In this episode, Bronson and Nate sit down with Ashley Wilson, CEO of Bar Down Investments and author of The Only Woman in the Room. Ashley shares her insights on today’s real estate market, why 2026 could be a turning point, and how she’s helping lead the next generation of women in investing. They also talk about teachability, long-term thinking, and the importance of aligning with ethical partners.
Ashley Wilson is a seasoned multifamily investor, operator, and developer who has managed over $150 million in transactions. She’s passionate about transparency, ethics, and empowering women in real estate leadership.
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Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: Welcome to the Mailbox Money Show. I’m your host, Bronson Hill. I’m here with my amazing co-host, Nate Hambrick, who is the best-selling author of The 18 Laws of Leverage.
We have an amazing guest with us today, and it’s Ashley Wilson, who’s the co-founder of and CEO of Bar Down Investments. I’ve worked with Ashley on a deal previously in the past. She’s amazing, has a great reputation in the space, over $150 million worth of real estate of transactions.
She’s also written a wonderful book called The Only Woman in the Room, which is the passion of mine helping women to become more active in real estate and more visible in real estate. So, really excited about that. Excited to have you.
Ashley, how are you today?
Ashley Wilson: Great. Thanks again for having me.
Bronson Hill: Awesome. Nate, I wanted to actually get your thoughts. I know we talk a lot about leverage on this show because you’re the author of the book on Leverage, but what are some things that you’re seeing people are doing to leverage their real estate investments right now?
I’m going to ask you that first as we start.
Nate Hambrick: I mean, there are so many different ways that you can use leverage for your business. Obviously, as we all know pretty well that the rich don’t work for money, right? And that’s why we invest in real estate.
That’s why we buy oil and gas. That’s why we do all the things we do. But I think there are so many opportunities within the businesses we currently own to bottle and package the services that we already have or subsidiary companies or different things that we use in our business that we can sell infinitely.
And so during our conversation, rest assured, I’ll be thinking through different ways that we can apply leverage to the businesses we already have.
Bronson Hill: Amazing thing about leverage is it’s and that’s really what we’re doing in the shower at the Mailbox Money Show. It’s leveraging your time, right? Helping other helping people that are wealthy to grow wealth without taking more of their time, making money while we sleep.
It’s all leveraged. The same with real estate. We use other people’s money.
The bank’s money. We use investors money to go buy deals, which is awesome.
Ashley, you’ve been doing this for a long time. What are you seeing right now? Let’s just talk a little kind of state of the market. And obviously, things are very different than they were a few years ago.
Rates rose the fastest they’ve rose in 40 years. And so we’ve seen a lot of pain in the market. Why don’t you talk to us about what you’ve seen and kind of what kind of the state of the market right now, what we’re seeing in multifamily?
Ashley Wilson: What an interesting question. And I think it’s obviously the top of mind for everyone because of just kind of the schizophrenic market we’ve had over the past couple of years. I mean, we started at the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in such a short period, as you alluded to.
So if we look back Q1 of 2022, the highest transactions for the past decade with the lowest compressed cap rates and marry that with one of the best interest rate environment and commercial lending history, it created a perfect storm. And then what ended up happening just to kind of like recap and set the stage is a lot of people don’t like paying the government. A lot of people wanted to 1031. So as interest rates started to creep up, people still needed to place capital, which kept multifamily evaluations, inflated in a non-natural way for a prolonged period of time.
Then the lag effect of the cap rates expanding also happened because people would prefer to lose 2 million by overpaying for a property than pay 5 million in taxes on capital gains. We saw this increased transaction volume, not really correlating with the interest rate environment. Which kind of delayed the impact of what was going on in the interest rate world. 2024 and 2025 have really kind of mirrored what is actually happening in the lending space.
So if you look at the 10 year treasury and we look at the cap rate expansion and the cap rate expansion expanded for a consistent period of time now, I think it’s more realistic in terms of the current or historic values. Comparatively, when you look at residential real estate, residential real estate average transaction is 45 days. So that’s why residential real estate, when you see prices transact, they’re pretty much spot on with current market values. When you look at commercial real estate though, commercial real estate pre-COVID was approximately 75 to a 90 day period from the date of when a property went under contract to when it actually transacted.
But post COVID environment, we’re seeing 90 to 120 days. Now you could argue that has to deal with the lending environment we’re in, but it also has to deal with the equity. So there’s two real major components when it comes to the capital stack, the debt and the equity, and both are being stressed.
