Tax Planning With Opportunity Zones, With John Berlet

The Opportunity Zone incentive can be a powerful (but underutilized) tax planning tool for certain investors.

John Berlet, president of Coastal Bend OZ Fund, joins the show to discuss how he came to learn about Opportunity Zones after selling his business, and why he believes OZs should be used by more investors and advisors for tax planning and retirement planning.

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Episode Highlights

  • John’s background in tax planning, including guaranteed lifetime income annuities, Roth conversions, self-directed IRAs, and tax-balanced pension plans.
  • The bull case for Rockport, Texas and boutique hotels.
  • How investors approaching retirement should consider Opportunity Zones in their tax planning strategy.

Guest: John Berlet, CBOZ Fund

About The Opportunity Zones & Private Equity Show

Hosted by OpportunityDb and WealthChannel founder Jimmy Atkinson, The Opportunity Zones & Private Equity Show features guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in Opportunity Zones and the broader private equity landscape.

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Show Transcript

Jimmy: Welcome to the Opportunity Zones & Private Equity Show. I’m Jimmy Atkinson. Hurricane Harvey wiped out much of the Texas Gulf Coast region back in 2017, but Opportunity Zones are helping to revitalize some of these communities. Joining me today is John Berlet, president at Coastal Bend OZ Fund, which is currently raising capital for construction of Blue City Paraiso, a boutique hotel with conference center in an Opportunity Zone in Rockport, Texas. John, thanks for coming on the show. Really appreciate you being here today.

John: Hey, thanks, Jimmy. I’m happy to be here on this spring, beautiful morning in the Coastal Bend region of Texas.

Jimmy: Yeah, it’s a beautiful region in Texas, a few hours down the road from where I am here in Fort Worth. And I wanna talk with you a lot about Rockport and your project a little bit later during the show today, John. But first, you know, a lot of my audience of high net worth investors and advisors, I think they may already be familiar with you and your project because you were one of our presenting sponsors at our OZ Pitch Day Spring 2023 event back in March. But for those who aren’t familiar with you personally, John, and with your Rockport project, and again, I want to get to the project in a little while here. For right now, John, I want to hear about you. Can you tell us about your experience and expertise, and what led you to Opportunity Zones?

John: Sure. So, my background is financial planning services. I had a registered investment advisory firm based in Austin, Texas for a little over 30 years. I focused on retirement income planning, tax planning, creating lifetime guarantee via fixed indexed annuities. Built my book of business up significantly, and had a law firm offer me a chunk of money back in March of ’21 for my annuity book of business. So, I decided to sell, which caused me to have a eligible capital gain and do a deep dive into Opportunity Zones. So, my niche was folks that had kind of done a pretty decent job with the accumulation stage of life, and they were transitioning to the income stage and wanted to protect their account. So, I used primarily real estate, fixed indexed annuities from major insurance companies.

I had a passion for real estate. I personally started buying tax lien properties in Travis County, Austin, Texas, at the courthouse steps in 1992. The first sale I went to, there was just two of us there, myself and a wise sage attorney by the name of Walter Winland. And there was 13 properties in a community called Lago Vista going up for sale. And he told me, “Whenever you bid, I won’t bid, and if I bid, you don’t bid.” I said, “Okay.” So, I end up using my IRA and bought three lots, two on the golf course in Lago Vista, one commercial lot, and parlayed that little $26,000 IRA into about 300,000 via raw land in Lago Vista. So, that’s a passion of mine, real estate. But a tax planning, I have clients who I’ve helped create cash balance pension plans where they’ve been able to contribute significant amount of money, much higher than SEP IRAs allow, and also done a lot of Roth conversions for people that feel the need to get some of their money in a tax-free situation.

