Investing in RV parks is profitable, but before you jump in, you'll need guidance.
Alex Alexander spent years in Hawaii flipping land (with an old-school mentor) but moved back to the mainland and is now deploying his unique investing strategy across the US.
From a small town in Texas to a life of entertainment and adventure, Alex shares how his unique journey shaped his innovative approach to developing RV parks.
Why are RV parks becoming a hot topic and a booming investment? Alex dives into RV parks, explaining their rising popularity and unexpected potential for social impact. He sheds light on the 'Silver Tsunami' and how investing in RV parks can offer benefits like capital preservation and countercyclical advantages.
Alex also shares his own big WHY and the significant impact that RV parks can foster deeper connections among families, especially between fathers and their children.
Live free. Get Educated. Master Your Money.
Subscribe to our Podcast here!
https://investingstuffyoushouldknow.buzzsprout.com
Youtube Videos now up as well! Subscribe here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1kV60Yxx4ntgLqAwOCR1Pg
Investing in RV parks is profitable, but before you jump in, you'll need guidance.
Alex Alexander spent years in Hawaii flipping land (with an old-school mentor) but moved back to the mainland and is now deploying his unique investing strategy across the US.
From a small town in Texas to a life of entertainment and adventure, Alex shares how his unique journey shaped his innovative approach to developing RV parks.
Why are RV parks becoming a hot topic and a booming investment? Alex dives into RV parks, explaining their rising popularity and unexpected potential for social impact. He sheds light on the 'Silver Tsunami' and how investing in RV parks can offer benefits like capital preservation and countercyclical advantages.
Alex also shares his own big WHY and the significant impact that RV parks can foster deeper connections among families, especially between fathers and their children.
Live free. Get Educated. Master Your Money.
Subscribe to our Podcast here!
https://investingstuffyoushouldknow.buzzsprout.com
Youtube Videos now up as well! Subscribe here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1kV60Yxx4ntgLqAwOCR1Pg
Hey, hey, hey. Everyone here at the Investing Stuff You Should Know podcast where we bring you expert insights into the world of investing and beyond. My name is Johnny Nelson and we're thrilled to have Alex Alexander as our special guest. Alex is a or has specialized in RV Park Development in the last 10 full years, but he's got a lot more than that. He's really grown as a man, as an investor, and now he's in RV Park Development space here. So, alex, good morning and thanks for being with us.
Alex Alexander:Good morning, johnny. It's so good to be with you. You've been. That's a really nice compliment the way that you said that, that introduction.
Johnny Nelson:Thank you very much For sure you almost got me a little emotional already, right at the beginning.
Johnny Nelson:That's my job. That's my job Good deal. So Alex and I had been. We were part of the mastermind that I joined a little over a year ago. Alex was part of that too and just since that time we've seen I was on his podcast, his podcast but we've gotten to know each other and learned from each other a bit. But before jumping to that, alex, give us a little background of where like I guess where you were born. Then also, you have a really cool story of you spent some time in Hawaii and that's always kind of a good place to start from and we all know a lot of people that follow the news. The recent fires in Lihana has been captured people's imagination very devastating. But give a little background there Again, your kind of your origins and then your time in Hawaii, and we'll jump right into the RV Park Development site.
Alex Alexander:Sure, well, I grew up actually here in Texas. I grew up in this little tiny town called Midland, texas, and this will relate later in the story but I grew up in Airline Mobile Home Park, so I grew up in one of these trailer parks and I understood, like, how things kind of worked as a kid. You know, you rent the land We'll get into that part later but I left Midland at 19 and went into the Air Force, traveled around the world and actually had a whole another life and a career. Before real estate and business and all this, I was a professional entertainer and so I traveled the world in the military as an entertainer and then on cruise ships in New York and Las Vegas and so that was Can I ask?
Johnny Nelson:you've intrigued me now. I didn't even know that about you, alex. What did you entertain? Did you sing dance Like? What did you do All that singing dance?
Alex Alexander:Yeah, singing, dance, tell jokes, entertain master ceremonies, just being on stage with the microphone, and it was a lot of fun. It was a good 10 years, pretty much mobile on the road, and I literally just came to that point where I was like I'd like to settle down and really I'll tell you, this is kind of funny I didn't have a talent as a singer in high school at all and I just really wanted to do it so bad. So I took private lessons and I worked extra hard and I go in at lunchtime and I go in before school and I get teaching. I get from the teacher. She spent a lot of extra time. Paula Edwards, she spent a lot of time with me and I remember my very last year. I had gotten better. They have these singing competitions every year it's UIL competitions and so every year I'd gotten one step further. In my senior year I made it to second chair, all state. It was a big honor, biggest thing, that's incredible man.
