Hey Sherman Ragland, The Realinvestor®️. I'm here, of course, with Bruno, the Wonderdog. Brunie, we're here. So we're here at the Realinvestors®️ Academy, and I'm not gonna give you a tour because we're actually under construction right now. We're remodeling, doing a couple of changes, but as soon as the remodeling's over I'll go ahead and give you the $25 tour instead of the nickel tour. There's nothing in the world as powerful as sitting in the car, or sitting on a bus, or meeting somebody at a property, right in your very own backyard to learn this real estate investing business, and that's the power of real estate investor clubs, real estate investor associations, real estate investor Meetups, is getting to connect with the people who are right in your own backyard, and while there's great things that can happen on websites, like Connected Investors in Bigger Pockets, those are nationwide websites that very often never have the chance to meet with somebody right in your own backyard. Now here's a little secret a lot of people don't know. The Realinvestors®️ Academy started off as a real estate investor club. See, about 20 years ago, maybe 22 years ago now, I started a real estate investor association which, quite frankly, would've been called a Meetup except Meetup didn't exist at the time, where a group of us would just meet up at a hotel and we outgrew the hotel, and then we started meeting at the library, then we outgrew the library, and then about 2005, after we've been doing this for about four or five years, I had a chance to buy this building, and this is what's called a flex building, so it's office space on the front, so I bought the office to run my rehabbing business and my wholeselling business. Yep, Sherman Ragland, The Realinvestor®️, bought his own building back in 2005. You hear all these new cats on the YouTube and you think, "Oh gee, the first person to ever buy a building was somebody who bought a building in 2010, 2020." No, I bought my first building to run my real estate business, but we had too much space. This is what's called a flex building, so the front of the building is sort of your traditional office space, and again, I'd give you a tour, I'd give you tour, but we're in the middle of remodeling, and I'm gonna do a separate video just on the remodeling that we're gonna be doing. But we bought this building back in 2005, and the backside of the building had a warehouse. There's literally on the backside of this building, it's 20 feet lower so you can have trucks pull up, and it's got a loading dock and we didn't need all of that warehouse space. I needed some of it to store some of my rehabbing materials but I didn't need all of it. So we literally draped a curtain so that you couldn't see all of the lumber and all the storage supplies in the back, and we started teaching classes, letting people look over our shoulder and showing them how we were doing what we were doing. And that was, like I said, we first started off as a real estate meetup. This is back 2002, 2003, 2004. We bought the building in 2005, and then about 2004, 2005, just before we bought the building, we officially formed something called the Greater Washington DC Real Estate Investors' Association, DC-REIA, and so, we were the first, and are now the largest real estate investor association in the entire Washington DC area. I think, last count, we've got over 1500 members, and still have over 1500 members despite a lot of groups getting smaller during the pandemic, and some even going away. So let's talk real quick about how do you find a real estate investor club. Now, we're certainly not the only ones in Washington, DC. We're by far the largest, by a factor of five, I think, but we're not the only ones, and even if you're not in DC, if you're in Dallas, Atlanta, my buddies, Phil at Shenoah Grove run a real estate outfit down in Texas, where they're in five or six cities, I lost count, and then, of course, my cousin Ebony's down in Atlanta and Atlanta's got a huge number of real estate groups, real estate fathers, and, of course, my buddy Lou Brown's also down there in the north side of Atlanta, but the bottom line is right in your own backyard, right where you live right now, there are real estate investor clubs or real estate investor associations and there are people who are willing to let you look over their shoulder and show you how to get into this business. So let's talk real quick about how you make that happen. Number one, and this is what I call the good. There's lots of real estate investor clubs, real estate investor associations, or REIAs, real estate investor association, R E I A, but not all of them call themselves the same thing. So the first thing is understanding that you're gonna have to seek them out. You're gonna have to seek them out before they seek you out. It's easy though. The easiest way to find a local real estate investor association is to Google real estate investor associations near me. REIAs, R E I A, which is the acronym for real estate investor associations, or REIAs near me, real estate clubs near me, real estate Meetups, there's lots of real estate meetups, but the first thing and the first step, and the good is the chances are, there's probably a dozen to two dozen real estate investor groups, right in your own backyard. You just have to seek 'em out, Google 'em, find 'em, but they're there. Number two, what