The Secrets to Building a Million-Dollar Real Estate Portfolio (ft. Matt Cox)

A rental portfolio doesn’t scale on grit alone. Matt Cox joins us to map the leap from single family BRRRRs to 10–40 unit apartments—all while living in Manhattan and buying in Oregon. 

We dive deep into the small-multifamily sweet spot where mom-and-pop owners leave money on the table. Think stale insurance, unchecked utilities, no RUBS, and rent rolls with big gaps across identical units. Standardize operations, right-size expenses, and even a $100 rent delta at a six cap becomes meaningful value.

On the build side, feeding AI your cost library turns blueprints into accurate material and labor takeoffs in minutes. We close on policy and affordability: tenant-friendly markets can be hard to operate in, yet scarcity often props returns—if you respect the rules, the risks, and the people whose money you steward.

Transcript

Cold Opens And Intros

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Everyday Millionaire Show with Ryan Greenberg and Nick Calvis. Alright guys, welcome back to another episode of the Everyday Millionaire Show. We're here with Matthew Cox coming in from New York. How you doing, Matt? I am good. It's great to be here, guys. Yeah, thanks for coming.

SPEAKER_03 0:18

Chase? Not too much difference in weather here in New York, huh?

SPEAKER_00 0:23

No, it's a little warmer. It was negative 20 in New York the other day. So uh Oh, I was there. It feels a little balmy in uh in Baltimore today, actually. Wow, that's insane.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Definitely looking forward to warmer weather. But I just came back from Florida, so it was 75 and 70.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

You just flew in today, didn't you? Yeah. What did you go down there for?

SPEAKER_02 0:41

Just a Super Bowl party.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Were you looking at properties on there?

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Uh not this time. I mean, but I was just browsing. I was in Fort Lauderdale this time, um, but nothing to to buy.

SPEAKER_03 0:50

Got you one of your rich friends to a party or something?

SPEAKER_02 0:53

No, just uh just a friend.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

You weren't at Grant Cardone's house.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Oh no, I can't say who it was.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

10X party. Um somehow this guy sneaks into every like every place that he probably shouldn't be.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Those are the buddies you need to have. I'm uh I'm not that guy, so it's good to surround yourself with guys who know how to get into the cool parties.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Yeah, me me it's always a good time. Yeah, I was up in New York on Saturday, and Sunday it was we woke up and it was like I looked at my phone and it just said one degree with the wind chills like negative. It was absolutely brutal walking around Saturday. Like I had layers, I had long johns on, jeans on, like a winter ski coat, a mask, and I was still cold up there.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Yeah, there's no defense for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

You're just freezing if you go outside. Yeah. So um, God bless you for living up there, man. I I escaped. Um so you live in you live in Manhattan proper. I do. I'm I'm Upper West Side, I'm Manhattan proper. Yep. And I I'm really interested about this because I feel like I when I came down here and I started my real estate business, looking back at New York, Long Island, specifically where I'm from, like there wouldn't have been no opportunity for me there to invest because it's like so expensive to get started. Like, for example, my first houses, a lot of the houses that Nick buys, it they were like a hundred grand, you know, 150 grand. New York, you get like a little box for half a million dollars. So how do you make like how do you like give us a little bit of a rundown of your investment style in New York?

Bend, Oregon And STR Crackdowns

SPEAKER_00 2:28

So to be clear, I live in New York, I do not invest in New York. And uh, I mean, and and to to to your point, 500k for a box is is generous. Try try a million for a box in Manhattan. Um, but no, I so I moved to New York about four and a half years ago. I invest exclusively in Oregon, which is where I'm from, which is not which is not a cheap market, but it's uh it's uh nothing resembling New York.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Yeah. Bend, Oregon's one of my favorite cities in the country. Oh, yeah. That city. I wouldn't call it city town, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

It kind of is now. When I was a little kid, it was like this this tiny little ski town. It's got like a hundred and something thousand people now, which feel feels enormous for what what we were used to out there.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

I don't know if you guys have ever been to Bend, but it's one of the places that you can actually go in the summertime and mountain bike in the morning or ski in the morning and mountain bike in the afternoon. It's like really, really cool. Like the it's like uh high desert. High desert, yeah. So you go like in the town of Bend, not to get too deep in this rabbit hole, but I love this place so much. The the town of Bend will get like, I don't know, 15 inches of precipitation a year, and then you can ride your bike up the mountain 13 miles, and that'll get like 300 inches of snow every year.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

And it's like up in the mountain, it's it's a cool place. It's beautiful. My uh my parents just they don't live in Bend, it's called Eagle Crest, it's like 25 minutes from Bend. I played a golf course in Eagle Crest. Oh, yeah, beautiful course. I'm not I'm not a golfer myself, but I I have played it. Um, but they just moved over to Eagle Crest after living in uh Salem over in the valley for like 30 years. Um but yeah, it's uh it's it is a gorgeous, gorgeous part of the country.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

So Nick always super jealous of sorry to cut you off. I'm always super jealous of agents that sell in like these awesome areas like Ben. I do follow an agent that is just in Ben, and like how much easier is it to sell a house when the freaking views are incredible, you know, and you get like eight to ten acres on a house like here, we get nothing.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

The thing with Ben too that I've learned when I was out there, a lot of people were, I guess, and you can answer this if you do short-term rentals at all.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

I have so it's funny. I own one piece of real estate that's not in Oregon, and that is my short-term rent, my Airbnb, which is by uh Lambo Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I'm a I'm a huge Packer fan, and I'll go out there and use it, and then I'll I'll rent it out. But that that is my only uh short-term rental.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

When I yeah, when I was down there the last time, so we went out there a couple years in a row for a mountain bike race. My uh sister-in-law and brother-in-law were in, and one of the neighbors that we met at the Airbnb that we were staying at was one of like the only residents on the block that actually lived there. Every other house was an Airbnb.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Oh yeah, it made it bend. They've been cracking down on it though. It's uh because that you know, it'd like much of the country, the locals just they don't like the the ski people coming in to ski and party and then they leave, and you know, but on the you know, in their defense, this the the town has gone crazy, and so the people that have owned there have just incredible, have experienced incredible amounts of uh appreciation in their properties. Yeah, I can imagine.

Why He Lives In NYC But Buys In Oregon

SPEAKER_01 5:34

I mean, some of the houses that we've rented are thousands of dollars a night and they're like sick, like just balls to the walls, like full, fully renovated, like custom kitchens, you name it. It was it's it's a cool place. Um, so what what's your um strategy on how you invest across the country and how do you manage all that? Do you have like a property management team in place or do you do that yourself? Like what's your what's your deal there?

