3D CRE Investing with Blake Templeton

Blake Templeton is a seasoned Real Estate and Cryptocurrency Hedge Fund manager who is passionate about helping investors invest confidently into alternative asset classes like Blockchain Technology, Cryptocurrency, and specific sectors of Real Estate. Blake serves as the CEO for Boron Capital’s family of investment funds, whose teams have created triple-digit returns and consistently outpaced Bitcoin.

Mr. Templeton is the President and CEO of Boron Capital and is responsible for the strategic direction of the company, capital markets activities, and the overall performance of Boron Capital’s Funds’ underlying investments. Blake also serves as the external voice for the company. He is an experienced and knowledgeable economic speaker and addresses small and large audiences of executives and business professionals nationwide. His passion is to awaken awareness concerning our current economy and emphasize the need for individual investment dollars to be invested into tangible assets, not paper investments (Stocks, mutual funds, etc.).

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Brett:

I’m excited about our next guest. He is a gentleman for the past 13 years who has built a private investment firm that specializes in acquiring and developing corporate housing, luxury rentals, and event venue investments in emerging real estate markets, providing above-average returns to his partner investors. He has extensive knowledge and expertise in residential and commercial real estate and has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. And, in the past decade, his firm has closed over 300 plus real estate transactions and most recently has developed a full-service corporate housing investment. He owns and manages Boron Capital please welcome to show with me, Blake Templeton. Hey, Blake, how are you doing?

Blake:

Doing good. How about you?

Brett:

I’m loving the habit you’re rocking today. I’m excited to dive right into your story. So for our listeners, getting to know you for the first time. Would you tell them a little bit about your story? By the way, we’ll be talking all things three-dimensional commercial real estate investing here in a minute.

Blake:

I think the big picture is starting to be college dropout without a painted my name though and own a business someway somehow, and didn’t know you can defer student loans any longer. So I had to humbly move back in with mommy and daddy back in oh six, and ended up getting a letter in the mail to go to a conference for real estate went to it. Realize that I was wired for numbers. It was less real estate, I was wired for numbers knew nothing about renovations and so forth. Fast forward, ended up doing 300 plus transactions of whole cells and flips and so forth in the residential area. And then doesn’t 12 went into commercial real estate, went to corporate housing, and which is fully furnished all bills paid sort of like a hotel. But we did that in the oil industry, and then still have corporate housing, went into apartments and wedding venues. I think that intro was fantastic, but it’s a little outdated. So what we’ve realized is, most importantly, is flowing into your podcast is the capital gains as well as hitting us when we’re doing syndication. So for instance, apartments, syndicating in apartment value, add a deal, you find the treasure, and then you do the value add, and now it’s time to sell this treasure. And obviously, now if our investors didn’t go into it in 31, or something, we’d had this massive capital gain issue. So we ended up shifting into running funds, or hedge funds in self-storage, mobile home parks, and cryptocurrency. And in these funds we never sell. So we never sell the actual assets and specifically in self-storage and mobile home parks. How we fight against that large expense, which is the tax, every investor gets all their money back, we then refinance the property and the investors get to stay in the deal. So they still own interest proportional to their amount of money in the deal. But all their money or their actual principles are back in their hands and we refinance. So instead of doing the value add and then selling and then having that capital gains consequence, we now do the value add and then refinance and pay that distributions back to the investors but that’s a loan versus a capital gain. So there are no taxes so fun.

Brett:

Okay, so we’re gonna geek out Blake and me here in a minute. But Blake and I appreciate that we’re already diving right into the show topic, but I want to take one other step back and help our listeners get to know even better, I want you to go back to your maybe your high school days. Maybe you’re playing some sports, maybe you’re just sitting in math class and you’re getting calculus done and you’re getting all the numbers stuff. I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life. These gifts are given to us to be a blessing and to others, some people call them strength, some people call them superpowers. I believe they are God-given gifts that are given to us to just make a difference for more people and bless more people. So I’m curious, besides being wired for numbers, maybe what’s one other gift you believe you were given? And how does that help how you help and bless people today?

