Transcript
Speaker: We're losing the ability to think, consuming information, but we're not thinking. We've stopped becoming creative. And my biggest fear for the new generation coming through is that they're not thinkers, they're not innovators, they're just absorbers of information, consumers.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Regenerative Design podcast. I'm your host, Mathieu Mehuys, and in this show, I interview the leading authorities in the world of regenerative practices.
Speaker: People who do good and do well. Are you a person that cares about your environment and our planet? Are you a person that wants to leave the planet to our children to be something that we can be truly proud of?
Speaker: something to enjoy for many generations to come. But are you also a person that believes we can do all of this and do good in business? Well, I have really good news for you.
Speaker: You're here listening to the podcast that is all about making our planet a better place and making your business more successful. Enjoy the show.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Regenerative Design Podcast. Today we have a super special guest. It's none other than Dolph DeRoos. And Dolph DeRoos is a real estate expert. He's in the top 20 real estate and teachers in the world.
Speaker: So i'm very excited to have Dolph on the show. He's also award-winning author. He has written numerous books on real estate. And today I really want to dive deep together with Dolph about how we can actually use the power of real estate to create a better world.
Speaker: So ah also stay tuned because we're actually going to make it more interactive. When you're driving in your car, you should keep listening to it on ah audio, you but ah you can also watch it on YouTube and we'll actually be sharing some projects and some ideas so we can make it more visual.
Speaker: I just wanted to say start with saying that. And yeah, first of all, Dolph, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to have you here. How are you doing today? Well, thank you very much. It's my absolute pleasure. and It's good to see you again. go back a little way and we share some interesting things which we might get into, including geography.
Speaker: So, yeah, no, it's my pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, thank you for mentioning that as well. i'm Actually, i two I've taken a course from Dolph, which was amazing. It was mind-blowing and it opened up for me so many ideas of how to combine landscape architecture with real estate and real estate development. So I'm super excited about what I've already learned from Dolph. So also great to have you on my podcast.
Speaker: But Dolph, let's go a bit back in history where you were closer geographically to where I'm also from. and Like how how did everything start? How did you get into real estate? Oh, my gosh, that's that's sort of ah not a simple thing to answer.
Speaker: But, you know, I've got a mixed background. The shared geography is you're spent. Obviously, you're raised in Belgium and my parents originally were from Holland. um But then, you know, when they were young, just married back, my gosh, this is 70 years ago, they emigrated like a lot of Dutch people did to Indonesia.
Speaker: And then things got a bit rough there with the independence movement. They actually got married in Indonesia um and they had two options. One is go back to Holland or the other option is try something new. And in those days, the choices were the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Speaker: And for some reason, New Zealand had the most strict entry requirements and they naively thought that or it must be the best for thing to New Zealand. i don't know. That's the Dutch thing. So I am officially a citizen of New Zealand. I also have Dutch citizenship because Dutch law says any child born out of a Dutch wedding is Dutch.
Speaker: and so and But then we moved around a lot. We moved back to Holland for a while and back in New Zealand and in Australia, up in Papua New Guinea. and But at one stage, we all moved back to Belgium. And I lived in Planaken, which, as you know, is just over the border from both Maastricht in Holland and Aachen in Germany.
Speaker: And so I spent quite a bit of time in Belgium and really liked the the culture there. In fact, I like just about everything about it except for real estate, because for some reason, the rules are quite onerous. Taxes are quite high. Transfer taxes are quite high, as you know.
Speaker: And um even though I attempted many times and I set up companies in Belgium, I never actually ended up investing in real estate in Belgium. and But we do have this shared fondness of the Belgian culture and even language as and a somewhat ob obscure expatriate Dutch person.
Speaker: I prefer the Flemish spoken in Belgium often to the Dutch spoken in in Holland. The Dutch is very harsh and almost rude, whereas Flemish to our ears sounds still very and pleasant and traditional, if you like. Anyway, that's probably got lots of meanings that aren't intended. But...
Speaker: And that comes across to me. and But the real estate thing, so my parents, you know, they're products of the war. They were young when the war broke out. They never had a chance to go to university. So they indoctrinated in my sister and I this notion that if you want to do well in life, you have to study hard and get a degree.
Speaker: Because in their minds, people with degrees were the ones who did really well. So without thinking, Mathieu, when I finished high school, off I went to university. And in my first week at university, I looked around at the people with the degrees, the professors, the tutors, the and it occurred to me that they were anything but rich, right? They drove very modest little cars to tiny homes and they had very modest clothes.
Speaker: And I thought there's something wrong with this formula that degrees equates to wealth. And so I took it upon myself to make a study of the rich. I wanted to know what is it that the rich have in common?
Speaker: thinking that if I could identify maybe 30 or 40 things that the rich had in common, and if I could emulate them, then I'd have a good shot at being rich. Well, it's a good theory, maybe, but the problem was I could hardly find anything that the rich had in common.
Speaker: It wasn't age, it wasn't gender, it wasn't earth or country where you're living, or whether you were the first born in the family or the last born or in between, I could only find two things that the rich had in common. And one of them was that almost without exception, the rich either made their money or held their wealth in property.
Speaker: And I thought, that's all it is. I can give that a go. i didn't even know if I could believe it. But that's sort of the impetus, Mateo, as to how I got started in real estate. I love that. Yeah, that's a very interesting way to look at it and studying it. Yeah, I think many people grow up in in that thinking like, oh, you have to study hard and then you work hard in your job.
Speaker: And I've been there myself as well. I was in the nine to five and I thought this was it. This is like what I was meant to do. But then I became depressed and I decided to hit the road and and discover what projects are out there in the world that are are doing great and And then I discovered a lot of very interesting things and I'm using that today.
Speaker: So back to you, Dolph, like in the course of your career, like I've, I've, I know all your studies, I studied them. you You've done some amazing stuff in, in real estate. What was like the, what the the coolest project you've ever worked on in the course of your career that, that kind of stands out in, in what you've created?
Speaker: Well, I've sort of made a reputation for myself and made most of my money by using my brain power, because to come up with a new idea. yeah And when you think about it, the world comes along exactly the same generation after generation until they're infused with a new idea.
Speaker: So the steam engine kind of started the industrial revolution. And until then, we couldn't manufacture large scale things because we didn't have the horsepower literally to do it. um So, you know, the introduction of the steam engine changed things. I guess before that, the introduction of the wheel changed things.
