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David:
This is the Bigger Pockets Podcast, Show 656.

Trevor:
And I think it’s about being proactive, and then also letting your ego take a backseat because as you guys know too, everyone in the real estate business is not the most friendly person. So you can get into these conversations where you got to be careful not to have a pissing contest with someone and realize that the greater good of everyone is just getting the deal closed.

David:
What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast, here today with my co-host, Rob Abasolo. In today’s show, we interview brothers Trevor and Tyler Sarter, who run a business together that does all things real estate. These two brothers focus on helping other people make money through real estate while also earning a living for themselves, former basketball players that have learned the importance of chemistry, both with each other and with their clients, and most importantly, doing whatever it takes to win, which in this case is getting the deal done. In this episode, we dive pretty deep into the mindset required to succeed as well as some practical tips that you can use to build your own buyer’s list, find motivated sellers, and make sure you get to the closing table. Rob, what were some of your favorite parts from today’s show?

Rob:
Yeah, I really like a good brother dynamic, and this is just a good wholesome episode with two brothers, former college basketball players. And they actually talked about the number one thing that they learned from basketball that fuels their very successful real estate business today, so I thought that was really fun. And I think for them, their big thing is how to keep the art of the deal alive, right? How to keep any deal alive by any means necessary, what you have to do to get to that closing table and sign those documents and close that deal. So I thought this was a really, really fun episode just to kind of explore the brother dynamic and see how they run their business from day-to-day.

David:
I also like when you see two brothers that actually get along, because oftentimes families don’t get along. So when you see siblings that not only they get along or it appears so, but they’ve built a successful business together, they get to work together, I thought that was pretty cool.

Rob:
Yeah, yeah. But before we get into the episode, today’s quick, quick, quick, quick tip is brought to you by David Green.

David:
Nicely done, my man. Today’s quick tip is-

Rob:
Thank you. Thank you.

David:
We are heading into the traditionally slow season by seasonality for real estate, which means there are usually less buyers competing with you to get that great deal. So when you combine this with rising interest rates, fears about a recession, and the constant negativity that we’re seeing in the news, coupled with a slowdown in the competition that you have to buy houses, you are likely to find a better deal now more than at any other times. My advice to you would be to target houses that have been on the market longer than their competition, and reach out to the real estate agents to find out how motivated the sellers are and then write very aggressive offers and hope for the best.

Rob:
And that was today’s quick, quick, quick, quick tip.

David:
All right. We’re going to bring in today’s guess if you would be so kind, leave us a comment on YouTube and let us know what you thought about today’s show. If there was questions that you wish we would have asked or what you liked, also please go give us a review online on the Apple Podcast app, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen to your podcasts, those really help this podcast get to more people. All right. Let’s bring in the brothers. Trevor and Tyler Sarter, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Podcast. How are you two doing today?

Tyler:
I’m hanging in there. David, how about yourselves?

Trevor:
Doing great.

David:
I’m hosting the best podcast in the entire world. I couldn’t be doing better. And I get to talk to you two fine former basketball players at a college level, men after my own heart. And we get to join that with real estate, so I’m doing good. Thanks for asking. If you don’t mind, tell me a little bit about the business that you two work in as well as your personal portfolios to get started.

Tyler:
For sure. So we’re more so a full service real estate investment firm company, per se, definitely heavy in the wholesale arena, do some fix and flips, and then also advise and consult a lot of international buyers, so that’s pretty much the gist of it. I’ll let my brother weigh in if I left anything out.

Trevor:
Yeah. I think that kind of describes what we do. When we started this company, Promise Land Realty, in 2015, it was pretty much solely focused on wholesaling and just being a cash building platform for where we were in our careers at that time. Since then, we’ve grown to do our own fix and flips. We hold just a couple rentals. We’ve offloaded a bunch of them while we still had good margins there, but now we also consult with international investors to get their short-term and long-term portfolios built up.

David:
All right. So you said you’re a full-time real estate firm. Are you guys doing direct mail campaigns to get deals coming in or are you more representing other investors, finding deals for them?

Tyler:
So both. So we use our website as a platform to get deals, to actually source deals from investors. And then, we also use it as our vehicle to offload portfolios for the clients that we service, so we’ve focused on both sides, acquisition, and sales. So we’re more so of a full service real estate investment firm.

David:
So give me an example of the different types of clients that you guys might get and the ways you help these different people.

Tyler:
Right. So right now, we’ve been working on a deal for about a year, and I won’t go super in depth here, but it’s an international buyer and the property that he was targeting, unfortunately had some title issues. So we were able to connect him with an attorney to complete the quiet title process, which took about a year. Also, coordinate inspections, there were some issues with the basement on that property, kind of rectify those issues or point him in the right direction of the best help, and then get everything back on track to a year later now being able to finally close this deal. So that’s just a kind of brief example of keeping the deal alive and kind of what we specialize in and working with investors who don’t have boots on the ground.

Rob:
Tell us why you worked on this deal for a year. I’ve got to imagine there was some financial incentive, right? Because if it was a $30,000 flip, you probably wouldn’t work so hard for a year, but I’ve got to imagine there’s something here, right?

Tyler:
Right. Well, it’s kind of what we do. We stick the flag in the ground. We go all the way to the end with every deal that we’re involved in, win, lose, or draw. And that’s what kind of makes us stand out from other wholesalers or real estate investors. It’s kind of like a “never say die” mantra, and it leads to repeat business. Yeah, the wholesale fees are good, but real estate is a relationship business. And doing good business, going the extra mile for a client, leads to referrals or repeat business from that client, so that’s kind of what we built our business around.

Rob:
Okay. So when getting started in real estate, you obviously started in the wholesaling side of things. What was your reason there? Everyone’s got a lot of reasons for starting out in wholesale, and obviously that’s the big bread and butter right now of your company, too. Was there something that attracted you to that? Did you have a mentor that brought you into it, because it’s always a thing about circumstance, right? So what was the initial draw to that section or that niche of the industry?

Trevor:
Well, initially I started off marketing and managing bank-owned properties quite some time before we started the wholesale business, so in ’07, and my little brother was in high school. We got to be on the good side, if you will, of the economic crash and in terms of being signed up directly with the banks to help manage their inventory. So from there, I was able to get listings as an REO agent for pennies on the dollar and make good commissions. But then in hindsight, we thought about those investors that were actually making those purchases and that were able to cash out once the economic crash was over, and it was kind of like, “How do we become that guy? Right? How do we become the person that’s actually capitalizing in, that has less liability than say an agent?”
So when we got back together, started this kind of trek to figure out what that looks like. As far as starting Promise Land Realty, my brother was able to go up to Baltimore and become an intern with Jay Morrison and he got the textbook and sent it to me. And we learned about this thing, wholesaling, where we already had an idea of how to have a Rolodex of buyers and sellers. But now, with this new weapon, if you will, it kind of changed our mind state and expanded us from just being local in Michigan to possibly having a nationwide business.

Rob:
Okay. So Trevor, you started out, you were already kind of in real estate, Tyler came to the table. Is that right?

Trevor:
Yeah.

Rob:
And then you guys sort of came together. Now you have this firm. I’m kind of curious, what role do you take on out of the two? And then Tyler, I’d like to hear from you, what do you do and how do you guys complement each other as brothers in this? Because I know that a little bit of a family dynamic here can sometimes either complicate things or excel things.

Tyler:
From my perspective, I mostly deal with acquisitions and bringing properties into the pipeline, so going out there and sourcing deals, connecting with investors, and kind of solving their problem. And then my brother, and I’ll let him speak after this, he deals more so with offloading the properties or working with the buyer. So we’re like peanut butter and jelly, so to speak, you can’t have one without the other.

Trevor:
For sure, for sure. And just to that point, this deal he was describing and why we do take on deals for that long is because he actually has a relationship with the seller, and I myself have a relationship, personal relationship, with the buyer. We’ve closed several deals. The guy’s a real cool guy, straight shooter. And it was a great property that I wanted him to have after we had done so much work. So that’s just an example of one of many deals that’s been like that where my brother has had some sort of relationship within his network with the seller and I’ve had a direct relationship with the buyer and we’ve been able to make it work.

Rob:
That’s really cool. And I think in kind of digging into your story a little bit here, I found out that one of the first deals you’ve ever closed was actually a church. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How did that come to fruition?

Tyler:
Yeah. So that was our first deal. It was actually a storefront church that we were able to wholesale to another investor, and then the church was repurposed into a small grocery store. So that actually came through a friend of mine, Brandon Brand, who’s a real estate investor in Detroit. So Brandon, if you’re listening to this, thank you. We appreciate you. But it was like just jumping out there, and we got our wholesale contract. We’ve got a friend who needs to offload a property at the time, and just throwing our hat in there. We were using all type of tactics at that point, going to Craigslist, blasting out emails, violating all type of email rules at that time. We were just novice wholesalers, so yeah. But we got it done in a pretty short amount of time, so it was a good experience for all of us involved,

Trevor:
Quite a few of our deals, as I was taking notes for this, quite a few of our deals have been helping out friends, even childhood friends. One of the last closings we had together in Detroit was for the Chapman’s, who is my brother’s childhood friend. And that was a real smooth deal, one of those just dream deals. The guy comes in, does the inspection, two weeks later closes. And we also did another deal for one of my real close friends who was having issues with substances at that time, got behind with HOA like $18,000, and we were able to help him sell it. And he actually netted a $55,000 profit, was able to kind of turn his life around. So I think as we started getting into it, it became about more than just the money, knowing that we could actually solve some of our friends’ life problems and still earn a living at the same time.

David:
All right. So give me some stories that you guys have had with a deal that you thought was going to fall apart and maybe what you did to keep that deal alive.

Trevor:
So this is actually a deal that we just closed, what, about two weeks ago?

Tyler:
Yeah, about two weeks ago.

Trevor:
About two weeks ago. And actually, when the deal came in, it came in through a buddy of Tyler’s, so it was already kind of like a daisy chain. And so we’re like, “Okay. Let’s see what we can do,” because we didn’t have any attachment to the seller at all, really. And once we started fishing up interest, it became real frustrating because we couldn’t get any answers. So we kind of gave our guy who gave us the lead, we kind of gave him every chance, “Okay, can you get answers back? What’s going on?” This went on for probably about a month and a half. And so, finally he kind of threw his hands up like, “Man, I don’t know what’s going on.” So Ty and I got together, I reached out to the seller, got him under contract with the expectation of closing in three weeks, because this is a no-brainer in Detroit, all brick, two family flat, paying tenants, in good condition, just a decently moving deal.

Tyler:
A layup, yeah.

Trevor:
A layup, supposed to be a layup. So I reached out within my network to source one of my investors in Detroit who’s a real rascal. The guy is a real trash talker, but a guy who you can’t leave him alone because he’s probably going to pull through, but you want to leave him alone because he’s so full of crap. So this guy gets in the deal. Now, this seller we’re dealing with is a man by the name of Mr. Tally, who’s 91 years old. Okay? So he’s looking to just cash out and go on his way with his wife.
So our guy, Rodney, keeps telling us, “Okay. I’ll be able to close this out two weeks, no problem.” So this is in early April, I believe. So he’s like, “Two weeks, no problem.” So every week it’s something else. So, Mr. Tally has a CPA at first. They’re on us because it’s not even him, so he is like, “What’s going on with the deal, guys? We’re trying to hang in with you guys.” So long story short, Rod was getting financed by another guy and then trying to set up a double close to a whole nother lady who we had no idea about until like two months in. But we finally were able to line up all the stars after what, about five, six different delays and get it done. And we still-

Tyler:
After closing without funding the deal first, and then funding the deal probably two weeks later or something like that. So it’s all about managing people’s expectations, knowing your buyer and your seller’s personalities, and being able to keep everybody in, keep everybody engaged until that wire gets in the air and it closes. So I think that’s a good example of us keeping at it.

Trevor:
Yeah. And even after, because a lot of people, and you guys can attest to this, when the deal gets closed, they’re done with it. But it takes a real professional to really follow up, making sure, especially in a tenant-occupied situation that the keys are transferred, water bill gets turned over, all those things like that.

Rob:
We just closed on a hotel, and there were so many components to making sure that that transition went smoothly, that in retrospect, we probably would’ve made a few different decisions moving into it, but we figured it out along the way. And I think one of the things that I really like about y’alls story here is I see a theme and the theme is persistent. You guys are very persistent with your deals, right?

Tyler:
Absolutely.

Rob:
And you talked about how you closed on a deal that took you a year. Most people probably would have walked away from that, especially if it was a wholesale contract. But you guys kept with it, this deal right here, kind of dealing with the buyer and everything like that. So I know that one of your specialties is the art of keeping the deal alive. Do you think you can walk us through some tangible steps on how people can do that and how they can just make their way to the closing table at all costs?

Tyler:
Right. So a few ways that immediately come to mind is when you’re in a deal and you’re working with a buyer and seller, transparency and transfer of information is imperative, so keeping each side updated with new information constantly. It can be small or big. If title work came back, following up that, following up and sending it to both parties immediately, addressing any issues that may come up with a deal, immediately following up on every email chain, coordinating the inspections, collecting your END, confirming your wiring instructions with your buyer and your seller. Basically, leaving nothing to chance in a real estate deal and making it easy for both sides to close, I think is what you get paid for as a wholesaler. It’s more than just assigning a property. It’s about doing all the dirty work to make sure that you get to that closing table and you collect your commission at the end of the day,

David:
Something I spend a lot of time teaching the people that work for me on the real estate team, or it works with investing as well, is real estate is this unique industry where you can do 99% of the job and you get paid exactly the same if you don’t get to 100% as if you do 1%. There is this often a subconscious belief that we get from working in the W2 world, where if you work a half day at work, you get a half day’s pay. So it’s not as good as a whole day, but it’s still something. And then you get into our world, and it’s so discouraging because you feel like you’re working so hard, but then you’re making no money, because if you don’t get all the way to the finish line, it’s nothing. It’s everything or nothing in our world.
And I’ll see that if you don’t have that killer instinct, that, “It does not matter. I will do whatever it takes. It has to close.” You’re not going to last in this industry very long, because you’re just going to be burning a ton of energy and not getting a result. Do you guys mind sharing a little bit about your experiences with that concept?

Tyler:
Yeah, definitely.

Trevor:
I was just going to say, to your point, I definitely agree with you. But I have to add something to that, that keeps me having faith as I’ve been doing this full-time for so long, is on the other side of the coin is no work is done in vain. So yeah, you might have a couple closings where you did everything you could do and you kind of fell short. But something in that last deal that didn’t happen prepares you for the next deal, because either you’re going to win or you’re going to learn, basically is kind of my ideology with it.
But to your point, yes, for sure. As a grown person, knowing that we have to have funds to pay our bills, you have to check every box off to close, yeah. And I think that’s one thing that kind of separates the killers from the wannabees is that one instinct to where it’s like by any means necessary, and everything that’s physically possible and legal, within legal bounds, you have to be willing to do that if you want a consistent check in this real estate business.

Tyler:
Right. It’s like you eat what you kill. There’s another mantra we have, it’s called “lions only.” In this business, if you want to be successful, it’s lions only. So basically, doing whatever it takes. I can go into a very quick example of what I mean by that. There was a commercial deal actually, I just helped sell the barber shop that I go to on a weekly basis. So the seller was out of state, New York seller, we were supposed to close on a Friday, mail-away closing.
The title company gets the closing documents out late. His originals all have to be signed in blue. So he gets it, he is going to mail it back to me to obviously save time. I’m so on it that I hold the package for delivery because we have a 1:00 PM closing time on Monday. I go, get there, get to the FedEx location, pick up his originals. He has a partner that I have to meet. Drive it 30 minutes to meet his partner, get it notarized at the local UPS Store, then take the documents myself to closing, just to make sure that we get it done in time, all because the seller was initially inconvenienced by the title company getting the closing package out late. So that’s just some of the stuff that you have to do if you want to keep a good name in this business and you want to actually get deals done. You have to take things into your own hands.

David:
Trevor, what’s something that you’ve learned as a former college basketball player? For those that didn’t play basketball in general, to understand why I’m bringing this up, everyone plays basketball. It’s not like baseball or football where you’ve got to get a whole team together, and you can just go grab your buddies and go play baseball or something. Football is the same way, right? Once you get out of school, there’s not a football league you could go join in most places. But there’s always basketball. Every gym you go to, every playground, you can grab your buddies. So everyone grows up playing basketball, which means if you want to play it at a high level, it is incredibly competitive. A lot of people are all chasing that same dream. So in order just to play at college, you have to be very, very good and very, very driven. And I’m curious, what are some of the skills that you learned in that environment that are now helping you be successful with your role in the company now?

Trevor:
I think the number one thing that I learned from basketball was that you can get better. When I was in, I think, seventh grade, I got cut. And it was the first time that I got cut from the AAU team, and it crushed me. I did skip a grade, so I was a year younger, but still I thought I was real good. And we’re from Michigan. That next year, man, I shoveled the snow, anything. I shot every day. And I was starting on that next year, but it just showed me if you put the work in, you can actually get better. You don’t have to stay at the same level if you don’t want to, as long as you’re willing to put the work in. And I think that’s one thing that I kind of carried into the real estate business with my brother and I, is a lot of things we didn’t know starting off, but I was like, “Okay, as long as we keep studying, as long as we keep making calls, showing up, eventually we’ll get better, and the numbers will reflect.” And that did happen.

Tyler:
That’s a great question, by the way. But I would have to say, when you start off, it’s kind of like street ball, and then you go into organized basketball. And then from being an organized basketball team, you look at a team that’s intricate, or has very detailed, like the Golden State Warriors. So just that maturation in our business; when you first start off, you’re playing street ball. You’re just trying to score a basket. And then you understand the rules of the game and you become more organized. And then you become a fine-tuned machine like the Golden State Warriors. So I think we look at great sports organizations, Chicago Bulls, we mentioned them earlier, the Detroit Pistons of 2004. And in the 1980s with Isaiah Thomas, being a well-built organization and kind of following those teams. We watch those games in the background when we’re writing PAs or sending assignment agreements. It’s kind of like nostalgia. It definitely keeps us worn, for sure.

David:
Something I learned about really well-run sports teams that helped me in business that I needed, was I looked at business like there’s a blueprint that everyone follows to be good at this thing. And it’s always the same for everyone, as if you could build a sports team just by, I get five players at these positions. The better players I have, the better the team is going to be. And it’s not that simple. The chemistry between the players means a lot. And you see the really good teams, like we’ll take the Golden State Warriors. They’re built around a star, like let’s say Stephen Curry, and then they look for support pieces that have a better chemistry with Stephen than they would on… So if you took Draymond Green off of the Warriors, he’d be a good player. He would not be nearly as valuable to another team as he is on that team, so they get more out of each person they have.
And when I started approaching my business like that, I’m the Stephen Curry of this business. I need people that support my unique strengths, my skills. And that would be different than Rob’s business, because he has different strengths, and people that might support me might be useless in his organization and vice versa. I guess it was hard for me to give myself permission to admit I’m that important in this business. And I need people to surround me that will help me be good. Would you guys mind sharing what your evolution was like, where you realized, “Hey, I am good at this thing. And I’ve got to own that and put people around me that allow me to be good at it.” We’ll start with you, Tyler.

Tyler:
I think, for sure, just being the expert in my peer group, my circle of influence, with regards to real estate. It took me a long time to really step into that gift that I have, just my passion for helping people through real estate, my passion for continued knowledge within the industry and different parts of the industry, as we are trying to transition into more commercial and then into development. I definitely think that’s the natural progression, and just stepping into that and just acknowledging your talents and accepting your gifts and using them, because if you don’t use them, you’ll squander what you’re really supposed to be doing and it’ll be taken away from you. So that’s what did it for me.

Trevor:
Yeah. I think, especially starting off, it’s a matter of fit and feel, especially when you’re trying to form different teams. And it’s part of overcoming ego and just looking at the facts from where you are gifted at, because I know, and this has just been from facts, from proof of concept. If I get the right people around me, I’m good at developing other leaders. And so, that’s kind of what I look to now, is if someone has potential, as long as they want to work and as long as they want to learn, I can put them in a position to help me more by becoming the best them.
But that doesn’t happen if the environment is not safe for me to do what I do. So I definitely hear what you’re saying on that, Dave. It’s so key to have the right energy too, because you might have… Look at the Brooklyn Nets. You might have super killers on your team, but you can’t win because everybody doesn’t see it the same way. So I think that’s the difference between a good squad full of guys in a championship ball club is that chemistry, that communication, that sort of thing to make this work.

Tyler:
Being on the same page.

Trevor:
Being on the same page.

Tyler:
Understanding our system and what works for us like you were saying, David, because the Princeton offense is not the same as the triangle offense. So understanding what our system is and bringing in the players who fit in our offense and can make things work with us.

David:
Yeah. I had a cop I worked with, and we were actually learning building search stuff, which is incredibly difficult. I won’t go too deep into it, but it feels exactly like when you’re playing a sport like basketball. Depending on if this person goes this way, you’ve got to go this way. You’re quickly adapting all the time. There’s new stuff getting thrown at you. It’s very challenging. And they were talking to us about teamwork and he said, “Look. Let’s say you take a team of NFL All-Stars. You take the best players from the entire league. You put them on the same team, and the next day they’ve got to go play the New England Patriots. Which team is going to win?

Tyler:
The New England Patriots.

David:
It’s pretty obvious, right? The Patriots are going to crush them, right?

Tyler:
Yeah.

David:
And it just was an example of, it’s easy to not factor in chemistry when you’re looking at building the team. Do I work well with this person? Do we communicate well? Do they have a complimentary skill set? You don’t want a team full of five point guards. And I think a lot of people looking at the industry from the outside, it’s very easy to just think, “Oh, I just need to find people. Build my team, find a person that’s good at whatever they do.” But no, you’ve got to find a person that works with you because you’re building it around you. And that was a big step for me as I built things. Rob, did you have a similar sort of epiphany, or are you still trying to figure that out?

Rob:
Yeah. I’m kind of in the throes of it. I’m trying to keep up with all the basketball lingo here. Admittedly, I’m not very good at basketball, and that will be revealed very quickly in this podcast episode. But I will say I did watch The Last Dance, and so I understand the triangle offense thing. I’m pretty sure I can keep up with that. But, yeah.

David:
Robby.

Rob:
And I took that personally. But yeah, I think ultimately for me, it does come down to team chemistry, right, because everybody really compliments each other. I heard a very important phrase that a mentor told me one time, and he said, “If we are the same, then one of us is unnecessary.” Right? And so, that is something that has really resonated with me ever since, because me and my business partner, he’s kind of like the COO of my real estate business, and we’re both very visionary and very kind of big picture thinking. And so, what I kind of came to realize was we both really can’t be working side by side on the same project because we both do the exact same thing, and we both think the exact same way and we execute the exact same way.
And so, there’s a lot of times where we were working on a project and stuff was falling through the cracks because it’s like, “Oh, I thought you were doing that.” And it’s like, “No, I thought you were doing that.” And it’s like, “Well, I usually do the big picture stuff.” And he’s like, “Me, too.” So we kind of learned that in order for us to function as a team, we sort of had to lead our own projects. And there’s a lot more collaboration that comes from that because there’s not the pressure of having to double fill the same role, right? And so, I think for us that’s something that we kind of learned, not necessarily the hard way. I think we’re happy to have gotten there, but I think we’ve seen a lot more progress in our own systems and our own practices as we’ve kind of taken on different projects and can kind of come together for bigger strategic meetings, but execute on our own different projects, if that makes sense.

Tyler:
Absolutely.

Rob:
Yeah. So I kind of wanted to keep jamming a little bit here on the keeping the deal alive, because I know you talked about the persistence, we’ve talked about team chemistry here. And I know one other kind of aspect of this was being solution-oriented. I know you kind of spoke to this a little bit with one of the deals, of kind of having to make sure the information was all being transferred and everything like that. But can you give us a little bit more in the world of being solution-oriented and why this is so important to keeping a deal alive?

