'm not gonna raise taxes, and then he did.

The beneficiary of that was Clinton who got a balanced budget because of the raised taxes. So there's a couple year lag on that effect. It's the same thing with all federal policies. So if we change tax laws, if we change our policies towards quantitative easing, we start buying mortgages again, or buying our own treasuries again.

We have an impact that lasts one to two years. And so when we were buying. Mortgages and bringing them down into the 3% range both for single family and for the multifamily investors that locked it in with, cheap Freddy Fannie money. 



They're still sitting on that and it's locked in.

Those policies last a long time and, that's what we have to keep in mind with respect to the federal policies that what somebody's, I think the general public often thinks that a central executive administration can change policies in the economy within two weeks. It's more like one to two years.

Whatever they do. At the local level, it's a, it's a different story and it can be, more quickly impacting or disrupting things like rent controls. 

But but at the federal level, it's a long lead time. And so we are benefiting and suffering from the policies of the past several years.

And that, that will continue. Now at the federal level, what are they doing? Right now they're talking about some home crisis group that's gonna try to. And to supply and put pressure on states, will that help add to the supply? If you look at California, we have a governor given Newsom who's tried to do the same thing, and it's had modest impact.

Sometimes there's good intentions that don't have much impact. The market can be very sticky and very stubborn. 



I don't. Pay that much attention to the federal policies, except what do they do to create the environment for jobs which we need, and what do they do that will affect inflation and interest rates?

Those are the key indicators. That I watch. And right now, as we said before, it's very ransom. And and that's spooky. So there's a lot of money sitting on the sideline. But as I told the students at the University of Electorate yesterday, there could be great opportunities for distress a year from now.



And they may have to do some entrepreneurial backup business planning but the investors that have been around for a while, they know this and they'll be ready for it. 

Excellent insights. Now I have to ask you too, what about immigration? How big of an impact do you think that potentially is going to have on both demand as well as, potentially payroll?

Rather we're talking about needing to increase payroll because, because simply people are gonna expect to be paid more than maybe they currently are. And then also maybe the impact that it might have on rental demand if we start to lose a significant portion of folks that normally are part of this rental market.

Yes. At the when you look at immigration, we have that at several levels and the illegal immigration and that part of the market has less impact on, on, say, the rental market because it tends to be the bottom. The bottom part of the market. And so your typical multifamily investors, not really that affected by that the legal immigration and the lack of immigration coming for student.

Work and staying here and letting us brain drain India, Korea, and Europe and stay here that, that is a long-term concern. Currently we don't have enough supply in a lot of markets, again, in terms of general lessons, I would never. Try to analyze the market as if the United States is one single market and we're short so many units that doesn't make any sense because it's where we are short the units and we may simultaneously have too many units, as you probably know, in Austin, Texas, they built like crazy. 

Yeah. 

They have too many units and the rents are softening. And that's good if you're a renter. And Ben, if you're an investor. So elastic supply can be a problem. But you have to get down to that local level to analyze the market.

So California, Texas and some other markets are being affected significantly by the immigration exodus. But not so much in terms of the multifamily rental side. It's more on the construction cost side and the job side and the jobs that they're not filling. So if you look at the construction jobs and you look at the roofers.

40 to 50% of them are gonna be immigrants. And if we lose those, not only will the wages go up, as you indicated for the roofers, but they they may not be able to finish the jobs. There may not be enough roofers out there that can do your project. So it slows everything down. So it, it is a dramatic cost on the construction cost side for certain.

Subcontractors net is about a 5% increase in cost. Not catastrophic. But there'll be certain areas of the country that are affected more by it. And then in the long term, if we keep this lack of funding on the research side and we steer away the foreign students and the research grants, that's gonna slow down the economic growth of the US long term.

So I am concerned about that. I'm hoping it comes back in three years, but I don't know that the damage can be reversed that quickly because when we're steering these professors and these scholars to other markets around the world, they're gonna just turn around and say, oh, now they're funding research will come back.

Maybe not. But we need them for the biotechs, the life science and the ProTech and the ai. We need all that. 'Cause it's helped us. Till now, but all of a sudden I am losing colleagues, to Europe and Asia and elsewhere. 

