Starting your Assisted Living Investing Today

Transcript

00:00:00
Hey friend, it is Brandon Gustafson with Assisted Living Investing. Excited to have you here. I help beginners like you launch their assisted living business in the next 12 months and excited to have you on our live today. Today we're going to be talking about some of the things that you should be doing, the basics for how to get started with your assisted living business in the next 12 months. How to actually do this here in 2025 with all the crazy things that are going on in the world.

00:00:28
And as things adjust, I want to give you a little bit of guidance on that. So excited to have you here with me today. We will have some time for questions here at the end of the video. So for those of you that are watching live, make sure you type in your questions. I'll remind you again as we get a little bit further on and we'll have time to answer those for you.

00:00:47
And if you can't make it live, that's totally fine. Make sure you type in your questions anyways, because it oftentimes leads to these types of conversations and these types of videos for you to answer your questions and help you along your path as you're trying to launch your assisted living business.

00:01:04
here in 2025 and for those of you that are brand new type in newbie down below love seeing all the new people here as you are trying to get started and try to figure things out as as you're like you've heard about this you think it's a cool idea I'm I'm here to help you and guide you along the path to launching your assisted living business and helping you be successful so I

00:01:25
Make sure you're typing in your questions, type in newbie. And I also want to remind you to go and grab your free resource, the business plan checklist at assistedlivinginvesting.net slash BP checklist. Really cool resource there. And it's going to actually hit on a lot of what we're talking about today and some of the things that you should be doing to help you launch your assisted living business successfully and get things moving along.

00:01:50
So with that, let's hop over here. I'll give you a little bit of background on who I am before we get started, why I'm qualified to teach you some of this. So my name is Brandon Gustafson. I own and operate two assisted living facilities. I've done this since 2020.

00:02:05
I operate out of state as well. I live in Utah and I have a facility in Colorado and another one in Idaho. So I've been doing this. We actually were just at my facility last week in Idaho and had a really good visit there. We're making some really fun changes in the house. We did a bunch of painting and artwork and things like that. And I was going to do a video and I forgot to take my gimbal with me. So next time I go up, we should be able to do something like that. But it was fun to go

00:02:34
Hang out with the residents, see them, get to see how things are going. They love the changes at the house. And that was a lot of fun to see and just interacting with our staff there. I mean, it's the reason why I love being in this job is the people, getting to interact with them. It was a ton of fun.

00:02:54
uh i have as i've gone through this i've also secured one and a half million dollars in sba funding so i understand the funding process just kind of the struggles that you have to go through as you're trying to get funding as you're trying to get started as you're trying to make progress and again we're going to talk a little bit about that in in today's video

00:03:11
And I have a master's in health care administration. So I worked in the health care industry for over a decade, have a lot of experience in this world, both like on the payer side and on the provider side and the administration side of things. And I've worked in this industry for a long time and can give a little bit of guidance as to what I'm seeing and how things.

00:03:32
politics can play into healthcare. It's already a heavily regulated area and help you kind of navigate those things because it can be very confusing for sure. But I've got a lot of that experience and can help guide you as you're trying to launch your assisted living business. So I'm

00:03:50
With that, let's hop over to the things that you should be doing in 2025 to really help you make progress and launch your assisted living business and help you get to the point where you're actually doing this. The first thing, and I tell this to people all the time, and

00:04:09
So I have a five phase process. For those of you that have never watched my videos, five phase process, phase one is building a foundation. And a huge component of that is hitting on your business plan. You got to like you have to nail it. You have to do such a good job with the business plan. And there's several reasons why.

00:04:29
It is going to give you direction, give you personally, it's going to give you direction as you're trying to figure out how to move things forward, where you want this to go, what population you want to serve, how big the house is going to be, where it's going to be located, all of those things. Writing this down, thinking through it, making a plan, it gives you direction and confidence as you're trying to move forward with it.

00:04:55
So that's that's number one. It helps you out, gives you clarity. And it's such an important piece of getting this put together. The other reasons why you need this is people are going to ask for it. And so you might as well build this up front to give yourself clarity so you can speak more intelligently to it.

