Jason presents innovative new thinking on real estate investing with The Hartman Risk Evaluator™ which can virtually eliminate or at least dramatically reduce downside risk based on the LTI (Land-to-Improvement) Ratio™. Don’t miss this episode as it could cost you a bundle! You won’t hear this unique content from any other financial and real estate guru as it is truly unique – enjoy!
Announcer: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman, President of Platinum Properties Investor Network in Newport Beach, California. During this weekly program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, or a new slant on real estate, fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible.
Jason is a genuine self-made multimillionaire, who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in nine states. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom through real estate. You really can do it. And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman: Good afternoon. This is Jason Hartman, your real estate investing expert, here with Podcast No. 19, broadcasting from Platinum Properties Investor Network in the O.C., Orange County, California. Today, I want to share a live clip from one of my recent seminars with you on the subject of the Hartman Risk Evaluator.
Folks, it took me 19 years to discover this. It is totally new thinking in real estate investing, as I have never heard anyone else talk about it. I have never read about it and I’ve read lots of books on real estate investing, been to lots of seminars, and spoken with lots of people, so I think you’ll really find this refreshing. It is new thinking. It is cutting edge and innovative, and I sort of stumbled on it by accident.
What this is is the Hartman Risk Evaluator, which is something that allows you to basically limit any downside risk in a real estate investment to make sure, of course, we follow all of the other rules we teach here, in terms of making sure the properties make sense the day you buy them, making sure the metrics work. Don’t buy anything on a speculative basis, no gambling; follow the Ten Commandments of Successful Real Estate Investing that is in a prior podcast. I believe that might be No. 15 or 16.
And by the way, while I’m thinking of that, I wanna mention to you many people are listening to our podcasts now, but they are listening to only the more recent podcasts. And I tell you we have some terrific content available on the podcast in the past, so please go back and listen to the last few at least, starting with No. 14 or No. 13, and go forward. Go all the way back if you have the time.
Anyway, today, the Hartman Risk Evaluator, let’s talk about limiting any downside risk and maximizing upside potential of our real estate investments. This very cool thing, which is based on what we call the LTI ratio, LTI ratio, and that is the Land to Improvement ratio. This is a hard one to demonstrate without the visuals used at the seminar, so if you have questions, contact any of our investment counselors here at our office. The number is (714) 820-4200. Again, that’s (714) 820-4200. And any of our investment counselors would be glad to explain it in further detail. If you wanna come in and meet with them, provide visual aids to help convey the ideas in this podcast or any of our podcasts because we realize that the podcast is audio format and does not give you all of the visuals, which are quite extensive in our seminars.
Anyway, listen in, enjoy, and for further information also, be sure to visit www.jasonhartman.com, our website where we’ve got lots of interesting articles, videos, Power Points, just a load of information, and other audio content. So that’s www.jasonhartman.com, at your convenience, and enjoy this small vignette from one of our recent live seminars. Let’s listen in.
So this is the risk evaluation model. There are several things here. Remember we talked earlier about bifurcating your investment into two components: improvement value and land value. This is something that took me 19 years to discover and what happened is this.
My insurance broker, Jennifer, called me. I was buying this house in Georgia. It was my second out of state property. Remember, before two and a half years ago, I never purchased a property outside of Orange County. I owned several here, made lots of money on them, but never before two and a half years ago outside of Orange County.
I was buying the second one in Georgia. Insurance broker, Jennifer, calls me up and she says, “Jason, we’re gonna give you $135,000.00 of insurance on your Georgia property.” And I thought, wow, as an insurance company, you only insure the improvement, not the land, because the land can’t be destroyed, right. The land can’t burn down. The house could flood, it could burn down, it could be vandalized, whatever. The house is what they insure. They don’t insure the land.
$135,000.00 insurance on the house, I realized, wow, I only paid $159,000.00 for the whole thing including the land. So the land value was only $24,000.00 and that really made me aware of something that, for the prior 19 years in the real estate business, I never understood. I understood then that this was a way to minimize any downside risk, almost eliminate downside risk in my investments.
Here are the things that go on here. The improvement value is determined by the cost to build it and the builder’s profit. Those two components go into the cost of the house sitting on the land. That’s the improvement value.
