Joel Friedland with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Debt-Free Empire

Joel Friedland talks with Jason Barnard about the debt-free empire.

Debt-Free Empire! Joel Friedland, CEO of Brit Properties, reveals his proven strategies for building a $100M industrial real estate syndication without debt. Drawing from his 43+ years of experience in Chicago’s industrial market, Joel shares how he transformed relationship-based investing into a scalable online business model. Learn why debt-free investing creates “Steady Eddie” passive income and discover how to leverage AI and digital presence to attract accredited investors.

In this value-packed episode, you’ll discover:
– The debt-free syndication model that survived the 2008 financial crisis
– Why industrial real estate generates consistent 7-8% annual returns with 20-year tenant retention
– How to transition from offline networking to digital investor acquisition
– The “Claim, Frame, and Prove” method for building credible online authority

This conversation delivers actionable insights for real estate professionals looking to scale their investor base through strategic digital marketing and personal branding.

#RealEstateInvesting #IndustrialRealEstate #RealEstateSyndication #PassiveIncome #DebtFreeInvesting #AccreditedInvestors #RealEstateMarketing #DigitalMarketing #PersonalBranding #WealthBuilding

What you’ll learn from Joel Friedland

This episode was recorded live on video July 22nd 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://youtu.be/iS2gk69Zfdw?si=et9BciRxo4OFs_YY
https://youtu.be/Df3qxQhC9ng?si=hmWscw8XtUum5ORx
https://www.youtube.com/@investingwithjoel/shorts
Joel Friedland

Transcript from Joel Friedland with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Debt-Free Empire

[00:00:00] Joel Friedland: One guy told me yesterday, 60% of his investible money is with me. That’s bad. That’s dangerous. That’s dangerous because there’s no diversification. What happens if, God forbid, industrial real estate becomes like office real estate where you can’t fill an office building ’cause people are working at home.

[00:00:22] Joel Friedland: I don’t think that’s gonna happen in industrial ’cause people have to actually work with their hands and be on site. In industrial manufacturing operation, there’s trained labor. So industrials likely not to have an implosion like office did ’cause of COVID. But the message that I want to get to people is, yeah, you should put three or 4% of your net worth in my safe stuff.

[00:00:52] Joel Friedland: That’s a steady Eddie that gives you passive income but not 60%. But some people do that with me and I’m grateful to have them. But I wish that it would be more diversified.

[00:01:06] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week. Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.

[00:01:24] Narrator: How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and becomes their legacy? A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:01:36] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody, and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard, and a quick hello and we’re good to go.

[00:01:43] Jason Barnard: Welcome to the show, Joel Friedland.

[00:01:48] Joel Friedland: I love it, Jason. I love when you sing.

[00:01:50] Jason Barnard: Thank you. You said you watched a couple of episodes and that’s what caught your attention. Not the content and the interesting insights you get but the song. Lovely to meet you, Joel. You’ve built a hundred million dollar empire of debt-free investment in industrial real estate. And you’ve done it mostly through your network and the people you knew. And you’ve made the step to move all of this online. And created a social profile or social presence. And realize that your competitors have got the jump on you because they’ve already got social media teams working and you are struggling.

[00:02:32] Jason Barnard: So we’re gonna talk, first of all about debt-free, empire debt-free real estate, industrial real estate, and your hundred million dollar business. And then say, how are you building it online? And what can you do to improve how you are reaching out to these investors who need to have 25 to $50,000 to invest with you and need to have a million dollars or more in the bank?

[00:02:52] Jason Barnard: If I’ve understood correctly.

[00:02:56] Joel Friedland: That’s what we do. We own industrial buildings only in the Chicago area. We’re laser focused on one niche.

[00:03:07] Jason Barnard: That’s super smart and very difficult to do.

[00:03:10] Joel Friedland: It is. I’ve heard this before, the riches are in the niches. And our niche, and I’ve been doing this for 43 years.

[00:03:20] Joel Friedland: Having started working for a family business, not my family, but a family business, where they owned a lot of industrial real estate in Chicago and taught me how to lease buildings, sell buildings, and buy buildings, and how to raise money from investors. Because what I do is I put together what’s called a syndication, which is a group of let’s say 30, 40, 50 investors who each put in between 25,000 and a million dollars. Most people average about 50,000. So we buy these buildings. They’re oKalicube®pied by manufacturing companies primarily. Some are very large corporations on the japanese stock exchange, the london stock exchange, owned by private equity groups. We have the US postal service as a tenant, and we have the Chicago professional soccer team where they have a warehouse and an office in one of our buildings.

[00:04:19] Jason Barnard: Even cooler.

[00:04:21] Joel Friedland: Yeah. Yeah. So we’re in the business of owning and managing. These buildings were very interesting, fascinating, operations take place inside the four walls.

