Our guest today is Rod Khleif. Rod has personally owned more than 2,000 single family homes, and multiple apartment communities. Rod has also built several multi-million dollar businesses, and has dedicated himself as a community philanthropist. A compelling rags-to-riches-to-rags-to riches story, Rod soared from humble beginnings as a young impoverished Dutch immigrant to incredible success.
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- Why is psychology more important than technical knowledge in real estate?
- How does one find the drive to be a huge success in real estate?
- What’s the difference between Achievement and fulfillment in your real estate business?
- And so much more.
If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to listen to Inflation, Debt and the Investment Landscape with David Stein.
Enjoy the show!
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Finding The Drive To Be A Huge Success In Real Estate – Rod Khleif
It’s my pleasure to welcome Rod Khleif to the show. Rod has personally owned over 2,000 single-family homes and multiple apartment communities. Rod has also built several multimillion dollar businesses and has dedicated himself as a community philanthropist. He has a compelling rags to riches to rags to riches story. Rod has soared from humble beginnings in Holland, I believe it is, to incredible success here in the US. Having said that, Rod, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Marco. It’s awesome to be here.
It’s my pleasure to have you on the show. I didn’t know much about you until recently. In doing my due diligence on you and learning more about you and listening to your podcast, I was very impressed with a lot of the things that you had accomplished in years past. Then I was even more impressed with your Tiny Hands Foundation. I’m going to do a little thing that’s out of the ordinary for me here. I usually start with tell us about yourself and whatnot. If you don’t mind, before we get into you and real estate investing, can you just take two minutes or so and tell us about that Tiny Hands Foundation? Because I’m very intrigued with it.
I was a narcissist back in the day, probably seventeen, eighteen years ago. I came across Tony Robbins, I went to a Tony Robbins’ event. I saw what he does for needy families. He has something called a Basket Brigade. I decided to model it the year I went to my first event with him. I decided to feed five families and called the church, found out who needed help. My brother and I went and delivered big boxes of food to five families. One of the families, the lady came out of the house, she was in the shack and she came out of the shack, and she started crying when she saw the food. Then her five children all came out and they all started crying. I was hooked. The next year, I fed 50 families. This is for the holidays, a big holiday meal with gifts and things like that. In fact, I used to do turkeys. Literally, I deliver a turkey for Thanksgiving. I did 50 the next year, I did 100 the year after that. I doubled it every year, 200, 400, 800, 1,600. I paid for it all up to 1,600. That was ’07. Then ’08 hit. I was in real estate in ’08, need I say more. I formed a foundation called The Tiny Hands Foundation. We have now fed, in the last sixteen years, 40,000 kids for the holidays. We’ve also done thousands of backpacks filled with school supplies. In fact, we’re doing 1,500 backpacks to local kids here in Sarasota and Bradenton. It’s just astounding to me that children in the United States
of America don’t get supplied with school supplies.
I have given thousands of teddy bears to the local police departments here for their officers to put in their vehicles when they encounter a child that’s experienced a traumatic event to help comfort that child and bridge the gap between the child and the officer. It’s very dear to my heart. Those of you listening, if you don’t incorporate giving back somehow in your life, you need to. It’s cliché, people tell you, you get it back tenfold of what you do. You really do. I know why Marco does his podcast and why I do my podcast as well. It’s giving back. It’s just the most rewarding thing in the world.
It’s similar to the concept of tithing. In fact, I was talking to my daughter this morning. I was telling her, “Doesn’t it feel good when you give something to someone else?” I said to her, “What happens? What do you see?” She goes, “They smile. They’re happy.” I go, “Doesn’t that make you feel great?” She goes, “Yeah.” She just turned nine years old. I’m indoctrinating her at an early age about giving back. It feels really good. Some people think that wealthy people or rich people are greedy. It’s actually not true because I think rich people and wealthy people actually give back more than other people because they have the ability to.
Anybody can give back. Just make a decision to smile and lift somebody up that day, you never know what they’re going through, you never know who they might touch next. You might save a life by literally smiling or asking someone how they’re doing. It doesn’t take money to give back, but of course money helps or giving things helps. Go to an old folks’ home and talk to an old person, just ask them questions, trigger their memory and make a friend. There are so many ways to give back.
Rod, tell us about yourself, your background, how you got started and how you rolled into real estate.
