Ever wondered what it feels like to leave a comfortable corporate job and dive into the world of real estate entrepreneurship?
Welcome to the “Inspired To Invest” podcast. This week we have Jacqueline Francis from Francis Five Properties joining us.
To tune into the episode, click here for video or here for audio options.
Throughout our discussion, ignite your curiosity as Jacqueline shares her enlightening journey from the corporate world to managing a thriving real estate business with her husband, Leo.
Jacqueline’s story is packed with tangible insights about scaling investments and the benefits of focusing on multifamily properties.
The transition from a structured 9-to-5 job to the unpredictable world of real estate can be filled with hurdles. Jacqueline did not shy away from sharing the challenges she encountered along the way, shedding light on the importance of mentorship and solid education in the field.
So, get ready to be inspired by their wild journey and learn about Jacqueline’s ‘freedom number’ – a concept that might just change your perspective on financial independence. Jacqueline’s advice and experiences are golden nuggets for anyone interested in real estate investing.
Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights from a seasoned investor! To connect with Jacqueline directly, find her information just slightly below!
We also have a page dedicated to this podcast on Instagram and Facebook where we preview guests each week, highlight their episodes, top takeaways, tips, quotes and more.
Are you a full-time real estate investor with an inspiring story to share? Apply now.
Thank you again to our sponsors Francis Five Properties & Maynada Media for bringing us this episode! To learn more about them, go to:
✨ @francisfiveproperties on Instagram or LJ Francis on Facebook
✨ @getsocialwithaleks on Instagram or https://maynadamedia.com online
Tune back in on Wed., Jul. 19 for Episode Six for an episode with Jacqueline Francis from Francis Five Properties. Her and her husband Leo are have built a business on land development, multi-family property conversions and so much more.
Thank you for your support – and remember, “when you invest in yourself, the sky’s the limit!”
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 100:02
Welcome to the Inspired to Invest podcast, where we’re sharing stories from real estate investors and how investing has changed their lives. This episode of the Inspire to Invest podcast has been brought to you by Francis Five Properties and Maynada Media. Hi everybody, welcome to Inspire to Invest. We have a wonderful guest today named Jacqueline Francis, from Francis Five Properties, and she’s going to introduce herself, but I’ll give you a little bit of information about her before we get started. So, as mentioned, she’s from Francis Five Properties and she founded this real estate business with her husband, Leo, based on the principles of love and also leaving a legacy for their lovely children. They are real estate investors, focused helping others build wealth. So thank you so much for being here, Jackie. How are you today? I’m doing amazing.
Speaker 200:52
Thank you so much, Sreena, for having me on this amazing podcast.
Speaker 100:56
Awesome. I know I should have just a very little bit about your background, but maybe you can tell everybody what you were doing before real estate and real estate investing came into your lives. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 201:06
I was working for the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, so definitely corporate job with the government. So that was interesting. Leo at the time was starting out his active business, which is the dump truck company that we currently own, And we were just getting started in this whole world. Well, for him it was entrepreneurship. it was me just finding my way and figuring out is being in the government where I want it to be. So that’s how we originally got started, until real estate came into our lives and we decided to fully be on board with entrepreneurship and have our active business, but become investors.
Speaker 101:48
So what was the catalyst for that? So, obviously you had your businesses going, you had your government jobs. So what was it that attracted you initially into real estate and got you going?
Speaker 201:57
Yeah. so Leo actually came to me one day and he had heard an ad on the radio when he was driving and said hey, let’s go check out this real estate networking event. And we went to it and we were really blown away by the information that we were learning just about not paying down your mortgage and not you know, like all the stuff that we learned was phenomenal. We had never understood these concepts before because we were always taught pay off your mortgage. you know you have that secure job and do well in life. but this was totally brand new to us. So that’s what piqued our interest. So we wanted to move forward with it and get a little bit more formal education behind it.
02:38
At that time I wasn’t working, so I was then helping Leo run his business, which was phenomenal, and that’s how we got to learning how to work together and understand, you know, the dynamics of a couple of partner relationship. So the real estate really then helped us to know we wanted our time back because they was putting a lot of time into driving the trucks, because as an owner, as you know, you are responsible for all of the things. So even when you have employees, you’re the one that oversees all of the repairs, maintenance, just everything to do with the business. Yeah, spending so much time that he was like there has to be something better for me to be able to still build a life that I want and have more time to do the things that I love.