[00:04:33] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And it’s a kind of shared investment system, which means that it’s low risk.

[00:04:44] Joel Friedland: Okay. So in 2008 with the global economic crisis, I had 50 buildings and I had debt at seven banks. I had mortgages at all the buildings and when things went south, it was very difficult for me because you have to pay the bank back. They have no sense of humor and when I had 10 buildings out of the 50 that were struggling with tenants who couldn’t pay rent or who moved out when their leases were up when I expected them to renew the leases and stay longer, most of our tenants stay in our buildings for 20 years. We buy a building and sometimes the tenants already been there for 20 years and we think they’re gonna spend another 20 years there. And we’ll collect rent, and the rent goes up a little bit each year. So the investors are in it for the passive income where they make about seven or 8% starting the first year.

[00:05:39] Joel Friedland: And my investors love it. They are loyal repeat investors. We have 23 buildings and we’re buying one now, and we’ve got about 25 investors who are entering the deal with us with a minimum of 50,000. But I’m struggling with something that you’re an expert at. Which is my competitors no longer just put deals together with their friends and their family and their longtime clients. They have an online presence and a social media department. I’m behind the times, man. I watched you and I thought it made me sweat when I was listening to you talk to your other guests about how important it is to use the internet and AI properly, and you’re the expert and I’m struggling to get investors through that where there are maybe 400 syndicators in the United States who have a department that does what you know how to do and I’m new at it.

[00:06:51] Jason Barnard: In fact, you’re talking the riches is in the niches and what we’ve done. Because optimizing your Personal Brand or your Corporate Brand in Search and AI is something that everybody should be doing, every company, every business leader. And we’re focusing in on the business leaders, the entrepreneurs who are actively investing in their Personal Brand through social media, through podcasting, through writing articles, through writing a book.

[00:07:17] Jason Barnard: And helping them to take control of the narrative in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the other AI, and helping them to amplify the work they’re already doing on social media, on podcasts, in books and whatever through that channel. Because if you think about what ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Perplexity are is they are having conversations with billions of people every day, trillions of niche conversations with people who trust them and trust their advice. So they actually become by far the biggest influences in the world. And you need to be involved in that conversation and your social media presence is a way to get involved in that conversation. And what we’ll do actually now, we’ve actually gone through six minutes because you’ve explained that brilliantly.

[00:08:02] Jason Barnard: And we can then move into this entire topic because here I looked at Google’s AI mode, and that’s recently been launched a couple of months ago. And what it does is it takes your the query, which is Joel Friedland subtitle: CEO Brit Properties. So I’ve made sure it understands who you are, and I’ve asked it, not a specific question, but implicitly I’ve said, who is this person and why should I trust them?

[00:08:30] Jason Barnard: And AI mode has then created what we call cascading queries. So it’s made three or four, maybe six different queries. Who is he? What’s his job? Can you trust him? Is he credible? What was his career? And finds the passages and pages online and then stitches them together in the way that ChatGPT does?

[00:08:53] Jason Barnard: And I’ve put a little red arrow there to say, number one, we’re in AI mode, which is like ChatGPT but significantly more powerful because Google has such a huge amount of data and such huge technology that ChatGPT cannot compete with. And we see here it says, while Joel Friedland’s LinkedIn profile list him as a principle, some search results refer to him as the co-founder and CEO of Brit Properties.

[00:09:18] Jason Barnard: It’s worth noting that another LinkedIn profile list him as a real estate investor at Brit Properties, another source list him as a partner. These variations could potentially be due to different roles he has held or different interpretations of his position within the company. So it’s immediately coming up and saying, I’m not sure what Joel’s job is.

[00:09:41] Jason Barnard: That is a huge problem that I think a lot of us don’t realize is your digital footprint is messy. So the machines can’t understand in a confident manner and that means that they’re going to struggle to introduce you to the conversation with the people you want to talk to.

[00:09:58] Joel Friedland: Oh. So I’m gonna tell you, I’ll give you my vulnerabilities. I’m 66. I am not tech savvy. I’m relationship savvy. I’m buying building savvy. I’m taking care of tenant savvy but not tech savvy. And so my LinkedIn is something that has me tied up in like a pretzel and knots because I have no idea how to get rid of the profiles that still exist that I want to have go away.

[00:10:35] Joel Friedland: Because as you said, I’ve got these three different profiles. I think I know that there are three of them. Only one of them is the main one, the other two, somehow someone made them for me many years ago. I don’t even know what the passwords are to get in to turn it off.

[00:10:52] Jason Barnard: And that is vitally important because Google’s obviously understood that it’s the same person because we’re listing the same company or you are listing the same company.