Tyler:
Yeah. I think just in real estate, in a real estate transaction, nothing is ever going to go as planned. I think you two can attest to that, the unexpected circumstances that arise. And it’s a mentality, it’s a mindset, being solution-oriented, and just having that approach, knowing going in, “Okay. It says 30 days, this deal is going to close in 30 days. But we hope. We’re going to do everything within our power to make it close. We’re going to control all the variables that we can control personally to make it close. But being able to accept that when variables outside of our control arise, that we’re going to be solution-oriented. If the title’s not clear, okay, we’re going to order a FOIA. We’re going to wait for the FOIA to come in. If the FOIA doesn’t cure the title, then we’re going to pursue a quiet title suit. If it takes a year, it takes a year. But we’re going to get the deal done no matter what.” That’s kind of my approach. And I think you have to have that to be a successful real estate investor.

Trevor:
And I think it’s about being proactive, and then also letting your ego take a backseat, because as you guys know too, everyone in the real estate business is not the most friendly person. So you can get into these conversations where you’ve got to be careful not to have a pissing contest with someone and realize that the greater good of everyone is just getting the deal closed. Because there’s been times, people talk to you crazy on the phone, and you could look at what you’ve got going and be like, “Yeah, I don’t need this. I don’t have to sit here and listen to this.” And in some cases you don’t, right, as long as you’re not being disrespected. But in some cases, you have to just put your ego to the side and be like, “Okay, is this something I can deal with? Yes. What’s going to go ahead and get the deal done will be me doing X, Y, Z.” Instead of beating your chest up against a buyer or a seller, just go ahead and get it done.

Tyler:
How many inspections am I going to coordinate on a specific deal to get it done? As many as it takes. Am I going to wake up and go at 6:00 AM and go get photos of this property? Yes I am. Because that’s just the intangibles to make a buyer or a seller more comfortable to get the deal done.

Rob:
Yeah. So I was wanting to ask because I’m kind of curious, do you feel like you stepping in and making that solution yourself, if that means you have to personally show up at 6:00 AM to take those photos or if you have to actually get your hands dirty, do you consider that a solution? Are you willing to do that? Or is a solution for you more so in the camp of, “Who can I empower to go and do that for me?” How involved are you getting in some of those day-to-day “solutions?”

Tyler:
So, from my perspective, I’m very involved on the day-to-day. If I personally have to do something, I take pride, I enjoy getting my hands dirty, even still, even with I don’t know how many deals we’ve closed. I still like it because it keeps you alive. Real estate is personal. A lot of people don’t do it hands-on, but for me it is hands-on. Eventually, yeah. Of course, we want to create the team to where we don’t have to do these things and we have people on staff, but you always have to be willing to roll up your sleeves, and if push comes to serve, get the job done yourself.

Trevor:
Yeah. We pretty much had a frontline attitude from our days in marketing, managing the bank-owned properties, where we got large amounts of BPOs back then all across the state of Michigan. And so, we had so much work at some points that Tyler in high school would get the photos as well, and we’d split the money. And then, it was like you’re going into some of the wildest neighborhoods in Detroit, no doors on the homes. So coming from that to doing this is kind of like a piece of cake for us now. So we always had that frontline attitude to where it’s got to get done. And dealing with the banks, we were all raised on a timeline, so I think subconsciously we’re still on that 24 hour, 48 hours, it’s been 36 hours, so trying to get items done on time.

Rob:
Yeah. Yeah. And I know one of your underlying philosophies here with keeping the deal alive is also showing up. I’m kind of curious, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by showing up?

Tyler:
Showing up means going the extra mile. So for example, and I’m going to use this as a tip for all real estate investors out there, especially wholesalers, take care of the people who take care of you. So if you’re dealing with a title company and you close a couple of deals and you’re satisfied with your experience, drop them off a gift card. A little appreciation goes a long way. Just recently, I had a deal that closed, the Claremont, which we were speaking about earlier in the podcast. I just dropped off some gift cards to all of the staff at the title company. And that led to the actual processor or the person in control of funding the deals sending us two additional deals for us to work on directly through her properties that she owns herself that she would like to offload. So that’s just one example that I could give. And that’s not your typical example. That’s why I wanted to share it.

David:
That is awesome. And I think that’s a good point to transition into the next segment of our show. It is the fire round. We don’t always do this, but when we have extra intelligent guests, we like to fire questions at them and see what they would say. So I’m going to start, and we will go, how about Tyler then Trevor, for each of these questions. Question number one. Is there anything beginners should know based on your experience in this industry before getting started?

Tyler:
Yeah. So do everything to build your knowledge base before actually trying to get out there and get a deal. So that means tune into this podcast that we’re on right now on Bigger Pockets, join the Bigger Pockets forum. Read as many books as you can, definitely those beginner books, Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller, Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert, Kiyosaki. Just build your knowledge base so that way, when you’re in the field in live action, you have those reps. So it’ll make your deal go a lot smoother.

Trevor:
Definitely preparing yourself mentally for a grind. And I think the mental preparation is everything, because the majority of what we’re talking about is entrepreneurship. So I think starting to understand entrepreneurship on the basic level is a good start for someone, too, just so you’re kind of braced for some of the frustrations that may occur as you’re trying to pursue your goal. And I definitely agree with my brother in reading as much as you can and getting as knowledgeable as you can. And also, if possible, shadowing someone or finding a mentor. I think that’s so key. Whether you know that person or not, whether it’s someone on YouTube or Bigger Pockets, someone that you can kind of follow their moves to where you can see in reality, it’s doable for you and repeatable for you as well.

Rob:
So a follow-up question on this, how do you go about getting a mentor? Do you have any tips there?

Tyler:
Getting a mentor? You have to seek, you have to go. If you want water, you have to go where the water is. So actually, when I wanted a mentor back in the day, I think my brother mentioned this, it was Jay Morrison at the time. I actually drove to Baltimore, got there early, and helped set up the seminar, and the relationship develop that way. So not just always having your hand out saying, “I want this information. I want this information. I want you to be my mentor.” But adding value to whatever the source that you’re seeking out, adding value to that situation and being selfless is a good way to stand out and secure that mentor relationship, for sure.

Trevor:
On the backside of that, I’m going to say one of the quotes is, “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.” So basically, when you’re taking massive action towards what you’re trying to do, basic human nature is someone who is more experienced will say, “Hey man, tell me what you’re trying to do.” And they might have already been doing it or might be already great at what they do. And when you recognize that same energy within someone else, it’s easy for someone to bring you on board because you’re already actively trying to do it. Whereas a lot of people are just sitting out with their hand out saying, “Oh, why doesn’t anyone help me?” Because they don’t see what you’re doing. I think you can attract mentorship when you’re kind of engaged in process, making mistakes or whatever, and you kind of stumble upon that right person to help you and guide you in the right way.

David:
All right. So any tips from each of you, we’ll start with you, Tyler, on how to go about finding the mentor? I love that piece of advice. “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.” And none of us ever want to hear that. We’re like, “Why can’t I just find someone that’s going to make this easy for me?”

Rob:
Right.

David:
We’ve all been there with that person that wasn’t ready to learn. And it was a disaster for both people. So what advice do you two have about finding a mentor?

Tyler:
For me, is actually going out and seeking, taking action, adding value to the relationship. For me, I went and sought the information out. I drove to Baltimore for a mentor, Jay Morrison, that I was pursuing at the time. And actually helped him, got there early, nobody asked me to do this, got there early to help them set up the event and make sure everything was coordinated for the people. And that led to a good relationship, and actually us getting started with wholesaling was actually through that interaction, and just being willing to go the extra mile and help outside of just having my hand out, being willing to give to get.

David:
All right. Next question. How much money should I spend on tools to get into wholesaling? Do I need to spend money or is there stuff out there for free?

Trevor:
My whole motto is to do everything that you can possibly do for free first and then start spending money, because when we got started, we were really on a shoestring budget. I didn’t even know about MailChimp initially. I was sending a thousand emails out name by name on Gmail, until my buddy was like, “Man, what are you doing? You can sign up with MailChimp and log your CRM that way.” But I would say once you start getting results on the stuff, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Craigslist, whether it’s bandit signs, whether it’s calling people on Zillow, I think you exhaust all of those free resources and start getting return and then you start making investments.
So some main investments I think you need to make once you get your wits about you is definitely real estate software, whether that’s REIPro or PropStream or whatever you use, just so you can get accurate data. I think it’s worth spending, tools, on anything that you absolutely need, but outside of just having just a bunch of shiny object syndrome, cool microphones and headphones and all that stuff, I think you need to just invest in stuff that’s going to bring a return first before you start spending a lot of money.

Tyler:
Yeah, definitely. I would say invest in your business, because yourself, you are a business. You need a professional website. You definitely need… It still holds true and true. A lot of people don’t have business cards, but I can’t tell you the amount of times a day that I wish that I had business cards on me. So definitely just investing in the simple things to set up yourself as a legitimate business, as a wholesaler or a real estate investor, not just a wholesaler, just making yourself appeal to your audience or to your target market the way that you want to present yourself in a professional manner. So invest in yourself is what I would say. That’s the best investment you can make.

Rob:
That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s very similar, I think. Trevor said invest in something that’s going to make you money. Investing in yourself and education, you really can’t beat that.

Tyler:
Yeah, for sure.

Rob:
How crucial is it being overly communicative? Can’t I just coast once I’m looking up deals?

Tyler:
Not if you want to get paid. But yeah, I’ll take that one. I think over-communication, and this is something that I learned. I also have a background of working in corporate America. It’s better to over-communicate and not leave things to chance. I think over-communicating gives everyone in the deal confidence that things are progressing. Even the smallest update makes a big difference in just keeping everybody engaged, because that’s a key component to keeping the deal alive is everybody has to be engaged. And the only way to do that is to over-communicate with all parties involved. So it’s definitely a pillar of success, I would say.

Trevor:
I think so as well. I’ve witnessed it as my career is matured. And a lot of the rockstar agents that I do deals with in St. Louis and other places, and even Tyler, I learned a lot from him and over-communicating just to be honest, because I was kind of a coaster because I was closing something like that. I was like, “Oh, it’s good. I’ll check back in with the title company.” And then you check back in and they’re like, “Hey, we don’t got you guys on the schedule.” You’re like, “Hold on. What do you mean?” So yeah, it’s definitely key because it keeps everyone in the game and everyone on the same page. Going back to what we’re saying on chemistry, everybody’s got the same point of view, whereas if you’re communicating with some people and not others, other people are going to be like, “Oh man, I thought this deal was dead.” I’m like, No. We’re closing next Friday.” So it definitely helps to just keep everybody in the same train of thought.

David:
Any cool tricks to find buyers and sellers that either other people aren’t doing or that you found work for you two that are under-utilized?

Tyler:
So, I will start with sellers since that’s more so my wheelhouse, and I’ll let my brother speak to securing buyers. So one thing that I picked up on is contacting people who are behind on property taxes or are maybe in the redemption period of possibly losing their home and offering them, being solution-oriented will say, “Hey, we don’t want you to lose your home for nothing.” So definitely going back, searching a public record. If you’re an agent and have access to last deed recordings, if you’re not an agent, there’s websites out there, Spokeo, where you could find out who the property owner is and have their contact information and just reaching out it. The obstacle is the way. So those are two strategies, especially for inner city markets such as your Detroits, your Baltimores, your Memphis, Tennessees, where there’s a lot of possible tax delinquent homeowners in those situations, definitely that’s one way I would recommend.

Trevor:
As far as buyers, I would say the number one for me is landlords. So these are “for rent” signs, signs that you might see every day. You can call and ask if they’re interested in purchasing more properties. Nine times out of 10, they probably are in the market to purchase something. One of the best ways I learned, especially before COVID and coming back now, is the real estate meetups, joining real estate clubs and getting there face-to-face with buyers, people that are act actively searching for properties in your area, real estate agents. That might be one of the best ways to find buyers for sure, because they’ve kind of automatically got buyers through access to the MLS and their network.
And then, once you build up your website, online lead capture is very good. And I will say for people just starting off, kind of a tricky way is also ghost bandit signs. So just kind of describing a house like a three bed, one bath, fixer upper with a phone number, and kind of trying to build your database that way. And you can’t leave out Facebook Marketplace also is one of the main tools that we used starting up to build our buyers list directly with emails and kind of getting a feel for who’s looking for what and in what regions.

David:
All right. This brings us to the last segment of our show, the world famous-

Speaker 5:
Famous Four.

David:
In this segment of the show, we will fire questions at you and we will let each of you take turns answering the same questions we ask every guest, every show. Tyler, we’ll start with you. What is your favorite real estate book?

Tyler:
Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller, for sure, is what I started on. The blue book, the infamous.

Trevor:
I’m going to say the same thing, Millionaire Real Estate Investor, just because it was the most comprehensive book I found that kind of laid it out from start to finish. It was before a lot of other books came out, but that was kind of my bible for so long and how we got started.

Rob:
Okay. Awesome. Great books. Question number two, favorite business book?

Trevor:
So my personal favorite business book is Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco. It really kind of revolutionized the way I looked at our business, and it took us up a level from the things I learned from Richest Man in Babylon, if you will, just about finances and what was possible. It kind of really expanded my mindset in terms of what could be possible when you pair real estate with the internet and the other pathways that come from that. So I’m going to say Millionaire Fastlane, for sure.

Tyler:
For me, this book is not directly related to business, but it applies to business in so many facets. I’m going to go with Mastery by Robert Greene. I just feel like that book has a lot of examples of how business leaders and leaders in culture and art and have mastered what they were pursuing. You look at Leonardo DaVinci to Freddie Roach in boxing, and just what all went into them pursuing their craft and mastering themselves in what they’re trying to get after, so that’s one for me.

Rob:
Awesome. And then, when you guys aren’t out there running your own real estate empire as two brothers, what are your hobbies?

Tyler:
So I can start here. I’m actually taking up a new hobby, which is boxing, not professionally or anything like that. But when you’re dealing with all these buyers and sellers, you just need a release. Sometimes you just need to hit that heavy bag. So that is definitely… You can catch me in a boxing gym if I’m not in front of my laptop writing a PA or sending an assignment agreement or researching a property.

Trevor:
Yeah. So I started off boxing too, but chess and boating now, my girlfriend and I, she’s really introduced me to this whole world of boating, so I’m really enjoying that, especially this season. We’ve been on a boat a couple times this summer, so I’m really liking that. And then, chess, I’ve loved that since I was in high school. Actually in Nashville, had a program to teach community youth how to play and we had to tournament, so I really like those things.

David:
All right. Tyler, in your opinion, what sets apart successful investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started?

Tyler:
Action. Taking action separates 99% of the people who succeed or fail. And then, knowing when to say no separates the other 1%. Knowing when to turn down a deal and not pursue an opportunity sometimes is the caveat that a lot of people overlook. I think the worst thing you can do is buy a bad deal or do a bad deal. So having that discernment is what separates the 1% from the 99%.

Trevor:
I’m going to say the will to keep going despite failure and frustration. And I’m also going to say being focused on one thing. I think a lot of people get started, they start on one thing for a while and then they split off in all these directions. And it’s like diverted effort is not as impactful when you’re chasing a million different rabbits. I think that discipline of just staying focused on one thing is what separates successful people from those who aren’t in this business, for sure.

Rob:
Okay. Awesome. Well, lastly, can y’all tell us a little bit about where people can find you on the internet?

Tyler:
For sure. Mostly at our website, if you’re looking for a deal or if you just want… We have other things, audiobooks, eBooks, promiselandrealtyllc.com and also Promise Land Realty on Instagram and on Twitter, where my brother is a super influencer and superstar. Promise Land REI, that is where you can find us. We’d love to interact with you guys and see if we could do some deals together.

Rob:
Awesome. Well, as always, you can find me at Robuilt on YouTube, Robuilt on Instagram. What about you, David? Where can people find you?

David:
You can find me at DavidGreene24, pretty much everywhere. If you got correspondence from me, make sure it’s me. Check the screen name very closely. And then, I’ve often said if I reach out to you for some reason and you’re not sure who you’re talking to, ask for a voice note. At this point, you know what all of our voices sound like, so I think that’s one work around that I encourage people to use.
And then you can follow me on YouTube at David Greene Real Estate. Gentlemen, this has been fantastic, and we really appreciate your time. I always love hearing about how the struggles that we go through at one point in life help us in the next phase of life. I feel like a lot of people are trying to get all the rewards without going through the struggle, and it just doesn’t work.
And I also like that line you dropped about When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.” It’s actually up to us to put ourself in the right frame of mind to get what we need to get to the next level. So you guys have a very inspirational story, very cool people to talk with, and I appreciate you guys sharing your information there. Any last words before we let you get out of here?

Tyler:
I just wanted to say thank you to all of the mentors that we’ve had along the way, all of the people from Detroit who have given us the opportunity to help them out with deals and in other markets, but Detroit has really been a springboard for us. So I just want to say we appreciate you guys, and just looking forward to doing more positive things in the future.

Trevor:
Definitely. Thanks. Thanks to you guys.

David:
All right. This is David Greene for Rob, my pupil with the coif, Abasolo, signing out.

Coming soon…

Glenn Kelman, Redfin CEO, joins ‘Power Lunch’ to discuss if buyers and sellers will get on the same page soon and offer insight into home purchase agreement cancellations.

Ashley:
This is Real Estate Rookie, episode 213.

Nate:
I don’t count on any of the income that comes from the rental or the storage facility as true income. I don’t touch it. It’s just for reinvesting for right now, but in my mind I can allocate that stuff. So basically, I’m living for free right now in the house hack. The rental property covers most of my food every month. And I invested in a bunch of real estate trusts, which you can invest in the stock market and that pays for my car. So we’re slowly ticking the things off, with each property that comes up it becomes how can I live my life for free? And if you keep your expenses down to a pretty low amount, it’s very easy to do that with a small amount of properties.

Ashley:
My name is Ashley Kehr, and I’m here with my co-host Tony Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, where every week twice a week, we bring you the stories, inspiration, and information you need to kickstart your real estate investing journey. And if you guys have not yet done this, we would really, really appreciate an honest reading and review for the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever it is you consume this content. And before we get started I just want to highlight a recent review that came in, this one’s from Iscriminator. And Iscriminator said, “Every episode is unique. I’m glad you guys do what you do. I’m addicted. I discovered you guys three weeks ago and I’ve been binge listening and catching up. Hopefully, soon I can share my success story with you.” So guys we appreciate all the honest ratings and reviews, it helps us reach more like-minded investors just like yourselves. So Ashley Kehr, let’s get into some boring banter. Tell me what’s going on. What’s new in your world today?

Ashley:
While we were actually recording this podcast, I was having an inspection done by a home inspector on a lake house that I have under contract. And this is the first time that I’ve actually hired a home inspector in probably five years I think. So really exciting to have a bit more peace of mind of what’s going on in property than just buying such a dilapidated property, where I already know there’s so many big issues that it would be a thousand page report from the home inspector, so why even bother hiring them. So excited to see how it turns out. My business partner went there and met the home inspector and there was no big red flag, so we’ll just get the final report and hopefully be moving forward.

Tony:
That’s awesome. The reason you haven’t gone much is because you knew you were going to have to gut the whole place anyway.

Ashley:
On other properties. Where this property it’s turnkey, we really shouldn’t have to do anything to it. But we just wanted to get just an inspection report on it, just because we’re buying it at a turnkey price.

Tony:
And want to make sure it’s solid. For all the inspection reports that we’ve done, I don’t think I’ve ever been there in person when the inspection was actually taking place. Usually, I’ll just get it afterwards and I’ll call if I have any questions. You said Darrell was there at the property today walking with the inspector?

Ashley:
Yeah. And actually the seller was there too, because he let them in. But when I first started out and I had inspections done on every property, I would go and I would just follow the inspector on just because I wanted to learn.

Tony:
Learn. Right.

Ashley:
Darrell brought back this binder of stuff that I’m like, “Wait, where’s the inspection report?” He’s like, “Oh no, they send it later.” Where five years ago when I was having it done he would hand write it as he was going along, and he got it at the end of the inspection and would go over it with you. And so when I stopped using an inspector, I would go through the property using his inspection checklist and-

Tony:
Template.

Ashley:
… his sheets. Yes, template and go through the properties myself and look at everything. And obviously I couldn’t do everything like check the electrical outlets, things like that, but it really helped me get familiar with what actually a home inspector does.

Tony:
There you go. What a great tip to start today’s episode.

Ashley:
So Tony, what about you? What’s going on?

Tony:
Yeah. So much is going on. We’re still working on our big BRRRR deal, so we got until the end of August to get that one closed, so making steady progress there. We’ve got a few flips that we’re working on. We’ve got a new short term rental that just went live two days ago, another one we literally just published today. So just lots of things happening, so we’re excited for the next couple of months here.

Ashley:
Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. And I think we are both very excited about the guest that we have on today.

Tony:
Yes.

Ashley:
So we have Nate on who is actually the copywriter for our podcast. We’ve never really gotten to put a face to his name that we see all over the podcast stuff, so this is awesome to really be able to meet him too along with hearing how he got started in real estate.

Tony:
There’s this misconception maybe about all the folks at BiggerPockets that everyone’s just this massive successful real estate investor, but it’s not the case a lot of people are just getting started. And Nate’s at three properties right now, two of those are single family type residences, but one is a self-storage unit. So we spent a pretty good amount of the episode talking about how he graduated up to self-storage, how he educated himself on analyzing and the process that he’s gone through to manage that property as well. So overall, just a lot of really good nuggets from Nate about breaking into the world of real estate investing.

Ashley:
So if you read the description of this podcast and you did not think it was great, blame Nate.

Tony:
Nate, welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, we’re super excited to have you. And before we get into your story, I just want to let everyone know that Nate you are actually a very, very, very important part of this Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Literally, every piece of copy that anyone has ever read about the Real Estate Rookie show came from Nate’s fantastic artistic marketing. I don’t know I’m running out of adjectives. I’m trying to be like you man, but you’re the copywriter for everything Real Estate Rookie. So super excited to have you on the show, man, but tell folks a little bit about yourself.

Nate:
Thank you so much, it’s been fun working with BP. And I’ve gotten to see every single time Tony’s worn a black shirt, it’s every episode, it’s just black shirts. There’s never a gray, there’s nothing, so he keeps that vibe going the whole time. So I’m the copywriter for the BiggerPockets Podcast. I started about a year and a half ago, we were probably in the high 300s on the regular show. You guys were much, much earlier than that, but I basically look at and watch every podcast that comes out from the BiggerPockets Podcast network. We write all the titles, the descriptions, so if you don’t like any of them, you can email what’s your email Tony?
[email protected], that’s the email you can email. But it was slightly before I started working with BiggePockets, I had just started getting into real estate investing. So obviously, digesting this on a daily basis, a multiple daily basis has helped out a lot. And it’s just been great to listen to Ashley and Tony give insight to other investors that are new like me.

Tony:
Yeah. I think there’s this idea that everyone that works at BiggerPockets is already a real estate investor, but it’s not the case. There’s quite a few people who haven’t started yet, or at the very beginning phase of their journey. And obviously, Ashley and I get to chat with a lot of folks at BiggerPockets, and it’s always so cool to see people start from zero and build themselves up. And Nate, you’ve got an interesting story as a real estate investor as well. Just give us the background. You were already thinking about real estate investing before you came on at BP, but take us through where that journey has led you so far.