00:05:14
and also make it so you don't have to go and reinvent the wheel every single time that you are talking to a lender or getting questions from somebody at zoning because they will ask for it. Lenders, it is one of the things that they ask for

00:05:29
like right off the bat, they will say, okay, we want to see your tax returns. We want to see somebody like your, your personal finances. We need some fake statements. And then if you can also send us your business plan and then we'll start from there. Like those are really the three things that they're going to ask you for.

00:05:46
upfront, day one, first conversation, they're going to ask you for the business plan. I've talked with several lenders, lenders I've worked with, lenders that I'm building relationships with to help people like you launch their assisted living business. And every single one that I talk to tells me,

00:06:05
Make sure they have the business plan. Make sure that they have the underwriting. Make sure all these foundational things that I teach you to do, that is what they want to see. So I don't just tell you that because I have incredible resources that can help you out with it because I absolutely do. The Launchpad bundle is a great resource for helping you do that. So assistedlivinginvesting.net slash launchpad if you want to go check that out. But I can help you do it. But it is the thing that lenders are going to want to see more than anything.

00:06:35
So you want to make sure that you have that in there. Local municipalities as well. I was working with somebody in my mastermind program and we were going through the process of trying to figure out what was needed for the house. And the municipality was actually asking for business plans. They were asking for that type of information, not because they're going to read a 10 to 20 page business plan, but because there's information in there that they want to see.

00:07:03
They want to see how many residents are you going to have in the house and what's your plan with things like how are you going to operate? How many staff are going to be in there? Does it need to be wheelchair? Like, are you working with a population that deals with wheelchairs? What about fire? Like, are you thinking about those types of things? They want that because they have questions around it.

00:07:25
This is going to help you, number one, answer their questions when they ask it. Or number two, if they ask for the business plan specifically, you've got it ready to go. So it helps you out both ways. And then state is also going to want to see that. They'll want to see it when you're trying to go through the licensing process. I've seen states ask for this before. Some of them don't, but they're going to ask you questions that if you had a business plan already, then you'd be able to answer those questions very quickly. And having those things in place,

00:07:55
It makes your life so much more simple. So a huge thing for you there is just hitting on the business plan, doing it well and getting it to the point where people know what they're getting into as they're trying to look at what you're doing with your assisted living business. You have to focus on the business plan. That's the first thing you got to do.

00:08:17
Number two is determine your starting point. And you're going to flesh this out in your business plan. But as you're trying to get started here, you've got a there's there's kind of four ways that you can get into this. Are you going to buy an existing facility? Are you going to buy a home and renovate that home?

00:08:34
Are you going to lease a home and maybe do some renovations to get it ready? Or are you going to build it from the ground up? I'd love to hear from you. What are the things that you're looking at doing? Are you going to buy existing? Type in existing down below. Are you going to buy and renovate? Type in renovate down below. Are you going to lease? Type in lease down below. Or are you going to do something from the ground up and type in construction down below? We'd love to just kind of see where are people at in this process.

00:08:58
and what are the questions that you have about that because there's a lot of a lot of things that go into each of those areas there's a lot of similarities there's a lot of things you have to do that are the same same pieces of that puzzle but they just kind of fit in differently and you have to go about it a different way a slightly different way for each one so like specifically what are some questions there that you have that you need some help with as you're trying to figure out

00:09:25
the starting point and which one is best for you i actually have an awesome tool for you um that can help you decide um between buying an existing facility and buying a home and renovating it so if you go to assistedlivinginvesting.net profit dash pat no not no dash assistedlivinginvesting.net profit path one word um i've got a resources just for you is free um and you can go grab that and use that to see hey which one of these is going to be best for me

00:09:54
and it has a little bit of a guide there so you can really make some good progress on that so again assistedlivinginvesting.net profit path uh the next thing after you've kind of determined that starting point and how you want to to move things along you've got to figure out who you're going to work with all right so um this is um the partnerships that you're going to do this with and there that you could do a partnership or maybe you don't need to um there's a lot of you and i know

00:10:19
there are several of you out there that they just want to do this by themselves and and or they they think they want to do it by themselves because they don't want to lose control or they don't know how to go and develop a partnership with somebody or how to develop a relationship with somebody so they think they have to do it by themselves I want to tell you that that's not the case that you can do this with a partner and it's all about going and or or an investor and

00:10:45
It's all about going and building relationships with people. It's such an important and underutilized way of working through this. Those partners don't have to be somebody that you work with today or ever, but building those partnerships are going to be key in helping you be successful.

