Episode 186 - REIT's & Redemptive Innovation in the $1 Trillion in Church Real Estate with Nick Bonner of AARE
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A groundbreaking vision to unlock $1 trillion in underutilized church real estate could revolutionize how faith communities use their buildings and democratize Christian impact investing. Nick Bonner shares his remarkable journey from developing an innovative church-sharing model to launching what may be the world's first Christian impact investment REIT. Through unexpected setbacks and divine redirections, Bonner's story demonstrates how surrendering business plans to God can lead to even greater opportunities for kingdom impact.
Please note that the views expressed by the hosts and guests are their own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Faith Driven Investor.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Richard Cunningham You're listening to Faith Driven Investor, a podcast that highlights voices from a growing movement of Christ, following investors who believe that God owns it all and cares deeply about the heart posture behind our stewardship. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 Hey everyone. All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosted guests may maintain positions in the companies of securities discussed, and this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization. Thanks for listening.
Richard Cunningham Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Man we are nearing the end of 2020 for Luke Roush and really it's been since May, since we've had the opportunity really in earnest to hit on the real estate markets. And we've got an incredible leader in the space. Nick Bonner with us here today that will introduce your momentarily, but excited to have you back in the podcast. Luke, I know it's been a couple of weeks and excited to be talking. Real estate feels like it's after an election. A lot of Fed activity, everything that's been going on, we just kind of need to pay tribute to that asset class and large. But Luke, how are you doing? How is Team Roush this Thanksgiving?
Luke Roush We are doing great. We had a great Thanksgiving. Grateful for unique times that we live in. And certainly the last handful of months has been unique in the real estate realm and dynamic, which makes for a fun podcast session. So this is a great guest and a great conversation we're going to have today.
Richard Cunningham It sure does. So coming from sunny San Diego, California, where he can probably dunk on as in terms of weather as our friend Nick Bonner. Nick has been a leader in the FDI real estate space for quite some time, thinking about just redemption inside of real estate. Longtime CBRE, Caldwell Broker, great expertise. Nick, awesome to have you on the phone with us. Man.
Nick Bonner I was a joy to serve and I'm grateful for you guys and your entire team. What you're doing to spur the movement of faith driven investing. We've heard Luke say it before. Aslan is on the move. You guys are helping investors to be found faithful and they can return. So thank you guys for what you doing.
Richard Cunningham Absolutely. Well, Nick, you've got a wild story. And I think that's just kind of where we want to start with this podcast is your time at the Pine Tops Foundation what you've had your hand in over kind of your career, I think will help frame up where we're going and kind of what happens now and present day with your work. But I just want to hand over the mic to you to kind of contextualize this episode a little bit and who you are.
Nick Bonner Awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah. So I'll start off just like a quick background on me because I think it helps sort of frame this up. Pastor's kid born and raised, actively involved in the church my whole life, spent about a decade on the board of a church board, 13 years on the board of a Christian foundation called the Pine Tops Foundation. In about the last 20 years in commercial real estate, in the capacities of lender, broker, property, manager of my own assets, investments and the like. And all that has sort of helped frame up a lot of my thinking around some of what we're going to dive into today. Since I started volunteering with the foundation, we've deployed over 500 grants and over 40 different private placements, the majority of which were for impact investments. And I mentioned that because my roles in commercial real estate in the foundation have opened my eyes to a very broad spectrum of the deployment of capital and the impact that it can have, which has really stirred up a lot of good questions and opportunities around this space for me. Give me a what I think is a pretty unique perspective. So I'll start real quick with Pinetop, just to give you a brief overview of that. So Private Christian Foundation, we set out about nine years ago. We sort of said, Hey, we need to come up with a theory of change because in spite of being one of the wealthiest Christian nations in history, the church in America has declined. And so we don't have a money problem. We don't have a critical mass problem. We have an efficacy problem. So what are we going to do to steward God's money in a way that actually results in real change? And so the answer to that was what we call the Great Opportunity Report or the GAO report for sure. And how we came about with that was initially was intended to be a confidential internal domestic strategy for us. But we quickly realized it was something that was just much