Nate:
Sure. So from the very, very start, I grew up with a real estate investor as a father. My dad had been investing in rental properties before I was born, so that has been ingrained in me for a long time. The problem was growing up with someone who is heavily into single family and small multi-family rentals, you can see the headaches that come with it. So every single day it was not unusual for my dad and I to be talking and then he’s like, “Hold on.” And then he’d pick up the phone and it’s his handyman and a strong Southern accent, and I still have no idea what that guy was saying. Talking about a plumbing issue, a lighting issue, painting, something like that because he was running this small portfolio with his partner. And there was just a lot of things to take care of all the time.
So the 5:00 AM phone calls, the toilet calls, all that stuff that everybody dreads that’s scared of. It wasn’t a thing that I had to really like, “Oh, is that a possibility when I buy a rental?” I saw that growing up the entire time. The downside of that was because I saw that so much, it didn’t really seem like an option for me because I saw my dad stressing so much over it. And obviously, it had huge benefits for the lifestyle we were able to live. I never had to worry about any mortgage being paid or food or anything like that, because he was investing from a pretty young age. But I didn’t know that was exactly what I wanted to do because I seemed to only see the downsides of it. I didn’t see the nice life I lived around me.
I just saw, “He’s always on the phone. He’s always talking to these guys. He seems stressed a lot, there’s eviction, stuff like that happening.” So I remember when I was 16, he tells me he’s like, “Nate, when I don’t want to do this anymore, I’m going to give you all these rentals.” And I was like, “Please don’t do that. I don’t want that.” Which I know for everybody listening is like, “Are you kidding, that’s the opportunity of a lifetime.” But I think when you’re growing up, you just see the hassle a lot.
So it wasn’t until I started working at an internship close to the time I was leaving college when I was like, “Oh, this is how people actually work W-2s in the real world. I understand why he was doing this the whole time.” Because I had always had small businesses that I relied on for money from age 16, up to early 20s. So when I saw what the other reality was, which I know you both know very well, it clicked to me that, “Okay, there is a reason for all this stress.” It’s a worthwhile pursuit to do that.

Ashley:
That stress is better than working a 9:00 to 5:00 job.

Nate:
Yes. And that’s the thing is you always have to think about that, you’re going to suffer either way in life. And so are you going to suffer doing what you like and having control of your life, or are you going to suffer at the helm of somebody else and that’s your choice. So he chose the right thing in my opinion, but as I’ll tell later in the story I went a different way because I didn’t want to have the full throttle amount that he was handling.

Ashley:
We had this guest on once that was talking about how when he got his first rental, he got his first call from the tenant and they had a maintenance request, and he was just panicking and full blown anxiety and just like, “Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever,” and blah, blah, blah. And then he hung up with the tenant, he called somebody to go take care of the plumbing issue. And then he was like took a breath and was like, “Wait, that was just five minutes of my life and this lady is paying me a $1000 a month,” or whatever it was.
“I just made a $1000 for five minute phone call. That’s the only issue I had that whole month, it was that five minute and I panicked for no reason.” And I think that’s a great example, there’s going to be headaches, there’s going to be things you don’t want to do, but it’s so minimal and minuscule compared to other opportunities such as 9:00 to 5:00 jobs to make money in life.

Nate:
Exactly.

Ashley:
So tell us a little bit more about what you did before you started in real estate, and what made you decide to actually buy that first property.

Nate:
So during that internship, when I was looking around at everybody and I was like, “What are you guys doing?” And everyone’s just the same thing it’s like, “Oh, on the weekend I go out, I come home, I sleep and that’s it.” And I would talk to people about their finances because I’m generally interested. Now you can do that when you’re a younger person at an internship because people will just be like, “Oh, he’s young, he’s stupid. He doesn’t know that’s pushing the boundary.” Use that, do that when you’re young because people won’t mind. But I was talking to people like, oh, financial stuff, “How are you investing? Are you doing your Roth? Do you have any rental properties, stuff like that?” And the amount of people I talked to who were doing nothing really scared me, and I was just watching it week in and week out.
So I kind of clicked where I was like, “I think I should try and buy a rental property after college.” So at the internship I started going on Zillow and it was just looking at markets, looking at how much the prices of every house was in different places that weren’t crazy unaffordable, like my home state of California. So after I got a W-2 after I left college and then a year after that this was during about a year and a half after, so this was March of 2020. So the best time to buy real estate ever, nobody said it was a stupid decision at that time, everybody said, “Great. Buy during the pandemic.” I put a house under contract in Rochester, New York, Ashley, which I know that you’re probably well aware of.

Ashley:
Yeah. It’s like an hour from me.

Nate:
Yeah. This is a very heavy cash flow market, and I think when you’re young you care about that a lot more and you’re just like, “Oh, I got to get cash flow so I can retire early,” stuff like that. So I put a full cash offer in on a $40,000 house in Rochester, New York. And I had it under contract March of 2020, we didn’t close until June of 2020, it took that long, and that was the first investment I made.

Tony:
But before we keep moving Nate, can you just give us a brief overview of what your portfolio looks like today?

Nate:
Yeah. So I have the house hack I’m currently living in Florida. I still have that Rochester property and we also bought a self-storage facility, a 63 unit self-storage facility, me and two partners last month. So it’s just three properties, but I guess I can say 65 doors, which makes me sound really impressive. Can I say that at a meetup?

Ashley:
I would say don’t say just three properties because that’s still impressive. I think there’s people already drooling right now, “He has a self-storage facility. I want one of those.”

Nate:
That was me for a year, I was like, “How are you people doing this?” But with that first property it was really entirely cash flow. It was not a good market, I’m sure I can talk to Ashley about this later. It’s not a very good market. It was a C neighborhood. It was a C house. It wasn’t super taken care of. The saving grace, which was the reason I probably still invest in real estate now is that I had really good inherited tenants, really good people who the entire time during COVID, when they couldn’t have paid me, tried their hardest they could to pay me the whole time. And it was the same thing Ashley that you were saying before where as soon as I closed on the property, I remember I was going to sleep that night after everything was done.
And I was like, “Oh my God, they’re going to call me and something’s going to happen. I’m going to have to call someone else.” And that happened and you just get over it. But that was the first property and I think buying in a C neighborhood, a C property with still very good tenants, but not the best house, not the best area, the cash flow was fine. But buying that residential real estate and realizing that I was like even if I’m picking up the phone three or four times a month, and it’s maybe taking me one to two hours of work to do this rental property stuff. The scale of doing that isn’t that fast with just buying a single property at a time, and that led me into maybe we should try something a bit bigger.

Tony:
And I definitely want to get into the self-storage piece Nate because I think people are always intrigued by the idea of going bigger. But before we do, so you’ve got a property in Rochester, where’s the self source facility at, what state?

Nate:
The self source facility is in Alabama and I’m in Florida.

Tony:
Alabama. Okay. So you got one in Rochester, one in Alabama, this other one in Florida. So walk us through your process for choosing a new market to go into. What is your analysis and due diligence looks like? And at what point do you say, “Okay, this is a good market let me sink my teeth in. Let me start submitting offers.”

Ashley:
When you bought the Rochester one, was that when you were living in California, that’s literally the farthest point across the country to choose.

Nate:
I don’t know what it was, but I’ve never been to New York. I tried to go to upstate New York one time to look at the house during COVID and they were like, “Get out. You’re from California.” I was like, “Okay.” So I couldn’t do that. I don’t know why I chose the farthest part-

Tony:
Wait. So Nate, you still haven’t seen the property in person-

Nate:
I still haven’t seen the property in person, and I’m probably going to sell it soon so I can move it into more self-storage. But no, I never saw it, I don’t know why I picked that far away. But when I was doing it, I wasn’t very educated on choosing a market in the first place. It was literally just does it cash flow? Is my house going to get damaged by some really bad thing? And if it basically was there’s two to 300 plus dollars of cash flow and I feel like my tenants can safely live there, that was kind of it. That’s not the way you should do rental property analysis at all, but it’s worked out until now, it was very basic. I was a complete beginner.

Tony:
But Nate there’s several thousand miles in between California and Rochester and there’s thousands of other potential cities in between those two location, so what was it about Rochester that made you even begin to look there?

Nate:
They don’t have an increasing population, but they have a pretty large population, it’s 200,000 plus, their houses are relatively cheap. I bought the first house 40k in cash and I’m a very financially anxious person probably as it is. So for me buying something in cash took away that fear of a mortgage collector’s going to come after me. I just wanted to do the first one in cash just as a complete learning experience. Because I didn’t want to mess with any leverage when I really didn’t have any idea of what I was doing. So that was a market that hit, the population was relatively big, I knew there was a lot of renters. The cash flow was giving me two to 300 plus bucks a month, that’s true cash flow after everything. Their Section 8 laws are also really good. So that was another thing because I was buying in a C class neighborhood, I knew that I could probably get Section 8 renters there.
The thing is the house I bought it for $40,000, it could be rented on Section 8 for 1480 right now. So what is that like a three point something percent, it’s insane. But I just knew that there were options that I could take if something really went bad, because there is a pretty strong Section 8 market in Rochester and they seem to be able to give out the money quite freely. I had a few points where I felt like I had some defense going into the deal that I felt comfortable with that. Why I didn’t do anywhere in the Midwest it was just I looked at so many markets and nothing was matching that I can buy this in cash, making cash flow metrics. As soon as I got there I was like, “Let’s just do something,” because I was tired of waiting.

Tony:
So Nate something else you mentioned that I want to dive into is the fact that you still haven’t seen this property. So for a lot of new investors there’s a high level of fear and anxiety around buying property sight unseen, but you were able to do this nonetheless during a pandemic. So walk us through what your process was for completing your due diligence on this property that you were never able to see in person.

Nate:
So the first thing I would tell people is if you’re going to buy a residential property, probably see it in person, unless you have a really good team. I had obviously we did a full inspection and everything and we had about three months of closing, so there was time to do it multiple times. I had an investor friendly agent who I found probably through BiggerPockets that I got to go into the house and do the full Zoom videos with me, so I could see everything. Also when you’re buying a rental property in Rochester they make you go through a certain I forgot what it’s called, but you have to get a certain rental qualification.
Someone has to go into it from the city and make sure that it’s livable, so that passed. I looked at it with my real estate agent and I got an inspector to look at it. I also had a few months after I bought it, now this was after the fact. I had a handyman that my father knew in a neighboring state drive up there and do a full deep dive into everything that had to be done there. But it was basically inspector, the city and my agent who were all able to lay eyes on it before I wanted to dip out of the deal if I wanted to.

Tony:
Nate, I’m so glad you mentioned that because that is exactly the same advice that I give to new investors as well. It’s like Nate, you had never purchased a rental property before, so how much value do you believe you would’ve added on top of the city inspector, your agent and a professional property inspector?

Nate:
Oh zero. I’m a first time homeowner right now house hacking. I was impressed that I installed a sink in the bathroom. I don’t know anything about construction. If you show me an electrical box and you’re like, “How many volts?” I’ll be like, “I can’t even read this. I don’t know.” So if you’re someone who’s new that’s getting it and you know that there’s people, who have experience that you can trust that can do the things that you can’t do. I could say you could feel pretty confident buying an out-of-state property that you’ve never seen, because it’s like what you said what are you going to provide that they can’t?
If you’re coming from a background like mine where it’s like, “I know the numbers, but mechanically I know zero,” there’s not much I can add to that besides do I feel safe in this neighborhood physically, and for some people that might be worth it to go see it. But I asked my agent, “What do you think about this? How do you feel? Is it okay as a rental?” And he got back to me on all those questions, and we were talking every day about this stuff. So I had someone I could trust that I could ask.

Tony:
Nate I do think there’s a ton of value in obviously being able to see the property in person, but not so much for anything other than emotional. I think for a lot of new investors there’s just a sense of emotional, I don’t know, you just feel better as a new investors if you can see the property in person. But usually if you’re a new investor, that’s never purchased a property before, you’re just going to walk around, take a look, “Oh, this looks good.” You’re not going to have a really technical or critical analysis of what needs to be done to that property.
But you can get an inspection report and see that, “Hey, this panel is an old panel that might need to be upgraded,” and you can take that and get a quote. Or you can see that, “Hey, there was some leaking in the roof here in this bathroom that looks like maybe it was a bad patch.” You can take that and say, “Okay. What’s the quote to get that corrected?” You can take all the information that’s in an inspection report, shop that around to other qualified professionals, and then you’ll get an idea of whether or not that property’s still a good deal. So that’s always my advice for new investors is to have a property inspector agent, if you can get a contractor to walk through it, let the professionals be the ones to give you their opinion on the value of that property.

Nate:
Yeah. For the house hack I’m living in right now I came here. I came from California for me to look at all the properties because I’m living in this property. I’m also going to be living with other people in this property, that’s emotional value to me that I need to feel safe in my own neighborhood. If it’s your own house you’re living in, you’re like, “Oh, there’s a fountain out there. I love that fountain. I don’t know why, I just like it.” But that’s something that it’s not the same with a rental property as it would be when you’re living in there, so I completely agree.

Ashley:
There are those differences. And especially even with doing the due diligence, there may be things that you’d be able to live with if it’s your own house or versus if it’s a rental, it can go either way. But Nate, I want to know are you managing this from afar or did you hire a property management company?

Nate:
I learned from my father that 90% of property management companies are not great. And most people told me they’re in the Rochester area, I talked to so many agents and every single one said, “None of the property managers are good.” I tried to reach out to someone they didn’t even get back to me, that was like, “Oh, that’s the sign.” So I’ve been self managing it for two years now. I have a very good relationship with my tenants. They’ve done right by me so many times and as soon as they need anything fixed, they call me and I call whoever needs to come out and take care of the house.
It’s worked out fine for me, I haven’t gotten a call from them in a month and a half. If it’s a busy month I’ll get maybe three calls and it’s just stuff you have to deal with. But not even the money saving part of it, I felt like it was important for me as a first time investor to manage the property myself, even if it was out of state. Because I feel like I know so much more about not only my tenants, but the house through just talking to them through any issue that comes up.

Ashley:
Are you using any software or anything to make them pay their rent online, or they submit their maintenance request online or anything like that?

Nate:
I wish because I work for BiggerPockets I hear this enough. No, but I don’t though. It’s just because I had that one rental, I think if it was beyond that I would. But it’s so easy for me to manage everything internally, that I don’t have anything. I tried Stessa for a bit, that was fine, but I don’t know why I’m such a spreadsheet freak that I like my own stuff much better.

Ashley:
So you’re a lady in the streets, but a freak in the spreadsheets.

Nate:
Yes, I am a lady. I think if it’s just one property and you’re really trying to get nitty gritty, it’s fine. But I think anything past that where you have multiple tenants, it makes no sense to not use all the free property management software that’s out there.

Tony:
So Nate, I want to talk a little bit about your move as well. Now you were in California, you’re SoCal like me and you packed up a move to Florida, and I just want to know what prompted that move, was it a cost saving thing? Was it because you wanted to invest there? What was the motivation and what have been some of the benefits of making that move?

Nate:
I lived in San Diego, so for me being by the ocean is very, very important. Now there’s no waves here because I’m on the Gulf side, but there still is the ocean in a relatively short distance, so that was nice for me, but the biggest thing was probably affordability. Tony and I lived in California or he lives in California, I lived in California. I think the average home price in San Diego is about $800,000 right now. And even if you can afford that it’s hard to make that sense. I have friends who are house hacking in San Diego and even with the subsidies from renting out another room as a medium term rental, something like that, they still have to pay three to $4,000 a month just towards PI, CI stuff like that. So for me it was a lot of cost savings.
It’s not only that, you can buy a house here for 400,000, my house is 428,000 and I should be able to subsidize the rent by about 75%. And on top of that, I also now don’t pay any state income tax. So even though I’m not living for free on paper, I am living for free because I’m saving enough from state taxes that covers the rest of what I would be paying on my mortgage. So for me it was like, “I can be close to the beach, this area’s growing a lot.” I’m in Sarasota, so it’s close to Tampa, so it’s growing a ton. It’s a very nice place to live. The school systems are great. You’re close by the beach and I get to essentially live for free. I don’t really know why I wouldn’t do that, especially when I don’t have so much physical attachment over to San Diego that I couldn’t.

Ashley:
Do you have any other tips or tricks? It seems like you’ve gotten a great plan in place to live for free, but do you have any advice for our rookie listeners of some creative strategies that they can do to reduce their living expenses?

Nate:
I mean you can rent hack if you’re renting a place and it allows you to sublet it to other people, you can rent out another room that you’re not using. I know people that have rented out their garages as storage. You can get a couple hundred dollars a month for that. If you’re thinking about making a move for house hacking, definitely visit the area first, but look for the places that seem like there’s a lot of businesses going into them. Tampa’s a big part of that and that equals job growth, which usually equals more pay, so then everything is probably just going to increase in price.
Also Sarasota’s a place with very, very low inventory and you have to basically whack down jungles to build here, so there is some barrier to entry for new homes. So if you’re looking for some place that is going to appreciate that you are going to be able to subsidize your costs, just look at where the population is moving towards. Look at your total cost with state tax savings, if you’re going from one state to another state and go on roomies.com or roommates.com and look at what a room could rent for. And then just use the BiggerPockets calculators to go calculate out how much money you would save.

Tony:
So Nate, I know you’ve got the house hack going on, which is fantastic, and we recently had Craig Curelop on an episode where he gave all the ins and out outs of house hacking. So if you guys haven’t listened to that episode, go back and listen to that one. But Nate I know something else that a lot of folks use, as they’re building their portfolio they’ll say, “Hey, this rental is to cover whatever my credit card debt or this rental is to cover my student loan payments.” Are you using any of those strategies as you build your portfolio?

Nate:
Yes. 100%. I don’t count on any of the income that comes from the rental or the storage facility as true income. I don’t touch I. It’s just for reinvesting for right now, but in my mind I can allocate that stuff. So basically, I’m living for free right now in the house hack. The rental property covers most of my food every month. And I invested in a bunch of real estate trusts, which you can invest in the stock market and that pays for my car. So we’re slowly ticking the things off, health insurance is going to be a tough one because I’m self employed. With each property that comes up it becomes how can I live my life for free? And if you keep your expenses down to a pretty low amount, it’s very easy to do that with a small amount of properties.

Ashley:
So Nate earlier you said that you’re getting about $200 per month cash flow was it on that Rochester house?

Nate:
It’s probably 300.

Ashley:
300. So you said that covers most of your monthly food costs.

Nate:
Yes.

Ashley:
How much are you spending on a meal?

Nate:
I bet the producer Eric told you guys about this. I watched The Money Show because I’m also the copywriter for that. And I’ve always been a pretty frugal person and it’s made sense to me my whole life that the less I spend, the closer I am to financial freedom. So my girlfriend and I consistently will eat out for probably $25 or less. And if it’s over that we look at each other and we’re like, “What are we doing? This is insane.” We just buy a bunch of vegetables and beans and stuff like that and eat that stuff all the time.

Ashley:
The Dave Ramsey, beans and rice.

Nate:
Exactly. Oh my God, I get those Taco Bell, just bean and rice, no cheese. Just bean and rice burritos those are a $1.50 and I’ll just eat four of those at a time. There’s ways to do this people.

Tony:
So Nate, I want to talk a little bit about the self-storage piece because I know that’s an asset class that I’m super excited about. And I think honestly after we do short term rentals, self-storage would be the next asset class we move into. So I’m just curious, so you have this new one that you just got on your contract, 63. What do you call them in self-storage? They measure by the square footage, however many square feet typically. But anyway, so you have these two residential properties and you leveled up pretty quickly into this massive self-storage portfolio. Talk us through, A, why you made that decision to kind of level up, and then, B, how did you even start educating yourself on what is a good purchase in the self-storage asset class?

Nate:
Learning about this whole different asset class it’s just weird if you’re a residential investor. Because for a long time you don’t think you can buy these things, you think that’s for really rich people. Only they can buy self-storage facilities, only they can buy hotels and motels and camp sites and all this stuff that you guys are doing now. It takes a big mindset shift for you to realize that there’s not really a barrier in entry to any of this. There’s just, can you do it? And if you think you can do it, you probably can. So what was happening was I have someone who I used to work for, she was my manager at my old job and we were always talking about real estate at work. So she ended up buying a duplex in Cleveland around the same time I was buying the single family house from Rochester.
About a year later, she texts me and she’s like, “Can I pay you money to help real estate coach me?” I’m like, “I don’t think I can accept money. I have one unit, that doesn’t really seem like an acceptable amount to do coaching.” But I was like, “Do you really want to buy more real estate?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Why don’t we just go at it together and then just pull our money and do it together?” Because I trusted her, I worked with her for so long. So originally, we were thinking apartment complexes, but then we got on the whole topic of the toilets and the trash and everything else like that. And that over time it blended into, “Okay. So what should we do?” And we were thinking, “What can we do that’s not residential?” And then we had two options, mobile home parks and self-storage.
They both kind of operate the same, because both of them you’re literally just paying for a spot somewhere, that’s how it works. For mobile home parks, most of the time the mobile home owners will pay for all their own maintenance. Is self-storage, I have a concrete box. And it’s like in those movies where the angel scene because someone realizes something, that’s how I felt when I realized that somebody would pay money to put their stuff in a box. I didn’t realize this before, but it was so amazing when I realized it, so we shifted gears towards that. And then we hunted around for a deal for about a year before we finally got one. But the way that you would get educated on that is you read books, you read books by AJ Osborne. You read books like what is it Crushing It in Commercial Real Estate, is that by? Why am I forgetting his name?

Ashley:
Brian Murray.

Nate:
Brian Murray. And there’s sites. There’s tons of people talking about it on BiggerPockets, there’s sites like Storagerebel, stuff like that. It’s very easy to get self-storage information. And anytime I had a question, “Does it need to be climate controlled. What unit breakup do you guys have on your facilities?” I could just ask it in a forum and someone would answer it, and that was pretty much how we got educated on it. I don’t know if I answered the full question, maybe I went on a tangent.

Ashley:
Well, Nate, can we use this as your deal dive here?

Nate:
Yes, we can do the rookie deal review. Let’s go.

Ashley:
See, he even knows the name of it better than I do.

Nate:
Yeah. I’m ready for this.

Ashley:
Okay. So I’m going to rapid fire you some questions and then you can go into the story of it.

Nate:
I’m completely unprepared.

Ashley:
Okay. So you had mentioned this deal was in Alabama?

Nate:
Yes.

Ashley:
And how did you find the deal?

Nate:
So when I was looking for off market self-storage deals, I would be calling everybody throughout Florida, Alabama, Sun Belt area. And I found a deal that didn’t work for me, so I called a wholesaler whose list I was on and I said, “Just take this information. I don’t even want anything for it. Can you just keep sending me more deals?” And he was like, “Sure.” So luckily enough four months later, he’s like, “I’m on the email list and there’s a deal that’s coming up in Alabama.” I saw him start to drop the price over time and nobody was bidding at it, so I thought it was overpriced. We ran the numbers. We realized it would work at some level or some price, it wasn’t the price that he was asking for. So I got it through a wholesaler. Can I explain what a wholesaler is for people who don’t know what wholesalers are?

Ashley:
Yes, that’d be great.

Nate:
Okay. So a wholesaler is basically someone they’ll either send letters to or call properties that aren’t for sale on the market. And they’ll ask owners who might want to sell the property, “Would you sell the property to me?” If the owner of the property says, “Yes.” They’ll lock it up in a contract and then the wholesaler legally because there’s a stipulation in that contract that says, “Even if I don’t buy this, I can hand it off to another person who can buy it at the same price, same everything in the contract.” And they usually charge a fee for this, so our wholesaler did charge a fee. But that’s how a wholesaler works, they’re basically just the matchmaker between an off market property and you a person who doesn’t want to do all that work and they collect a fee at the end, so we got it through a wholesaler

Tony:
Nate really quick, before you move off the wholesaler piece, how did you find this wholesaler in this new market you’ve never been in? What advice would you have for someone looking to find a wholesaler?

Nate:
If you want to find wholesalers, if you’re looking at residential houses or anything, the easiest thing to do is look up on Google cash for houses, insert the city you’re looking for and there will be tons of websites that come up. You can email any of the people on those websites, and they’ll put you on a buyer’s list where they’ll send you deals. They like to blast a lot, Facebook groups, I’m part of a bunch of self-storage Facebook groups. People always say, “If you need deals sign up for my email list,” I know there’s people who will probably say it on BiggerPockets. You might even be able to look up wholesaler, my city and you can find a website and you can sign up for people’s buyers list on that website.

Tony:
That’s so funny, I’ve never thought of doing it that way.