Speaker 103:30
Yeah, now, what kind of projects did you guys get started with back in the beginning?
Speaker 203:35
Originally we wanted to be passive investors. The business was great, The kids were actually a lot smaller. I have three children and it was just easier to know that we could just run a business passively through real estate. Yeah, we got quickly changed and we wanted to be more active And what piqued our interest was multifamily. So we started to. We actually committed to making a decision to take real estate seriously and commit to the path that we were meant to go down. Yeah, and those decisions. We started looking for ways to get into multifamily and just learning about it, because that’s where we had to first invest into ourselves before we can just go out and buy anything, of course.
Speaker 104:23
Now there’s a lot of concepts when it comes to real estate investing. What was it specifically about multifamily that made you feel like that was the right fit for you guys?
Speaker 204:31
Yeah, so we had learned that taking care of five doors or 20 doors was much better than dealing with a single family home or two single family homes. All of those units are in one place, so that means it’s like one boiler, one maintenance. That made more sense to us than going out buying like five single family homes or condos or whatever it was. And why not scale now? because we started to see the trend of people that got into duplexes or purchasing condos eventually moved in the direction of purchasing multi-family. So it made sense for us.
Speaker 105:15
Yeah, and there’s a real estate educator that I saw recently and the way that he always described it is with a single family home There’s just too many leaks, because you’ve got your mortgage, your utilities, your taxes And if you only have one tenant or two tenants, if you run into issues with them and obviously that can happen sometimes then you know it’s a lot more challenging to kind of float that as an investor. And then, on the flip side, what I learned later on I think you know if I could go back differently, knowing some of the things I know now is that it’s actually easier to qualify commercially. So for anything more than five doors, you’re really looking at, you know, the profitability of that building rather than personally guaranteeing it the same way that you would with a single family home. And you know you can only go so far, kind of when you are working with traditional financing when it comes to the single family home. So I think that’s a natural progression for a lot of real estate investors.
06:02
You know, maybe they don’t want to start there because they’re still getting their feet wet and they’re learning how to adapt to those changes and things that come with being a real estate investor or a landlord and things like that. But I think it makes sense that you guys started there And I’m sure there’s a lot of people that you know knowing what they know now could go back and be like I should have just dove right into multi-family, right, go big or go home, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. Now you’ve obviously had a lot of different experiences so far. What would you say are the biggest, like what you’re most proud of or what your biggest success is to date?
Speaker 206:34
I think it would be through personal development, through real estate and being able to get comfortable being seen, if that makes sense. Because we have to be showing up on Facebook, and well, not that we have to, but we wanted to, because we wanted to allow people to know what we’re doing and be able to show people that you know we’re everyday, regular people that have jobs and kids, and if we can do this, you can create wealth as well. If you can watch our journey, i hope that we can inspire you to take you know, a page out of our book and get started for yourself. You don’t need to have lots of money. You don’t have to have you know, like years and years and years of experience. You just have to make a decision Yeah, and get started.
Speaker 107:19
Yeah, and I think that’s a big misconception. With real estate investing, a lot of people are struggling just to buy their own primary residence, let alone building up a real estate portfolio, and I think that was something that became. You know, something that really surprised me is just how many people are really using other people’s money to basically fund these opportunities, and that can obviously take different shapes depending on how you want to structure it, but there are a lot of people that might partner with a money partner and you know they find the property, maybe they renovate it and then they’ll be the working partner. So it’s really interesting just those dynamics and you know what people do. But that was the whole premise of this podcast.
07:54
I really want to just show people like you know they’re. It’s everyday people doing these extraordinary things, and they just took the risk and made the decision to make a better life and a better future for themselves. I love that. Exactly. That’s exactly how we feel, okay. So, with that being said, we’re just going to have a really sharp pause, just for our word from our sponsors Introducing Francis Five Properties.
Speaker 408:14
Hello everyone. I hope everyone’s doing great. My name is Leo Francis and this is.
Speaker 208:19
Jackson Francis.
Speaker 408:20
Together we are called LG Francis from Francis Five Properties. We are real estate investors, business owners and entrepreneurs. Some of the real estate investing strategies that we’re involved in are multifamily, valiad, we’re involved with replication rentals And now we’re also doing a small development.