I immigrated when I was six from Holland and ended up in Denver. I got my real estate broker’s license when I was eighteen. You were able to go all the way to a broker status back then with just education, without having experience. I got my broker’s license and ended up starting to buy houses in Denver. I bought 500 houses on a buy and hold strategy in Denver, did very well with them. Then I bought a couple hundred of houses in Memphis, didn’t do so well with them. Then I moved to Florida and bought somewhere between 1,300, 1,400 houses here in Florida.
I’ve had different businesses throughout the years here as well besides the real estate. I had 800 houses when ’08 hit. Because of several factors, one I’d refinanced some of the houses that I had here, taxes and insurance are very high here. The caliber of inventory that I had was the low end market that had a lot of turnover anyway. I imploded when ’08 hit. I call it a seminar, I don’t call them failures. I’ve had a few seminars. That was biggest seminar ever. What was interesting about that period was, I had apartment complexes then. They did just fine through the crash.
If I had been in Denver when ’08 hit, I think I would’ve survived just fine because the taxes and insurance there are good and they’re not high, at least they weren’t back then when I had them. I think where I was, I just got my butt handed to me. That’s what my podcast is about. It’s about multifamily real estate investing, because now I’m a big proponent because of my negative experience. In Florida here, my focus now is multifamily investing and I love it. I love talking about it, I love looking for deals, finding deals, love it.
You’ve got experience on both ends from single-family up to apartment buildings.
I love single-family too, don’t get me wrong. For a long term hold strategy, my focus now is on multifamily.
Let’s get into the mindset of things here. A lot of people talk about attitude being about 80% of your success and the rest of it is just the action you take. The attitude has to come first. I actually like what Kiyosaki says. He says, “You don’t invest with money. You actually invest with your mind.” No matter what field you’re in, your biggest asset is your mind. Once you have that knowledge, you can find deals, you can find your team and you can use other people’s money. Why do you think psychology is more important than the technical knowledge when it comes to real estate?
You’re absolutely right in the way you just described it. I’ll take it a little step further. If you have the knowledge, if I’m speaking to someone that wants to be an investor in real estate, you have to have the knowledge because not only will it prevent you for making mistakes, but it’ll give you the confidence to take action. It’ll mitigate the fear, it may not eliminate it, but it’ll mitigate it. It’ll also give you the ability to influence other people. Knowledge is critical.
Going back to when I first started in real estate, my first year in real estate I was a real estate broker, I made $10,000. My second year, I made $15,000. My third year, I made over $100,000. The difference between year two and three was knowledge and confidence. Basically, psychology. I totally subscribe to that mindset that 80% of success in anything is your psychology and only 20% is the actual mechanics. Everybody listening knows people that know how to do whatever it is they’re interested in, but they don’t take action. You hear about people that have gone to college and got advanced degrees and things but have never utilized those degrees to their capabilities. It’s fear, it’s psychology. It’s something I enjoy talking about in my podcast and totally believe in. There are ways to shift your psychology.
As you were talking, you just reminded me of a quote from Warren Buffett. I use this often, I just didn’t know who said it, but I just recently learned it was from him. He says, “The more you learn, the more you earn.” It’s absolutely true.
No question. When I talk to people that are interested in getting into real estate investing, I tell them, “There are two things you need to do. One, you need to educate yourself.” You need to go to a course. You need to read books,
whatever you have to do to educate yourself on the topic because otherwise you’re going to make mistakes. Take it from me, I got that memo. I made every mistake you could possibly make because I’m one of these fire, fire, fire then take ready and then go ahead and aim. I didn’t go to any classes when I first started buying real estate. I made every possible mistake.
I say, “The first you got to do is educate yourself. The second thing you want to do is go out and kick the tires.” Go out and talk to brokers. Go out and look at deals. Go out and evaluate deals. Do those things simultaneously. That’s how you get good at something. You don’t just do one or the other. What we’re talking about here is people that will do the education part but they’ll never actually take action. You’ve got to get out there and immerse yourself in whatever it is you want to do, be it real estate or whatever, and learn by doing as well as educating your mind.