Nate:
Oh yeah.

Tony:
I just Googled cash buyer or cash for houses Pigeon Forge and there was six, seven websites that popped up saying, “We’ll buy your house in Pigeon Forge.” That’s a great tip, man.

Nate:
Quick tip. There you go.

Ashley:
Wrong podcast. Back to the rapid fire. What was the purchase price on this property?

Nate:
So he wanted 400,000 for it, it didn’t make any sense at 400,000, it made sense around 360, but not 400. So I went to the wholesaler and I was like, “Dude, you’ve been emailing this out maybe four or five times, nobody wants it at this price. What if you just let the contract go, void it with the seller, give me the seller’s contact information, and then I’ll just pay you the same wholesaler price if I lock down a deal with him.” And for him that’s a zero risk way of doing it. We signed kind of a JV agreement with each other that if I got the deal, he would get paid his wholesaler fee. So there wasn’t any way of me going around him, so he says, “Let me wait for one other buyer to see if he wants it.” The other buyer didn’t want it.
He comes back to me and he goes, “Okay, I’ve just voided the contract with the seller. Here’s his information.” So remember the wholesaler was asking 400. I called the buyer and within about five minutes the buyer says to me on the phone, “I’ll take three 50 for it.” And I go, “Okay.” So that’s how we got to that price and that was a price that worked well with me, it was also a very, very nice owner. He’s helped us the entire time moving over to our management, sending us everything we need, going to the facility cleaning out units that he had stuff in.
He’s like, “I’ll mow the lawn for you the whole summer.” That’s fine. I’m like, “Okay.” I think people get hung up a lot of times where this is the price and it’s never that this is the price, there’s ways to get around that. But we ended up at 350 and the wholesale fee was 14,500 and that’s on a 2% interest only loan for two years. So hopefully, by the time we refi we can just give him that… Yes Tony, pretty crazy, right?

Tony:
2%.

Nate:
Oh no, sorry 5%. Two year at 5%. That’s still pretty good though.

Tony:
Oh, gotcha. Gotcha.

Ashley:
Yeah. Still.

Tony:
Okay. But still really impressive. Still really impressive. Wait, so if I can keep going, how did you guys finance this thing? Was is it a cash offer? Did you guys bring some debt? What did this look like?

Nate:
It was just a 20% down commercial loan from the local credit union who the seller was actually a commercial underwriter there. So he was like, “Hey, if you buy this and use our bank, I will give you a 4% interest rate for 15 years, 25 years amortized.” And I was like, “Yeah. Let’s do that.” So that was the thing, that closed on the first of this month. Interest rates were not 4% at the first of this month. I don’t know how they’re doing this, I don’t want to ask, I’m just getting the loan.
Let me explain that again for the rookies who don’t know what I was saying. It is a 4% interest rate, the loan will last 15 years, but the length of the loan is over 25 years. So at the end of that 15 year period we will in theory owe the next 10 years worth of loan payments at once. But we’re probably going to refinance out sooner than that or sell it before that even happens. So for us, it’s more a long term, low mortgage, low interest rate loan.

Ashley:
And instead of having it amortized over 15 years, the length of the actual loan spreading it out to the 25 years makes your payment a lot smaller, and hence gives you more cash flow the longer you can amortize-

Nate:
Exactly.

Ashley:
… out to, which is awesome. Your strategy with this is obviously self-storage, but how are you managing it? You had mentioned that the owner helped you switch over to your own type of management. What are the differences there compared to what he was doing?

Nate:
So before he was like everything’s on a piece of paper, that’s how he sent me everything. Every customer info phone number, address, contract is a written down piece of paper. I love the gentleman, he’s so kind. I would not do what he was doing, because it seems like such a headache. And my partners had to take the time to transfer 45, 50 tenants worth of all information contracts and everything onto spreadsheets and then into an online system that’s called ESS, it’s Easy Storage Solutions.
And that’s kind of a property management software for storage that allows people to put in their credit cards and have recurring billing, purchase insurance, stuff like that. But it was basically a Nate is on the weekend, Nate turns on a Netflix show, Nate tries to understand what this man scribbled on a piece of paper and put it into a spreadsheet, but we got it. We got all the customer info in after a month, it’s amazing, I’m so happy about that.

Ashley:
That is really cool, so what is your exit strategy on this? You said maybe you’ll sell it or refinance before 15 years, but what are some of your immediate goals that you have for it?

Nate:
Part of the reason we liked the storage facility, it was so heavily under rented or not under rented, the rents were way below market. It was about at 75% occupancy when we bought it, so pretty close to full, but for something that might have been $85 a month unit, the old owner was charging $40. And every single self-storage facility in the area was charging 85, $90. And this one had no online presence, nobody knew it existed unless you drove by it.
So our long term thing is basically we’re going to try and increase the rents over time, by either, A, getting new customers at the full price it should be, and slowly through a multiple tiered way that we’re doing it increase the rents of the current occupants. That should take us probably about a year or two, because I don’t want to do things too quickly and get people to just dip all at once. But when that’s done, when we get everything to market rent, start selling self-storage insurance, which if you don’t know this, if you offer self-storage insurance you get a kickback from the company, a pretty significant amount that increases your profit.
Once we get it all rented out like 90% plus, we’ve calculated the facility should be worth at a minimum with a pretty high cap rate $500,000. So then there would be 150k profit made over about a year or two. And then we could either choose to should we refinance and buy a same size facility or should we sell the whole thing and 1031 into a bigger facility, and just repeat until we’re bajillion, trillion, fafillionaires.

Tony:
So Nate, gosh, so many questions rolling through my head right now. So first I know you said that you’re using the Easy Storage Solutions software, but are you personally managing this thing or is Bubba still playing some kind of role in the day to day management for you guys?

Nate:
So we’re managing all that, we’re managing that ourself. I have two other partners, so one of them handles the customer service. I kind of manage getting everything into ESS, my other partner then just takes it from there. So we have everything in there, it’s super streamlined, you can text people, email everyone through that system. We’re handling all the management, the old owner isn’t handling anything besides just helping us continually get it rolling, because he lives in the area, but we’re self managing that whole thing.

Ashley:
Have you been there to that property?

Nate:
Oh no. She asked me this question. No I have not. I will be going in… I think we’re going to try and go in September. But the thing is which is cool is because it’s about an hour outside Huntsville, and I have a good friend who invested in Huntsville and had a great property inspector, so I got that guy too. And he looked around the facility, sent us a lot of pictures, we asked him his opinion of stuff and it’s been pretty good so far. And every single time we’ve had a new customer come in and say, “You guys have any open units?” And we say, “Yeah.” And they go, “Okay.” And they accept the full price that we ask them for. So we know we’re not completely off base for the area, but no, I haven’t visited. Why did you ask me that Ashley? Now I seem like a rookie.

Ashley:
No, I think that’s so cool that you’re able to get all this stuff done and you don’t even have to go to the property or look at it.

Nate:
Have partners.

Ashley:
I think that’s awesome.

Nate:
Have partners that do things that you don’t want to do. Doing this alone, I guess it’s cool because you get all of the clout if you’re like, “Oh, I own a 63 unit self-storage, I get all the profit.” But dude, it sucks if you’re doing all this on your own, it’s less fun, it’s so much pain. Everybody’s asking you for something all the time. When you spread the risk it’s just way better.

Ashley:
I have to 100% agree with you today while I’m recording podcasts, which I love to do. My business partner Darrell was out at the lake house where we’re buying and getting with the inspector getting this section done. And for me that is not something I enjoy standing there waiting for the inspector to be done, small talking a little bit with the seller, that’s things he loves to do. So you’re exactly right, it makes it way more fun doing it with somebody else. And especially when they enjoy the things that you don’t want to do.

Nate:
I hate calling people. I think it’s the worst thing ever. I just don’t like talking to people, even though I’m a very social person. So I have a partner who has no problem with it, I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “I’ll just pick up the phone from people.” And that’s the weirdest thing to me, but I’m so blessed. Thank you Alex, I love you, that he’s taking care of this for the business because there are things you’re good at. I think I’m good at the learning about real estate side and there’s some things my partners are good at, like calling customers who won’t pick up the phone and calling them five days straight, stuff like that, so I’m very thankful for them.

Tony:
So Nate, I want to talk a little bit more about the analyzing piece. So you talked about how you guys stumbled into this one and a little bit of the educational piece. You’ve talked about maybe 1031-ing wanting this property into something larger. So it makes me wonder, what is your buy box for these self-storage facilities? What kind of boxes do you need to check to say, “Okay. This is a good investment for us our team.”

Nate:
So off of the first one, we didn’t really want to borrow anybody else’s money. We wanted to make sure that we could do it all on our own. So we had a half a million dollar was the max price. We wanted it in an area that had at least a population of around 6,000 people, and there’s ways you can figure this out. How many storage facilities per a certain area does the area need to fulfill the demand? So that was another thing we checked out. I think this town is 9,000 people that we invested in and there’s four storage facilities. And if you can count up all the units under demand of what people need.

Tony:
Can you dive into that a little bit more Nate? What is an adequate number of supply given 9,000 residents in a city?

Nate:
So I’m not AJ Osborne, so please don’t quote me on this. But the way that it works is about… I think the recent numbers show that 10.5% of US households use self-storage, and there’s about two to three people per household. You can look that up in the county website, how many people per household on average is there in the city? So if you think there’s about a 10.5% need for how many households, you can divide it and say, “Okay, how many storage units are there available?” And if it’s under what the demand shows you can start up a storage facility in there. If it’s way over and there are some cities like small towns that have… I’ve seen towns with, “It’s a 300 person town, I have a 400 unit storage facility.” I’m like, “I don’t know if that’s going to work.”
So that’s some way to look at it is because it’s like this is a business. It’s more of a business than rental properties I think, even though obviously rental properties is a business. But it’s a real business, you’re on Yelp, people are looking you up on Google reviews. You need to make sure there’s actual demand there. And another great way to look at this is because ours wasn’t online, nobody knew it existed. We looked at all the other facilities within a 10 mile radius, every single one was booked minus a parking spot here, a one unit there. That shows you already that if everything’s filled to the brim in the area, there’s probably a good chance that other people want to get in. Especially, if you can call other places and they say, “Oh, we already have a 10 person waiting list, so you have to get on it.” 10 people, those are my 10 customers. Let’s go. There’s a few ways to figure that out.

Ashley:
And Nate real quick, he mentioned AJ Osborne, who is the self-storage king. If you guys haven’t heard of him and you are really loving this episode with Nate talking about self-storage. So you can listen to AJ Osborne on the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, episode 286. If you really, really want to dig into the mind of a self-storage genius and check that out.

Nate:
Aren’t you friends with him?

Ashley:
Yeah. Yeah. He is an awesome guy too. I plug him every single day. Not only as a great real estate investor, but just a really awesome person in general.

Nate:
All right. Don’t show him this episode in case I’m wrong.

Ashley:
You know what’s funny I was thinking as you were saying that, I was like you could probably give him the exact town and he’d like, “Yeah, that’s about-” He’d be able to throw off some statistics, just a random town in Alabama.

Tony:
Cool. Well, can we talk a little bit more about the marketing aspect. So I know you said that this place had no online presence whatsoever. So what has been the plan for you all to beef up the online marketing for the self-storage facility?

Nate:
So the good thing about this is I come from an SEO background, and now a kind of SEO combo copy writing background. My partner also comes from an SEO background where she worked at multi-billion dollar companies and knows everything about organic search. So basically, the way that we’re doing this now is obviously you get your Google page set up. You have to submit all the information about your self-storage facility to the billions of listing sites out there, so you’re on every single one of them. And we’ve just been doing that, we’ve been hitting all those listing services.
We’re going to start trying to get in reviews because you’re in short term rentals, you know this, it’s the biggest thing if you’re trying to make your business just grow out of nowhere. So we’re getting set up with Google Business, all the listing services, Yelp, SquareFoot, everything else like that. And then we’re going to start a referral program with the current customers, we’ll look at X percent off of rent in two months if they refer someone over and that person also gets X percent off. I think in these small towns referrals is way bigger than for us in big cities, so we’re going to push on all those angles. My SEO partner could go more into this than I can because she’s doing all of it.

Ashley:
How are you going to track those referrals? Is that something you’re manually going to have to track or is that built into the software?

Nate:
We can set that up with different UTM URLs and stuff like that, where we can set up different URLs that people come in from. So on Google Analytics or other analytics softwares like that, you can see which site someone came from or which code they used or which ad campaign they came from as well. Again, it’s a business, less of a rental property, so if you know your stuff it’s kind of helpful, which thank God she does.

Ashley:
So to wrap up the deal here what is your cash flow going to end up being here?

Nate:
I think if we do it right, we should be cash flowing somewhere between two and a half to $4,000 a month off of it, and that’s after the mortgage payment. So it’s pretty good for three partners as a split, especially if it’s 3k, it’s like a $1000 each, but it’s more important that we get the cash flow up so we can refi. Because this is a commercial loan they’re looking at income, we need to just show as much income as we can to get the value of the property up.

Ashley:
And what do you think that value is going to be after you increase the rent to where you want them for everyone? What do you think that value will be on them?

Nate:
Hopefully, low estimate around 500k, it could be anywhere from five to 600, if things go really well. But we always set up these parameters in our calculations where we have a worst case, okay and best case scenario. And I always look the worst case scenario, I’m like, “That’s the one.” So if I can at least hit that I’m doing all right.

Ashley:
Increasing a property value by 150k in a short period of time, that’s awesome, that’s great. That’s 50k in net worth for you and each of your partners.

Nate:
And it’s cool because the partners I’m working with no one’s really concerned about taking profits or spending any of this right now. All of us are just thinking, “Okay, we’re going to use this for the next one and then do that for the next one.” And then in about five to 10 years when we’re all like, I’m tired of working with you, “I’m done with this,” then we can be good.

Ashley:
Just sell it all cash out, take your money and run.

Nate:
Put it in REITs and then just go to sleep for a while.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Tony:
Well Nate, congratulations, man. It sounds like you got a pretty killer deal there and we’re excited to see how it turns out. And again, just before we move off of this, I think that’s obviously the big power of commercial real estate is that you do have the ability to manipulate the value of that property in a way that you can’t really with single family residential properties. Because your commercial properties are based off of your NOI, your net operating income, and then the prevailing cap rates, where other big properties are selling for and you divide those things, whereas your single friendly residences are all based off of appraisals. So if you can buy this property, increase the NOI by increasing the income, decreasing the expenses or some combination of both, you’ve just immediately increased the value of that property as well. So really, really love the approach there, man, and we’re excited to see where you take that one.

Nate:
I’m going to try guys. I’ll do it just for you two.

Tony:
All right. So I want to take us now to our rookie request line. So for those of you that are listening, if you want to get your question featured on the show. You can give us a call at 885-ROOKIE and if the question is a good one, maybe we’ll use it for the show. So today’s question Nate it’s actually about partnerships, which you just talked about. So are you ready for today’s question?

Nate:
I think so.

Tony:
All right. So today’s question is from Davidson D. And Davidson says, “Having multiple properties with the same partner, should it be one big LLC or multiple single member LLCs owned by a parent LLC that is then split 50/50? Thanks so much for your time.” So what are your thoughts on that Nate?

Nate:
It’s multiple rental properties.

Tony:
That’s what it sounds like having multiple properties with the same partner, how have you guys structured your legal setup with you and your partners?

Nate:
The way that we want to do it long term thinking is each property has its own LLC. We want to limit the way that people can go after us. I’ve listened to a lot of the what is it asset protection on this show and the other shows. I can’t say because I’m not a lawyer, but we’re going to set up each property in its own LLC. And then eventually when it’s probably worth over a million dollars worth of things, we’re going to try and put it in a trust as an umbrella for all those LLCs, and then one day do the, “That’s in Bermuda, you can’t touch me,” type trust.
So I think that pretty much is our plan going forward. It’s so cheap to file LLCs that if you feel like there’s even a smidge of protection extra that you’re getting, it probably makes sense to pay the 100 to $200 to just set up for each property. And then I think you may know this better than I do, is it easier on an accounting end because then you each have each entity instead of just this whole scrambled seven properties and one LLC, and all these expenses for different houses type thing.

Tony:
For me in California, it’s actually, I think it’s 800 bucks to open up a new LLC, and then the tax returns is only 1200 bucks a year. So it can get pricey, especially on smaller family residences if you’re trying to spring up an LLC for each one. But to your point I think everyone’s going to have a different risk profile. And if you’re you’re really concerned about potential litigation or protecting your assets, then obviously it might be worth that extra expense. But I think our approach moving forward is that we’ll have a collection of properties that fall under one LLC. So maybe five in this one, five in the next one and so on and so forth, and then eventually we’d like to put a trust in place as well.

Nate:
And then it probably also matters on how expensive the properties are, you’d probably not want three $3 million properties in the same LLC. But if you have five 50k properties, that’s probably fine, don’t quote me on that. I’m not the lawyer.

Ashley:
I want something that Tony said to be a reminder to everyone, how he said it costs $1,200 for an LLC tax return in California and to do his return. So I think a lot of people forget to actually add that into their numbers when they are doing a rental property. If you don’t do your own tax return and you are hiring an accountant out, if you get an LLC that’s a separate tax return you have to pay for, I think mine runs 250 to $300 per year, per tax return. But if I were to go and put an LLC on every single property, that’s $500 plus that $300 for the tax return. And if you are just buying a small single family rental cash flowing, maybe a 100 bucks a month, you have a mortgage on it everything, there goes your cash flow it’s gone, if you don’t remember to add in that accounting cost.
But for my partnerships, each partner I have an LLC with them and we put our properties and I think Nate’s point is very valid. I’m buying $50,000 properties, we’re throwing a bunch of them into an LLC and then it just depends on the equity split. So with one partner we actually have two LLCs, one, we are 50/50 each and the other one we are 60/40 each. And it just depended on the money that each we’re putting in and the workload that we were each taking on, that determine that we are changing some of the properties to that 60/40 split too. So I think there can be a lot of costs associated with having multiple LLCs. I actually like having more properties under an LLC, because if you are using bookkeeping software like QuickBooks, they charge you per an entity.
So if you have an entity for each property, you’re going to have to pay 50 bucks per month per each property that you have, where if you have the LLC with five properties in it, you’re just paying for that one QuickBooks file. So I think there’s definitely an advantage. And as far as asset protection liability, if you have mortgages on these properties and there’s not a ton of equity, there’s not $3 million of equity in the property, you don’t have a ton to protect anyways, if you only have $50,000 in equity in your portfolio.
I think that kind of plays into factor too, because no big time attorney hotshot is going to go after your LLC, if it only has $10,000 in equity. Nate, we’re going to go to our rookie exam and this one is special for you, we actually have four questions for you today. So the first one is the most important, which podcast is your favorite to copyright for of the BiggerPockets platform?

Nate:
It’s not a hard decision. It’s the new podcast On the Market, which you guys should check out. More people over there because it’s a really good podcast and Dave Meyer does a very good job talking about up to date information. No, Rookie’s a really good podcast. Every single time it’s good because you see people who are in the same situation as you. And it’s just good because sometimes you’re learning the same lessons over and over again, but with just a different flavor, so you’re like, “Cool. I won’t do that thing that that person did.” So I love the Rookie Podcast, but go check out On the Market, it’s a great podcast.

Ashley:
On the Market is such a good answer because I love it too, my friend James Daynard who’s one of the hosts on it and I’ve been listening to every episode, it’s really great. Especially, now with a lot going on in the market to stay informed.

Tony:
And in the economy.

Ashley:
Yeah. Okay. So the next question, what is one actual thing rookies should do after listening to this episode?

Nate:
Just talk about real estate more. I met my partner through work because I just talked about it a lot. I’ve had people offer me money because I’ve talked about it a lot. She’s had multiple people offer her, they’re like, “Oh, you did a self-storage deal. You don’t want money for the next one?” It’s weird just post on Instagram, even if you’re not that comfortable with it, post once in a while, talk to people at work, talk to family members, just talk to everybody. Because most likely someone might not even be thinking of it, but it might be able to change their life in a way that they can do something that they love, so just talk to people.

Tony:
Yeah. That’s fantastic advice Nate, love that, man. Ashley and I have preached the same exact thing many, many times in this podcast, so love that. All right. Question number two what’s one tool, software, app or system that you use in your business?

Nate:
Easy Storage Solutions, it’s pretty intuitive. I like it. I know there’s two big ones for storage, storEDGE, it’s something called storEDGE. And it’s called Easy Storage Solutions, those are I think the main two that people use. But if you’re trying to get into self-storage, watch some videos on that because when you get a self-storage facility, it’ll be way easier, but it just makes running everything really easy.

Ashley:
And Nate, the last question, where do you plan on being in five years?

Nate:
Probably with more storage units, hopefully doing less. My goal is to do nothing, not in a lay around all day thing, but really just taking your brain away from things that, I don’t know, just putting your brain to the best use possible. And I feel like if you invest in real estate and you like investing in real estate and solving these fun financial problems that are fun for you. Buying more real estate probably will give you more energy than taking away from it even though it’s work. So hopefully with more units, hopefully doing less, maybe with a gator farm in Florida, who knows. We’ll see.

Ashley:
I can’t wait to come visit that.

Nate:
Yeah. Please.

Tony:
Yeah. I’m excited too, man. All right. Before we close this out, I just want to highlight this week’s rookie rockstars. So again, if you would like your story featured on the show, get active in the Real Estate Rookie Facebook group, which honestly one of the most active, the most engaged Facebook groups out there. Get active in the Real Estate Rookie forum on BiggerPockets, there’s a wealth of knowledge.
Almost any question you can think of asking has probably been answered somewhere at some point on the BiggerPockets forums, but today’s rookie rockstar is Andrew White. And Andrew says, “Started last week on our most ambitious project yet. This will be our fifth property in our fourth Airbnb, it’s a 1930s historic build in San Antonio, Texas. The plan is to Air-BRRR-nb this property and it’s a doozy.” Almost 4,000 square foot main house with five beds and four baths, as well as a two bed, one bath casita, so seven bedrooms in total, but they purchased it for 265,000.
They’re planning a whopping $210,000 for the rehab, and the ARV is projected at 70 or I’m sorry, $700,000. And then they did a cash out refi leaving about 10 grand into the property. Right now the monthly revenue is about 11 grand a month and they’re cash flowing about 5,100 bucks a month, which gives him a crazy cash on cash return of 660%, which is-

Ashley:
Wow. That’s awesome.

Tony:
Pretty solid.

Nate:
Get Andrew on the show. Why am I here? Drew’s killing it.

Ashley:
Well, Nate, thank you so much for joining us, really enjoyed hearing about your Rochester property and the self-storage. Can you tell everyone where they can reach out to you and find out some more information about you?

Nate:
Sure. If you have any organic content SEO copywriting needs, you can go to calicocontent.com, that’s calico like the pirate or the cat, calicocontent.com. Or you can email me at [email protected] You can also find me on Instagram at natelikesmoney, that’s actually my handle.

Ashley:
That’s a good one. I like that.

Nate:
Yeah. So that’s basically it.

Ashley:
Well, thank you everyone for joining us this week. If you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform and check out our YouTube channel and make sure you are subscribed at the Real Estate Rookie. My name is Ashley Kehr at WealthFromRentals and he’s Tony Robinson @TonyJRobinson on Instagram. And we’ll be back on Saturday with a rookie reply.

Band:
(singing).

I fear for my fellow real estate investors.

Many of them, at least.

I fear many investors have been hypnotized by a market that went off the rails somewhere back up the tracks—a crazy train.

Case in point.

One of my friends is among the nation’s top commercial real estate syndicators and fund managers. But everyone has to suck on a lemon sometimes, and he had a sour one. His apartment deal barely cash flowed above the debt service. His experienced team worked on it for three years and failed to raise income or appraised value.

Earlier this year, he accepted an offer for about 50% more than he paid for the asset! Furthermore, my friend’s interest rate was around 2% (he’s a big player), and the buyer had bridge debt at about 5%. A rate that has probably risen significantly since the purchase.

