Table of Contents
Podcast Transcription
Dave Dubeau [00:00:09] Hey, everyone, this is Dave Dubeau here with another episode of the property Profits Ulysse podcast today with a special spotlight interview with Kim Tucker, who’s coming to us from the Mid-America Association of Real Estate Investors, a.k.a. Mary. Based out of Kansas City or thereabouts. So Kim, welcome.
Kim Tucker [00:00:31] Thanks for having me on. I don’t do a lot of podcast, so thanks for inviting me.
Dave Dubeau [00:00:36] Well, we’re just we’ll just have a conversation. It’s pretty easygoing. So let’s start off with Kim. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your association, Mid-America Association of Real Estate Investors? Where are you guys based? How long have you been around? What kind of number of members do you have those kind of things?
Kim Tucker [00:00:57] OK, well, we opened our doors in what was in January of 2004, so we’ve been around for a very long time. I went to one of those boot camp things where you’re supposed to learn how to be a real estate investor. It was a four day event. It was at the beach. So I was like, Oh, I’m going to go off to the beach. But no, it rained straight for days straight. So we did a lot of networking with the leaders and came home and we started our organization because we didn’t have one in Kansas City and we say, Oh, sorry,
Dave Dubeau [00:01:26] sorry, are you one of the founding members and you’ve been?
Kim Tucker [00:01:29] I am the owner, the chief cook, the bottle washer email sender. So I
Dave Dubeau [00:01:35] have you name it, you do it, give vent
Kim Tucker [00:01:37] to it or get somebody
Dave Dubeau [00:01:38] to do it. Yeah, hat’s off to you. Because I’ve run a small real estate investment club myself. It’s a lot of work. You’re definitely the unsung hero, and you don’t always get all the appreciation and thanks that you deserve. So hats off to you for sticking with this long. That’s great.
Kim Tucker [00:01:53] Yes. Well, it’s all about the people. So when the people show up. That’s a great reward. But when I had nobody shows up, well, then I’ll probably stop doing it. But we’ve been doing this, like I said since 2004. We serve primarily the Kansas City metro area, so we have members that live in our general vicinity. And then we have members. I think we had one once from British Columbia. I don’t know. In fact, several Canadian members. I have somebody during COVID from the Netherlands that joined us, but primarily we’re in Kansas City that live here. And then we have investors that invest here during COVID. We also got investors that were just interested in the speaker, so they showed up. We have I would say, I look this morning, we had six hundred and thirty members this morning that are paid current on their dues. But if you asked all of the people out there, how many of them are actually members, I would say I probably have another two hundred people that think their members. They just missed he renewal part of their membership. So when they want to come to the next meeting or they want to have their auditing members, I guess is what we do. Yeah, so and then we also run a Facebook group. So it’s not part of our membership, but it’s a tool for our members and it has about 13000 members worldwide on that group. So we have a far reach and we were talking earlier, where is Kansas City? For those of you that aren’t familiar with the center of the United States because you fly over it in an airplane, there are two Kansas cities. One is in Kansas City, Missouri, and one is in Kansas City, Kansas. Got that backwards, but they are right next to each other, but they are separate. So when you think of Kansas City, you hear the Chiefs of the Royals. You’re talking about Kansas City, Missouri and dress, well, confusing as heck for those of us who don’t look back. But basically, your club covers all Kansas City. This is just me, that whole area. Yeah, but try figuring that out when you’re going into one of those real estate investor search engines and they want to know what state are you in? And like both, and where is your where your target buying area? Well, some of them are in Kansas and some of them are Missouri. So I have to buy two different things to cover both states.
Dave Dubeau [00:04:03] It’s crazy. That’s fascinating. You went one of those boot camps. I mean, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I got started right around the same time, and I can remember attending one of those kind of boot camps. And you know, there must have been at that one, seven or eight hundred people and a lot of rah type stuff, and a lot of people were keen to get started. Very few actually did anything. So obviously you did and you have and you’ve got the group up and running. What would you say are some of the big benefits that you’ve seen as number one, being an active part of a rehab like you started at your run it, you’re still the chief cook and bottle washer? So that perspective and then from a second perspective that of your members. So for you personally, Kim, what has been the big benefit for you for starting this, running this, keeping it rolling?
