Family Values & Real Estate Investing with Jim Sheils, A #1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller

 

Guest: Jim Sheils is a seasoned real estate investor, #1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller and founder of 18 Summers, a family education company. Jim shares his journey from clueless investor to building a thriving real estate business while putting family first.

 

Big Idea: From his early days as a clueless investor in California to his thriving new construction projects in Florida, Jim’s career is a testament to resilience and adaptation. Beyond his real estate prowess, Jim is known for his family education company, “18 Summers,” which advocates spending one-on-one time with loved ones every quarter, fostering deep connections and lasting memories. Discover the power of intermittent tech fasting, detaching from distractions during these moments, and prioritizing family to achieve a harmonious balance between personal and professional life.

 

 

    

 

Jim: Yeah, sure. Like most of us, I started out pretty clueless 24 years ago. I remember the first offer I had accepted in Lompoc, California for 152,000 on a three-family house. And I hyperventilated in my kitchen when it got accepted because that just seemed way above my anything. And that was the first deal. And I went into a pretty active model in the central California area, a place called Bakersfield, buying, fixing, and reselling, and renting HUD foreclosures. I did that for a number of years. It was crazy in California. I didn’t like the landlord laws or the taxes. I’d always liked Florida. I had grandparents there and went off to Florida and started doing the same thing. The meltdown happened, which was not fun but we survived it and there were tons of deals. So we went into bulk foreclosures, buying, fixing, and reselling HUD foreclosures, not HUD foreclosures, bank foreclosures. Fixing them up, keeping our own portfolio, working with investors. And then by about 2015, we just got two screwy around here. It was getting bid up, you had to cut corners as a rehabber. So my now building partner and I said, well, what if we could build our own houses in properties instead of finding old ones? And that started as about a $3 million experiment and bring it up to last year we did 185 million in sales. So we build new construction only. No more rehabs. Rehab shoes got hung up. We’re just new construction, single-family, duplexes, and quads are our main focus. And we’re in high-growth markets in Florida. And all that means is markets that are experiencing economic growth, population growth, have a good affordability index, healthy supply and demand, and something desirable drawing them to the area.

Dan: Fantastic. Before I go down the tangents of real estate-specific questions, and we’re going to dive deep into that in a few minutes, but you have 18 Summers on the wall behind you. And for the listeners who are in the audio version only, we’re on the video, you could check that out on YouTube. Would you mind kind of touching on that and the family values-driven nature of how you’ve built your career over the past decade-plus?

Jim: Yeah, about, whew, 12 years ago, my wife and I started 18 Summers. It was just a simple family education company that was doing some retreats and workshops, and it was about bringing families together with this simple premise. We wanted to be successful in business and at home. And getting invited to some real estate events at a young age, Dan, I got to get too close to some heroes with huge balance sheets and absolute nightmare personal lives. And I didn’t want to be like that. I was like, I don’t think it has to be that way. And now a father of five, myself ranging from two to 20 and both biological and adoptive, it was just a big value that I held for myself. So it was really built out of a need for my own that I didn’t want to fail at home. So how could we find easier ways to get it done? How could we be more present at home? How could we bring more families together to kind of mastermind, if you would, family life and how to be more engaged and enjoyable? And that’s where 18 Summers started and our book came out of just some simple stories and strategies we were using at home and just got a following that we were not expecting. So it was an unexpected thing, but I’d say I’m definitely known more for family than I am for real estate, and I’m okay with that.

 

This Episode of The REI Diamonds Show is Sponsored by the Deal Machine. This Software Enables Real Estate Investors to Develop a Reliable & Low Cost Source of Off Market Deals. For a Limited Time, You Get Free Access at http://REIDealMachine.com/

 

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

www.jjplaybook.com

 

For Access to Real Estate Deals You Can Buy & Sell for Profit:

https://AccessOffMarketDeals.com/podcast/

 

Jim Sheils & I Discuss Family Values & Real Estate Investing:

  • The art of balancing family values and business success.

  • The “18 Summers” paradigm which emphasizes creating meaningful family connections.

  • How Intermittent tech fasting fosters mindful living.

  • How Build-to-rent opportunities can lead to an evolution in real estate investing.

  • Methods to mitigate risks in high-growth markets through new construction.

    

Relevant Episodes: (There are 225 Content Packed Interviews in Total)

 

The transcript of this episode can be found here.
Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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