Why Grant Cardone Is Combining Real Estate and Bitcoin

**Grant Cardone** (0:00)
This is the greatest time in history. Our economy in the United States is going to explode. Bitcoin is going to be a beneficiary.
People got to live someplace. You cannot live in your Bitcoin account.

**Michael** (0:15)
All right, welcome back. Grant, welcome to joining Consensus, first time with us.

**Grant Cardone** (0:20)
Yeah, thank you so much, Michael. Thanks for having me. Great of him. By the way, give him a big hand for putting this on, guys. Come on, big hand. You got the energy.

**Michael** (0:28)
I'm so excited for this. OK, so Grant, because you're with the crypto crowd here for the first time with us at Consensus, you've got this fascinating story of how you came across Bitcoin. Can you tell the folks how you came across Bitcoin?

**Grant Cardone** (0:42)
So I was asked to speak at this gig in Las Vegas, and I heard in my office, we office in Aventura, we have about 300 employees there. And I heard after a morning meeting that the president of the company had said no to this guy that wanted me to speak at his event.
And they wanted to pay in this. They didn't have cash. They didn't have money. They're not a legitimate company. And they wanted to pay with this thing called Bitcoin. And Jared said, no, absolutely not. They ran it up the chain to somebody else. That person said no. And I said, hey guys, what is Bitcoin? You don't know. She don't know. I don't know. What is it? And they said, well, it's called BTC or Bitcoin. I said, okay, it's true story. Is BTC like STD?
And they said, no, it's not. I said, good, then we should take it. If that's the only way they can pay us, we should take it. We should not hold it against them that they don't know. I don't know what it is. And they gave me 115 Bitcoin for a 50 minute speaking gig.
And I still have that Bitcoin today. They paid me more than you're paying me today.

**Michael** (1:53)
That's pretty fascinating. Okay, so you went from you didn't know what this was, you took it in to now actually running a business related to that. And I think that's kind of one of the interesting things. We have a lot of folks who've been through this stage as well as this conference who focused on traditional finance, but primarily in like a payments-oriented piece or kind of traditional financial services. But you're coming at it from a real estate perspective. Now, I remember when people said crypto, tokenization, real estate, all they were really seeing at the time was just digital timeshare. But you're taking a completely different approach. Tell us what you're doing with that.

**Grant Cardone** (2:27)
I mean, anybody that's talking about real estate being on the blockchain, you just don't understand real estate. No offense, but we own 15,000 units, about $5 billion, $5.3 billion for the real estate. We have six deals that are in contract right now. We buy from major institutions, best in class locations, cash flow positive day one. We don't build, we don't construct. We simply buy something that is underpriced because of the marketplace. Right now, there's about a 30% to 40% discount on all the institutional quality of real estate in this country, from Miami to Minneapolis all the way to California.
And what we do is, rather than just taking a discount on the real estate, if I'm buying something 30% below replacement costs, and it's cash flow positive day one, I'm not putting real estate on the on the blockchain. All I'm doing is keeping the real estate in a separate LLC entity, and rather than getting a great deal on the real estate, I simply go buy a bunch of Bitcoin and stuff it into the discount gap.
And so we bought a deal last year.
I don't know if they sent those slides or not.
So we bought a deal last year from a lender. The lender was Blackstone. It was $235 million. 101 Meister and Boca. Main and Main and Boca Raton. Fantastic real estate. Irreplaceable. We paid $235 million. We wrote a check for it off my balance sheet. It's worth 400
Sometime in the future, it's worth 400 You can't build it for 400 today. And if you started building it today, it'd be seven years out, if you could ever build it again. And rather than just stealing the real estate, we just simply added another 100 million of Bitcoin. So we're now we're in the property for 335 So I have two assets that we just fused together in an LLC. And then I go to my investors. I have about 20 million people follow me online. And I say, Hey, I just bought this asset off of my balance sheet. It's 235 million dollars worth of perfect real estate. It's 100 million dollars worth of Bitcoin. We dropped them into an LLC. If you want to invest with me, this is what I think it's going to do. I think it's going to be a home run. It's a seven year to a 10 year to a 17 year to a 20 year hold. We know that every seven years I can refinance that real estate. Typically, a good piece of real estate is refinanceable every seven to 10 years, which means I'd end up owning the Bitcoin for free. It's 1,100 Bitcoin that one day in the future is going to be worth more than $80,000 of Bitcoin.