Speaker: And then, you know, it's a well-known cliche, but the introduction of the computer changed things too because it enabled automation. We used to have armies of not accountants, but bean counters basically just adding up numbers and columns to give to the accountants. Well, computers automated all of that.
Speaker: And you could argue that now again, And AI is going to change things and get rid of a lot of jobs. And most people fear change, Mateo. This is what I found. And one of the things I admire in you is you don't just fear change. You you hunt it down. You crack it down and see what can we do with this.
Speaker: So I've always done that with real estate. And I know you can become rich in real estate by just buying something at today's market price. And then you just sit on it for 10 years. And chances are the rents will have crept up a little bit every year and the value of the property will have crept up.
Speaker: And the mortgage that you used to buy the property because you don't have any money, right? So we need to borrow money from the bank. The mortgage has gone down in value, both in literal euro terms or dollar terms or yen terms, because we're slowly paying it down, but also because through the forces of inflation, the value of that mortgage is being eroded, whereas the value of your property is going up. So you've got a double win.
Speaker: The value of the mortgage, the number of units of currency used to describe that it's going down through inflation, but people are bidding more and more prices on this property. So that increasing gap also known as equity is for your benefit.
Speaker: So what I've done over the years is I haven't just waited for property to slowly and incrementally go up. I've done things to that property to fundamentally change what it is.
Speaker: This is a crucial point, Matthieu, because if you think of any other investment, Bitcoin and people have become millionaires on Bitcoin. Do I wish I'd bought a thousand Bitcoin when they were two cents each? Of course I do.
Speaker: But if I'd spent money to buy a thousand Bitcoins at two cents and a thousand of everything else that seemed good at the time, I wouldn't have had any money left over for real estate. Right. But what and when you look at Bitcoin and gold and silver and platinum and unit trusts and certificates of deposit and treasury bills and stocks and bonds, once you've bought them, there is nothing you can do to fundamentally change the value.
Speaker: But with real estate, and you're a prime example of how it's done, but the thing I love about real estate is once you've bought it, you can do things to change the value. So your question was, what's one of the greatest examples I can think of?
Speaker: And the example that comes to mind is I was living in New Zealand at the time. It was the 1980s. even though New Zealand is a small country, we were at that stage the largest exporters in the world of sheep meat and wool, wool coming off sheep's backs.
Speaker: In fact, at one stage, New Zealand had only 3 million people. And at the same time, they had 72 million sheep. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That was around the 80s or do you know? Yes, it was all through the early 80s.
Speaker: We were producing so many sheep that we even built coal store in Bahrain and we had three million sheep carcasses there. And then one day they woke up and realized that when the Arabs bought sheep, they wanted live sheep, not frozen ones. So that was sort of ah a waste of time and effort and energy and money.
Speaker: But apart from that, the government had a subsidy on sheep. And this is an example of where subsidies have good intent, but they have the the wrong effect. And for them government rules are created with good intent, but they have the inverse effect of that intended. So there was a $10 per head of sheep subsidy on sheep.
Speaker: So a lot of farmers... Yeah, $10. They stocked their paddocks full of sheep, not because they could make money by having them, but they got the subsidy. On 70 million. So that was actually costing the government 700 million a year.
Speaker: Exactly. No, not of a year, sheep. So in 1984, we got a new government and the government abolished the subsidy. They just canceled it. And a result of that is that one third of sheep farmers literally went broke.
Speaker: but yeah they They went bankrupt. And there was blood on the streets. You know, they used to walk the sheep through the streets out of the capital to the government building called the Beehive. to protest or what the government had done to all these farmers and the government should continue the subsidy and waste taxpayer money to subsidize an industry for which there was no market. I mean, it was they got rid of the subsidy. A third of sheep farmers went bankrupt. So there were lots of sheep farms on the market and no one knew what to do with them.
Speaker: and And I thought at first, I'm not going to buy a sheep farm because there's no money in it. Right. But then I had an idea and I did buy them. I bought as many as I could.
Speaker: They'd all gone bankrupt. I got them for what we call pennies on the dollar. Right. They were very cheap. And then I planted a crop and I waited five years for my first harvest.
Speaker: And the harvest was grapes. I turned these sheep farms into vineyards. And the 1980s was a time when wine was becoming very popular in the world.
Speaker: They wanted more vineyards and more wine. Consumption was going up. The value of these farms went up by a factor of 10. Wow. Wow. and And, you know, later on, I can pull up some photos of that of the the sheep farm. So it's an example of fundamentally changing the value of the real estate that you're working with.
Speaker: And you don't need to do it by, you know, bulldozing the paddocks flat and planting crops and all that. You might have a commercial premise and the tenant might be a thrift store. You know what I mean by that? A goodwill store where people donate things they don't want anymore and then others sell them and the money goes to charity.
Speaker: And say they're paying, you know, a a hundred euros a square meter. And it's not a very good business. It's not very profitable. And the tenant, the thrift store doesn't even know if they want to continue.
Speaker: And then in the meantime, you've got a coffee shop chain. It could be an international chain like Starbucks, or it could be a local Portuguese chain or Belgian chain or Dutch chain or French chain. But they want to rent and the going rent on coffee shops, depending on where, of course, but it might be 200 euros a square meter.
Speaker: So by replacing the tenant paying 100 euros a square meter, the thrift shop, with a coffee shop paying 200 euros a square meter, any bank and any valuer or appraiser would say the value of that commercial building has just doubled.
Speaker: Many people find this hard to believe, but the value of a commercial building is literally ah multiple of the rental income that it generates. So if you and I can figure out a way of doubling the rental, we've doubled the value.
Speaker: and So there are many things you can do to real estate to massively increase the value. And you mentioned I've written a few books. I think I've written 23 books. of kind of and But one of them has this title, and it's the longest title on Amazon. It's called 101 Ways to Massively Increase the Value of Your Real Estate Without Spending Much Money. Yes.
Speaker: but It's not just that there are two examples. You turn bankrupt sheep farms into vineyards and you turn thrift stores into coffee shops. It's not as if they're the only two things you can do. I wrote this book with 101 ideas. And by the way, was it easy to come up with 101 ideas?