Wow. Interesting and good, fair and good point. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of, brain drains also, not only, are we looking at these potential impacts, but now let's talk about technology.

So you're working as a strategic advisor for, a couple of different startup companies, in the propex. Space, and we've got ai, we've got advanced analytics, we are seeing change tech we are seeing tech change so rapidly. It's really almost like a neck break speed, right?

It's a, it's changing how we underwrite, how we manage. So I'm curious to know, in your view, which of these technologies do you think are really game changing and are gonna actually. Stick and really continue to grow and develop throughout the industry or do you think that there's a lot of buzz out there and some of them are gonna die down and a few strong ones will survive 

Yes.

To all of that? Yes. There are 12 to 15,000 ProTech firms in the world. There are around three to 5,000 in the us There's a lot in Europe, there's a lot in Asia. 80% of those are gonna be outta business within five years. So from a landlord point of view, an asset manager point of view, I have to be pretty careful which ones I get in bed with.

I wanna make sure they're gonna be in business for a while. And I'm sure that your firm's very careful about that. Some are already successful and they're going to stick. So things like investor reporting portals. And I can name a few, like App Portfolio and Jupiter. These firms they're already here and they're gonna stay and I think we have some dominant players there.

In other areas, we have too many players, so it's not clear who the winners are gonna be yet. That's one of the problems with having too much. They all claim that they're using ai. Whether it is AI or really expert systems is hard to differentiate sometimes, but there are some that are definitely beneficial.

One example, this multi-family firm that I work with. We simply put on an app that lets people have access with their phone control, their temperature control, everything in the house or everything in the apartment with their phone. 



They were willing to pay $75 more per unit 



For that convenience.

Absolutely. 

And they can order repairs and service and everything. That's one that's gonna stick. Now who's gonna be the leading vendor in there? I'm not sure, but definitely. It's one that's gonna change things. And if you're a landlord and you don't take advantage of some of those, you're not gonna operate as efficiently or have as much rent and or your investor reporting will be primitive and slow and labor intensive.

And operationally valuation transaction management, document management, we have a lot that we're already using. You're probably using things like DocuSign already, that's, 

yeah. Yeah. So actually I was able to boot DocuSign because Google just came out with their own e-signature tool, so I was excited for that.

But yes, and it's this outpacing race, right? That they're in 

And competition is good. Uhhuh, and actually AI is one of the things. All this investment is helping our economy. Grow right now. We would probably be in a recession right now if we weren't spending as much on AI investment as all the consumption in the United States right now.

So it's incredible. I do think it's gonna transform real estate. I think you have to be careful which vendors you work with can embed with. But you can't be so hesitant as to say, no, I'm doing it the old fashioned way. Or if it's not broke, don't fix it. That's not gonna fly.

You. You really need to look at everything you can for energy management, for operational management, for maintenance and repairs for leasing. And for automating everything you possibly can. And I'm 

curious to know, do you have any recommendations for investors? So for example, most investors don't know how to necessarily underwrite, right?

And they wanna take a look at a deal, they wanna stress test it themself, but, underwriting is not, a skillset that they possess. But now with technology, we've got, a phenomenal ability to close that gap. And so I'm curious for investors specifically, are there any cool tools that you've come across that you think.

People might wanna check out or try to utilize without it being quote, an official endorsement. I'll put that plugin for you. 

I'm not sure because I could ask chat GPT 5.0 to do a, this kind cashflow pro forma for me. And it'll have a couple glitches. I need to edit, but it'll be not bad.

But if I don't have the education, know the difference between the IRA. I'm sorry, the IRR and net present value and which is better for me then I'm better off finding an investment advisor I trust who has credibility and delegating to them. And so I would say for most of the general public, it's better to work with credible people that you trust than anything else.

And learn to ask good questions. About the market and how they do things, their track record matters and at the institutional level in our textbook, we mention that when they say they're gonna hit a 15% IR at the institutional level, they usually hit about 12%.

If they say they're gonna hit 12, they usually hit about 10. If they say 10, they're gonna hit eight. But in the private market. Interesting. If they say they're gonna hit 10, they hit 10 historically, or 12. They tend to be, they tend to be, the private managers tend to be marketing with less puff.

