Do Not Buy A House… Here’s How To Get Rich | Todd Nepola

Todd, founder and president of Current Capital Real Estate Group, said he entered income-producing real estate at age 25 in 1998 after working as a stockbroker and in investment banking. He wanted assets that could generate cash flow without requiring him to show up every day and earn commissions through constant client acquisition and trading.

His first investment was a warehouse bought in June 1998 for $575,000, and he said he still owns it. The asking price had been $600,000; the previous developer had gone broke and lost the property to a Canadian bank while owing roughly $1.2–$1.3 million.

Todd put essentially every dollar he had into that first purchase despite having never completed a real-estate closing. Unsure what additional cash he might need beyond the down payment, he applied for credit cards and was prepared to take cash advances, although closing credits for items such as security deposits and taxes meant he ultimately did not need them.

People around him strongly discouraged the first deal. Stock-market colleagues mocked the idea of tying up large amounts of money for modest real-estate returns when stocks were rising rapidly, and even the real-estate attorney handling his closing told him he was crazy.

Todd concluded that advice is valuable only when it comes from people with relevant experience and results. The people warning him against real estate did not themselves own investment property, leading him to adopt the rule that he should listen primarily to people actually doing what he wants to do and whom he would be willing to trade places with.

He believed the distressed warehouse could work because he could fill its vacancies and improve the property at his purchase price. Within roughly six months, he filled three vacant spaces, re-signed four existing tenants whose leases had been affected by the foreclosure, and cleaned and painted the building with help from friends.

The first property quickly validated his investment model. He refinanced it for $600,000, recovered his original capital and closing costs, received an additional closing check he remembers as roughly $8,000–$12,000, and expected about $5,000 a month in cash flow beginning that January.

He immediately recycled the recovered capital into another property and repeated the strategy. That success turned real estate from an experiment into a pattern of buying, improving, refinancing and holding assets.

Todd said his biggest long-term real-estate risk is excessive debt rather than normal market cycles. His career has included recessions, wars, pandemics and both rising and falling markets, but he believes manageable leverage allows an owner to survive cycles that cannot reliably be timed.

His first warehouse also became his example of why he favors holding over selling. After the improvements it appraised around $800,000, meaning he might have sold it and cleared roughly $175,000 after costs, but he held it instead and said it now produces almost three times that amount in annual cash flow.

Todd distinguishes investing from flipping. He described fix-and-flip activity as a trading or sales business, comparable to buying and selling watches, boats or stocks quickly, while investing means owning an asset long enough for income, debt reduction and appreciation to compound.

He views patience as essential to building generational wealth. His argument is that valuable properties need time to mature, and selling whenever an attractive short-term gain appears can sacrifice far larger future cash flow.

Todd did not choose commercial real estate because he believed everyone should begin there. His first building simply caught his attention when he repeatedly drove past its for-sale sign; he believes investors should choose the property type they understand and enjoy rather than assume multifamily housing is the mandatory starting point.

He considers multifamily, industrial, retail and office real estate variations of the same underlying investment discipline. Multifamily is a strong asset class in his view, but he personally never liked it enough to pursue it heavily.

Todd did not know in his early 20s that real estate would become his career or that he would build a company around it. Even after acquiring his first, second and third properties, he remained a stockbroker and enjoyed that career and lifestyle.

The 2000 technology-stock collapse pushed him toward real estate full time. As stock activity dried up, he found himself paying other people more to manage his growing real-estate portfolio than he was earning in his brokerage work, prompting him to obtain a real-estate license and manage and operate the properties himself.

Current Capital Management grew out of that transition rather than a predetermined entrepreneurial plan. As Todd became more involved in operating his own properties, other owners began asking him for help; he said he started the management company more than 20 years ago and gradually expanded its services.

Current Capital now manages and leases both its own properties and properties for clients. Todd described a sizable organization with specialized teams rather than the small owner-operated setup with which he began.

His career reinforced his belief that young people do not need a fixed life plan. At 22 or 23, he said he would not even have identified real estate as his future; his approach is to keep taking useful steps, notice where opportunity and enjoyment develop, and adjust accordingly.

Delayed gratification is one of Todd’s central financial principles. He argues that spending $10,000 on a watch at age 25 carries a much larger opportunity cost because the same money could compound through investments for decades.

He advises delaying luxury consumption until it becomes financially insignificant. At 50, he said he can afford virtually any material item he wants yet does not even wear a watch, because possessions became less meaningful once he no longer needed them as symbols of future success.

Todd said financial security became more meaningful to him than visible displays of wealth. He considers being able to fund children’s education, help parents and cover family needs from recurring investment income a more meaningful form of wealth than owning an exotic car; someone wanting the Lamborghini experience, he joked, can rent one for a week.

He has rented his own apartment for more than a decade despite owning extensive real estate. The last personal residence he owned was when his children were young.