bigger than anything we could ever tackle on our own. And so what we did with that is we basically asked two questions. One, what is the state of the church look like in 2050 and how do we change that? So we built demographic models around it, and then we went back through history and said, okay, how do we change that based off historical record? Like, where have we seen big growth in the church and are there common denominators there? And the answer was, Yeah, there's five. And so we built a chapter on each one of those five intro to kind of frame it up and then a closing chapter of just ideas, just tons of ideas to like, all right, how do we get after this? So if you're listening to this podcast and you're like, okay, this is an investor podcast, but a lot of people on here are faith driven. And so if you're tired of people talking about the church and how it's dying and how it's, you know, not efficacious, read this report and get inspired and get to work, there's some really exciting ideas that come out of that and so you can find it. It's free. Great opportunity, dawg. We probably had 40, 45,000 downloads on it. We're not marketing. And it's just it's kind of tough to tell like how much exposure it's had because it's a PDF document that just gets forwarded around. But our best guess is, you know, probably 45,000 different church leaders of major denominations and ministries that have been using that as their game plan. That's required reading in a number of seminaries and denominations. And so, you know, we're excited about what it's. And I'm more excited about what other people will do with it when they get a hold of it and start to ideate on like, Wow, what's my part in this? So one example of that is a real estate model called Open Doors. And what's fun about this is this wasn't even my idea. Like we hired a bunch of McKinsey consultants and KKR people. There's 150 different people that helped us put this dock together. Their names are in the back of it. And they came up with this idea that like, hey, as we look at the overall church, like your two biggest costs, like most companies are people in real estate and arguably maybe there's a vocational angle in there for pastors. But clearly the low hanging fruit is in the real estate because as I started digging into it, I realized the average church in an American city spends half of their finances on a building that the only fully utilize about 5% of the week.
Richard Cunningham Absolutely. I've always thought about that.
Nick Bonner It's a colossal waste of stewardship. I mean, it's just like it makes me angry when I think about it. And so their idea was we've got to have a better model for that. What if we had for profit sustainable solutions with third parties that owned this property? What if we had sort of like a we work for churches like 20 years ago, if I would have told you that you'd be interested in sharing your music collection, your home in your car, you'd be like, You're crazy in your office space, for that matter, right? But like, here we are. So why is the church so far behind this? Why couldn't we do that, too? So a couple other big stats for you, as I sort of do some of an original research on this is there's about $1 trillion of equity just buried in the dirt in church buildings, just church buildings alone, not even the rest of the real estate the church owns. And so if we deployed that capital alone, we could triple the current rate of church planting. And why that's important because I didn't know really anything about church planting before this report is church planning is one of the five most catalytic things that could be done that would be positively disruptive for the church. It is a common denominator behind all big revivals in American history. One other stat on that, which is roughly 12% of companies own their own properties, but roughly 84% of churches own theirs. And it's such a big difference. It's like, wow, why are we settling for, you know, a property tax exemption and maybe 3% appreciation when the scripture tells us that we're given returns of 30, 60 and 100 fold? Like what if we were putting our capital into our mission in the same way that businesses put their capital into their mission? And so that was sort of the big idea behind like, okay, we've got to do something different about about real estate. So what does that look like?
Luke Roush Yeah, well, I'd just dovetail on that, Nick. One of the things that we talk a lot with business leaders that we partner with about is stay focused and stay clear on the business that you're in. If you're in the business of distributing heavy industrial equipment, focus on distributing heavy industrial equipment. Don't focus on somehow trying to become like a real estate mogul through the the dirt that's underneath your dealerships. And so we try to always remind business leaders of what is the business that you're in. If you're in the real estate business and you're trading multifamily properties, you probably want to own the real estate. But if you're in almost any other kind of business, you're looking to control that costs and make it a variable expense rather than a sunk asset. So what you're bringing up is very apropos. And, you know, it'd be curious to go back and figure out how did we get here? Maybe it's just a spirit around kind of own in the building that started, but more importantly, I think more constructively, where do we go from here in terms of trying to return to the core mission, which is reaching people with the Gospel? So please continue.