So you have debts, the debt environment, which is being stressed and that’s being stressed due to stress assets going back on lenders balance sheets through foreclosures and cash management types of situations. But then you also see it on the equity side because people are holding tight with respect to deployment of capital and they just don’t have the funds that they had pre-COVID and even during the early days of COVID.
Bronson Hill: Money is tight.
Ashley Wilson: So money is definitely tight. But I do think there’s a cautious optimism in the air today. Getting back to your original question, I think people are holding steady and trying to survive this storm, so to speak, this perfect storm we’ve experienced over the past couple of years. I’m very optimistic on 26 in particular.
I think it has to do particularly with the political environment. The Fed chair, Jerome Powell, his position comes up for renewal in 2026 and seeing that our president is very real estate focused. I think that we will see someone who aligns more with the president’s opinion on the financial environment that he would like to have during the rest of his presidency tenure.
So that’s why I think 2026 will have a different story. And then I think 2027, we’ll see definitely a rebound in the impact of that change in position. So I think it’s a little bit more holding pattern.
I know that’s probably not what people want to hear. And I am not an economist. I’m just going off of my own experience.
So everyone should do their own due diligence and not make investing decisions off of anything I just said. Just consider everything I just said, my own opinion, but nothing proven in fact.
Nate Hambrick: So how does that change how you are investing? Like in light of all those, I mean, you hit us with like 18 different revelations. But how does that actually change what you’re investing in and how you’re investing?
Ashley Wilson: I have a tendency to do that. So always stop me if I ramble on too much. But how it changes.
So well, you want to swim in a blue ocean, right? So you don’t want to swim in a red ocean. And I’ve been a huge proponent for understanding market cycles and know that we’re just in a different phase of the market cycle.
You don’t want to do what we’re doing in that current market cycle. It’s interesting. When I attend residential real estate meetups, everyone’s talking about how is the economy today, but commercial real estate events, everyone’s talking about how is the economy going to be in six months to a year from now?
There’s just a different approach in the business strategy and perspective of what you do. So what do you do? Well, if you believe that we’re in a recession, then what you really should be doing is gearing up for new construction development.
And the reason you want to do that is because there is such a strangle hold on capital right now that if you can make a deal pencil. You should be developing because of the gap between our supply and demand. And what happens during a recession, especially when we look at the tariffs that are rolling out. There’s so much uncertainty in terms of the economic impact coupled with the immigration policy, which impacts labor. So those two components are directly impacting real estate as a whole, whether it’s an existing property or new development, but more significantly when it comes to new development.
So if you can make a deal pencil on new development, that’s what you should go for, in my opinion, because when we start to transition into recovery, recovery is when development starts to ramp up. But if you can get ahead of that transition, you should be positioning yourself quite well when it comes to exiting.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, that’s interesting. We had a panel, we do our group called the Wealth Forum, which is basically a wealthy passive investor to get together. We were in Dallas this weekend and we had Veena Jetty was there and we had a couple others on a panel and Omar Khan was there as well.
And he was talking about, and he’s a CFA, very smart guy. But you talk about, he said, guys, he’s every business is cyclical and kind of the idea of like, we’ve been, this is a cycle, right? We go like things have come down, whatever, and it will come back. But it’s just been like, there was a lot of on the panel, we had four different people on the panel and everybody say, hey, there’s been some painful moments.
And I think that kind of going to what you were sharing before as an investor who was investing that a, five years ago, everybody had lots of cash, right? There was the PPP, there was the EIDL, there was all this stuff. So there’s just people were flush with cash everywhere.
And now it’s like, not only like, oh, yeah, I’d love to invest in more deals, but I had seven capital calls in the last two years, or I’ve had this happen in other areas. So it’s like, I think it’s a great time. I personally think it’s a great time for multifamily, but it’s like, it’s hard to get people excited about it.
And I know for people like yourself that are in multifamily, has that been a challenge or frustrating to get people to kind of see like, hey, this is actually far less risk than it was a few years ago. We’re actually seeing stuff now. We’re seeing 2016 pricing on a lot of things that we haven’t seen in obviously many years.
So, how do you work with people that just the sentiment is like, I don’t quite, I’m not quite ready to jump back in if I’ve had some pain in this market before.