Can someone tell me how this deal will work for this buyer and his investors?

But this was months ago. The situation has gone from bad to worse now, with interest rates rising significantly in the interim. (Note that a rise from 3% to 5% is larger than it looks. That’s a 66.7% increase!) And while we would expect property values to soften, they haven’t done so as much as the math would predict—one of many telltale signs of a real estate bubble.

We’re in the Valley of the Lag. A predictable disconnect between the market’s reality and sellers’ expectations. A time when frustrated but optimistic or naïve buyers may be tempted to overpay for assets that have avoided their grasp for years in this frenzied market.

I wrote about this in detail in my previous article. I discussed a few ideas on spotting a bubble and why we should act appropriately for where we are in the current cycle. We looked to seasoned mentors like Warren Buffett and Howard Marks for guidance.

But, I May Have Been Wrong—Sort Of

In this article, I want to present a few contrary arguments. We will ponder the possibility that we are not really on the edge of a cliff. Or, if we are, how speculators may be rescued anyway.

Specifically, I want to consider four reasons investors and speculators may be spared of disaster in this current market cycle, where we are gingerly poised on the edge of a plummet—and the factors that may provide a soft landing and a resumption of the continuing upward ascent we’ve enjoyed for the past 12+ years.

Mitigating Factor #1: Inflation

Real estate rent and value inflation are at staggering levels. According to the Federal Reserve, it took 11 years from the date I was married in 1987 to 1998 to see a 30% rise in median home sale prices. The following two rounds of 30% respectively took seven years and 15 years, ending during the heart of Covid. Note the average of 11 years again for these two periods. That’s 33 years for three 30% cycles.

Who would have dreamed the subsequent 30% rise would occur in only 18 months? Especially in the wake of a pandemic.

Rental property values are impacted negatively by rising operating costs. Increasing interest rates are one of the biggies, potentially affecting some owners and almost every buyer. Interest rates have nearly doubled in the past six months, and they’ll likely go up more before they level off and retreat.

But real estate values are positively impacted by rent inflation. At least nominally (meaning “in name only” due to eroding currency values). This results in higher revenues and net operating income. Thus, higher values.

Investors may dodge a bullet if property rent and value inflation effectively outrun increasing costs, particularly the increased costs of debt service.

Mitigating Factor #2: Quick Economic Response to Interest Rate Hikes

The Fed has hiked interest rates significantly in 2022. Their goal is to cool an economy overheated by inflation. Given the structure of our system, it seems to work quite well. It has worked every time in the past.

How quickly and completely will these interest rate hikes cool our current market? And will the cooling of the market in general (including the stock market and the economy as a whole) occur much more quickly and thoroughly than the cooling of the real estate market?

No one knows the answers to these questions. But they are good ones to consider as we keep our finger on the pulse of the real estate cycle.

If and when the Fed feels they’ve effectively doused this inflationary fire, they will halt the hikes and potentially allow many real estate investors to avoid disaster.

Mitigating Factor #3: The Federal Reserve Doesn’t Overshoot Their Target

The Fed’s target annual inflation rate is 2%. It has been running at over four times that level recently, and many feel it is actually much higher. See the chart above for housing inflation, an essential component in the total calculation.

The Fed’s goal in hiking rates is to cool the economy and force inflation to retreat to its target 2% level. But it’s a tricky balancing act, and it’s nearly impossible to hit the target perfectly without overshooting. Suppose the Federal Reserve’s hikes result in squelching the economy to a level where inflation falls below its target, even into deflationary territory. In that case, this could devastate many real estate investors. See point #1 on the role of inflation above.

Is it realistic that the Feds could overshoot their target and cause a meaningful recession? History says it is quite likely. And Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is a disciple of Paul Volcker, the chairman who oversaw rate hikes into the 20%+ range in the early 1980s when I was a mere high school lad. Like Volcker, I believe Powell will stop at nothing to squelch inflation, and if it takes a painful recession to achieve this, he will stay on this course.

Yet, it’s possible they could hit the target and retreat before causing disaster for many real estate investors.

Mitigating Factor #4: Continued Housing Demand

Two major factors can cause inflation. The first is the push from higher costs. The second is the pull from higher demand. The current runup in inflation results from both.

Increased interest rates generally target the former, hoping to lower the cost of building and operations. We are already seeing meaningful declines in the price of some building materials like lumber. I expect this will continue as the impact of rate hikes continues to work its way through the economy.

But housing demand remains at crazy levels, especially in some markets. Sunbelt and “smile” locations in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona are booming. Homeowners and renters fleeing California and New York land in places like Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and many other locations.

These folks often have a lot of cash and are willing to spend it to outbid their fellow refugees. The result is continuing inflation, even in the face of higher interest rates.

Another result of interest rate hikes is a home and multifamily construction slowdown. But this just fuels even more supply and demand inequity in popular locations. Part of the current inequity results from supply never catching up from its screeching halt in the Great Financial Crisis.

So, we see that interest rate hikes play more than one role in the demand for housing. And this fourth factor – continued high demand – may result in many real estate investors dodging the bullet I predicted in my previous post.

Conclusion

So, do you agree with these four likely scenarios? Do you think I just gave you a pass on the disaster I predicted in my last article?

Please keep this in mind: if everything, especially the market and economic factors outside your control, must go right for your deals to succeed and your portfolio to prosper, you are probably a speculator.

Investing is when your principal is generally safe, and you have a chance to make a profit. Speculating is when your principal is not at all safe, and you have an opportunity to make a profit.

If you’re counting on the market to go your way to create your profit, your principal is certainly not safe. And you’re risking your financial future and that of your trusting investors.

I’m writing this as a guy in his third decade as a real estate investor who has seen and done this already. I’m hoping you won’t follow my earlier mistakes.

Question: Are there strategies you can follow to control your destiny in any market? Are there tactics you can implement to significantly improve your chances of making a profit in an up, down, or sideways real estate and economic cycle?

Yes, I believe there are. So tune in for our third installment in this series next time to hear more.

Prepare for a market shift

Modify your investing tactics—not only to survive an economic downturn, but to also thrive! Take any recession in stride and never be intimidated by a market shift again with Recession-Proof Real Estate Investing.

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.

David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast Show 655.

Amy:
And never say, “I don’t know.” And a lot of us are still learning, right? A lot of you are going to get out there and implement that four-second power pitch and you’re not going to know what to say next. So instead of saying, “I don’t know,” just substitute that with, “That’s a great question. Let me turn back to my team of experts and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.” And then get on the phone and reach out to your community or other people in your network who have done this before, if you have a coach, and be like, “This just happened, what do I say? What do I do?” So we always want to position ourselves as the polished professional poised for aggressive growth.

David:
What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene in the Smoky Mountains, checking out cabins, recording from one of my own cabins. I’m actually in the theater room right now joined by my co-host, Rob Abasolo, fellow cabin investor, fellow short-term rental investor, and fellow co-host of the best freaking podcast in the world, the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast. Rob, how’s it going?

Rob:
Good, man. Yeah, it looks like you’ve got the whole theater system there, so you can finally watch Interstellar after all this time.

David:
You know, you did see that I posted and tagged you on an Instagram thing, but I wasn’t able to watch the whole movie. It just took too long to get going to that.

Rob:
What? How did you stop watch… Oh my god. I would rather have you just not watch it. How are you going to tell me this on air? You didn’t prep me for this?

David:
No, I got to watch it again. That’s what I’m getting at. I’m trying to be honest here and confess that. That doesn’t count.

Rob:
Right.

David:
We were shooting pool and I kept winning and I just couldn’t stop. Nobody could beat me. I ended up getting distracted. Wasn’t able to watch the show. There’s a little humble brag about how I was better at pool than all the people that never play it, which really isn’t saying a whole lot. But our house is just so much dang fun, man. It’s hard to do one thing at that property in Scottsdale.

Rob:
You’ve seen the final product of our Scottsdale mansion, right?

David:
Yeah, I was there. I will be going back. So if you guys follow me on social media, you will see about a potential trip that you can sign up for to take. But I’m going to be going back there again, because that place is so much fun. I just like being there. Rob, when’s the last time you were there?

Rob:
When we set it up, but I am flying out there hopefully in the next month to go and get the final footage of it so that I can release like my… I’m cutting together like a TV show, HD TV riff on… I’m trying to make a very funny version of an HD TV show out of the episode that I shot out there. So stay tuned for that. That’ll be fun, I think.

David:
Did the episode that you made with me in it, did you put that out yet?

Rob:
No, that’s not out. That’s the one that we’re editing together. It takes a long time to edit a 40-minute video in my style with Caleb and stuff. It’s taken weeks. But we need the final B-roll that shows everything coming together and then the resolution, and then boom, we’ll get all the TV offers.

David:
If the length of time that you took to get that place ready for the market is any indication of the speed you work at, I’m sure that video will be released sometime in 2028.

Rob:
That’s right. Yeah. Well, we’ll see. Stay tuned everybody. 2028.

David:
Yes. Stay tuned. And tune in for today’s podcast. I suppose you already are. That is really good. So this is the finale, the wrapping up of the four-part series with our guest, Amy Mahjoory, who specializes in raising capital to put into deals and teaching other people how they can do the same. So in the first three episodes, we went over Amy’s four-part system. It’s an acronym that spells out FACT. I will let Rob give that to you guys in a second here. But in today’s episode, we actually dive really deep into what to do with the money once you’ve raised it, red flags to avoid getting into both in raising money and who you should be giving your money to. And then we get into some questions that people asked on previous episodes where Amy and Rob both weigh in.
It gets a little spicy at the end. So I want to make sure you listen all the way there, because this episode turns down Tapatioville and I want to hear what your guys’ comments are. So listen to the stuff that we talk about, leave us a comment on YouTube, ask some questions there. We read those. In fact, today’s questions that we played in the show came from the YouTube comments. We look at all of them and we try to include them in future shows.
Part of the topic is free content and for today’s quick tip, I’d just like to remind you, BiggerPockets is almost completely free. 99.9% free. So use it. Go to the forums and read the questions or ask your questions. Go to the blog and read the stuff that people have taken their own time, effort, and I can’t really say sweat. Because typing on a keyboard doesn’t make you sweaty, but I suppose you do get a little bit of finger exercise when you’re doing that. Listen to all the podcasts that we have. Listen to the other podcasts that we have. Cruise through our YouTube channel. You can immerse yourself completely in BiggerPockets and get a free education that will make you much more money than you would spend if you went to actual college. I’m going to put a pin in it right there and I’m going to leave it with you, Rob, for last words, before we get into the show.

Rob:
No, nothing significant here, other than I want to say that actually, this might be my favorite episode of the series. Every single one is always an eye opener, but we get into some pretty tactical nuances of just, oh man, private lending and the power of that can just be so specific to every scenario. So we kind of talk about the good and the bad and the ugly for every single scenario. No, not every single scenario, but a lot of them.

David:
I never thought about this till right now. But you built almost your entire portfolio up to this point using private lending, right?

Rob:
It’s true. Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:15]. Yeah. Yeah. The first couple were privately funded. And then after that I just started partnering up with people and using all my sweat equity to basically run it for them. And yeah, it’s paid out very well and-

David:
Yeah, but partnerships is a form of still like-

Rob:
Yes for sure.

David:
… private lending. They’re lending their money and they’re getting equity in the dea.

Rob:
100%. Yeah. So it’s worked out really well and now I’m scaling even past that. So it’s been really exciting and I think a lot of people will be really empowered after this.

David:
All right. Well, BiggerPockets Nation, thank you for being here. We are going to get into the show and we’re happy to bring it to you. Amy Mahjoory, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. How are you today?

Amy:
Thank you, sir. It’s great to be here. I’m doing well. Excited to catch up with you guys.

Rob:
Awesome. Well, I’m really excited to get into the rest of the final installment of the series, where we’ve talked about how to raise money for newbie investors and even experienced investors. We learned a lot, me and David, just in how we can apply your different principles to the practice of actually going and getting money.
So to sum up here, you have a framework that we call FACT, F-A-C-T. And that F stands for foundation. So that’s where you go in and you meet somebody and you set the foundation. You let them know what you do. So you call this your four-second power pitch. It’s 13 words. And if I recall correctly, I believe it’s, “Hi. I’m Amy. I teach people how to make double-digit returns in real estate.” And so if they’re interested, depending on their interest level, you follow up with them.
And then you go to the A, in fact, which is action. You take action. This could be many different ways, but I believe some of the, I think you gave us four or five different ways, but this could be hosting a meetup to basically establish yourself as a local professional. There are many different ways that you can take action. But however that is, it’s effectively moving your leads down the quote, unquote pipeline, if you will.
Then we have C, where you establish credibility. And this is where you basically go from a group setting or the more informal setting down to a very personalized setting where you’re actually telling them about the financials of the project, what you do, your experience, and just basically proving your financial acumen and that. If they give you your money, you’re going to deploy it correctly.
And then finally we get to T, which stands for transaction. And that is actually closing the deal, right? They wire you the money. And what happens at that point? What are the logistics of them giving you the money? And then after that, we move into a little bit more of the complex side, which is nurturing and making sure that there’s a little bit of a high touchpoint there after you close them. And you make sure that they’re excited about the deal and that there’s communication to make sure that they understand that their money is safe. Did I sum that up correctly?

Amy:
That was perfect.

Rob:
Whew. All right, good. I was getting nervous. I was like, I’m pretty sure this is all correct. But I know all this, because we just did it like an hour ago. But I believe we left off on the last episode with a bit of a cliffhanger. David was going to answer it and then he was like, “Hey, let’s do it on the next episode.” And I believe that question, David, was, how do you feel about getting your investors kind of involved in the project? Not necessarily giving them a job responsibility, but actually having them come out to the site and getting them amped up about the different project that they are investing in.

David:
I’ve had some time to think about that since you first asked me. I think for some people, the short answer is every investor, every person raising money is going to have a different skillset, a different value to add. So they’re going to want to structure it differently. And I think in this episode we can cover some of the ways that it can be done. And so as people are listening, they can ask themselves, well, where do I fit in? And how would I want to structure mine? Because it’s definitely not a one size fits all. The way that Rob raises and deploys money is going to be different than the way Amy does it, different than the way I do it. So it wouldn’t make sense to put the same system together, because we’re all deploying the capital differently and we’re appealing to different lenders or investors depending on how you structure it.
So if I was trying to set something up where I had repeat business, you were going to give me your money, get paid back, give me your money, get paid back. I think it makes sense to bring them out to the project. Have them walk the property, see what’s going on, meet the contractor. He comes up walking with this hard hat and a big smile and they get to feel good that they’re meeting the people. It sort of becomes personalized. It shuts off the part of their brain that’s always saying, what if this and what if that? And what if this is a big scam, or what if they’re not even putting the money in the property? If they can drive by and they can see progress being made, oh, the framing is up. Oh, the drywall’s up. That’s going to put people at ease. I think that’s a smart idea for a situation like that.
I personally don’t want something like that, because what I’m going to get is a bunch of people that are going to say, oh we’re here. We have a full-time real estate investor. Let’s ask a bunch of questions. Let’s see if we can get some of these contacts for our own deals, right? Or let me use this as an excuse to say, I need an update on every single thing that’s going on because they want to learn. Then I’m not going to want to be raising money from those people. I’m going to want the passive investor. And I’m going to turn down that person who would’ve been able to make money and now they can’t, because they kind talk themselves out of the deal.
The other thing that I would point out is there’s different ways to structure how people get compensated. So I would say the more common way is you give away equity in a deal. So they get the upside, but they also get the downside. And while the market has been rising, which it has been for the last eight to 10 years, very rarely did downside come into play. And that’s why I want to make sure we highlight this. Because you could do everything wrong and there was so much appreciation, you still paid people back. Maybe they didn’t get as high of a return as what they wanted, but they didn’t lose capital. And as we’re entering into this bear market, no pun intended, because I’m in the Smoky Mountains and there’s bears everywhere up here, that’s changing a little bit. You’re at a point now where, if you miss your numbers, if you don’t execute on the deal right, it is very possible that your investors could lose money, especially when it’s structured with equity.
So the first thing people have to understand is, if you get the upside, you also get the downside. If you lose the ceiling, you also lose the floor. There’s nothing wrong with that. You need to know going into it that’s the case. I don’t want to structure my deals that way because to be frank, if somebody lost money in a David Greene deal, the hit to my reputation would be worse than if I just paid them back their money so they didn’t lose it. Right? If I lost money with the platform that I have as a level of trust that I have with the audience that makes BiggerPockets look bad, that makes me look bad. That makes real estate investing as a whole look bad.
I’m not a random person without a platform who’s like, hey, invest at your own risk. If it doesn’t go well, well, that’s investing. I don’t think I’m in a position I can get away with that. And then there’s an emotional price to pay. I just wouldn’t sleep at night. If I lost my money, I can make more money back. If I lost someone else’s money, I think, as just my personality, that is not worth it. The price I would pay feeling bad is bigger than the upside if I made them some money and made some myself. Basically, I’m going to guarantee any money that anyone lets me borrow, they’re going to get it back. They’re getting their capital back and they’re going to get back the interest that I told them they were going to receive.
So that doesn’t make sense for me to invest with equity just based on that strategy. If I’m going to guarantee their return, which I’m going to have to, I might as well just make it debt. I will pay this interest rate on your money for the period of time I have it. Now, I’ve structured mine where not only is it a guaranteed payment to you that isn’t dependent… When I say guaranteed, I mean, it’s not dependent on the performance of any one property that I put the money into. It’s guaranteed by income from that property, income from other properties, income from book sales, income from the businesses that I own, income from every single thing that I do is guaranteeing that person their return. So I know that I can pay them back their debt. And because I know I’m set up this way, I also want to make it as convenient as possible.
So what a lot of syndicators will do is they’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to borrow your money. In five years, when the deal sells, you’ll get all your principle and you’ll get all of the interest. You’ll get it back at the end.” Or some of them will say, “You’ll get a check every quarter when my bookkeeper reconciles the books and you’ll get some money.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but it makes it harder for the person who let me borrow their money to sort of use it. So I’m set up towards more convenient. They get a check from me, or not even a check, they get an electronic deposit in their account every month for agreed upon whatever the interest rate is. Right now I’ve been lending at 10%. So they let me borrow their money. They get a 10% annual return.
One 12th of that every month goes right into their account. They don’t have to think about it. They don’t have to ask about it. It goes right there. They can use it for whatever purpose they want. They want to pay down other debt, maybe they’re lending money to me at 10% to pay down interest at five or 6% on something else, they’re actually making money to do that. Maybe they want to live off it. That becomes passive income to them. It’s paying their mortgage for them. It’s paying their rent. It’s easier for someone in that position to figure out, what can I expect? What money do I have coming in? How much do I have to work?
So I try to make it as convenient as possible and as safe as possible. The downside is they’re not going to get an amazing high return in case I go do an incredible deal with that money. If I go find the best deal ever, they’re not getting half the equity in that deal. But on the other end, if I go after the best deal ever, and it doesn’t work out, I run into permitting problems, construction balloons, the cost of supplies, everybody’s kind of dealing with that right now, they’re not on the hook for it.
So I think this is a good example of how someone in my position, I feel much safer giving a guaranteed return versus someone in a different position. Maybe for them to be able to raise money, they almost have to offer more of an equity position with less guaranteed money because they don’t know how the deal’s going to work out. I’ll throw it back to you, Amy. What are your thoughts on these different approaches and who should be taking which approach?

Amy:
Oh man, that’s a loaded question and my mind is all over the place, in a good way, because I’ve experienced all this stuff. Wins, losses. What do we do? Liquidating assets, draining my retirement account. Because similar to you, David, I mean 2017, and I’m very transparent about this on webinars, from stage, it was the worst year of my life. And, David, I didn’t sleep. I’m getting emotional now. I cried every day. I problem solved every day. It was the perfect storm for these properties I’d bought in Downtown Chicago and I could have filed for bankruptcy, but I came up with every solution. Half those deals had personal guarantees, which I still sign personal guarantees today, because I agree with you. And it sucked.
And it was just a matter of liquidate, selling all my rental properties, draining my retirement account. I had to put private money lenders on payment plans. I mean some people, eventually I had nothing more to give. I secured their investments on future projects. Those projects went south. So eventually some people didn’t even get their interest back. Most got their principle back, but it was like, I have nothing more to give. I gave everything that I could. That was also… However, the silver lining is that’s why I’m way more conservative now in my analysis of projects. Back then when I was buying properties, I had assets. So I was going into these deals and buying them. They were a little riskier. I wasn’t sticking to my standard net ROI of 10 to 15%. I didn’t do my due diligence as my company blew up and hiring general contractors. One guy took off on me. Anyways, it was the perfect storm.
To your point, there are so many ways that we could structure deals. It’s a matter of what works for you and what your goals are. So even today, 10 years later, I still raise all of my capital from private money lenders who they’re debt investors. And I also make it very clear in a respectful way like, “Hey, you’re a silent stakeholder. You’re not going to have a say in the design aspect. I will proactively keep you informed every single month through progress picks and executive reports, whether it’s good or bad. I’m very transparent. And at the same time, we’re going to start syndicating deals.” So those offers are going to look very different.
Even in today’s market, one of the things we’re going to be talking about in the October conference is everything is shifting. Even hard money lenders, they’re not allowing second lanes now. So how do we structure deals with our private money lenders who are in a equity position and bring them onto the LLC so that they feel better about being in the first lane? But then you’re right. Do they take a loss if we take a loss or do we eat all of that? Right? So there are so many ways you can structure it. You have to do what makes you comfortable and what makes sense for you.

David:
Yeah. And this is especially relevant right now because, like I said, the market is turning and technology, social media, I mean you can be a person with a charismatic personality and relatively good looks and get on TikTok and get a million followers pretty quickly and raise money very easily. And to the person who’s new, listening to this podcast as maybe one of the first because they just saw someone talk about real estate investing or they heard passive income for the first time, they’re getting into the space, very naive. They wouldn’t know what questions to ask. They wouldn’t know how to vet if this is a person. That’d be terrifying to be in that position where someone’s saying raise money and they’re offering a return. There’s no way you can know how accurate that would be.
And then you throw into it, all these fake spam bots that are online that are pretending to look like us and they’re using our likenesses to raise money. Then they’re having different people say, I made this much money in crypto. I made this much money in NFTs. I made this much money in real estate. So your FOMO is at an all-time high like, well, I have to do something. I need to take action. Which one of these people should I give my money to? It’s hard to know how to go about doing this. I don’t think that there’s an easy answer. I know people want to say, well, who should I give the money to? I don’t think it is a quick, easy answer. There’s principles that you can follow that will reduce the risk. Rob, what’s your thoughts on this entire thing?