Johnny Nelson:Yeah, thanks man.
Alex Alexander:There's a little short lady. She turned to me and she goes when you came in four years ago, you couldn't even sing at all and look at you now, and so that's the kind of changes that can happen with a lot of hard work and that's been a big foundational part of my life and it's something I talk about kind of often.
Johnny Nelson:That's often awesome and I just right now that's something I wanted to do for probably 10 years, that I haven't taken the time. But also just like hearing that story and seeing other kind of growth around me and myself. I know it's possible if I just basically applied myself and was diligent. So just whatever it is, I just like guitar but also I've been wanting to sing for a long time, so that's really encouraging. To set a little anecdote right there of what's possible with the focus and effort and training of others, that's very encouraging.
Alex Alexander:Yeah, the other thing about singing I'll just go off on a small tangent is that you're going to love it so much that you'll spend the hard time doing it when, soon as you start to get a little bit good and this is like this in working out and business also as soon as you start to get a little bit good, it feels good, and then you get on stage, like one time and you feel so good it'll feed you for like three or four or six months, however long it is, until you can get back on stage and do it again. But you're going to enjoy it, you're going to love it.
Johnny Nelson:Awesome man. So, yeah, I will make a gonna be redoubled out on that and get lessons after I Finish up some of the things like that going on my life. But the point that the focus is on you, so that was. That's an awesome kind of beginning story there, and then I know we're kind of skipping right over to it. So then you but you spent some amazing time in Hawaii, or at least you had. You know what I thought sounds like an amazing story. Talk to us about that.
Alex Alexander:Yes, I spent 10 years in Hawaii and it was off-grid and so a lot of people don't they think they're like, oh man, you're on the beach and you're having fun and surfing, and that was not my lifestyle at all. I lived up up in the mountains, off-grid, no power, no water, no sewer and so kind of the origin there, as I had moved over there to be close to my son and then I had had a couple of businesses go poorly back to back because moving over there was very expensive. And then I tried something. It didn't work out, tried something else that didn't work out. I wound up waiting tables and living in a van on food stamps and it was pretty demoralizing to move over there to try to be there with my son and to wind up in that situation.
Johnny Nelson:So yes, yeah.
Alex Alexander:So I was able to save up money just from working and all that kind of thing and and I bought a piece of land for 200 down and 200 per month. Now. That sounds like an amazing deal. It's an acre of land, but there's no power, no water, no sewer, there's no pharmacy, bank, doctor, anything for an hour away. So it's way out in the middle of nowhere, off-grid and full of trash, and so the guy sells it to me, of course ridiculously cheap. I mean now there's like a hundred tires on it. That was like Five cars, that were just parts just spread out throughout the entire acre. So I took about sure months.
Johnny Nelson:I'm sure we've all seen those kinds of like desolate, vacant lots driving up the middle of kind of somewhere, you know, in the middle of Wyoming or some place. It's just, you know, far away from anything useful. So you know, we have this vision like everything is like this lush paradise, you know, of course it is near the beach and where there's all this development. But it just speaks to nature, nature of harsh, and man, when he interacts with nature in a careless fashion, leaves trash. There's nothing, no, develop, there's nothing that of real value there. So he would be delighted, I'd be delighted, to like, yeah, it's like worthless acre of land or whatever. I'll get the $200 a month. Hey, why not? For sure, let's do this.
Alex Alexander:Yeah, and he was thrilled about it. So once he saw what I was doing with that one, he owned the one next to it and he had that sold to another guy. That guy just disappeared. Stop making the payments. He said, hey, you want to know to buy the one next to you for 400, down 400 a month, because it's nicer? And I go, okay, sure. Then I turned around and sold it to the next guy for 800, down 800 per month.
Alex Alexander:So now I'm doing a little bit of owner finance arbitrage and so I started doing that with this fellow. We did contracts for deeds and he kind of taught me the business. He was 84 when I met him and he was the spryest guy ever, bob de Bower. He I kind of tricked him into being my mentor Because every every month that would come and I say I got to be in cash. And he go oh, just go put it in the bank. And I said no, no, no, I really want to give him, give it to you in cash, because now I've got two of his lots, now I've got three of his lots. It's starting to grow. Now I'm bringing him a larger amount of cash by the end. You know, I'm bringing them like six to ten thousand dollars in cash every month. Well, he's thrilled to see me whenever I show up because, yeah, I'm basically like he's got Well 10 to 12 properties that he doesn't have to worry about because I, I'm the one who's reselling them.
