The End...

The Final Season: Ending the Go Big Live Real Estate Investors Podcast

In this emotional episode, I announce the end of the Go Big Live Real Estate Investors podcast after nearly two years and almost 100 episodes. I share the reasons behind this decision, including a personal and financial disaster stemming from an arson incident at a historic building I owned. I talk about the traumatic impact, insurance and legal troubles, and the health consequences I faced. Reflecting on the experience, I explain my decision to enter a 'season of subtraction' and how I plan to take a step back to focus on what matters most—my health and family. I'll continue to share valuable insights and findings from my journey as a real estate investor in my final episodes, and I invite you to join me on YouTube for future content. Thank you for your support and understanding.

00:00 Introduction and Big Announcement
00:36 Reasons for Ending the Podcast
01:48 The Pulver Building Tragedy
03:47 Financial and Legal Consequences
06:50 Health and Personal Reflections
10:01 Season of Subtraction
14:08 Future Plans and Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:00

Hey, what is up everybody? My name is Matt Drew and I'm the host of the Go Big Live Real Estate Investors podcast, the show that you've listened to and watched over the past almost two years. If you are a. Experienced real estate investor, maybe own a couple duplexes and looking to scale up into the larger commercial real estate space. So why did I use listened to and watched in the past tense? And I do have a big announcement. I am announcing the official end of this podcast or project that we've called Go Big Live. And I really, really appreciate all of you that have tuned in and gotten value and enjoyment and shared their feedback with me over these years. First things first is why am I ending it? Alright. And be sure to listen to the very end. This isn't the very last podcast. I'm gonna be recording about six more episodes that are not going to be in the standard interview format that you've been used to. But the reason why I'm adding it is it was never my intention to run this thing forever, all. The objective was to interview investors and exactly how they did their first larger commercial real estate deal. And then extracting every excruciating detail about the factors that led them to make the decision to go big. How they found the deal, how they put together the funding.'cause capital is always a bottleneck for us growing the outcome and all of the glorious outcome and all of the gory details and battle scars that they earned in the process. So is to empower you with confidence and also to. Avoid some of the mistakes that other people have made along their journey of going big. So I wanted to provide all this information to, to be inspiration and a blueprint that any investor could use to massively scale their real estate portfolio. And after nearly 100 interviews. The themes became abundantly clear. Alright. Which I'll summarize all of those that have been able to, boil down to their essence in the final shows that I will be releasing over the coming weeks. So that's the first reason why second reason why is that I had an incredibly traumatic experience. That happened in November, 2024. We had bought a historic building that we called Pulver Studios, or the Pulver Building was formerly the home of the Pulver Chewing Gum. And we'd been working on it for almost three years. And then it was set on fire by an arsonist. Nothing? Has it been secured? No. Okay. Alright. Right now the building is a, it's a pile of rubble. Okay. I actually have I'll put in some actual pictures and videos of this of this experience. Just so you know, kind of like the extent of it and how devastating it was. And I will share my learnings of how this could have been avoided in the future on some on one of the future episodes. Okay. Some history on this building is that we bought it vacant intending to save it and bring new life to the Susan B. Anthony Neighborhood which is a nationally registered historic district. It is the the area where Susan B. Anthony, the famous abolitionist and women's right to rights to activist had her house and this neighborhood was struggling is right on the border of the, of downtown of the city of Rochester, right outside of downtown where we own some other buildings. So that being said, not only did this wreck me emotionally after all of our hard work but it's also turning into financial disaster as well, which I'll detail the extent and magnitude of that. One thing is that, on another emotional thing here, I used to bring my daughter to this building. I tell her about what we were gonna be doing with it and we also had some monthly market events here. I have a photo right here of we used to bring in a photographer Opportunity for people to have family pictures and that sort of thing. So I put a photo over there so you can see it. So why was this a financial disaster? Okay. Number one is that we had some insurance issues. Whenever you buy a vacant commercial building or a vacant building altogether, there's a lot of insurance companies that are not even going to insure it. They're high risk, they're high risk for arson. Fires due to whatever, right? Water damage, all that stuff. And since this building was vacant, we could only really get a junk insurance policy on it. The max coverage that we could get was$200,000 in this building. And we, I. Owe I, I was gonna use the past tense owed, but we owe$425,000 in this building to our private lenders. Alright, so to put the financial loss in perspective, like best case scenario, we're going to take a$225,000 loss or bath on the building. Okay? Not only that, but the fire was the place was an absolute inferno as you saw in the videos before that the city. Ordered a emergency demolition of the building, which we had, no control over the site, no control over the decision making or anything like that. And, basically, the fate of this building was completely taken out of our hands. And by morning this building was actually getting torn down. And I have a picture of the, of the actual, demolition equipment that was tearing this thing