Jimmy: So, you’re a huge…you have a lot of expertise in retirement planning, but also in not just retirement planning, but tax advantaged retirement planning. It seems like that’s a huge concentration of yours, John, and it’s interesting you mentioned that you were doing those tax lien properties inside of your IRA. I wanna hear a little bit more about that. Do you have… And we’ll get to the Opportunity Zone discussion in a moment here, but I think a lot of our viewers and listeners, a lot of them, high net worth investors would be interested in that concept of a self-directed IRA. What are some practical tips that you can give anybody who’s interested in getting started down that route, and accumulating income-bearing properties or assets within a self-directed IRA?

John: Well, there are some outstanding third party custodians right now that I would introduce. One, the Quest Trust Company. Two, Intrust Company, and then their IRA Club out of Chicago. They all administer self-directed IRAs. And my biggest advice would be if you don’t have a Roth, convert some of your IRA to a Roth, because there’s a five-year clock to all that growth to come out tax-free. But if I had do over, I would not go into my IRA, how to use my Roth IRA, so it’s all tax-free, just like our Opportunity Zone after a certain timeframe. Anyway, there’s those introductions. I’m happy to make our offering with the Blue Zone Paraiso Coastal Bend OZ Fund is on the platform at both of those third party.

Jimmy: That’s great, John. Yeah, John is…he’s been referred to as a pioneer in the self-directed IRA space. So, we could probably focus an entire episode, John, just on that topic, maybe I’ll have to get you back on at some point, we can do that.

John: Okay. I’d like to go back to my story about what we did when we sold my business. My wife and I went to Las Vegas, bought a motor home, a class A coach on the showroom floor, and traveled 17 states, specifically looking at Opportunity Zone locations, hundreds and hundreds of Opportunity Zone locations, and that’s what led us to Rockport.

Jimmy: Yeah. So, I wanna hear more about that process. Where did you go? I mean, that’s a fascinating story, just kind of you sell your business, you have this huge gain. And when did you find out about Opportunity Zones? And then I wanna hear more about that process of traveling the country with your wife and finally landing in Rockport. But how did you discover Opportunity Zones? I wanna hear that story. How long did it take you to kind of cotton on to the fact that, hey, this OZ incentive might be a really good thing for us as we’re planning our retirement and doing some strategic tax planning around this gain that we just have accrued?

John: Great question. It was all during COVID. So, the motor home was ideal. We didn’t have to check in hotels, worry about, you know, how clean the environments were. So, this was like in April of 2021, right in the thick of it. And we traveled. We left Vegas, went down through Nevada, looked all around, actually went down to Baja and not looking at OZ in Baja, Mexico, but my grandson was racing in the Baja Motocross 1000, so we got to go down there for that. We had a razor we put on the back of the motor home on a trailer, one of those side by side razors, and went through the streets of San Francisco up and down pooling that razor. So, it’s a pretty cool experience for me.

We looked at OZ areas in the San Jose area around the Bay Area. We went through Utah all up through Colorado, down through New Mexico, looking at specific OZ locations. Some of that kind of stick out in my mind as we went up through the Midwest. We looked at some property in the Tennessee, Kentucky region that seemed pretty promising, and went up as far as Niagara Falls, looked at Opportunity Zones there and came back down through the Midwest into Biloxi where we actually put a piece of property under contract in Biloxi that was Opportunity Zone. Proceeded back down through Texas, headed toward… I forget the name of the place where Elon Musk has put into SpaceX.

Jimmy: Oh, yeah.

John: And all the speculators had gotten there before us, driven the prices up sky high, Boca Chica is the name of that place. And come back to Rockport as we’re headed down the coastline. And the area just kept jumping out at us as far as, why is this Opportunity Zone? And I’ve since learned after we found the property that we did end up closing on was an old hotel, and the hotel district, I believe now the reason, and it’s actually in my background right here if y’all can see, that’s where the property we acquired three blocks from the Bay. The Hurricane Harvey, of course, may have had some impact because that was August of 2017. The governors chose the areas in December, or maybe January of ’18, was certified by the IRS. I’m 100% convinced the reason 85% of this county is Opportunity Zone is because there’s so many second homeowners who report their incomes in San Antonio, Austin, Houston, even Dallas Fort Worth, but all throughout the Hill Country. And they’ve been coming here for generations and generations and generations. So, it’s quite a bit of anomaly in my opinion, because they report their incomes, and the data that was available was the 2010 census data. So, it is what it is, and it’s an opportunity beyond the normal Blythe community.