Nick Bonner Yeah, I know with you and I've got a whole white paper I wrote on how we got here that you guys have been nice enough to post on FDI on, you know, basically takes you into the etymology. It's about words, like language matters. Like we can't even look at a building and call it the right thing. We look at buildings and we call them churches. They're not churches, the churches, the exits, the gathering of people. So, so long as we look at buildings and say, that's a church, then we actually even create a mindset where a pastor is like, Wait, you want me to share my church? No, this is my church. Like, I'm not sharing this building. And so we just need to think differently about this. And to your point, there's an example I give of you guys get pitched by businesses all the time. So let me pitch you on a business idea for a moment. All right. So I'm going to start a business. It's a predominantly retail business. We are only going to be actually visible to the community a half a day a week. We're going to go to our main parishioners and we're going to ask them to take their day off for 2 to 4 hours and spend that moving, picking up stuff and moving in and out the rest of the week. There's going to be zero sign that we actually are even in existence. And as the CEO of this company, I'm going to spend a decent amount of time on things that are. Pletely outside of my scope or set of abilities. Do you want to invest in me? You'd be like, Are you.
Luke Roush Crazy? That sounds like a long cut, Nick.
Nick Bonner Right. So this is the model. This is plan A for church planting. Like we're sending these guys out to battle the go get slaughtered. Like these poor pastors have these really crummy models that they're given. And so you probably hear my voice. We just we need better solutions for this. And so I don't want to camp on this for too long. But the quick idea with this whole open doors model was let's go out and buy buildings or create a fund for profit sustainable, fund them, go buy buildings, be a church industrial office, whatever, it just have to work for the users, renovate it so that multiple churches can share the space when they need it, when they don't need it, which we just learned is the majority of the time, at least the entirety of the building. We rent that out to other uses, like Christian preschool or coffee shop or coworking or let's just let's take wedding space back. I mean, an event space is a huge income generator and all of those uses can both subsidize the church's cost to be in the space and bring in new sources of people. So that might not normally set foot inside of a church. So now you put the well inside of the building. You have these divine collisions that can occur within the church and you're creating a sense of space of a third place that people want to be in. And you just tell the pastors, Hey, you've got access seven days a week, why don't you sit in the lobby and just hand out coffee to people as they come in like they're showing up at your front door? Just love people and basically take all the distractions away from them. So that was the model set out to do it. I love Henry Kissinger's example of like introducing somebody to the world of sushi where he says, like, you got like the apartment life model over here. And that's like, you know, the California roll. And then you've got, you know, some of these other private equity funds that are like the nigiri sushi, right? You don't take somebody straight into Gary Sushi. You start him at the California, get an appetite and you go towards that. Well, this open doors model, like there's so many different moving pieces to it and then there's like all this cultural overlay and spiritual things of like people, you know, hating on the church that it's like, that's the nigiri sushi. And I came out of the gates swinging for that, and it was hard. It was an interesting time because I was a part of a group. It was kind of like the first FDI group ever, only unofficial. You'll recognize the names of like Beaner Skin. And I don't know if, you know Matt Migliore is, but couple of other guys that are part of this.
Luke Roush These are some of the urges and they threw in real estate.
Nick Bonner The O.G.. So we all get together. Dan Mack it maybe not a name you guys know, but it's just a phenomenal human being. And a buddy of mine, John Kim, we all get together. We're like, How do we solve for this stuff? So it's during Covid. We're like, Well, let's just do like a video. Like we can't meet with people. Just do a video meeting like, you know, every week. So it was awesome. Was first FTI Group during that time super formative for me. This is when Ben starts Callus Capital was turns in the Sovereigns real estate fund. We introduced each other like narthex, which is doing like their own real estate fund co hatch. Well then Field Redemption Collective. There's like all these groups that are spinning in our minds and we're learning about all these great solutions that entrepreneurs are pursuing and having the realization that, like, man, access to this capital is really hard because the only thing that investors love more than their money is their time. And so if you want to invest in one of these models, it's going to take time to go evaluate is brand new. Like these aren't California rules. These are somewhere between that and the Gary Sushi. And so God gave me a vision during this time that was like, Man, I love these people in their models so much. I'm going to take the operator route. But my goal is to prove this so well that we could go raise up ultimately a REIT where all of my buddies, we could all collaborate and roll up all of our individual funds into this massive REIT because then we can begin to democratize the capital in this space. Right now, the barriers of entry for anything really Christian