Speaker: No, it was tough. It was tough to limit it to 101. There were so many more, you know. That's amazing. Yeah, I love your energy. I love your your story, like the amount of enthusiasm you have to doing it. And and just like you, it sounds like as if you would just grab everybody, you know, and like get into real estate, do something amazing, create value for the world. ah Like, and and the beautiful part is like, okay, you're you're getting richer as a person as well, but you're also helping people like that coffee shop that they didn't have a place. Now they have an amazing place.
Speaker: and And how beautiful it is that when you can find a ways to increase the value or how you can increase the rent of a property that that just magically increases the value of of real estate, which is amazing.
Speaker: um But I think with with and COVID hitting, that also obviously had a huge impact on a lot of other commercial real estate, more specifically on office buildings, right? like commercial andly office buildings have kind of collapsed. How did you see that coming? did you like um How was that time to, as a real estate evolved in ah in in during COVID and and after COVID, how how did you deal with that?
Speaker: um Well, I didn't predict it. I didn't know it was happening. People often ask me to share what I see in my crystal ball. And a little secret I want to share with you is I actually do have a crystal ball.
Speaker: But the harsh truth that I also feel compelled to share with you is that my crystal ball has proven itself to be no more accurate than anyone else's crystal ball. Meaning i can't see into the future.
Speaker: and But without going on too big of what might seem like a tangent, I want to talk about a book. And the book is called The Black Swan. It's not my book. It's by a Lebanese author called Nassim Taleb.
Speaker: And it's a great book. It shouldn't be confused with a movie of the same name, which is sort of a fictional fantasy story. But The Black Swan is literally about black swans because the world knew, the scientific community knew for centuries that all swans biologically were black. Sorry, I goofed that, but all swans were black, right?
Speaker: You've seen it at Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky Swan Lake, you see white swans. So all swans are white. Everyone knows that. And then somewhere around 1868, 1869, these explorers were crossing the outback of Australia, crossing the desert by camelback, and they came across black swans.
Speaker: Now, the whole world knew that black swans didn't exist, and here they had proof that they did. So the scientific community had to rethink their theories on why all swans were white, because now we have evidence that they're not.
Speaker: There are, in fact, black swans. So Nassim Taleb, the author, uses the the word black swan to signify something that you don't expect to happen, and then it happens anyway.
Speaker: And if well, it could be something that you do expect is going to happen. It's going to rain this week. And then for some reason, it doesn't. So it's an unexpected event. and the And he not only says that it signifies something that's completely unexpected, but he goes further and says most people in their lives, they try to avoid black swans.
Speaker: You know, a tornado is not likely to happen in the azores. So most people ignore it and they don't prepare for it. isn He says what you should do is not try to avoid them or ignore them.
Speaker: You should start to depend on them. You should start to pray for them because it's when there's a black swan that there's a change to the system and there are massive opportunities there.
Speaker: So to get back to your question, could I predict COVID and the glut of office space because everyone had to work at home to be socially distant at first, but then so many workers liked it.
Speaker: And many companies, by the way, they liked it too because they weren't paying crazy rents on all this office space, even though some companies wanted their workers to come back. Not many did, et cetera, et cetera. So there was a glut of office space. Could I predict that? No.
Speaker: But there are some people who are still crying about the fact that offices are empty. And there are other people who've taken advantage of it because we've got a new situation. One way of describing it is as a, you know, cumulative effect of COVID. We had a lot of vacant office buildings and that meant a lot of office owners went broke.
Speaker: And another thing you could say is, oh my gosh, as a result of COVID, we've had a lot of space and buildings that we can now do something with because we could acquire those buildings at a cheap price. So many, as you know, have been converted into apartment buildings.
Speaker: this Now, Is it a cheap conversion? Probably not. But it seems for those people, it was a lot cheaper than buying a piece of land and starting from scratch. They already had the structure there, the walls, they had the piping there. Yes, they needed to install bathrooms and toilets and lavatories and showers and subdivide the rooms differently.
Speaker: That's all true. So many have been converted to and apartments. but Some converted different floors for different purposes, pickleball courses. Yes. You can't turn an office space into a tennis court, but you can turn it into a pickleball court. Yes. And we've seen mixed-use developments where they'll put shops on the the ground floor, like a coffee shop and a restaurant and a hairdressing salon or something, and then maybe one layer of offices and then three layers of apartments. In fact, as you well know, in Belgium and France,
Speaker: They that's how things have been built for centuries. You walk around Brussels or Paris and you've got commercial on the ground floor and it usually offers space that doesn't need window facing the sidewalk pavement footpath, whatever, and then residential for the five remaining floors as a building item Paris of seven floors.
Speaker: So all of this is, and it's it's opportunity. Yes. And, you know, we've seen a building, it had happened yesterday, I read it on Apple News as recently as yesterday, that there was a building in Denver, Colorado, that just sold for two and a half million, and it sold five or six years earlier for 113 million.
Speaker: sir So when you say, could I predict that COVID would have this effect on office space? I'd say no, i i didn't predict COVID. I knew that there'd probably be a pandemic like the great pandemic, you may recall, of the early 20th century, the 1900s, the big influenza that killed millions and millions of people.
Speaker: We knew it was on the cards that something like that would happen again. And by the way, it's going to happen yet again. And it may not be another 100 years before it does. But the thing is not to panic from it. And of course, if you succumb to it, then it it really affected you and fatally. Right.
Speaker: But if you don't, there will be opportunities. And for the owner of the building in Denver who paid 113 million, he lost out big time. But for the person who bought it for two and a half million below replacement, cost that's that's a win.
Speaker: That's huge. Yeah. Yeah. So hello yeah what can we do differently? Exactly. I love this black swan. Um, well, I don't know if it's a theory, but using that like events that happened to actually change the world and and also make real estate more usable. Maybe we don't need more office buildings. We will like, I think COVID enabled us to have a big, a better understanding of what is the quality of life. Maybe we don't have to sit in an office from nine to five.
Speaker: exactly And then we can, and we can, rather have office buildings where you're going to work maybe one or two times a ah week. And then when you finish, you go play pickleball with your colleagues, just one floor down, or and there's other things happening or, or even an indoor garden. And I'm working with, with somebody ah that is now actually creating inside of a building.