Jimmy: Yeah. Yeah. So, that makes sense. So, the full-time residents of Rockport who live and work there, they may be lower income, but the folks who come down for the weekend or over the summer, they are very high income. They have these really nice homes, second homes, oftentimes, vacation properties, that they’re able to visit for a weekend. So, that is a little bit of an anomaly with regards to how they calculated the medium household income for the census that then led to which of these zones were eligible. Just to back up, go through that timing again. So, Hurricane Harvey landfall in August of 2017. The Opportunity Zones provision was passed as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act legislation in December of 2017. And then the zones were nominated by the governors, and specifically the governor of Texas in this case, nominated the list of zones for Texas to the Treasury Department. That would’ve been in probably spring of 2018’s, probably March, April, May is when they were working on it. And then the list was finally certified by Treasury in July. So, I think you’re right.

My guess is the hurricane impacting that area probably did influence the decision of the powers that be in Texas who had then nominated those tracts to the Treasury Department that following spring, a few months after Hurricane Harvey hit that region. But tell me more about the process of actually setting up the fund. So, we kind of went through your trip through the country. You landed in Rockport. You kind of found out that it was a bit of a diamond in the rough. Maybe it shouldn’t have even been an Opportunity Zone, if you’re taking into account the income from the folks who are visiting there as vacation homeowners, but there was some devastation from the hurricane, so maybe you could justify it in that regard. So, you’ve already settled on Rockport. Now, tell me about the process of getting the fund set up. What did that process look like?

John: Okay. And I skipped over the question about how much I knew about Opportunity Zones.

Jimmy: Oh, yeah. How did you come to know Opportunity Zones? Because I like to hear that story from everybody.

John: So, just, you know, being in the industry, focused on tax planning, I’d get glimpses of it here and there, and really had no reason to take a deep dive at that point until I had the sale of my company, which caused me to have the capital gain event. So, I said, you know, “I want something I wanna really look into as Opportunity Zones, see if it makes sense.” So, I did the trip within the 180-day time horizon, and ended up closing in August of ’21 on this site in Rockport. So, the current question, I believe, is the process. We set up the fund in August of 2021. I used a Dallas-based legal firm by the name of Crowdfund Lawyers 101, I believe. Nathaniel Dobson helped me in. And they’re pretty focused on the securities firm and, you know, bit the bullet, paid a big chunk of money and got the entity formed.

And then we began, I had originally set it up as a 506B as in boy where I could go to my warm market and not advertise, but I could bring on non-accredited investors at that point. And then soon ran out of resources there, and decided to reorganize under Reg D506C so we could solicit and advertise and reach a broader base of high net worth people. And that was done all in 2022. Ended up meeting Patrick Sughroue, our securities council through the Opportunities Zone…OZworks group, which you’re familiar with, Jimmy, and most people in the OZ space know of. It’s a great networking group of vendors and administrators and service providers that helped. And so, Patrick analyzed our situation, helped us reorganize and be totally compliant with all of the compliance issues. And we amended our offering in December of 2022 to incorporate the property and set up our QOZB component of the Coastal Bend OZ Fund.

Jimmy: No, that’s great. That’s really great. And then at some point, I know you’re working with OZworks Group, you’re working with Chris Cooley there and Ashley Tison’s in that group as well. How has that group helped you accelerate your project?