Ashley Wilson: Well, there’s a couple of things. Number one, I think we had a Pavlov’s dog situation happen in 2022. A lot of people were able to get in and get out in a short period of time, which attracted a lot of people from different real estate asset classes.
Like for example, flipping, no offense to flipping because I personally came from flipping. So I know this to be true. Flipping is short term gains on an investing strategy and multifamily was never meant to be that way. Just because you came in during a period where you could get away with doing that.
You could get away with not being able to operate a property and compress cap rates got you a 20 plus return. Doesn’t mean that that’s the prolonged business strategy. And I think people were a little bit lied to in terms of whole periods and expectations on their investment.
So it involves a lot of reeducation. It also involves the realization that cream rises to the top. I think this was a great shake up to get people who shouldn’t have been in this asset class.
They weren’t cut out for it. Had no construction knowledge experience. No operations experience.
They had no real estate experience who came in and really did a disservice to protecting investors capital. Because at the end of the day, that’s who I answer to. Yes, I use properties to gain investing returns.
But I answer to investors. So all of my decisions should be guided upon that principle. And I think educating investors and understanding that investing.
This is a long term strategy in terms of investing. You should not be going into multifamily investing if you’re looking for a quick turnaround. You’re lucky if you can get that.
But that’s not the thesis of multifamily investing. I also think in terms of now more than ever before, to your point where you’re speaking about the basis when it comes to pricing expectations right now, if you believe in the thesis of real estate, that over a prolonged period of time, real estate from a valuation standpoint historically has gone up. I’m not going to ever say that it forever goes up.
I think that’s a false narrative. It depends on the duration that you’re looking at. But if you look over a prolonged period, it’s on average a 12 and a half percent return.
If you look at the historic return in commercial real estate, and if you compare that to the stock market where you’re at an 8 and a half to 9% return, but real estate comes with an asset backed and it has tax advantages.
And to Nate’s great points, all the leverage components, you can see that the original principles that attracted people to real estate haven’t changed. So if you believe in those original principles and you believe that we’re buying at a discount and you see that there’s opportunity for interest rates to come down and cap rates to compress, then you should believe that at some point during the whole period, which is typically a three to five year whole period, we should be able to see a 20 to 30% gain.
And that’s just to get us back to where we were. So then there’s obviously the upside when you speak to natural and forced appreciation as another component when it comes to real estate. And then also when we look at the creativity that probably is going to enter in the more in the lending environment with respect to extending out loans.
One last point is I think that we’re going to see a technological revolution in this space. It’s a very archaic industry when it comes to technology integration. And I think it shined a spotlight in terms of just the archaic nature in which we operate and own multifamily and even hold multifamily.
Like one could even argue how people are going to invest in the future and whether or not we’re going to be locked into these long-term investments as opportunities that are going to come in the immediate future.
Bronson Hill: You teach us on a lot of really good things. I think a few things I want to touch base on technology. So we were actually we started a new business.
It’s a modular home business in Southern California where we’re bringing and they build homes in the high desert and they put them on pieces and truck. These are two, three thousand square foot houses they can assemble in one day on site. And so for the where the fires are here in Altadena near where I live, we’re going to be doing this and development can make a lot of sense right now.
And then you mentioned as you talked about, I guess, the technology, but also the archaic way that we kind of manage or run these things. What are some of the technological shifts that you’re seeing in real estate or that you see coming that’s going to kind of change the way that we do this?
Ashley Wilson: Everything from soup to nuts. So everything from owner-operating is one aspect of it. Deal identification, due diligence, operating in terms of attracting tenants, maintenance.
I mean, the day to day operations all the way to reporting to investors to financing. And then to your point, in terms of construction, there’s a lot of 3D modular type of building that’s being done. I believe in Austin was the first place that in the U.S. that they were able to build a two story component and one component that had a basement too. Austin was able to achieve, if I remember correctly, two different really advancements when it comes to not only the costs, but also the accessibility and how quickly products can be delivered. So that is forcing some other creative aspects. And then of course, there are things like the integration of like smart devices, and that just keeps getting expanded further and further.
So we see that not only impacting new construction, but retrofitting, so going back in and whether it’s an all bills paid and you’re able to decrease expenses that there’s automations based off of, if there’s movement in a rental unit, whether or not for like a certain period of time, if no movement is seen, all of a sudden the air goes into an eco-friendly and the lights turn off to consume energy. There’s just a lot of different advances on so many different levels that I think people aren’t realizing. But at the end of the day, the ones that are going to be prioritized are the ones that impact the bottom line and yield a high return.