Alex Alexander:Yeah, so he was. He just taught me a lot about the business and before you know it, I had 12 of those properties and then I had a somebody come over and give me an investment Brent Mott. How to Houston, texas, amazing investor, really good friend, and he came over and actually hiked up on the land and we bought 36 acres, an entire city block, one whole block, and within he he went out and raised three hundred thousand dollars for us to buy the whole thing and do some excavation. And within 30 days let's see, is 32 days we excavated 34 Driveways and house pads and we just got it knocked out. Within six months we had taken that three hundred thousand dollars and turned it into one point five million dollars worth of contracts, worth of revenue, worth of Income coming in and so does incredible man.
Johnny Nelson:Yeah, what a what a journey. Just folks again think about this. Alex, from a van on footsteps to hustle and a business sense, of business savvy and Finding indirect, you know, accidentally finding kind of a mentor and some other things. And then worth of this stage here really quick transition, how many, what? What? The time frame here? Oh, like a couple, like four or five years or ten years.
Alex Alexander:That was about three years that are really started, making the big Five years total, I would guess, from the first first property I bought once I started really buying properties in about three years to really roll it up, and so that turned out to be 56 properties total that we're holding at the end and the. The one metric that I really like to talk about is that that company over there makes about thirty thousand dollars per month, but I only work on it about thirty minutes per month, and I don't say that to impress you, but I want to impress upon you that there there are technologies and there are systems that you can really leverage yourself to have these way Outsized returns, because leverage is a little bit of work here and a great amount of return on the other side. And so this is how I've been able to leverage myself. And then the reason I'm talking about it is because I took that knowledge and I brought it over into RV parks, because I started realizing I said wait a minute, I'm selling this person a property, so they pay me every month. Right, I own the land, they don't own it. I own the land but they own what's above it, which means that I don't have the responsibility to take care of it. So I don't have tenants, trash, termites, toilets, I don't have any of that. But I'm still making a monthly income off of this property.
Alex Alexander:And the more I was doing this over the years, you know I'm learning about real estate and I started watching Brandon Turner and he starts talking about mobile home parks and I go. I grew up in a mobile home park. That's kind of interesting. I've always known that. Like you know, I thought whenever I was a little kid, even I was like Wait a minute, the people who own this land we're not, we're never even gonna own it, they were just renting it forever, right, so I got that even as a kid. So whenever I saw it again as adult and now I'm actually doing it but I didn't even really, I didn't really realize what I was doing. But whenever I finally did, I kind of had this aha moment and I said, wait a minute, we can take this ignored lower part of the economy and we can give it like the rich treatment. And so that's what I did with my properties in Hawaii I put it online, I made it digital, I allowed them to make payments online.
Alex Alexander:So they, you know, most like the most real estate. Now you can just do it all right there, online boom, boom, boom, right on my website, all the way to them making their payments down to. I text them an SMS or a QR code. So they get a text QR code. They take that into Walmart CVS 711. They show it to the cashier, they scan it, take cash and that goes straight to my account. So that's what I'm saying. You can really leverage yourself with these technologies. I'm not driving around picking up cash from my customers who don't have bank accounts, because I have customers who are from the Marshall Islands. They're Micronesians or Marshall E's a lot of them and they might be new to living in a place that has access to banks. They live off grid. Their islands are very, very rural, completely off grid.
Johnny Nelson:But and the impression.
Johnny Nelson:The impression sometimes nothing precious like us or assumption Whatever the right word is there of people that are, you know, outside the cash society or whatever. It's like oh they're, you know, maybe they're not, you know they're maybe illegal immigrants or something else. You know they're. They're maybe criminal or they don't want to use cash, like no, it's like there's people that are just not using, you know, they don't have their what they call the bank list, or they're kind of outside the bank system. Then I'll maybe a credit card and whether restrictions or just they're just not part of their culture and this allows that type of investing in kind of Transactions that happen and around the world. It's a lot bigger deal than kind of our you know, our cloistered system that we have in America. There's a lot more, there's a lot more options out there and you kind of tapped into that and then you, within that, you you kind of merged it with your Way of investing using land for RV parks and mobile homes, that kind of investing.