Speaker: We're going to make a planetarium. So it's all indoor plants. But then they're going to add augmented reality to it. So you'll be wearing like a glass. And then you look at the plants and all kinds of things happen ah in 3D augmented reality with it.
Speaker: So this becomes like an improvement for the environment of the building because the plants obviously have ah have a great effect, but then people will also pay money to to get that augmented reality experience.
Speaker: yeah And I've visited a museum myself actually in Belgium. And it's it's so cool when you have like the combination of what you can actually see with then 3D things added to it. it's It's very interactive. So I see a lot of opportunities and in that as well. Or or another and firm in Belgium now has like, you when you want to build your house, you can never experience what it is.
Speaker: like to see it in real scale. It's always on a piece of paper. Now there's a company that came up with, ah they will actually project the the floor plan of your house in a huge hallway.
Speaker: And then you go to that space and you can actually live inside your future home before it's being built. So sort in order to do that, you need space. So commercial real estate is always going to be needed for creative ideas.
Speaker: I agree. That's so interesting you say that because I've noticed on Amazon, when I buy something now, not even a piece of furniture, but a silly object of some kind, it says in a little window, would you like to see this in your current home?
Speaker: haven't done it, but the idea is you take a photo inside your home and then they will superimpose the object and scale it to size so that you can see it in your home. So this concept of seeing things with virtual reality and is gaining ground almost instantly imperceptibly, like we don't really notice it because the change is so slow and persistent.
Speaker: But here's an interesting thing. Most of that uses what we now generically call artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence requires a lot of processing power, right? So we need more computer banks.
Speaker: And a lot of computer banks used to be um created to mine for Bitcoin, but that's getting tougher and tougher and using a lot of electricity. So they're scaling that down. But the need for space for service for AI is increasing.
Speaker: So I know of some commercial buildings are being converted to AI processing centers or data centers as they're more commonly called. And again, it's so interesting because you may recall in the olden days of the telephone when we had, it was called POTS. Let me see if I can remember what it stands for. P-O-T is plain old telephone system where you had dial. You're probably not old enough even to remember the rotary dial where you dialed in ring, click, click, click, click. rear click click click click click And the wires would be connected to a central exchange, a building somewhere in town, and it would have little rotary electromechanical actuators that would do a click, click, click on a different contact and connect you to your desired party.
Speaker: That took up an enormous amount of space and electricity. And then As the world slowly went digital, we got digital exchanges and you didn't need all those electromechanical devices moving.
Speaker: It's all done in a slab of silicon. So the need for those exchanges went down. Now, those exchanges were buildings with very few windows because you don't need light in them. So now we have a lot of vacant windowless buildings, and they're the exact buildings that are perfect for turning into data centers because they also don't need windows and they want to keep the heat out.
Speaker: In fact, they want to extract heat from them. So it's just so interesting that as technology evolves, we can repurpose things for something that the original builders of those buildings wouldn't have dreamt of in a million years.
Speaker: But it's just it's a good fit. Yeah, it's amazing. It also reminds me like it's just how you look at things, like perspective that you have when something difficult or things are changing, how you look at it, you can become pessimistic like, oh, this is changing and it's going to impact my life.
Speaker: Like I remember a story that back in the days when the first automobiles, the first cars were being built with by Henry Ford, like it became big that people were complaining that a lot of jobs would be lost by people that clean the streets to um ah put away the horseshit on the streets.
Speaker: This is actually like a campaign. and We can't have automobiles because and there won't be jobs for people to clean the streets and and move away the horseshit. Can you imagine that? There was actual discussions that people were having.
Speaker: And then obviously that became obsolete because the the car was just way better than the horse. like and And that ah you can't stop ah technological advancement. You can be against it. You can argue if it's good or bad for humanity, and but you can't stop it. Like AI as well. People say, oh, AI is bad for us, but it's just how you use it.
Speaker: Right. And we can try and influence it. I'll give you a real life practical example. So, and you know, I created these vineyards. I told you about that just on this call. But the interesting thing, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit this because it's not socially popular to have this vineyard.
Speaker: a physical anomaly, but I don't like wine. I don't drink it. Even though at one stage I was producing 25 tons a year, I never had a crate of it shipped to my home so they could tell my friend, this is from a vineyard, would you like it?
Speaker: I just don't like it, it tastes to me like vinegar. I'd rather have mango juice or water. But having said that, I do happen to like coffee, right? A bit of a coffee connoisseur.
Speaker: And fortunately for me, as my life has evolved, it's also the same period of time in the history of humankind that coffee has become more popular. Because I'm you.
Speaker: When my parents arrived in New Zealand, there was no such thing as a coffee shop. People drank tea. It's a very British thing. You have tea and they had pubs for beer, no wine. um So coffee shops have become more popular. And I've been a big proponent of putting coffee shops into commercial premises. I gave the thrift store to a coffee shop.
Speaker: I've started a lot of coffee shops. I got in tenants in there and an interesting tangent. And I go on so many tangents when I speak about here that I sometimes forget what I was talking about. anyway, Here's the tangent. I once had a piece of real estate, commercial real estate that I thought would be ideal for a coffee shop.
Speaker: So I advertised that as such, and after three months, I couldn't get a single person to take on a lease to start a coffee shop. And I thought, you know what? I'll start it myself.
Speaker: So I spent about $25,000. It was in the US, a US dollar, about 25,000 euros. ah us dollars about twenty five thousand euros and to buy the furniture and the crockery and the cutlery and the barista machine, the coffee machine. Those are expensive.
Speaker: A fridge and all the things you need. And I started it. And you were standing in the cafe? Yeah, and I was there. I had to have it. So I wanted to make myself the quality control officer. So every day to make sure the quality was good. That a good job.
Speaker: And then after about three months, I sold the business and I sold it to a tenant and for $30,000. And here's the interesting thing. My friend said to me, Dolph, you worked hard for three months to make a profit of $5,000.
Speaker: And I said, no, I didn't. I made half a million dollars. And they said, you're crazy. We know that you spent 25,000 because you told us and we know that you sold it for 30,000. The profit is 5,000, not half a million.
Speaker: And I said, no, I'm not a lunatic. Before I had a vacant premise and now I've got a tenant who's paying 50,000 year in rent. And remember, I said a moment ago, the value of a commercial property is a multiple of its rental income.