Blake:

Like a really good question, I think that came about when first. as we started the business, I was prideful and arrogant and thought I knew everything and wanted to do it my way, because I had a vision of how he’s gonna own the island and so forth. And God just set me aside. And it was this revelation moment in my life where he just started with teaching me about King Solomon, and how King Solomon, when he was at this meeting in the road he actually at the Lord asked him I’ll give you one thing, what is it that you want, and he could have asked for anything could have been money could have been women could have been whatever he wanted. But he asked for wisdom, as he was becoming king. The fact that he asked for wisdom, God said, you could have asked for many of the things that because you asked for wisdom, then I’ll give you the wealth of the nations and you’ll have more wealth than the king before you. And so it’s wisdom, the three-dimensional aspect of what we do in from real estate from self-storage, mobile home parks, to cryptocurrency is walking in God’s wisdom. And the three dimensions is the first dimension is the investment, how you’re investing the source, the power of the investments got to be sourced by God’s wisdom. And the opposite of that would be watching the news. Watching as the storm of the drama is happening, watching the day-to-day optics, and, and creating your circumstantial emotions based on what you’re seeing and feeling from narratives created by someone else. And so God’s wisdom would be calculating the items from what we call from heavenly places from a non-earthly volatile scenario and seeing it from his perspective. And then the second dimension would be it’s got to be tangible. So if we had time to get into crypto, how we’d call that the virtual tangible, virtual real estate if you will. And then the third aspect is it has to create exponential wealth. And a lot of people are or become what I call the natural condition of man where they fall asleep and become a machine, they literally kind of get stuck in that a piece of cash flow, or a something coming around the horizon. But there’s no quantifiable picture of how much money it’s going to produce. And understanding the inflation is now 15%. CPI might say it’s anywhere from two to 7%, depending on what things are in the basket. But it’s 15% because of all this printing of all the money and devaluing the US dollar, a matter of fact, the Fed they have a mone money supply chart and says we’ve expired this chart because the chart is just catabolic, it is like a jet going straight up have the inflation rate. So in God’s wisdom, it would be this question of like, how my I always outpace inflation, like it’s not even cool just to make inflation because depending on your tech strategies if you’re falling bread system, or like you’re still paying taxes on that, so you got to outpace inflation. And that then puts us into why we invest in self-storage mobile home parks and cryptocurrency.

Brett:

Impressive there because this is amazing. You’re dropping so much fire wisdom, I love it. So three dimensions, first dimension, we’re talking about looking at where the source of your pulse, the pulse of what’s going on, what’s true, what’s real, what’s reality, and then also being God’s wisdom, heavenly wisdom versus the news, which is drama, which is agendas, which is I mean, chaos. And it just kind of so where are you first getting that source to even look at potential investments because it’s a big deal. After all, money is talked about more than just about anything in the Bible. That’s one of the most alluring things for all of us to not get caught up in. And, but it is being good stewards with that wealth right, in which God’s allowed us to do that and be a blessing to others as well. So where are you first sourcing that wisdom? Is it coming from God? Or is it coming from Earth? And so I think that’s awesome. Number two, you said, is it tangible and I love how you said crypto because I was curious how this is gonna go I just interviewed a guy on cryptocurrency in his last interview, he’s brilliant. And there’s seems to be, generally speaking, three camps, there’s the traditional stocks, bonds, mutual funds, people pension fans, IRAs just Dave Ramsey, put it in the Roth, put it in the IRA, then there’s like the commercial real estate, like hands-on value, add development brokerage, find deals, partner deals syndication, hedge fund stuff. And then there tend to be the crypto folks that are perhaps definitely not stock market, folks, I feel like they’re more real estate, they want to be real estate, but they maybe don’t understand it or other people to partner with. So there’s kind of these three camps of these major amounts of wealth in the world. And it’s how do you bridge the gaps. And we have a cool thing called deferred sales Trust, which we bridge with the tax part because we talk about it, it’s not just about cash flow anymore. It’s about tax flow. Because guess what, we’re at 30 trillion now, where the government is, I guess we as the people, who pay the taxes, and so they have to increase. So it’s not just cash flow anymore, because inflation is going up it’s tax law as well as efficiencies there. So I love how you touched on that. And we’ll dive in that in here in a minute for the virtual tangible of crypto, the number three, you said the exponential wealth, How do you make sense of all this given inflation? So is that a fair summary so far? Now it’s the 70 are fun. Are you getting comments on that? You can go ahead and comment.

