In this blog post, I’ll share a remarkable story of resilience, transformation, and the lessons learned from overcoming challenges in real estate investing. In my latest podcast, I speak with the founder and CEO of Steed Talker Capital, whose journey from financial loss to success in commercial real estate is both inspiring and deeply insightful. With over 30 years of experience and a PhD in organizational systems psychology, this guest explains how leveraging the right mindset, systems, and strategies helped him pivot from setbacks to building sustainable wealth. Whether you’re facing challenges or looking to scale your investments, his story offers actionable advice and motivation to keep pushing forward. Dive into the full episode to discover how his experiences and insights could transform your approach to real estate.
For a complete guide on optimizing and scaling your real estate investments, download my Freedom Blueprint! This essential tool walks you through ten key steps for organizing a profitable property portfolio. Click here to get your copy today!
Hello and welcome to another episode. Today, I have with me a special guest. Thank you so much for joining me today.
I’m so glad to be here. Appreciate the invitation.
As you may have seen, we are starting to have podcast guests. It’s very exciting to share with you wisdom and knowledge regarding real estate investing from more people. Be sure to tune in as we continue interviewing amazing individuals in the real estate investing space. Starting with today’s guest, the founder and CEO of Steed Talker Capital, who is proof that resilience and smart investing can transform lives. With a PhD in organizational systems psychology and over 30 years of experience, I’d like to have you tell us about your journey and how you got to where you are today.
Well, thank you for asking. My story is not a whole lot different than many other individuals who are in real estate. I loved what I was doing. I loved being a professor of psychology, and it has always brought me a great deal of fulfillment. I’ve never wanted to leave that profession, which I guess is somewhat different than a lot of people who go into real estate because they can’t stand what they’re doing and are looking for an out. I was interested in developing wealth beyond what a professor’s salary could offer, and real estate just seemed like the most logical way to do that.
Well, I did it just by the seat of my pants. I didn’t really have a plan or a whole lot of education—I just jumped into it. I was working at the University of Guam as a professor there. I bought a piece of raw land in Colorado, where I was from. I had a home built with a mother-in-law suite, and I did that intentionally so I’d have a place to go when I was back in the States. Unbeknownst to me, that’s what has become known as house hacking.
I had a tenant paying for the mortgage, and I had a place to stay rent-free when I came back to the States. That worked out really quite well. The property also appreciated over the five years I owned it, which was a nice surprise. After I came back to the States, I ended up in South Texas and continued the process.
Eventually, I bought a home much bigger than I needed and divided it into a triplex, so I had tenants paying my mortgage once again. I just continued with that strategy, and within a few years, I had developed a considerable amount of wealth that I never anticipated. It was a little surprising to me. I really didn’t start my career until I was 42 years old—that’s a whole different story—so I had a late start in life. But within just a few years, I developed a lot of wealth.
Then 2008 hit, and I lost everything. On top of my investments, I also lost the job that I loved. That’s a story in and of itself. But the long and the short of it is that I was able to come back from that. I did some fix-and-flip projects, purchased a small mobile home park, did some spec home building, and lost it all again.
At that point, I decided I couldn’t keep starting over. If I were 25 years old, maybe I could do that. But at 60, it was just too late to keep starting from scratch. So I started getting educated. I joined mastermind support groups, started listening to podcasts, and began studying. That’s when I discovered commercial real estate. It had the security, the stability, and most of all, the scalability that I needed at 60 years of age.
That’s the long and short of the story. We can dive into any part of it or move on to other topics. I’ll let you take it from here.
Wow, I love hearing your story and how honest you are about the challenges you faced along the way. So often, I think a challenge we have in the real estate investing space is people only share their best days, right? It’s like the whole issue with social media. Everyone just shares their wins, which gives people a skewed perspective. Then, when they face challenges like you did, they feel like quitting and walking away.