00:11:05
I'm going to use Serge Lopescu. He has a YouTube channel. You probably have watched him. He's quite a bit bigger than mine. He's been doing it for longer than I have. But Serge and I, a few years ago, I reached out to him and kind of told him, hey, I'm doing this YouTube thing and I have my own facilities. I'd love to just bounce some ideas off of you. And we got to talking and ended up looking at a few deals together. I looked at it with him and his group of investors that he works with.

00:11:34
on his website that i can't remember or else i'd plug it for sure um but he and i had a conversation and we ended up not doing the deal but we looked at probably two or three deals uh we did underwriting i learned a lot from the process that they go through um him and his partners um and i think they i hope that they learned a little bit about me and and how i go about things and being able to collaborate and and have conversations and develop those relationships

00:12:00
While it didn't turn into anything in the immediate term, I could definitely see myself working with them in the future. I could see myself doing more types of projects there or even just implementing some of the things that I learned through those conversations. And so you want to be developing projects.

00:12:18
partnerships or relationships with people because you never know where it's going to lead. I don't know if I'll ever do a deal specifically with search, but the doors open there and the relationship is it exists. And so that's something that that I think is is valuable for for you to do. So that's an example of how you can do that. And that's as simple as finding that person and reaching out. So I have a community. We have we have a new community brand new. We're going to talk about it here.

00:12:48
in a couple of minutes, that's ALI Basics. So if you go to assistedlivinginvesting.net slash basics, you can learn all about it.

00:12:55
it's a monthly membership but it's like a a far superior uh group to what we just have on facebook facebook is great um but you you know you're gonna get spam you're gonna get things in there that just you know people shouldn't be posting or uh it's facebook it's social media and you're not gonna get all the notifications whereas in this group you're going to have that you're going to be building relationships with your peers

00:13:18
And it's something that I'll be in there and helping you out with my assistant. And we're going to be building this together with you to help you make progress as you try to launch your assisted living business. And doing that and building relationships with those types of people could lead to partnerships or could lead to getting introduced to other investors that might be a good fit for you as you're trying to go down this path to launching your assisted living business.

00:13:48
You can do these things by yourself for sure. It's certainly possible. I've talked to people that have done it. But it's so much better when you're not going down this path by yourself. I partnered with my dad. I didn't have the funds. He was my money partner on these deals. And we have now been working together on this for close to five years. And it has...

00:14:12
it's certainly changed our relationship because now there's a lot more business involved, but, uh, it's, it's been a good change. Like we go on trips, um, either him and him and I alone, or, uh, he with, with our families. Um, so my, my parents and myself, um,

00:14:29
And my family, like that's what we did this past week when we went to Idaho. Those are trips that we probably wouldn't have been doing otherwise. And those relationships have been deepened significantly because of that. So, yeah, I strongly encourage you to think about what's the process that I want to be going through with this?

00:14:48
who do i want to be working with and how am i going to develop those types of relationships that are going to help me make some some actual real and good progress here it's it's really important for you to do that and it's going to help you be a whole lot more successful if you're able to do it so i'm not i'm not discouraging you from doing this alone i but i do encourage you to look at working with partners and investors and you have to go about it the right way and and implement some strategies think about some strategies how are you going to do that

00:15:17
And you got to start taking action and start moving forward as you're trying to have some success. So that's that's another quick tip there for you on how you can actually do this, how you can launch this, figure out who you're going to work with and then developing this plan on how you're going to move forward and working with them.

00:15:34
The fourth one is figuring out funding. So funding is hard. I hear it from you all, like all of you. I hear it all the time. There's two things that you don't know how to do as you're getting started here. Like there's two big ones. And that's why I hear you when you say this.

00:15:51
You don't know how to start. That's what this video is about on how to get started. Business plan, relationships, planning, building the foundation. And number two is funding. I don't know how to get funds. I don't know how funding works. I'm confused by this. I've heard about that.