Rob:
It’s a choose your own adventure, Dave. I mean, I really don’t think that there is a right or wrong. I’ve done a little bit of both and I think that it makes sense in certain applications, right? So you’re talking about your structure, which we’ve talked about this at length, even for our partnership and raising money on different luxury properties and everything. And I like it, because it is property specific and it keeps the equity side out of it. And you don’t have to really answer to investors in the same way, because there is a difference. If you’re raising money from somebody at, let’s say a 10% return like you’re talking about, basically I feel like that’s going to be different than if I bring on a partner that’s 50/50, because now they’re vested in it. Now their name is probably part of the debt and there’s a little bit more emotion there from the investor. Not everyone can be a passive investor.
And so I think that’s a little bit tougher to manage. So I certainly see the application of, hey, I’ll give you a 10% return. You give me your money. I don’t really think the equity thing makes sense for anything that’s necessarily in the short term, right? If you’re doing a flip or if you’re doing a set of flips, those in theory are very quick investments a lot of the times. If you go and you buy a house, you’re going to remodel it within three months, maybe sell it within six, depending on how big that remodel is. And in that instance, I think a quick flip and a quick return for that investor makes sense.
But it also comes down to what options do you have? Some people don’t have options, right? If you’re new into the real estate space and you’re approaching a private investor about money and it’s your first deal and they say, hey, I want 50% equity. I think that newbie should take it. I don’t think they should say, oh, it has to be a 10% return. Because again, like I said on the last episode, I think the experience is incredibly valuable to work through the nuts and bolts and learn what it’s like to actually get into an investment like that. Now, obviously there’s a lot of caveats to specifically that scenario, I’m not saying just give up everything, but there are scenarios where that makes sense.
But I think where I disagree on the fun side of things is, and where I don’t like this model nearly as much is, yeah, I mean we can go and we can raise 10% and you’re guaranteeing that. And I like that. I mean, I really do. I think that’s a very good way to do it on a deal-by-deal basis. But how, David, can you go and buy a 100 or a 200-unit apartment complex? I think there’s a moment there when it comes to scaling that you’ll need to go and raise some of those funds that you… I mean, there’s some level of guarantees with funds and syndications, but if you ever want to go the big 100, 200, 300-unit complexes, I just don’t really know how that model really makes sense at that point. And if the investor doesn’t want that, no big deal.
But for me, I am. I do want that. I do want 100 properties or 200 or 300 properties. Right now, this year, I’m going from 15 units. I just closed on another 20 units. And I actually raised that with a private investor funny enough. So now I’m at 35 and then I’m raising money for another 23 units. And pretty soon I’m going to be at 50. I’m going to be halfway to my goal of 100 units this year. But the only way I can do that is by going out and raising money and kind of going to that next level because the small secured debt, that format to me, doesn’t seem to make as much sense.

David:
I do what you just described sometimes. So I closed a couple months ago on an apartment complex in Fort Walton, Florida. If you guys watched the episode with Andrew Cushman, he and I buy apartment complexes together and we do structure them that way. Those are a little different because people know when they’re buying one of those, they’re not investing in… How do I want to say this? That’s very clear this is a deal outside of David. It’s an entity that is not David Greene. They’re not lending money to David, right? It’s marketed very differently. That’s made more clear.
And you’re also dealing with a different type of investor. That’s typically someone who understands that space, has done that a little bit more. I sleep well at night knowing this is a credited investor who understands these deals. This is kind of what they do, right? That’s not the same person who’s like, David, I have $100,000. I think the market’s going to go down. I don’t want to buy anything right now, but I want a return on my money. Can I let you borrow it for two or three years? And then I’ll get it back from you right around the time I think the market’s dipping. That person doesn’t really know real estate very well and I would never want them investing in the apartment complex, because they don’t understand how to even read the prospectus that we put together.
Amy, I’m going to ask you for your opinion on, in today’s market, how this should be approached. Because there’s certain people that are used to seeing the syndication model where the risk is shared amongst the investors, and then there’s other people that are terrified of getting into this because they want to invest and they don’t know what they’re supposed to look for. In my mind, maybe they should be debt investors as opposed to equity, but they don’t even know that they’re supposed to ask for that.

Amy:
Right. So one of the things I always try to do is I explain to private money lenders, “Hey, if you’ve never done this before, or even if you have, I’m always going to just educate you, educate you on our standard process. I will educate you on the different types of investment options that we have.” There was a gentleman I spoke to a couple of weeks ago and he said, “Hey, I only want to invest into commercial syndications.” So I don’t feel like there’s a right or wrong way. I just feel like there are different ways of investing your money. And we, as the real estate investors want to just educate our private money lenders on the different investment options that we have. And I still will tell them, like the gentleman who wanted to invest in a syndication, I didn’t have a syndication available at the time, but I said, “Hey, I’d be more than happy to introduce you to a credible investor in my network who is launching a syndication right now and raising capital. And if you want to park your money with him, great.”
So I’m all about collaborating and sharing resources. I just want our lenders to know what their options are. I’ve even gone as far as getting my underwriter on certain deals on the phone, my CPA to explain benefits of investing and leveraging out of your retirement accounts or life insurance policies, because that’s not something I’m an expert at and I don’t want to be an expert at that, but I want my private money lender to have enough knowledge, to make an informed decision for what makes sense for him or her.

David:
Let me share an example of how money flows in and out of smaller deals versus bigger deals. Because I think this can clear up some of the confusion that people may have with what type of deal is better for them. Most people that are investing in real estate, we’re looking for cash flow. At its basic general level, real estate with training wheels, you go buy a house, it collects a certain amount of rent. You figure out the expenses. The rent is more than the expenses. You take the difference. You multiply it by 12. That’s how much you make in a year. You divide it by the money you put in, you get an ROI and you want that ROI to be high, right? Double digits would probably be pretty good, right? Then maybe you factor in a little bit of, is it appreciating or is it stagnant? And that’s kind of all, you got to figure out. At entry level real estate, that’s how it works.
When you start getting into these bigger deals that someone needs to raise money for, because the ones I just described, you don’t see a ton of people raising money to buy stuff like that. The thing is, value is being created in these bigger deals, like a development or an apartment complex that someone’s going to buy and they’re going to put $6 million into a $20 million apartment complex that’s going to raise the rents over a three-year period of time and then add $10 million of value to the apartment complex. The tricky thing about understanding those is that the deal can be progressing just fine. The rehabs are happening. Rents are slowly going up, but they happen over a 36-month period as tenants move out, then you fix up that unit. Then the rent’s up on that one, but you still have the other 300 that you haven’t got to yet. You can’t just go in there and rehab the whole thing if it’s a duplex that people are used to buying.
So you run into a scenario where value is being added. Equity is being added. The NOI is going up, but your cash flow does not keep up with the rate of return that the investor would want. So when you’re offering a 15% internal rate of return, you can’t get that money every single month like you would when you bought the duplex. I’m trying to make sure I’m explaining this right. Maybe you guys could clear it up for me. Cash flow is one way that money flows in and out of deals. Like, if you look at blood, you need blood flow coming in and out.
But then there’s other ways that value is created inside of the deal that you can’t necessarily pay people back with. So with a bigger deal, you may have to wait five years before you can get that money out because there isn’t enough cash flow being generated, even though there is value that’s being created. And at the end of five years, there typically would be that kind of cash flow. And if you don’t know that just because it isn’t cash-flowing, doesn’t mean it’s not working or it’s not performing, you would be afraid of those kind of opportunities. Am I explaining this very well?

Rob:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are a few ways that that works out, especially if you’re talking about a bigger deal like that. I mean the cash flow typically, obviously you want to… That goes into the return. But a lot of the times the funds and the syndications, like the ones that I’m doing, for example, we put a sale date on it between it’s usually three to seven years. I think the one I’m doing right now is five to seven years. But because of the added value that you’re talking about, a lot of the times what we’re doing is we’re going to go in and we’re going to fix up a hotel, for example. And we get into pretty specifics here, but you’re talking about an apartment complex. There’s tenants. You have to wait for them to leave. I like the hotel model, for example, because people are in and out every day. And so we can just block off that.
But our idea is we’re going to go in, we’re going to renovate it. We’re going to get the value up. And then ideally do a cash out to pull most of that money back out and pay back to the investors. Every single fund is obviously very different. Not everyone does this. But for the funds that I’ve been a part of, we try to pay back the investors as soon as possible. That way, basically whatever cash flow does come from that, it usually ends up being a good return because a good portion of the capital has been returned at that point. But again, that’s like one way to do it.

Amy:
Yeah. I mean, there are some private money lenders who don’t need the income in the form of a monthly cash flow. And they’re more interested in taking advantage of all of the tax benefits they get by investing in a commercial syndication, forwarding the depreciation, 1031 exchanging certain investments. So it really just depends on… This goes back to knowing your audience and understanding what they have experienced in the past as a private money lender and what their expectations are moving forward.

David:
Yeah. That’s a great point. So thank you guys, you’ve kind of brought me to the point where I can clarify it now. If you’re trying to build wealth, you’re probably not going to have access to your money during the period of time it’s working. Okay? You’ve sent it out overseas for five years. It’s out doing its job and it’s going to return with a … full of spices that they’re going to make you are rich. Okay? That’s how the people that make good money in real estate, that are putting into these bigger deals, they don’t expect cash flow to come in every month or even every quarter. But when the money comes back, it comes back with a very big return.
If you’re someone who’s trying to find financial freedom, if you’re someone who’s trying to get yourself out of debt, if you’re someone who’s just trying to build momentum to where you can get yourself financially solid so that you can save money easier so that you can go take on some of these deals, maybe you want to focus on something that will get you monthly cash flow in the beginning. And I don’t think it’s an either or. I don’t think it’s which way is better. I think it’s, in this season of your life, do you need money coming in every single month so that you can get ahead or are you relatively safe and now you’re at a point where you don’t need to see that money right away, as long as you know that it’s working?

Rob:
This is quickly becoming my favorite episode of the series, simply because we’re actually getting into very… It’s very nuanced, right? I hate that, as a educator in the space, a lot of people ask you a question and it’s always like, it depends. But it really does, because every single investor’s different. And I’ve talked to at this point 100 investors in my real estate career and every single one is different and some care about one thing and the others are like, no, I don’t care about that. I just care about what’s the ROI on it or what’s the IRR, right?
I wanted to ask you, Amy, because I know you do raise a lot of money. This is what you do, right? And you talked about in the credibility aspect of the FACT framework, how you take them through how the money is deployed. So when you’re raising money and, again, I know this will probably be a “it depends” answer, do you not necessarily have a project intended for that money? If you’re going out and someone says, “Hey, Amy, I’m going to give you a million dollars.” Are you like, great. I’ll take that. And then you then go and figure out how to deploy it. Or do you usually present what deal that money is going to go into?

Amy:
So I’m always proactively looking for capital and building rapport and trust with individuals. If I don’t have an active project… Like right now, I have a couple. If somebody says they’ve got capital to invest, then I will turn to other trusted investors in my network and make an introduction. Hey, I’ve got a friend of mine in Scottsdale right now, who’s doing a million-dollar raise on a small syndication. And there’s more money coming in to my business than I need based upon my project. So I’m introducing them. So I’m all about collaborating. No, I don’t have that scarcity mindset where I’m worried about what if I get a deal tomorrow and then I need that million dollars. Because when you’re following a proven system and you know how to raise capital the right way from the right people, it’s not going to be difficult to get out there and raise capital from your existing network or a new network that you’re developing.

David:
And that’s why we wanted to have this conversation. Because if you follow the steps that Amy has laid out, you’re going to have people that say, “Yeah, I’ve got some money. What do you have in mind?” And you don’t want to be like, “I didn’t think I’d get this far.” Right? There’s that old meme of you start talking to the pretty girl. And then she’s like, “Yeah, you can have my number.” And you freeze like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. You want to have some idea. And so I’m trying to plant some seeds in people’s minds that depending where they are, what opportunities to deals they have, how they can structure that.
And then the reason I think that’s valuable is, if I know I’m looking for someone like the people that I described, I’m looking for a person that has a lot of money in the bank, doesn’t want to invest in the market right now, whether that means they don’t have enough time, they don’t like the risk factor. They think that the market’s going to drop. Doesn’t want to have to learn the asset class. They just trust me. I’m looking for a different avatar person to give my 13-word speech to versus someone in Rob’s space. He’s looking for a very different classification, a person who’s going to put their money into his hotel that he’s going to be building. And then the money that Rob and I are going to raise eventually for the Scottsdale place that we bought, completely different person. You want to know who you should be talking to in the elevator, right? You’ve got a couple different people in there who you should be focusing your time on.
I want to ask you, Amy, as someone who is experienced in doing this for a while, what are some of the red flags that people should look out for if someone’s trying to raise money from them? And then, also, if they are raising money, what are some red flags they should avoid so that they don’t trigger that stereotypical Nigerian print syndrome that other people think, oh, this is a scam. I don’t trust you at all.

Amy:
Sure. As I’m putting myself in the shoes of a private money lender, if you guys are approaching me and you’re trying to raise capital from me, a red flag to me would be you on the first phone call asking me for money, trying to convince me of this amazing deal that you have. Or if I get an email from you that says, “Hey, I have a deal.” We’ve never even met. We’ve got no rapport. “Hey, I’ve got this deal.” Don’t put your private money lenders on an email blast until you have an established relationship with them. So if I see those types of emails come in, it’s a red flag to me. I will not give you guys the time of day.
If you reverse that and now we are out there and we are raising capital, things to look for in somebody that’s lending you money, I mean, there’s a lot… I always say, hey, we’re going to raise money the right way from the right people. And it starts with mindset. We have to believe that we really are providing these private money lenders with an opportunity to invest. And I believe that we are. Where else are they getting double-digit returns backed by real estate, above and beyond all the other controls we put into place, right? Because as control goes up, our risk goes down. And we control everything in our real estate business. So it’s a matter of educating this to our private money lenders.
So number one is we have to have the right mindset. If our private money lender doesn’t share a common mindset, if we don’t align on our moral or ethics, I don’t have time for that. That’s not somebody’s money who I want to put to work in my business. There are going to be people who… This has happened to me. I had one private money lender who just bullied me around with his money, but it wasn’t until he had actually processed the wire. He was great. He was my best friend. The minute he processed that wire, the next seven days were the most daunting.
He actually showed up at my property unannounced, which means he flew in from Florida on his private jet to Downtown Chicago, left me a voicemail saying, “Amy, we’ve got some big problems. I need you to come to the property right now so we can talk about what’s going on.” I didn’t call him back till the next day. And then in my passive aggressive voice, I was like, “Oh my god, I understand you were in town. Did I miss the memo?” And I said to him, to make a long story short, “This isn’t working now. I’m going to need your wire instructions and I’m going to just cash you out.” And I gave him seven days of interest. I don’t have time for that, right? You’re a silent stakeholder.
Other red flags for us is let’s make sure that we’re not data dumping on people. Until a private money lender asks for more information, don’t just give it to them. And never say, “I don’t know.” And a lot of us are still learning, right? A lot of you are going to get out there and implement that four-second power pitch and you’re not going to know what to say next. So instead of saying, “I don’t know,” just substitute that with, “That’s a great question. Let me turn back to my team of experts and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.” And then get on the phone and reach out to your community or other people in your network who have done this before, if you have a coach, and be like, “This just happened, what do I say? What do I do? Right? So we always want to position ourselves as the polished professional poised for aggressive growth.

Rob:
Yeah. There’s a lot of gold in what you just said. I mean, I think first of all, just because you can take money from somebody, does not mean that you should. And obviously this is a good problem to have, if you do have all those options, but you really do want to vet your investors just as much as your investors are vetting you. And this is something I don’t think a lot of people realize because we’re so hungry to get into a deal. We’re so ready to get into our third or fourth and scale up, right? And so when someone’s like, “Take my money,” in your mind, the obvious answer is like, heck yeah, give it to me.
But for me, for example, I get people that reach out, I mean, several, several times a week, that will just out of nowhere, say like, “Oh, I’ve got a million dollars. I’d be interested in investing. Give me a call.” And I’m like, “Thanks, but no. First of all, how about just say hello first? Don’t just say, give me a call right now.” Because that right there shows they’re expecting a phone call. If they’re expecting a phone call from me before we’ve ever met, that already for me is a red flag. I don’t want that. And plus I don’t have… This kind of goes back into, don’t just take money because people are offering it to you.
You might disagree with me here, Amy, but because of the influx of investment inquiries I get, I don’t always have projects to deploy them in. And so that for me is my struggle right now is I actually have really great investor deal flow, several times a week people reaching out, I just don’t have anywhere to deploy it. And so it’s always like a, “Hey, thank you anyways. When I have a project, I’ll let you know.” So I’m always now actively working on what the other side of this equation is, which is deal flow, right? I think investor deal flow is important, but the actual deal flow is equally important.

Amy:
Just to piggyback off that. The power of raising capital, it is endless opportunity. Whether it’s to the listener out there, those of you who are experienced or not experienced, when you know how to raise capital within raising in ethics, you can do whatever you want in the real estate world. You don’t have to be a fix and flipper. You don’t have to wholesale properties, go raise capital and become an equity partner to somebody who is syndicating a deal. This is an opportunity that someone just presented me with a few weeks ago. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I never thought of it. He said, “Go raise capital. I’ll give you 5% equity in this syndication.” So you don’t even have to have experience in flipping or wholesaling. You don’t even have to want to flip or wholesale. Just go raise capital and partner with other people who will give you equity stake in their company.

Rob:
Yeah. I’ve figured this one out recently where I was like, I should probably not always just not follow up with these investors that are like, “Take my money.” Because again, for me, I do have the fiduciary duty to perform well. So if I can’t perform well, if I don’t have a deal that I feel I can do that, I’m not going to really pursue that lead.
But I want to go back to what you were saying about what newbies are saying that could be a red flag to an investor because I think that’s where most of the people are going to be at for this episode. And you said one already, “I don’t know.” And just a very small shift in your language going from I don’t know to that’s a great question. Let me figure that out for you because actually partner handles this side of the business. Or, we have a couple ways we do that, but before I speak too quickly on it, let me send you the actual document where it’s written after this phone call or after this meeting because I don’t want to speak out of turn. Because what people will do is they’ll either say, I don’t know, or they’ll try to fake it till they make it, quote, unquote. And by faking it till they make it, they’re going to give bad information that they’re going to be held accountable to whenever the actual terms come to light. So are there any other things that newbie investors say that are kind of in that camp?

Amy:
Aside from what they’re saying, I mean, that’s a huge one. A lot of it is also our body language and our tone going into these conversations in person or over the phone. We got to be confident in our delivery. If anyone senses any sort of timidness or uncertainty in our voice, they’re not going to invest with us. Right now, take the script we’ve given you, that four-second power pitch, practice it at home. Perfect it. Even if you don’t know what comes next, just be able to rattle off those 13 words with confidence because that will be a red flag to a prospective lender is if you don’t sound confident in your delivery.

Rob:
Yeah, for sure. I think there’s a few ways you can do this. So A, if you end up not closing an investor, I actually don’t think that there’s anything wrong to ask like, hey, where did I go wrong here? What was something I said? If you’re close. Because a lot of the people that I know will reach out and you may have that relationship with somebody, but, hey, I’m just curious. You’ve already said you’re not interested. That’s totally fine. I’m just curious. Where did I go wrong? To not mince words here. And kind of find out and then also talk to other people who have raised money to find out their tips and tricks.
I recently had a similar story. It’s a little bit adjacent to real estate, but I’ll tell it anyways, because it’s something that I figured out that talking to a pro was really able to help me out. I’m becoming somewhat of a watch guy. I’m wanting to get into watch collecting and build up that side just because I’m fascinated by this asset class. And so I started doing a lot of research and I got pretty knowledgeable. I fell on watches and these are tough to get. So I’ll go into the dealer and I start saying like, “Oh, I want this and I want this.” And, “Oh, you know what, give me these four. Whatever’s available, I’ll take.” And they’re like, “Sorry, bud. It’s a yearlong wait list.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. All right, sure, fine, whatever.” And I left.
And so I got connected with another watch expert/reseller. And I was like, “Hey, man. Yeah, I kind of struck out several times.” He was like, “All right. Well, tell me about the conversation.” And I said, “Well, I said I wanted these five watches. I said that I was willing to whatever it takes to get it.” I said this and this and this. And he’s like, “Oh, these are all the red flags that you just said in one conversation.” He’s like, “Congratulations, you actually broke the record for listing all the same red flags in the initial conversation.” And he was like, no worries. Here’s what you got to do. Here are the tips and tricks. This works for me every single time.
And so he said, “Hey, go in. And instead of talking about watches, why don’t you talk about your life? Strike up a conversation with the watch seller, the time piece seller, if you will. And let them know that you’re a person, that you’re not just there to get a watch.” And he’s like, “And also don’t go in guns blazing saying, ‘Hey, I want any watch. As soon as it’s available, you let me know and I’ll come by and I’ll buy it.’” He’s like, “The last thing you want is for that watch dealer to think that you’re a flipper because the moment that they think that you’re just going to flip the watch and sell it, then you’re already blacklisted.” And he is like, and also do this and this and this. And I was like, “Oh, okay. All right. I did mess up.”
And so I went back to two and I implemented exactly what I said. And I was like, all right, I’m not going to say these five red flags. And I was able to actually get the watch, instead of waiting a year, within three weeks, both times with two different dealers. And I was like, oh. So there is a practice to working with somebody and making sure that you are educated and that you’re not just, like you said, data dumping and trying to prove that you’re smart. Because I think what we’re trying to do at the end of the day is prove that we’re people first, that we’re people that we want to work with. And if we can prove to an investor that they want to work with us, then at that point you can start leading with a little bit more data and kind of nurturing that relationship.

Amy:
Yeah, absolutely. I get a lot of investors out there who will say, “Shouldn’t I be marketing my company?” And I believe it’s the opposite. We’re marketing ourselves. And when people know us, like us, and trust us, the individual, then they’re naturally going to invest in our business. And we really have to just wrap up mindset and confidence. Remember, we’re not asking for money. So we don’t ever want to approach a private money lender and say something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m looking for $100,000. Are you comfortable lending me money?” Right? It’s, “Hey, I’m in the middle of a capital raise. This is the investment opportunity. Let me know if you’d like to know more.” And we just got to deliver that with confidence.

David:
What do you think about the red flag, Amy, of starting with the interest rate before you give them ease that they’ll have the return? That’s something I’ve seen where there’s someone raising money and they’re like, “Hey, I’m offering 18%. Are you interested?” And immediately they’re like, “Oh, that sounds scary.” Versus, “Hey, I’ve got a deal and it’s under market value and this is the plan to add value.” And they’re going to receive their capital back after 24 months. And we’re anticipating a return of this much. I think that’s a pretty significant red flag where someone comes out and says, “Hey, you want to invest with me and get a 75% return?” as the way that they open the conversation.

Amy:
Right. Like, I don’t even know you, right? Along the same lines of what Rob said, I don’t know you. I know nothing about the deal, who you are, and what you’re doing. I don’t care about your 18% return. So it’s going to be the latter of the two. I’m going to highlight how we protect, secure and ensure their investment, how long we’ve been doing deals in Downtown Austin. And by the way, we offer double-digit returns backed by real estate. If you’d like to know more, great, let me know. And I’m still not going to ask when I frame it that way.

David:
One of my favorite books is Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. We’re working on trying to get him on the show. The title of the book is a little bit kitschy. I understand, like it kind of turned me off. I didn’t read it for a couple years just because pitch sounds so negative. But what he is really getting into is how the human brain processes information. And one of the key points in the book is that the very first thought emotion anyone experiences to any form of stimulus is, is this going to hurt me? So when you guys say, I don’t even know you, nobody’s assumption is you’re probably nicer than Santa Claus, a stranger. No one’s like Will Ferrell and Elf is what we’re getting at.
Their first thought is always, how are you going to take advantage of me? How are you going to hurt me? They don’t listen to a word you say until you’ve already proven yourself to be safe, which is why, like Rob was saying, by leading with here’s who I am. This is what I do. I’m a regular person. And eventually this is why I want the watches. I’m a big fan. I want to give them to my kids someday, whatever the case is. Now that part of their brain that says, threat, bad, negative quiets. Now they can actually hear what you have to say and then the appropriate time to bring up the price you want to pay for the watch or, Amy, in your case, what the interest rate would be.
I love highlighting that because that’s a mistake I see a lot of people say, “Hey, huge returns. Invest here.” It gives you that same feeling of in the ’90s when a little popup would come on your computer that you just knew there was a virus behind that. Like, this looks so shady. Even I’m afraid to tap the X to make it go away, because for sure this is going to hurt me. There’s human beings that walk around giving that same vibe and you don’t want to have that if you’re an honest person looking to put money to use.
Right. I’m going to move us on to the next segment of our show. In this segment, we are going to read questions from people that have asked about this specific topic and we’re going to let Amy and Rob answer them. Question number one comes from Stephanie Mokris. She says, “Okay, I am officially addicted to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m a travel nurse with a one hour 20 minute commute. And I love listening to you guys while driving. Thank you for all the value you provide to your audience. I do have a question regarding this series. What is the strategy used to pay the private lenders back? I can see in a flip or a BRRRR, but how about if the borrower used the private money for a turnkey property?”