I’d love to dive more into the lessons learned from those challenges. Obviously, your biggest takeaway was getting into commercial real estate, and you’ve shared some of those benefits. But I’d love to hear how those lessons could apply to others—how you persevered through those losses—because it’s a challenging real estate market right now, and I’m sure people would love to hear your wisdom as they may be facing similar trials.
Well, it was a hard road back emotionally and psychologically more than anything else. I’m supposed to know something about psychology, yet I was faced with shame, humiliation, and guilt, and I didn’t deal with it well. So I had to go back to the drawing board myself.
The first thing I had to do was forgive myself and give myself the unconditional positive regard and empathy I would offer a friend or family member in the same situation. From that perspective, I also had to look at my mindset. When I was down in the dumps, I realized I had a very fixed mindset. I had to challenge that and see it as a growth opportunity—not the end of the world.
That shift in thinking—viewing challenges as opportunities for growth—was a complete game changer. I won’t go into all the details, but it involved counseling, work with horses (which inspired my company’s name), and other transformational experiences.
With all of that in place, I realized my biggest mistake wasn’t getting into commercial real estate—it was over-leveraging. Even today, there are gurus who push leveraging to the max. Of course, leverage is a critical component of real estate, but like anything, it can be misused.
Another mistake was buying properties at market value that barely cash-flowed. That worked fine as long as I had a good salary to support it, but it wasn’t sustainable.
Two key lessons emerged: First, you make your profit when you buy—don’t purchase at market value. Second, use leverage wisely and ensure you have respectable reserves. These principles keep me afloat today and prepared for the next economic downturn.
All right. Well, and those are great lessons. I actually was just speaking to an investor who had been in the Galveston market and ended up having to sell her properties there because of not having enough reserves. They had a bad hurricane during the high season recently, and that really affected the numbers. I’d love to hear, what does good leverage look like to you now?
Well, since I’m in commercial real estate, leverage is typically about 30 percent. Sometimes we see 20 percent, but very rarely. Between 25 and 30 percent is what I’d like to see for the equity part. And the lending part is anywhere from 70 to 75 percent.
The other measure is whether the property can sustain itself with, say, a 25 percent vacancy rate. Can we still make the mortgage payments? Rarely does that happen in multifamily, but I want to be assured that if market rents drop or if actual tenancies drop and we hit a 25 percent vacancy rate, we can still make the mortgage payments. That’s what I feel is good leverage.
Those are great numbers. Thank you so much for sharing that. So I’d like to hear more about your transition to commercial real estate. A lot of people… You know, it’s funny. People buy their first investment property thinking they’ll keep it forever, pass it to their heirs with a step-up in basis. Then, a few years down the line, they pivot strategies. So I’d love to hear about your transition between strategies and the lessons in that for our listeners.
There’s a lot of people out there in the single-family space, and that’s a good place to be. If you like that and if you’re enjoying it, there’s no reason to leave it. The reason I left it was because I went back into teaching and had a full-time job—I didn’t need another full-time job. I wanted something I could do passively.
When I started looking at commercial real estate, I realized there are opportunities for passive investors. We’re always looking for limited partners, and that’s a perfect place for people who are fulfilled in what they’re doing, who don’t want their lifestyle interrupted, and who have accumulated a sizeable amount of investment capital.
When I stepped into commercial real estate, I had been very active in the single-family space. I was handling acquisitions, renovations, working with contractors, tenants, property managers—you name it. I was doing the whole shebang. When I decided to move into commercial real estate, I thought I’d do the same thing. I started looking for multifamily opportunities, working with realtors, networking in mastermind groups, and putting in offers to purchase.
But I soon realized I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t enjoy it. It was time-consuming and required developing a huge amount of networking. Once you get a property under contract, you have to get serious about underwriting, perform due diligence, oversee property managers, and develop asset management skills.
I realized I didn’t want to do any of that. On top of that, there are hundreds of successful syndicators out there who already have all those systems in place and are doing a good job. What they need is capital. That’s when I realized that raising capital was the perfect place for me.