down. And, we were seeing this thing like, our dreams and aspirations getting torn down in front of our very very eyes. Okay? So in lieu of them ordering this emergency demolition, they slapped a$50,000 lien on the property. And that tax lien actually is is a super lean position, which will which will put them in, in front of our lenders in getting those insurance proceeds, which is reduces our payout on the backend. Okay. Not only that, right? And I don't mean to bum you guys out because this is, just a part of being in the development business. I'm gonna get through this, but it's definitely, been a seminal moment in my life. A total nightmare, so to speak. So I just wanted to like, give all the gory details on on the magnitude, do this thing. Legal trouble, right? Because the. Fire was so extensive. They were shooting water all over the place. It was a four alarm fire. And the ne next door neighbor's property, which is actually recently renovated sustained significant damage, alright because of the water. And so they put in a claim with their insurance companies about.$600,000 worth of damage. And they put in a claim with their insurance company and their insurance company's, of course, suing us and claiming that the building caught fire due to negligence on our part. Okay. That we didn't secure the building properly and so on and so forth. Okay. Where this makes things particularly. Harry for us is that if they're able to, if this goes to litigation for instance, and they can prove to a judge or a jury, I have no idea how this stuff works, because this is the first time I'm going through it. If they prove negligence in court, then our insurance company could deny the the claim entirely. Meaning that we get nothing in terms of insurance proceeds usually, quote unquote negligence is a is a is a, a waiver or a something that is actually, would cause the insurance company to deny a claim. All right, so meaning a total loss of$425,000 or half a million dollars. Okay. So there's the financial consequences there. Where this has really been the most detrimental to me is the, is the health consequences. Okay. After this obviously I was dealing with insomnia. I was so stressed out that my finger. My fingernails started, falling off. I, you can't really see this on the camera or anything like that. And also I've been experiencing, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, all of that stuff due to this experience. Okay. And so I've been through many tough things in my life and business and trying to make sense of this. All right. I, it can drive you insane, right? When things like this happen, whether it's death or loss, trying to make sense of it while you're going through it can be a fruitless endeavor, right? And I don't talk about this much often, but I am a spiritual person. I'm a Christian, and what I've found some anchoring in and grounding in is this verse from the book of Isaiah. Okay, so this is Isaiah 55 eight through nine. And start quotes for my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways. My ways declares The Lord fors the heavens are higher than the earth. So are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts? Than your thoughts? Okay. And I think that when you're going through something particularly difficult in your life or business, you have to understand that there's going to be a silver lining eventually to be revealed. Okay? And God speaks in a different language than us, alright? And we have to trust that there's meaning in this that will be revealed with time. At this point, I don't know what it is. Okay. So it might be. The fact that after this experience, I'm like, okay, it's time to reevaluate, take stock and hit the reset button. And take stock of what really matters, right? My health, right? If I'm sick or dead, then none of this matters. This whole real estate thing and all of that, right? Two, my family. And then three, recognizing how incredibly blessed I am I am for all the things I do have, right? I have complete control over my time. I spend an enormous amount of time with with my kids and my family. We are able to travel around the world. And that's what real estate has provided for us. And I think there was only a matter of time for us to go through an experience like this. But, going through and what's actually kept me, sane is, practicing gratitude. I know that you probably heard a lot of, you know that on podcasts and it sounds like woo woo stuff, but I think that if you're in the state of. Being grateful and taking stock of what you're grateful for. Like, all these other negative emotions really can't enter into that. Like you can only feel the piece of gratitude and regardless of where you are, whether you are a, an absolute if you're a dog, for instance, okay? There's something that you can be grateful for, right? If you woke up this morning, even if you were sleeping out in the street, you know your heart was still beating right? Yes. So we're way better off than, being in the unfortunate circumstance of being without housing, for instance. Okay. We have a beautiful house. I have beautiful children. I have a beautiful wife. My entire extended family is incredibly just a, assaulted the earth people. And, we really have to have to put that into perspective. Okay. So that leads me to, this next season of my life is I've decided in the wake of this experience is the season of subtraction. Alright? I was recently inspired by a documentary on the life of Sylvester Stallone. And I've always looked up to Sylvester, but I really didn't understand the depth of his character. And, really, he's a very, very wise person. Everybody, kind of like looks to his whole experience with Rocky. Being an extreme underdog during the first part of his career and the Rocky franchises. But toward the end of the documentary, he said something that really hit me right. And he said, from my twenties to my forties, I was adding and adding and adding. Then after 40, it was time for a season of subtraction. All right. And so that's where I am right now. I've never really subtracted before. So this will be a new experience for me. My biggest challenge probably will not be letting other things take