So anyone who jumps on that early, I think we’ll be able to really leverage those spreads and be able to get it upon sale, like the realized gains from technological advances, construction advances, ownership advances. So I think we have a huge opportunity before us and it’s a matter of how people, like which type of people are going to transition with this knowledge and then deploy these different types of ideas as quickly as possible.
Nate Hambrick: I love it. And actually, I wanted to take this a slightly different direction, Ashley. Obviously, we are the Mailbox Money Show, so we do focus primarily on mailbox money.
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence all three of us have books behind us. And so I wanted to ask you like teach us some business principles. What assets do you use to generate capital, raise capital, get investors?
Obviously, all three of us use books. Books are one of my primary revenue and capital generation mechanisms. Bronson and I speak a lot.
We leverage the books to be paid speakers at different events. But I’m curious, are there any assets that you have that you’ve leveraged for business that might be helpful for our listeners?
Ashley Wilson: I’ve used probably every asset that I know, learn of and try to leverage that. In fact, it was actually the premise and the reason why I asked 19 other women to co-author my book. I know that’s not what you asked, but I firsthand noticed that every keynote speaker had a book behind their name.
And I noticed that when you go to these real estate events, there aren’t many women as speakers. They’re mostly on panels. So I wanted to provide an opportunity and a platform for us all to be able to leverage and get keynote speaking engagements.
So that is one tool that I use. Social media, if you aren’t using social media, to me, it’s like in the 90s, not having a business card and then not having a website. Social media is such a necessity, whether you like it or not, it is a necessary evil to get in front of folks that need to see your name and your brand. And what you’re doing to feel like they know, like, and trust you, because people typically invest with folks that they know, like, and trust and continue to deliver.
And when things get hard, those folks talk more instead of retreat. So that’s something that I’m a huge proponent for. Like, for example, our communication cadence never wavered during any rough season in the marketplace.
We always have myself and Jay. My business partner have remained pretty front and center with what we’re doing and trying to stay as consistent as possible. The only exception to that is when work calls and we’re prioritizing, you know, doing things for the business, but it’s nothing that’s related to any cause for concern. Jay and I, because we’re different in our communication styles, have realized different platforms provide better outcomes for us.
So we don’t try to be the guru on, you know, or the expert on every single platform. We match platforms based off of our delivery. I have a definitely more detailed corporate America style delivery and my writing style that does really well on LinkedIn.
And I figured out the LinkedIn algorithms. So I do really well on LinkedIn, whereas Jay does really well on Facebook. So he has a huge following on Facebook.
Every time he posts something, you know, there are hundreds of comments and engagement, thousands of views. So that’s something where we’ve kind of divided and conquered. And then to your point earlier, we go out and we speak and we do podcasts.
So it’s about remaining very visible and transparent. I go on all these podcasts and the first thing they’ve asked me since COVID is, is there anything off limits that you don’t want to speak about? And the answer is always no, you can ask me any question.
And I believe I’ve been asked almost every single question which I think then provides a consistent approach as to who you are. So if you’re someone who’s been very transparent and then all of a sudden you’re in a situation where you’re having a property foreclosed on and you’re like, Oh, well, we can’t talk about foreclosures. We can’t talk about capital calls.
We can’t talk about things like that. People will start to notice that you’re more guarded, but we’ve never wavered in terms of what we talk about, what we believe. And I think for those reasons, people have a lot of respect for what we’re doing because we are always about doing the right thing.
Even if it’s a hard thing, it doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do.
Bronson Hill: This is something I think that great operators deal. We can, we had this panel. I just love that we, we did this, but we had four operators and they all were saying, Hey, we’ve had some issues here.
We had a capital caller. This happened or here’s the, and it’s just, I think sometimes like the challenges, a lot of times people meet people through social media or online, and they don’t know like, well, is how real is this person really being? And I just think the more honest we can be about where we’re at, the better it is for everybody.
Right. And I think that there are people that are out there that are scammers or people, they were, somebody actually had an investor send me something. This was probably a year ago and they said, Hey, I’m thinking about investing with this person.