Speaker: How much is the multiple usually? Well, the cap rates at the time were 10%. So that 50,000 divided by 10% is half a million. I increased the value of that property by half a million dollars by having a tenant who was willing to pay 50,000 a year.
Speaker: And the pretext was putting a coffee shop in there. um So again, it's thinking differently. Most people say, ah, pleased they don't own that commercial building. It's got a vacant space and they can't get a tenant. They tried for three months. Am I ever glad I don't own that?
Speaker: Whereas my brain goes, man, what else could we put in there? And if coffee's not popular, what is popular? This podcast is brought to you by the Garden of Your Dreams Masterclass.
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Speaker: Then the Garden of Your Dreams Masterclass is for you. I love that. That's so brilliant. Now, I want to bring it back even more to to the what you did in New Zealand and what you know about my work as a landscape architect and what this podcast is obviously also about is how we can create ah and ah ah beautiful world and do good in business. What do you think is the biggest opportunity with real estate meaning to do good for the environment and ah create a good business and use your systems that that obviously have worked ah for many years?
Speaker: Well, ah you know, sometimes the best thing for an environment is to do nothing, just leave it as it is. I read this week about some rich, I think he was a Canadian, and he is obviously a gazillionaire, but he spent several hundred million dollars buying, I think it was 114,000 hectares of land in the Amazon jungle.
Speaker: And what he wants to do with it is absolutely nothing. Nothing. He did that to prevent others from buying it and chopping down all the trees and planting even more crops and having all the rich soil, rich in nutrients erode and flow into the rivers and go out to sea.
Speaker: So, you know, sometimes the best thing we can do is absolutely nothing. and I've done a few things that ah that sort of on the borderline between being good for the economy or not.
Speaker: I've got a current example that I think is actually ah really, and really good. I'll get onto that in a minute. But the one I did in Arizona. And Arizona is landlocked. That means it doesn't border the sea anywhere. And there are more boats per capita in Arizona than either Florida or California.
Speaker: yes a lot of And that's because there are 76 lakes in Arizona, of which 72 are man-made.
Speaker: and And so I i had the situation where I had 168 acres. I know the numbers in acres because America, for some reason that I can't understand, even having lived there for a couple of decades, is they haven't made the jump to the metric system.
Speaker: It's very confusing. France went metric with the the revolution in 1789. The Netherlands followed in 1820. Mexico, America's so-called poor neighbor to the south, they went metric in 1840.
Speaker: America is still struggling to go there. Anyway, 168 acres. So to give a perspective, that's probably around 70 hectares roughly to give you. um And no one knew what to do with it. So I started digging a hole.
Speaker: It was a big hole because I had 24 earth moving machines, scrapers and dumpsters and all that. And they worked three shifts every day, three eight hour shifts, so 24 hours a day.
Speaker: And they spent three months digging the hole. and And when they finished digging it, then I started filling the hole with water. Maybe I could show I can. Oh, yeah. That would be awesome to see that.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll see if I can find this one. Oh, yes, here it is. And if I share this, see that and maybe I go play. Can you see this on a big screen? Yes, perfect.
Speaker: So this is literally the land as it was when I had it, 160 acres. Oh, and I don't know I can. Oh, yes, here's another shot of it. Which is just desert, pretty much, for listeners. It's just desert.
Speaker: And it wasn't worth very much what you could do with it. And here you could see I've got poles with markers on it where the scrapers had to go and scrape the dirt. And that's some of the machinery that was there. Wow. All Caterpillar gear. and It fleets them. was It was a massive operation.
Speaker: Wow. And here you can see how they're scraping the dirt. um And let me see if we get and here is a ah shot from so the hole I was thinking was a big, long thing with two little circles at the end.
Speaker: m And there's another view of it. You'll figure out what it is in a minute. And this is where we landed the helicopter on what was going to be an island in the water. And then this is when the hole was finally dug. And then we started filling it with water. It took three months to fill with water.
Speaker: Yeah. And there we are slowly filling it and it's getting higher and higher. But eventually what we had is I created a pair of water ski legs. This is amazing. And, you know, houses on the side, the poles, you could see where the, plate you can still, I can't get my pointer to work on the screen. But anyway, and we had jetties there and it's a water ski park. So people who live there, and they can have their boat and you put a flag up, you want to go water skiing and everyone gets 15 minutes to race up and down the lake and then turn around the island.
Speaker: And um so, you know, would it have been better leaving the desert as desert? Maybe. No, I have to disagree because you regenerated the desert. Now there's trees growing. Exactly. it's It's better off than it was before. I can tell you that.
Speaker: Exactly. And the thing is that we do lose water to evaporation. In fact, it gets so hot, we can lose up to a couple of centimeters a day. yeah We have a lot of aquifers underground and we didn't have to buy water from anywhere or get it from anywhere or truck it in or flow it in through pipes. We just tapped into our own aquifer underground.
Speaker: said well and So anyway, I think that's the last one. Oh, no, there's another shot. yeah But that's one thing we did there. um But then, you know, I want to talk about and another project that I'm involved with kind of now.
Speaker: I don't know how I get. I know I've got my mouse back. Here, while I've got it, these ones here, because I talked about the vineyards. I didn't realize they were coming next. So I'll show some on those too. So this is the kind of a territory in New Zealand. It's beautiful in New Zealand. mean, geologically, it's stunning.
Speaker: But this is where I converted these sheep farms into vineyards. And here you can see the rows of um vines of of grapes. well And then I learned a lot about winemaking that I didn't know. I learned why we have rose bushes at the end of each line of grape vines.
Speaker: And they're like the canary in the coal line, where if there's any disease that could affect the, yeah it manifests in the roses much more quickly. So you can take action more quickly.
Speaker: Exactly. Yeah, you can tell it's a little while ago. and here you also see fans. You can see one on the left. It's hard to see because it's right by a power pole too.
Speaker: But we fans there and they aren't like windmills that generate electricity when the wind blows. and they work in the other way. We feed them electricity and they create airflow. And the reason for that is when it gets frosty, the worst thing for grapes is to be frozen because of destroying cell structure for the grape making process.