00:16:08
You know, those types of questions, they come to me all the time. So you've got to figure that out. There's a few options here that I'm going to talk about briefly. And I have videos on each of these. But if there's one here specifically, as I talk through it, what I have up on the screen, and for those of you that are listening on the podcast, just listen to them and comment them inside of the podcast.

00:16:34
Tell me which one of these is most interesting, and I'll get some refreshed content for you, some refreshed videos that kind of go through each of these things so you understand exactly what it is. And I would love for you to ask me specifically about it. SBA loans, we're going to talk about that right here. What about it do you need to understand so I can help you out as you're trying to make some progress here?

00:16:57
So figuring out funding, number one, an option that you should be considering is SBA funding. So SBA, it's a federal lending program. It doesn't mean much to you. Honestly, it just gives banks a lot more security that they're backed by the Fed if something goes wrong, essentially.

00:17:15
But what it does is it allows them to, allows those banks that are approved as SBA lenders to have more confidence in taking a little bit more risk in going with something that maybe you're a brand new business or it's a brand new concept. You're new to the world of lending and they're willing to work with you because they know they've got this extra backing on the back end. So they're willing to take a little bit more risk.

00:17:39
There's two different types of loans with SBA that kind of are applicable to assisted living. There's the 504 loan and the 7A loan. They both can work. It just kind of depends on the situation. And so you want to have these conversations with them. They have to build relationships with these lenders. SBA or any other type of lender, you've got to have relationships with them. And there's a lot of good strategies on how to do that. Those are things that I can definitely teach you inside of my courses and my communities.

00:18:07
So SBA lending can be confusing, but it's an incredible resource for you as you're trying to get started.

00:18:14
Next is hard or private money. And I can feel like confusing or feel, you know, like hard money. It sounds like when I first heard the term hard money, I was like, I don't, I don't want to do that, but that, that I don't, I'm not comfortable with that. But as I've learned, excuse me, as I've learned more about it, I think it's a really great opportunity for you to, to get funds, especially if you're not able to do it through more traditional means like an SBA or a conventional mortgage.

00:18:41
using hard money or private money is a really good option for you because they, they're willing to take a little bit more risk by putting more collateral in the house. And they do it with a short term, more of a short term loan. And that can allow you to get things in because you might talk to an SBA lender and they're going to say like, we love the idea, but you are brand new to this and we just don't have a lot of confidence in

00:19:08
start operating and come back to us in a year 18 24 months and let's have another conversation so that's where you turn over to hard money you get started with that you pay a little bit higher interest rate but you get started and then you refinance into an sba or a more conventional loan later on so it's a really good strategy that a lot of people a lot of investors in real estate are are implementing and you can do that too

00:19:32
But you have a bit of a leg up because you have this extra option of SBA funding that traditional real estate investors just don't really have access to. It's kind of hard to do real estate investing with SBA loans because it's not a business per se. It's more of an investment and just buying real estate. But you are in this unique position where you get to have both. And it's pretty cool.

00:19:54
unsecured loans is another one so these are like unsecured lines of credit unsecured funds loans where they use your personal credit generally unless you have business credit already built up and they'll use that and it's very high interest rates but if you need to do it in a pinch for a specific reason like we did a big construction project using some grant funds we were able to use unsecured funds to

00:20:20
Pay for that and they get reimbursed through the grant on the back end. So that's it's another really good opportunity for you if you need something to help you get started and you have the confidence that you can refinance or eliminate that debt within a certain period of time, three to 12 months, whatever you're going to be comfortable with.