Now, what affects the improvement value? Well, environmentalism and building restrictions affect it. Why? Because when the environmental movement gains more steam and it becomes more restrictive to build out existing plots of land, improved land that already has a structure and the associated entitlements to build that structure on it, becomes more and more valuable. And the old riddle for this is what do you call a developer? Someone who wants to build a house in the woods or at the beach. What do you call an environmentalist? Someone who already has a house in the woods or at the beach. Isn’t that convenient hypocrisy there?
As this environmentalism continues to grow in strength and power, improved real estate becomes more and more valuable, kind of to what you were talking about. Industrialization of China and India. This is huge. This has never, ever before happened in human history. You might wanna look this article up on the internet. Richard, whose sitting in back, who is my favorite pessimist, emailed me this article thinking it would be negative probably, a while back, but I really drew something really positive out of it. It’s a Business Week article. I’m sure you can find it on the net. I don’t have a copy for you. But it’s called “A Boomer Bust” and the date is April 27, 2006.
And they interview Jeremy Siegel and Michael Milken. Remember Michael Milken, the junk-bond king, a/k/a crook, okay, the guy that spent some time in jail. Well, he’s definitely a brilliant guy, criminal or not, and here’s what he said. He said this. He said, “Now, look at wealth. Most accumulation of wealth has been in the last 200 years. Technology has driven it. Many people predicted the more serious problems would be who would buy the assets of tomorrow.”
In the ’70s, they predicted mass starvation. That didn’t happen. Now, we see people that have moved out of farms into cities because agriculture has become so efficient. “Each farmer today feeds 350 others. The idea we can’t produce enough food to feed humanity is no longer in vogue.” Okay. “We constantly underestimate life expectancy. In Japan today, the quality of life lasts longer than anywhere else in the world. They have 73.6 healthy years before becoming disabled by old age.” So people are working longer.
He talks about two major trends going on in the world today and I’m skipping back, actually. One is that there is a growing middle-class population outside the U.S., which is where most of the world’s population lives. And two, there is a chronologically aging population in the developed world.
So what is he saying here? I’ll just sort of sum it up for you and then I’ll quote a little bit more later. Milken says that basically there are two huge generators of wealth around the planet now. One is that people are living and working longer and being healthier longer, so they are creating more value in world economies. You all agree with that? No. 2, technology. Technology is creating more and more prosperity around the world.
Now the next one is globalization and this is me talking. You’ve got 2.5 billion people in China and India that are approaching, no matter how fast or slow they are, a middle-class lifestyle. Think about what happened over the last 100 years and this is just me talking. This is not the article. Over the last 100 years, if you take the free developed economies of the world – you take Western Europe, you take the U.S., you take a few others scattered around the world – you had what? Maybe 400 million people, 500 million people that were really the major contributors to the economy and those people in those economies caused the price of every commodity on earth to get to where it is today, basically.
Whether it be oil, copper, glass, steel, concrete, lumber, whatever it is. Those are all commodities. Gold, several years ago, wasn’t it Chinese people weren’t allowed to own gold. Now they are. What happened to the price of gold? It went up. I’m not saying that’s the only reason, but I think it’s a contributing factor.
Now instead of having 400 or 500 million people, we’ve got 2.5 billion potential consumers of resources and commodities. My mother went to China just about a year ago and she said I couldn’t believe it, Jason. You know, you fly into these Chinese cities; it’s like flying into ten New York cities. It’s unbelievable. They just go on forever. There’s just skyscrapers as far as you can see. And then you get on the ground and you look up and you see there are cranes everywhere, and more and more building going on. In fact, the national bird of China should be the crane.
So then, you look around the streets and ten years ago, everybody in China was driving what? A bicycle. Now, they’re all driving a car. A lot more traffic, a lot more consumption of materials that build cars, and what else? Oil, of course. What’s happened to the price of oil? You’ve got more demand. The basic theory of economics, of course, is supply and demand. So now, you’ve got all of these consumers that are constantly increasing the demand on existing supplies. Look at what happened. Raw material costs, the government tells us that, in 2004, inflation was 3.3 percent. How do they tell us that? The Consumer Price Index, the CPI.
