Family Wealth: Long-Time Investor Shares His Story, Strategy, and Sage Advice (Video)

The key to buying real estate may no longer be “location, location, location.” According to one long-time real estate investor, it’s now “property management, property management, property management.”

That’s just one piece of sage advice you’ll get from this interview with Myron Schroer. He’s had a real estate license since the 1970’s, has purchased real estate in several parts of the country, and is teaching his kids and grandkids about the business with a family corporation. You’ll find out how he and his wife got started, how they got the whole family involved, how they choose their markets, and where they have invested.

Be sure to join RealWealth for access to the kind of information that has helped Myron become a successful real estate investor. Go to realwealthshow.com and sign up for free. It’s also free to speak with one of our investment counselors who can answer questions and put you in touch with experienced property teams across the U.S.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] [music]

Speaker 1: You're listening to the Real Wealth Show with Kathy Fettke, the real estate investors resource.

Kathy Fettke: The key to buying real estate may no longer be location, location, location. According to our guest today, it's more about property management and I agree. I'm Kathy Fettke and welcome to the Real Wealth Show. As I said, this is just one piece of advice that we'll get from today's interview with Myron Schroer. He's had a real estate license since the 1970s, has purchased real estate in several parts of the country, is teaching his kids and grandkids about the business with a family corporation and that is so cool.

You'll find out how he and his wife got started, how they got the whole family involved, and how they choose their markets, and what they're doing today. Myron, welcome to the Real Wealth Show.

Myron Schroer: Oh, thank you. It's great to be here.

Kathy: I'm excited to hear about how your family has created a family legacy with real estate knowledge and wisdom passed on to the kids. That's not always easy to do. How has that worked for your family? Starting with you, was your father in real estate?

Myron: Correct. We bought our first house a couple years after we had been married. We moved out here from Indiana, and I grew up on a dairy farm. My father started in real estate and like I said, we bought our first house. He was instrumental in us doing that. Over the years, we continued to purchase additional homes, as it became available. In about 1991, he started doing condo conversions. We had some apartments, and we're trying to convert them to condominiums.

In 1991, that, unfortunately, went south. [00:02:00] We had a problem. Actually, the builder went bankrupt. My father was the money partner of it and he almost went bankrupt. Unfortunately, it took us about seven years to pay everybody back that was owed. At about that time, unfortunately, he passed away of a sudden heart attack. In the interim there, he had formed a corporation and put most of the real estate into that corporation. In doing so, he actually gifted part of that to myself and to my sister.

After he passed away, the corporation wasn't doing well, obviously. We just paid everybody back that we had owned from the previous problem that we had had. In the course of the next couple of years, we actually was able to turn things around, sell a few things get the cash flow going in a positive direction. At that point, the corporation actually started doing well. My mom was actually the owner at that point or the major shareholder. At that point, we decided that, from an estate standpoint, it made sense to start gifting part of the corporation away.

We did that to the kids and the grandkids. We started having yearly corporate meetings, which was really a blessing because it forced us all to get together. Sometimes that's not the easiest things to do. Again, we wanted to do things right from a corporate standpoint. We started having our yearly meetings. [00:04:00] People started getting more and more involved. Really over the course of the years, it's been a real blessing.

Kathy: How I bet? How did those family corporate meetings go? What was [crosstalk]

Myron: Well, initially, we didn't really know what we were doing. It was a lot of questions. I think most of the folks trusted my wife and I pretty much run it. In the meetings, we obviously have questions about where we're going, what are we doing, what do they invest in? Dividend is a big thing. This is a philosophy thing, but we never wanted the good corporation to give off more to the individuals or to give off enough that would change their lives.

In other words, we learned a long time ago that you can't give somebody something for nothing, because it will change who they are and it's just not a good thing. We never wanted the corporation to give off a large sum, the intent was to help the kids, the grandkids, for example, playing sports is relatively expensive in school now. If the kids want to play sports, it can cost as you probably know, a pretty good chunk. We're able to help with that if the kids want to play sports, if they want to do extra things.

I have six grandkids, and four of them are currently in college. It's been able to help with them. One of my grandsons is getting his [00:06:00] aerospace engineer degree, and he just became a pilot. That's extremely expensive. It's been able to not pay for all that but to help him to achieve that goal. In fact, he had his first solo here about two weeks ago.

Kathy: How exciting.

Myron: We're very fortunate to be able to do that.

Kathy: I agree with you that when things are handed to others for free, it's maybe not appreciated, or doesn't necessarily go in the right direction. How do you keep it equitable with your kids? Is there any kind of expectation that, yes, these funds will go towards the sports or the college, as long as you hold up a certain GPA or, or you show up at a practices? Are there any requirements?

Myron: We're really, really, really fortunately blessed. Our kids and grandkids, they're great kids. They understand what it means to work to achieve things. We've been very, very fortunate in that area. What we do is we give out shares and the shares give the dividends, and then it's up to the individuals to do with those as they please. One other thing that we've done, we've been able to take in and actually use a corporation as a bank, in a sense for the kids and the grandkids. If they have additional funds, they can invest in the corp, and we pay a 6% [unintelligible 00:07:41].

It's like putting in the bank only, it's the corp. It helps a corp give us money to go out and purchase additional things, but also it gives them a little bit higher return than they would get in the bank. Then we can coach them [00:08:00] on what to do with those funds eventually also.

Kathy: Are any of your grandkids invested in it?

Myron: They are.

Kathy: With their savings?

Myron: We have a couple that have shares at this point. They come to the meetings. We've tried to come up with guidelines that make sense. You have to be a certain age, in order to take and to buy in. You have to have a certain number of shares to be able to vote so that investing-- Also, we try to take advantage of the tax advantages of having a corporation and having a meeting. We pay the individuals to come to the meeting. Again, like I tell people, and I tell our accountant, we want to take advantage of every tax opportunity that is there but we don't want to take and do anything that's questionable.

If the line is in the sand, we want to be a foot away from the line. The corporate meeting allows us, to take advantage of some of those, tax opportunities.

Kathy: For example, the family could meet in a reunion-type setting and have that meeting and a couple of nights might be covered by the Corporation, the cost, and the food.

Myron: We have not done that yet. We will. Our corp meetings, we have them local and the food and then the travel expense and the attending the meeting, those are all paid for. We've talked about the remote location and having a meeting. We haven't done that as of yet.

Kathy: It seems like it would be really important for your meeting to be somewhere like Hawaii where you [00:10:00] can really relax and create. [laughs]

Myron: I agree.

Kathy: That might be too close to the line