Ben Mallah is a Florida commercial real estate investor who has been filming himself walking properties, negotiating with tenants, and running numbers on camera for more than a decade. His show is called Life for Sale. Jason Price has watched it since before Ben had his own channel, and in this episode of The Price Perspective he lists the ten things that actually stuck. Some are about buildings. Some are about family. One is about bonds. All of them are things Jason uses now.
Who Ben Mallah is, and why ten years of Life for Sale
If you search who is Ben Mallah you will find a lot of noise about his houses and his net worth. That is not what this episode is about. Jason has never met most of the people he learned from, and Ben is the exception: they have spoken a handful of times, and the rest came from hundreds of videos. Nobody has taught Jason more about commercial real estate, about banking relationships, about maintenance, tenants, leases, how to negotiate a property, and how to walk one. The lessons below are in the order Jason gives them, and he says up front that it is not all about real estate and not all about what you expect.
Find a deal first: how to find real estate deals
Lesson one is the one Ben repeats most. Find a deal. That is everything. Without a deal you have nothing, and as Ben puts it, finding one is like giving birth. Find, hunt, excavate, ask, pay. Everything else in this business happens after that, and nothing happens before it.
So where do deals come from? Three places, in Jason's experience. Brokers and their email lists, which you get on and stay on. Relationships with people who send you deals directly, which is the best channel of the three because trading properties with people you know cuts fees, cuts headaches, and removes the risk of not knowing who is on the other side. And the listing platforms: the MLS for residential, LoopNet for commercial, which is Jason's favorite, and CoStar behind it. If you want to see that sourcing process on the ground, we hunted three off market warehouses in Fort Myers on The Route and walked away from one of them.
Do what is right for your life, and teach your kids the work
Lesson two is the reason Jason trusts Ben in the first place. Ben never tells you what to do. He says this is what I am doing and this is why, these are the deal points, this is how I analyze it, and then he leaves it there. What works for him, what works for Jason, and what works for you are three different things. Figure out what is best for you, your team, and your family. That is the whole instruction.
Lesson three follows from it. Ben has worked alongside his older sons for as long as Jason has been watching, and more recently has started teaching his youngest. What Jason notices is not just that they work together but that they clearly like being around each other, in and outside of the business. His view on family business succession is simple: if there is any way to work with your kids, or at least hand them what you know, do it. He mentions a stat he heard recently, that by the time your children turn eighteen you have already spent around ninety percent of the time you will ever get with them. Whether or not the number is exact, the point holds. Teaching them the work is how you get some of the remaining ten percent back.
Municipal bonds and simple cap math, kept simple
Lesson four surprised Jason, because it is not a real estate lesson. Ben talks about municipal bonds, which are bonds issued by cities and states to pay for things like water, electric, roads, and libraries, and which are tax free for the people who buy them. Jason had never looked at them until Ben explained them, and he has since started a small bond portfolio of his own as one piece of a wider mix that includes stocks and property. That is the extent of it: a category he did not know existed, made simple by someone he trusted.
Lesson five is the math Ben does in his head on every property, and it is the same math Jason and Abe ran on a $3.2 million triple net building two minutes from the office. Take what the building brings in. Subtract the expenses. Divide what is left by the cap. If a building brings in $100,000 and costs $20,000 to run, you have $80,000 left, and at a 5 cap that building is worth $1.6 million. That one line tells you what a deal can be worth, what you are willing to pay for it, and what you could sell it for. You can run it yourself on our cap calculator.
Inspect it yourself, keep it updated, and treat tenants as partners
Lessons six, seven, and eight are about what happens after you own the building.
Six: physically inspect prospective properties. Ben has hundreds of videos of himself doing exactly this, and it is the model for The Route. Seven: go out and check your own properties, all the time, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise. You can have people help. You can have people do the work. But you are the only one who can see what needs doing, set the timeline, and confirm it actually got done. It is the reason we run a monthly inspection on every property we manage.
Eight is the one Jason expects pushback on. Your tenants are your partners. They pay you, you provide the building, and each of you has a stake in the other's success. So if something needs fixing and it is not in the lease, fix it anyway. Paint it, install it, sort it out. Anyone asking how to be a good landlord can start there, and the mechanics of keeping that promise are in the nine step maintenance request process we use.
Do not stop moving, and give value
Lesson nine has nothing to do with property. Family, business, life: do not stop moving. Jason has watched Ben go from one thing to the next for a decade, and he believes momentum is the best cure for any hardship there is. When you stop moving, you start thinking about the thing you do not want to think about. Keep moving forward and you do not have time to. It is the same idea behind the daily discipline loop, applied to the hard weeks instead of the ordinary ones.
Lesson ten is the reason the episode exists. Give value. Ben has given Jason a decade of it, through the videos and the few conversations they have had, on how to buy, how to sell, how to analyze a deal, and how to treat your family. He will also be the first to tell you what he is not good at, and Jason takes both halves from anyone he learns from. Ben came from humble beginnings and built something real, which is the kind of person you watch when you want to know what actually works, and it is the difference between being rich and being wealthy that Jason talked about last episode. If you like real estate and have never watched Life for Sale, go watch it. Then come back here, because The Route is the same idea, twenty five years younger.