00:20:40
And then grants are another one. Grants are really hard to come by, especially for a startup. It's not impossible. I'm actually working through an opportunity right now with one of my students and we're making some pretty, pretty good progress. And I'm excited about where we're going with that. But yeah,

00:20:58
a lot more likely once you are operating to find opportunities. I've, I've secured one in $1.2 million in grant funding for my small for-profit assisted living facility. So it's, it's definitely possible. You just have to know where to look and how to handle those things. Um,

00:21:16
But it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. And while it is free money, it is not without its hiccups and its issues and hangups. It is still a difficult process. So I don't want you to look at this and be like, cool, free money. It's going to be super easy. It's going to be more difficult than any of the other funding opportunities that you do. It's going to be more stressful. There's a lot more rules you have to follow. It can be difficult. But

00:21:43
there are opportunities that are out there. So once you kind of go through that and you figured out your funding, then you're able to really move things forward and make some good progress on it. So we've talked a lot. I'm going to quickly scan back through these, your business plan, build that foundation, determine your starting point. How are you going to insert yourself into this business? How are you going to get started? Who are you going to be working with? Figuring out the funding piece of it is going to really help you make some good progress there as well.

00:22:13
now i uh i help out with all of these things inside of our our brand new community uh it's called ali basics assisted living investing basics so you can go check that out at assistedlivinginvesting.net basics we're gonna have links down below for you as well to go check it out i would love to help you out it's a monthly membership i have special um discount codes uh as we're we're going through this launch

00:22:37
So go check out the website to see what that is. Again, it's assistedlivinginvesting.net slash basics. And if you don't have the code, it means it expired. So we're only doing that code for a limited time for the people that are jumping in up here up front. And so I'm rewarding those that are taking action and super excited. We've already had, I think, four people join in the past week, and I'm super excited to have them in there and help them along the

00:23:04
along the path. Inside of Ally Basics, you're going to get resources, webinar recordings, library of Q&A recordings as well. We have an active community. We're going to be putting in weekly tips, getting your questions answered, some peer-to-peer networking.

00:23:19
I am going to be adding in a bunch of other resources as we go. We're going to probably drip those out to people as you're in there to make sure there's continued value and you're continuing to make progress. My goal with this community, with this group, is to help you launch your assisted living business.

00:23:35
you don't get the exact same treatment that i give in my mastermind because those are people that are really like super dedicated and they want to do this and they're they're paying me to to really help coach them um and and work through things in specific and get a lot of direct feedback on the work that they're doing but inside of the of the ali basics community you you're getting access to me i'm there to help you i'm here to answer your questions

00:23:58
here to help remove some of those roadblocks and help you make some really incredible progress. So I would love to have you inside the community and start working with you to help you watch your assisted living business. Again, that's assistedlivinginvesting.net slash ALI basics.

00:24:14
Now, let's get over to Q&A. So if you are live here, type in your questions. I would love to see what you've got, see what you need help with today. And let's see. I feel like I was forgetting something with that.

00:24:29
While you're doing it, I want to make sure you like the video, subscribe, ring the bell as well so you get notified every time we put out incredible content like this. It's going to help you launch your assisted living business. We go live on Tuesdays. We put out content on Thursdays, content in between and various times. And I just want to make sure that you're getting the help that you need as you're trying to make some progress and launch your assisted living business.

00:24:52
And help you reach your goals and your dreams as you're trying to get this done. I love helping and coaching people. It's one of my favorite things to do. I know it's confusing. I totally get it. It's not easy to navigate this process and it's not easy to know exactly what you need to be doing.

00:25:12
It's really hard. But that's what I'm here for is to make sure you get your questions answered. Make sure I'm removing some of those roadblocks for you so that you are really making some solid progress here and launching your assisted living business. So it looks like we don't have any questions today. I was going to check and see if I had some in another spot. I feel like I had a question from somebody.

00:25:38
Um, that somebody emailed me and I cannot find it. So, uh, that's fine. I think we're going to go ahead and, uh, thank everybody for watching. Um, I love again, doing these, these lives. It's super fun to be here, interact with you. Uh, even when sometimes we don't have, have questions like today, uh, still love putting this content out there. Cause I know it helps you as you're all along your journey as you're trying to

00:26:05
to launch your assisted living business. And again, go get that free resource. The business plan checklist, assistedlivinginvesting.net slash BP checklist. It's a great resource. It helps you build that, that business plan and helps you make some, some good progress, which is that first thing that we were talking about. Looks like we did get a question here from JJ Hamilton. Let's see.

00:26:29
You wanted to use your current home for the business. How can you use your current home as leverage to acquire a second home to live in? Any suggestions? That's a good question. So you would definitely want to be having a conversation with a bank to figure out how you could leverage that. There's a few ideas there. One would be to do like a HELOC on it.