Remote Landlording Systems And VAs

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Yeah, it was uh I was telling Nick a little bit of this on the rideover. By the way, shout out to Nick. I took the train into the wrong train station for getting here. I just went to Baltimore proper and ended up like 45 minutes from where the studio is. So thank you, uh Nick, for that. But as far to answer your question, yeah, so I so I moved to New York about four and a half years ago. Um, I'd already started building my portfolio when I was in Oregon. And my, you know, I started off buying single family homes, kind of slowly duplexes, slowly building it. And my first instinct when I was gonna move to New York was like, I have to sell all this stuff. And so I thought about it, and then I was like, you know what? I don't really go by my properties very often anyway. Like, I'm not a handyman type, I don't know how to fix a fossil. It's not my skill set. So what I would do anyways, I would call somebody and they would go fix it. And I just kind of thought to myself, I'd like to hold these properties, and frankly, not that much changes being in New York versus being in Oregon. So, I mean, when I was out there, I I was a solopreneur, like I was doing all this, handling all the tenant stuff, putting people in leases, um, making the maintenance calls. And so what it forced me to do is um I had to build a business. I couldn't just like hustle around and figure it out on the fly. So I started building out systems. You know, we document every single thing. If X, then Y. If so if tenant calls about this, here's what we do. Here's how you put somebody in the lease, here's how you do a walkthrough. And so then I started hiring. I hired my first first virtual assistant in uh, what was it, 2023. Uh, I left corporate in 2023, coincidentally as well. And so from that, just as as we've scaled, um, I've built that out. We've got a few virtual assistants now that handle the property management. Um, and then we'll get we can get into this if you like. But as we started doing larger deals and buying apartment complexes, I've actually started outsourcing um some of that to to third party management as well.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

So, what did that look like before you hired the VA? So you you've moved four and a half years ago in 2023. You hired your VA. So you were probably living in New York for at least a year and a year and a half before hiring the VA. What was that transition like from you being in Oregon to moving to New York and managing your portfolio?

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Yeah, it's uh it's a shit show. Um we can we can cuss on here. Yeah, okay, okay, cool. Um, yeah, and and a lot of people go through this phase, and I feel like everybody tells you like start running it like a business from day one. Like, don't be a hustler, don't be a you know that's an easy thing to say in a couple of things. Everyone, everyone tells you to do it. You don't figure out that you have to do it until you literally hit such a pain point that you want to quit real estate. And so, you know, when I was when I first moved to New York, like I had an Excel sheet that I was tracking rents in, like, and I I was collecting rents on Venmo. So like a Venmo payment would come in and I'd like check it off on the and then you know, you slowly and I I I got to the amount of scale, right? Where I have enough doors that maintenance request, you know, you own a couple houses, you're getting a maintenance request every few weeks, maybe, and then all of a sudden you're scaling, and maintenance stuff is just I mean, today, like I'll go look at my phone after this, and we'll probably have two or three two maintenance requests in the time to record this podcast. So you start hiring, I mean, we got we got a tenant portal. That sounds like the simplest thing ever. For 200 bucks a month, we got a tenant portal that tracks all of our rents, maintenance requests, all that kind of stuff. Um, you start hiring, you start hiring quality people. Um, you know, I read uh, I don't know if you guys have read uh Dan Martell's Buyback Your Time. Yep. The book, yeah. Great book. I don't I don't read a I read a ton of history and nonfiction and stuff. I don't read a ton of business books, but that one absolutely changed my not it sounds like hyperbole. It kind of changed my life because I was like I was borderline ready to just be like, let's sell all these things and be done with this. And the second I finished it, I hired somebody and it started started really building a business instead of just this hustle where Matt's running around taking phone calls, trying to trying to figure out everything on the fly.

From Chaos To Tenant Portals

SPEAKER_02 10:08

So had you sold, what was your what what do you think your plan would have been if you did sell? Would you go into a different business or would you try to build something in New York?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Hard to say. I might still be in corporate, honestly, because that this was happening, this was 2023, and I was hitting like hitting that point where it was a level of scale that was either figure this out and keep doing it long term as a business or crumble under this. And I was still at corporate, I was in my uh sale sales job, and if I had just sold everything, I'm yeah, I might still just be working uh uh working that sales job today.

SPEAKER_03 10:43

Something we ask all of our guests that come on here is from your first property, how did you go about getting that first property? And then when you moved to New York, how many properties did you have at that time? And then when did you increase your scale?

First Deals, COVID Pivots, And BRRRR

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Yeah, so my path went something like this. I I I bought my first rental property in 2018. Um, I was working at a working at a real estate investment company. I bought it. It was kind of so my company I worked at, we bought foreclosures. And so I had, in hindsight, I should have been buying like a ton of properties because I had access to all these crazy deals. Um, but at that time it was, and maybe you guys, I'm sure a lot of your listeners can relate, when you first start learning real estate or you first hear about it, you're kind of just like, oh, that's like a thing. You know, my boss, he he does that. He's like the super rich guy. Like, I don't get to buy real estate. And so, you know, I ended up I ended up buying one because he kind of to his credit, he would kind of be like, Matt, like you should be picking up some of these. And I kind of bought one and I was like, okay, cool, I'll, you know, I'll tuck this thing away. It'll be it'll be great in 20 years for my retirement, you know, no aims of of doing this as a as a scalable business or anything like that. And then in so that was 2018, I also bought my personal residence, a townhouse in Portland while I was there. Um, but then so I was at my next job in 2020. I was selling uh that was the corporate sales job. I was selling aviation data to airports in the US and Canada. And COVID hit, and I was like, shit, like none of my customers want to talk to me. You know, the airports are like in survival mode, they're not making any money, nobody's buying anything from me. They don't even want to talk to me. And so I got nothing but free time, and I also know I'm gonna make no commissions for the foreseeable future. So like I got all this free time. You know, a lot of my friends are doing like Netflix and video games. I'm like, dude, I gotta figure out a way to make some more money. And so I started, you know, uh listening to bigger pockets like crazy, um, reading books, but then I just I then I just started buying deals. And that's uh anybody that you know, people hit me up sometimes wanting to, you know, I don't know if you guys use LinkedIn, but people want to pick my brain or whatever. And that's always my first piece of advice is like read the books, do the education, but start buying deals. And so I bought another deal in like May of 2020. Um, I but and I just started scaling like crazy from that point. I bought I bought everything I could get my hands on. Um, I would do the the the burr method, get my money back out of it, buy another property, and I just kept repeating that um and slowly built a portfolio. I think by the time I moved to New York, I had probably 15 doors, 12, 15 doors, something like that. Um, and then when I got to New York, I I I've scaled it. I scaled it much more quickly uh than when I was living in Oregon. And that's normal. You know, your your your portfolio. I talk to guys that have been doing this for 30 years. It's kind of a it's usually hockey stick because you start building the portfolio, you got some equity, you can pull that equity, you can buy more. Um, but yeah, that's uh kind of how we got here.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

