[00:00:05] Kristen: Welcome to this edition of Insider Secrets, the weekly podcast that turns real estate investing goals into reality. Each show we interview guests who are seasoned real estate professionals, actively closing and managing real estate deals. Mike is the founder of My Core Intentions and would like to help you make your real estate investing dreams a reality. Mike coaches you to buy investment real estate, creating short-term cashflow and long-term wealth, your host and real estate coach Mike Morawski has more than 30 years of real estate investing and property management experience. Here’s your host, Mike.

[00:00:44] Mike Morawski: Hey everybody. It’s Mike, your host of Insider Secrets and welcome back. It is always good to bring content and always good to bring information and great guests. Today I have a great guest that I’m really excited about, Erica Meitz. Erica, you want to say hi real quick?

[00:00:59] Erica Meitz: Hi everybody, Mike, I want to thank you for having me on today. It’s really fun.

[00:01:04] Mike Morawski: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you being here. Before we get started, all I ever ask for is that you go out and you follow us on social media, follow myself, and follow my guests. Make sure that you like us, love us, subscribe on YouTube. This is where you’re going to get the most relevant content. Wherever you hang out on social media, that’s where you’ll find either me personally or My Core Intentions. Speaking of intentions, I always like to ask you, what are your intentions? What did you start the day out with today? What’s empowering you? What are you feeling really blessed about? What’s going to help you to drive your business to the next level? Hopefully what Erica has to share with us today and the conversation we get into will really give you something to think about and help you scale your business. So let me get right into it, Erica is the CEO of Maroon and Gold Investments. Their core belief is to create quality, safe, and sustainable living environments for their tenants. They’re actively adding large value add multifamily assets to their portfolio, both active and passive investments. Their company strives to bring qualified investors opportunities to enhance their portfolio. Their gift is to create dominating teams of talented people resulting in improved living environments for their tenants. Erica, welcome. Glad to see you today.

[00:02:23] Erica Meitz: Thank you. We had a unique situation last week when we tried to record and poor Mike had to switch gears because my son had to go to the emergency room real quick as we were starting to record. Thanks for being so flexible, Mike.

[00:02:35] Mike Morawski: You bet. I always say you have to adapt, right? You gotta be able to adapt and adjust. Hey Erica, one question I ask all my guests is in one word what best describes you personally and professionally?

[00:02:47] Erica Meitz: Integrity. I try very hard in my personal and professional life to have a high level of integrity.

[00:02:56] Mike Morawski: What about integrity is so important to you?

[00:02:59] Erica Meitz: I believe that what I give, I will get back. That is included in deals and hiring people and even selling properties. I feel that if I give fair and solid opportunities, I’ll get that back with good people. That will just build lifelong relationships professionally and personally, it crosses over both lines.

[00:03:20] Mike Morawski: Isn’t it so true that whatever we give away, we tend to get back?

[00:03:24] Erica Meitz: Absolutely, absolutely tenfold.

[00:03:26] Mike Morawski: It’s interesting. Fill in some gaps, I gave a brief bio of you, an overview. How’d you get into the crazy world of real estate?

[00:03:32] Erica Meitz: Sure, I love real estate. In 2015, I bought my first single family rental and bought it for a thousand dollars. It was almost a 3000 square foot model home and the development that went belly up. Sold it just through the pandemic and made $80,000 on it, so not a bad return. So that was kind of fun. The whole time it was cash flowing with renters. So that was a fun one, I seem to find these really unique properties that bring something to my life. I bought a house up north for $5,000 and it was in my family for a very long time, I am now looking at doing a contract for deed, for a new family that’s just starting out and selling the house to them. It’s really fun to find such unique properties. That’s not the mainstay of our business anymore, now we switched from a passive position to this year really leaning heavily into creating teams of people around the nation that we are investing with. We have a team out in North Carolina that we’re doing the multifamily value add properties. Then I have quite a few teams here in Minneapolis that we’re doing ground up development and in Nebraska. So those are the biggest projects we’re working on right now.