Todd sees a primary residence mainly as a lifestyle purchase rather than an investment. He accepts that owning can provide stability for a family and that a house may appreciate, but argues that the owner must keep paying the mortgage and expenses, whereas his commercial properties generate rent from tenants that services the investment.

He rejects the social pressure that treats renting as evidence of financial weakness. In his view, both a homeowner with a mortgage and a renter are paying someone for housing, while the meaningful investment distinction is whether an asset produces income independently of the owner’s labor.

For people without enough capital to buy property immediately, Todd recommends first investing in skills and knowledge. He favors books, courses, masterminds and practical training over prematurely spending disposable income on cars, watches or other status items.

He specifically recommends learning the operating side of real estate before becoming a major owner. A young person can obtain a real-estate license, learn leasing and brokerage, source deals for investors, wholesale opportunities or otherwise participate in transactions while building experience and relationships.

He does not believe a first investment needs to resemble a $20 million institutional deal. Someone can begin with a comparatively small property—he used roughly $300,000 as an example—and can sometimes pool capital from relatives or partners rather than finance the entire purchase personally.

If forced to choose between buying a personal home and a comparable investment property, Todd said he would choose the investment property. His reasoning is that the investment begins building productive assets rather than merely satisfying housing needs.

Someone starting from zero should immerse himself or herself in the business before risking money. Todd recommends repeatedly underwriting hypothetical deals, studying which local transactions are occurring and who is buying them, reading local business and real-estate news, and learning why particular properties work financially.

He considers active deal sourcing one of the most valuable things a person without capital can contribute. An aspiring investor can identify an off-market property, determine which established local buyer acquires that type of asset, secure or structure an opportunity and approach that buyer about a partnership or another way of sharing in the deal.

Todd believes local-market knowledge is largely obtainable through public information. Regularly following transactions and news reveals the major owners, brokers, developers and buyers in a city, allowing a newcomer to determine whom to approach when a relevant opportunity appears.

Networking is central to his approach to finding off-market opportunities. He says useful relationships extend beyond brokers to building staff, doormen, golf professionals, personal trainers, boat captains and other people who interact closely with wealthy property owners and may learn about impending sales or life changes before the formal market does.

His networking principle is that access grows with the diversity of people one knows. A luxury agent who knows only competing agents may miss information available to professionals who regularly interact privately with prospective sellers.

Todd says mentors do not necessarily require a formal relationship. Someone whose work, routines or decisions you consistently study through books, podcasts or social media can function as a mentor even without personally knowing you.

His first major in-person real-estate mentorship began because he approached an older, highly successful operator after a conference presentation. The speaker told an audience of roughly 400–600 people that everyone would take his cards but almost nobody would actually contact him; Todd decided to be the exception.

Todd waited outside the man’s conference booth for roughly 10–15 minutes so he could approach him personally rather than risk being turned away by staff. He introduced himself, explained that he was doing the same type of work on a much smaller scale and asked to visit the man’s office, observe his operation and get advice.

The mentor was based in Virginia, while Todd was in Florida, but Todd immediately agreed to travel. After returning from the Las Vegas conference, he flew to the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and visited the mentor’s office.

The visit became far more substantial than Todd expected. The mentor toured him through a two-story operation with roughly 150 employees, spent about five or six hours with him one-on-one and went to lunch with him; Todd insisted on buying the meal despite initially being offered lunch himself.

Seeing the larger operation changed Todd’s perception of scale. He realized the mentor was fundamentally doing the same work Todd was already doing, simply with more employees, larger assets and more years of execution.

The mentor’s central lesson was to stop allowing familiarity with one deal size to become a ceiling. Todd described the progression as moving from $10 million deals to $20 million and eventually $50 million deals because the basic operating principles remain similar even as the numbers become larger.

The same realization applied to company growth. Todd compared his roughly 30-person organization at the time with the mentor’s roughly 150-person company and concluded that a larger organization was not a fundamentally different business, only a larger execution of the same functions.

Todd says authenticity is what makes an aspiring entrepreneur worth mentoring. He believes he can quickly distinguish between someone genuinely determined to pursue something and someone who merely wants conversation, reassurance or attention.

He advises making it exceptionally easy for a successful person to help you. Inviting a stranger to a long dinner requires that person to sacrifice family time, whereas asking to bring a coffee to the office for a 15-minute conversation imposes very little burden; Todd said those 15-minute meetings often naturally last much longer.

Reading became one of Todd’s main forms of self-education after he had been a poor reader in school. He began reading seriously around age 21 or 22 and said he has since read hundreds of books.

The book he identified as most influential personally was Tony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within. He credits it with making him believe he could build something substantial even before he knew whether his eventual field would be real estate, finance, manufacturing, shipping or something else.