That's uh yeah, that's that's the typical story, I feel like the the hockey stick method, you know. It's like uh once you figure it out, and I think that's the biggest thing too. Like I I do some coaching for a guy that for five years was just listening to podcasts, reading books, listening to books, doing whatever education he can do, and just never pulled the trigger, and then hired me to basically coach him through a deal. Within 30 days, he had his first deal, it's cash flowing. And I own a property management company, and I was like, I suggest you manage this property with my help. Like, he's I'm on a monthly retainer with him, so like every week we meet, and this week uh and we're going back and forth with his tenant. He had his first like big like service call, and the the lady doesn't even this is the craziest thing. The lady the section eight pays a hundred percent of her rent. She the there was a leak, a gas leak. We got it fixed the same day. The only thing that was wrong was that there was a patch up they had to cut a patch to run the new gas line. We the lady's now asking for like temporary accommodations and like money, and we're like, you don't you don't really get that when first you don't pay your rent, second of all, like you there was no like uninhabitable time. So I'm teaching him all that because he's just letting this lady just like run all over. I'm like, you tell her we're gonna be there in 24 hours to fix the cosmetic stuff, all the safety hazards are done, and then she found there was a leak in like the water heater. So she then again requested like accommodations, and we're like no. And I I had to like tell because he was like he's like trying to be a nice guy.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

Yeah, it's intimidating when you're when you have your first property and you're trying to deal with these tenants.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

I mean, I was I would say soft in the beginning, like I would say yes to almost everything and try to like be, you know, I would be the a good person, but like they were trying to like bend me over, and I'm like, nowadays it's like it can't it can't happen that way.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

That's one of our when I'm training our my VAs who run the the property management now, that's one of the hardest things to train them on, is like your job is to give them a safe place to live, and their job is to pay rents. You're not their therapists, you're not there to book hotels for them, you're not there, you know, your job is to take care of maintenance requests because um, you know, and I want to be clear, there's a ton of awesome tenants, but there are a lot we call them professional tenants here, and uh they will they will take exactly what you allow them to get.

Tough Tenants, Leases, And Boundaries

SPEAKER_01 16:20

You could tell by the way that they word their text or emails exactly. Like the first email when he sent me the screenshot of it. I was like, all right, well, she's using the language, we're gonna use the same language. Like this is in your lease section four, blah, blah, blah. Like 24 hours notice, she was like, Well, nobody noticed notified me 24 hours that they were coming for the gas leak. I'm like, Well, that's an emergency. Look at this section in your, you know, like all of that language, you just gotta that's another thing when you're scaling, you have to document, document, document and have all of that stuff in place because these tenants will and can take you to court. And the especially here, I don't know how Oregon is, but I know New York's the same, it's tenant-friendly. Oh, yeah, it is Oregon. Landlord friendly. So when you go there, if you don't have all your ducks in a row, it's always gonna go to the tenant.

SPEAKER_03 17:09

It sucks. I wonder how AI is gonna affect the way tenants talk to landlords, right? So, like, for example, that tenant could put their lease into chat and say, Hey, this is my problem. Can you pull out any leash? Oh, she's using AI. Right. So, like, how many more professional tenants are there gonna be now because of AI and pulling out We could do it the opposite way too, though, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:32

Yeah, I would say that she's probably using AI to communicate, but she like that's a step forward. I I never thought about them inputting the whole entire lease in there and figuring out a way, like asking chat, like, hey, how can we screw my land over landload over?

SPEAKER_03 17:45

I mean, dude, it's scary because we're using like I'm developing an app right now that checks contracts for agents. Um, so that way you can upload the contract to this portal and it'll use AI to look over the whole contract, pull out any red flags that it sees, any missing spots where there's supposed to be signatures and stuff like that. Like, I was just thinking about that. I was like, man, if you were a professional tenant, you just upload the lease agreement and ask it, hey, where are the loopholes at? This is my situation. Like, we had a gas leak. How how much could I screw my tenant or my landlord over?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

I I had a guy do that that was buying a he was buying a house for me. I was selling, he was my tenant, and he's buying one of my uh single family homes, and he uploaded the entire thing to AI and he sent me this like laundry list of questions. I was like, dude, I'm not I'm not your attorney. Like, don't I'm not I'm not gonna answer these for you. A, it's not my job, and B, if I come off as giving you legal advice, I know you're gonna so go take this to an attorney. But he yeah, he uploaded the entire thing and spit out like 30 questions for me on it. Yeah, I would have just uploaded it back to Ted. And like just answer these questions, yeah, and make sure it's not legal advice. Just let the chats talk back and forth to each other.

Tenants Using AI And Landlord Countermoves

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Like I've seen videos of that where like a husband and a wife are like two friends just sitting next to each other, and they're like, I think it was a a clip on South Park that I saw. They're like communicating through, like sitting next to each other in person, but using chat to talk to each other, so they're like forming conversations, just be like, tell them this, and then that then that that person says it AI is definitely a wild, wild place. Like it is, I think, changing the whole like platform. Um, my one of my virtual assistants, Carl, who's editing will edit this podcast, is really good at using AI. And um Juris is actually, I think she's getting she's good. So I took a a VA from Chase when he he didn't need her anymore, and I took her in um for the property management company, and she's actually really good. And and I'm like telling these people, I'm like, you have to use if we're not using it, we are behind. Like we are going to be left behind. We could be cutting costs, we could be cutting time, we need to be using anything and everything that's available within reason. I think like with that app we talked about the other day, like I think there's some liability that needs to be figured out, like with AI and disclosures is obviously the way with like with what you're doing, but like it's a little scary what could come of AI. Like, are you how how are you using it in your business?