Back to your expanding on psychology. In fact, I’m doing a goal setting workshop for my local entrepreneur club here tomorrow, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last couple of days, preparing for that. I really believe in, you have to know what it is you want and you have to know why you want it. To me, it’s critical to have written goals. It’s critical to have written down why you must have each one of those goals, both positive and negative reasons. Positive being, “I can’t be able to live the life I’ve always wanted. Life will be fantastic,” whatever you put in there, but you need to write the positive, why you want each goal. Then also, put some pain in there, “Because if I don’t do it, I’ll feel like a failure,” or whatever. Put some pain on it because pain will drive you as well. I believe you need the goal plus the why.
I’m a big person in visualization. I really believe in visualization and using visualization to manifest what you want in life. I’ve done it, unwittingly visualized a lot of things into my life over the years. I believe in getting pictures of what you want. The movie, The Secret talked about vision boards. I have numerous vision boards. I didn’t even know what they were.
I remember when I first got in real estate, I had this bone ugly four door Ford Granada. I wanted a Corvette. I got a picture of the Corvette, I put it on the visor of my Ford Granada and within a year and a half, I had that Corvette. Then I wanted a Ferrari. This is back in the Magnum PI days when Tom Selleck drove a Ferrari 308. Remember that red Ferrari 308? Man, I wanted one of those so bad so I got a picture of that Ferrari 308, two years later, I got a Maserati that looked just like that Ferrari from the front end.
My favorite visualization story is when my son was eight years old, I’d always wanted a Lamborghini. I’m not bringing this stuff up to brag, I’m hoping to inspire some of your listeners to what’s possible through visualization. Please know this is not me bragging. This is just me giving you examples. All I can use is my own personal examples. I had always wanted Lamborghini. I’ve always had posters of them, the old countaches back in the old days with the hot girls and the beautiful cars. I made the mistake of telling my eight year old that I wanted a Lamborghini. He got himself posters and pictures. He actually got models of these different cars that he always had, but he got a model of the exact same color and style of the Lamborghini that I ultimately got. He said, he used to lay in bed and visualize me taking him to school in it. I believe in that. I visualized the house that I wanted on the beach for 20 years, I ended up getting that. I was showing my son the other day, in the back of my daily planner, I’ve got pictures of all of these material type goals that I’ve wanted, I’ve had these pictures in here for over fifteen years and three-fourths of these things I have.
I believe in clearly and concisely defining what it is you want, clearly defining why it’s an absolute must and then getting pictures and looking at those pictures and visualizing as if you already have those things with deep gratitude. That’s how I get passed the speed bumps and the fear of taking action. Hopefully that helps.
The pleasure you’re going to gain from achieving that goal is good. One thing you’ve mentioned a few minutes ago, which is very powerful, in fact it’s probably far more powerful than the pleasure you’ll
get from achieving goal, is the pain that you’ll get from not achieving that goal. Because pain is a far stronger driver of our motivations and actions than the pleasure piece of it.
Most people leave that piece out, but it’s a really important piece. It’s how you get leverage on yourself. People don’t make big life changes without leverage on themselves. That’s one way that I do it. I don’t want to have regret. I don’t think there’s anything worse than regret.
I agree. I try not to live with regret, but unfortunately there are a few things that you look back and say, “Geez, I regret doing that.” Anyway, the best thing to do in a situation like that is learn from your past mistakes, learn from your past experiences. Because if you make a mistake and you fall on your face and you get yourself up, that’s great. But if you move forward and you didn’t learn from that experience, you’re setting yourself up to potentially make that mistake again or a variation of it. If you’ve learned from that, now you can maybe 10x your results the next time you try.
I couldn’t agree more, Marco. That’s why I call them seminars. I could call them failures. I’ve had some spectacular successes in business and in real estate and I’ve had some equal, even more spectacular failures and I call them seminars. Because you learn. You look back on them. It’s funny, you look back on them and there’s always a silver lining. It’s hard to see when you’re in the thick of it, but there always is. If nothing else, through the educational part of it.
Taking what you just said, how do you embody that to become a driver for you in building your real estate business?
It’s what I just said, you’ve got to realize what it is you want and you’ve got to draw attention to it daily. I do it through pictures. Like Grant Cardone, everybody knows who he is, he’s a sales trainer, incredible guy. I interviewed him recently. He’s a gazillionaire, got his own jet. He writes his goals every morning and every night. To me, that’s a little extreme. Also, whenever he’s feeling down, he writes his goals. Whenever he hits a speed bump, something’s not working out quite right, he writes his goals. To me, that’s brilliant. I write them every morning based on him as an example.