[00:04:45] Mike Morawski: Interesting, what popped out to me when I read your bio that you like to put good teams together. You’ve talked about that now a little bit. What do you look for? How do you strategically put a team together? What do you look for? What does that team need to bring to the table? What do you bring to the table?

[00:05:01] Erica Meitz: For me, the biggest thing for my teams is they have to bring what I don’t have. They have to be an expert in some part of what we’re doing, that I don’t have that knowledge base or have enough knowledge base just to be dangerous. Or just to know somebody who’s full of crap or we have a good synergy let’s partner, let’s see what if we can do something together. But for me it’s filling gaps that I don’t have. That’s the other side of what I do, I love talking to people, I love looking at properties and going out and seeing and talking with contractors. A lot of people don’t enjoy that, a lot of people don’t like going to the field and seeing the projects underway or talking and asking for money. That’s a big one. A lot of people don’t like asking for money. So if I feel like I can bring value to an investor, I don’t have a problem asking.

[00:05:54] Mike Morawski: Let’s qualify a little bit, you’re in the multi-family space, market rate rent or workforce housing?

[00:06:00] Erica Meitz: Yep. Affordable workforce housing is our sweet spot. For those just getting into this area of real estate and in investing or development, when I started to really get into it deep, I had to figure out what niche I wanted to be in. This just happened to me over the last four months is I had so many things coming across my desk, you just want to spread yourself so thin. I told my assistant, I said, okay, we have to tailor in and have three check boxes, so we made three check boxes. Our check boxes are multifamily, affordable, with a sustainability component. If they don’t have that then we’re going to move on to another deal. Those are our three check boxes, if they make those check boxes and we move forward and go on to see if this is a viable relationship together. That’s what we had to do, our lanes kept crossing and going from industrial to just business opportunities.

[00:06:55] There’s opportunities everywhere and you have to just find your niche. The easiest thing is what interests you? If business interests you, there’s a lot of people starting businesses. If it’s real estate and single family homes, stick to that, there’s a lot of cool stuff with that. If it’s multi-family do that, I love sustainability. I want to build stuff or create products that are better for tenants and better for the environment and that’s where I’ve landed.

[00:07:23] Mike Morawski: When you say sustainability, explain that a little bit more.

[00:07:26] Erica Meitz: With a sustainability component, the easiest and low-hanging fruit is solar. People can put solar on the roofs. In Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, there’s a law that you have to buy back the solar. If your complex produces more solar output than energy output, then your building needs, the grid has to buy it back. So that’s a really awesome way to make a little bit of money on your buildings. The other opportunity is simple things like recycling, which a lot of people already do. But there’s also gray water treatment where you have community gardens, gray water can feed the gardens. You have trees that have a purpose, for instance, trees that have fruit on them or trees that yield nuts or anything like that, where people can actually get something out of the landscape. Sustainability can go a long way, most of the development projects that we’re working on, the other part of their sustainability is that they’re so energy efficient. Especially in the state of Minnesota, that’s amazing, they’re so energy efficient, that’s one of the biggest sustainability avenues that we’re going down is they don’t have to use so much energy to heat or cool their units.

[00:08:39] Mike Morawski: Are you doing any gardens on any of your properties?

[00:08:41] Erica Meitz: Yeah. Each building I believe has two or three community gardens built into them.

[00:08:47] Mike Morawski: Interesting. Are they really big?

[00:08:48] Erica Meitz: They’re manageable. They’re not five acre gardens or anything like that. They’re manageable in a courtyard setting. So a lot of the new amenities in apartment complexes, these are new builds, are outdoor spaces with gardens and instead of landscape that’s just there to look pretty it’s edible landscape. That’s one of the things that we focus on.

[00:09:08] Mike Morawski: Interesting. So where’s your primary markets or what markets do like today?

[00:09:12] Erica Meitz: Yeah, Huntsville, Alabama. Charlotte, North Carolina. We’re looking at Nebraska, then I have projects in Minneapolis.

[00:09:19] Mike Morawski: Okay. Nebraska though, wow interesting.