Speaker: So by having airflow over the paddock of grapes, and then it stops the frost from setting in. Well... You did become a wine expert without even... Well, yeah, you could do it. And even a water ski expert, because you saw those legs there, but they have to have a particular angle so that wake, you know, the wake, the wave behind the boat, it dies down as quickly as possible. It turns out it's 16 and a half degrees. 16 and a half degrees.
Speaker: Yeah, going down as quickly as possible. That's amazing. The other thing you need to account for in the lakes is you get mosquito larvae, right? Lakes attract all kinds of water things like birds, but also mosquitoes.
Speaker: So you need fish that will eat the mosquito larvae, but you also need fish that handle algae blooms. And sometimes the fish that handle mosquito larvae eat the fish that handle algae b bloom. So you need to choose your species of fish very carefully so that they don't eat each other.
Speaker: And yet you get rid of those two problems because a lake full of algae or a lake full of mosquitoes is not popular. I don't know what comes after. Oh, that's another story. But anyway, okay, there we go. So, um yes, no, it's all interesting.
Speaker: So that's one thing and that we can do with land, as we said, like turning, you know vacant desert into water ski lakes. And I agree with you. It became a little oasis because of the water there. Plants grew that brought bird life in that brought all kinds of things.
Speaker: um The other thing that we have, and again, I knew this from my time in New Zealand, we had 72 million sheep. Right now, there are about 10 million cows in New Zealand.
Speaker: And I didn't think much about cow farming. I did have a commercial building in New Zealand. And one of my tenants was what's called the Dairy Farmers Association. So this is a loose grouping representing all the dairy farmers. And they were big industry, but I didn't think about it.
Speaker: And then my background, Mathieu, you probably know, is electrical engineering. i ended doing a PhD in that, and I worked on some fun high-tech projects. And I spend a bit of my time doing technology transfer. I help people with a brilliant invention be able to take it to the world and sell it. And I was approached through people who had this Polish inventor.
Speaker: And he'd come up with what they call a biomass digester. What it does is it takes the output of dairy farms like manure, or as you described the horse stuff in New York is shit, but it takes manure or the shit.
Speaker: um And because there are a lot of gases that come off it, unpleasant odors and effluent, uranium gases, greenhouse gases. So he processes that and turns it into both electricity, which you can then sell, and high-grade methane.
Speaker: Wow. So I started inquiring about this and I happened to be down in New Zealand in November and I stopped by and saw a friend of mine, I've known him for 20 or 30 years and he's a dairy farmer.
Speaker: And I said, I'm just curious, you know, and what prevents you from increasing the size of your herd, your dairy herd? And he said, well, interesting, you'd think it'd be the rate at which we can grow grass, but it's got nothing to do with it.
Speaker: The size of our herd is dependent on how much effluent we produce. And the government comes around and monitors that regularly. And depending on how much urea you're putting onto the land and other things, that they they tell you how many cows you can have. they said...
Speaker: What if we could have a machine that takes that effluent and processes into three things? One is electricity, one is methane, and one is water, water that you can spread on your farm.
Speaker: He said, well, that would be brilliant. We could increase the size of our farm. He said, but it's even more interesting than that. There are many farms here that are sheep farms still, but they're not very profitable, but they aren't allowed to convert them because there's already a saturation of urea and other dairy byproducts.
Speaker: He said, if that machine truly would work, then we could buy those farms. And in New Zealand, they're going for about 40,000 New Zealand dollars per hectare. Forget what the exchange rate is of the New Zealand and dollar. It doesn't matter. 40,000 units. And by turning them from sheep farms to dairy farms, they'd be worth $65,000 per hectare. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: per hecta If this machine works and we can generate electricity and methane and sell it and run it profitably, and we buy a thousand hectare farm, which would be $40 million, dollars and turn it into $65 million, isn't that a way of making $25 million dollars by applying an idea that we've been told about in a different geographic region?
Speaker: and get back to the land, the land would be better off for it because there'd be less of this horrible effluent that's really a problem for the land. That's a brilliant idea. love that. And that's actually connected to farming, which I grew up on a farm. And that makes a lot of sense to to close cycles and and re reuse what people may um think of as waste, which is actually a ah very valuable thing product because actually back in the 1800s, the most valuable thing on a farm was was the was the manure that was often stored in the middle of the farm and they would protect it even by gates because people would steal it.
Speaker: So maybe we're going back to that in in that sense that we can create ah sustainable energy because it's yeah it's there and if we don't use it, it just evaporates.
Speaker: So ah turning it into methane makes a lot of sense. having sustainable energy from while you're also producing high quality milk because New Zealand, actually New Zealand, Ireland and the Azores of all places where I'm now are the three best places on the planet to milk to make ah milk because. Oh, on the basis of one.
Speaker: You mean food supply or quality of the air? Quality of the, um ah why is it? Or why it's it has to do with ah rainfall, soil soil type?
Speaker: And yeah, just like a good environment for the cows. Right, right. Like here in the Azores, I'm on a volcanic soil, which is extremely rich. its It's crazy. It's like full of minerals.
Speaker: and And that grass grows within a week. You have like knee high grass here in the Azores. That's interesting because New Zealand is like volcanic too. But yeah, very rich soil. Very interesting. Wow.
Speaker: but damn you very rich so a very interesting wow Yeah, so it's all a matter of what can we do to make better use of the land? It's just exploiting it and extracting as many dollars as we can. It's how can we have less pollutants because people are going to consume milk anyway.
Speaker: You know, and that's a whole other argument. Should we drink milk? We're humans. We have one stomach. Cows have two. I don't want to get into that argument. if If milk products are going to be used, then there will be cows. So how can we make our cow farms friendlier to the environment?
Speaker: Exactly. Yeah. And that's what you're doing. it and I love that already just by asking you this this main question, how can we use real estate? You've already come up with like numerous ideas. And I like all of the approaches because you could say, okay, I'm just going to focus on commercial real estate and optimizing that, making a lot of money. And then all the money that I make, I'm going to buy it.
Speaker: ah natural areas and I'm going to reforest them or re re ah reestablish it into nature. And i highly encourage people to do that ah because we need people we need rich people that reinvest their money in in the natural world because yeah our planet needs it.
Speaker: more than ever. But at the same time, if you want to get more creative, like you you're also doing, it's like, okay, we can look at solutions that actually have a positive impact directly, which is related to farming, ah because farming is the biggest land use in the world.