I call the bad. There's lots of real estate investor associations out there, and some of 'em, because people start 'em as a labor of love and then they lose interest. There's meetup groups out there that say they have three, 400 people, or 20 people, but they haven't had a meeting in years. So make sure that as you're doing your search, you actually look and find those who are still active, and that's really, really important, to find active groups, and, quite frankly, the only way to do that is to search for the groups, real estate investor associations, real estate investor clubs, real estate investor meetups, and then once you find them, look to see their calendar and see what their activity looks like. We do live meetings, live trainings, almost every week, mainly 'cause again, we've got our own building, not everybody has their own building, some meet in hotels, but, as I said before, I'm an active investor, I've been an active investor since 2001. I am The Realinvestor®️, and so I believe that instead of making the guy rich, who owns the hotel, now I'll change my tune when we finish our hotel, but rather than making the guy rich who owns the hotel, why not buy your own building and host your meetings in your own building? So that's kind of what we do. We also meet onsite at properties. There are other groups out there that don't own their own building. They meet onsite at properties, and, of course, there's nothing like property tours, either on a bus or car caravan. I know some people are still a little squeamish about sitting on a bus with 45 people you don't know. We do bus tours but we don't pack 'em in like sardines. If we do a bus tour, we're gonna hire an executive coach with great air filtration, and we're not gonna put more than about 20, 30 people on the bus, so there's plenty of room to spread out, but we also give everybody a map in a schedule on our property tours, so if you don't wanna get on the bus but you wanna drive yourself and just meet us there, we also make that as an option. So again, the good is there's lots of groups. The bad is there's lots of groups so you're gonna have to filter through them. You're just gonna have to look at their website, see what the schedule looks like. And the ugly. Something happened, I guess about a year or two ago, where a lot of out of quote, unquote, "outta town" gurus have been buying up meetup groups and buying up real estate investor clubs, and they're doing virtual meetings, and so you Google real estate investor club near me, you find a real estate investor club, or real estate investor meetup only to find out that all of their meetings are being done online in virtual, and good thing to do is click and see where the group is based and then click and see where the admin team, and I've seen this, almost popping up like mushrooms, I've seen 10, 15 meetup groups that are in the DC area, but all of them are being run out of town and all of their meetings are online. Now, that's not to say that you can't learn anything from an out of town Meetup, but the bottom line is this, that's what Bigger Pockets is for. That's what Connected Investors is for. That's what those online websites CRE, that's what those websites are for. If you really wanna learn the business and you wanna learn it fast, the best way is to connect with somebody right in your own backyard, and the best way to do that is to join a real estate investor club that truly is local. They may have their own website, like we have our own website, dcreia.com, some do, some don't, some, their only way to find out about 'em is through Meetup, so you're gonna wanna make sure that you check out Meetup, but the most important thing is don't fall into the trap of seeking out a local group only to find out it's some national person who somehow aggregated a thousand Meetups but everything is done via online webinar and there's never a chance to connect live and in person with other people, 'cause that's where the real magic happens. Getting out, seeing properties, getting out and connecting with other investors, getting out and being a part of something. So, I hope this was helpful. Went a little bit longer than I thought I was gonna go, but this is an important topic and I think it can be really important to your success, and so, again, if you're in the DC area, check us out, dcreia.com, and if you're outside the DC, and, again, don't just check us out, there's lots of great real estate investor groups. They're not as good as us, but there's lots of good real estate investor groups in and around the greater Washington DC area. Check out clubs in your backyard, and, most importantly, don't get locked into thinking, "Oh, I have to go to this one site and this one site's gonna tell me where the real estate investor clubs are." That's generally not the case. Just go ahead and Google real estate investor clubs, real estate investor Meetups, real estate investor groups, real estate investor REIAs, associations, near me, in my backyard, but probably near me, and you're gonna find there's probably a dozen or more, and then just start going through the list and seeing, okay, who actually is speaking to what I need as an investor, who actually is live and does live local meetings, and who actually does have an opportunity to connect with other local investors? Sherman Ragland, The Realinvestor®️. I hope this was helpful. Talk to you soon. Bye.