Alex Alexander:Yeah, that's exactly right. And then, from all the lessons that I learned there, I knew that I wanted to be in more commercial assets. I just sort of looked at the ability to scale what I was doing and I was like I'd really like to be able to knock out like 100 units at one time, versus, you know, I can only buy like five or 10 units usually at a time whenever it's the raw land. And so I was like if I bought an RV park and that'd be like 100 units, that'd be like 100 lots all at one time, because each parking space is giving me the same income as one of my lots. And so I started thinking about it. So I moved over here to the mainland. I also wanted to be closer to my family.
Alex Alexander:I'd been over there in Hawaii for 10 years and as soon as I got back over here to Texas, it was wonderful to just reconnect with my family and reconnect with just all my friends over here in Texas that I've missed for so long. But once I got here, I got started in RV parks and I started just digging into it, training myself, consuming content, calling RV parks constantly. So exactly what you would do as a wholesaler just picking up the phone and just calling RV parks. Do you want to sell? Are you interested in selling? Have you ever thought about selling? And so I just started making lists and I started calling and I, to tell you the truth in the searching, was the biggest education, because when you talk to about 20 to 30 RV park owners per month, for two years, like I have, and I know what makes an RV park work.
Alex Alexander:I can see why they're going to fail because they tell me their stories. And this is a different from multifamily. You know, whenever you go into multifamily and even like a lot of single family, when you have like a larger portfolio, a lot of the owners are trying to hide their identity, and not for any legal purpose, for just for a nuisance lawsuit purposes. It's really important to kind of like have some barrier in between personal assets and your business assets, just like all businesses. So you don't find that nearly as much in RV parks. So one of the big secrets that I even teach to the people that I work with all of my partners is that you don't have to go be quite a private eye A lot of times you can just call up and you're going to be talking right to the owner of the RV park, the person who makes the decision of who's going to sell it.
Johnny Nelson:How do you understand that? The bridge there, alex, real quick. Why not just like normal? I guess just human, like you know pride, I guess you know social scoring, social level. Why would I just like give you I mean, yeah, there's a few out there anyone would just share anything overshare. But why would I be willing to share overshare? Like hey, my RV park isn't going so good or having some problems, why would I be willing to share that with a perhaps stranger in the space? Versus like that I had a multifamily or a portfolio, versus like trying to kind of hide that, like, yeah, we're doing good and also maybe even trying to boost the business, like hey, this is going good, it's worth $3 million. Actually, because you know how the valley is going, it's worth $1 million. But elaborate there if you would.
Alex Alexander:Right now we have something going on in the economy and society in America that's really changing everything. We call it the silver tsunami and we've talked about it before. It's the fact that the baby boomers are retiring and that's a big deal in the greater economy because they own about 50% of the small businesses in America. The mom and pop business is about 50% is in that generation. In RV parks it's more like 80%. Wow.
Alex Alexander:So the RV parks that I go and find they don't have online booking, they don't have dynamic pricing, they don't have property management. They're very unsophisticated. So you have mostly boomer owners, mostly unsophisticated, and they really don't know why they would hide any of their information. Some of the stuff that they're not interested in sharing is kind of how much they take in and cash and how much they pay in taxes. So a lot of the big underwriting that I do. We had to find a workaround because they're almost all tricking out the system for the taxes. They'll pay themselves like $250,000 as the manager of the park and stuff like that to try to move money around in different ways. So we go in and we really don't. We're not that concerned about how much money they're making now because I know enough about the market. I know enough about what would draw people to that area and keep it full and how to advertise it. So we don't even care what they're doing. We're buying their infrastructure to do what we do. So we don't have a cash box where somebody can come drop off cash and an onsite manager that's collecting cash and checking. It's not like that.
Alex Alexander:What we do is completely online professional property management, revenue management, yield management. Dynamic pricing has completely changed the game. There are times whenever you can make double the amount of money, because during dynamic pricing times you know okay. So I should explain. Dynamic pricing is what you experience whenever you buy an airplane ticket during a really popular time like Christmas. So it's supply and demand. You have less supply, higher demand, higher price. So it's the same thing. We can do that online digitally with our online booking. So somebody goes to book online at 50% occupancy, we begin to raise the rate 10% per 10% occupancy. That's some more of my information. You get some of the good free stuff today, johnny.