John: Oh, it’s been phenomenal. The education that I’ve gained from being a part of that group, and they meet…there’s something going on once or twice every week as far as learning, networking, educational component. I did learn about the Puerto Rico. I went down there firsthand after about six months of hearing all the buzz about what’s going on in Puerto Rico. And so, I said I’d rather get down there. And we really wanna scale our resort concept at some point once we get established and profitable in Rockport. And Biloxi is on our radar as well as Puerto Rico. So, I went down there and attended the OZworks Opportunity Zone conference in January of this year, and met with Ashley actually a second time. Ashley made a trip to Rockport here in October of the fall of 2022.

Jimmy: Wow. That’s right. Yep.

John: And it was a wonderful time to bond with him. And in fact, our investment relations manager, Stormy Johnson, one of our investors, and Ashley and I did a fishing trip. And we loaded up, I’m not even a fisherman, and we caught all we could handle and had a wonderful meal that night together bonding. So, back to the OZworks Group and OZPros, it’s been nothing but phenomenal, deep dive education. If you wanna learn Opportunity Zones, ins and outs, all the compliance components from A to Z, that’s the way to go for resources.

Jimmy: No, that’s great. I’ll be sure to link to OZworks Group in the show notes for today’s episode. Also, you mentioned your journey from being a Reg D506B as in Bravo to Reg D506C as in Charlie a while ago. I did a deep dive into securities law and how it pertains to different Opportunity Zone offerings. The difference between those two different Reg D filings in an interview that I did with Coni Rathbone last year, I’d like to link to that in the show notes today too in case any of our listeners or viewers wanna learn more about what the heck we were just talking about there. But we don’t need to digress down that rabbit hole any further. Let’s talk about Rockport. Let’s talk about the project now, John. So, why Rockport? What can you tell us a little bit more about Rockport, why it’s special, and also then, why did you decide on a hotel property versus any other type of property?

John: Great, great questions. So, why Rockport? I get this a lot. Rockport is a small, sleepy, coastal community that’s… The locals here refer to it as a drinking town with a fishing problem. So, it’s on the radar. Texans just love to come here. They’ve been coming here for generations and generations. I went to middle school and high school in San Antonio, and we would come every year to Porter Ranches, which is 20 miles south of Rockport. Porter Ranches, or Port A as Texans call it is the number one beach location in Texas. And a lot of spring breakers go there. It’s really the place. It’s so congested. Port A is an island. You have to get there by ferry boat or go through Corpus Christi. So, we’re 20 miles from Port A. Rockport is a very artsy community, a very established art center, just got reopened after the Harvey wiped out their venue. And they just opened in December a 12-million art center.

Rockport is a big birding destination. Bird watchers come here, duck hunters come here, fishing. And it’s just a phenomenal place to come. And vacation, it has been a seasonal, somewhat. Snowbirds, winter Texans come through here in off-season, October through March. All of you in Minnesota and Michigan and New York, y’all can relate with that, I think. So, Rockport, a couple things I’d like to point out. It’s a home of the oil rich and famous. The Bass Brothers have an island, the largest privately owned island, three miles off shore called San Jose Island. And it has a phenomenal history with former presidents from Roosevelt, Eisenhower, George Bush, having meetings on this island, foreign diplomats. So, I’m not sure what all could’ve gone on in discussions on that island, but it recently was acquired by Sid Richardson, the uncle of the Bass Brothers. And they have a major presence in this community.

Our biggest famous spokesperson for Rockport is gonna be bar none George Strait. He has a second home here. And he came here and helped during the hurricane rebuild, spent a lot of his personal time and personal money in the Rockport, helping it rebuild. So, these cottages behind me used to be, you know, cottages built in the ’60s, and Hurricane Harvey did the area a big favor. The hotel we bought was built in the ’40s. It was the first swimming pool in Rockport. So, during our demolition, we had people in their ’70s, ’80s and up come by and say they learned to swim on that property. So, the site we found was called the Oleander Courts, and it was in bad disrepair. Two and a half acres, we proceeded to demolish it, already had the hotel. It’s in the hotel district, nine blocks from the downtown shopping area, the harbor, the art center, the marina, the whole community buzz of Rockport.

