Insurance Trends: Expert Advice for Optimizing Coverage and Rates as a Real Estate Investor With Obie Insurance Co-Founder Aaron Letzeiser

Aaron Letzeiser 00:01
Letzeiser, just like Budweiser.

Tim Lyons 00:07
Love that. Okay, this is going to be the episode with Aaron Letzeiser. How did I do?

Aaron Letzeiser 00:14
Got it.

Tim Lyons 00:15
And this is with OB insurance. All right, cool. Are you fellas ready? So, all right, 321. Welcome to another episode of the Passive Income Brothers Podcast. My name is Tim Lyons, and today I’m joined by two absolute rock stars, one of which being my brother Greg. Hey, today, buddy.

Greg Lyons 00:34
Tim, fantastic day, exciting, exciting podcast on the horizon right here. You know, we’ve talked about taxes here recently, we’ve talked about other riveting things, but we have insurance today. And you know, when we think about insurance, we think, ‘Oh, I have to do it.’ We have a guest today that’s, you know, kind of turned insurance upside down and has some tips and tricks to really start thinking about, you know, when you build out your team, insurance has got to be a big part of it.

Tim Lyons 01:04
Guys, I have to be honest with you, if I was to think back 30ish years ago, and say, am I going to be really excited to talk about taxes and insurance and, you know, entity structuring with my older brother, Greg, you could have knocked me over with a feather because that was not going to happen. It wasn’t on the radar. So here we are today. And I’m really excited to bring you Aaron Letzeiser from OB insurance. So Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Aaron Letzeiser 01:31
Thanks, guys. Thanks. Listen, I also did not ever think that after time in the real estate world, I would be starting an insurance company with my older brother. So this is a timely podcast, I’m glad you guys are pumped to talk about something as exciting and as riveting as insurance.

Tim Lyons 01:50
Well I gotta be honest with you, you know, getting into the real estate space, you know, once you get over that one-on-one kind of mindset of like, you know what, yeah, real estate’s a class that I want to be a part of, and I’m a regular W-2 guy, and I need to figure this out. And then once you kind of graduate to that next level, it’s really kind of not back to the Mac back of the napkin math anymore, right? It’s spreadsheets, and it’s pro formas. And we have to have good information, right? Because if you put garbage into a pro forma, you’re gonna get garbage out, right? Yeah, you can’t massage the numbers because it makes you feel good. Because the returns look more sexy than they are. That’s a problem, right? So the way in which we have to go about the good data, especially for insurance these days, right? So I don’t even care if you’re a passive investor or an active investor. Today, we’re recording this in February of 2024. The insurance industry has been stood on its head insurance rates across the country, especially where we invest a lot in the Sunbelt se, right, as gone bananas, and it’s really kind of taking a lot of people by surprise. So Aaron, can you kind of take us through a little bit about that? What, actually, before we get into that, I want to set the table for Aaron, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into real estate?

Aaron Letzeiser 03:10
Yeah, it’s an interesting story, writing, you know, like you guys started with my older brother, actually. So his background was real estate, private equity. And mine’s been a myriad of different businesses that I’ve started and grown. But I’ve also always had my insurance license. Got it back in college, I hustled my friends for their renter’s insurance, their auto insurance, some good beer money on the weekend, right? It was easy. Had a lot of people that I could just send them a link and sign up. And, you know, it was after college that my brother kind of hit me with the real estate bug, right? You know, early to mid-2010s. We’re coming out of a bit of the retail Apocalypse that has stuck around a little bit. But, you know, Ryan always said something to me, felt like after doing a bunch of grocery-anchored shopping centers, that people don’t always need a place to shop, but they always need a place to live. And that’s a phrase that has just really stuck with me over the last 10 years. And so that’s really where I got my start. Like a lot of, I think, hobbyist and accidental landlords, I had my first condo unit and said, ‘Hey, this is my jumping-off point, right? It’s a nice place to put blood, sweat, and tears into this. I’m not going to sell it, I’m going to turn it into a rental.’ And so that really kicked things off, continuing to grow a portfolio of residential real estate investment assets, primarily in the southeast Carolinas as well as up here. We live in Chicago, so I hold my nose and take an aspirin before I pay the property taxes, but otherwise, seems to cash flow okay. And that’s been the experience, and, you know, a lot of that in that journey really always had my older brother complaining. I don’t know if you guys have experienced something similar, but insurance, even before the market is kind of turned on its head, it was the thing that we always felt like was the largest line or one of the largest line item expenses that we had on our balance sheet or on the P&L, and especially on pro forma, but the one that we always felt like we had the least amount of control and insight into everything else we could do, right? You could hire and let go of your PM or maintenance folks, your different vendors, even tax and accounting, right? You can kind of see how some of this stuff shapes up, what you’re actually paying for. And insurance was the thing that we felt like was just such a black hole. And after talking to a bunch of other investors, we felt like we did the exact same experience. And so that’s really where OB started and where we focused on today?