Blake:

I think it’s important to understand. So it’s like the lamp before your feet, the light before your path on everything. So how that would be for us is like, there’s optics and metrics that drive stories, numbers tell a narrative, but that’s still an earthly picture, that would have to be secondary. So just like in real estate, when you’re buying a deal, our deals are typically 10 to 40 million in your large self Storage community, or a large mobile home park community, when, when you’re buying it, the optics and metrics may have all these green lights like 16 different checkmarks that have got a hit. But I would still have to then process from the narrative of his voice, so I may still have an uncomfortable feeling. I don’t like to silence the numbers above his voice. And so we’ve not done deals where then we find out later, they were hiding a lot of different things in it, or vice versa, all the checkmarks were not checked, some checkmarks weren’t checked. And so we’re just legalistically going in and, and we jumped in, when we found out they were it was so within I have a feeling from the from God’s voice from his understanding from him that it is a good deal. But the numbers don’t check out. Well, we go ahead and do it. And we find out there’s a treasure chest of untapped value that they just weren’t quantifying. And so the same thing goes for crypto, we’re looking at the back office. So it’s kind of an unfair advantage we’re looking at on the blockchain, how many businesses are running, let’s just say on the Bitcoin Blockchain, the apps that are running the velocity of the money. So when Bitcoin looks like it’s going down, because there’s an earthly in there, at the moment, we’ll pull our Bitcoin we have a portfolio, we’ll pour a big coin and put it on the side. And if everything’s going down, we’ll pull everything on the side but we can see behind in the back office, what’s happening. So we understand the dynamics of that there’s a false narrative happening at the moment, but this the true narrative will actually take over and so will sit on the sidelines stake and earn something around 10% annually while we’re waiting, and then we’ll put it all back in. And so the problem with someone who is throwing a thumb drive in cold storage is, is you’re having to buy into it just gonna do what’s gonna do long term value. But the idea is there’s understanding the two-millimeter shifts you can make where, for example, just a quick example on crypto, someone just for arbitrary numbers has $100. Our minimums are 250, but 250,000 but on $100, they keep it in Bitcoin at 62. It drops down to 31. So now, they’ve been cut in half and when it is The 62 We pulled out and are now making a small increase sticking it making 10% annually. And then when it comes back up, we are we buy back down at 31 and write it back up. Unfortunately, when they get back up here, they’re not even to even because they lost those funds so they’re still below even where we’ve already doubled our money. And so it’s those kinds of things that shift it’s just the two-millimeter things. Last year, kind of big picture on crypto, bitcoin, 93% from over 12 months and net to investors was over 173%.