The courthouse and city hall are now under construction, brand new buildings. And it’s kind of a unique situation. They’re side by side. And it’s my understanding it’s the only county in the state of Texas that has city hall and county courthouse going in right next to each other. And that’s about a $35 million total building going on right now. Our project, if you’re ready for me to talk a little bit about the…

Jimmy: Yeah, please do. Yeah, talk a little bit about the hotel that you’re putting in the conference center and why you decide on that property type.

John: Okay, great. So, originally before I lived here, moved here, my thought was a long-term rental, and going vertical up on pylons. Most everything between us and the bay across the street is in the hundred-year floodplain. We’re out of the hundred-year floodplain, by the way. But I thought we’d go up on pylons, have open area down below for outdoor living. My second concept for this site was like everything between us and the bay, single beach style homes on pylons. And then finally, I said, “Let’s do something different, something totally different for the community.” And my wife and I spent a little over a month in Morocco where I proposed to her in Casablanca, by the way. We ended up falling in love with this city called the Blue City, Chefchaouen, Morocco. And the area was settled by Portuguese and Spanish Jewish refugees in the 1500s.

And they thought they’d come to heaven, and they painted the whole city blue. It’s fascinating. Take a look at it. So, we decided, “Let’s build the Blue…” Trying to represent the Morocco theme in Rockport. And it’s gained a lot of traction. The city planner for the city loves it. It’s a combination now. We’ve submitted our civil site plan to the city. We have about the 60 days left now before being fully permitted with our construction drawings. And our mechanical and plumbing are all underway, and they’ve all been hired. So, we have 60 doors, 60. And the front mixed use space consists of 12,000 square feet, three story, a rooftop lounge overlooking the bay. We also are in the same block in the community with the bird sanctuary. So, to the south of us, it’s six and a half acres that’s all protected, won’t be developed, bird sanctuary.

And then the second floor is gonna be a very high end spa with hammam Turkish style, Moroccan style mineral pools, dry sauna, wet saunas for relaxation. Our feeling is the guys wanna come down here and fish. The wife wanna relax, and they’re gonna stay at our property and spend, you know, additional revenues. We have three income streams from the rooftop lounge, the spa on the second floor. And now we’ve added a conference center and meeting space on the ground floor for corporate events. And our thinking is the room nights during the middle of the week when the community is off, the Bang Up business is on the weekends, with the exception of there’s one resort here in town called the Lighthouse. And they do a fair amount of business during the week, which is evidence to the nature of our development. So, we added this corporate meeting space to accommodate up to 85 employees that may wanna…out of Corpus, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, who wanna come down, spend a day and a half fishing and a half a day in a corporate meeting, or vice versa. And it really juiced our IRR on the rate investment side by getting more heads in the beds during the middle of the week.

Jimmy: Yeah. Let’s talk numbers for a little bit. What’s the total project cost? How much equity are you raising? How much have you raised? How much do you have left to go? And talk to me about the returns a little bit. What are the returns looking like, the IRR?

John: Sure will. So, our project is a 16-million development, and we’re raising about 50%, 8 million equity, 8 million in debt. We’ve raised right at 830,000 at this point. So, we’ve got about a 7 million left to go on the equity side. We have term sheets from USDA lenders that are favorable terms even in today’s environment. I do wanna back up and mention one other thing regarding the project, and that is I was recently…I feel like I’ve broken through the good old boy system in Rockport. The remnants is very prevalent here. I was recently appointed to the Chambers Tourism Development Council, which oversees the tourism spend for the Chamber of Commerce. And again, I mentioned earlier, the community’s number one industry focus is tourism. That’s what they want, is what the community wants, it’s what we’re gonna provide them.