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Probably not enough to be honest. I mean, I use it, I use it constantly for like content writing and stuff. So I'll write whatever I'm gonna post on LinkedIn or and then I'll plu I'll I'll I'll write it from my own thinking, and then I'll plug it in there and be like, hey, does this sound help me make this sound more succinct or make more people interact with it? So I'll use it for content. I train my VAs on it a lot, actually, just for tenant communications, because um a lot of them, you know, English is not their first language. So I'm literally coaching them on like plug in what the tenant just said to you and say, please craft me a response that sounds stern but also friendly and gets my point across and just let it spit out because they communicate a lot via text. I see and I so I I coach them on how to do things like that. Um, but there's people, I mean, there's this one guy, he's a huge investor, and he's doing things with AI where he's basically building like he has a staff, he's doing he's creating AI agents, and he almost has like a whole like they're they're basically employees and they're all interacting with each other. I mean, that's that's the next level that that I am uh you know, I'm not there yet. I don't know about you guys.

Construction Estimating With AI

SPEAKER_01 21:26

So one thing that I'm doing, um, if you're like I because I own a construction company, basically I'm like vertically integrated from property construction, property management. We're doing everything from new constructions to custom kitchens for homeowners. And I could take a blueprint and I can upload it to Chat GBT. And over the last, I don't know, year or so since I've been using it, I've been feeding chat my costs of things. So like what I charge L VP six bucks plus two dollars um you know for for profit or whatever. So it's like eight dollars a square foot. Baseboards, if it's craftsman, I'm charging X. Amount if it's this, I'm charging X amount shoe molding. I can at now upload the just the drawing to chat and say, make me a material list and cost of each and every item from kitchens to baseboards to flooring, and it will sit there and it'll calculate everything and tell me my exact cost. And then I can take it and put it into my estimating software and then send it out to the client. Or like if we're doing a new build, we can just put it in there and I'll know exactly how many linear feet of baseboard, how many square feet of floors, how many sheets of drywall. It'll do cubic feet. I mean, it does everything. It counts. I tell it when we're doing recessed lights, they should be about four and a half feet apart. So it'll take the length of the room and say, okay, you need 18 recess lights. It's unbelievable once you learn how to like I've been just feeding it the information. I think you have to like train it, right? It's like one of those things that it's like an actual like a learning, like a almost like a living thing. You know, you're like you're you're feeding it the information. It it's a living thing that perfectly remembers everything you tell it. And then it just you could once you train it, like it has cut my estimating time, which has been like my biggest time suck pro in like 25%, like by by 75%, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

I saw one the other day. I I haven't used it yet, but this guy uh my uh uh fiance's brother told me about it because we're so we're raising money for a lot of our deals, and it's an AI, it's a video call you get on with AI, and it like grills you on the deal as if it's on the other end as an LP that's looking at investing in your deal. So you pitch to them and it gives you like ask you the hard questions back and it like prepares you for uh investor calls. It's pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

That sounds pretty nice. We need that for my real estate team, so I can just throw them on there and they can role play with prospective buyers and sellers.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Like that's so do you want to talk a little bit about how you transition from the single family space and how you got into the multifamily?

AI For Capital Raising And Team Training

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Yeah, so I I I started off, like I told you, doing doing bird deals, single single family, you know, that was back when rates were three, three and a half percent. So you could just the the the numbers worked, even in, you know, Oregon's a fairly expensive market, but you could you could cash flow single family homes. And then, you know, I kind of progressed, probably a standard path to a lot of people, started buying duplexes, then I bought smallplex, fourplex, sixplex. Um, and then I started kind of just building a little bit of a name for myself, a little bit of a reputation, post you know, just posting on social media, having a podcast, having a blog. And it sort of naturally came about where like I had one guy in particular who's my biggest investor who just read something I wrote and hit me up, like, hey, if you're ever looking to uh kind of scale this thing more quickly, you know, I'd be interested. And it it wasn't even like it wasn't even like a thought where like, okay, now I have to do larger deals. But then, you know, he talked, and so I started started just underwriting larger deals, learning how to structure um a syndication or a or a JV agreement, how to raise capital. And I just kind of did it on the fly. I mean, 2025 was so I I should backtrack. When I before that, when I was doing the smallplex stuff, I would maybe I bring in like one strategic partner or something. Like I would do deals with my brother, or maybe my parents would partner with me on a deal. And then in 25, I started talking to investors and just learning the lay of the land. Because when you get into those, you know, larger apartments where you're raising from, you know, a handful of investors as opposed to just, you know, one guy or gal who wants to throw money in the deal. And a lot of 25 was like a going, you know, I was I was banging my head against the wall a lot of it. It felt like, and it was, I learned so much. And then we started late in the year, we put a couple deals together. We did a 10 unit, and then uh two weeks ago we closed on a 19 unit. Um, today we offered on a 22 unit and a 33 unit. So we finally sort of, we're not there yet, but we've sort of started building this machine around capital raising and knowing how to structure these deals, having the right lenders, having the right loan broker. Um, like I said, having the capital relationships, having the broker relationships where people are are starting to bring me deals now instead of having to go find them. So it's a it's a totally different game when you're raising money. I mean, it's uh, you know, you you using other people's capital is is no joke. Like you, there's always risk involved, but you do not want to do something reckless with somebody. It's one thing to do something reckless with your own money. It was somebody else's money, that is like I mean, you got you got to take that more serious than your own money a hundred times over.

Single Family To Small Multifamily

SPEAKER_01 26:41

And that space that you're in, um the 10 to let's just call it like 60, 60 units, is a really hard multifamily space because I've learned this the hard way by just competing on deals with bigger companies and losing out throughout the years. And I'm I've stayed in my kind of lane now, but um when you don't have like 70 plus units, you can't really create like an ecosystem. When you have 70 units under one roof, you can have a full-time leasing agent in in-house, you can have a full-time maintenance person in-house. When you have like 10 units, you that doesn't support full-time staff on site. So that's a hard space to manage in the 10 10 unit range. And then you have with multifamilies and commercial loans, you have balloon payments and and refinances to worry about. So like I feel like 25 is a good was a good year to start because you're starting high with high rates, but your NOI is what tells you the value of the property. So like we were talking last week with Jeff Irvick about this. Like, if you were to buy the same deal in 21 and then in 25 or whatever, you had to start your refi because it's a five-year balloon, you'd be getting a capital call like a son of a bitch. Like you'd be you'd be in the red on that refi.