Johnny Nelson:I know that's awesome man, it's amazing. And again, just to crystallize again for the folks now so we went through quite an arc of journey of being in the military and an entertainer in Hawaii, now back to Texas and kind of like distilling all these lessons and learnings. I mean, you told us like several three or four aha moments and now we're really zeroing. Now it's kind of discussed at the beginning of the show, that of RV Park. How do you invest or how do you develop RV Park. So that's you're giving us the gold here, alex, right now, right, are you just to clarify for the folks what does that relationship look like? Are you leading? Do you have like an investment team and you're like buying individual RV parks and then you're bringing them into the Alex Alexander's investing capital group, or what does that look like? And then are you raising money? It gives a little insight there, kind of gives the business structure.
Alex Alexander:Awesome. So what we're doing right now is we have a company called Paradise Park Ventures and paradiseparkventurescom. So this is our real estate investment firm where people can participate with us as passive investors. And so I have my business partner, john McGaugh. He's our chief capital markets officer, so he's out there raising capital. For example, he just raised $2 million for this 20 acres that we own at Lake Ford, and so we raised. Let's see, we have 2.5 million. We have two already in, so we have 500,000 left we can raise in this subscription group. But he raised that $2 million already, got 500,000 more he's gonna be raising. Then he also went and got us a $3.3 million construction loan and so that's gonna close next week and we're gonna break ground and get started on that 20 acres. It's at Lake Ford and that's something that's actually up for investment.
Alex Alexander:People can go to our website. So back to the technology. We even take it down to our investors, not just our customers on the retail side, the buyers, renters or whatever. We work with the investors. We have an online portal so the people can see everything. They can see their position, they can see their percentage of the total deal, their percentage of the bucket, where they are in the investment. How many other investors? Everything it's all broken down. They have access to it all of the time. All their K1s are there, all the subscription documents, the pitch deck, everything they wanna see, so-.
Johnny Nelson:So excellent transparency for an investor. So I can just say this is important. We have our customers that actually I have an RV, which actually do have an RV. I bought that two years ago and I'm gonna go.
Johnny Nelson:I will say I wanna say it's a new RV park. Maybe it's something you've acquired older asset or something brand new which is not even existing yet, but it will be. I'm sure it'll be very nice and I can very easily, easily, seamlessly, and it's gonna be operated really well pay for it, schedule, all that kind of stuff online, very, you know, in the modern era. And then the other side of that, of course, if you wanna be part of your group what you're doing, the cash flow and the other kind of opportunities and advantages of RV park investing then you have your investor portal and that's highly transparent and there's a certain advantages and I'd like you to just quickly talk about that. My focus, as you know, alex, has been multi-family investing and I've kind of ventured into some industrial and self-storage and some other assets and they're very compelling as well. Why and again, this is not a competition where there's one winner why would I want to bet on the horse called RV park, rv parks, safety?
Johnny Nelson:Safety it's really about preservation?
Alex Alexander:Tell us elaborate on that Preservation of capital. Rv parks are counter cyclical. So if you're going into a time like we are right now and you're worried that assets may be losing value every time, other assets lose value, for the past 50 years, rv parks, campgrounds go up, they go up in value, they go up in cash flow and so really the safety part is really big. If you're an investor and you're looking at what asset class you want to get into right now, just kind of look at RV parks. We're a safe and here's the thing we stress test our properties and not just ours. The other ones that we buy, we look at them.
Alex Alexander:You can go down to 30% occupancy and still break even. That's incredible. So say we have a terrible, terrible situation, the economy shifts, we're wrong, it's going to take a couple months to change things. Say we want to have something like that. We can be down to 30, say we have a flood that wipes out the power, half of our water gets messed up. So if we were only half full we'd still be making money. 30% is break even on most of these. So it's really kind of hard to totally go broke and lose your money on one of these. So say you sell it and you make a way smaller profit than you thought it's preservation of capital. That's very unlikely. Most of the times we're seeing ridiculous returns. The investors can't get back quick enough to bring the money back to us for the next deal.
Johnny Nelson:Yeah, what is the timeline? And now we'll go back to kind of the development side, which is really cool, and kind of some of the insights there, but just to focus here, if you were wanted to be a GP, general partnership, come along with you guys, or an LP, whatever that looks like, but that's something for another discussion. But just from an investing perspective, what is the timeline on your normal deal? Is it in a fund or is it like an 18 month turnaround? What does that timeline look like? If I put like a hundred K in today, what does that life of that money look like?