So, I got on this committee and I’ve been able to have access to all the star reports. We’ve hired a feasibility company at a very significant cost, and that’s in the works. We’ll sure have a feasibility report available within the next 10 days to show the demand, which through Harvey, you know, it suffered a little bit. COVID, 2021/2022, the room night revenue going to the 2% of the HOT tax that goes to the chamber to spend on tourism is more than double the peak in 2016. So, that’s real interesting and encouraging. Back to the raise where the waterfall is set up as a 70/30 split, we plan to cash out refi in 2026, and distribute approximately 52% of the equity back to the investors at that point. And then, of course, it’s a 10-year hold. We have targeted IRR of 18.48% after the 10-year hold with distributions. Once the investors are made whole, that’s when I start to share in the revenues. So, I’m incentivized to really get back the basis to the investors sooner rather than later.

Jimmy: Oh, that’s great. Those are great numbers and good terms. I want to talk about some of the challenges now with Opportunity Zones. And, you know, before we started recording here, we were on with your partner, Stormy Johnson, your head of investor relations at the CBOZ Fund. And he was telling us a story about how he also had a capital gain around the same time that you did. And he asked his CPA how to soften the tax blow, and his CPA came up with nothing, which is kind of interesting. But I think it’s a story that I’ve been telling over and over and over again. Opportunity Zones, they’ve been around for about five years. You think, “Boy, that’s a long time.” But in terms of like the different tax credit programs and all the other different types of tax advantage strategies that folks can employ into their retirement planning or tax planning strategies, it’s still a relatively new program, and a lot of high net worth investors and their advisors aren’t really aware of it yet.

And it kind of drives me crazy, John, that, you know, here’s this high net worth client with a capital gain. He is going to his advisor, his CPA in this case, and asking him for some advice, and he doesn’t even think to mention Opportunity Zones is… And eventually, he came to you, John, because he knew you. And you said, “Hey, look at this thing that I’m doing here in Rockport. Look at this fund we’ve set up. Here’s how OZ’s work.” Is that a story that resonates with you? Is there a huge gap still that exists in knowledge gap? And how do we change that as an industry? How do we address those situations so that more high net worth investors, the types of folks listening and watching us right now on this podcast become aware of this program and how great of a tax incentive it is for those individuals?

John: Well, I’m definitely in your camp on that. It’s frustrating and shocking really, that the tax planning community, the attorneys, the realtors, you know, they know 1031s or they should. And that they haven’t really taken the time to do the dive like many of us have. But I constantly come across it. I used to provide continuing education to the CPA communities in Austin. I’ve done one in Corpus. And it’s still to this day shocking to me the lack of experience. And it’s because it’s new, I think’s gotta be the only thing I can conclude. And maybe I don’t wanna use that word unproven because it’s a regulation in the federal law. So, practice will create the proof. I don’t guess there’s been a whole lot of exits because of the 10-year hold. Now, there are some strategies that you and I know of, Jimmy, that are allowing people to do things shorter than a 10-year period, but to maximize the incentive and the tax strategy, it is the 10-year hold.

Jimmy: Yeah. But I think the unproven thing is bunk, quite frankly. And I think you would think the same thing, John. Maybe you could use that as an excuse in 2019 or even 2020. But at this point, we’ve had over $100 billion of equity flow into different qualified opportunity funds all over the country. So, I don’t know if that excuse really has two legs to stand on anymore as we head in toward the… We’re toward the middle of 2023 now.

John: That’s a great point. Absolutely. And you monitor the amount of traction and some of the big players that have been part of your Pitch Day program are well versed on the amount of dollars that have been deployed in OZ space. And it’s off the charts, really.

Jimmy: Yeah. Yeah. It is.

John: Just a matter of us keep focusing, keep plugging away, keep educating, and I wanna compliment you and your associate, Andy, on what y’all are doing now with transferring out into the wealth channel. I think that’s a smart move on y’all’s part as there’s so many family offices. I’ve been reading, and I think it was on your platform, the amount of family office activity that’s coming into really accepting the Opportunity Zone format is pretty dynamic.