Raising Capital And Responsibility

SPEAKER_00 27:59

Oh, yeah. It's happen, I mean, it's happening all over. You look at the sunbelt right now, people are blowing up, and a lot of people, and it's not because they're stupid or because they, you know, it's just, I mean, some of them were probably a little bit reckless with money, but it's timing. I mean, I think a lot of people honestly had their experience was with 30-year debt, and they were not like, wait, hold on, I have to pay this back in five years, and that's that's what's happening right now. And you, you know, you lock in at 3%, you stretch your numbers, you make your underwriting work to try to get the deal done, and it's you can't you can't refi that at six percent, six and a half percent now.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah, that's uh that's why I like I had one deal that I was that I was offering on a couple years ago, and I'm so happy that we didn't get it. We ended up losing it by like a lot of money, and I underwrote it and I underwrote it, and this company came in and bought it for like five hundred thousand dollars more. And it was I think it was it was like between twenty and twenty-five units, mixed use. It was a couple commercial units on the b on the basement uh ground level and then apartments above it. And had I bought that, I hadn't done the math, I should do the math. Had I bought that back then when because it was when rates were like insanely low. I mean, my private hard money at the time was six percent, no points. So like rates were at like the all-time low, I would be losing my ass right now. Yeah because it was exactly the time when the rates were the lowest, and in my underwriting, I was luckily just it was a big renovation project too. So I was like pretty conservative with it and didn't end up getting it, but had I gotten it and not had found the value add between 2020 and now, I would have been fucked. Like big time.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Yeah, it's a common story. I mean, I I have buddies that are they're they tell me these stories like man, I am so glad that guy outbid me on that deal. Because you, you know, hindsight's always 2020, but you see these markets like like Denver was trading at three caps, like Texas, Austin, Texas is the poster child, right? Rents are down like 20% there. That market's getting wiped out right now. And it, you know, it's it's when you look back, it feels like it was nonsensical. But when everybody's out there and you know, the punch bowl's at the table and everybody thinks it's uh it's gonna go on forever, it's it's very easy to start getting loose with your numbers.

DSCR Appraisal Scandal And Cautionary Tales

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Yeah, that's I think it's super important to be strong. And like the underwriting is so, so important, especially in that space. Like with the single family space, I can underwrite a deal in 10 minutes and know the worst case scenario for 30 years. In a multifamily space, there's so many factors between the rates going up and your rents going down, you could be upside down in no time. And that's something that I like warn people about that are like new to investing and they're trying to get in just like straight into becoming a syndicator. Like, you need to figure out like some you need to figure some stuff out first before you could just go syndicating stuff because it is a very dangerous game and it could go really, really wrong. And like you said, like I use other people's money for stuff and I take that really seriously. And as like a property manager, I tell my staff this all the time. Like, we are managing the biggest asset of these people's that they own. Like some of these people that we manage for, they own like one extra house. You know, it's like they're they had their house and their wife had their house and they moved into one, and now this is their biggest asset, their biggest holding. Like, we need to take this like as seriously as we can. And um if you don't and you lose somebody else's money, it feels different than losing the bank's money. In my I've never lost any investors' money, I should say that as a disclosure. I've always paid back. I've lost money, but I've never lost um an investor money, and but I know people that have, and it's not a good look. It's not a good look.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah, if you if you have a conscience, it feels horrible. There's there's a lot of people out there raising money who don't have conscience, consciences, and they'll, you know, they'll they're the types they'll go turn and burn investors, they'll go to a new market where nobody knows them and they'll raise again. But it's uh it's it's it's a very serious deal, and that's not to say I've never lost investor money. It doesn't mean I never will, but what I can say is I will never lose investor money because I do something sketchy or do something reckless with somebody else's money. There's always risk involved. You can lose money, but you better not lose it because you did something something reckless with somebody else's dime.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Yeah, so funny story, this office. I I own this office and the one next door. The guy, the commercial broker who sold me this this uh two units here, wanted to get into he was a commercial broker, made very good money, he's an older guy, wanted to break into the hard money space. He he texted me about a specific guy. Well, you guys will know him. I'm not gonna say his name, but he texted me and said, Hey, this guy wants me to lend him on these deals. Do you know him? And I said, Yes. I will not recommend, I would recommend you don't loan to him. I know what he's doing, and they're chasing these they have appraisers in their pockets and they're getting these crazy appraisals done. And it was part of that whole New York have you heard of the New York investors scandal that happened here in Baltimore?

SPEAKER_00 33:15

No.

Underwriting Pain And A $90K Loss

SPEAKER_01 33:16

So there's a huge DSCR scandal that happened, and basically what was happening was investors there was a group of investors in New York that were buying properties, selling them to out estate investors at inflated values by basically having the appraisals done based on pictures of other properties that weren't renovated, and it was really, really sketchy. This guy was involved with it somehow, and the guy, the guy, the broker who just came to me the other day and he's like, Hey, can you manage or sell these four units for me? I had to take them back, and I and he didn't tell me who I you know who he did. And I said, Was it this was it the guy that I warned you about like a couple months ago? He said, Yeah, unf I have to admit, unfortunately, it was him. So you told him not to lend to him and he still did. Yep. Oh my god. I literally told him, I said, I know this is this is different than New York. Baltimore is a very small city. If you are a real estate investor here, it's called we call it Smaltimore. Like it is a very small city. If you're a real estate investor here and you do anything in our space, everybody knows everybody. Like when we go, we have a quarterly event that we have to plan soon, by the way. Um there's you know, 200 people there that basically run the whole real estate investment in Baltimore. Like it's like there's not that many of us. We're in the city of New York, like New York's different. You can get away with like sliding by and not knowing people, but here it's not like that. You know everybody, and I know all their tricks and all their schemes. I've either done contracting work for them or know somebody that's done contracting work, I know their property matters. Somehow we all know each other, and I knew this guy was doing what he was doing and getting appraisals but from a company. And when he went to this guy for hard money, I was like, that doesn't make sense because he had a relationship with this other very well-known hard money company, and then they wouldn't give him money anymore. So that to me was red flag number one, and um anyway, yeah. So he lost four houses and now he's fire selling them at auction and losing a good chunk of change doing it. So it it was there was like 700 properties that was caught up. What is it like 700? Yeah, about seven, eight hundred properties that was caught up in the scandal of these New York investors that were basically buying deals, selling them to Anastate investors that never saw the property, was saying the appraisal would have an appraisal for let's just say 225,000. On the market, the house would sell for 140. Oh my gosh. So people were buying the people buying them at 75%, yeah, thinking they were getting a fucking steal, and instead they were actually getting stolen from. And then that guy, those you know, non-recourse loans basically just you know, all that money just disappeared, and now there's just a bunch of foreclosures everywhere. Yeah, he's like, whatever. Like I already got mine, you already got his, you know. Like so it is a it it really changed the whole investment space. Like all the appraisers, there's appraisers that got caught all caught up in this, and now like I just I'm refinancing eight of my properties right now to buy a big duplex and um like a very high-end, I shouldn't say big duplex because it sounds like kind of oxymoron, but it's an expensive piece of real estate, and um we can talk about that too. It's those other two deals that you told me to sell that I own the other two with this guy, and I'm buying the other two now. We'll talk about that later.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