Alex Alexander:So we do a three to five year hold. We're doing single syndications right now. We have three more projects in the pipeline right after this one. Right now we're just finishing up Lake Ford, getting that all done, and we're gonna do three at one time right after this. So we've got those are underwriting right now. We're feeling really confident that they're gonna get through underwriting and feel really they're gonna fit into the model.
Alex Alexander:I've got a really specific buy box and so what I did is, through all this research of the 20 to 30 RV park owners that I've been talking to every month, through all of that time, I started to crystallize the specific RV park for us to buy. Because if you go out and you're a single family home flipper and you know that three twos are your, that's your sweet spot, that's it. So you're gonna make the most amount of money. You're gonna be able to do them quickest as most profit in your pocket. You've got systems and procedures built out and infrastructure to make that happen. That's exactly what we have for our V parks and instead of three twos, I have a specific buy box. And here's the other thing About 20 to 30 years ago, whenever these folks who are now boomers were buying RV parks, buying land and developing them.
Alex Alexander:They all kind of had the same idea. They said we're going to go and buy this size of land, but we don't have enough money to buy to build on the whole piece of land. We'll just build on half of it and then later on maybe when the kids get out of school or something we'll build the second half. Well, what wound up happening is their first half became successful. They made $150,000, $200,000 a year and they're just like why in the world would we work more and build the second half? We're thrilled with the amount that we make now. And so they wrote it out for 20, 30 years and they really didn't do any maintenance and they didn't expand it and they were friends with the people who were there, so they didn't raise the rent. So they're way below market rates and there are thousands and thousands of those out there.
Alex Alexander:And so I found that this is a real common situation. I know how to find them, I know what they look like and so kind of the next part that I got into you were talking about how do I go and acquire them and what's the team about. So we have our real estate investment firm. John and I are real strong on that. There are positions to come in on GPs with our deals. But on the larger side we're going to be raising a fund under Paradise Park Ventures. But these individual syndications we take capital raising GP partners. We take a deal finding partners.
Alex Alexander:And here's the thing I realized that there's three parts of a deal and our mastermind that we were in with Bridger Pennington actually crystallized this in my mind as well was that there's a deal getter, a money getter and administrator. So I just form all of our deals the same way I do the administration. I've spent the money to go learn how to do it. My business partner, john McGaw. He raises the capital, and so we had this deal getter position that I had been doing and we had been all doing together and I started to realize that we could teach people how to do this. I taught a couple of friends, some family. They started going out having some success, and so now I've put it all together in videos and a curriculum and a full on course. So I've got a mastermind.
Alex Alexander:Amazing, I've got a course, I've got just a real great way to teach you how to go find these exact parks, to bring them back and partner with us, because what I'm trying to do is I'm not just trying to have students that go out and do these deals and have them succeed, have them don't. I'm holding their hand. And so I do a very customized approach where I do one-on-one calls with people and I walk them through the deal and I bring in my team to help out. I've got designers, architects, bankers, accountants, attorneys, sec attorneys to do blue sky filings and we have the technology already in place. My business partner, john, that I keep talking about, has got the technology in place to handle the investment side so that the K ones go out seamlessly, one can see exactly what's happening and all the transparency in the business. So that's what we've set up. We've been building that and getting it. Now that it's really firm and it's really running well, we're going to plug in three properties at the same time and that'll raise about $8 million for those properties.
Johnny Nelson:That explains the scale that was like. So you're like, you know, first it was kind of like conceptual and then you're kind of putting the team together. You know I've been conversing, so I know a little bit what's going on, and then all of a sudden I was a little bit surprised, not that my surprise should be telling you either way, but also like I'm going to do three next. You got this first one and then three, like holy smokes. That's amazing. And then now that explains in the back end here why you can have that kind of scale. I mean, yeah, it's only three, but we're talking, you know, millions of dollars of development here in land and these big projects Three are coming on after this first one that you're doing. So that's incredible. That's amazing and it speaks to the validity. It's kind of validating the success that you're actually having is not just talk. I'm like I'm the greatest coach. You know, flip houses with no money down in 90 days and blah, blah, blah. I'm like no, actually this. You know we actually have three projects next year, right?
Alex Alexander:Yeah, and that's exactly right. And so you know those projects have found a way to really like 5x the value of these properties. So this portfolio that we're building right now, these three projects, are going to be worth 40 to 45 million in three to five years.