[00:11:00] Jason Barnard: If it listed a different company, it would assume it was a different Joel Friedland and it would assume that it’s a different person. So when it finds multiple profiles on LinkedIn, on INDB, on forbes.com, on Twitter, on Amazon as an author. It will assume that it’s multiple people unless there’s a piece of evidence like Brit Properties that joins them altogether and it just says, oh, we’re now just confused about his role.

[00:11:24] Joel Friedland: Then this is my problem. I’m very good at finding real estate opportunities, industrial real estate opportunities that are super safe because of the lack of debt, because we’re the only syndicator out of the thousands of syndicators. who use little or no debt. People think that you need debt in real estate. I’m really good at finding deals. We have a staff of people that cold call door to door in industrial parks, so I’m very good at what I do, but I’m not good at all at bringing in new people who, if there are, 3 million people who could potentially invest with me. In the past three years, I have found 30 of them.

[00:12:22] Jason Barnard: Obviously the investors who work with you don’t need to live in Chicago.

[00:12:26] Joel Friedland: No, most of them don’t. Most of them don’t. My investors that I have found have been through referrals and people bring their families in ’cause they love the deals. They’re so different than everybody else’s real estate, yet I’m not getting my message across.

[00:12:45] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Even though I like the idea of debt-free investment in real estate and collecting seven to 8% a year through rent.

[00:12:54] Joel Friedland: Yeah, it makes sense. It makes perfect sense because people who are safety freaks and who are not gamblers love this. I get them to go with me over and over but how many times can a person who’s got a $10 million net worth put a hundred thousand dollars into one of my deals because they’re gonna wanna diversify into other things including people who are in my industry that do have debt. I’m not against debt, I’m just against debt for me.

[00:13:25] Jason Barnard: What I like here is that I can give you hope in the sense that I was the voiceover artist for a cartoon blue dog at my last company. I owned the company. It was an edtech company. And I was a musician and a cartoon blue dog, and yet I can master my Personal Brand. What’s lovely is that it’s non-technical. And what we do at Kalicube® is take what you are doing, amplify it through, Search and AI, but before we can amplify it, we need to take control of that narrative and make sure the Search and AI understand who you are.

[00:13:59] Jason Barnard: Then we can build your credibility on top and then we can build on top of that the visibility that comes through social media. And give you the strategies for LinkedIn, for YouTube, for writing for Forbes, for example, to amplify your voice. And I think this is really interesting for me, it’s an interesting conversation because somebody who’s been incredibly successful offline like you have and then says, actually now I can see an opportunity to go online with my credibility and my authority.

[00:14:29] Jason Barnard: How do I represent that to the online world? And the answer is build your Personal Brand, educate the algorithms and get the algorithms to amplify you. And I love this approach. It’s worked for me because what we have at Kalicube® is my Personal Brand drives 80% of the revenue. And my Personal Brand, if you ask ChatGPT or Google AI mode who is Jason Barnard? Number one, it isn’t confused. Number two, it’s super enthusiastic about how wonderful I am and what a great authority and best in the world at Knowledge Panels and so on and so forth. Because I’ve educated it. You have the same opportunity.

[00:15:10] Joel Friedland: We have a local, not local, we have a fellow here in the US whose name is Adam Gower. Who we found somewhere on the internet maybe four years ago who is an online syndication real estate investors version of Jason. And we have paid him and we have consulted with him and he has helped us and I love him. He’s great. Lives in California. so I could go back to him and say, Hey, I’m ready for more or you and I could work together and do something where maybe you’ve got some ideas and techniques that are not up his alley.

[00:16:09] Jason Barnard: The key here is what we call claim, frame, and prove. So I claim, for example, that I won an award, EdTech innovation, and I did a Dave Award 2008. So I then published that on my website, say I won this award.

[00:16:24] Jason Barnard: This award means that I’m an innovator in technology, so I frame it in a way that makes sense for my career today, and that I prove it by linking out to pointing Google and the AI to different resources across the web on third party websites that say, for example, the Davey Awards website, Jason Barnard won this award for EdTech innovation.

[00:16:46] Jason Barnard: So claim, frame, and prove, and it’s like in court or educating a child. Here’s a piece of information, here’s why it matters, here’s the proof, problem solved. It’s really simple and as you said, you’re not a technical developer person. We’ve got the software that we put behind it that holds it all in place for the machine.

[00:17:04] Jason Barnard: Makes it easy to read for the machine, but at the end of the day, it’s what are you claiming? How are you framing it and how do you prove it? So you need the social media and you need potentially a book and you need potentially to publish articles on third party sites. You need potentially to have a podcast strategy where you guest some podcasts, because all of that is gonna build up the proof.