That’s what you have to do, you have to keep your goals in front of your face. Unless you know why, because it’s the why that’s going to drive you, unless you know why, people do New Year’s resolutions, they never do anything with them. If you look in my exercise room, you look in my office, you’re going to see pictures of the things that I want, the material things that I want. Before I met my wife, I had a vision board for a relationship with pictures of the emotion I was looking for in my relationship.
You have to find out what pushes you, what drives you. I would suggest to your listeners, once they’ve written their goals, go on Google and find pictures that evoke emotion in you, pictures of the things you want that you actually
have an emotional reaction to. Have them printed, go to Vistaprint and have them printed or have sayings printed. I frame them and put them on my wall. I’m telling you, people overestimate what they can get done in a year, but they underestimate what they can get done in a decade. Take the top off your mind and don’t be afraid to have big goals, is my advice.
I actually have written goals and I keep it folded up in a piece of paper and I put it in my wallet. I could read it in the morning or during the day. Writing them out every morning is taking that to a whole other level.
Grant does it morning and night. Holy cow. I tried it for a while. My wife just got disgusted with me and that was the end of that. When you said you wrote it down and put it in your wallet, if you Google Jim Carrey and the word check, you’ll see he had a check he had written himself when he was poor for $10 million. He had it in his wallet. He’d sit up by the Hollywood sign, he’d put it out and look at it and he got $10 million for Dumb and Dumber, and he talks about it.
Any Olympic athlete, any athlete period will visualize the race in their mind before they do it. Visualization is extremely powerful. Visualize yourself as already having whatever it is you want with gratitude. It’s very, very powerful. Some people call it prayer. Whatever you want to call it, but it’s very, very powerful.
Agreed. Let’s quickly touch on something here. Achievement versus fulfillment, what’s the difference in your real estate business?
For me personally, and this one is Tony Robbins’ favorite things that he talks about because he’s met billionaires that have achieved but they’re miserable. That’s why I’m really glad you started with giving back and contribution and philanthropy because you go out and make a ton of money, but if you’re not happy, what’s the point? If you’re not fulfilled, if you’re not satisfied, if you don’t get up and feel great, that’s why giving back is so important. Even if you’re not where you want to be yet financially, give back anyway, because that’s fulfillment. Doing something that gives your life meaning is fulfillment. Achieving, anybody can achieve, they put enough energy and enough time in, they’ll achieve, but they may not be fulfilled. The meaning is what brings fulfillment. Meaning typically comes from helping people in some fashion or helping whatever it is in some fashion. That’s the difference in my mind.
I like to say that real estate investing is like a game. The name of that game is passive income. Then after that is increasing your assets and then after that is ultimately creating that financial freedom. It all starts with passive income and building up lots of it as much as you can.
Couldn’t agree more.
Having said that, what would you tell someone who is looking to build up a lifetime of cashflow from their rental real estate, regardless of whether it’s apartments or single-family homes or duplexes?
I would tell them to start immediately. What else can you buy that someone else pays off for you? I would say pay attention to the cashflow, I would not pay much attention to value right now. I would pay attention to cashflow. Get it going, get started. Everybody I’ve ever interviewed on my podcast, I ask them what their regret is and it’s always that they didn’t sooner, they didn’t go bigger faster. That’s always the complaint. Or that they sold their real estate instead of holding onto it. That’s what they say. I would say, definitely get started, start that investment’s process, you’ll be very glad you did.
Rod, you sound like a pretty self-disciplined type of person. There’s a saying out there that if you spend the next five years doing what other people are afraid to do or just simply won’t take action to
do, you could spend the rest of your life living like the other people only dream of.
I say that all the time, “Do what other people aren’t willing to do and you’ll be a success anyway.” I use that as examples in how to find deals and go out there and beat the bushes. You’re right. Grant Cardone says, “Grind now,
play later.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I have that sign on my wall. “Comfort kills.” That’s another sign I have on my wall. Get out there and push yourself and you’ll be glad you did. You’ll live the life you dreamed of living. Find what it is that drives you, find what it is that motivates you, get pictures of it, write it down, listen to tapes if that helps in the car, listen to podcasts if that helps, and stay positive. Where you put your energy is your life. If you’re always negative, you’re going to have a negative life. If you’re a positive person, it’s a hugely important piece of it, is your attitude.
