Gene Trowbridge. What is the BIGGEST RISK?
Gene Trowbridge:
Okay, well, you talked about avoiding minimizing and transferring. Okay? So avoiding the risk. In my best legal language; Don't do this! That's how you avoid the risk of being a syndicator. Just don't do it. And what is the biggest risk, the biggest risk is really, the investors. Never the property properties will get empty and go into foreclosure and all that you can always deal with that. Excuse me, but you can't deal with the investor whose life changes in the middle of a project.
That's really the BIGGEST RISK.
So simply how to avoid the risk is to don't do it. Well, if you're going to do it, then the question is how do you minimize it? Okay, you might minimize it by the investors you choose. You could have a strategy of only dealing with accredited investors who are rich and smart, who have enough money where they can handle the risk of your investment. That might be a good one. Another way to minimize it is make sure your manager LLC is free form correctly so that people can't get at you. If there's trouble, and maybe two, this is kind of an asset protection answer. Maybe you want to be an LLC yourself, and then that LLC becomes the member of your manager LLC. So they really have to go through multiple loops.
Every once in a while, I think asset protection gets a little carried away, you can have two very too many of these LLCs and tax returns and all that stuff. But that's not uncommon for the manager to be an LLC and have the member of the manager be LLCs the one thing you don't want to be, is an individual manager. Yet 30 investors up there, and Gene Trowbridge is the individual manager. There's no protection for Gene Trowbridge from those 30 investors. I'm in the LLC with all the other investors are kind of protected from the outside world. But any investor can go after me for everything I have. So we want the manager to be have the layer of protection the LLC.
When I did it, it was a sub s corporation. Same protection, but today different issues that I was trying to deal with insurance and employees and all that stuff. But today almost everyone is ais aan LLC.
And then the last one How do you transfer the risk?
I don't know if you do.
I don't know if you do I think one thing I would say is the manager LLC is constructed in such a way that it has no assets. All you want you don't want your let's say there's a commercial real estate broker listen to us and he has an office with 20 salespeople and own some buildings. That's not going to be the managing member. We're going to form a brand new entity that's clean. And the only thing the managing member actually ever gets his some cash distribution for the fees and some stuff subordinated interest that might occur in the future. Okay?
So there's nothing in there. Okay? So don't syndicate.
Minimize your risk by having limited liability protection around you at least one or two layers. And then make sure that nothing in your syndication world, really at any time has any value. Now I do get I do get asked this question, should we buy directors insurance?