Jimmy: Yeah. Family offices, you know, I know of a handful that are using Opportunity Zones as part of their strategy. But frankly, I think they’re also kind of guilty of the same pitfall, which is not being aware of it enough, or not being entrepreneurial enough to take that deep dive like you have been able to do and others in our community. I think a lot of family offices could stand to benefit from Opportunity Zones. They seem like they’re ideally suited to take advantage of Opportunity Zones. They have patient capital, they’re constantly generating capital gains. But for whatever reason, they have not employed Opportunity Zone strategies as much as they should in aggregate. Again, there are exceptions in the family offices that I’ve talked to and who have been on my show certainly are, but I think there’s still a pretty big gap out there.

John, we’re kind of running out of time here, but a couple more questions for you. You’re a retirement planning expert, as we alluded to in the intro. How should those approaching retirement consider Opportunity Zones? You mentioned that, you know, there’s this phase that folks go through when they’re kind of moving from wealth accumulation to wealth preservation and income. Opportunity Zones as a strategy kind of lean more toward that capital appreciation strategy, right? Because it’s a capital gains play, it has to be ground up construction or heavy rehabilitation. When you’re making an investment into an opportunity zone, it’s not like you’re doing a 1031 exchange where you’re typically buying a property that’s already cash flowing or can cash flow quickly, right? And produce income quickly. These Opportunity Zone deals carry a little bit more risk. So, with that in mind, how should retirees or soon to be retirees consider Opportunity Zones?

John: Well, good point there. I do wanna point out so far on our raise, on our project, more than half of the equity we raised is not eligible capital gain money. For example, it’s some self-directed IRAs. I have some of my self-directed Roth in the project and other after tax money that may be idle just on the sideline. At the end of the day, my project and any real estate project needs to stand on its own as far as its own merits, its own investment risk, return ratio portfolio, etc. The question that you commented on, or you just suggested is for folks that do have money in their IRAs, you wouldn’t wanna consider this on the OZ incentive alone because it’s not applicable to an IRA. If you invest in my real estate project or any real estate project, you or somebody in your family’s gonna pay taxes on that money at some point in time.

I would encourage you to have a conversation with your tax advisors about getting some of that money repositioned as a Roth, and as far as retirement monies, if it makes sense. And if it’s money you need as income, it may not make sense if you need it within the next two to three years. If it’s money that you have a time horizon, a little further beyond the next two, three years, it may be worth taking a look at our hotel boutique project in Rockport. Does that answer your question?

Jimmy: It does indeed, John. It does indeed. Hey, we really wanna thank you for joining me today on this episode. Thanks very much for sharing your insights and your story also. It’s an interesting story. I always like hearing different stories of how different investors come to learn about Opportunity Zones and the process they take to actually put their money to good use. Before we let you jump, John, where can our audience of high net worth investors and advisors go to learn more about you and the Coastal Bend Opportunity Zone Fund?

John: The quick answer is Google. We’re on Google. We have a website, coastalbendozfund.com. We have a investor portal set up. You can go on to our offerings page and fill out some information, get access to the private placement memorandum. We have a phenomenal full-blown proforma available upon request. Happy to schedule a time to talk with anybody, perhaps a co-GP at this point. We’re talking to some of your other affiliates along those lines. Or if you have some potential interest in limited partnership, we’d welcome a conversation with you when you’re ready.

Jimmy: And I think you can also look at a rendering of the project on your website or in your pitch deck as well, which shows you what that blue roof is gonna look like when it’s completed. It looks very neat.

John: And the spa is gonna be remarkable.

Jimmy: I have no doubt. I’m looking forward to hopping down there and checking it out when it’s completed, John. We’ll make sure we link to your website in the show notes for today’s episode, which will be available on our website at opportunitydb.com/podcast. And please be sure to also subscribe to us on YouTube or your favorite podcast listening platform to always get the latest episodes. John, thanks again for joining me today. Really appreciate it.

John: Thank you, Jimmy. Wonderful talking to you.