Speaker: So if we can change farming, then it's going to have a massive impact on on our environment as well. Right. No, I fully agree. Yeah. So, yes, I'm always looking, Mathieu, what can we adapt or apply or do to make better use of this, to have, you know, better use of resources?
Speaker: um And that's why I love, you know, I'm a technology geek, but I'm coating buildings with panels that collect solar energy and convert it to electricity, not just solar panels that you put on the roof and hopefully out of sight, but they've they've got windows now that have some...
Speaker: and of collecting energy, even though they're translucent, you can see through them. And I love that technology. Yes, there's so much interesting things in, B it's all about being creative about like, okay, what can we improve? How can we do better and using that to actually create value? Because there's also a huge misconception. I feel like in the world is like, oh, if we want to save the planet, it's gonna, we're gonna have to live, um, less well, we're gonna have to be, we need to be taxed more. We need to like change our lifestyle. We need like,
Speaker: This is like the paradigm, like either we have to live in in like a luxurious life or we have to save the planet. We can't have both, but we can actually have both just by the examples that you've given. There's there's so many opportunities to to do something ah good for for the planet and do really good in business.
Speaker: In fact, I strongly believe that they they the better it's for the environment, eventually the better it's actually gonna be for the profitability of a project. ah especially on the medium to long term.
Speaker: So we have to dare to look look further than just a couple of years. yeah yeah Yeah, and be ready for change, you know. and We're going full circle almost coming back to the black swan, but be ready for change because those who were early adopters and got some of the earlier solar panels out there, they're not very efficient anymore.
Speaker: So did they waste their money? or Maybe not. I always think about it when I'm an early adopter, I'm contributing funds to the developers, which helps them spend money to find out what the next level of technology is.
Speaker: it's good doing that. and But even if you have to replace your solar panel, I've got some solar panels that I don't use to collect sunlight and convert it to electricity. I put them in front of these big windows because it's very hot in Arizona.
Speaker: And they're just used as solar screens. They stop the sun from getting in the house because they're blocking, you know, they're not positioned well for collecting maximum electricity. They'd have to be on the roof facing the sun in the middle of the day.
Speaker: and But they serve purposes that. That's okay. You can repurpose things. Yes. And always be thinking. And that that's, you know, to get off the topic a little bit of real estate, but it's still related.
Speaker: I'm lamenting the fact that even though we live in a better world and we've all got social media and we use social media and I contribute it, I'm on social media, I'm doing extraordinarily well. I'm getting as many views as normally people get when they have a different age from me they're at the beginning of the life not the end and they have a different gender from me and they're willing a bit of flesh not so much as to be pornographic but enough to be racy I'm the complete opposite of all of those and yet I'm I'm blown away by how many views I'm getting yes um
Speaker: But the challenge I find with social media is we tend to scroll, we look at something and we look at it long enough to say, oh, I get it. That's funny. Or I get it, but that's not funny. It's disgusting. Or how could they do that? Or how did they do that?
Speaker: And you scroll to the next one and then the next one and four hours will go by. And what's happening, Mateo, is it's training our brains to absorb information. And just long enough, do we understand it or not? Do we get the joke?
Speaker: But we don't ever put our phones down and say, let me think about that. How can I apply that in my life? My point is we're losing the ability to think. Every waking moment is now of consuming information. We watch a rerun on Netflix of something we've seen twice already.
Speaker: And somehow we justify watching it again. We know when the jokes are coming. We know what the joke is. We even laugh again. and But we're not thinking. We've stopped becoming creative. And my biggest fear for the new generation coming through is that they're not thinkers. They're not innovators. They're just absorbers of information, consumers.
Speaker: That's why what you're doing and even you know this podcast, for instance, and spreading the message about what you want to do and better use of land and more sustainability and regenerative. It's so good. it's forcing people to think differently.
Speaker: So I applaud what you do and support what you do. Thank you, Dolf. I really appreciate it. And i also salute you with the content you're putting out on on all social media platforms. It's it's so good because it's it makes people think, oh, I never thought about that. It's it's so fresh and new, even though you've been doing it for such a long time, it it gets people to think like, oh, yeah, you're right. That's that maybe not so good looking real estate property that I walk by. Oh, maybe there's actually a huge opportunity in that rather than say, oh, that's that's a very bad investment if you would ever buy that. I love just that thought alone is worth so much for people to, you you give people the opportunity to put on a new pair of glasses and like, wow, I never thought of that. So that's huge value for, i would say for humanity and and to be able to think outside of the boxes
Speaker: such a precious skill to have and it has to be trained and and you need support. So yeah, I highly encourage people to listen more to your content or or get your trainings. I think um I'm curious, is that still up? Can people still find that online and and how can they actually find out more about what you do and how they can get more training from you?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I'm blessed and cursed with a rather unique name. Like there aren't many people called Dolph, D-O-L-F. Yeah. then, um you know, the name Daruss is short and easy. So Dolph Daruss, I haven't come across any other. So if you do a search on Dolph Daruss, and if you don't know how to spell it, if you do a search on golf real estate or Dolph property, usually I come up.
Speaker: So I'm pretty easy to find. And my website is DolphDeRoos.com. We offer varying programs there. And even with that, Matteo, the world has changed because, you know a couple of decades ago, I do a single email blast about an event I'm running in Las Vegas at, say, 3,000 euros ahead, $3,000. And people would show up. They'd fly in, pay money on airfares and accommodation and come to the event and hopefully enjoy it and learn from it and make much more than their money back.
Speaker: But the internet has changed everything. You can find anything about anyone on the internet and their courses. If the people themselves didn't put their courses up on the internet, then someone would have bought it and ripped it and put it on the internet anyway.
Speaker: So we're finding that the kinds of events we can do to help people are evolving. We're not doing many live events anymore because they're just not the way people learn. So a lot of it is on social media. A lot of it is free.
Speaker: But I'm always offering things because part of my mission in life is to help people. It's not just about the money, it's helping. And what I found is people can read a lot of books on real estate and understand them.
Speaker: But when it comes to deploying it to actually buy something, they know what to do. They know what to look for. They know how to analyze it. They've read that. But they'll come across a building and then they'll say, oh, my gosh.