Greg Lyons 05:33
You know, it’s interesting, you always find that the best entrepreneurs are the ones that solve their own problems. And it sounds like, you know, as you go through the hand-to-hand combat or being a single-family investor or multifamily investor, whatever it is, right? It’s, it’s what kind of problems keep arising. And when those problems just become too much, you say, ‘How do I solve this?’ And that’s really cool. It sounds like you have a great older brother, Ryan; Tim is fortunate enough to have a great older brother as well. And I take great pride in that, of course. And, you know, through our journey, some of our mentors have always mentioned food, clothing, and a place to live, is why multifamily apartments, single-family investing is just so very important. And when you’re on that real estate journey, it’s, you know, kind of where do you want to put your money? Where’s it going to be important? Where’s it going to be relevant? It’s not always in retail or office or these different places. So finding your way is really important in real estate investing. So, you know, when you go about solving your own problem, it’s not always just kind of like this linear progression. Can you kind of walk us through how OB came to be, number one, how did you get the name, and then, you know, kind of like how it came to fruition of this wonderful insurance business that you’ve built?

Aaron Letzeiser 06:57
You know, it’s interesting, it’s into thinking, hey, you know, I’m just gonna buy this property, and I’m gonna rent it out to a great tenant, and I’m gonna have never on-time rent collection every month, nothing’s gonna break. That’s what kind of starting an insurance company was like, for us, right? We said, Hey, this can’t be too hard. Right? It’s not like it’s highly regulated or anything. And so that was really the journey. We jumped into it, right. And I joke today that if we knew how complex this industry was, right, we never would have started in the first place. But that’s, you know, that’s where you get the battle scars. That’s where on the real estate investing side, you’re, you know, after you put up that first rental unit, much like me, right, it’s, it’s for so many people the first place that they lived, and now I can’t, man, I hope to take care of it. Right? What are the things keeping you up at night, and then you start adding the units and you’re like, alright, this feeling a little bit better? That was it. That was insurance for us, right? We fortunately got started, we had a good network as you and most your listeners know, real estate’s a massive, massive asset class. But it’s a pretty small community. Right? There’s 17 million individual and small business landlords and real estate investors in the US on the residential side. And we just started going around to people and saying, Hey, like, you know, is this a problem for you as well? What would you care about? What are the things that you actually want to think about, as your agent ever talk to you about, you know, about cap rates, right? And how saving premium and kind of adjusting some of these things can actually help to pencil out pro forma, right? Are you going to sell it or you’re not going to sell it? What’s the goal of that asset? How could we build an insurance company that was really focused on keeping our real estate investor hat on. And building a product that we felt like really solves the day-to-day needs, because for so many, so many different insurance carriers, and they’re no fault of their own. You know, they’re really focused on two ends of the market, either your personalized side, your spent, you know, this is Flo and the Gecko, Geico and your Superbowl commercials and the State Farm guy, and they really want your home in your auto. And then you have these large national massive carriers, right, that are doing like 30 Rock, the Empire State Building, and what these really large trophy class assets. And there was this middle ground right of the small, you know, what a medium-sized residential real estate investor, small commercial investor, and they just didn’t really get a lot of love in the space. And so as a result, there just wasn’t there wasn’t a lot of support, or a lot of agents that focused on it, because there weren’t a lot of markets. And so that that’s that was our jumping-off point that was us going out there and trying to find people that were certainly a hell of a lot smarter than we were in the space and trying to figure out how do we how do we get smarter? How do we take this, you know, piece by piece. And that’s really where all these grown today, we now offer our own insurance products. We underwrite things internally, we try and build insurance products in the way that we use real estate investors would want that, you know, that type of coverage, or at least that type of transparency and control. So that way, every unique and individual property or asset can be evaluated now at least from an insurance perspective on what’s in the best interest of that specific asset or that specific portfolio during the course of the next year, right how to rents Look, do you want to? You know, do you want to add a little bit of coverage? Do you want to take it away? What are the things that are important to you? What keeps you up at night? And what can insurance do to help be a strategic partner in your real estate investing strategy?