impact is really high. If you don't invest in this stuff, you got to have typically minimum like a quarter million bucks. Be ready to have your money locked up for 5 to 7, maybe ten years. And oftentimes there isn't a massive amount of diversification. So if grandma wants to invest your money, you're saying, no, grandma, don't, don't do it. And so what if there were a highly diversified vehicle that had a $2,000, you know, minimum and a ton of flexibility that opens up the pool so much bigger. And so I sort of got off track a little bit. I wanted to share an example of one of the thought experiments also that led me to this space. So years ago, Tom Blaisdell wrote this white paper where he explains that there's we all think that government is supposed to solve this stuff. Or guess what? Like there's only about 15 times the amount of government money available, then donation capital. And certainly donation capital was not enough to get the job done. There's 100 and. 50 times the amount of investment capital available in the ecosystem. Then there is donation capital. So the thought experiment on this is. So all the two pocket investors, right? Let's just imagine for a moment that in the philanthropy space we could create a KPI that measured kingdom impact. I don't believe you can, but let's just imagine for a second that you could. So if we did, let's imagine that the philanthropy space has a 100% return on their KPI. Let's imagine that the impact space does a really poor job and they only have a 1% return on theirs. Even in that scenario, the impact investment space would still have a 50% greater return than the philanthropy space because of its sheer size. Right. And so please don't understand me. Like philanthropic capital is absolutely necessary. I'm just trying to cast a bigger net, bigger vision beyond that as the sole apparatus for solving the world's issues. Right. So this is not binary thinking. This is like a continuum. God made 17,000 types of butterflies. So there's plenty of room for expression and creativity in our work. But this thought experiment gives you a sense of like, how critically important it is to actually get into this impact investment space and start doing work there.
Richard Cunningham Right? That's really important. I want to double down on that real quick because I think that's just worth stopping because it actually plays off really nicely. One of the most legendary FTI videos, in my opinion, for those that have been through kind of the six week FDI cohort is when Greg learned a hand unpacks this concept and he talks about, you know, Americans are given somewhere around 400 to $500 billion to philanthropy, which what you're talking about charity each year. And that number is actually going down, which is a bummer. You know, we the church should be joyfully, hopefully like increasing that number in that share that we're giving. And that's such a small percentage of GDP. And what you're talking about here is the hundred plus trillion dollars in investable assets out there. Just a small portion of that was unlocked for other than, you know, purely profit driven purposes, which making a good return is absolutely key. You're saying what could take place here is just an even greater multiple. Am I am I understand that correctly?
Nick Bonner Yeah. And I love Greg learned a hand. And that is a man that has put his money where his mouth is. And his two by two model was instructive and edifying for me as well, where like, you know, on the vertical axis, you've got the spiritual impact on the horizontal, you've got financial. Everybody wants to be talking to the right, but what about top on the left? Like what about concessionary investments? Like where's our space for that? And like, where's our ability to like seek the Holy Spirit's guiding in that space. In fact, a lot of the times he'll tell you this and I'll tell you the same some of my favorite investments are talking to the left. So there's certainly needs. One of my dreams is after we sort of prove out the right thing is actually go out and do a concessionary fund. But it's a hard issue. And I think I need FDI to help mature the hearts of a lot of the faith driven investors before I'm willing to take a flier on that one.
Luke Roush Hey, Nick, one question that I wanted to ask pertinent to the reconstruct is any time you think about creating an open ended vehicle like that where there's more flexibility around minimums, more flexibility around individuals who can access it is from a networth perspective. And then also having the liquidity to be able to support that more open doors access pun intended. Given your background, I'd love to have you just talk a little bit about how do you tactically start that? Like once it's big, once it's stable and you've got sufficient liquidity reserves and all that to be able to facilitate churn, it's easier to imagine. But a lot of times I've seen folks get hung up on this model because they can't figure out how do you get critical mass at the beginning? Maybe talk a little bit about how you're facing into that or thinking about facing into that in the coming years.
Nick Bonner Yeah. So I don't want to blow the story too much, but for the vehicle, the plan would be raise enough money that you can get an initial critical mass. And so, you know, an initial rig, A-plus offering, would allow you to do 75 million a year every year until you've got enough capital and operational history to go to an investment banker and say, okay, let's go big now. And what an investment banker is willing to start with as their minimum, whether that's, you know, 300 million or 2 billion, you know, that's the question that would need to be answered at that point in time based on that fund and its performance. But ultimately, if you go the I.B. route to the road to Wall Street, we bring.