[00:09:22] Erica Meitz: That’s only because I met a team there that really struck a chord with me. So we’ve been studying that market a little bit and it looks fun. So we’re gonna head in with them and see how it goes.

[00:09:32] Mike Morawski: Huntsville is one of those really hot markets. I’ve underwritten a couple deals there and can’t believe the pricing, it’s like Phoenix actually.

[00:09:39] Erica Meitz: Yeah, it’s really fun.

[00:09:41] Mike Morawski: What do you look at when you’re looking at a market to go into? What are those, I like to call them traps, but what are the things that you look at when you go into a market that says this is a good market, not a good market.

[00:09:53] Erica Meitz: The fundamental is and unfortunately the Twin Cities, starting in May, it’s going to have some rent control put in. So it’s a little tougher to go right into the Twin Cities, but the suburban areas help, there’s no rent control yet on the outer rings of the suburban areas, but no rent control obviously would be one of them. Then I do look at crime, the crime for me is a big thing, and to have a low crime area or, not as heavy, I don’t go into a lot of D markets or anything like that.

[00:10:25] Mike Morawski: Okay. Interesting. The rent control thing, I started to look at some of these things and I think that there’s a bit of an overreach. I walked in a restaurant the other night and I needed to show my ID and vaccine card, to even sit down and eat dinner with my business partner. It was like, man, this is just crazy, but how does that rent control? What’s that going to look like? How’s that going to work? Cause if I sit down to underwrite a deal and I can’t project rents at a certain growth percentage. It almost doesn’t make sense.

[00:10:53] Erica Meitz: From what I understand, I don’t have a building in that market, but from what I understand from the other players in the area, they are trying to raise rents as fast as they can before May. Because from what I heard at the conference is the rent control follows the building, not the new owners. So if you sold me a building in Minneapolis in two years, it doesn’t reset. You have to take that lease in progress and just go for the rent control where it is. I think it’s a 3% increase in rent control, which is absurd when inflation is going up. I don’t know how they’ll keep up with maintenance and things like that. San Francisco’s rent control as well, and people do well in that market.

[00:11:39] Mike Morawski: New York’s been rent control too for years, it’ll be interesting to see though what happens in some of these other markets that are starting to impose it. Haven’t imposed it here in Chicago yet, but I think it’s probably coming. I have to imagine that they’re watching some of these other markets and this is already a tough market to really make any money in.

[00:11:56] Erica Meitz: It’ll be interesting too, because a lot of people with this new way of life, of working from home. People don’t have to live in the metropolitan areas anymore. Not all the time to do business. It’ll be interesting how it shakes out.

[00:12:11] Mike Morawski: Yeah. It’s funny because it was like this big wave of people moved out of the urban areas and then migrated back. So it’ll be interesting to see where it maybe balances out at. Let’s talk about real estate, when you look at a real estate deal, we’ve talked about how you look at markets. Do you look at your real estate the same? When you’re going to buy a property, how about age and class?

[00:12:31] Erica Meitz: Over the last six to eight months, I have watched one of my mentors do a really heavy lift on a property. I just did a really heavy lift on a single family rental. A little cosmetic lift is fine for me, but I’m not really interested in doing big, full house plumbing, from top to bottom electrical. But cosmetic easy, lipstick on the new asset, those are really great.

[00:12:53] Mike Morawski: I was wondering if you were going to go there.

[00:12:56] Erica Meitz: Yeah, absolutely, those are fun actually for me. There’s actually a fine line, I’m looking at a project right now and I started it and this is what made me come back to my lane. As I finished this project, I’ll really stick with these lanes that I’ve created for our company, but it’s an industrial renovation and the building has been empty for eight years. The roof is toast, the HVACs toast. Now a couple of weeks ago, they just tore all the copper wire out of the building and it’s a 45,000 square foot industrial building. So to put the numbers together for that versus a new build, they’re not penciling out. So now we’re at the stage of we have our numbers and our renovation numbers and do the ARV, the after repair value, does that pencil out to resell this building? So it may not and we may have to walk from this deal because they let this building go and it was too bad. It’s a nice, big concrete building that they could have easily just had it a little bit of maintenance on and done something

[00:13:57] Mike Morawski: The price that you would pay for it is too much to tear it down?