Todd later met Tony Robbins and said the personal encounter strengthened his positive view of him. More broadly, he reads according to the problem or skill he currently wants to improve rather than limiting himself to conventional business books.

He uses biographies to study business builders such as Carnegie and Rockefeller and reads specialized books when he wants help with relationships, fitness or another part of life. His principle is that reading allows a person to borrow decades of someone else’s accumulated experience in a few hundred pages.

Todd estimates that a typical useful book may compress roughly 25–35 years of an author’s experience into 200–300 pages. At roughly one book every two weeks, he notes that a reader can absorb around two dozen such bodies of knowledge each year.

He is critical of a standardized education system while expressing respect for individual teachers and educators. Todd said he was bored and disruptive in school, was not interested in subjects such as geometry and believes a student like him today might be labeled as having attention problems rather than being recognized as disengaged by the material.

His parents did not accept attempts to make him simply conform to what the school expected. Todd believes his poor academic fit reflected a mismatch between his interests and the teaching system rather than predicting his eventual capacity to succeed.

He argues that modern education should emphasize how to learn and use available information rather than merely transferring information. With enormous amounts of knowledge now accessible through a phone, he believes the ability to locate, assess and apply knowledge has become increasingly important.

Todd believes schools can be incentivized to protect rankings and funding instead of maximizing opportunities for individual students. He cited stories of schools discouraging students from applying to colleges considered unrealistic because unsuccessful applications could reflect poorly on institutional statistics.

He argues that students from very different economic backgrounds may need different forms of educational support. Children in affluent families may have private tutors, SAT preparation, college counselors and even specialized sports coaching—he mentioned 12-year-olds receiving $200-an-hour football coaching—while poorer students may lack even basic academic support.

His proposed goal is not to eliminate common subjects such as math and science but to supplement them with the life skills and institutional support disadvantaged students lack outside school. He sees a uniform system that moves everyone through the same curriculum and then leaves them on their own as insufficient.

Todd rejects the idea that practical sales experience and sales education are substitutes for one another. He recommends both doing the work and using books, courses and experienced coaches to avoid unnecessarily rediscovering principles that generations of salespeople have already learned.

He views sales largely as applied psychology. Rather than naming one universal sales book, he recommends sampling well-reviewed sales and psychology material—including audiobooks—and choosing authors whose communication style resonates with the learner.

Todd considers reputation one of an entrepreneur’s most valuable assets because it takes years to build and can be destroyed by one bad decision. His simplest sales principle is to tell the truth rather than inventing a persona or manipulating people.

He argues that selling becomes more important, not less important, as a business becomes larger. A major property buyer must persuade the seller, attract investors, convince banks to lend and, in development, persuade governments and local residents that a proposed project should be approved.

Todd wrote his own real-estate book despite never expecting to become an author. He began after realizing that podcasts allowed him to help more people than private conversations and that a book could preserve far more information than even several hours of direct discussion.

He wrote the book himself before the arrival of ChatGPT, often working in his office before normal hours and on Saturdays and Sundays. After completing a manuscript and hiring an editor, he reread the edited version, decided he disliked it and started again.

A piece of writing advice caused him to rewrite the book around a specific reader. He began treating it as a conversation with someone who had never invested in real estate rather than writing primarily for experienced professionals.

The resulting book, Keeping It Real on Commercial Real Estate, was designed to explain multiple ways of participating in property markets rather than only Todd’s own strategy. He discusses direct ownership, investing through real-estate-related securities, investing in another person’s deal, triple-net properties and multifamily assets.

Todd said the book took about 18 months to complete and cost him substantial time and money. He nevertheless treats the book as a more efficient way for someone to learn his thinking than requesting hours of private access to him.

He gives the book’s proceeds to charity rather than treating it as a profit center. He said a recent allocation went to CREW Network, which supports women and minorities in commercial real estate; he wants readers to understand that his investment opinions are not being offered to maximize his personal book income.

The first major lesson he wants readers to take from the book is that real-estate ownership is not reserved for elite academic or financial backgrounds. Todd described himself as coming from a stable, involved family but struggling academically, attending community college and hearing pessimistic predictions from teachers about his future.

Todd said that by age 50 he controlled hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate and employed graduates of institutions such as Harvard despite having had little chance of attending such schools himself. He uses that contrast to argue that academic credentials are not a prerequisite for participating successfully in real estate.

His second book lesson is that even highly paid professionals need assets or another plan for the period when active earnings stop. A doctor, lawyer or scientist may earn millions during a career, but Todd argues that financial responsibility includes converting some earnings into income-producing resources for later life.

His third book lesson is that ordinary property ownership and operation are less complicated than many outsiders assume. He believes fear and over-analysis can make the mechanics appear more difficult than they actually are.

Todd said he has reached a stage where helping other people is often more enjoyable than increasing his own wealth, although he has no intention of slowing his business activity. He regularly allows motivated younger people to visit his office because he finds directing them toward useful next steps personally rewarding.