Richard Cunningham Luke on the pod for investment expertise, and you can just see him foaming at the mouth, chomping at the bit. Want to get into that conversation?
Luke Roush I love innovation. I love people who are looking at what others have looked at and seeing new opportunities. That's really what innovation is. Very rarely is it inventing something new, but it's figuring out how to apply a concept from one field in the maybe a new field and just creatively playing at the margin of, you know, intersecting circles. So I really like the construct and I think that know what you're really pointing towards, Nick, is the democratization of faith driven investing. Even if it's true that the majority of assets are held by very few individuals globally, the reality is that, you know, the vision, mission, dream, I think that we all share this is our collective mission is to be able to allow everyone to participate, whether in big ways or small ways, in this idea of reflecting our values and how we steward capital and to try to look for market based mechanisms that can lead to an enhanced ability to plant churches and do some of the things that you've outlined through that Global Opportunity report, which is incredibly insightful for me. And it sat on my desk for well over a year as I just kind of processed and reprocess the contents. So really grateful for point. Absolutely, in a way with that.
Nick Bonner Yeah, well, praise God and thank you. Yeah. One of the visions that God had given us with this is like the widow's might. Like when we came out with this, we went to a number of the operators that are doing really good work, and the people that are running the ministry side of their work came to us, were like, I can't invest in the work we're doing. I don't have a quarter million dollars. But like this vision of like being able to go to Wall Street and have a lower minimum, man, like I'm in. So there's a lot of people that want to be a part of this. And that's what's driving me more than anything is all my friends and family that are like, Hey, I'd love to be a part of this, but I can't do it just yet. And even like even the investors that have a lot of the money, like so my best friend's house, three years old, he had a liquidity event recently and he came to me. He's like, Nick, you know, I want to do a faith driven investing real estate thing. What do I do where I go? And I'm like, Yeah, here's like six different funds have invested into you. And he's like, Dude, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have the time to dig through this. So is there an easy button? Like, is there like way I can invest in all of these? And I was like, Well, yeah, we could figure that out. Actually introducing the business, give us like solvency. Got a real estate fund, do that. So yes, trying to solve for that is the fun part. So let me take you back. Yeah.
Richard Cunningham I was about to say, bless my linear brain that likes to hear the conclusion of the story that gets us to the present day and go quickly through the kind of like the open doors to now.
Nick Bonner Yeah. So open doors start that, by the way. Like I still got a full time job at CBRE and joked during the time of working two and a half full time jobs and working full time at C, which is not like a residential where you can work like 20 hours a week, like you got to be full time. And it's a very competitive industry. Plus volunteer and Pinetop plus starting this whole Open Doors syndicate, I thought it would take 18 months. And right before Covid, I was well on my way on pace for that. And then Covid hit and bunch of other things hit. And, you know, it ended up taking more like six years. And so during that time, I mean, this is a podcast for another day. But like I just had to say it was rough. I ended up having a full on panic attack. And I'm not a person that is panicky, my wife. Laughed when our therapist diagnosed me with anxiety. She was like, You don't have anxiety, but there's something to like going after this stuff that has real repercussions. And so I actually wrote a whole white paper on like discerning that call in, like, how do we know if like, we followed God when we're in the middle of like, the desert? Did I do wrong or this is actually where you brought me God. And so during this time I bump into Dallas Jenkins and he's like, Nick, you have to read me and myself and Bob by Saul Fisher The story of the collapse of Vegetables and shout out to the Holy Post. By the way, I'm Phil Fisher. So I read the story and he's got we have time to go into it in detail. But like he talks about the Schumann Night Woman, which is not a story that I remember in the Bible, but quick upshot on this. So there's this woman who's barren. She's serving a Leisha. He says, Hey, God's going to give you a child. God gives her a child. A year later, she raises him up. When he's in his teens, the child basically ends up dying in her arms. So she goes to her husband. Her husband asked her how she is, and she says this astounding thing. She says, all is well, which is not something you would normally say when your first and only child dies. She goes a like she asked the same questions. Use this all as well. And it's clear that she's messed up about this, by the way, like she's like grieving over this. But the question that he poses in this is like, what kind of a God gives somebody a dream and then takes it away. Right. And then the second question is, what kind of a person answers all is well when their only child dies in their arms in the answer is like God had clearly taken her through a journey personally where the moral of the story that she learned was like, sometimes God gives us a desire or a dream only to take it away only because only then, after taking it away, can we really know if we love him more than the desire or the dream. And should he ever give that dream or desire back to us, only then would we ever actually be able to experience it to its fullest. So this is a super powerful lesson for me through this process because I think I sort of made this like seeing how important this vision was. I think I, in spite of my best efforts, I sort of made it a little bit of an idol. And so I'll pause for a quick diagnostic for those listening, if you want to figure out if you've got an idol of your own, let me ask you two quick questions. The first question is fill in this blank. For me, living is for me, living is for me. And be like, I don't know, going on great surf trips or, you know, hanging out with my family or having success in business. Right.