Tim Lyons 10:17
Oh, I love that. Greg and I just had a podcast/webinar with a real estate CPA firm. And you know, a big part of that webinar, Greg, was building out your team when you become a real estate investor. A lot of us, especially the New Yorker inside of us, Greg, we don’t trust anybody, right? Guilty until proven innocent. We want to do it by ourselves; we want to be in control, and we have all these things. And then as we grow up a little bit, we realize that we need a team and we need people who are experts in their field, right? So what I find about real estate investing is that if you start off like traditional single-family homes, not every realtor knows about rental real estate, right? They might not stage it, they might not sell it, they might not help you negotiate and all those things that Realtors know how to do, but they may not understand the aspects of rental real estate. Same thing with your CPA, right? You might have a family guy or girl, right, and they’ve been doing Uncle Tommy’s taxes forever, and moms and dads that we just kind of followed suit. And then all of a sudden, we’re like, ‘Wow, we need somebody to understand our needs, right?’ And I can really say, now we have an insurance guy, right? Because you know, a lot of these expenses that have gone up in real estate in the last 18-24 months, they’re material, they’re not just your average resetting of rates or anything like that; they’re material differences. We’re talking 50-60-100% increases, depending on the market that you’ve been investing in. So really, you know, on top of an insurance guy, CPA, a realtor, you’re gonna want to stack on top of that, maybe an attorney to help out with some entity structuring or something like that. And of course, you know, guys here at Cityside Capital can help you with private placements. But anyway, so what’s an Aaron? What’s kind of talk about, you know, how does the OB process work? Like, pretend that I’m an investor and I’m looking for a one to four unit, you know, down the fairway, you know, duplex triplex quad something like that single-family rental? And I go to your website and told us how, you know, how does the process work? And yeah, can we expect?