Less puff rate. I find that interesting, but it also tells me that if I go to a really giant firm and I say put my IRA money part of it into. I won't name a firm. But all the really big ones you're not gonna hit your return numbers 

and you're gonna pay out through the nose and fees 

and you're gonna pay out through the nose and fees.

Yeah. And you might be in a fund of funds, and there's fees. And there's fees. And at the private level, there will be fees, but they usually hit their numbers and they've looked at their proformas and they've looked at the stress testing. And so I would work with credible managers.

That is, is what really matters. 

Fabulous advice. I did not slip Norm at 20 to say any of that, but I definitely agree. All right. Now Norm, before we get into what I call the lightning round questions, I have just one last item I'd like to pick your brain on, and it's about the the metro demand models for multifamily properties that you actually designed with NMH NMHC back in the day.

So I'm curious. To know what did those models get right? And what did those models miss? And if you had to rebuild them today, what early warning signals would you add so that they could better, guide underwriting? 

Yeah I did help develop those models. I worked closely with Paige Mueller and Michael Den and Paige and I worked a lot on these models.

And what did we get right? And what did we get wrong? We had predicted that home ownership rates would be going down before this and that rental rates would be going up. And the reason we predicted that in our models is because the standard deduction had been bumped up a lot and we calculated that 60% of households in the US would not benefit from property tax and mortgage interest deductions.

They're better off with a standard deduction, even with charity and other things. And so we, we saw that given that landlords can depreciate units, have access to cheaper capital, in some cases we felt that the rental market would increase, the home ownership market would go down. And one of the big factors there was student debt.

Student debt is so high, it's really inhibited the younger generation from buying a home. And as you probably know, the the median age right now for buying your first home is up to 38. That's incredibly high compared to history. That part we had gotten right at first, but then we had President Biden and he put on hiatus because of COVID, the student debt, and all of a sudden that, that was totally off the table.

And so we were totally wrong on that. And now we're right again because now student debt is due again and it's affecting your credit ratings. Now, we didn't know that it would affect the credit ratings as much as it is. So we got that wrong. It's actually worse than we had predicted on the student dead side right now, but it really is inhibiting the ability to buy a home and therefore it's creating more renters long term.

There's also more renters long term at the senior level. The people that are healthy, that are 65 and over that say I just don't wanna mess with home maintenance anymore. And so there's a luxury market that's a little bit stronger than we had predicted. We did get right, the fact that interest rates would stay up and that would make home ownership less attractive.

So there are a number of things that we get right, we get wrong. Immigration, we did expect that to rebound now 'cause we didn't know Trump was coming around. We thought it's gonna go down and then it's gonna go back up. And we didn't know that Trump was gonna come back in and bring it down again. So we got that totally wrong.

Yeah. But that we did calculate doesn't really affect the rental market that much except that the bottom tier. And for the higher quality multifamily market it's fine. So the market's going in the direction we thought it would several years ago.

But but student debt and immigration, both are factors, especially student debt. That's probably one of the hidden things that is really quite a burn on the young generation. 

Very fascinating. Nobody gets it right a hundred percent of the time, right? Norm? That's

Of course.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Very insightful though. All right. Before I let you go, I'd like to just ask you a quick five questions that I ask all of the guests on this show. So are you ready? 

Go ahead. 

All right, so when you're not making cool models and getting to advise really awesome prop tech companies, what do you actually do for fun?

I like to bike. I like to travel. I like photography, my wife and I went to Africa, bought one of those giant cameras, oh, cool. Worked with a professional, and now we're gonna do a little photo show somewhere. So I have a few diversions. I'm always going to the wide workout.

But, living in San Diego, it's a pretty nice place to get out there and bike along the the ocean coast, so you can't really

yeah, absolutely. All right. And what is something interesting about you that most people don't know?

Yeah, I don't think there's that much interesting about me.

Interesting. I think what's interesting about peers and colleagues that I have is that it's amazing how much capacity we have, all of us. When we put aside the time killers, I don't use any social media except for LinkedIn. 



I don't use Instagram. I don't tweet or X or snap or now I know for businesses you have to do some of that, but I view that as a time killer.