[00:14:01] Erica Meitz: No, you could tear it down and start over, but will you be able to get the money back out of it that you have to put into it?

[00:14:09] Mike Morawski: You mentioned industrial, so if you’re in a multifamily space, how does that show up in your world?

[00:14:16] Erica Meitz: Yeah. Great question. So through our networking efforts, we met with a gentleman who asked me to help him fund for his business. Great guy, awesome, unique business that he’s working on. With that was the real estate part of it. So I went and I’ve been working on this project and I’ve been doing all the due diligence, getting contractors together, the well water, all that kind of stuff. Even getting a 600 foot well, no pumps in there anymore, the wiring’s gone. Do we hook up to city? Do we stay with the well? All of these massive decisions that really affect the bottom line. Then we had another interesting caveat, in the state of Minnesota there is, especially in the Southern part of our state, there’s burial mounts from our tribal communities. So our projection is to rehab this building, but then put five other buildings on the property, we found out there’s possible two burial mounds. I don’t know if it’s a federal law or just a state law, but in our state, if you come across a Native American burial ground, you cannot disturb it. So that would affect the potential builds of the other expansions of this business. Which I agree, shouldn’t disturb them. So those are things we’re taking into consideration as well.

[00:15:30] Mike Morawski: Is there a distance that you have to stay away from those?

[00:15:33] Erica Meitz: Great question. I don’t know, I don’t know that we’re going to get that deep into this project to even find those answers out. Nonetheless I learned a lot. But if there was a burial ground and they found a village under the soil, that’s what really stops progress because a burial ground you can’t do anything with it, right? It’s just done and you call the Tribal Councils and they do what they do. But if it’s a village, now it’s an archeological site that has digging involved. There’s one in Minnesota that’s 13 months in and it just stops the project until they take out the artifacts that they want for their museums or historical societies and then you can continue your project.

[00:16:13] Mike Morawski: Interesting history, that’s for sure, and it’s everywhere right? Hey, let’s talk about private equity, raising capital, talk to me a little bit about that. How do you go about doing that? What’s your perfect investor look like?

[00:16:26] Erica Meitz: Yeah. So my team here in Minneapolis, we’re talking about doing a smaller raise where everybody gets a chance to be part of the project, or do we hit just one of the bigger investors? It’s interesting that you ask that because this morning we just got out of a meeting about that and we have a potential investor on the table that can put up $12 million for the project, but they come with a lot of baggage, honestly. So we’re going back and forth, do we want the baggage? Possible bad publicity? Just with the way that they carry themselves in the political arena and then will they want a lot of say in the projects? We’re going back and forth on that. I think if you go back to your mindset of let’s play with the people that have pretty high integrity, then it should overshadow the money. It should, but when you’re not the only person making the decisions you have to take in everybody’s opinion. The same thing can happen with smaller people who only can put in 50 to 100 to 500,000.

[00:17:27] You can have the same amount of maintenance, if you will, with those investors. They may want to know when their next check is or what’s happening with this building. Why haven’t we broken ground? They have the same questions and sometimes people who can put in $12 million in a deal, understand investing a little bit better. They understand real estate and they understand that there’s timelines and there might be lumber shortages, or there might be this, and there might be that. Trouble with the city or anything that can perhaps put a hurdle in place for us. Where sometimes these other players that are, 50 or a 100 or $500,000 investors, they don’t really understand that. You have to have a whole educational part of your program to be able to say remember when you’re doing real estate, it’s not always cut and dry. It’s not always black and white, you have to put some timeline buffers in there, just like you need some monetary buffers.

[00:18:19] Mike Morawski: Yeah, it’s always an interesting world raising equity, finding any investors. Anything that you do over and over again that helps you to bring potential new investors to the table or?

[00:18:31] Erica Meitz: Yep. I have had a ton of luck on LinkedIn as wild as that sounds. I’ve had a ton of luck on it and I am constantly on there, or my assistant is on there, helping us drive business. She sets up phone calls all the time for us, so that we’re always out there networking and getting our heads out there, getting our name out there and just driving new relationships.