Not only was it the perfect place for me, but it also gave me the opportunity to do something I love: giving opportunities to other people. That’s where my program came from. I realized I could create a platform where people like me—fulfilled in their professions or successful in their single-family investments—could put their accumulated capital to work in commercial real estate.
Commercial real estate is much more stable than stocks or bonds. It offers higher rates of return, and for investors already familiar with real estate, it provides all the same ideal benefits: income, depreciation, equity, and leverage. On top of that, it acts as a hedge against inflation, is recession-resilient, and reduces tax liability.
Best of all, as a limited partner or passive investor, you avoid all the management headaches. The process is no more difficult than investing in the stock market. It’s been a wonderful journey, and I realized I could help other people achieve the same thing.
I love that, and I love how you found your niche. Your story is similar to so many people’s. You get into it, do everything yourself, and hit a wall where you realize what got you here isn’t going to get you there.
Can you share some advice for people who’ve hit that wall—those who feel like they’ve given themselves another job instead of building wealth and freedom? How can they pivot their strategy or systems and continue to grow as investors?
There are a lot of elements to that. As a single-family investor, I was buying shacks and turning them into palaces. That was very rewarding—taking a shack and transforming it into a comfortable, livable space feels great. It strokes your ego and gives a sense of gratification.
But then, like you said, it gets to a point where what was supposed to be fun and profitable becomes a nightmare. It turns into constant work, from sunrise to sunset, and even late into the night. How do you find your way out of that?
First, give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished. You’ve done a great job. Acknowledge that.
Second, recognize that you can’t do it all if you want to scale. Many of us are control freaks, and we need to let go of the idea that everything has to go through us.
My degree is in system psychology, so maybe this was easier for me than for some people. I see everything as part of a system—the universe is a system, the galaxy is a system within the universe, the solar system is a system within the galaxy, and so on. On Earth, you see systems everywhere: ant colonies, beehives, cities, counties, states, and nations. They’re all systems within systems, working independently but interdependently.
Your real estate business is a system too. If you’re doing everything yourself, you’ve already built a system—you’re just doing all the work in that system. To transition, you need to outline and formalize the processes you’re already doing. Start with simple steps: What are the tasks? Who’s responsible? What happens after each task?
Once you have the outline, write it down and systematize it. You can train anyone to do what you’ve been doing. There are fantastic gig workers on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. For example, I work with a brilliant young man in Nigeria who handles my website and a skilled administrative assistant in India who’s been managing my podcasts and social media for years.
You may not find the perfect help right away, but you can start by outsourcing small tasks on a project basis. As the manager of your business, you can decide how to delegate and build your team. That’s how you turn your job into a system that allows you to scale.
Wow, thank you so much for sharing that! Let’s move into a quick-fire round of questions here at the end. First, what’s the best system you’ve implemented in your business?
I don’t know if it’s the best, but the starting point for scaling was systematizing my podcasting process.
I was doing everything myself—attracting guests, scheduling, production, post-production, follow-ups—while putting out three episodes a week. It was exhausting. After about a year and a half, I finally decided I needed help.
I outlined the process, found an administrative assistant, and handed it off. I also hired a video producer for post-production. Now, the entire process is systematized, and I don’t worry about it anymore. It’s been such a relief.
Great answer! Next question: What’s one book every investor should read?
I’ll give you two. For mindset, I recommend Mindset by Carol Dweck. It’s a classic. Another is Grit by Angela Duckworth. Both are essential reads.
Love it. And what’s your go-to tool for managing operations?
Our CRM has been a godsend. About six months ago, we transitioned to Go High Level. The switch was painful, but it’s a very robust platform, and we’re happy with it.
That’s a great tip—don’t be afraid to switch systems even when the transition is challenging. Finally, where can people reach you?
The best place to reach us is through our exclusive high-yield investment blueprint. They can visit highyieldblueprint.com.
Perfect! Thank you again so much for your time today. I appreciate you sharing all your insights and your journey.
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.