But look at what happened to steel and iron prices. They went up 34 percent in the same year, ten times – well, no, 11 times almost the rate of inflation. Lumber went up 17 percent; wallboard – this stuff – went up 20 percent. Think about what is happening. How many of you know someone who builds houses or offices or is a contractor? Anybody? You do it yourself. What’s happened to the cost of construction materials? They’ve gone through the roof.
I did my landscaping on my current house a couple of years ago, three years ago, and I couldn’t believe the bids. I’d done landscaping jobs numerous times on other houses I’ve owned, and I couldn’t believe how the prices were so high. I said to every contractor that I got a bid from, I said, “Why is it so expensive?” He said, “China.” Huh? Well, they’ve driven the cost of concrete through the roof.
So think about what happens when you buy a house today. Houses are made of simple, low-tech bricks and sticks, glass, copper wire, petroleum products, steel maybe, certainly lumber, wallboard, all of the concrete. All of these materials are getting more and more expensive because you have 2.5 billion additional people starting to drive up the prices of them.
A very good thing for us because think about what really happens. When we buy a house today, what we do to our construction costs? We lock it in, don’t we? We lock it in for how long? Well, it depends how long you think the house will last. I say five decades. I say a good 50 years is how long a house lasts. IRS says 28 years. Whatever. It depends on the tenant. I don’t know.
But the point is we lock in our cost and everybody that comes after us has to pay a higher cost for these materials because of the massive consumption of them. A lot of petroleum products go into a house. Copper goes into a house. Copper’s gotta be mined; petroleum products have to be – they have to come out of the ground. So that goes up.
What’s happening to the cost of labor? Is labor cheaper today or cheaper ten years ago? Labor is going up. Certainly, if you build anything or know anybody who does, they will complain about the cost of worker’s compensation insurance, right. Really expensive for those people. Energy costs are going up. Every time the cost of energy goes up, really, the price of your assembled house goes up that you own. I don’t like to invest in commodities, like I don’t buy commodities on the exchanges and things like that, but you know, what I do like are packaged or assembled commodities where they bring it to the land I own and build the house on it. All of these commodities, these materials, I’m basically a commodities investor in a way.
And the better thing about my type of commodities way of investing is I get the bank and the tenant to pay for it for me mostly. When the cost of energy goes up, the cost of your house goes up. I was complaining to my mother who’s quite a stock market freak when the price of gas started to escalate so dramatically. I was complaining to her and she says, Jason, quit complaining. Just buy some oil company stocks. I made a fortune on Valero. That’s the thing. Hedge your bet. When the cost of other things goes up, just make sure you’re investing in that commodity so that you’re making money off of it, too.
So two components: improvement value; land value. Let’s look at what this means in real life to us. Here is a copy of my tax bill. Now, look, I’m a single guy. I could afford a better house, but I don’t want a better house because it’s going down in value. Frankly, I’d like to rent the better house if I had time to think about moving.
Here’s my tax bill. When I bought my house just over three years ago, I paid $815,000.00 for it. Okay, why do I show you my tax bill? Because our tax collector divides the improvement or structural costs, the house, from the land cost. And here’s what the tax collector said. They said that the land was worth $660,000.00 and the improvement or the building sitting on the land was worth $156,000.00. What’s this gonna mean to us as an investor? Well, a lot, I think.
Here’s how it looked when I bought my house. Eighty-one percent land value, 19 percent improvement value; total of $815,000.00. A year went by. I got concerned because I noticed a lot of “Sold” signs in my neighborhood, so being in the business, I kept tabs on the values and I noticed the value of my house seemed to be increasing dramatically. And I got very concerned about this. Now, why would I be concerned that the value went up? Well, because I know that if the value went up, I’ve got what? Equity and I don’t like equity. The reason I don’t like equity is because it’s not FDIC insured. The best insurance is a high loan balance and I know it’s earning exactly zero percent rate of return, nothing.
I wanna put my equity to work. I call up the bank, they send out this appraiser guy. The appraiser guy says, Mr. Hartman, congratulations, your house is now worth $1.3 million. Wow, do I love real estate. Only a year goes by and I make $485,000.00. Nothing beats real estate. Did I know that would happen? No way; had no idea. I got lucky.
When you’re investing in bubble markets, you get lucky sometimes, but I can’t hang my hat on that. That can’t be my strategy, to be lucky, so I wanna take that money out, put it to work in investments that you don’t have to be lucky in, that just make sense. This investment doesn’t make sense.