[00:18:53] Mike Morawski: So what do you look for? Who do you look for?

[00:18:56] Erica Meitz: We play in the sustainability area. So we look for people who have the same alignment that we do with providing a better product, not just worrying about what the IRR is all the time or what the cash on cash is. Of course, for us to be able to do our service and want to do other things and give back, we have to look at those numbers. I think that we can do both, I think that we can have a good return on our investment and do good for our environment and still give back and serve people. It might be lofty, but I don’t care. What else do we have to do? Might as well make it big.

[00:19:30] Mike Morawski: What a cool concept.

[00:19:31] Erica Meitz: Thanks.

[00:19:32] Mike Morawski: Making my head spin a little bit thinking about man, how do we pull a little something out of a deal and put it somewhere else? A little social responsibility of some sorts.

[00:19:41] Erica Meitz: Yeah, absolutely. We I have another company, in California, and it’s a gymnastics club. We have about 25 employees and coming back from COVID, we were closed for 18 months and we just implemented a tree planting program. Every kid that is in our gym gets a tree planted for them when they sign up, so that was a fun thing that we did. We were allowed to pick the area, the Amazon or the Sierra mountains or the Appalachias and we chose the California wildfire restoration area. So that’s really fun, yeah.

[00:20:13] Mike Morawski: Wow. That’s awesome. Just a real quick story, I had somebody on my show a week ago or so, who has raised a hundred million dollars since 1999, all private capital. It’s all been family offices and small 50, a hundred thousand dollar investors. I asked him, “so how do you do that?” He goes, “I talk to everybody I meet or run into. I just tell people I’m a real estate investor. I provide value for my investors that X amount of, return on their investment. What a concept, old-school.

[00:20:48] Erica Meitz: Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say, most people like us that just want to talk and get out there and talk to people or look at deals and go walk properties, sometimes our internal systems need some attention. I have to give a shout out to my assistant, who is also my marketing director, Holly, she has really helped build some momentum and take what I do and put it into some systems and it really has helped change the momentum of the company. It’s been great.

[00:21:17] Mike Morawski: I love Holly, Holly called today, she said, ” Hey, I was trying to get Diana.” I said, “yeah, I answered.”

[00:21:25] Erica Meitz: Yeah, she’s fantastic. I was in a meeting this morning and I said, “someone was supposed to send me the zoom link, I just want to make sure that I’m not missing something.” So she’s like, “I’ll check. I’ll check.” She’s fantastic. Everyone should have an assistant, if you go a hundred miles an hour, you should have an assistant.

[00:21:41] Mike Morawski: I’ll tell you what that’s a lifeline, it’s a lifeline and it really helps you do more. You can only do so much. It’s funny that this has come up in conversation, cause over the last few months I’ve had some challenges and finally just hired someone again here that so far pretty happy with. Knock on wood, we’ll hope that it stays running the same way. A lot of times we can paint this picture that real estate is great and everything’s wonderful, but we also know, and we just alluded to the fact, that it can get stressful. How do you deal with stress with making high stake decisions? What’s that like for you in your life?

[00:22:17] Erica Meitz: First I educate on the situation, if I feel anxious or holy crap, I need to educate myself. I need to reach out to my mentors, I need to read about the area and understand it. Then you can make an educated decision on the situation. Sometimes you have to tell people to go fly kite, that’s just the way it is. That’s the hard part about, it’s just business really, it’s not just real estate. The one fun thing about real estate is if you take a project and you put it in an LLC and you have these specific partners and investors in that project, the whole time is a five-year hold let’s just say, in five years in that interim, you can do another project with those partners if they’re a good fit for you. Or you can just okay, we’re done, thank you very much, and move on to your next projects. Everybody from the beginning of that business, when you build that business for that specific asset knows that in five years, we’re done, we’re selling and we’re moving on. That’s the nice thing you can either choose to keep those investors or not let them into the next deal, same with the partners.