[00:17:25] Joel Friedland: I’ve been doing a lot of podcast guesting like this. I’ve been on 110. And of the 110, five or six actually speak to my audience, which are accredited investors who like real estate syndications. And when they hear that we do industrial laser focused in Chicago with little or no debt, they become very fascinated ’cause there’s nobody else doing anything like this.

[00:17:58] Joel Friedland: And yet I don’t have it out there.

[00:18:00] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Can I just point out, I’m interested and I’ve got nothing to do with this industry. Can I ask you a question? Why did you do the other 105 interviews? If there are only five that aim at your industry, why do the other 105?

[00:18:13] Joel Friedland: Because I don’t know which ones are gonna work until I do them.

[00:18:17] Jason Barnard: Now, what’s lovely here is those 105, even though they’re not in your industry, still count as proof. It’s a question of how you frame it. That’s the beauty of framing. If you can figure out how to turn the story so that podcast appearance has some authoritative and supporting proof for your message, you’re a winner.

[00:18:40] Jason Barnard: And that’s what we will do is go through that entire list and say, how can we claim, make these podcast episodes on not necessarily very relevant podcasts. Frame that in a way that supports our claim. Build it up. Obviously it’s less valuable than something that is directly within your sphere. But that’s something else as well is there’s we’ve got 3 billion data points in our data set in our database. And what we do is find the podcast and the places you need to be because we analyze your industry and your market.

[00:19:11] Jason Barnard: So this is your really interesting case study because you’ve got all that stuff and it’s just not organized and we can organize it.

[00:19:19] Joel Friedland: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That’s why I’m glad I came on when I saw your podcast pop up. One of my guys is responsible for, he’s a young guy responsible for social media and getting me booked on podcasts.

[00:19:36] Joel Friedland: I looked at what you did and I said to him, the reason that this is relevant is because Jason understands and is good at what we need to build our list of investors so we can buy more buildings and not have people say, come on Joel, I’m already in seven of your deals. I need to diversify and be with someone else.

[00:19:55] Joel Friedland: I love your stuff. One guy told me yesterday, 60% of his investible money is with me. That’s bad. That’s dangerous. That’s dangerous because there’s no diversification. What happens if, God forbid, industrial real estate becomes like office real estate where you can’t fill an office building ’cause people are working at home.

[00:20:17] Joel Friedland: I don’t think that’s gonna happen in industrial ’cause people have to actually work with their hands and be on site. In an industrial manufacturing operation, there’s trained labor. So industrials likely not to have an implosion like office did ’cause of COVID. But the message that I wanna get to people is, yeah, you should put three or 4% of your net worth in my safe stuff.

[00:20:47] Joel Friedland: It’s a steady Eddie that gives you passive income but not 60%. But some people do that with me and I’m grateful to have them. But I wish that it would be more diversified.

[00:21:02] Jason Barnard: Right. And if we can end with just one point, which is the bottom of the funnel decision moment. Which is that you’ve reached out on social media.

[00:21:09] Jason Barnard: Maybe your social media strategy is actually working really well, and somebody Googles you or asks ChatGPT and here, all of a sudden it’s saying, I’m really not sure what his job is. Instead of saying, Joel Friedman is the founder and CEO of Brit Properties. He has 50 years in the industry, 40 years maybe in the industry.

[00:21:30] Jason Barnard: He’s created deals worth a hundred million dollars. He has 24 large real estate industrial buildings in Chicago and he can help you if you want the steady Eddie investment that industrial real estate brings. That’s what you want on that result because the person knows who that you are. They’re close to the decision moment.

[00:21:53] Jason Barnard: And this is typically, and this is exactly why I started Kalicube®, is my search result like this. Said, Jason Barnard is the voiceover artist for a cartoon blue dog, and I lost millions of dollars in potential deals because people don’t trust me.

[00:22:08] Joel Friedland: I fully understand. I appreciate that you and I in the position that you are in not quite as much because I’m not a voiceover artist but I love that you understand my predicament and that you’ve verbalized it very well.

[00:22:27] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I really appreciate the fact that you came on and were vulnerable and said, I actually have this problem. You recognize the problem because a lot of people don’t see it. And it’s been a lovely conversation. Thank you so much. I’ve learned about debt-free empire, industrial real estate steady Eddie, 7 to 8% income within a hundred million dollar portfolio, you’ve learned what you need to do with the work you are already doing on your Personal Brand to make sure you’re converting those bottom of funnel prospects and getting the Search and AI, Google, ChatGPT, to amplify your message in the way that you want. This has been a lovely conversation.

[00:23:02] Jason Barnard: Thank you everyone for watching, and you get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Joel. And have you got any last words?

[00:23:17] Joel Friedland: If someone wants to reach us, because this is what I’m struggling with is having people reach us, the company is Brit Properties and it’s britproperties.com.

[00:23:28] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you so much.

[00:23:30] Narrator: Your corporate and Personal Brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.