Yeah, look at the numbers, make sure it makes sense first.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Yeah, it's too late now. I'm the underwriter on that deal. Too late now. Um I already signed an LOI for over a million dollars. Um, we broke the chair. God damn, Nick's gotta start losing some weight. Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Carl's gonna have to have to do some editing. Coming off that Super Bowl party. So many nachos and wings. That Buffalo chicken did really sit in on the city. This is good, this is great content here.

SPEAKER_03 37:20

Um the people come for.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah. Oh god. It's a budget podcast. We have budget budget cheers. Um now, I lost my train of thought. But anyway, I'm I'm wrapping up my these properties into a refinance, and the lender, the appraiser, told me that he got approached by some of these guys, and they were basically like offering him money to give him appraise, give them appraisals based on pictures. And like, hey, like I know your appraisal fee is$595, but if I paid you$9.95, would you just do it based on our pictures? We're just doing this at scale, and we, you know, we don't have the time to wait for you to get out there. And he he didn't do it. Luckily, he didn't get caught. But there is a list of now blacklisted appraisals appraisers that are, I imagine, gonna have some legal troubles in the made it harder for us to get these DSCR loans for quite some months because of all that going on.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

Everyone got scared, everyone who was lending that product in Baltimore pulled back a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

Uh but right now it's it's pretty all the institutional money that was doing that was lending on that product here basically disappeared. And then now they're now it's easier. It's coming back now. But a lot of people got scared and a lot of people lost a lot of money, and it's all from it's just fraud, basically.

Pricing Strategy And Letting Markets Decide

SPEAKER_00 38:40

Nobody's uh gonna accuse me of paying off an appraiser or uh our duplex that closes tomorrow. The appraiser came in 45 grand below our contract price on it, had to take the haircut on it.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

So that's our appraise on the eight units that I so basically my lender was like, What do you think the values are on this eight units? I'm doing it in the portfolio loan, and I was super, super conservative. And um we actually came in, he came in, it was like$300,000 more, the appraisal. And then when I went back to the lender, he was like, Oh, well, came in higher, you can get where I was like, Well, what if I took a lower LTV? Can we get a better product, a better rate? And that's what I ended up doing. So instead of going with the 75%, I think we're at like 60% LTV and getting a better product. So being conservative is is good when you're underwriting stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

But that's I don't know. So like I want to talk about the buying multifamily in 2020. Like, how could you be conservative at that time when you know some of these loans are like five-year loans and you're you're at the bottom of the market with the per interest rates, and like where do you expect them to go from there? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 39:53

Like you you can't be conservative. So the you don't buy deals, so you're conservative.

SPEAKER_02 39:57

So basically, you couldn't buy a deal if you analyze it to where in five years it might go up to six percent because then there would be another buyer that would have already bought that deal.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

Those people thought that the rates were just gonna stay at 3% forever. Yeah, I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 40:09

But how could they think that? Is it's kind of like crazy for someone.

Targeting 10–40 Units And Mom-And-Pops

SPEAKER_00 40:11

I think the hard part with it, like it's easy to sit here like Monday morning quarterback and be like, well, you should have thought about the truth. Is no one it was the fastest rate hiking cycle in history. Like nobody is underwriting for interest rates to go up by four percent. Now, if you had underwritten for interest rates to go up by two percent, maybe when they go up four, it sucks, but it's not gonna wipe you out. And so I think that's where if you were thinking they were gonna be three forever, you know, that's that's problematic. But the the the truth is, I mean, the the people that were true conservative investors during that time and under, like they didn't, they just didn't buy deals. And that's horrible. If you're you know, some if you're a syndicator and you you're living off of fees and you have to do deals to to pay your bills. I mean, that's where you know you look at the incentives there. Like if you are truly underwriting conservatively and the market is going that ape shit and everybody's overpaying, the reality is you're just not going to do deals. And so it's uh yeah, I mean, the the the smartest investors I know, or I don't know if they're the smartest, they were the guys who have enough cash flow and own enough property already that they didn't have to do deals in order to pay their bills.

SPEAKER_03 41:28

Yeah, that's that's important. So, how are you right now? Like, I we talked about it earlier about you know, money is typically the biggest thing that sets people back when they buy their first deal. How are you now raising the amount of money you're raising? And like, what are some like strategic tactics that you guys use to like go find money and you know get people to invest in you?

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Yeah, so I put I put some of my own money in every deal, but we have to, you know, we raise a large chunk of it as well. I mean, the not honestly, the number one pro tip I can give for raising capital is just be like on everything, like podcast, like what you guys are doing right here. Like people know you from this. Hosting events, be all over, be to the point you're like annoying on social media, honestly. Like every deal you do do should be on Facebook, it should be on Instagram, it should be on LinkedIn. You should be. I mean, so LinkedIn, that's the biggest one I discovered this year. I had, you know, I had LinkedIn for 10 years while I was in corporate. I never used it. Or like if my boss told me I needed to post something, I'd post it. But I started like investing in LinkedIn. I post every day at 9 a.m. on LinkedIn. I that's I've gotten inbound that and that's the people you want. Like it's one thing you can go pitch friends and family, and you'll you'll raise some money for sure. Um, but the the the the people you want are the inbound. Um, because those are people people most people at the end of the day, if they're not like your family, they they don't really want to be pitched. They want to feel like they're deciding to work with you. And so I've started getting a lot more of that. I mean, much like you guys, I I have a podcast, I have a weekly blog that I publish. But yeah, you just got to be out there and telling everybody about what you're doing and building expertise and sharing pro tips. Like, here's what I learned from my last deal. People want to feel like they're working, working with an expert at the end of the day. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Good. I think one of the things too, like you say, like sharing pro tips. I think that also includes like we've talked in this podcast about when I've lost my ass on deals and how I've done where like a lot of investors I feel like have their high school highlight real always, and they never tell you about how much they've lost. Like we did a flip, I mean, just what was that two years ago that you sold that we that I did that I was last year? No. That was the end of 2024. Yeah, it was at the end of 2024. It was definitely 2024 because that's when I because last year I didn't have this.