Speaker 208:41
So if you’d like to learn more or get involved with any of our projects, please reach out to us. We would love to share what’s going on. Our socials are Facebook at LJ Francis, Instagram at Francis Five Properties, LinkedIn at Francis Five Properties, or you can email us at Francis Five Properties at gmailcom. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you scale your business.
Speaker 409:06
Take care for now, bye, bye.
Speaker 109:12
Thanks again for following along with this episode of Inspired to Invest. In addition to real estate investing and running my own brand experience agency for 18 years, I also published a book called The Accidental Entrepreneur in October of 2021. This is my story and it chronicles how I turned tragedy into triumph to embrace my destiny in entrepreneurship. If you’re interested in picking up a copy, you can find the link at SerenaHolmesRealtor.com and you can also find my link tree with all of the retailers in the details below. Thanks again for your support.
Speaker 309:47
Hi, i’m Aleksanda Sydorow. As a social media strategist, brand builder and business consultant, i help real estate investors grow their reach and build their brand. In today’s digital age, having an online presence is critical for the success in the real estate industry. If you’re looking to grow and elevate your brand, visit www.maynadamedia.com to book your free discovery call. Let’s work together and take your brand to new heights.
Speaker 110:18
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Inspired to Invest podcast. We have Jacqueline Francis here from Francis Five Properties and she’s talking about how her and her husband, leo, basically made the decision to move into real estate investing a few years ago to create a better future for their family and for their children. We’re talking about successes before the break, but now I wanted to lead into the flip side. What would you say are some of the biggest obstacles that you have faced so far and how have you kind of worked through those?
Speaker 210:45
Yeah. so I would say, originally we didn’t know where to first figure out what we wanted to do, so I would say that we didn’t make that a challenge, but I could see how that could have been a challenge. So get clear on what you want, because that is how the things that you want will come to you. When you make a decision on the path and the direction or whatever strategy that you’d like to work through, then you will start finding the people that will help you to get to where you need to go. So that education piece was so important for us. If we didn’t find mentors and education programs to invest into, we would not feel as confident to go out and be able to purchase the multi-families that we have right now.
Speaker 111:33
Yeah, and I think the community is so important just to learn from a brainstorm and collaborate with and stuff like that, because otherwise it can be very isolating and really intimidating. You’re here doing things on your own and if you make a mistake there can be very big legal and financial consequences. So I think it’s important to surround yourself with the people that have been there and they can just help you get where you want to go that much faster. So it’s so important.
Speaker 211:55
They’ve made the mistakes, so we’re not reinventing the wheel. we just have to follow the systems already in play. Do it our way, with our style.
Speaker 112:05
Yeah, put your twist on it. What’s the craziest thing that you’ve gone through so far? Because I mean, obviously you guys have had like some pretty diverse experiences.
Speaker 212:14
I would say waiting seven months to get permits on one of our buildings. That was definitely not anticipated, and because we were following up so much with the city and it still took that long, we were like, wow, i can’t believe it. It seemed like it was never going to end, counting down the days, the months and then finally it was like the seven month mark and we got it. So that so far has been one of the craziest things that we’ve experienced. Yeah, it’s like a realistic baby.
Speaker 112:47
So going through that process, what would you say is the biggest lesson that you learned and you know if you could go back. Is there anything you could have maybe done differently to handle that?
Speaker 212:56
No, i don’t think there’s anything, because that was completely out of our hands. We had done all of the pre-work and sent in all of the paperwork and everything crossed her t’s, dotted our i’s, so it was nothing on our end. So what I would just say is that when you are going through a challenge and the unknown is in front of you, you really should be surrounded by people that can help you grow through that. Yeah, remain positive, like, remain focused on the end goal and don’t give up the faith and hope that that’s going to happen. It’s just the timing and keep your why at the forefront of it all.
Speaker 113:37
Yeah, and that was during the pandemic right, Like that was really the cause of those delays.
Speaker 213:42
Yes and no. I think it was a bit of the aftermath, because it was last year. It was in 2022, March that we had applied for the prevention. We didn’t get them until November 2022.
Speaker 113:54
Yeah, so maybe they’re just still backlogged and stuff like that, but I think that’s in itself, an important lesson. You know, when I talk to other investors, they talk about, you know, things that can go over budget or things that can have those delays and stuff like that. So I think for anyone that’s starting out, it’s just very important to be very, very conservative with your timelines, because that can ultimately have those impacts on your cost and your budget and stuff like that. So if you’re running too lean, i think that’s where you can run into issues with an investment because you don’t expect it will happen, right, exactly.