I don't watch most sitcoms and TV shows. I just don't waste the time. So I think that. We have a lot of capacity if we just don't go down that rabbit hole of killing time with things that don't matter. Yeah. So I do like to read, I try to read, a couple books a month but I don't read fiction.

I read nonfiction. I wanna learn something. So I'm a little bit obsessed with compulsive, but I'm not that different from. Your hyper competitive, typical real estate investor. They all tend to be, type A employee. Competitive. Uhhuh? I'm not unique at all. 

I agree with you, especially on the fiction versus nonfiction component.

I am also the same, but yeah. Nice to know. All right. And then what about as far as a book or a podcast, if, an investor wants to just simply sharpen their skills or their knowledge set what would you recommend? Either they read or listen to? 

Of course I'm biased here, but I think the best book out there, and it was globally the best seller for English Books for Graduate Level is the commercial real estate analysis book written by David Ner and myself and Pete Ikos and Alex Vanderman and Feast Denal and Lily Chen.

We brought in these younger co-authors. We're coming out with the fourth edition. It should be at around the end of October. The website that can, that's the companion to it, is a lot of free educational materials. It's CE book.net, just CRE for commercial real estate, CRE book.net. And and I think it's gonna be a great resource.

However, having said that, it may be too high level for some people, and they may want to go ahead and they could go on our website and they could find some lower level readings and introductions and things like IRR versus net present value and how to analyze the financial ratios that important in a pro forma.

You can get that out of our book, but we do assume a fair amount of knowledge and our book is used quite heavily by the institutional investor market. 

Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. Other books, 

I can't. I can't necessarily endorse. 

No. It's good stuff for sure. And we'll be sure to include that information as well as the link to the website that you referenced in the show notes for those of you that are listening.

All right, good. Now, yes, we all wanna make money. We wanna have good returns, but the point of it, at least for us, that we like to drive attention to, is about really being able to live and build, extraordinary lives. So what is your advice for someone that is focused on that? 

What I tell the the young people, the students, and some of them by the way, are 40 and 50 'cause they transitioned from military here.

I say that in addition to your income, if you want to be able to follow your moral compass and say no to doing things that you don't think are ethical or right. You have to generate enough income outside of your salary job or your bonus job or your commission job. That at some point you have that as a resource and a backup.

And so I say you have to invest, you have to start investing as soon as you can. I started investing as a senior undergrad with three buddies. We borrowed college loans and and we started investing in real estate. Because of that. Not only is my ex-wife very well off, no I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding about I don't know about very well off, but she benefited a little bit. But I was able to always do what I thought was right. 'cause I had some wealth outside. And to this. Stay. It's given me independence and I think you have to get that independence. So by the time you're my age, or even before you have some backup.

So I guess the lesson is save, invest. And it's not that you should be so frugal as to not enjoy life, not travel and not do things. But if you care about having flexibility or you may be at a job you think super secure. And just look at all the federal workers that thought they had secure jobs and they don't.

I hope some of them had nest eggs and had invested in real estate and the stock market and other things. Because they're gonna have a much easier transition time if that's possible. So if my advice is, take some risk early and and try to become independent of your job in terms of being able to survive.

Excellent advice. Outstanding. All right, great. And I'm not just plugging, I'm not just plugging 

real estate investment firms. I really do I really do mean that I would hate to be so dependent on the job that I'd have to do everything that's asking me, even when I think it's morally wrong.

Yeah, absolutely. No, it's really excellent advice. All right. Now last but not least, norm. If someone wants to get in touch with you, how can they find you? 

Pretty easy to find on LinkedIn if you would type nor Miller and real estate. And at the university I'm pretty easy and my email is on a number of public sites.

It's just nMiller@sandiego.edu. If you do go to LinkedIn. You want to connect? I'm happy to connect if you're involved in real estate sustainability. You went to one of my universities. If you're a fashion designer in Hong Kong, maybe not, but if you have a true interest in real estate, I'm happy to connect.

Awesome. All right. Very good. Norm, thank you so much for taking time to share your pearls of wisdom with us. It was fun, it was insightful, and I know that I benefited from it, and I'm sure our listeners did too. 

Thanks, Jeanette. You do. You do a great job interviewing. 

Oh, thank you. And for those of you that invested your time with us today, thank you.

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