The question I have for you is this. When it went up $485,000.00 in a year, what went up? Land or improvement? Improvement – who votes improvement? Structure, okay. Who votes land? We got more land voters. You’re right. Both went up. Look, it’s more expensive to build my house today than it was three years ago, no question about it. My house today, instead of costing $156,000.00 to build, probably costs $200,000.00 to build. Most of the increase was in the land.
Now, most people agree that the market in Southern California is going down. We know what went up the most, but when it goes down in value, where does the decline come from? Does it come out of land or improvement? I say that when it goes down in value, the risk area is the land. See, the land is where is the only place the decline can come from, in my opinion, because the improvement keeps getting more expensive to build.
Look, the great thing about houses is they’re low tech. Why is that great? Because, you know, this laptop, the next one I buy is better and cheaper and faster. There’s always new disruptive technology in the tech world, but in something low tech like a house, where it’s just made of simple sticks and bricks, there can’t be any big innovation. I mean, at least not that I can see, unless we’re gonna start living in like a force field. I just come home and turn on my house and it is a force field. Maybe that could happen someday, but I don’t see that any time soon, right.
So if we know the risk area is in the land – now, I’ll tell you something interesting about this. I called the appraiser again one year later and it was the same guy from the same lender, and you know what? He came to my seminar and he sat right where you’re sitting now, B.J., just about two months ago. He was sitting in that seat and I’m telling this story, and he came over again and he said I hate to tell you this. A year later, your house has now declined in value. It’s only worth $1, 215,000.00. It went down $85,000.00. I’m still at $400,000.00, still pretty good, but I hated to give back the $85,000.00. But where did it come from? It came from the land.
So what do we do with this knowledge? Well, if we know that the risk area is in markets with high land value, all we have to do as smart investors is stay away from this kind of market. This is all, by the way, the bubble markets around the country now. Did you notice that? This is Miami, California, Las Vegas; it’s all these overvalued bubble markets. This is Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon. It all looks like this. We wanna stay away from this and go to areas that look like this, where the ratio is largely improvement.
See my Georgia house? $135,000.00 improvement, $24,000.00 land. If the land value gets cut in half on the Georgia house, how much am I gonna lose? Oh, $12,000.00. I can live with that. What if I lose half in California? $500,000.00, that’s gonna hurt. A simple way to minimize downside risk, it took me 19 years to figure this out, and if it wasn’t for that call from my insurance broker, I would have probably never seen this. I just suddenly discovered it that day. New thinking, huh? Bet you never heard that before. Hey, give me a hand. Just kidding.
So here’s what Milken says at the end of this article that’s really interesting. He says, “With all this wealth, the problem is not going to be who’s going to buy assets. The problem is, are there enough assets for people to buy with all this liquidity around the world.”
“Take housing, for example. We don’t efficient mortgage markets around the world, but we’ve had a $20 trillion increase in housing assets between 1997 and 2004. If developing countries can fully borrow, what are they going to buy? Where are the assets for them to buy?”
That’s Michael Milken’s words. He’s a bright guy, criminal or not. “The Milken Institute does a global capital access index every year, which shows China and India still very low on the rankings. Imagine what will happen when these 2.5 billion people get access to capital. Their economies are already growing at a rate of 8 – 10 percent without efficient mortgage markets.” Imagine when they can borrow. I mean, folks, the type of prosperity that will be created over the next couple of decades, I think is going to astound all of us. I think 6 percent appreciation in real estate assets with the commodities issue is like nothing, and that’s been – 6.4 is the average for the last 38 years in the United States.
“The real issue,” Milken says, “is rate of return. If that increases, it solves the problem.” In other words, attracting investors to invest in loan money in these economies. “The issue will be, “Where can I invest?” Not “Who is the buyer?”
“The trend has already begun. Already, we’re seeing ads saying, ‘Help wanted. We need older workers.’ The only offense nowadays is calling someone age 60 ‘older,’ instead of ‘midlife.'” Think about that. “The rest of the world is growing so quickly, they’ll be looking for anything they can to buy.”