Johnny Nelson:Incredible. So let's talk real quick, john, as we kind of go into the final chapter. Or Alex, sorry, just go to John, that's mine, that's mine, I'm John, I'm Johnny. Let's talk in the final chapter here of the show here. What people are going to naturally be skeptical if they know about RV parks Cool. If not, what is like, what's driving this? Why would this be safe money? So you're claiming it's safe money, but also, like, what is some of the data that feeds into this? Like, like lots of people like RV, or there's like billions of units sold. What's some of the foundational things that people are going to have give people confidence of? Like this is going to be a continuing trend in American, canadian, whatever. Whatever you're looking at, let's stick with America, american society. People will still want to be and live and be part of RV parks and nothing.
Alex Alexander:So we all know that during well, maybe we don't all know during COVID, this completely changed During the 2020, all of a sudden, people couldn't travel. Travel changed dramatically and since then it's still remained different feelings about traveling. So people started to try out RVs and you can rent them online. So there's this technology called Outdoorsy. It's kind of Airbnb for RVs, so people can now rent one instead of having to commit and go buy one and actually try it out. So I compare this to remember you know those little QR codes for the menu and the bar in the restaurant now. So that technology has been around for a long long time.
Alex Alexander:That wasn't brand new as soon as the pandemic hit and everybody had to have that. Now it's popular and still carries out throughout society. Those QR codes are everywhere. We got used to them because we had to do it at a restaurant. There was no choice, and so whenever they had to do it, they got used to it. Now people do it on videos, your business card. They're everywhere on a sign. They don't even have a phone number on a website anymore. They have that QR code because it's going to take you right to the website.
Johnny Nelson:And so it's low friction. Think about like getting the number, or typing in the website, or like enter this or whatever it is it's, you know it pops in your phone. You basically click, click. So they've reduced it to almost frictionless effort, you know, which can actually be a downside because you don't want to scan scammy codes, but we're assuming all as well.
Alex Alexander:But please continue, yeah, so so the um, the popularity that comes from being forced to do something and seeing how good it is. That's, that's the point I was trying to make. So a lot of people this was the only choice they had was to go camping. Now here, here's what I've noticed People who go and try out RV parks, camping, all that kind of stuff. It's mostly uh, it's going to be a large amount of those are going to be families. Bam, this is very strong for families and and it actually kind of goes back to my mission. You know, I have a personal mission, we have our company, we have our core values and our and our our paradise pledge and all that kind of stuff. But I have a personal mission that I'm on here and that's to help one million fathers connect more deeply and emotionally with their children through the power of these outdoor camping experiences.
Johnny Nelson:I didn't know that. That's incredible.
Alex Alexander:Yeah, whenever you, whenever you get to go and I call it like hand watering the kids, like if you're if you're a gardener and you have a huge, you know, a farmer and you have all this irrigation going, you're not seeing every plant, you're not noticing when there's mold or pest or something like that getting on it, but if you're hand watering every plant, you're going to see it, you're on top of it, you're going to catch that really early. And that's what I see people doing whenever they go camping with their kids. They're hand watering the kids, they're on top of them, you know they, they see them, hear them, smell them all day, every day that you're camping and it's, it's a, it's an infusion of time together that's invaluable to the growth of love and emotion between humans and and you know, especially with adults in there and their kids. I specifically, you know, focus on, of course, fathers.
Johnny Nelson:Yeah, that's, that's, that's really amazing. I never even connected that. But that the investing piece, of course, in tight end to an actual, you know, real good, like that is, I just is very just exhilarating to find kind of that, that, that common thread and being able to, like you know, foster that and then, like you said, it just had COVID precipitated it. And then I can even add, like I don't know what the I'm just going to add kind of a general, a generalization here. Some of the largest RV manufacturers you know in the country have produced millions and millions and millions of units that you know they couldn't keep up. I don't know where they are now with production, but you know, a year or two ago. So millions of units are out there.
Johnny Nelson:People are kind of recommitted, refinding, enjoying camping. So, yes, even if the trend came down a little bit, we seem to see a strong trend, interest in doing activities versus like maybe obviously RV is an item, but it seems to be. There's a kind of a more of the latest generation seems to be a little bit less about the stuff, more about the activity. So, yeah, get the one thing, your RV and the vehicle, but then it's not just like any boat and RV and a bigger house and bubble boss. So it's like you know, get the RV and you can do that, you can incorporate that with activities. So I think that it just it makes a lot of sense to me to why this asset class is compelling, is strong and also can serve as social good, as you just laid out.