Brett:

Fantastic, my mind’s blown. I’m so glad to go on crypto because that’s our number one focus now. We’ve done 1031 exchanges, Delaware Statutory Trust, syndications real estate brokerage started at Marcus and Millichap with a background group in the real estate industry. And now our focus is crypto because we think so many people want to exit well and invest into tangible real estate assets, but it has that capital gains tax. So I love all the things you’re saying there. And I love the wisdom aspect. I’m a Christian. And I believe God gives us wisdom. That’s where wisdom comes from. And so it’s by asking and seeking that. And likewise, my part of my testimony and I people ask me, why do you believe what you believe? And it’s like, part of it is evidence but a lot of it is faith. But I’ll say, part of why I have my belief and my relationship with God with Jesus is, everything could be going right in my life. Like, I mean, as I say, family and finance, and you know school at the time, or, or whatever, And, but if I wasn’t right with the Lord if I wasn’t close on, something was missing. I just couldn’t explain it. The opposite, though, was true, Everything could be going haywire. I mean, just just just tragedy and chaos and challenges. But if I’m right with the Lord, like I have a piece that I can’t, I can’t. And so I think I’m gonna try to correlate what you’re saying there. So you’re saying, apply that in your personal life, but then also apply that to the investments and start there? Is that a fair summary of what you’re saying?

Blake:

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s the mindset that unconventional world events beckoned us to be good stewards with unconventional strategies, and unconventional strategies back that would have to come from the wisdom of God. So who’s ever running your portfolio? Well, it would make sense if they were God-directed because if they’re not God-directed, I mean, we have investors all the time that I mean, I just don’t fully agree with where you are spiritual. I’m, like, totally cool with that, but I invest with you. Because in case you’re right, I’d rather my money be God protected. And so the mindset that we’re surrendering the idea of 15 years plus of business and tons of money, and you’re in and out of deals strong returns, but we’re surrendering of that, from the aspect that there’s a higher power that has more authority over the optics and metrics. And then he would give us a perspective of wisdom to utilize.

Brett:

Blake and I met 20 seconds before the show started, like, jam and I have to run here in a few minutes, too. And we’re having on for part two because there’s so much here, you never have any idea where these conversations are gonna go. But by the way, you can learn more about Blake Templeton at boroncap.com. So let’s talk let’s just chat quickly on capital gains tax. We touched a little bit in the beginning. I want to make sure we live upon the promise there. And so I’m curious, like, what’s the biggest frustration that you’re seeing when it comes to those that perhaps are not invested with you yet? There are cryptocurrency millionaires that have huge gains and they want to exit but they’re like I love to invest with you Blake into your fund your real estate fund your crypto fund, but to do that, I’m getting hammered capital gains tax so what’s the biggest frustration with exiting, highly appreciated cryptocurrency?

Blake:

Yeah, what we’re seeing right now is there’s that fear of what’s the consequences of my actions in investments, especially if something has appreciated quite dramatically. What we’re doing though, what the solution we’ve found is that in our fun, we can do what’s called light kind transfer. So, someone who has $10 million in Bitcoin $20 million in Bitcoin, bought it in 15 or 16, 17, 2000 a coin or something, they can like kind of transfer that into the portfolio with no actual tax consequence. And then those funds now can get put into a portfolio moved around to where they’re built under our principles where they can ride they can, they can, we can ride the narratives and they don’t receive that massive tax consequence in case there is the all the volatility that can remove themselves from all the volatility, but then again the massive increase in real estate. That’s kind of what we shifted to the fund mindset. So when they’re in the fund, when they’re actually in the actual real estate fund, self-storage, mobile home parks fund, and we’re not ever selling, but we pay them all their cash back, and then they’re reaping the benefit of the rewards of the refinance. So that’s tax-free. And that’s ongoing forever. So when they get all the proceeds back, or they’re receiving their principal back, they then can reinvest that, again, it’s their natural principal, their original principle, and do it over and over and over again, if you guys have any interest in being a part of something like that, there’s a three-dimensional investment in self-storage, mobile home parks, in cryptocurrency, just gotta be real quick text. 877-771-0615 you’re gonna text this number, don’t call it good. You’re gonna text the word INVEST, and then the number 1 to 877-771-0615. That is INVEST 1. Then that’ll come to me directly. I will help in any way I possibly can.