I couldn’t believe it, folks, the global economy and how incredibly pervasive it is. I’m sitting in a realty executive’s office. I’m looking at that market about a year and a half ago, and I’m sitting with a realtor there, very experienced, very intelligent guy. He’s with Realty Executives in Knoxville, Tennessee. He said that a lady from St. Petersburg, Russia, came to Knoxville – not exactly a first-tier city; it’s not New York or L.A. or Chicago, or even Dallas, which is kind of a first-tier city – and bought 37 houses from him. Yeah. The money is just sloshing around the world. There’s so much capital out there looking for a place to sit, looking for a place to go.
This is going to drive up the value of your assets in the years to come and I think it will be a lot more significant than we’ve seen in the past, especially when you add inflation and all those other things into it.
Okay, I hope you found that helpful, useful, and interesting. Again, new thinking as far as real estate investing, so I hope that was enjoyable to you. Again, if you have any other questions, contact our office. Any of our investment counselors would be happy to explain these concepts in further detail and also explain the actual practice of the concepts to you.
This is the copyrighted creative work of the Platinum Properties Investor Network. All rights are reserved, so call if you have any other questions on them and join us for our next podcast, which we think you’ll find very interesting as well. We’ll see you next time. Visit www.jasonhartman.com or call us with any questions, (714) 820-4200. And until next time, happy investing.
I’m here with Area Manager and Investment Counselor Lynda Mulley, and she just returned from Kansas City and also Grand Junction, Colorado, and Lynda, tell us about what you saw in Kansas City.
Lynda Mulley:Kansas City is a great market, Jason. It’s very stable and solid. It’s a market where there’s good growth and lots of things going on, and there’s some great projects there that I took a look at that I think the investors would love to hear about.
Jason Hartman: Now one of the things we always do is you’ve gotta go buy your own house there if you wanna recommend the area to clients and of course, I’m already an owner in Kansas City. I bought a 4-plex there, but tell us what you’re recommending today in Kansas City.
Lynda Mulley:What we have is a great single-family home, three-bedroom, two-bath, about 1450 square feet, for $189,900.00.
Jason Hartman: Brand, spanking new, right?
Lynda Mulley:Brand new, rent ready, close to schools and a beautiful shopping center, big upscale shopping center called Zona Rosa, which I had lunch at and just fell in love with.
Jason Hartman: Excellent. What’s the projected return on investment?
Lynda Mulley:Projected investment return here is 34 percent based on our usual assumptions that we put on our performance projections in the loan that you could get.
Jason Hartman: Excellent. Boy, 34 percent annually. Don’t try that in a mutual fund or the stock market. You probably won’t get it. But you can do it pretty conservatively and prudently with the right real estate investments with the right structure. Lynda thanks so much for talking about the property in Kansas City.
Lynda Mulley:You bet. Thanks so much.
Jason Hartman: Hey, I just wanted to announce a couple of quick things for you. If you are interested in the Platinum Properties Investor Network franchise in your area, we are now approved for franchising in eighteen states. Please visit www.jasonhartman.com and click on the franchise link, and fill out the short application.
If you are able to come to one of our live events, we would love to see you and meet you in person. We’ve had people fly in from all over the U.S. for them. So hopefully you can join us for some of those events.
Also, if you are interested in career opportunities with us, our company is growing quickly and we would love to talk with you about career opportunities.
Also, remember our rental coordinator is here to help with your rental properties. If you need assistance with your rentals, your property managers, your advertising, remember we’re here to help and we stay with you through the life of the investment. So feel free to call our office anytime and ask for the rental coordinator for assistance on your rentals.
Also wanna remind you, listen to our old podcasts. At least go back to podcast No. 13 forward and listen to all the podcasts after that. You’re welcome to listen to all of them. The ones before No. 13 are older, but they’re also good, but the newer ones are No. 13 and forward, which are really good ones to listen to, so please take advantage of that.
Be sure to see appropriate disclaimers and disclosures on our website at www.jasonhartman.com. Remember that we are not tax or legal advisors. So give us a call on any of these issues, and remember, we are here to help, and we will look forward to talking to you on the next podcast.
This material is the copyrighted creative work of either Jason Hartman, the Hartman Media Company, Platinum Properties Investor Network, Incorporated or the J. Hartman Company, all rights reserved.
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Duration: 30 minutes