Alex Alexander:I think it really is a social good. We can go into this in a political podcast, but I think fathers being strong is a really important part of all communities. Being able to have that strong connection between fathers and their children, I think, is really just like you said. It really helps out community, it helps out society and that's why I've made it my personal mission. Here's another thing it helps to guide my decisions.
Alex Alexander:I have a friend and I like to smoke cigars and a lot of the bankers and a lot of the people that's a thing here in Dallas. Once a week I'll go out and go to a place where we'll meet up and do that. One of my friends was like oh man, at RV place, wouldn't it be great if we had a cigar lounge there? I thought for a minute and I said wait a minute. My mission is to help one million fathers. How is this going to help me? How is this going to help one million fathers connect more emotionally and deeply with their children? I thought about it and I said, well, it's not so. That really just makes the decision for us. And that's really what these core values and these mission statements they're like a document you can go back to and look like a contract you make with yourself and you go back and look at it and say, no, this is what I said, this is what I'm gonna do.
Johnny Nelson:And it's like a life map. Alex, that's really, really powerful and I love that it's such a concrete example of like, yeah, it's cool, A lot of guys would like to do it, but then it's guys hanging out with guys Like your kids aren't gonna be smoking a cigar, and then you're taking you, not with your kids. So, like you know, like you said, that was an easy one it's too far, it's off the map, not on the map, too far off the map. Yeah, done. Moving on to the next decision here. So as we, I guess I'll just like give you the opportunity to close out the final chapter to share. How can people and you already kind of mentioned it, but just kind of a recap how can people get in contact with you about your either it's a GP, is a general partner, a limited partner to investing, but then also your course and other people are gonna be interested in learning how to do this. More about this Is this for me, and things like that. So give us a little, give us the best way to reach out, connect.
Alex Alexander:Sure. So Paradise Park Ventures is our real estate investment firm. You can go to paradiseparkventurescom and that's where you can find our investments and that's where you can actually invest right there, online with us and get in touch with us and everything. And then I have my course is called the Boss Method and the Boss Method is bossmethodnet, and that's where I teach people how to go out and be the deal-getter.
Alex Alexander:I actually have three courses. The first one is the only one that I'm teaching right now. The other two are in preparation but we got the deal-getter, the money-getter and the administrator, and so the deal-getter is the first thing that I teach people how to do, and whenever they come back, I actually partner with them. So I'll take them in as a full equity partner in the deal for going out and finding these deals, and so I'm really proud of the fact that I can do that. That's why I hold their hand, that's I have a vested interest in their success, because their success, my success, is not just from charging them for a course. My success is them getting a deal. We're gonna make way more, much more money together over five years that I'm ever gonna make on a single course with somebody. So-.
Johnny Nelson:You're asking them to invest in themselves, alex, exactly. And what does investing do? You don't invest. It's not always just, I mean, sometimes it's transactional. It's like, oh, I'm gonna invest a dollar, we're gonna get a dollar for the back. But also it's like, do you, if you're gonna be an investor, are you able to delay gratification, invest in yourself, become part of work with Alex or some other investor that has the growth mindset, and delay gratification and get this return? So let's just say I don't know what it is, let's say it's a thousand bucks, I'm just making up a number. But then, like you said, at the end of all this training and coursework and working with you, you're gonna far exceed that and the lessons and the skill level and the people you're gonna need is gonna vastly exceed that. So people remember that that's not just this, but it's other ways of investing too. But are you an investor? Can you think longterm? Can you do? You wanna be part of people with a growth mindset? That's the kind of that's how you wanna approach us.
Alex Alexander:You got that right. The other big thing I talk about is plugging people into a team, and so we get a lot of times I get a ton of people who have this mentality of oh, I wanna do it myself and be the solo entrepreneur and I wanna be the main hero of the story. Really, they don't say it, but that's, you know, that's what's in their mind. I wanna be the hero and win the trophy or whatever. And I teach them. I say you know, you can have 100% of a grape and do it all by yourself, or get 30% of a watermelon and do it with a team. And so if you wanna go just be a solo entrepreneur, go get that grape, buddy, you can have 100% of it. Come on the team and let's get you a big, nice slice of this watermelon.
Johnny Nelson:And that with that analogy, alex, that is a fantastic place to stop. So thank you everyone here at the Investing Stuff Pichino podcast for sticking through another episode. I got a lot of great value out of this, learned a lot. Reach out to Alex at his website and I'll drop that in the show notes. So until next time, thank you for being. Share the show, give us feedback, give it five stars. Until next time, thank you, hey, alex. Hey, thank you.