Aaron Letzeiser 12:28
Yeah, I mean, it’s great. I love that you said you want to build the team, right? That’s so important, whether it’s insurance, CPA, whether it’s OB or somebody else, find somebody that knows the space. If there is nothing else to make your life easier as a real estate investor, find that team. We’ve gotten really lucky that over the years, we’ve found really, really, really good people. So that’s the first thing. The second thing on the real estate side and on the OB side, if you got a fairway deal on the one to four-unit space, we can do one to four instantly, basically anywhere in the country, right? If it’s below a million dollars in replacement cost, which is 95% of the single-family rentals in the US, as long as it’s not a mansion on the beach in Palm Beach or in Miami or right in the lower half of that boot in Louisiana, some of those areas, we provide instant rates at probably 90 to 95% of the different counties throughout the US. I like to tell people that you can sit on your couch on a Saturday morning, get insurance at OB without having to talk to anybody, right, and still have a really great experience. And now there’s somebody there, if you want to, you can chat, you can call us, you can email us, you can email me. I’ve found that the thing that people really value, and what you would find if you went to the website is you can get through their fairway deal. I’ll have a quote in your hand that’s instantly findable in a minute, maybe a minute and a half, right, assuming you have some of the information. We don’t ask you a lot of stupid questions, right? A lot of the stuff that I can get from publicly available data sources, the fact that people are still asking some of these things in 2024 is always pretty astounding. And then I think the biggest differentiator, right. And again, this isn’t a knock on the traditional insurance space. It just was never built for this. And so I want to get you to a checkout page and a checkout experience where the two of you guys can sit there. Right. And and, you know, Tim and Gregor are on a speakerphone, right on the weekend. They’re doing this for the new duplex they’re buying. And you guys are saying, well, you know, rents might be peaking a little bit, we’re not really sure if we’re gonna be able to command the market rate that we want to get to. Maybe we want a little bit of a higher deductible. Right? Maybe we want to add some coverage, maybe we want to subtract it. Maybe you guys are the type that are like, ‘You know what? We buy insurance to use it, right? We want a lower deductible because we want to actually utilize the insurance. We’re not the folks that want a $10,000 or $25,000 deductible.’ And so you can sit there on that last page and the price is dynamically changing. Right, and that’s the best part. You might not even be under contract for that duplex yet, you might just want to see where pricing is coming in at and you want to gut check the investment sales broker, right, because that Disneyland version of that offering memorandum that everybody gets, right, you want to double-check with that pro forma prices for insurance and you can sit there and you can do it, you can change those combinations to your heart’s content. And then you throw in a credit card, you’re done, right, maybe you came through a lender, and that’s how you found OB; we’ll digitally deliver that Doc directly back to your lender, maybe you came through your property manager; we’ll automatically add them on as an additional insured, that’s usually a requirement of all the PMs that exist out there. So it’s really about using technology to make that experience a little bit better. Now, if you’re, you know, if you’re a five-plus unit investor, if you’re buying an apartment building, I can’t underwrite that instantly, just because the nature of the apartment world, but I can be pretty fast on it. So same type of experience, you throw some information in there, somebody’s gonna follow up, right, we might just grab an offering memorandum, we can read that digitally pretty quickly grab all the info out of it, but have that exact same type of experience, right? Our goal at the end of the day is to really put an owner in the driver’s seat to become the master of their own destiny, right? It’s a phrase that we use often, because you know, your property is better than anybody else. And it’s just again, it’s a function of the traditional insurance market where you can’t go back to your insurance agent and ask them for 30 different combinations, right? It’s not that they don’t want to do it, they gotta go back to their carrier and they say, ‘Hey, Mr. underwriter, please do me a solid, they’re not even under contract yet. But if you could give them these 30 different combinations to try to see if this thing pencils out or not, right, they’re just not going to do it. It’s just not built for that. Not that they don’t want to. So that’s the OB experience, that’s what we’re trying to flip insurance on its head a little bit here.

Greg Lyons 16:42
That’s fantastic. It sounds like to get where you really want to be with your insurance package. It sounds highly customizable. And you can, you know, whether price deductible all those different things, you know, as we sit here, and not everyone really knows a lot about insurance, right? Unless you’re really in the nitty-gritty. And this is what you do 100% of your time, right? What are some of the tips that you may have for someone that’s buying that one to four-unit, and they’re shopping for insurance, they’re talking to their guy that has their home and auto, but they go on OB? What are some of the tips and tricks that they should be looking at? Or maybe like the top two most important things that they should be doing when they’re trying to customize their insurance package?

Aaron Letzeiser 17:29
Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say the first thing, especially right now, especially with the year that inflation has had, and the insurance market has had, is looking at your replacement cost. If there is nothing else that I can leave people with, it’s, you know, really two things. If it’s an existing asset, we’ve seen folks that bought something 3, 4, 5, 7 years ago, they’ve just never increased the limit, right? It just continues to renew. And then you look at it divided by the square footage, and you’re like, ‘Hey, you’re set up for like $75 a square foot?’ Right? Like, do you think that’s enough? No, like, hell no, right? And in this market, like I can’t rebuild this thing for less than $140 a square foot. And that’s not even including remediation, right, of the land and the labor and everything else, you’re like, that’s the biggest thing. Because unfortunately, accidents do happen, especially with tenants, right? Everybody listening right now can empathize with that. And in the event that the worst happens, and the entire place burns down, what you don’t want to find out is that you don’t have enough coverage, if you’re going to pay for insurance, right? Make sure that you have the coverage that you actually need to rebuild the place. Because what ends up happening is that, let’s say you didn’t change it, you’re at 75, at $100 a square foot really need to be at 125, maybe 140. Your lender, which most people have debt on their assets, right? It’s very normal, your lender might end up just saying, ‘Hey, listen, they didn’t get enough coverage, I just want my check,’ right, of the total amount of that limit, I’m just going to take my check, I’m going to take my losses a little bit, I’m going to move on. And so you get the remainder of that check, right? Maybe you got 30 40% and equity into that property, you’re going to get a check for that remaining balance of whatever limit you had. And then you’re going to have a burned-out property that you’ve got to try and figure out what to do with hopefully, maybe sell it, right, you can’t rebuild it. You don’t have that lender that’s also helping you kind of rebuild it provide the cash, it’s needed to do so. So that is the biggest thing. If I can leave anybody with one piece of advice, it’s go check out what your property limit is where the building limit sometimes it’s called the coverage a on your declarations page. It’s usually the biggest number that’s out there. Right? Divide that by your total square footage and then ask yourself, ‘Is this enough to rebuild the property in my market?’