00:26:54
to pull out and get access to that cash that you have. And if you're able to do that, then you can use that to them buy a home. So that's what we did when we bought our first facilities was my dad had access to capital through a HELOC. We use that as the down payment to pay for the home. And so you're able to do something like that.

00:27:23
I mean the other option would be just like traditionally going about the process of doing it. So if you've had, if you've been in your home,

00:27:31
your primary residence that you want to convert into an assisted living facility. If you've already been there for, I think it's three years, but it could be off. It's somewhere between two and five years. I'm pretty sure it's three. If you've been there for that period of time, then it can, you can buy another home without it being an investment property. So you can turn that primary one into an investment property and then you can go buy a second home.

00:27:58
with normal primary resident interest rates, if that makes sense. So if you're buying a second home and it's specifically for investment purposes, you're going to have higher interest rates. It's just the way that this works. So if you're going to turn that one, that's a strategy I would definitely implement if you've lived in the home that long, is leverage that so you can get the primary resident interest rates on this new home that you're going to buy for you and your family to live in.

00:28:27
using the HELOC to as a down payment is a good way to do that if you have the equity in there the other option if you another option that you could consider is if you have a lot of equity and your house isn't like really really great for assisted living you could sell that house use the equity to then buy two properties one for your primary residence and one that is more of an investment

00:28:54
option so those are a few strategies that I think you could implement as you're trying to get into them the other one is just like developing a partnership with somebody and and seeing how you can leverage that so you don't have to use like maybe you have some equity in your home but it's not enough to buy another residence maybe you are able to get a portion of that out and then you

00:29:21
This is all theoretical. I don't know if this would actually work, but you pay somebody, a private lender, so that they then buy out or buy a portion of the house that you're going to convert into an assisted living facility, and then you take some of the proceeds from that.

00:29:38
to then buy a house. Like there's, there's a few ways around that. And I'm just like playing with things in my brain right now. So I don't know if all of those work or not. Um, but those are some strategies I think you could have some conversations with. I would definitely start with just a lender. Start with the local bank or credit union that you work with.

00:29:56
and kind of present to them the idea, hey, I want to convert this home into an assisted living facility. I have $100,000 in equity. I'd like to turn that into a HELOC. You may not need to go into this level of detail, but I want to get a HELOC so I can use that money to buy a house. Can you help me out with something along those lines? Or we want to turn this primary residence into assisted living. Do you have any loan products that would work?

00:30:23
for that, but I also need somewhere to live. Like I would have these conversations because the worst thing that they're going to say is, no, sorry, I can't help you. Right. I would maybe not ask the company that holds your mortgage today. Initially, I would probably talk to other banks first and see what they say. And then you could potentially refinance with them and get access to the capital that way.

00:30:47
Or you can do a cash out refinance on the house as well if you have enough equity in there. So basically, let's say you have a home that's worth $500,000 and you have a mortgage on it that's $300,000. So you have $200,000 in equity. You can usually tap into about 80% of the equity on the home. So 80% of $500,000 is $400,000.

00:31:10
So you'd have this $100,000 gap you could do a cash out refinance on. So you get actually like $100,000 in cash in that scenario. And then you could use that as an option to help you get what you want. So those are some strategies, just like brainstorm and have fun with that. Hopefully that helps you out.

00:31:27
as you're trying to figure things out and would be interested in where you land with that. So make sure you keep us posted, JJ. Yeah, not a problem. You are absolutely welcome. Okay. Well, with that, I am going to...

00:31:45
log off and go to another meeting. So I want to thank everybody for watching. I really enjoy being here and helping people like you get answers to their questions, launch their assisted living business, take the right steps as you're trying to move forward. We'd love to help you out inside of ALI basics as well. Again, it's assistedlivinginvesting.net slash basics.

00:32:06
Does residential assisted living sound interesting to you, but you don't know how to get started at assisted living investing? I'm here to help beginners like you launch their assisted living business in the next 12 months. And remember, it doesn't take a lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do and you're consistent and persistent, you're going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day.