Speaker 214:23
So try to plan your best, but definitely put in contingency plans and a little bit of extra money around in case there are delays.
Speaker 114:33
Yeah, no, absolutely. Now, I guess, in terms of the portfolio that you’re working towards building, what would you say is your freedom number And that could be monthly income, the value of your portfolio. maybe it’s a certain amount of time that you want to have with your family every year, like, what does that look like for you?
Speaker 214:50
I would say being able to have our investments running by themselves passively and us doing minimal work, being able to travel and be able to check in on our investments overseas, having a great team in place and just knowing that we can live comfortably. So when I say comfortably, we’re not worrying about money, that everybody around us, from the people that work for us to our families, are taken care of and we’re creating an impact in this world.
Speaker 115:20
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s amazing, And obviously you spoke to the education that you’ve received. What do you think is the best advice that you’ve been given over these last few years?
Speaker 215:30
The best advice. We’ve gotten a lot of that like great, great advice. I would definitely say that it’s always coming back to your why, remembering the reason that you started and having a strong enough why to push you through all of the things, the successes, the challenges, the delays, anything that you feel that isn’t sometimes going to help, but that why is so strong that it will carry you through.
Speaker 116:02
Yeah, i mean it’s a foundation, so I can see how that’s super important, yeah, and intended with real estate. Now, i guess, in terms of the projects that you’re working on right now, are there any opportunities that you wanted to share that could be of interest to any investors that are watching right now?
Speaker 216:17
We always have opportunities. So I would definitely say reach out to us, let’s have a conversation. There are things that are coming across our desk all the time And if it suits your goals and your needs, then we can help you build wealth and create wealth. And let’s have a chat Yeah, that’s awesome.
Speaker 116:35
Now, in terms of inspiring others, are there any particular quotes that you find personally motivate you a lot?
Speaker 216:43
Yeah. So I would definitely say thoughts become things. So the way we think creates the things that we have in our life. So let’s always think good thoughts and think about how we can move forward in life and how we can continue to help others and how great and successful we can be, because if we have thoughts that are opposite, we’re going to bring those into our lives. That’s not what we want, that’s not our purpose as investors, and as humans.
Speaker 117:11
Yeah, i think that’s so smart. I had a mentor once that said focus on the roots, not the fruits.
Speaker 217:15
Yeah, Oh I love that.
Speaker 117:17
You have everything that’s inside and what you focus on expanding and all of that. I know sometimes people may not realize just how much mindset really plays into all these things and overcoming those limiting beliefs to really make the right decisions and put yourself on that path towards achieving that financial freedom number whatever that looks like for you.
Speaker 217:37
Exactly, and I would say it’s 95% mindset and 5% strategy.
Speaker 117:42
Yeah, No, absolutely. So obviously you guys have been great at that and thank you for sharing your story For anyone that does want to get in touch. What’s the best way to reach you?
Speaker 217:51
I would definitely say that. Reach us on Instagram at Francis Five Properties. You can also find us on Facebook LJFrancis, LinkedIn at Francis Five Properties as well, for our email address, which I’ll just allow you to put that in the show.
Speaker 118:07
Yeah, we’ll include that below Now. is there anything else that you wanted to leave guests with in closing?
Speaker 218:13
I would say get started, don’t listen to family and friends. The vision was given to you, the idea was placed in your mind. It came across your path for a reason Get in front of the people that can help you to move forward. Take chances, because it’s your life and you only have one.
Speaker 118:31
Yeah, no, i couldn’t agree more. So thank you again for being here today. Of course, for anyone that’s watching, we appreciate your time as well. We’ll share contact information for Jacqueline and Leo below And, of course, if you like what you’ve just watched, make sure you subscribe and you’re following along at Inspire To Invest podcast on social Thanks. Have a great day, thank you, bye. Thank you again to our sponsors, Francis Five Properties and Maynada Media, for bringing you this episode of Inspired To Invest. The views represented on this podcast are for general information only and does not constitute investment or other professional advice or an offering of securities. The hosting guests featured on Inspire To Invest make no representations as to the performance of any particular investment. Should you decide to make an investment, you are responsible for conducting your own review and analysis. It is recommended that you obtain independent legal accounting and tax advice from licensed professionals.