Tim Lyons 19:42
Well, I see Greg taking notes furiously over there because he might be calling OB very quickly because he still has a single-family rental in Virginia. Right, Greg?

Greg Lyons 19:53
I’m just covering my bases and making sure I’m, you know, in the right spot here, but this is invaluable information. And this is kind of the stuff you need, whether you’re going to be active, especially if you’re going to be active, you have to know these sort of things. And it’s a good kind of gut check because I bought property five years ago, gotta make sure I have the right coverage.

Tim Lyons 20:15
I was going to stack on top real quick of what you just said, Aaron, how you so beautifully laid it out is that you know, when we’re first getting into this game, and I’m guilty of this, too. I mean, I literally did my calculations in a marble notebook, you know, that wasn’t even on the spreadsheet. And I called my insurance guy. I said, ‘Hey, by the way, you have my homeowner’s policy, hey, do rental properties.’ ‘Yeah, we do rental properties.’ ‘Cool. Can you give me a quote on this?’ I didn’t even go over any of this stuff with him. He just gave me the quote. And I was like, ‘Oh, that makes sense. That’s a good price.’ You know, I had no idea what kind of fire coverage I have. We know I had no idea, right? But I just know what I wanted to be a real estate investor. So I got into the game. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of people are. And then they learn by taking some of their lumps. And we call that, you know, education, not failures, right? We call that experience. But if you can get ahead of the game, and it sounds like it’s such a robust online tool, that you can do it from your couch on a Saturday morning, and really toggle some of the switches and say, ‘You know, what do I need? What’s going to support me?’ It sounds like a great, great product. And just to make a quick edit, you know, we’ve been kind of nibbling around the edges of some of the changes that have gone on in the insurance market. And as investors, you know, we have a small private equity company here, Cityside Capital, Aaron, and we invest in large multifamily, self-storage, industrial, triple net leases, among some other private equity, private placement offerings. But we’ve noticed that on our existing deals, the insurance has been outrageous, especially in places like Texas and Florida. And we’ve, you know, us and our operators have had to do a lot of heavy lifting, trying to figure some of that out. And luckily, we work with best-in-class operators. So it has been working out. And then there are other places like Arizona that have a cap of, I think, two or two and a half percent on yearly increases. And that’s why it’s so nice to invest in Arizona, because of that fact. So can you kind of tell us like, what are the leading trends right now? As you see them in your business? And as you can relate to maybe the one to four-unit space, as I don’t think everybody is interested always in ensuring 250 units or more, something like that?