Speaker: should I buy this or not? Am I being the biggest fool by buying this or and am I buying being an idiot by not buying it? And that's when they want my help. So now what we're doing is we have a program, we call it The Deal Room, where we get together once a month and people submit the deals that they're looking at and they don't know if they're any good.
Speaker: And not only do I look at it and analyze it and give them ideas and opinions on what it is, whether I like it, what what you can do with it, but everyone else on the course says, well, what about this? And you'd be surprised how many other people come up with ideas that I hadn't even thought of.
Speaker: ah's how That's brilliant. Yeah, so that's the sort of thing that we've got going. But if you're interested in any of that, you know, the idea is for people just to find their way to DolphDeRoos.com and see what we've got going on in that moment.
Speaker: And sometimes I do fly outs to people like I had one not too long ago in the UK where I literally flew to his town. It was Bournemouth in the UK. And I spent three days with this client helping him with his real estate acquisitions and his existing portfolio.
Speaker: I think next month I've got one in Germany. These are ah rarer things. And like, I don't do them once a week, but we have that as a possibility. Sometimes I'll bring people into Phoenix and show them what I'm doing there.
Speaker: so yeah, there's always something going on. Nice. You obviously love traveling and we'll will have to get something going here on the Azores. ah to show you the beautiful island and look what's what's happening here. and Yeah, I'm keen to see that. and I've you know traveled a lot. I've i've done more than 4 million miles. And if you do that in a straight line, that's 188 around the world. That's a lot travel.
Speaker: It's literally more than a year of my existence in the air. oh and i think I think that's bizarre. But anyway, it is what it is. number but And all that travel, I've never been to the Azores. I've been to Portugal. I once drove when I was living in Lanarkin, Mathieu. I drove with a couple of buddies all the way from Lanarkin to Oporto in Portugal. Oh, I've also done that. That's a drive, eh?
Speaker: It's a long drive. you do it i'm I'm impressed you did it as well. We took several weeks to do it, you know, going through Luxembourg and France and along the Riviera it is pain and But well what an adventure.
Speaker: Yes. And why would people not do that, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We obviously share a passion of traveling as well. That's very exciting. So yeah. And I can also say like the, what you do with them the deal room, I've been part of your mentoring group as well. And that was so valuable to have that, like, because you're looking at a deal, you don't know, is it actually a good thing or not? So that actually got me to get my first deal as well, which had its ups and downs, but it I did
Speaker: um persist and it it happened so I'm very grateful for that experience and I'm always ah looking for more but yeah thats this is amazing Dolph so thank you very much and ah just want to ask you one more question before we start wrapping it up is that what are you most excited about for the next five years could be in your personal life but probably related to your biggest passion in helping people and and real estate um
Speaker: Gosh, I'm, what am I most excited about? I think everyone's talking about AI and I'm thinking about it a lot too. Some of the stuff that it can do is absolutely astounding.
Speaker: I think that AI is going to change our lives, even your life and your, you know, a bit behind in the time curve than I am. But even in my life, it's going to change things beyond what we can even imagine now.
Speaker: And I'm excited by that because, you know, we we see things happen in a slow format. It's very incremental and we don't realize how big the changes. is But when you stop and think about how things were,
Speaker: Like I remember a time, and this is just revealing my age, but when a phone call was so expensive, I used to call my grandparents who were living in Holland when we were down in New Zealand once a year, and it was only for three minutes. And why?
Speaker: It was so expensive. That's all we could afford. And we would rehearse for most of the day what we were going to say in those three minutes so that we could squeeze it all in. And now it's just free calls. You know, it's... it's it's you So things have changed a lot, but I think they're going to change even more and faster. And the trick is to stay ahead.
Speaker: The thing is, you can usually tell old people when they stopped keeping up with things. You know, they don't don't use a computer. I don't have email or I don't use a mobile phone.
Speaker: So the trick is to just stay in touch with what's happening. And then how can you adapt it? You know, there was a while if if you were traveling then when Internet cafes became really popular, even the neighbors.
Speaker: Because you were traveling and instead of writing postcards to mom and dad back home and waiting four weeks for them to receive it, you could go into an Internet cafe and get on a computer and send them an email.
Speaker: Why we even have Internet cafes? Because no one had these mobile phones that we all have now. that's very randomly pocketgger Computer in your pocket. So they all died. You know, if you invested in a thousand internet cafes around the world thinking that's the future, you would have been wrong.
Speaker: Everything is temporary, including our time on this planet, right? We've got to make every moment count. And what I love about what you're doing is you've got to... dream about going to Portugal and riding some of those surf waves and silly me. I've seen it, but I haven't done it. I used to live in a place called Surfers Paradise. It's on the Gold Coast of Australia.
Speaker: Now, admittedly, I was young. I was eight, eight till 10, but I never went surfing. What a fool I am. You know, maybe we can do that together sometime. You can show me. Yes, I'd love to teach you. Yeah, definitely. Not on a 17 meter wave to start off with. Not at Nazaré in Portugal.
Speaker: Have you heard of that? That's the biggest wave in the world. I have, yeah. I've watched that. I mean, that I'd love to get to that level. But I also know if you do something wrong, it could pummel you. But I use surfing in my analogy, and I've said, you know, in life, often it's a bit like surfing.
Speaker: If you're a bit behind the trend and you're one foot behind that wave and you're trying to catch the wave, you'll paddle like crazy, you'll struggle, and you'll exhaust yourself, and you'll never catch that wave. But if you're one foot ahead of the wave, if you saw it coming, you did your homework, you got into position, and you got up on your board, you can ride that wave all the way in and not only that, you can stand there and enjoy the view and enjoy the progress.
Speaker: So the irony is, and I'm admitting this to you, is that I've used the analogy of surfing and saying, get up there and do stuff when I haven't actually been surfing. So maybe there's something we could do together someday.
Speaker: Yes, I'd love to. I'd love to teach you that. And I think, Dolph, on that note, I want to thank you from the depth of my heart for taking the time to come on my podcast and share your amazing knowledge, your enthusiasm, your the value you've already created and The fact that you're like not slowing down at all, you're just like pushing the throttle even more just to inspire more people, to help more people. So thank you very much for doing that. It's it's worked with me. So i'm I'm very excited about the future and where this is going. Well, thank you. Very kind words. My absolute pleasure. I hope to see you again soon. And thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker: Thank you, Dolph. Bye.