Kim Tucker [00:05:00] Let’s start with that question per animal for me. Yeah, I’m going to say probably my number one benefit for me is probably the same number one benefit. My members, because while it’s not necessarily listed out on a benefit list of any Rio group nationwide, all of the smart ones are putting it out there. The number one benefit of any area, any media, any club you go to is other members and we are talking about this at our meeting on Tuesday. We have a member that he always says, Oh, it’s not who you know, but who knows you? And I took it a step further. I put that into Google and I came up with this one, and this is why you need to join a. It’s not who you know, and it’s not who knows you, but it’s who you know, that knows the people you need to know. And so I mean, yeah, I need a stager so I can reach out to everybody I know and go, Do you know a stranger? Because I don’t know one. Well, 20 people will probably have somebody something to answer that. Or I need to know, what’s this law? I can’t. I don’t want to call an attorney right away. I want to do some research. I can reach out to my membership and get a ton of information back. And I guess the other benefit for me as well is I love the speakers. So when I want to learn something, that’s when we book a speaker around whatever it is. I want to learn and I don’t have to fly to see the speaker or go find it on the podcast. They come to me.
Dave Dubeau [00:06:30] Yeah, no, that’s beautiful. There you go. There’s the big benefit for you, the big benefits for your members as well. I want to ask you kind of a different kind of a question because again, you’ve been knee deep in this forever. What would you recommend or what do you see as the big benefits for your members to get more actively involved in the club? Like, I know you run it, but there must be people kind of helping you out from time to time and participating a little bit. So what have been some of what are some of the benefits you see of people actually stepping up and taking a more active role as perhaps a director in a club or something like that?
Kim Tucker [00:07:10] Well, being just volunteering to do something with your club, usually you’re there more, you’re more involved and people look to you to be the person that has the answer sometimes. And so it forces you to go get the answers. But for example, my people that help with check in, they fight over that position, sometimes because they can well, they can’t really network at the Check-In table. They’re sitting right there collecting everybody’s business cards as they come in and handing theirs out and following up later. They get to know everybody. They’re always there early. So when you’re there early, you’re not busy doing other things, necessarily. So you talk among yourselves and you learn more things and make more connections. And really and truly, our staff does the same. And I think every regrouped staff after the event well, not right now, because the bars are closed at our hotel, they have no staff. But in normal times after the meeting, we all end up in the bar, all the staff, the speaker, that’s a benefit as well. And we sit down and we talk and that’s where the real learning is. The deals get done is at the meeting, after the meeting and the meeting before the meeting. And then sometimes when the speaker comes in a day earlier, your stay is a long time, especially one of the national speakers. Usually, if you’re a volunteer, you get invited to go to dinner or you get invited to go to a private event. Would this be here so you have the opportunity to learn more things? So being involved, just raise your hand and say, I want to be involved in some way. And sometimes we don’t, as leaders know where to plug you in because we don’t know what you can do. But you could go, you know, if you’re a tech person, go to your leader. Hey, this is what I need help with right now is I know how to run a sound system. Could I help with that? And then you go for free to every training event there ever is because they need somebody in there to run the sound system. Or could I, you know, here in Kansas City, the airport’s a long ways away and some of our speakers do not like to, you know, ride in an uber or a taxi. So volunteer to go shuttle the speaker back and forth. Then you get private time in a car with somebody that’s way smarter than you. So take the opportunities, reach out and get involved. I mean, there’s always things that need to be done that need help, but don’t take a lot of effort, you know, especially if you got aptitude in that particular area.
Dave Dubeau [00:09:29] Very, very well put. So Kim, this whole pandemic thing through a lot of people for a loop sounds like you guys pivoted pretty nicely. In fact, you got people now you’ve got people from all over the place virtually attending some of your events. How did you guys make that adjustment? What was that like for you and what are you doing now in this kind of weird time that we’re in right now? Kind of.
Kim Tucker [00:09:52] Well, when we first, it was tagged with the day of lockdown. We had a national speaker that was in town for the week and I was going to teach a training class on Saturday. And on Thursday we told me to find a flight home because we didn’t think anybody would show up, but we immediately jumped on Zoom. We immediately created some extra events to not only get me and our staff and our volunteers up to speed on Zoom, but to get the members up on Zoom. And for the most part, we kept everybody engaged, got them online. We learned how to network on Zoom rather than just having it be a webinar or a podcast. Get all those faces turned on this screen and get them interacting with each other, and we were able to do that. But the sad thing is that the people we couldn’t get to come to Zoom still thought we were just a webinar, so they wouldn’t come. They never saw what it was like. So we haven’t seen them in two years. But at the same time, we have members that weren’t members before because they’re like, I can’t come to a meeting because I have kids in between doing this and that with my kids, I can’t come, but virtually I could log in from anywhere and attend. So I got a lot of members that wanted to be members but hadn’t been because they couldn’t come to a physical meeting or they lived out of state. We got to meet a lot of our out-of-state investors that we really didn’t see very often. You know, they’d win and we’d see him maybe once a year, once every two years, but then they were coming every month. So that was really good.