Richard Cunningham Spoken like a guy who lives in San Diego.
Nick Bonner Yeah. All good things, right? And then answer that next one for me, dying is for me, dying is, man, if I lost this or if that happened. Right. So if your answer to those two questions is anything other than Jesus, then you're set up for failure. Because the problem is, for me, living is like all of those things can be taken away in an instant. The only possible answer that can fit in both blanks and protect you from suffering is if the answer is Jesus. So I'll fast forward through the story and I've got the money raised. I've got 30 plus churches that are like, If you build, it will come. We're excited. I got multiple redundancy and all the tenants. I've pulled the trigger on the Lego. I spent all the money, I've got everything ready. I've got a couple of buildings lined up and God presses pause in a big way. And so I've got to tell you, this only got story for a moment because I think people will be blessed by it. So five years prior, I'd been shopping for a new church after 17 years of the same church and during the storm camping out in the book of Colossians, I'm reading cautions every day for the entire summer. The Lord is speaking to me through caution so loudly that I actually read chapter one every day for 30 days straight. Never done this before or since then. Every time I read it, he speaks to me. So I go to 12 different churches, and if you know me, I'm a nerd. I got my spreadsheet. I'm evaluating these churches on like 15 different points and three pastors preach on Colossians chapter one. And I'm like, What are the chances? And the Holy Spirit, you know, meets me in a way as a sort of Baptist Presbyterian background that I am not used to being about. I'm like weeping in these churches, super embarrassing, but I don't really care at the same time. And at the end of it, I'm like, God, wow, this is amazing experience. Like, what are you doing here? Like, I can't attend three church. I got to pick one and he doesn't give me that answer, so I have to pick one. So I pick one church back into the story. Fast forward five years. So church one, I'm attending church. Two of those three joins our church in August of last year and says, Hey, like we just love you guys are doing are going to join your church now two on the same roof. And then in September, a third church comes to us and says, Hey, we're closing down at the end of this year. We want to sell our building to you. But this isn't a market sale. We're not stupid. This is a. Time passed. We see a legacy here and we want to basically hand this thing over to you. You've got to pay off our debt and our severance. But, you know, it's a $50 million building. They want to sell us for 5 million bucks. And long story short, with this process, the church can't raise the money because they're like, look, their only catches. You got 30 days to raise 5 million bucks. So I call the people I know. I'm like, let's get you a $45 million write off. You guys could buy this thing for 5 million. You could gift it to my church. Nobody wants to do it. Shocker to me. I can't believe it.
Richard Cunningham I know where this is going. Back to the open doors thing. Yeah. Wow. I'm excited to hear how this ends.
Nick Bonner So bottom line is, we're closing in and I'm like, Yeah, we're not going to buy this thing. What are we going to do? And I feel like praying about it. I'm like, got to understand what's going on. And guys like, Hey, who did I give that vision to? You have three churches under the same roof and I'm like, Me is like, Well, what were those three churches? And so I go back through my notes, You want to get to the third church was the preach on Colossians. There's the church that wants to sell this building to us. And I'm like, Whoa, goosebumps, right? Like, okay. And then God's like, Hey, how much money does the church need? 5 million bucks. And how much money do you raise for the open doors model? 5 million bucks. Like with God, like.
Richard Cunningham Isaac on the altar necklace.