Aaron Letzeiser 22:25
Yeah, no, I’d say it’s a great question. I would say the answer is gonna be the same regardless of whether you’re doing the single unit, right, or a 200–300-unit class B, you know, garden-style somewhere. I would say predominantly the Southeast, right, and the Sunbelt has been the most active place for people to put dollars to work in the multi and single-family space over the last probably five to seven years. Over the last five to seven years, it has also become one of the most challenging places to ensure. I would say it’s really a confluence of a couple of events that happened over the last couple of years. I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel on some level of market stabilization. I think 2024 is still gonna be a bit of a rough ride for folks, but I think prices will start to stabilize. But it’s really a function of a couple of things. First, you got unexpected weather events, right? People think of Florida and they think hurricanes, but like, there’s a lot of really good modeling that can be done to figure out what’s going to happen with the hurricanes. It’s really about all those other weather events that happen, right? If you guys invested in Texas a couple of years ago, the Texas winter storm that nobody was expecting, you got the California wildfires. The other thing in Hawaii. So that’s been big, right, a lot of unexpected claims. Your second thing is obviously we touched on it inflation on replacement cost, if your carrier has done what’s known as guaranteed replacement cost, right? They’re the ones that offered that replacement cost number, so they’re gonna rebuild it for you. It doesn’t matter that lumber went up 15-20%, right? They’re rebuilding it and they didn’t expect that to happen. So they’re getting hit again. And then the last one that people don’t think about is really actually the currency markets. So most reinsurance capacity comes from Europe, right? Either from like the Lloyd’s of London or Markel or Swiss Re or Munich Re. If the pound or the euro starts to devalue against the dollar, by 5-7-10% as it has in different periods of the last few years, suddenly, there’s 5-7-10% less insurance capacity than they thought they were going to have even before you get into inflation or anything else. And so it has created a real confluence of events that has, you know, really landed in the laps of primarily real estate investors across the country, right? They’re the ones really absorbing this as they try and figure out the situation. So primarily, the biggest trends are increasing rates primarily in the Southeast, Texas, right? Harris County, southern Louisiana, Florida really anywhere in the state, right? It’s not even just the coastal areas. It’s about how do you aggregate and distribute your risk, right, and the portfolios of properties that carriers will insure for you across the state. So that’s been a big challenge. I think in the Southwest, you’ve had a little bit more market stabilization. It’s still larger because carriers are trying to make up for their losses around the rest of the country. But it has become both a I think very popular place to invest, you know, central and western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, very popular places to invest on the single and multifamily side, the places where at least insurance pricing has become a little bit more predictable, right, still not comfortable, still not somebody that really wants to be writing that check, but something a little bit closer to a 5-7-10-15% annual increase on that premium. So that’s where we see the market at, I’m hoping we do start to see some level of stabilization. But, you know, it really goes back to a point you guys made earlier, which is, you really have to find somebody in the insurance space, OB or otherwise, that really focuses on the space, the carriers in the markets that your generalist insurance person is working on, they just don’t have the specialist market access that you really want to find, you want to find that insurance agent or that broker who knows and understands the space because there’s constantly moving and changes in the market where they’re going to have access because of the volume that they’re doing, because they specialize in the space where a carrier who’s just jumping into the Texas market or may have just opened up a little bit more Florida capacity, those carriers and those insurance companies even like OB, we work with agents as well, we’re going to give that to folks that we know are going to use it right. And the first people that we’re going to go to are the ones that are most active in those markets. And so that’s where folks really, I think can find some benefit in working with a specialist in this space. Is the market still a little bit turbulent?

Greg Lyons 26:53
When you think of rising insurance costs, and just as a follow-up to what you were saying, you think natural disasters, wildfires, you know, different hurricanes, different things like that. But, you know, when you talk about the broader economy and what that has the effect on interest rates, you know, that’s something you just don’t think about. So that’s great information. And then just, you know, as a quick follow-up, you talked about in 2024-2025, maybe a stabilization in prices, do you, and this is just a total opinion of yours, do you ever see a retreat in pricing at all? I mean, you know, stabilization is great, but we’ve also gotten 50 and 20, and in some places, 50 and above percent, you know, that’s a lot. Can you predict? I know you can’t predict but do you see a retreat coming anytime soon?

Aaron Letzeiser 27:46
Yeah, I’m hoping that by 2025, you actually start to see that. We fortunately had, I think, a less than volatile hurricane season this past year, which allowed people to maintain some level of reserves. I would say, unfortunately, you know, and we get this question all the time. I see it online a lot in the comments, you know, why am I in Ohio, and my insurance is going up substantially when I don’t live in these places, right? And people need to remember that their insurance premiums, much like anywhere in the country, are helping to over the course of the year, stabilize the broader insurance market, right? Because we know that wildfires are going to happen at this time of the year, we know that hurricanes might actually happen at this time of the year, these different weather events, you know, your tornadoes, and when they’re going to actually happen. And so it’s a constant fluctuation of risk. But because of that, I think those non-catastrophic exposed areas, right, I think Florida and Southeast Texas are going to continue to see some amount of challenges depending on how close you are to the actual coast and the condition and the age of your building. Definitely those folks that really haven’t updated roofs or aluminum wiring or mitigated some of those things, statblock breakers, I think the rest of the country will start to see a little bit of a market reduction in price. And that’s again going to be a think function, more of market dynamics and true like capitalistic, you know, free-market structures, right, you’re going to have carriers that haven’t gotten impacted the way others have. And they’re going to start re-entering different markets around the country and they’re going to say, “Hey, this is where travelers is at, this is where this other carrier’s at, I think, actually, we can undercut the market by 5, 7, 10%, they’ll make really good money here because we weren’t impacted the way that they were.” And so that’s what starts to soften the insurance market is a true free market system, whereby people have made very good money in the insurance space, there’s always more capital that’s moving into the space. And that will then allow new products and new opportunities that I think will trickle down into the average investor.