Dave Dubeau [00:11:21] Does it look like now that things are? I don’t know if things have opened up a little bit more in your neck of the woods if you’re having hybrid events or are you having any in-person events yet?
Kim Tucker [00:11:32] I have attended a few hybrid events and they were very painful to attend for the poor people on Zoom. And it really actually turns into usually unless you have two moderators, I need two of you. So somebody is, you know, moderating the live meeting and then somebody is moderating the Zoom meeting. So instead of that, we also have the problem of our hotel does not have adequate internet service to live stream. So not only is it painful to do a hybrid, but I don’t have the physical ability to do it. I can’t find another venue that has the space we need at a price that’s workable. So we have to stay with our hotel, so we are recording our monthly meetings and so are people that can attend can do the replay. And we tried. We’re taking a break for November and December, but we’re trying to keep a virtual meeting on the calendar starting back in January, just so that everybody can connect. We were doing a weekly meeting, but as all the other groups in town started coming back and having live meetings, my attendance at that Friday virtual meeting dwindled down. So we’re trying to figure out what we want to do coming in January. We want to keep a virtual component, but pretty much right now we’re back to 100 percent in-person and we’re just recording the speaker.
Dave Dubeau [00:12:52] Well, that’s smart. That works as well. And that way you are still you’re out of town, out of state, people can still get the information. Yeah. And if we can figure out a way to keep the virtual version going at least once a month in the new year in some different kind of a format, then that will keep them engaged as well. So that’s
Kim Tucker [00:13:10] how we’re going to see how our national educators want to do this because I have the majority of them. If they’re going to do a training event on Saturday, they want to come to Kansas City and do a training event on Saturday. But I have another 20 percent. They’re like, Oh no, we can do a fabulous event Wednesday on Zoom. So we when we have a training event, some of them may be virtual, some of them may be alive. It just depends on the speaker and their ability. But when we’re able to do virtual, we’re able to get more speakers in that may not travel to visit us. Yeah, is another thing during the code, but I got speakers that I would have not ever been able to have because they all they had to jump on Zoom.
Dave Dubeau [00:13:48] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, Kim, time flies when we’re having fun. It sounds like you’ve got a very active, vibrant group. So again, congratulations for a getting that started beekeeping at Roland S. Pivoting through this whole pandemic thing, and it sounds like you guys are growing stronger than ever. So if people want to find out more, first of all, you still open having out-of-state people participate and check things out and find out a little bit about your market by attending your events. Are you guys open to that still?
Kim Tucker [00:14:19] Definitely. I am actually. I’m trying to get I have a counterpart in Denver and I’m trying to get him to partner with me for us to do a like a co networking event between his members and our members. Yeah, because we have so many people that buy houses in Kansas City that don’t live in Kansas City, a large majority in Denver. I’m sure we have people in your area that buy in Kansas City because we have
Dave Dubeau [00:14:42] way more affordable than most places in Canada, that’s for sure.
Kim Tucker [00:14:46] So if you’re interested in the Kansas City market, I very highly recommend bare minimum joining our Facebook group and connecting that way. You can find our Facebook group. What is it? Go to Mary dot org slash Facebook that’ll get you there. So may RBI dot org be our website to slash and Facebook on there, and that will get you to our Facebook page, our Facebook group Purple.
Dave Dubeau [00:15:10] Yeah, well, that sounds great. Well, Kim, thank you very much for your time here today. It’s been a real pleasure chatting with you.
Kim Tucker [00:15:16] It was great meeting you and thanks for having me.
Dave Dubeau [00:15:18] All right, right? Take care and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning into this special Spotlight episode. Now you’re a real estate investor and you’re looking to find private money partners and raise capital for your deals. Then check out Money Partner Formula dot com. You get a free copy of my book. You can find out how to raise six figures or more in six weeks or less. Again, that’s money partner formula dot com.