What Is The Most Valuable Piece Of Advice You Can Leave Us With Today?

The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.

Taking a macro view of your investments and asking the right questions of ourselves can give you a great roadmap of what you can expect out of your returns in the future. The times are always changing, and looking at your investments comprehensively ensures that yours will stay strong. Additionally, building out a diversified portfolio allows you to manage risks and saves you from relying on one single asset type to continue to flourish. 

Richard Wilson: What is the most valuable $100,000 piece of advice you could leave us with here today? To wrap up the interview, it could be on real estate investing, or working with real estate funds, or navigating the real estate industry, or anything you’d like that maybe we haven’t emphasized enough here today? 

Dr. Forrest Bryant: Great question. So, you know, I think one thing that, kind of boiling down to some of the basics, we take a macro view, we take a look at everything from a really high level view and we try to ask ourselves the right questions – what’s going to change in the future and what’s not going to change in the future? I think if you’re asking yourselves those questions and if you’re looking at demographic trends if you’re looking at tax rates, if you’re looking at where people are moving to, or if you’re looking at the demographic trends of senior living, and you’re looking at people moving out of the cities and going to lakes and beaches, work from home, I think those are some macro trends that are going to be with us for a while, so I think you’ve got to take a look at that. 

You’ve got to diversify. I think that’s a really big one. A lot of times I see new clients that come in and they hear about real estate is awesome so let’s go into apartment complexes and let’s just load up on apartment complexes, and that’s all of their allocation to that. And, you know, maybe that works out fine but what if we have some major impact to that asset type? We build out portfolios for our clients, we kind of kept it focused on commercial real estate but we do venture capital, we do precious metals, we do permanent life insurance, we do absolute return like life settlements, you know, there’s a lot of other things that these portfolios that we build out in addition to investing into other operating businesses, so our clients are not just – it’s not a one size fits all portfolio for everybody. I mean we really try to, we were talking earlier before the recording started Richard about your risk tolerance, and your time horizon, and what are the objectives, and making sure that we’re building a portfolio that really matches that and takes that into consideration. So, you know, maybe that’s not earth shattering but we try to stick to the basics on that and we really try to focus on each client and help them build a portfolio that’s suitable, that’s safe, that’s going to produce high returns and net worth growth over time while protecting things. Hopefully that helps. 

Richard: Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. Some people will focus on one area and maybe by good fortune and or skill, they’ll be fine, but that’s going to save somebody $100,000 if they’re newly liquid and are going too deep into a startup or a riskier area they don’t know like you talked about earlier in the interview, so.