SPEAKER_03 43:52

Oh, you're talking about your flip that you lost your bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Delphi. I thought you were talking about PG County where we lost 15k.

Operations Tweaks: RUBS, Insurance, Utilities

SPEAKER_01 43:58

No, no, no. So so I've Bought a deal from a friend that uh was a wholesaler, and I just didn't do my due diligence on the underwriting. It was just like the interior of this neighborhood would sell for 1.1. The outside is on a double yellow line. I was appraised uh, you know, in my head, I was appraising it just wrong, and ended up losing like, was it$90,000? Like right, like real quick. Like it was the quickest$90,000 that I bought. Well, actually, it took forever. Because it was like six months. It sat sat on the market for a while. That's even worse. You'd rather just lose it quickly. It was like a slow bleed of and it was a big ticket. So like it was like a s it ended up selling in like the mid-sixes, I think, somewhere. Yeah. So I had pretty high debt on it, you know, at 10% and whatever.

SPEAKER_03 44:48

Those are the worst too, because you you in your head you're appraising it high, or you're thinking that the value's high, and then you're sitting on the market, and all the buyers are like, no, it's not there, and then you're trickling yourself down and you're just bleeding yourself out.

SPEAKER_01 45:01

And that that's me. I was like, I was eight years into investing and like been doing deals, like been doing construction, and I lost my ass, and it was because of bad underwriting, and I put that out in the into the world, like not to like not to do anything but show people like everybody is susceptible to losing money in some at some point. So like be careful and make sure you don't lose. Like at that point, losing 90,000, don't get me wrong, it hurt, but it didn't put me under. Whereas if that was my first deal that I ever did, that would have bankrupted us. If that was the fifth to tenth deal I've ever did, it would have bankrupted us at that point.

SPEAKER_00 45:42

Yeah, that stuff's great to share. Like, here's what happened, here's what I fucked up, here's what I learned from it. I mean, there's uh there's LPs and and investors out there who won't work with a GP who hasn't lost money. Because the most the most dangerous time in your investing career is when you're on the biggest heater and you start thinking you got the mightest touch with everything. I'm the man, I've hit six deals in a row, they're all just printing money. That is the absolute most dangerous time.

Diversification, Margin Loans, And PE

SPEAKER_01 46:09

That was the script, actually, because that was the exact script because like that that quarter that we had sold like I forget the the addresses now. I'll I'll have to look back, but like that I remember because you were selling some of them for me at the time. I made like a quarter million dollars in like a couple months. Yeah, just cloud. I was like, I could do this fucking this is easy, you know. Like we had just did one, I think, together at the time. Do we do one together that we made a bunch on? Uh no, no, no, not yet. Okay. So I did a couple, I forgot I don't even know what the address was, but I made a fucking boatload of money and like I was just feeling myself. And he told me, now he was he came to work for like not work for me, but like work under me to learn from me, fresh out of the Air Force, fresh out of working for the government. And I he fucking told me, Don't buy this deal, and I'm like, I'm gonna buy this deal. And I bought that deal and I lost my ass. And uh I have to look at it. You remember that? Oh, I remember. You can't forget because of 90,000 and having your protege tell you not to buy it, and you ended up buying it anyway. And uh, yeah, that one we we took a bath on that one, and it was it was hard. That um, like you said, when you're on a high, it's so easy to just pull the trigger, the money's there, you know you can do you know, you know the construction, like you think you know it all, and then boom, that happens, and it it humbled you, and you know, it humbles me. Still to this day, when I'm like underwriting deals, I think back to that one. I'm like, okay, what went wrong there? Exactly the it was the double yellow line, like that was it, like the double yellow line roof.

SPEAKER_03 47:44

It was a double yellow line and it was on a hill, so there's no driveway to get in. So you had to go around to the alley and park in the back, or you parked on a main road and walked upstairs to your house where it's like where are your guests gonna park? Where's your family gonna park? You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

That's the thing with flips. Like, I I don't really flip houses anymore. Um, but you quit, like you learn how much your house is worth when you put it on the market. You run your comp, but it's it's so much different than multifamily because it's all it's so about livability, meaning things like that. Like, oh wait, do I have to hike up or there's nowhere to park on the street? You know, things like that that you kind of when you're just if you're running just like a cursory level comps, you're just like, okay, square footage, beds and baths, and that stuff shows up. I I mean, I've done it like I had a flip where I uh it was a three-bedroom, for example, but the third bedroom was like this shitty loft thing, and but that's the stuff people care about when they go in there, and so you're all of a sudden you're underwriting against other, you know, typical three bedrooms, and yours is not really being treated like a three-bedroom to a buyer.

SPEAKER_03 48:48

Yeah, we talked about this last week, but like multifamily is more like a business, right? Like you come in and create it, you know, make it a business and and raise rents and you know hit your target values, and you can't do that in the single family space. Brenton, I don't know if you guys just saw this, but Brenton just posted one. He has two flips coming in the same on the same neighborhood at the same time, and they're very similar houses. And he's like, I don't really know what to do here because it's like I'm gonna be pricing against myself, you know? So it's like that's that's something you gotta think about, and it's it's tough.

Team Building With VAs And SOPs

SPEAKER_01 49:19

I think like what you said, and you've said this before, and it's ring true, and I've actually like as like from a real estate agent's perspective, because I I I am an agent, I sell you know a handful of houses a year, um, just for clients that I do construction for and stuff. Most of the stuff I ended up I'm just referring to Chase and his people, but one of the things that Chase did that kind of changed my way of looking at the market and selling is pricing low and letting it run up rather than chasing the market down. And I've done that now with a couple of deals and and actually had to like explain that strategy to that one house in Shipleys that ended up taking like a long time. This neighborhood that's might happen to be the neighborhood I live in, these houses would sell in a day. If it's priced right, like it's gone in a day. This house sold in the and I explained to the clients like we're priced wrong, and they're like, no, this is this is the price. And like, this was the price last year. Yeah, this is the pro this isn't the price now. And we ended up waiting and waiting and waiting. We ended up getting very close to that price, but it took like six months on the market or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 50:25

My philosophy has always been like the market's gonna determine where you're gonna fall, so like, why not get there quicker than having to wait it out? Because like you're narrowing your buyer pool when you're priced high, and now you have to like search through all these buyers to find that one specific buyer that'll maybe even come close to that, maybe you have to ask for a buyer concession. So I've just always been like, let's get there quicker. Like, we're gonna fall where it's gonna fall, let's just get there quicker.