Amy:
Sure. I get that question often. You can still raise private money for a turnkey rental property. There are going to be a few differences. Number one, you’re more than likely not going to offer double-digit returns because the numbers just don’t make sense. What I have found is it’s going to be around a 6% annualized return. Number two, it’s not going to be a 12-month term, a 12-month promissory. No. At a minimum you’ll want to get a commitment of two years. And number three, you will make similar to Dave monthly interest-only payments out of the cash flow. And number four, just make sure you’re targeting rental communities that are in preferably type A markets so the property appreciates, so that in two years you can do a cashout refi. Even if you’re not implementing the BRRRR strategy, we want to make sure there is a little bit of work you can do with the property and it’s in an area that will appreciate so you can do the cashout refi in two years, pay off your private money lender, and then the house is yours.

Rob:
Yeah, I think that’s great. We’ve done it a few different ways. I actually have a buddy who said that whenever he’s buying his short-term rentals, he exclusively will go to friends and family and raise the money private. He says that they don’t know the power of HELOCs or they might have a HELOC line of credit where it’s just sitting there. I mean, I guess a HELOC is a line of credit. But a HELOC for those of you that don’t know is a home equity line of credit that you can use. And so they have that sitting. And so he’ll say, “Hey, your HELOC interest rate is 4%. If you give that over to me, I will give you a 6% return on that.” So a total of 10% debt for him. And he just chips away at that every single month.
Now caveats here, obviously that is pretty close to hard money rates. So if you’re going to do that, make sure that your deal works pretty comfortably and that there is margin on that just for errors and for market stuff and everything like that. But he does that and he loves it. And his plan is exactly what you said, Amy. He wants to go out and cash out in two or three years. In fact, just because of the crazy year that we had, he said he could cash out already and pay them back. But for him, he’s like, “Well, I’d rather just keep the cash flow and keep chipping away at everything.”

David:
All right, next question. Rob, I’ll let you take the last one. This one’s pretty good. And I like getting into this stuff that other people avoid. “What happened to the good old days where BiggerPockets had real estate investors on, who were willing to share their successes and failures? They just loved talking real estate and weren’t trying to sell anything. As soon as I hear a guest say, ‘One of my students,’ I immediately write them off, not as a real estate investor, but as some wannabe guru. The people who are out there really buying real estate, don’t have time to sit on the phone and coach people.”

Amy:
Another loaded question. So using myself as an example, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. It took eight years of investors all over the country asking me to coach them on how to raise private money because we all have strengths and weaknesses. I’m very good at raising private money. I’m terrible at a lot of other things. I’m terrible at marketing. There’s a lot. Because this comes so easy to me, for example, and because it is one of the top two most challenging things that we are tasked with as real estate investors, I enjoy coaching and helping and teaching others. Earlier I said, I wanted to help Josiah because he just seemed like a great guy who is actually implementing what I teach and starting to see results.
All that said, I’m still a student of the industry. I’m still learning. I’m still growing. I still go to events myself. So even through my coaching community, I learn from my students all the time. So I believe that when you coach and give back to others, that tool will find its way back to you, whether it’s in that same topic or other parts of our real estate business, or even other parts of our lives personally. So that’s why I do this.

Rob:
Yeah. I’ll try to answer this diplomatically. If you go to an electrician or a plumber and you said, “Hey, man, I love that you’re a plumber. Will you come do that for free?” What are they going to say? They’re going to say no, because you are paying for their experience and their time. And that’s effectively what education is. You’re paying for your educator’s time to help you go to the next level.
But outside of just the loaded aspect of this question, there’s a lot of free content out there. For me specifically, most of my content out there, it’s all free. Like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, I give everything for free. Now, obviously I do have coaching and everything like that. But for those people, I’m always like, well, you’ve watched 20 of my YouTube videos and those 20 YouTube videos, they’re all 15 minutes each, it takes one hour to edit every single minute in that YouTube video. So, if you watch a 20-minute Robuilt video, that took 20 hours to create. So if you watch 20 of my videos, you’ve just watched 400 hours worth of my work and that is for free.
So I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with online education if you trust the person that is there to educate you and if they’re credible. On top of that, I think the way you can really start sniffing this out and really getting to things is, is that person still doing what they’re teaching? It’s very easy to rest on your laurels and not continue specializing in the thing that you’re teaching, right? But for me specifically, it took five years to get to 15 units. So far I’m at 35. Now I’ve more than doubled it so far and I will quadruple it by the end of 2022.
So I think if you’re having a little bit of pause with the online education part of it, go and see what that educator offers and then make sure that they’re still doing it. And if they’re not, then, at that point, I think you can start to question it a little bit. But education is so underrated. Hormozi was just on the podcast. He got super fired up about this too. And I was like, thank you, amen. Because why is it such a bad thing to become smarter, Dave? Why is it such a bad thing, David?

David:
I can understand… It was Matt Spangenberg’s comment here. I can see his point that if you are good at doing this, you wouldn’t be teaching it. And I think that applies to a certain subset of slimy people who talk a big game and they are internet marketers, and then they go sell information that you could have got for free somewhere else. There is many of them. It’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But there’s other people who do this at a high level, who can reach more people via the internet than they could possibly do individual deals.
So like I mentioned, I’m out here in the Smoky Mountains. It’s been three days in a row, I’ve been driving around, looking at cabins all day long. I can’t really talk on the phone. The Internet’s in and out. You’re on these windy cabin roads. You can’t really do much of anything other than look at these cabins. I’m not being productive for anything else while I’m out here. It’s not the best use of time. Now I won’t do this forever, right? I will learn the area. I will figure out how this works and then I’ll buy cabins with my long distance investing techniques.
But what I’m getting at is, if I was to coach 1,000 people at one time on how I do this, that would be more money per hour than I could possibly make buying these cabins when I’m having to drive around, to look at all of them, and then write all the offers, and then talk to the agents. And you know how agents love to talk, right? So every time you want to get anything done with an agent, you got to listen to them talk forever with their high I personalities. You can tell that I’m a high D and that kind of drives me nuts a little bit. There is a scenario where it’s not necessarily true, Matt, where, if they could invest, they would be doing that instead of coaching people, because you can reach so many people at one time. You’re also spot on with the fact that there are some slimy people.

Rob:
Oh my god. For sure. 100%.

David:
And that’s one of the reasons that BiggerPockets grew to what we did is we firmly stood against the slime bots, right?. There’s people making a whole lot more money than me selling those courses instead of being on this podcast, but I’m not going to do that because I don’t want to be associated with those kind of people. It’s something you have to… I get it a lot of the time from, “Well, he’s a real estate agent. Of course, he says to buy homes.”

Rob:
15.

David:
I just bought $15 million worth of real estate in the last 30 days. Because I’m an agent, I’m telling people to go buy houses. Amy, go ahead.

Amy:
But this goes both ways as far as expectation and personality is concerned. As a private money coach, for example, there are plenty of people who I have turned away and I said, “You’re not a good fit for my coaching program.” Because in the beginning, because I really love this, if you can’t sense the passion and energy, it’s been like this for 10 years, I’m tired trying to convince people on the opportunities that they’re missing out on, how they can go buy five rental properties tomorrow, they can grow and scale their real estate tomorrow just by knowing how to raise capital. So if you don’t have that mindset, I don’t want to coach you. I just turned someone away the other day. I was like, “Keep your money and go figure it out on reading books or listening to podcasts or on YouTube.”
I’m the type of person, and this is exactly how I started, I want the fast track to success. I want the shortcuts. I don’t want to make a bunch of mistakes that’s going to cost me more financially in the long run. Again, we all have different goals and expectations, and there are plenty of coaches who will respectfully turn away your money as well, if your expectations don’t align with theirs.

Rob:
100%. Hormozi, I think he said he spent $170,000 for each of his four calls with Grant Cardone. And he said it was worth it 20 times over because of the value that he got from it. So you just have to ask yourself, what value am I getting from this? Is it something that’s going to help me? And if not, then move forward. Or, if you’re not going to get the value, then move on.
All right. So let’s move on here. So this one is Tamaz Poznanski. Sorry, Tamaz. I feel like I mispronounced that, but I gave it my best shot, Tamaz. Okay. Question. “Hello. What the entire paperwork process looks like and how it’s backed up for the investor, for the house that I’m trying to buy. So I want to see what the pros are of private money over hard money. And also how do I set it up?”

Amy:
So you’re going to want to use three standard contracts and the three standard ones I use in my business to protect, secure and ensure my private money lenders include, number one, the security’s going to be in the form of a recorded mortgage. Go get that from your real estate attorney or a title company. But that’s what secures your private money lender’s loan to the property. You cannot sell the house unless you get their written authorization.
Number two, the way you’re going to protect the investment is through a promissory note. Go get that from your real estate attorney or title company. A promissory note is just a one-page term sheet that summarizes the conditions of your loan. I, Amy, promises to pay you, Rob, $100,000 over the next 12 months at a 12% annualized return. And this loan is secured by the property located at 123 Main Street.
So, so far you got the recorded mortgage, the promissory note, then the third thing you’re going to do is talk to your insurance agent and say, “Hey, I got to make sure that my private money lender’s listed as a beneficiary or lost payee on our builders risk insurance policy for their loan amount.” You’ll give a copy of that two-year private money lender. This way, if a natural disaster happens, your insurance will pay back your private money lender. Those are the three pieces of paperwork that you will use as a part of your standard process.
Now, why private money over hard money? I love them both. Love my hard money lenders. Love my private money lenders. It depends on you. It depends on the deal. When you work with private money, you’re not going to pay any points. Because I don’t offer my private money lender points. You’ll pay a couple of points in hard money. It’s the cost of doing business. You’re going to have higher interest rates. They’re going to check your W-2. They’re going to check your credit. It’s all a part of their standard process, but you’ll have the money tomorrow. They’re still not going to give you 100%. So whether you work with hard money or not, you still got to come to the table with that gap funding, the difference. I don’t want to come to the closing table out of pocket. I want to use whatever money I have to go build my passive income portfolio, buy more rentals, lend to other investors, and then use other people’s money in my fix and flips and wholesale deals to make that infinite return. Anything you guys want to add to that?

Rob:
No, that was pretty good. That was pretty good. I think you summarized that very concisely and intelligently. I’m going to step back from this one.

David:
I do find it slightly ironic that Tamaz’s question, one of the first thoughts I thought was this is such a specific question that this is probably best directed to somebody who is coaching you. We get this a lot like, “Hey, can you share your spreadsheet with me?” And this is a spreadsheet that maybe Rob has spent four years developing and tweaking and making mistakes to try to get it to where it’s at. Or, “Can you just send me the document that you use to do these deals together,” that maybe Amy spent $50,000 over lawyers to put together. And you get someone who is getting free content, here’s about what they do and then says, “Now, can you give me the thing you spent $50,000 for,” and gets kind of salty if it doesn’t happen.
It doesn’t hurt to ask, but just don’t get upset if someone’s like, “Yeah, I’m not comfortable giving you my entire system that I’ve spent years and hours and made so many mistakes and lost so much money to come up with for free.” That would be more appropriate if you’re being coached by that person and you’re paying them to coach you. And then they say, “As part of my coaching program, I’m going to give you my complex spreadsheet or my legal documentation I use.” Do you guys disagree about that?

Amy:
No. And it comes up all the time.

Rob:
Yeah. Fun fact. I give mine away for free. All my docs. I give that, furniture shopping lists, templates. That’s why when people are like, “You’re just slimy.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s free. I’m sorry that it’s free.”

Amy:
I give away plenty for free. I just had someone call me the other day. And I’m at a point now where it’s like, again, I don’t need your money. Keep your money. You’re not a good fit for this coaching program. Because I don’t do one-on-one coaching anymore. And he said, “Hey, can I just give you like 500 bucks per call and do a couple of calls with you?” And I said, “Thank you for the offer. And no. Save your $500 because I’ve got 71 different strategies that I teach. And whether you’ve done this before or not, we all start with module one. So I can’t teach you everything to get out there and raise money the right way with two phone calls. I could literally talk about this for two months. So if you want to be a part of this community and raise money the right way, then,” I told him, I said, “let me know if you want to talk more about my coaching program.” And he ended up enrolling that night. But it’s like, it’s more than just two phone calls.

David:
Yeah. And by no means are we saying you have to go pay for a coach or even that you should go pay for a coach. I never did that for a long time in real estate. I’m going to use a gym analogy, because it just always works out so good.
The gym has everything you need. It’s got all the machines, it’s got all the weights. It’s got the cardio, it’s got the different levels. It’s got the sauna, it’s got the pool. It’s got the basketball court. It probably even has instructional videos on how to use this stuff, but that is different than hiring a personal trainer. The personal trainer will get you in shape faster. They will provide more than just access to the gym stuff. They will show you how to use it. They will push you. They will make sure you get there. They’ll teach you how to use it better than you would’ve been able to use it without them. They are going to sharpen your learning curve and your success curve. And that’s why you’re paying them. But that doesn’t mean you have to. If you don’t want to do that, you could just go to the gym.
BiggerPockets is a gym. It’s got forums. It’s got blogs. It’s got very cheap books. It’s got this podcast and five or six other podcasts. It’s got a YouTube channel. It has free webinars. It’s got tons and tons and tons and tons of stuff that you get to go use completely for free. But if what you’re looking for is a personal trainer, it’s okay to pay the personal trainer for their time and for their experience, because this is how they make their living. They got in really good shape and now they teach other people how to do it. I’ll kind of put a pin on it there. Let me know in the comments, as you guys are listening to this on YouTube, what do you think about what we said? Was this too controversial?

Rob:
Give us some hot takes, guys. Give us some hot takes.

David:
Do you agree with us? Did we not cover anything that we should have? I’m not afraid of the conflict. You guys can go ahead and bring it. Tell me if you don’t like something I said or what you didn’t like about it or, if you did, I will be happy to address that maybe in a different YouTube video for BiggerPockets, because this is a very controversial topic, but I don’t see any reason why I need to stray away from it.
Okay, Amy, this has been fantastic. I think this was a very good interview. I appreciate you being willing to wade into these murky waters that we just did, because borrowing people’s money is a very nuance and complicated topic. And I want people to get good at it. I want them to use your system. I want them to have success, but then once you get the success, you don’t want to be stuck saying, I didn’t think I’d get this far. What am I supposed to do? Because we want people to be successful with their investing. Do you have any last words of advice that you can offer?

Amy:
You guys got this. Again, you’ve got plenty of resources out there. Let us know. Let me know. I manage all of my social media. I am here for you as a resource. Any question you have, I will respond within one to two days. Just send me a DM. And I got you. I’m going to try to get through as many of the comments and questions as I can in these videos. So whether you work with me or not, you guys, I’m always here for you as a resource in any part of your real estate business. So don’t ever hesitate to reach out to me.

David:
Rob, how about you? Any last thoughts on this nuanced and complicated topic?

Rob:
No, I think it’s exactly that, it’s nuanced. And honestly this whole four-part series was really, I mean, gosh, just a really good rollercoaster of knowledge, right? Because we talk about the actual tactile concepts from start to finish for the first and second, and even the third one. Today was all about the application and the nuanced aspect of it, because I think this is probably where we were answering a lot of the questions that people have been developing over the past three episodes. So Amy, thank you so much. I mean Josiah already did, but I know a lot of people are going to benefit from just putting themselves out there. A power pitch. The power of four seconds and how it can change your life with the real estate is absolutely amazing. And I don’t think people should sleep on that.

David:
I’ve got one last question for each of you. I’ll start with you, Amy. In today’s market, where are you seeing the best opportunities?

Amy:
Best opportunities to invest or to lend in, or all of the above?

David:
No. For someone who’s either going to place their money with an investor, someone who has money, they want to invest.

Amy:
It really is deal specific. I always say, even in a recession or an economic downturn, we make our money when we buy. So private money lenders, those of you listening, if you’ve got money you want to invest, just make sure that you are talking to somebody in a market where they know how to buy. They’ve got a strict buying criteria. They’ve got a proven track record and they know what they’re doing. But you can really make money anywhere as long as you know how to buy properties.

David:
Wonderful. Rob, same question to you.

Rob:
What a curve ball, you. What a curve ball, Dave. Okay. Obviously I’m biased, so I’m going to move on from this really quickly. I think short-term rentals are going to be the place where people are getting the most return on just most of the typical asset classes, because obviously with interest rates and prices going up, I think the longterm returns are going to go down. And so that means that with short-term rentals, maybe we’re not going to get those super, super crunchy 30 to 60% returns like we were in the golden days, but those will now go down a little bit and I think be the gold standard for returns for the everyday investor.
However, with that said, where I personally am seeing the opportunity with where I am in my life and the way that I’m scaling up is I’m actually going and I’m acquiring the hotels, like I talked about, which is something that I’ve been very anti for a long time, anti hotels, and basically renovating and turning them into my version of Airbnb. So I’m taking down hotels by turning them into Airbnbs and raising money to do that so that I can basically just scale up a little bit faster than, I mean, it’s a lot more faster than I have over the five years. So I think I’m going to have a lot of fun here. The returns will still be really, really, really massive because of the amount of value that we’ll be adding. But it’s still in the short-term rental space. I don’t feel like I’m leaving my first true love quite yet.

David:
Wonderful. If you guys want to know what I think about that, you can find out and you don’t have to pay for it. Just go to BiggerPockets’ YouTube channel and look for a video of Christian Bachelder and I, talking about where we see opportunity in today’s market, what we’re both buying. And then another video with Kyle Renke and I, talking about negotiating strategies that we are using to get the best deals possible. And this is all on-market stuff that anybody can find. All right. Thank you both. Amy, really appreciate your time and your transparency here. Thank you for sharing your four-step system. And Rob, thank you for being you.

Landing founder and CEO Bill Smith joins ‘Closing Bell’ to discuss consumer trends towards flexible apartment rentals, the Landing business model and the growing number of flexible housing providers.

Dave:
Hey everyone. I’m Dave Meyer. Welcome to On The Market. Today, we have the Vice President of Research at the National Multifamily Housing Council, Caitlin Walter, joining us for a really, really informative interview. You’re definitely going to want to stick around for this if you’re interested in the multi-family space.
In large part due to bigger pockets, I think demand among investors for multi-family apartments, either as a sponsor, like you’re going out and buying the deals or as a passive investor, which is something I do pretty regularly, has exploded. And it’s because multi-family, over the last couple of years, has presented some of the best returns in the entire, not just in the housing and real estate industry, but across pretty much every investment class. Multi-family units has been very attractive and it’s why people want to get into it.
But the question, of course, remains just because it’s done well in the last couple years does not mean it’s going to do well in the future. So we wanted to bring on Caitlin Walter to help us understand the state of the multi-family housing market as it sits today, but also what is going to happen in the future? Is the crazy rent growth that we’ve seen going to continue? Are cap rates, which are the way that multi-family properties are valued, are they going to go up or down and change the valuations of apartment buildings? Is demand going to increase even though we’re seeing building at a much higher level than we have over the last couple of years?
These are questions I’ve personally had for a really long time, and I think you’re really going to like this interview if you have similar questions to me, because Caitlin does an excellent job explaining it. With that, let’s bring on Caitlin Walter, the Vice President of Research at the National Multifamily Housing Council. Caitlin Walter, welcome to On The Market. Thank you so much for being here.

Caitlin:
Thanks for having me.

Dave:
You currently work as the Vice President of Research at the National Multifamily Housing Council. Can you tell us a little bit about what that organization does and what you do there on a day-to-day basis?

Caitlin:
So the National Multifamily Housing Council is the trade organization that represents owners, managers, developers, as well as industry suppliers, so cable companies, things like that to the apartment industry. It’s typically the leadership of those organizations, although we do have a lot of opportunities for folks that are on the lower levels of those organizations as well. We provide research. We provide government affairs, outreach on behalf of our members, also a lot of industry best practices that we work on. And our owners, the companies can range from a couple of folks to thousands of employees, so it really runs the gamut. And at NMHC, I work in the research department, so we provide both in-house research as well as we do contract out some academic and consultant research to look at the multi-family industry, so typically rental units in buildings with five units or more.

Dave:
Well, you are the perfect person to be here right now, because so much of the data we look at is really mostly talking about single-family residences or small multi-family. That is, at least in my experience, the most readily available information about the housing market. And it is so great to find an organization like yours that provides really high quality, free for the most part if I understand, research that people can understand this market. I’d love to just start with a high level, overarching question. What is going on in the multi-family housing market, right now in August of 2022?

Caitlin:
So in August of 2022, and I should qualify, it’s the end of August, 2022, because it seems to change by the week.

Dave:
That’s true. It’s by the day. You have to say exactly what day we’re recording.

Caitlin:
We just released some research last week. We are fortunate. We have a lot of great data providers that provide free data for us to give to our members. Looking mainly at the professionally managed apartment universe, we still saw in the second quarter really high rent growth. We saw double-digit rent growth in most places. The highest places are in Florida it appears.
But people are getting nervous about the state of the overall economy, namely interest rates rising. We’ve seen a lot of costs going up over the pandemic and even before the pandemic, so insurance costs are going up, property taxes are going up. So while we are seeing those rent increases, we’re also seeing operations costs going up, too. And if you have interest rates increase, then that’s another cost item you’re going to have to absorb. So, folks are still optimistic about the fundamentals of the multi-family industry overall in terms of demand, but I think that some of the stuff going on in the economy is giving folks a little bit of a pause. But I’m hopeful that because the demand is so strong that we should be fine.

Dave:
You did some fascinating research, and I’d love to talk about this before… We’ll get back to the what’s going on in today’s market. But you brought up such a good point that demand is extremely strong and that’s led to a lot of confidence in this industry. You just conducted a really fascinating study about long-term demand trends for the multi-family industry. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Caitlin:
Sure. So we worked with one of our partner organizations, the National Apartment association, to hire consultants Hoyt Advisors, who have worked for us in the past, to look at demand for apartments going through 2035. And it found that nationally, we’ll need to build 4.3 million new units by 2035 to keep up with demand. And of that 4.3 million units, we actually need about 600,000 of those units now to ease the affordability crisis.
The bulk of that demand is going to be located in the South, namely in Texas. It shouldn’t be surprising to folks. You look at the news stories where people are moving, a lot of it is in the Southeast. And that demand estimate is actually kind of on the conservative side because they took into account the fact that immigration largely hasn’t been occurring in the past couple years to a variety of factors. So if we get immigration ramping up again, then that demand number could go even higher.

Dave:
And so, you’re talking about international immigration, right?

Caitlin:
Yes. Yeah.

Dave:
That’s really interesting. So even with a relatively conservative immigration number, you’re saying that we need 4.3 million more multi-family units over the next, what was that, 12 or 13 years, and then 600,000 is needed right now. Can you provide some context? Is 600,000 a lot? Is that achievable in the next couple years? Or is that something that the construction industry is going to struggle with?

Caitlin:
So it is a lot. It is doable, but there are a lot of headwinds. So taking a step back, when the housing crisis happened in 2007 and 2008, that coincided with the Millennials coming online, which traditionally the highest age cohort that rents are young adults. So we had this generation that was the biggest since the baby boomers, that all need to rent apartments. And because folks were concerned about building because of what was going on with single-family, it also bled over to multi-family, so we couldn’t build. So we had all these years where we needed to be building 300, 325,000 units, and we were only building 100,000. So that, yeah.

Dave:
Whoa.