up the space where I do subtract. All right? I want to let that space breathe and to take a moment from 19 years of absolute compression, okay? Since my early twenties, I have been adding and adding and adding. And compressing, more productivity in, in, in the same amount of time that everybody else has out there. And so this is going to be, certainly a, a, a big chapter in my life. Not only am I ending the podcast as you guys know it. I stepped down as a board of directors for New York State Commercial Association Realtors. I'm in the process of putting together a transition team for a local nonprofit trade association which I've been president of for the past two years. And getting a rockstar team in place of there so I can, pass that on. This is going to be something I'm gonna document as well along the journey when I have any type of insights on it. And I am very fortunate to have the liberty to subtract and do less, and I think that I think I've earned it. I think I really have I don't need more. I have been completely sustained financially since I was 33 years old. I'm 41 now. And and I just, during this whole fire experience, I was 40 years old, right? So it's very poignant on the Sylvester Stallone quote and that documentary coming into my life. So what's next? All right, after recording 94 episodes of Go Big Live over two years this is actually episode 94. I have this silly. Desire to get to episode 100. I know it's arbitrary but I think it's also going to provide a immense amount of value to you because I'm going to not only distill out my, the, the findings that I had during these 93 interviews that I had with absolute rock stars across the country from all walks of life. Diverse backgrounds. People that were, came from, came from money, people that came from nothing. People that didn't even, grow up in our, our country for instance. So the culmination of my insights from those 90, 93 interviews and also the major lessons I've learned in my 19 years as a real estate investor. Okay. And boiling that down to its essence that will probably take a few shows and I'm going to extract out. Themes on there and really put together a, a step-by-step process or framework within which you can follow if you were looking to scale your real estate portfolio as well. And then how all those lessons that I learned during the experience led to my success in achieving financial independence and building an$18 million real estate portfolio. Okay. I'm not gonna stop on the development side of things. Probably about six or seven years ago I made the decision I don't wanna be a deal junk anymore. I'm sick of, closing one to two deals a year. I just want to do one bigger, one bigger deal a year and kind of push the envelope from there. I. Okay. In terms of deals of greater complexity and size and all that good stuff, just to keep myself I truly do enjoy what I do. And I think that we create positive, economic impact for our community in Rochester, New York, and also positive social impact as well through the work that we do. And also I just wanna keep myself intellectually stimulated and that sort of thing without pushing myself too hard. Final note here. Okay. We are going to be. Migrating over to to YouTube. Okay. I have a lot of you guys have listened to this listen on audio podcasts either through Apple or Spotify and that sort of thing. By the way, please re leave a review. Just so I know. Hey, who's listening out there? I have no idea who who most of you are. Because I just, don't get any feedback really.'cause this is like a, this is a broadcast. Okay. So I'm gonna be moving my future content over to YouTube. So definitely make sure to look that up. I think that my handle is Matt din, so M-A-T-T-M-D-R-O-U-I-N is my YouTube handle. And then also on and I'm going to be dropping. Educational content on a frequency that is in alignment with when I think that I have something to share that is valuable. Okay. Even though this podcast is ending, I'll still be dropping valuable commercial real estate content there. But only when I have something that I feel is valuable to share or at least a perspective from a different angle. Of looking on it. So that being said I am really excited to release these episodes. They're gonna be more in a monologue format like this. I and please, listen, you can show your appreciation or your insights by, commenting on, on my, YouTube videos and that sort of thing. Now I do not have a, an ego type of, I'm not like a worshiping likes and comments and that sort of thing, but the reason why you get YouTubers that or any people that post content on social media,'cause I'm across all the platforms from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn all of'em. The reason why content creators have that call to action to, and comment and share is not just because. It's not because, oh, I want you to make me feel good. It's that the algorithm, the almighty algorithm and all these platforms will help distribute the content out to more like-minded individuals on their channel. Because let's face it, all of these social media platforms, they're ad companies, okay? And so they want eyeballs and engagement and that's how you can best support support me and my cause to help. People bust to the ceiling, swim upstream and really scale their real estate portfolio at exponential speed. Alright. And that being said I'm gonna sign off shortly. If you do want help if you do want help. And the reason why I do this and have been doing this is because. I do have a, a advisory business, and this is exactly what I do, is I advise, I become a member of my client's team to help them achieve that next step in achieving a financial independence at Lightspeed much faster. It took me. Took me 11 years. I'm helping clients achieve that in one year or less in a lot of cases in terms of case studies. If you are interested in hearing about how I can help you please be sure to to book in a call. I'd love to speak with you if whatever I had to offer is not your cup of tea I just use the opportunity to create, to create value and give you as much insight as possible.'cause what I have is not for everybody. So anyways, God bless and we'll see you soon.