Tim Lyons 29:50
Love it. I mean, that’s great information right there. I really appreciate you diving in and taking the time to really kind of delineate, you know, I think I’ve learned a lot, right? Just about on the back end of the insurance business, you know, just starts to make a little bit more sense after hearing you say that. So, Aaron, thank you so much, man. So we’re going to jump into the last three questions in the interest of time here. And these are going to be just kind of statements that I was wanting to get your feedback. And so the first one is from a mentor of ours, de facto mentor, Jim Rohn. And he says something that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most amount of time with, what does that mean to you?

Aaron Letzeiser 30:32
Oh, man, I don’t want to turn into my brother.

Greg Lyons 30:37
I hear that brother. I hear that.

Aaron Letzeiser 30:39
No, it’s so true. I think it really is. I think it really hits, sure you. You are the product of the people that you surround yourself with at the end of the day.

Greg Lyons 30:50
Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. And where I’m always trying to upgrade and you know, we hired another guy at cityside capital just for that reason, you know, it’s, we need all the help we could get. Second thought there is, you know, when you’re at a cocktail party, you’re talking to people, I do insurance and real estate and stuff like that. What do you say to people when they say, you know, investing in real estate is just too risky?

Aaron Letzeiser 31:17
I would show him, I would show him the different charts on the public equities market in the last 18 to 24 months, depending on what they’re investing in. You can find something that looks really risky and really safe at the exact same time. Find really good people that know what they’re doing in the space, build that good team, like we talked about. And you know what, once you get past that first rental that keeps you up at night, the rest starts to feel a little bit more like riding a bike.

Tim Lyons 31:43
I love that. And then finally, another quote by Jim Rohn, you can tell that I’m a big Jim Rohn fan, is that he says that a formal education will make you a living and self-education will make you a fortune. As that went on you.

Aaron Letzeiser 31:58
Oh, you gotta go through the things that you’re gonna go through. I mean, you appreciate that. I went to college. I think the hard-fought lessons that are learned by actually going out and actually doing are without a price tag. Completely priceless. Love that.

Tim Lyons 32:21
I also am happy I went to college at a great time as everybody that you know, who was around me at the time knows. But you know, it took me five years to get a four-year degree. But listen, I had a great time doing it. So listen, our this has been a tremendous kind of little mini masterclass, I’d love to have you back at some point to really kind of dive into some more of these topics on a deeper level. I’m sure we’re gonna get some great feedback from the listeners on this one. But if they want to know a little bit more about how to get started and they want to have a conversation with you or someone in your team, what are some of the best ways for them to go ahead and do that?

Aaron Letzeiser 32:53
The best way first one is to go to the website, obinsurance.com. Then people can email me as well on aaron@obinsurance.com for better or for worse. I’m connected to my email. So if I can’t answer the question, we got a lot of really, really smart people a lot of people a whole lot smarter than I am on the team I can find you an answer.

Tim Lyons 33:15
Love that. So I’d highly, highly recommend, you know, especially if you’re new out there winter seasons, right, just to kind of, you know, go onto the website, sign in. It looks super easy, drop in your address, you know, and it looks like, you know, from your couch, like Erin said. So head on over to OB insurance.com, connect with that and with his email address. That’s going to do it for this week’s edition of The Passive Income Brothers podcast, and we look forward to serving you again next week. That’s it, my brothers.