Ideas in the Wild: How Author Brent Sprenkle Aims To Help Real Estate Investors Create Their Own Billion-Dollar Portfolios

We admire them. We want to be them.

But we don’t understand how they do it.

How do commercial real estate investors create portfolios worth billions? Experienced investors know that patience and hard work are equally as important as trying to take available cash and leverage it toward the next deal. But according to real estate advisor Brent Sprenkle, building a substantial portfolio requires a unique drive to weather any storm and keep pushing forward.

In Billion Dollar Portfolio, Brent shows investors how to purchase multiple investment properties and maximize their growth by leveraging their resources — even the ones they didn’t know they had. Readers will learn how to find the right properties, finance and reposition them, increase their value, and sell or refinance them for a profit. I recently caught up with Brent to learn more about his book, his favorite idea in it, and how that idea has shaped his life and business.

What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment you realized these ideas needed to get out there?

Throughout my career I’ve worked with so many individuals that had such amazing success stories that I felt almost compelled to write about them. From the engineer from India who stumbled into investing in commercial real estate from taking a part time job on the side as a property manager to the Malaysian auditor that decided to buy an apartment building to live in instead of a house to the dentist that started looking at commercial real estate on the weekend as a way to fund his retirement, all of these people held one thing in common-none were from wealthy families, most were immigrants, and all of them started with nothing and none had formal education or training in business. All of these people are now worth billions and it’s all completely self made. They now view investing as more of a hobby then as a full time job and it gives them a purpose in life and a sense of self fulfillment.

What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?

There are so many but I would say the concept that there are always opportunities in any market at any time of the real estate cycle and that everyone with some level of experience has the means to find the funds to purchase their next property. So many clients of mine have just given up by creating a million excuses from “prices are too high, we are probably going into a recession, I think the market is going to crash” while others just continue on their business plan and keep buying properties and making prudent decisions and purchasing properties that can weather any economic crisis.

What’s a story of how you’ve applied this lesson in your own life? What has this lesson done for you?

On a personal basis I decided to quit making excuses on why it’s not a “good time” to invest. I realized that I’ve been entirely too conservative while other clients of mine have been making incredible investments. I realized that it’s always the right time to start making educated decisions on investing and being proactive in my approaches and strategy and realized that I’ve been investing with no business plan. As in, I created a model for what type of property I want to purchase and how I can add value to the investment to not only increase the property’s income and cash flow, but to also increase the value of the property so that I can potentially pull equity out to move on to the next project.