[00:23:25] Mike Morawski: Isn’t it interesting, I want to almost say it gives you a sense of empowerment, which I mentioned at the beginning of the show, to say no, and it’s okay to say no. If it doesn’t work in who you are and what you do no is fine. Whether it’s an investor, whether it’s a partner. That’s what I like about the partnerships today too, is if things just aren’t going right, you don’t need to take that partner to the next deal. This multifamily space that we live in, there’s all kinds of opportunity. I’ve met some really great people like yourself, that just seem to try and help make life in the business a little bit more comfortable. Really cool. What are your favorite technology resources?

[00:24:06] Erica Meitz: Yeah, I have to give a shout out to SyndicationPro, that’s my CRM, that’s how we keep our leads and our investors. People who watch this podcast will know what I’m sure syndication pro is, but it’s like AppFolio, but it doesn’t have a property management element to it. It’s just for investors and syndicators, really, but you can use it to even syndicate for a business. It doesn’t just have to be for real estate, but I like that everything’s in one spot. That’s what I love about that. Then technology, as far as platforms, there’s some crazy sustainability technology right now, and I’d be remissed even try to talk about it, but there’s stuff out there. They’re not smart meters, but they’re more intelligent than smart meters. You have a dashboard, you can literally see which every unit is doing and you can adjust it. It’s amazing that some of the technology out there right now, but the sustainability technology is fun. Then I would say, I’m an apple girl, apple products and technology of the apple world, yeah.

[00:25:08] Mike Morawski: I thought you were going to say you’re an apple girl. You like to go pick apples?

[00:25:11] Erica Meitz: Nope. Nope. I’m a Mac gal so.

[00:25:16] Mike Morawski: What’s cool is what you were talking about, all that AI technology, the meters on toilets or faucets or piping and you can tell if something’s leaking or using too much water. How to start to try and keep your utility bills a little bit more in order. I’m sure you’ll agree with this, that one of the biggest costs as an owner-operator that you have today is water. Old school, we used to do some crazy things. I’d buy a deal, we’d go in and we would rebuild all the toilet tanks, the levers and mechanisms and if the water bill still didn’t go down, we’d put a brick in those tanks. Take up some of the consumption, I think maybe AI works a little bit better today and smart and all that kind of stuff. Any special amenities that you like or if you go into a property that you like to add to give benefit to the residents?

[00:26:05] Erica Meitz: I don’t do this, but one of my mentors friends, he hires apartment.com and they go in and they have actual events for the apartment complexes like barbecues or ice cream socials or movie nights for the kids. I think that’s a really cool get back to basics, get back to knowing who you are, who you live with and getting neighborly, know your neighbor. I think it’s a really cool concept that he does. From what I understand, he does it on all of his apartment complexes.

[00:26:38] Mike Morawski: Nice, interesting. This show’s called Insider Secrets and I always try to drop some good nuggets, I think we’ve done a great job of that today. I am sure that my listeners will have to go back and listen a few times to this because I think we touched on some really good things. But from a secret standpoint or, a nugget standpoint, what kind of advice might you give a new investor today coming into the multifamily world?

[00:27:01] Erica Meitz: Yeah, can I give a couple?

[00:27:04] Mike Morawski: Yeah, absolutely. Please.

[00:27:05] Erica Meitz: Being in this space, I have realized everybody wants to help, or at least the people I have run into. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or ask for mentorship, it is invaluable. The other thing I would say is, there’s a lot of talk that real estate’s so high right now, there’s no deals out there. There’s always deals, there’s always deals in every single market. Maybe your first deal is just your education deal and you just get in just to learn and hopefully you come out on the right side of that, but you’re going to make mistakes along the way and it’s okay. It’s okay, just get going.

[00:27:43] Mike Morawski: Yeah, awesome. I’m glad you said that because I think people just need to get going, right?

[00:27:48] Erica Meitz: Yeah, for sure.

[00:27:49] Mike Morawski: A lot of people say well I can’t do that. You know, Earl Nightingale said years ago, “what you conceive and believe you’re going to be able to achieve.” When I first got in the business, I knew nothing, I just did it. Here’s what I understood, you raise private equity, you marry it with a great real estate deal, you put them together, that’s all I knew.