And it was like something like, it was like some ClickFunnel ad type of thing. I never, it was in multifamily, never heard of this person or whatever. I said, Hey, like, I said, I like, I’ve never heard of this person and I know a lot of people that are doing like education in real estate, but like you can do it, but I just, I think it looks kind of shady.
Like I’ve just never heard of this person. And then I saw a couple things from them. And then I just never saw something from that person again.
So I don’t think this investor did it, but like, it’s just so, but, but going back to like having a brand and doing it the right way is like putting out content, things, both that are business related. Some that are just values or personal related, so people can see you’re a real person, you have a family, you do what you do, you travel, you’re not just like an AI, something or other.
And I think, I think this is going to become like a bigger issue going forward. I love to hear your thoughts too, Ashley, but like the more AI kind of takes over a lot of this stuff. AI influencers, we don’t even know, they look real, but they’re not, right?
And all this stuff through chat GPT can create all these posts for different people. I think sometimes the most attractive thing is when someone can say, hey, here’s something that’s not like, here’s something that’s just vulnerable, here’s something that didn’t go well, either in the business or just about myself. It’s hard for AI to fake that stuff it can’t be fake, but it’s much more like, well, I actually feel like I’m getting the real person.
What are some things that you look for when you, I guess, when you look at investments, you start following people and you’re getting to know new operators.
Ashley Wilson: Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question. I’m a huge believer of surrounding yourself with like-minded people in the sense of doing the right thing, but not necessarily in the sense that they’re identical to you. I think when you align yourself with people who have same ethics and principles as you, because at the end of the day, if we’re all asked the question, OK, how many days, if you have kids. How many days or how many hours could you go if you have absolutely nothing and you have kids and they’re hungry before you would steal food for them?
And we all have a different answer. And I’m not here to judge any of those answers. But I think that if you look at your business partners and people you surround yourself with. You should be aligned in something potentially like that, or at least be able to understand their rationale for thinking a certain way.
And I think if you extrapolate that with investors like, OK, how long could you go, without doing a distribution if you had to? Or would you be willing to give up a part of your preface to make investors full? There are certain people who are going to say, no, they came in with a disclosure saying that there was a risk involved with this investment.
And then there are other people who might say, yes, I’m willing to give up my preface and my take home to make an investor whole. Because I believe in the long term business strategy or whatever their rationale is. Or I just believe it’s the ethical thing to do, even though we didn’t guarantee it, that’s how I feel. I think when you’re choosing business partners, you should align on that.
I don’t think necessarily that you have to be 100% aligned on the people that you follow because you can also get a lot of insight from listening to people who are different than you and understand different perspectives and potentially learn something you hadn’t even thought of before as a consideration. But I do think it’s important to spend time with folks who continue to push you in thinking and do things that you agree with from a moral and ethical standpoint. So, I follow different people and as soon as those folks come up on my feed with things that I don’t agree with and I’m not talking about political because I know there’s a lot of things recently where people are like really guarded and there’s been a lot of political controversy.
I’m actually not in one of those camps where I take a side. I actually want to know everyone’s perspective. I love learning.
I’ve always had a passion for learning. So I always want to hear people’s different sides. But when I see something that doesn’t align for me morally, let’s say. Then that’s when I start to say, OK, I don’t need that person in my feed anymore.
I don’t need to follow them. Maybe I don’t unfollow them, but I just like hide their content. So it’s not impacting me.
So I follow certain people that. Spark my intellectual side of my brain. It’s one of the reasons, to be honest with you, I transitioned from multifamily from flipping.
I honestly got bored of flipping. For me, it was like rinse and repeat. What I loved about multifamily is it’s so challenging.
To know every single aspect, to to figure out every single aspect. I don’t think you could ever know everything about multifamily. We’re flipping.
I felt like I knew everything. It wasn’t intellectually stimulating. So I choose to find followers who provoke my curiosity and challenge me to be a better person.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, that’s great. And I love what you’re sharing. Like you said, when it talk when you talk about vetting people and talking about kind of getting to know them and just really, there’s so much noise out there. I think this is a point, too, we’re really at a time where it was the information age and now it’s like the information overload age, right?
And it’s like, how can I distill who I want to hear from? Because there’s people now, the things that like actually get followed online are the most controversial things, right? It’s the political things.
It’s the other thing. And I’ve realized like there’s people that do it really well. I mean, you look at some politicians do it.