His older brother strongly influenced Todd’s thinking about giving back. Todd described his brother as an attorney who devotes much of his time to service, including Habitat for Humanity work, beach cleanup and other hands-on volunteer activity.

Todd concluded that his own highest-value form of service is education rather than copying his brother’s exact volunteer work. Writing, mentoring and sharing decades of real-estate experience are the areas where he believes he can contribute most effectively.

He also sees mentoring as a two-way exchange. Younger visitors bring him information, perspectives and knowledge about industries and places he might otherwise never encounter, so he does not view the relationship as entirely one-sided.

Todd reframes many apparent failures as unfinished attempts rather than permanent setbacks. He illustrated this with his daughter’s real-estate exam: she needed 75, scored 74, studied for another week and passed on the next attempt.

His broader lesson from that example is that difficulty should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that a person chose the wrong path. Sometimes the result simply requires more work than originally expected, and he believes many people quit at precisely that point.

Todd used baseball to normalize repeated failure in business. A hitter can fail roughly 70% of the time and still be considered exceptional; similarly, he says even after decades in real estate he does not obtain every property or deal he pursues.

The larger the deals he attempts, the more rejection and unsuccessful pursuits he expects. His response is persistence rather than assuming previous success should make future transactions effortless.

Geography is a deliberate part of Todd’s investment strategy. He concentrates on Florida because local knowledge of its economy, politics, weather patterns, neighborhoods and development activity gives him an informational advantage that he would not have in a distant market.

He warns that a property can look attractive in isolation while local knowledge reveals a hidden problem. His hypothetical example was buying a seemingly excellent shopping center in Cleveland without knowing that an undesirable development such as a prison might soon be built nearby.

His practical geographic rule is to own properties close enough that he can leave home in the morning, visit the asset and return for a late dinner. He described his normal investment radius as roughly zero to 400 miles.

Todd’s primary parenting principle is that children copy behavior more than instructions. He therefore exposed his children to his working life from an early age rather than merely lecturing them about business, money or effort.

His two children, about a year and a half apart and 17 and 19 at the time of the conversation, grew up visiting job sites and accompanying him to collect rents and meet tenants. They attended company meetings when school was out, later completed internships and worked in different parts of the business.

He deliberately allows his children considerable freedom rather than designing their lives for them. Todd said he says yes to almost everything reasonable because he wants them to take risks, try paths and discover what they personally want; he will intervene when something is clearly dangerous or foolish and help them recover from mistakes.

He encourages employees to bring their children into the office as well. Children sometimes spend an hour or two there after school, watching their parents work; Todd believes that experience builds respect and gives them a clearer understanding of what their parents actually do.

He warns that modeling works in both directions. Children will reproduce bad habits as readily as good ones, making the parent’s behavior more important than the parent’s speeches.

Todd defines leadership as making other people better at their own jobs rather than being the person who personally performs every task. Although he has done most functions in the company over his career, he now believes specialists in those roles can perform them better than he can.

Current Capital’s organization includes separate leasing, field property-management, office property-management, accounting, operations and lease-renewal functions. Todd sees his role as supporting and improving those specialists rather than substituting himself for them.

He describes himself as the opposite of a micromanager. Employees are expected to solve problems independently, and when they bring him a major issue he wants them to arrive with at least one or two proposed solutions rather than merely reporting the problem.

Todd said employees effectively run the day-to-day company while he operates more like a coach on the sideline. People move in and out of his office for decisions and guidance, but he does not believe leadership requires claiming credit for their work.

Todd and his wife are recognized publicly because of television exposure, with his wife receiving more attention as the star of the show they appear on. He said the experience reinforces the need to treat people well because public figures often do not know who recognizes them even when no one approaches.

He also sees television as carrying reputational costs because programs may emphasize conflict or negative material. That leaves participants repeatedly explaining events or portrayals after episodes air, making public exposure a mixture of advantages and drawbacks.

Todd named Carbone in Miami Beach as his favorite South Florida restaurant at the time of the interview. Italy was his favorite country from his travels over the previous decade, and he said he repeatedly returns because he enjoys virtually every part of the country.

His favorite movie remained the original Wall Street.

Todd said he ultimately wants to be remembered for caring about people, giving back and being a good father rather than for the size of his property portfolio. He believes the real estate itself will eventually matter little compared with whether he made a meaningful difference in other people’s lives.

His closing advice to younger people centered on mindset, patience and persistence rather than a specific business formula. He urged them not to punish themselves for progressing more slowly than expected or compare their present position with people who have a 10- or 15-year head start.

He considers sustained optimism and commitment especially important because meaningful goals are inherently difficult. Whether the goal is beginning a fitness routine or becoming financially successful, his message was to expect resistance, continue working and avoid allowing temporary disappointment to become a reason to quit.