Newbie in Music City (Nashville, TN)

[Luke Pierce]

Hey everyone, My name is Luke Pierce, and I’m excited to join the community here on BiggerPockets.  After 3 months of lurking around, today I feel it’s time to jump into the game. I’m a 30-year old music manager at a full service personal management company for recording and performing artists.  You can check out some of the artists we work with on our website.  I actually come from a finance background, having studied economics and finance at Penn State, and worked as an analyst for a small advisory firm in Manhattan Beach, CA, prior to starting my career in music. In 2016, after nearly 6 years in Los Angeles, I relocated myself to Nashville to be closer to the business of country and Americana music I was developing, to be closer to family (some in Indianapolis, some in Chicago), and to give myself opportunities to build wealth faster.  As you can imagine, the cost of living is substantially less in Nashville than Los Angeles, allowing me to save more money. After about 18 months of living in Nashville, I closed on my first property in Nashville — a home on Alice Street (zip 37218) — that I bought with a combination of my money and a hard money loan from my father.  I had intended on tearing the house down and building a horizontal property regime (HPR) 2-home with shared wall, and either selling one unit and living in the other, or long-term renting one unit and living in the other.  I made that purchase with some cursory glances of posts on BiggerPockets, which I found by searching through the Podcast app for real estate podcasts.  There were some very helpful resources that have helped me evaluate the deal, and I’m still very much learning through that process.   The past 3 months of working on that project has definitely scratched an intellectual itch for me, and opened my eyes to money-making opportunities.  Learning about real estate, and how the business works is an exciting challenge, and one that I hope can yield long-term wealth. While I don’t have an investment thesis pinned up, I love the idea of real estate generating passive income.  While I’ve been very lucky to experience success in the music business, I know that at the end of the day the success of a song and therefore my client could be a crapshoot.  And while I love my job, my business partner and team, my clients, and the business itself... the music business is very a much full-contact sport.  It’s a 24-7 service business that you have to enjoy, or otherwise you’d never survive.  So the idea of diversifying my income on a monthly basis would give me peace of mind that if something in the future might change — a client takes a break and decides not to work for a year or fires me (which I hope never happens as we do great work) — that I’d be protected.  In some way, I think it’ll also free me up to take more creative chances in my music business: I could stomach more creative risk. I’m sure I’ll be jumping into the forums and posting more here.  If you have any advice, I would love to hear it.  And if you’re in Music City USA, I hope we get the chance to meet up and talk about this exciting business we’ve chosen to be in. Luke Pierce Nashville, TN