Grant Cardone does it really well. Like if you can just be kind of like be offensive to some people, but I guess a lot of eyeballs. But at the end of the day, like maybe the best operators are not trying to just shock you on social media, but there are people that do it and they find ways.
There’s other ways to do it, too, but it is interesting to notice that. I did want to ask you, you mentioned this before about women in real estate, and we need to do another panel. We did a panel with you and Veena and a couple of others previously.
I want to do another panel with that where we, my daughter’s 12 years old and I just keep trying to teach her that, hey, anything that you want to do in life, it’s all available to you. And I know Nate has a couple kids as well like, how do you really set up young women or just women in general to be more successful? Obviously, they have to mentor as even people like you that are in the space and like your book, the only woman in the room.
And so I guess this is, I guess, a little more of a parenting question. But do you have daughters, by the way, or you have sons? You have daughters?
Ashley Wilson: I have two daughters.
Bronson Hill: Yeah. So, how do you and how old are your daughters?
Ashley Wilson: Ten and eight.
Bronson Hill: So yeah, so my daughter’s 12. So how do you think about that with your daughters and kind of preparing them for like, hey, you can, whatever you put your mind to here, you can do and really kind of equipping them or letting them Veena says, oh, I have my kids try to fail at things every single day so that, they learn that it’s OK to fail. And I think a lot of times we can do that.
But what do you think there are some things that you’re doing for your daughters to really be able to learn that they can do anything, particularly in career real estate or other things?
Ashley Wilson: A couple of things. So if you had asked me this question probably a year or two years ago, I would have said having a strong female role model. And while I do think that that is really important just for women, if we’re talking about girls as opposed to kids in general, right?
I mean, I think it’s important for kids in general, but for girls in particular, I think having a good female role model is really important. But since you’re asking me the question today, I actually think male support system is equally, if not more important than a strong female role model. And what I mean by that is I think that I am beyond blessed to be married to the man that I’m married to.
So on paper, people would never think that he is as much of a cheerleader for me and my success as what he lays out on paper. Former professional athlete, physics undergrad going into engineering. I mean, he like from a pedigree standpoint, looks like he would be very male and alpha.
And he is. We actually both are. We’re both very strong, dominant personalities.
But the support in the I don’t know, just every single aspect of what he does allows me to not only be able to shine and lead and grow, but also be a strong male role model for our daughters, while also being incredibly supportive of his wife and portraying us as equals. I’m sure like every marriage sometimes you have little tips. We don’t hide those tips behind closed doors.
We talk through them even in front of the kids, because to me, I feel like it’s a healthy thing for kids to see how you can have conflict resolution in a calm and communicative way. And I don’t think that folks should feel like our children should feel that you should avoid conflicts at all times. Because not only does it help you with personal relationships, it helps you in business, and it helps you just be a very confident person by means of not only expression of how you think, believe, and feel, but also it creates understanding, empathy, forgiveness, apology, and being able to apologize, not letting your ego get in the way.
I mean, there’s so many different aspects. So there’s that aspect that I am very, very grateful for. And I know everyone recognizes because everywhere I go, it’s like the number one thing people tell me between my parents’ generation to my friends.
They cannot stop saying how much of a balanced relationship if you just hang around the two of us, you can see it. And I’m very grateful for that. I think it’s our superpower.
I think it’s why we’re able to work together, why we’ve created multiple businesses together. So I think that’s really, really a secret sauce to how we’ve been able to do it. It doesn’t mean it’s the only way, but for us, it works right.
But I also think having accessibility. So I think you’ve done a great job, Bronson, by telling your daughter that she can do anything and be anything and achieve whatever she can conceive. But then the follow up is having accessibility to to start to visualize those things to see in reality, what does that look like?
Seeing another woman in that role or even seeing the access to get information and knowledge, and see to test the waters. So it’s kind of like trial and error because there are things when I was younger that I thought I wanted to do. And then I tested the waters and realized, you know what?
That’s not really a good fit for who I am. My personality type and my strengths. So that accessibility, that my parents were able to provide to me, allowed me to fail.
Like Veena said, I don’t believe in failure, by the way, I just believe you have to learn every single time you’re learning.
Bronson Hill: Yeah.
Ashley Wilson: So I believe that I learn a lot.
Bronson Hill: Failures like failing forward, like it’s never final unless you don’t learn something from it. So I think that’s I think that’s so important.