Brett:

Cool. So I want to make sure I caught that. So I got a client, she has 50 million a Bitcoin. And we just exit it 5 million tax-deferred to the Deferred Sales Trust, she worked for a big tech company in the Silicon Valley that you would know. And she had never sold partly because she believed in the future of Bitcoin, but partly because she didn’t have a good exit plan for capital gains tax. So the other thing she wanted to do, unlike kind, like she wanted to start a company with her college roommate and launch their dream versus building the big tech companies’ dream. So it’s entrepreneurial play. This five is like the seed funding, if you will, is a way to think about all tax-deferred to fund her business venture. So that’s number one. But what you’re saying I think is like, well, if you just transfer to this fund, It’s not really, it’s not a sale. It’s maybe I don’t know, if you said it you said exchanged, I’m thinking of it’s kind of like 1031. But I think 1031 is you sell something and you buy something else. But what you’re saying is that you can remain capital gains tax-deferred by going into a light-kind crypto fund is what you’re saying.

Blake:

Correct. So, taking this right now, for example. No one has a Golden Globe that would tell them exactly what’s gonna happen. That’s fine. There’s that’s why we have to sit and have in places, but let’s just say she then pills out 5 million and puts that into the fund. And then our goal is to always outpace Bitcoin anyway. And we have the last two years anyway. So the mindset would be, it’s gonna take volatility at some degree, even if it bounces up to 110 and finds a stable point, due to the early adoption due to its emphases. There’ll be some volatility, every time it hasn’t dropped, she’s losing if she stays in cold storage or whatever. But in the fun, we’re trading the narrative so volatility can

Brett:

Keep making good cash flow and versus it being called lazy or sleepy money Or it’s like sleepy capital that goes into a Delaware Statutory Trust and it’s like huge fees, lower grade turns new Liberal, liberal control. We’re literally out of time and I’m so sorry. Like we’re up two minutes. So I’m gonna have Blake back on guys this is just part one. We’re gonna maybe bring on here in a couple of weeks when he has some time. And we’re gonna go to continue this conversation where he talks about a self-storage fund, his mobile home park fund, the rest of this crypto conversation because this has to be fast. I had never heard that you can you could exit into another fund. And so we’re gonna dive in more but like if people want to get in touch with you right now, what’s the best place for them to find you?

Blake:

The best thing is to communicate directly through text. Then we’ll open up whatever method works best, that is 877-771-0615, then you’re going to text the word INVEST <space> Number one, so INVEST 1. But this is what we do, this is our passion, this is who we are, this is the air we breathe, living in step with God, the light before our feet and the light before our path. And that’s what gives me the zeal every single morning to wake up to serve our clients to extract greatness out of your investments for you. And it’s a pleasure to do such a thing. Especially in times like this volatility, again, is good for us in the crypto fund because it allows us to trade the narratives, where if you stayed in cold storage, you’re having to ride the negative side of the narratives, and every single time you take a negative on the roller coaster down, you’re always losing no matter if it comes back up, you simply lost not the only opportunity of potential that time period, but you lost what your gain was being based on. So to minimize your losses and exponentially increase your gains need a three-dimensional investment. I’ll just give you the number one more time 877-771-0615. You’re gonna text INVEST <space> Number one, so INVEST 1. So there are two separate funds, the crypto fund, and the self-storage mobile home parks fund, self-storage mobile home parks, you’re receiving cash flow preferred return of 8% and then you’re receiving all your money back and then.

Brett:

You were amazing. I’m over time you’re coming back for sure. So text that number. If anyone wants to learn about the Deferred Sales Trust and how we help people exit cryptocurrency your business as a real estate and has some other cool ways to do it. You go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com. We also have our masterminds, our crypto DST mastermind free 10 am PST 1 pm Eastern you go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com to register, figure out a way to exit well tax-deferred, and then maybe even get with Blake to invest or maybe like we’ll have you on our Mastermind and talk about what you’re doing. So people have another option. With all that being said, Blake. Thanks for being on the show. God bless you talk to you soon. And everyone else thanks for listening.