- Brandon Turner is a 36-year-old real-estate investor who says he’s worth $10 million.
- He’s the Instagram star behind BiggerPockets, which gives real-estate tips to millions via podcasts.
- But even he admits that buying a random property will lose you money in this hot market.
Brandon Turner is, in his own words, only “niche famous.” A cross between the self-help guru Tony Robbins and the stock-picking whiz Jim Cramer, but for the millennial crowd, Turner easily flips between the roles of motivational speaker and investment evangelist.
He preaches a simple mantra: Buying up homes and renting them out can be a path to wealth and financial freedom for the masses and an escape from a 9-to-5 grind that, for many during the pandemic, has become all-consuming.
It has garnered Turner a devoted following amid a DIY investment boom cluttered with Reddit stocks, cryptocurrency, and Robinhood accounts.
Over the past decade, the now-36-year-old has attracted 250,000 followers to his Instagram handle, @beardybrandon, and created a hit investing-advice podcast on the media platform BiggerPockets that’s earned over 100 million downloads and is the No. 1 real-estate show on iTunes.
That might still only amount to “niche fame” in a world of social-media megastars, but it has led to big money.
Though he started out as a small-time real-estate investor, Turner estimated that over the past year and a half, his nascent real-estate investment company, Open Door Capital, has raised close to $100 million, much of it by soliciting his social-media base. The firm has used that cash to acquire about $200 million of property so far, he said. In September, he added, he raised his largest real-estate fund yet, topping out at about $25 million in just five days.
Turner’s net worth has swelled to about $10 million and counting, he claims. On his current trajectory of fast-growing affluence, he imagined he could one day be a billionaire (though he might give up accruing wealth before then, he said, to focus on charitable endeavors).
Just as the rise of the meme stock signaled the public’s discontent with the Wall Street establishment, the success of both Turner’s podcast and Open Door Capital reflects a similar sentiment in real estate. Rather than park their money with professionally managed funds with long track records or real-estate stocks and mutual funds that have multibillion-dollar market caps, Turner’s listeners have turned to him for a game plan to realize profits on their own. An increasing number have ventured even further from the mainstream, pouring money into the charismatic outsider’s real-estate firm instead.
“Podcasting builds trust and credibility at a scale unheard of in human history,” Turner said. “When you listen to hundreds of …….