Do you have any tips on how to maintain a positive attitude even when you’re going through the doldrums?
I can tell you, for me, it’s exercise, it’s stopping and being grateful in the morning. My wife and I, almost every day, sit out on yard, we look at the water and watch the boats go by. We have our coffee and we just are grateful. We don’t take it for granted. We don’t take our life for granted. There’s always something to be grateful for, whatever it is, incorporate gratitude in your life and that helps a lot. If you feel like you’re feeling depressed or sad, you’re typically focused on yourself. If you can turn that around and go help somebody else or focus on somebody else, you’ll find that that’ll take care of how you feel about yourself. Get out of your own head, don’t focus on yourself if you’re feeling bad and start focusing on helping other people; be it your wife, your kids, your friends, your family, your employees. You’ll find that it’s hard to stay upset or sad or depressed if you’re focusing outward.
What you just said takes us full circle back to where we started about giving back and helping other people and your Tiny Hands Foundation. It really just goes full circle.
Thank you. By the way, I am writing a book on multifamily real estate investing. It’s going to be very, very good. I’m two chapters away from being done. It’ll be a couple hundred pages. I’m happy to give it to your listeners for free. If they want it, they can just text my name, Rod, to 41411. I’ll put you on the list for it. Don’t hold me to getting it done in 30 days, it’s probably going to be 90 days, but it’ll be very, very good, if anybody’s interested. Then if you don’t mind me mentioning my podcast, if anybody’s interested in multifamily real estate investing, come listen to my podcast, it’s Lifetime Cashflow Through Real Estate Investing. We have a lot of fun just like you do, Marco.
I love giving back and I like doing these podcasts because we can share ideas and teach people all about various strategies and techniques and giving back and everything else.
You’ll learn while you’re doing it. It’s funny, the teacher gets as much value as the students do.
I get something from every single show. Every time I have a guest, I always walk away with two or three nuggets. It’s just fantastic. Rod, is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?
No, it’s been a lot of fun. I love talking about psychology and taking action and goal setting and real estate. I think we’ve covered everything I love, and my wife.
Rod, I appreciate you spending the time with us today. I’m sure I’ll be talking to you again soon.
Awesome, Marco. Thanks for having me on the show, buddy. I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Rod.
Take care.
That was a great interview with Rod. I think I took away a lot of good insight from him. I hope you did too. At the heart of it, at the core of it is you need to build something that drives yourself. That drive will lead to motivation, because it’s the motivation that makes things happen. As they say, “Where there’s no will, there’s no way.” What you need to do is get defining what is driving you. I think at the heart of it and the ultimate secret is really, what are your values? What is it that deep down inside, makes you do the things you do? Is it your family? Is it love for a particular passion? You need to figure out what your values are.
One of my values is growth and learning and expanding my mind and learning new things. I thirst for new information. I like to learn and I like to learn from other people and from books and whatnot. Define all your values. Then once you have that, then you can find out what your why is. This is your compelling purpose. This turns into a compass needle and sets a direction. Now you know what you’re trying to achieve. When you know what your why is, now you can start getting tactical and you can start to find the how, the how you’re going to achieve it. Because remember, real estate is just a vehicle. It’s a powerful vehicle to get you from here to there and it can provide you with that financial freedom to allow you the time and the ability to do what you want, see the things you want to see, give back to the people you want to give back to, give to charity and all that good stuff. Always start with your values, define your whys, write out your goals and then you can map that out into the how you’re going to achieve that.
Of course, you need to take action. All this planning is useless and worthless unless you actually do something about it. Be sure to take that first step, break it down into smaller and smaller pieces until they’re bite size and you can start moving towards whatever it is you want to achieve as far as your goals go.
That’s it for today. If you have a question for me that you want to cover on the show, just shoot me an email through the PassiveRealEstateInvesting.com website, just click Ask Marco at the top. Send me your question. I’ll try to answer it on the air. If not, I will respond to you via email. If you’re looking to explore real estate investing or build your portfolio further, by all means, give our investment counselors a quick call for a strategy session.
Remember to subscribe if you’re listening to this show and you haven’t subscribed yet, just click that subscribe button at the top on your iTunes app or Podcatcher. Anyway, thanks for listening. We will see you next week on our next episode.
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