Nate Hambrick: And you bring up a good point, actually, with being able to see or allowing your kids to see conflict resolution in your marriage, because my parents have an amazing marriage. But they dealt with all of their conflicts behind closed doors and they had 10 of us. So I have nine brothers and sisters. And for some of us marriage, I mean, there was a there was a wake up call when we realized that what we saw wasn’t exactly what we got.
But I was going to ask you kind of in closing, Ashley, who are some of your role models? What are some of the books that you’re currently reading? Who are some of the people on social media that you look up to that you’re following, that you might recommend to people like your children, that you might recommend to our listeners and us included?
Ashley Wilson: Well, a lot of questions. I look up to my friends, family, my parents. I look up to a lot of different people.
I’m very blessed to be in a great circle of of folks, and it hasn’t always been that way. I’ve had to make choices along the way in terms of their friends that I like hanging out with. But they aren’t necessarily aligned with what I want to do, long term and what I want for my life and my family.
So, it wasn’t always like smooth sailing throughout my entire life. But I’ve gotten there and really grateful for the friendships and the people that I look up to along the way. In terms of the books that I’m reading currently, I have a couple on the go right now. One in particular is the big print…
Bronson Hill: I just finished that and I met Lawrence at the Summit or the Limitless as well. That was an excellent book. He’s very pro Bitcoin, but like the first part of that book is just they’ve been printing like crazy.
Crazy, crazy.
Ashley Wilson: So it’s interesting because I’m in the middle of my second book, and there’s a lot of overlap and fun facts. He went to Colgate. We were the only two people at Limitless who graduated from Colgate.
So we had that in common, which is great to reminisce about Colgate with him. That has been a very good read. There’s some other tech books I’m reading for my other company, which is really interesting because it’s the other side of the coin instead of real estate.
You know, building a technology company is pretty interesting. So I’m doing that in terms of people that I have been listening to and looking up to on social media recently. I was a psychology undergrad.
So everything I look at and analyze always has a psychology component to it. Professor Galloway’s Instagram page is really, really interesting. And sometimes it can get political.
I don’t follow him for political reasons. If you know me at all, I’m not political. Political to me is just like a roadmap of like what’s happening.
You just have to adjust to whatever is happening and you have to project like what are the trickle down effects of whoever is in office and you just roll with it type of thing for me at least. So I try to stay away from political as much as like implications of political policies. And I think Professor Galloway does a pretty good job at talking through data and impact of data.
So he’s someone that I’ve earmarked to watch any time something comes up in my feed with him all the way through.
Bronson Hill: Ashley, I still appreciate you share on here. I mean, you have had just a great level of success for a long period of time, even through challenging times in the economics. I guess one more question I have is how do you, you mentioned this with some of the people that you follow, but how do you continue to improve?
How do you continue to get better? I know you have a great business partner. I know you’re following some great people online.
What else? What are some of the other like habits that you have that you feel are like these are things that are helping me get sharper and better every year and every week and every day?
Ashley Wilson: First of all, it starts with a mindset and I don’t know everything and that’s my mindset. I don’t know everything. It’s impossible for me to know everything.
And there is nothing that I do that is perfect. Nothing. Everything can be improved upon.
And if you take that approach and then couple it with the philosophy that I think it’s like 65% of all businesses fail due to a breakdown of communication, being very communicative with your teams, your partners and your investors, your service providers, everyone. I just think that communication is the key to growth and empowering people and creating good processes. So communication is the cornerstone to everything that we do.
So, I’ll be very transparent. We stopped distributions very early on, before everyone else. I don’t know anyone who stopped distributions as early as we did.
And it’s in part because we all have different responsibilities on our team. So some people are short-term vision, like what’s coming up immediately and other people are long-term vision, like what’s on the horizon, where are our exposures? We have weekly meetings to talk through all of these different points and recognize the writing on the wall, the heightened insurance risk, the challenges with taxes because we’re primarily holding in Houston, Texas, which was one of the largest tax increases from 2022 to 2023.
These were things that we knew that were coming and we are not a believer of doing a distribution to only the next month do a capital call. We were met with so much disdain, frustration, anger. I mean, you name it, we were like, I mean, I can’t even begin to tell you how thankful I am for Jay for that period of time because Jay works with all of our investors.
And I just kept telling Jay, we have to do this. This is the right thing to do. I know we have money to distribute, but this is gonna be eaten up by all of these risk factors.