Caitlin:
I think that was the lowest we built. Then we had every year you don’t meet that demand, it just kind of adds to what you need to build. Our completions for the past few years have been about where we needed to be demand-wise on an annual basis, but we’ve still got that backlog of that 600,000 units. And so, obviously, rent growth is good, but we need those units at a variety of price points, not just the high end. And because we have this backlog, we actually, in a normal functioning multi-family market, what you would have is you’d have the Class A stuff come on that’s brand new, so then the older class A would move down to Class B. Rents would get more affordable to more people. But because we had this backlog, we actually had reverse filtering happen, so the Class B was Class A rents, basically. Those who would be paying Class A rents typically, they had to pay Class B and so on, so that’s why stuff has gotten more expensive.
So we have that problem going on. We can also only really build to the high end right now, because land is expensive, materials are expensive if you can even get them. The prices have been going up. It’s also just really hard to build period because of NIMBY, or “not in my backyard” opposition. Unfortunately, a lot of folks have these preconceived notions about what’s going to happen if you get multi-family in your neighborhood, which isn’t true. And so, it’s hard to actually get stuff out of the ground because you usually have to get your land rezoned to build multifamily. And so, if the NIMBYs are against it, then it’s hard to get the rezoning. So all of those things make it more difficult to actually build new units. So in theory, we could build that 600,000, but there’s a lot of reasons why that may not be happening right now.

Dave:
That’s extremely helpful context. And I want to get back to the affordability point in just a minute, but just to summarize, if I understand correctly, you’re saying that right now, we’re actually at a decent pace. But because between the Great Recession and recent period, it was so slow, we’d have to basically go above what is a normal level and we’re not seeing that yet. And so, this backlog of 600,000 apartments, multi-family units, has persisted.
When you look at construction data, at least on the single-family market, which is what I’m a little bit more familiar with in terms of the data, you do see that construction is starting to slow down a little bit. And that’s largely because of interest rates and people fear that will lower demand, and labor and material costs are going up very consistently. Are you seeing similar trends in the multi-family market? And is there concern that construction in multi-family actually might go down?

Caitlin:
So there’s definitely concern about it. Single-family building tends to be the first to stop when you see interest rates go up. Multi-family building is typically a longer process. It’s even longer now than it has been traditionally. We’re looking at two year plus timelines to get a project built. So because of that, when multi-family developers are looking at the time horizon, they’re kind of already building in more economic uncertainty because it is a longer time horizon. But that being said, it is impacting things, the interest rates. Folks are having to get deals repriced. When you have to get a construction loan, obviously, you have a higher interest rate. It’s definitely having an impact, but not a meaningful impact is what I would probably say right now.

Dave:
So that’s hopefully positive, right?

Caitlin:
Yeah.

Dave:
Because we would like, assuming I’m just going to say we would like, but let’s just assume that we would all like to erase these deficits and actually have enough units in the country to meet demand. So we would like to see construction stay at an elevated or at a level that we have currently, or perhaps even higher to erase the deficit that you said.
Now I want to get back to your point about building A Class buildings. And that’s sort of fascinating. I never really thought about how… It makes so much sense that basically A Class turns to B Class, turns to C Class. And because there was not enough A Class in the early 2010s, now there’s no B Class or C Class even, so that’s really fascinating. And I’m curious, because you’re saying you basically have to build A Class. And for anyone listening, that’s just basically the highest end, nicer level units. Is there demand for A Class? Is there a risk that what is being built doesn’t actually meet what people want or what people can afford?

Caitlin:
So it depends by geography. So you look at places like San Francisco, it’s so expensive to build there. You really have to have a high income to meet that rent. So it depends on geography. We did see in the pandemic a lot of building. We’ve always had a lot of suburban development, but there was a lot of demand for suburban development because people wanted a unit with a den or something like that. So there definitely is demand across the income spectrum.
With the Millennials coming online, it has made it so that a lot of them seem to prefer the lifestyle of renting. You can move from metro to metro. I know when I first started working for the Council, I was living in one place. I paid $500 and actually moved to another state with the same property manager. So there are a lot of benefits like that to renting. You don’t have to pay for your $8,000 HVAC if it goes bad. So folks have started to realize those benefits. So yes, there is demand across the income spectrum. Without some sort of subsidy, you really can’t build anything except for the high end. You can’t make those deals pencil.

Dave:
That’s what I’ve seen as well, is that it’s so expensive to just get things permitted basically. It really prevents builders and developers who might otherwise want to build affordable housing and they can’t do it. Does your organization track or advocate or do anything in terms of getting those subsidies? Or do you see that subsidies are starting to become more popular so builders can bring affordable units online?

Caitlin:
So I would say that there is more of a recognition that it is difficult to build. I’m optimistic because of that. It’s still up in the air as to what folks can do about it. The Biden administration has put out a housing plan to try to address some of those impediments. However, there really is a limited amount of things that the federal government can do. It really does come down to the local jurisdictions.
A couple years ago, the Council, myself, and some colleagues put out, it’s called the Housing Affordability Toolkit, and it has a cool infographic that lays out the finances related to building and why it’s so hard to build. And then, it looks at a variety of tools that local jurisdictions can use with local developers to try to actually build things beyond just at the Class A. So things like a voluntary inclusionary zoning policy, where developers can make the choice to take a density bonus so they can build a little bit higher or some more units in exchange for providing some units at a certain income level. And so, that way it achieves both parties’ goals.
There are some other things, too. You can do tax abatement. And it really is though, each jurisdiction has to look at what they have available to them, because what’s going to work in Dallas is not going to work in San Francisco for example. So we are seeing recognition, but unfortunately, there are some short-sighted things that folks want to do instead because it seems like a quick turnaround, like rent control. Folks think that that’ll fix things. That actually makes things worse.
So I spend a lot of my time talking to folks about why things like rent control don’t work or a mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinance don’t work, because then you’re not helping the developer make that lost revenue, and they still have to make their developments pencil. And so, we do work on things like that.
At the federal level, the Council, we advocate for more funding for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is a way to make more moderate workforce housing. Unfortunately, you still can’t hit the low income targets. You would need some sort of cross-subsidy like housing choice vouchers, which we advocate for more funding for that. It’s otherwise known as Section 8 vouchers. So there are some federal subsidy programs, but they’re way underfunded. What is there gets used, and so we try to make sure that what is there can be used in the best way possible and always ask for more money.

Dave:
That’s super helpful. I am very curious about the rent control issue. It’s actually something I’ve always personally just wanted to learn more about, because someone posed the question to me the other day about rent control. And Portland, Oregon was used as an example, because it does have rent control policies. And as of, I think, it was like in May or June, I was looking into it, and it literally had the highest rent growth in the whole country. So how does that make sense? And I know we could do a whole show about this, but can you just give us a quick explainer on why rent control doesn’t actually keep rent low?

Caitlin:
The shortest response is that it’s essentially a lottery system. Not everybody can get a rent controlled unit. There are stories about the old school rent control, which is what everybody knows in New York City. You pass it down generation to generation. Those are not the folks that largely need the unit anymore. There’s lower turnover and they don’t have income verification, so you don’t know that the low-income household that got it in 1952 is still the low-income household in 2022. I shouldn’t say 1952. I can’t remember what year New York City’s was enacted.
But you have these well-intended policies to have rent increases at a more normal rate. So it’s intended so you’re not going to see a 15% rent increase, you’re going to see a 5% increase. Usually it’s the CPI plus 5%. But unfortunately, it starts at CPI plus 5%, and then another city council comes in and they lower it. And then, before you know it, you have what happened in Berkeley, California, where you basically don’t have rent increases. We have these huge cost increases that property owners are trying to absorb for insurance increases, for property tax increases. You need to be able to absorb those costs.
And then, the other problem associated with it is we don’t have rent control around the United States, nor should we have rent control around the United States. So if I’m a developer that is trying to decide between building in a place that has rent control and building in a place that does not have rent control, I’m going to, and all else equal, I’m going to choose a place that doesn’t have rent control.
So we saw that happen last year. St. Paul and Minneapolis both approved rent control ordinances. One went into effect right away in St. Paul, and their development pipeline essentially stopped. So that’s what happens with rent control. And we did do a survey with the National Association of Home Builders a few months ago and found that yeah, folks do just avoid building in places that have inclusionary zoning ordinances or rent control on the books.

Dave:
Wow. Okay. That’s super helpful. We might have to do a whole other show about this. I’m sure there’s a lot to this topic.

Caitlin:
There is a ton.

Dave:
But thank you for the quick overview. So I want to get to some actionable items for our listeners, because I’m sure people are listening to this and wondering what as an investor they should be thinking about. And the first question that comes to mind is where are you seeing the largest demand? You mentioned Texas, but in your analyses, have you seen other areas that have disproportionately large demand or places that might have falling demand on the other side of the equation?

Caitlin:
Texas is one, Florida is another. They seem to have the highest rent growth right now. There are a lot of cities or metro areas that have been traditionally, I would think of them as single-family centric places like Nashville and Charleston, South Carolina. They’ve seen a lot of demand, but they’ve also seen a lot of building.
So what I tend to look at is I look at the population growth in a certain metro as well as what’s already been built there. And then, also what do you have in terms of employment opportunities? So, yeah. Texas has a ton of building, has a ton of population migration, but they’ve also got a lot of headquarters moving there, which was occurring even before the pandemic.
You look at Plano, Texas, they essentially built an entire new city. They’ve got several huge companies there. Places like Virginia, Northern Virginia, Amazon is going there. And it’s not just in Arlington. They have huge warehouse facilities in Winchester, which is not that far. Those are all things I look for. Again, places like Nashville, Charleston, they’ve gotten a lot of attention, but they’ve also gotten a lot of building, so they would be too that I don’t quite see quite so much necessary construction going forward.

Dave:
Is there anywhere that our audience can find some of this data that’s publicly available or easily digestible that you recommend?

Caitlin:
Yes. So if you go to www.weareapartments.org, it has a map of the US and it will have the total demand for the US, and then all 50 states and DC, as well as 50 metro areas.

Dave:
Oh, wow. That’s very cool. I did not know about that. And I love the URL. So weareapartments.com. We’ll definitely put a link.

Caitlin:
Yeah, weareapartments.org.

Dave:
Dot org, excuse me.

Caitlin:
Yes.

Dave:
And we will put a link to that in our show notes. So you mentioned at the top of the show that rents were still growing pretty quickly. What are you seeing in terms of rent growth? How fast is it growing, and is there any signs that it’s starting to slow down?

Caitlin:
So anecdotally, yes, we’re hearing it’s slowing down. However, it has not shown up in the data as of yet. So nationally, the rent growth, from RealPage, which is one of our private data providers, was 14.5% year-over-year in the second quarter, pretty high. So we’re expecting, and again, anecdotally expecting that rent growth to go down a little bit. I should note that that 14.5%, that’s professionally managed apartments, so they tend to skew a little towards the higher end. So mom and pops are not captured in that data. But I took a look, and I believe of the 200 or so metro areas that RealPage covers, all but maybe a dozen had double-digit rent growth. It was pretty crazy.

Dave:
Wow. That is remarkable. We’ve been seeing those double-digit numbers for, I guess, was it more than two years now? It felt unsustainable even at the beginning of that. And now, a few years later, we’re still seeing that. But you said anecdotally, I’m sure in addition to data, which of course lags by at least a month or so, it sounds like some of your operators are seeing that maybe start to slow down a bit?

Caitlin:
Yeah. Anecdotally, we’re hearing that. So again, you mentioned it’s a couple years that this has been happening. We had a lot of change at the beginning of the pandemic. Folks fled the cities, so we saw a decline. So for a while, that double-digit increase was just getting back to where we would have been had the pandemic not occurred basically, but we have well surpassed that now. But yeah, some of the apartments that have been in the pipeline for quite a while have started to deliver. So the thought is that this rent growth, we’ve probably hit our top. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s easier to project out with less volatility.

Dave:
Yeah. That makes sense. And to your point about affordability, if rent growth keeps going up at a much faster rate than wage growth is going up like it is right now, that could definitely exacerbate the affordability problem that we’re seeing in a lot of markets right now.

Caitlin:
We saw in the beginning, obviously, there was the Rent Relief that was passed in Congress. But now we’ve seen with what’s going on with the stock market and interest rates, we’ve started to see kind of the higher end of the economy of the workforce be hit a little bit more, so that might be impacting things as well. It’s obviously not concerning at this point, but it might put a little bit of a damper on things.

Dave:
Last week, we were doing a show, and one of our panelists who is a regular on the show, her name is Kathy Fettke, was talking about some deals that she was looking at, multi-families that she was considering investing in. And she was saying that she felt like multi-family pricing for purchases, not rent, hasn’t adjusted yet. We’ve started to see at least in a few select markets on the West Coast in the single-family market, prices are coming down a little bit off their peak. Is there any evidence that pricing in the multi-family market has changed at all to date or is likely to change?

Caitlin:
I think it’s likely to change. Again, I’ve only heard anecdotal stuff so far. It hasn’t shown up in the numbers. So second quarter, Real Capital Analytics, who track a lot of the bigger purchases, I think their threshold is a million and a half maybe per transaction, they still had historic highs, in terms of sales volume. But I definitely know it’s something that people are conscious of, that deals need to be repriced, or some deals will need to be repriced, I should say. I would expect that to start to happen more.

Dave:
Yeah. I was looking at your data and it seemed like in, I think it was Q2 2022, correct me if I’m wrong, the sales volume for total deals done was one of the highest it’s ever been. Is that right?

Caitlin:
Yeah. And so, the tracking started in ’01. It still hit a historic high in the second quarter.

Dave:
Yeah. I think anecdotally we see that, just that bigger pockets in general. There’s just been a huge amount of interest in multi-family housing because of the things we’ve been talking about. There’s a lot of demand, rent growth has been really strong, it’s an attractive option.
But we were chatting before the show. You were sharing some data with me that cap rates, which for anyone listening to, is basically a way of valuing multi-family properties based off of their income. And generally speaking, sellers want to sell at a low cap rate, because that means they get more money for each dollar of rent they collect, essentially. And I’m really oversimplifying here. But buyers also want to buy at a higher cap rate. But right now cap rates are, you said extremely low, right?

Caitlin:
They’ve been low for quite a while. But in second quarter of ’22, they were 4.5%, and that was down from 5% in the second quarter of 2021. So yeah, they are low. A lot of people tend to compare single-family and multi-family, but a lot of the competition from multi-family comes from other commercial types, so retail office. And so, we have the benefit that comparing to office, that performance is still quite strong.

Dave:
Oh, that’s interesting. And do you see that or do you expect that demand is up in multi-family because retail and office have sort of taken a hit over the last couple of years?

Caitlin:
There were folks that needed to get money out the door for a variety of reasons. And if you’re competing for… Now, we did have the kind of side note of the single-family build-for-rent, which is a very new phenomenon, so that has changed the game a little bit. But yes, if you need to get money out the door and you have to choose between office, multi-family, and retail, you’re probably going to… A lot of them chose multi-family. Industrial obviously, is very successful, but yeah, if you’re comparing between those property types, then multi-family generally wins out.

Dave:
Yeah. That brings up a great question, because you see cap rate so low and expect that they will rise. And this is just my personal opinion, I think they’ll rise a little bit. But you wonder how much they would rise just because there’s so much demand for apartments as we’ve been talking about, and there’s demand from investors because it is relatively the most attractive property type as you said, or at least has been over the last few years. We don’t know what will happen in the future, but it does make you wonder how much they would rise. And if deals do start to get repriced, how dramatic that adjustment might be.

Caitlin:
Yeah. I think we’re still in the wait and see scenario, because we don’t know how much more interest rates will rise, what’s going to go on with the other sectors. I know there’s a lot of talk about adaptive reuse. We’re trying to work on some research for that. So changing a suburban office park into apartments is not an easy feat, but it’s definitely getting talked about more. I know I drove by a completely empty office park the other day and was like, “They need to do something with that. It’s been like this for years at this point.” So I think that folks are still trying to figure out what to do. But yeah, cap rates are low. So I think that if they went up, I wouldn’t be shocked.

Dave:
I love the idea of adaptive used too, by the way. I was talking to someone about that this weekend, that there’s just a lot of office space, in particular, that could be repurposed into multi-family housing. And like you said, not easy, but an interesting prospect. It’d be cool if they could figure that out.
The last thing I really wanted to talk about was over the last few years, there has been a lot made about institutional investors entering the housing market. And you just touched on it a little bit, because a lot of the build-for-rent phenomenon has been driven by those institutional investors. Are institutional investors… Traditionally, they are more into multi-family. These are big, high dollar buildings. But has the amount of dollars flowing into multi-family from these large hedge funds and other institutional investors increased over the last few years?

Caitlin:
I don’t know if it’s increased in terms of volume. It’s hard to get data on that. If you look at our top 50 though, it’s undeniable that there are certain companies, private equity funds, for example, that are at the top of the list. I would say, however, I don’t know that there is a universally accepted definition of private equity. There is actually an official one, but that’s not what people think when they think private equity.
For example, there is a company on the top 50 that has been at the top of the top 50 for quite a while. And I actually had to Google that they were private equity owned, because I didn’t even realize it because I think of them as a traditional multi-family manager. I think that private equity can mean different things, and that’s typically what people talk about when they talk about institutional ownership, are those private equity firms.
Undeniable that there are some things that don’t go right when you have institutional capital coming in, but there are a lot of things that can go well. You have an economy of scale, and so when you look at what happened with the pandemic, some of these companies were able to put in place rent freezes, their own voluntary eviction moratoriums, because they could afford to absorb that hit. It’s a double-edged sword. I don’t deny that. There’s a lot more attention to it. The size, if you look at the number of units owned on the top 50, has remained largely constant over time. There’s actually a company that’s owned more units in the mid-nineties than one of the big top 50 firms now. I can’t remember if they officially surpassed the nineties height, but yeah, there’s always been economies of scale.

Dave:
All right. Thank you. Yeah, it’s just interesting. Honestly, I’m not happy about it, but it makes me feel a little… I also struggle to find data about institutional investors, especially in the single-family market. And it seems that everyone who puts out a report has an entirely different methodology for how they’re getting that. And so, you can never really get a consistent answer. And you hear all this anecdotal evidence about it, but it’s really hard to quantify what the impact of these institutional investors are, it sounds like both for single-family and the multi-family housing market.

Caitlin:
Well, it’s especially weird on the single-family side, because you have the single-family rentals and then you have the single-family build-for-rent, which a lot of our members, multi-family members have started investing in the single-family build-for-rent, because it’s essentially an apartment community, they’re just single-family, detached houses. But they’re all in the same community. They all can have the same benefits of multi-family renting. So you can have your maintenance crew out there. You can have your leasing office out there. So it’s essentially the same thing, but single-family detached. And so, you have to figure out how do you quantify that, because a scattered site, single-family rental who were a lot of the big, bad institutional ownership, that’s a completely separate phenomenon.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s a good point. It is really just an apartment community, it’s just a slightly different property type. So this has been very enlightening. Caitlin, thank you. Is there anything else you think our audience should know about the state of the multi-family housing market or where you think it might be going over the next few years?

Caitlin:
I would say since it’s multi-family investors, a lot of folks will look at things like cap rates and sales volumes. And yes, they are important, but at the end of the day, it’s the underlying demand. I’m a land use planner by training, so that’s kind of where I default to anyway. But you have to know where the people are going and where they want to work and where they want to live.
So there are some TBDs, still. The teleworking phenomenon, we don’t know if that’s going to stay. I was a teleworker before it was cool in the pandemic. You don’t know how often folks are going to get required to be in the office. We’ve seen some stories about Boise, where maybe people have had to move away because the teleworking wasn’t as permanent as they expected. Where I live, West Virginia, they’ve tried to bring more teleworkers. And I don’t think it’s been hugely successful under their programs, so I think that part of the demand is still TBD. And if you’re really looking for places to invest, I would look at places that maybe are beyond the teleworking phenomenon and have good fundamentals there.

Dave:
That’s great advice. We actually just did a show on work from home, and we brought in a lot of data and it’s really interesting. And my hypothesis was sort of like, I don’t think there’s going to be more teleworking go forward. I don’t think any companies that have held out on remote work are going to start adding it right now. But I’ve already started to see just talking to friends who work at large, publicly traded companies, they are starting to step it back a little bit. And even though they stated a work from home policy are now saying, “Eh, you might need to be in the office one or two days a week.” And it could be interesting to see if that reverses any of the migration trends that we’ve seen over the last couple of years or at least slows down probably some of the ones that we’ve seen.

Caitlin:
I did my dissertation work on population, metropolitan development. A lot of the older literature talks about how it’s really proximity to a major airport.

Dave:
Really?

Caitlin:
Yeah. Which is at least is true for me. I’m the example of one. I live closer to Dulles Airport than I do to my office in DC. Because if you’re not going to live near where your office is, at least I can hop on a plane and get to a conference really easily. And that’s true for a lot of teleworkers apparently.

Dave:
That’s super interesting. I never thought about that at all. Well, Caitlin, thank you so much for being here. If people want to read your research or learn more about you, what’s the best place to connect?

Caitlin:
You can email me at [email protected] I’m, I guess, an elderly Millennial, so I’m not great at checking my LinkedIn or my Twitter. But I do have a LinkedIn, Caitlin Surgue Walter, if you want to look me up.

Dave:
Awesome. I haven’t heard the term elderly Millennial. That seems like an oxymoron, but I think I’d probably qualify as the same thing. Well, thank you so much. For everyone listening, Caitlin told us before, this is her first podcast ever. And I think I’ll speak for everyone. You did a fantastic job.

Caitlin:
Oh, thank you.

Dave:
You’re a natural.

Caitlin:
It was fun.

Dave:
So this was a lot of fun, and hopefully we can have you back. Our audience is very interested in the multi-family market, and you and your organization are doing some of the best research I’ve seen about the multi-family market. And we really appreciate everything you’re bringing to the investor community and helping us understand.

Caitlin:
Oh, thanks, happy to help.

Dave:
Huge thank you to Caitlin Walter for joining us today. That was a super informative interview. I know I personally learned a lot. And I’ve been trying to understand the multi-family market a lot better, myself personally. I have never sponsored a multi-family deal, but I do primarily invest in syndications and specifically in multi-family deals over the last couple years. And so, I’ve been trying to learn more about this industry. And I highly recommend you check out NNHC.org. They have a ton of amazing research about the industry, so definitely want to plug that.
The main thing I took away from this interview and why I was so excited to have Caitlin on in the first place, was just looking at the long-term demand trends. And when we are on this show, we talk a lot about what is happening in the market here and now today. And that is super important because as an investor, you should be staying on top of those things so that you can make decisions about what property you want to buy, what market you should be in, what you should be looking for, what questions you should be asking. That’s super important.
But it’s also, even when you take all of those things into account, it’s very difficult to time the market. And to me, what gives me confidence investing in multi-family are these long-term trends. And if there’s anything you want to see in something you’re investing in, is that there is long-term demand. And so, what Caitlin was able to share with us is that the United States needs 4.3 million new units by 2035. There’s a backlog of 600,000 units that has persisted for years, and that there is a chance that multi-family construction could decline with rising interest rates and increased prices. So to me, that means that demand for multi-family rentals, from the renter perspective, there are still going to be a lot of people who are looking to live in these multi-family apartments, and that means demand and potentially rent growth and revenue are going to continue.
So for me, this gives me a lot of confidence investing in multi-family. Of course, we also learned that some deals need to be repriced right now. Kathy shared a deal with us where she was seeing pricing for multi-families stay stubbornly high, even despite rising costs and rising interest rates, which should bring prices down a little bit. So you do want to be careful and you do want to make sure that you are buying at an appropriate rate. But to me, if you are investing in the long-term, which in my opinion, you should be, this bodes very, very well for the entire multi-family industry for over a decade, which is an incredible time horizon to feel comfort that there’s demand for your investment class.
So big thank you to Caitlin. I hope you all learned a lot from this episode like I did. If you have any questions for me or want to connect about this episode, please do so on Instagram where I’m @thedatadeli. Or if you want to connect with our community of investors and data-focused investors, you should do that on the BiggerPockets forums. You can just go to biggerpockets.com and we have a special dedicated forum just for On The Market Podcast. We’d love to answer some of your questions there. I will be there answering them and it’s just a great place to connect. So as always, thank you all for listening. We’ll see you again next time.
On The Market is created by me, Dave Meyer, and Kaylin Bennett. Produced by Kaylin Bennett. Editing by Joel Esparza and Onyx Media. Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. And a very special thanks to the entire BiggerPockets team. The content on the show On The Market are opinions only. All listeners should independently verify data points, opinions, and investment strategies.