I was $15m in debt...now I own a billion dollar portfolio

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
10 years ago, this guy owned zero dollars of real estate, and today, he's got a portfolio of about a billion and a half dollars. And he did that with no outside investors, just starting from scratch, one property after another, flipping, flipping, flipping, compounding until he built a billion dollar portfolio. He's also my brother-in-law, and I've known the guy for 10 plus years. I've been asking him to come on the podcast, and he likes to keep a low profile, but finally, he agreed to come on and tell his story. And the story's a little bit crazy. He started off as a broker, ends up making a few million dollars doing deals as a broker, and then gets caught holding the bag when one of his clients, I don't want to say screws him over, but leaves him holding the bag, and he ends up $15 million in debt. And instead of declaring bankruptcy, he decides to try to pay it all back piece by piece by piece. He does, he pays it all back, and he ends up with a billion dollar plus real estate portfolio using a very specific strategy. So in this episode, I asked him how he did it to tell that story and to explain the strategy and his approach to real estate, because it's a little bit different than anybody else. So enjoy this episode of My Brother-In-Law, Sanjiv, aka the Rhino of Real Estate.
All right, my brother, we're here. Your story is a roller coaster. You have crazy highs, complete lows where you lose it all, and then rebuild back up 20 times bigger than the first time. So I want to go into that story. So today, you are sitting here, you've got a collection of real estate assets that you've built up over the last 10 years. That's now how big, roughly?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:35)
A little about a billion and a half in total.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:36)
Billion and a half. So 1.5 billion today, and that's really in kind of just a decade. So I want to go through the steps of how you got there. So where did the career start? You know, in the name of the podcast, My First Million, right? How you made your first million.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:49)
Yeah. You know, for me, it started, I went to law school, did an MBA.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:54)
Did you plan to be a lawyer? You thought?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:56)
I was full on set on being a lawyer. You know, I went to law school, worked for a very famous lawyer, Mark Garagos, out of LA. We were working the Scott Peterson case, and it was very intriguing, you know, in criminal law. When I met my now wife or my wife, she was very much against me being a lawyer. For some reason, she was always programmed that, you know, you're going to do certain things to win cases. So we'd always talked about, you know, I'm going to work for a lawyer for five years, and then I'm getting real estate. She goes, why do you need to work for five years? Why don't you just do it? You know, me thinking, I'm like, oh, wow, that's a different thought.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:31)
I don't have a good answer to that.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:32)
Yeah. You know, so I ended up opening a real estate broker's office, went back to my hometown where I grew up, town called Modesto, and opened up this, you know, real estate just broker's license. And I had a small 100-foot office and a phone. Start calling people, trying to understand the market. And really, I think my first high came when I sold my first building. I called someone and actually, I needed to grow my office. And I called this person and I said, hey, what if I lease your office? Will you let me sell your office? He said, yes, if you lease it, I'll let you sell it.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:04)
So if you become a tenant, you could be the broker.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:07)
You got it. I never had a...

**SPEAKER_1** (3:09)
Was that planned or it just happened to be that way?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:11)
No, I don't know if it was planned. It was kind of just like, you know, sometimes you never ask, you never know, right? And so at that moment I had asked, it was an older couple and I sold the building for them quite fast and I made 60 grand. And from there I started, you know, doing real estate brokers. I started understanding and I started meeting different tenants in retail. You know, I was working for Jack in the Box, AutoZone, DPRCO, different tenants that I would help get them spaces for.