[00:28:06] Erica Meitz: I don’t know if anybody visualizes that will watch this, but if you visualize yourself walking the property, being inside the complex and looking at the pool and going to the leasing office, that helps you get comfortable in your skin and being in part of that. I have a couple of deals on my desk right now that are uncomfortably awesome for me that I’m just going balls to the wall. I’m so excited. At the same time it’s pushing me so far out of my comfort zone that I’m just loving it.

[00:28:36] Mike Morawski: What’s cool is I always tell people that unless we grow personally, you don’t grow professionally. That’s what you’re doing by doing that, you’re stretching yourself and we all need to stretch ourselves to grow. I have a guy I’m coaching right now, and he’s really struggling picking the phone up. I’m telling him I’m saying, just do it. After you make that first phone call, after you make that second phone call, now it’s easy and it starts to come more natural for you. It’s getting in it, doing it, feeling the pain of doing it, feeling the fear walking through it. Glad you said that, that’s really good. Let’s take a little lighter side for a minute.

[00:29:09] Erica Meitz: Sure.

[00:29:09] Mike Morawski: You get to travel around a little bit and do some things, but tell me your most favorite tourist attraction.

[00:29:15] Erica Meitz: Yellowstone National Park, hands down. I’ve been in my motor home and my car and I don’t think I’ll ever ride a bike through the Yellowstone area because of the bears. I’ve been there a lot of times and I just, if you can get there, amazing.

[00:29:30] Mike Morawski: Awesome. How about best restaurant or favorite food?

[00:29:35] Erica Meitz: Yeah, shout out to Alice’s in Woodside, California. It’s up in the mountains right in the bay area. In the San Mateo, Redwood city area, if you go up into La Honda, it’s a beautiful restaurant sat right in the redwoods. Redwoods everywhere, you can sit outside or inside. It’s called Four Corners, and that’s where a bunch of the bikes and the Harleys and all of those guys, they stop and all the classic cars go there, corvette clubs. It’s really fun and good food too.

[00:30:10] Mike Morawski: Pretty neat. Always wanted to go to Seattle, rent a Harley and ride all the way to San Diego. Some of that country is just so beautiful.

[00:30:17] Erica Meitz: Yeah, down Highway One. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:30:21] Mike Morawski: Best book you’ve ever read?

[00:30:22] Erica Meitz: Probably Think and Grow Rich. It resignates with me every time I read it differently. Even though it’s a very old book, read the title and think that’s just people who want to get rich fast, but it’s really about your wealth, but it’s also about your spirituality and your health and your whole living, your whole being, and being rich and successful in your whole life, not just with your wealth.

[00:30:50] Mike Morawski: Great book, love it. One of my very good friends teaches it. He’s a certified Napoleon hill or through the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Great book, I’m glad you brought that up. Erica, it’s been a pleasure, thank you. Learned a lot and it’s always great to connect and good to get to know you a little bit more. If people want to connect with you and talk a little bit more about what you’re doing or their fever is sustainability. How did they reach you?

[00:31:15] Erica Meitz: Yeah, they can text me or call me at (510) 557-0727 or just email me at erica@maroongoldre.com.

[00:31:26] Mike Morawski: Nice. We’ll have all that in the show notes, everybody. Erica, thanks for being here today. Everybody will be here next Tuesday again, and glad that you are here and continue to do what you’re doing and move your investing forward.

[00:31:38] Erica Meitz: Thanks everybody.

[00:31:40] Kristen: Thank you, Mike, and thank you for joining us for another great episode of Insider Secrets as always, Insider Secrets is brought to you by My Core Intentions. Wherever you hang out on social media, you will find Mike and My Core Intentions, please like, and follow us to get the most up-to-date real estate investing trends. Visit mycoreintentions.com, where you can get expert coaching on all things, real estate investing and property management. If you’re looking to become an expert, Mike’s coaching will help you scale your real estate investment business. We’re looking forward to having you back again next week for more Insider Secrets.

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