And Jay never, never wavered on supporting me. Never, he never questioned it. He was extremely supportive.
He saw all the data as well. So it was just, we were very aligned and we presented like parents, like a team, right? And because of that, we have not done a capital call ever.
And it’s now like, investors are thankful that we are not, we weren’t in a position, we aren’t in a position where we’re doing capital calls to them, but we are responsible. We are the eyes and ears for their investment. We are supposed to protect their investment.
And it was not doing them a service. The crazy ironic thing about this is I’ll never forget that it was right before NMHC in January, National Multifamily Housing Conference for anyone who doesn’t know. And it’s one of the largest events of the year in multifamily industry.
It’s a must attend event. And I remember going there and sitting with a bunch of brokers and other owners and they thought I was crazy for not doing a capital call. And they all said to me, regardless of whether you need the capital or not, you can get by by doing it because everyone’s doing it.
Why wouldn’t you do it? What if you need the capital later? And I said, well, if I need the capital later, I’ll do it later.
And they said, you should just do it now because everyone thinks that they should have a capital call. So if you need it later on, then everyone’s getting mad and everyone’s gonna be out of money, which I know some groups got to that point, but I said, but I don’t need the money. That’s why I didn’t do a capital call.
That’s why I stopped distributions. So those are people I wouldn’t partner with. And those are the questions you have to have before you partner with someone where I was talking about you have to be aligned in terms of like, what would you do in these situations to know if that’s the right business partner for you?
So Jay and I have been aligned that way. And I think that’s what’s been helpful for us to navigate one of the hardest periods in this asset class.
Bronson Hill: I really love that you’re an independent thinker and you’ll just, I think really thinking independently is so important because if you just simply do what other people tell you to do, I mean, they’ll lead you off a cliff because that’s just what the group is doing, right?
And so I think that the one thing I look back on what we could have done differently is we could have not done some bridge debt deals when we did them, right? Or deals that ended up being at the time under capitalized that we didn’t know they were under capitalized, but just, you know, there’s things that you learn as you go along.
So now we’re looking at very different types of deals, right? So I think it’s great, but I just wanna say, I really appreciate your voice in the multifamily space, also your voice for women, for young women, for just for economics, for all the things that you do. And I just see you continually getting better and improving and it’s really inspiring to me.
So I’m grateful for you, Ashley, and Nate as well. Thank you for being here, brother. But thanks for coming in, Ashley.
We’re gonna have to set up that panel soon and do another women’s panel, it’d be awesome. But thanks for sharing some of your wisdom with us and so grateful for how you show up.
Ashley Wilson: Thank you so much. Really appreciate you guys as well, I really do.
Bronson Hill: And how can people reach out and find you?
Ashley Wilson: You can follow me on badashinvestor on Instagram, pretty much on every social media, but Instagram is probably the best.
Bronson Hill: Okay, awesome, and you got a big channel there. So we’ll put your links in the show notes and thanks again, appreciate it, Ashley.
Ashley Wilson: Thank you.
Bronson Hill: Wow, well, Nate, that was a great show, man. I really enjoyed, I always enjoyed talking to Ashley. I always learned something.
She’s always got some insight she shares and just very well thought out. And I think one of some things I appreciate about her the most is just her, the idea of failure is never failure, right? Just continuing to put yourself out there allows for more and more growth.
Again, she talked about a big mindset. Everybody I know that’s in this space just about is a mindset person, right? Either you have just like raging confidence from when you’re young or like the rest of us, we figured it out and we grew that over time.
We found ways to grow, but what were some takeaways that you found from this interview?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, I mean, obviously I love the book recommendations, the Instagram polls and all that, but she painted a really stark picture. If your children are starving, how many days would you go before you steal? That kind of gave me a shock to the system, but I love the way that she framed that because I’ll never forget it, but it is helpful, right?
If you’re going to invest with somebody, if you’re going to partner with somebody, and something does go south, are they going to give up their return to save you, or are they going to choose themselves over you, right? We all know people who are really, really successful, but they always put themselves first. And so when you’re down, right?
You want to be partnered with people who put you first instead of the other way around. So I thought that was really, really great advice. The imagery is stuck up here forever. And so I’m really grateful for that.
Bronson Hill: So you’re going to figure out how many days you’d go before your kids are in the room and steal food.
Awesome. Well, hey, I appreciate you being here.
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