Nick Bonner This is the Isaac on the altar moment, man. And so rule number one is churches don't own real estate with open doors like they can't like you need a third party. And so, again, just to abbreviate all this, I make the decision. I go to my lead capital provider. I'm like, Hey, here's the idea. I don't really know if you want to do this, but here's the opportunity. We could do it alone. I could just back out. We could just sort of put open doors on pause and they're like, This is great, let's do it. And I'm like, okay, I was open. You'd say, No, but here we go. So bottom line is I put open doors on hold, give up my capital, then help them close escrow on the building. And that may end up being the first open doors building. And it may not. It's out of my control. And so for the second time in six years, I give up my career and then found myself on the other side of it saying like, okay, God, like, what do we do now? And the following from that was really a dark night of the soul. My wife gave me John Comer's book Lit The Dark Night of the Soul, which was cathartic during that time. So just like just felt like God had just sort of hugged me out to dry. And so this was a time of of a lot of soul searching. But now I just have to say that God is just so good and so patient. And I was rebellious in my heart during that time. But he just showed me a tremendous amount of grace through it. And I think the upshot during this time was what I came down to, in spite of all my anger about sort of like giving up my career twice now, this is like, you know, God, whatever you want to do with me, do with me. Where else can I go? It's like Peter, like only you have the words of life. So if your endgame is for me to end up, you know, poor and naked and alone, then, like, I guess, like, okay, there's nowhere else I can turn to. So that was a really, I guess, maturing time in my face. And I think I'll speak to this maybe a little bit later. But there are few biblical characters that didn't have a desert journey that God took them through or they just had to like abandon basically all things and make the decision that it's really only God. It's not the dream, it's not the desire. It's got to be only God. So you fast forward to today, which is shortly after all that happened. I got a phone call into Andrew Arroyo from Andrew Arroyo. Real Estate is a buddy of mine who calls me and says, Hey, Nick, I think there's a generational wealth making opportunity in commercial real estate. We've got 40% of all commercial, say, debt roll. In the next three years. There's going to be a lot of people that need to sell fundamentally good buildings for discounts just to, you know, meet redemption cues and to pay off their lenders. And so I said, yeah, it sounds interesting, man, but I've just seen too much. And for me, it's in Pachter bust. Like, I can't do anything that doesn't have a legitimate impact. It's like me too, like I'm in the same boat. He's like, Nick. He's like, for the last X amount of years you've been sharing all these Christian models, all these redemptive impact models of people for free. What if we did that? You actually got paid to do it? I was like, Whoa, that would be a dream come true. And so fast forward on this. Again, we're in the process right now of starting, as I understand it, the world's first Christian impact investment rate. And it's one of those things where it's like Mark since got this quote where there decades when nothing happens in days or decades happen. And this is one of those for me where I feel like by giving up Isaac on the altar with this whole open doors thing, like God allowed me to, instead of hitting my 20 year vision of like, Hey, we'll go to open doors. And 20 years later I have a right. It was like, Now let's just do the rewrite. Now you've been faithful, go. And so I'm super excited by this idea because we just yesterday, I mean, this all happened in real time. So what's today's Thursday? So Tuesday I sent my farewell notice to everybody at KB yesterday. The SEC got back to us and said, We're officially qualifying you guys to be a read on. And is real. Like, it's getting real really fast. I haven't even updated my LinkedIn profile. So bottom line is we're going to go start this REIT that can do all those things that we were talking about where we're going to go find all these other operators and invest into them and lift up their arms and provide an easier route to capital on both sides of the equation. Want to grow both the supply and the demand side of the equation. So if you got a question of the REIT, we've talked about that more later. But I just want to say that the lesson here for me is it's actually the second time in my career that God has taught me this lesson. I hope there's not a third, but it's a Joseph story. Like God doesn't move in a linear fashion all the time. A lot of times we think he should go from point A to B to C to D, and God can go to A to F, over to Q and straight to Z and right back to again if he wants to. But like if you look at the stories in the Bible of people like Joseph, it's like, man, we're not in control of this stuff. God is in control of this stuff. And if we can just hang on to him, the places he'll take us to, all the places will go.
Luke Roush I think that's a good word. And you know what I would say, Nick? Is that what you're talking through in terms of the journey that you've been on, is what it looks like to be actively faithful and guard against being willful. There's certain things that God has put in our control and is allowed to be in our control and those other things that are kind of outside of our control. It's a trying to discern, as you did in your path through the desert, what is the voice of God? What is maybe the voice of the enemy or your own voice? Kind of speaking of the voice of the world, speaking in the year, trying to discern which voice and listening for the accent that God has and how he speaks to us, which oftentimes is corroborated by Scripture and or godly counsel around us. That is what discernment looks like in the process of being faithful, but being actively faithful and moving forward with full recognition that God controls the outcomes and teaches us things along the way. And in Patterson's quote, around decades happen in days and other times it's, you know, days happen over decades. I think that's a really important reminder around controlling what we can control and trusting God with some level of the timing and the outcome. So this has been super instructive and informative, I think, for Richard and I sitting here and it's great to hear your story. I love the process that you're going through to be able to democratize real estate and what it looks like for more people to get in the game, which in the words of Henry and Justin. So, Richard, over to you.
Richard Cunningham Yeah, I mean, if you'd allow me, honestly, the liberty just to try to summarize like Nick, because it's powerful and it's a really cool, as you said, only God story, kind of all of it, but it's this catalytic vision. You receive it pine tops for how you can engage as kind of this church issue that we have the systemic church issue. And I love that. It's so overlaps with your passion and your background and, you know, just professionally what you're capable of, which is in the real estate space. And so then you get this vision for open doors, which is for church real estate spaces, to kind of step in as an antidote and a healer. There Open Doors is at the finish line, docs are created and signed, capital is raised, and you're there on the goal line. And then all of a sudden the Lord comes down the pipeline with this $50 million church that is an opportunity to be acquired for 5 million. You sacrifice the capital, the Isaac on the altar moment for Open doors. This project you are so excited about for the acquisition of this church leads to what sounds like a pretty dark season or just a lot of contemplation of like, God, how would you use me? And then all of a sudden this Rick comes to fruition in a way which was the ultimate end game. You started open doors with in a way that you could never have kind of fathomed. And so I just I love that it's God not moving in a linear fashion and so deeply edifying. And there's 30 podcasts inside of just this one podcast that we could pull on each individual strand. But maybe Nick closes down with this of just like generally you've given so many just kind of incredible tidbits of wisdom in here, like what it was like kind of that last piece of advice you might leave the audience with as it relates to real estate or just engaging with the space, what have you. And we'll close there.
Nick Bonner Yeah. So and there's so much I want to say on this front. So I'd like to speak to two different audiences here in your podcast. So first, to those who haven't yet done any impact investments, I'd say, you know, there's this great Leonardo Da Vinci Code who says, I've been impressed by the urgency of doing knowing is not enough. We must apply. Being willing is not enough. We must do right. So if you haven't done impact investment like start now, it doesn't matter how much money you have, like you start now. Don't wait until your victory lap. Our time is now. How are you stewarding the other 90% of the capital that God's entrusted with you? And if you don't have time to go investigate, 400 different operators go investigate and five funds make them do the due diligence and I'll give you a freebie. Like there's a bunch of people that are on this podcast. Chuck Weldon was just on this podcast. He's fantastic. Invest in him. We're going to. Launch capital. Their outstanding guys are great. Yeah, we're talking about really solid people. And so those who are active, I'd encourage them to consider the Greg learn a hand to buy to. I mean, try some concessionary investments and see what God does and go pray about that. There's this Viktor Frankl quote that says Success like happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue, and it only does so at the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a byproduct of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. And so my final thought on this is if your identity isn't being an investor, you will likely do a poor job of furthering that gospel through investment. Dump your identity as an investor or receive your inheritance as a child of God. Bring him your loaves and fish and watch him walk away.
Richard Cunningham Come on. Nick Bonner. Thank you. How awesome to hear your story, man. Thank you for what you're doing for this broader, redemptive investing space, specifically within the asset class of real estate. I'm excited to follow your journey. Friends in the FDI ecosystem, I would say keep your eyes open on LinkedIn, social media, everywhere. You're going to see Nick around and this is going to be something that we're going to follow along closely. So friends, Happy Advent, we'll catch you for one last FTI podcast after this one to close out 2024. But otherwise, we'll catch you next time. Thanks so much.
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