SPEAKER_00 50:49

Yeah, I we see that in multi-family. If you see in multifamily, you'll see the listings where it's like perfect for a 1031 buyer, which means translation. We're hoping we can find somebody who's desperate enough to overpay for this thing. And it's uh I mean you're totally right. Like the if you price it too low, the market will let you know. But if you price it too high, nobody's gonna show up. And then it's like, you know, you sit on market six months. Are you having to pay if it's uh owner occupy, like what's it worth? You're having to pay two mortgages for six months, maybe, or it's a or just like from a stress standpoint and all that stuff, too. You gotta account for it.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

What I try to tell people is like you don't have to start like you don't have to accept any offer. Right. You could put it on the market for one dollar and then it you could say no to every deal every person, but it's like getting those eyeballs on it is number one priority.

SPEAKER_03 51:37

It's why auctions are so good, right? Like you get at a price point where there's a ton of people interested, and now the seller has leverage. Well, that's the same thing we're trying to do here. So I always call it event-based pricing with my sellers. I'm like, hey, you either want to do event-based pricing or like fair quote unquote fair market pricing. Um, but nothing's ever fair until a buyer and seller agree on it.

SPEAKER_02 51:56

So are you your multifamilies that you're buying now? Are they are you looking for fully occupied? Are you looking for uh value add? And like what kind of value add opportunities are you specifically looking for?

Systems, Problem Solvers, And Ownership

SPEAKER_00 52:08

We'll do both. I mean, we are to answer your question, we're looking for mostly fully occupied, fairly stabilized. I mean, the reason we like the kind of 10 to say 40 unit space is it's a lot of mom and pop. And um, Ryan, you mentioned there, I mean, there there's benefits to both, right? The huge apartment complexes, there's economies of scale, maybe you don't get in the 10 to 40 unit. You can have on-site management. But what we like about this space, and particularly in Oregon right now, where we're buying, it's a huge buyer's market, is when you're buying from mom and pop, a lot of them they're not running it like a business. They haven't, I mean, the so the last deal we bought,$2.1 million, day one, we created$120 in value out of six cap just by getting a new insurance quote. Like things like that, that your institutions are going to be on top of all that. There's way more, we think at least there's way more low-hanging fruit in these. Like they haven't checked their garbage bill in 10 years. They haven't checked their insurance. Um, they haven't that huge one, obviously. They haven't instituted rubs, right? They're just eating, like this one that we just bought, they're eating$30,000 a year in utility costs. And then, you know, of course, that's the expense side. Then on the um the revenue side, of course, you want to look at the the rent roll, right? These are all very similar units, but there's huge disparities between what they're getting in rent. And so that's I mean, a hundred bucks in rent out of six cap is twenty thousand dollars in value. So you can see how you know you got a handful of units that are 300 bucks under, you can you can add some pretty serious value uh pretty quickly. So that's what we're looking for mostly. We're so to answer your question though, we will buy more um, you know, kind of renovation value add stuff if it's really juicy. We have one going right now that's a 10 unit, and it was just like too good to to pass up. But right now, with how much of a buyer's market it is, I mean, I I just I don't see a ton of incentive to buy that riskier stuff and and take on bridge debt and um because there is so much you can buy that's borderline stabilized already, and you can just make little tweaks to the operations and and hit your numbers on it.

SPEAKER_01 54:25

Yeah, I like that that outlook on it by mom and pop because uh we do this we're kind of in the similar space with the new development stuff that we're doing. Like we're buying like one to four lot develop like development deals, we're building new houses and selling them where like the big institutions don't want that, but like the Ryan Holmes of the world and the DR Hortons, they're buying like hundred you know, hundred unit lots, and they don't want the one unit, but it's too big. Like the development world is too big for some for the flipper that you know has done 10 deals, but it's too small, so you're kind of in that niche, and that's kind of where you're sitting in the multifamily space. So I like that kind of outlook. Um, what are you are you investing in anything else besides real estate right now? Because I've been heavy, and I I texted Chase today. I'm like, I've been heavy on putting money into equities recently because it's just the that market has been just on fire. Do you just doing real estate or are you doing anything else?

SPEAKER_00 55:20

I I own some stocks. I don't actively invest, I mean, I'll keep a little money on the side to have my fun with it. I'll buy an individual stock every now and then. I've got my I time cost average for a long time and I'll I'll leave that money in there. I don't pull from it. Um I don't know. I mean, the way I I think for most people and arguably for me too, I think being diversified in real estate and and equities is probably a good idea. Um right now I'm pouring so much money into these deals that we're doing that I'm really not allocating anything to stocks. So I mean, my net worth is probably I mean, definitely over 90% in in real estate, and I'm not actively adding to my my equity positions at all. Now, for your average person who's uh, you know, for example, people who invest in our deals, I always tell people you should not put your last dime into this. Like you should be diversified, but for what I'm doing, I'm I'm going pretty uh pretty heavily into investing in our business.

SPEAKER_01 56:23

So one of the strategies that that I've been doing um is I have uh managed account with Merrill Lynch, right? And I put my money in there, and I've been I honestly have been putting probably 80% of my extra money that I'm that I'm getting into this these accounts, their CMA accounts, that I get to borrow against. So I'm borrowing against my assets that are growing. So it's kind of like it is like a little bit of a double leverage thing, but if you do it safely, like at a 50% ratio, you can keep your money in in the markets and also use it for real estate deals at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 57:01

What rate will they give you on that type of loan?

Partnerships, Politics, And Tenant Laws

SPEAKER_01 57:05

It depends on how much you have in the um in the account. Yeah. Because it'll be like if it's you know, you have to start with a hundred is the minimum. And then that'll be like, let's just say, prime plus one. And then once you get to 250,000, it'll be like prime plus a half. And once you get to 500,000, it'll be prime. And then once you get to a million, let's just say it'll be prime minus one.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

How do they make money if they lend you prime minus one?

SPEAKER_01 57:36

Because they're making money on your investments being with like the Darrell Lynch, right? So they can 10x your they can leverage your stuff ten times the Bank of America. They, you know, they so they make their money on advisory fees and using my money as collateral. Right. They're also leveraging my money. Um, so that that's how they make money. But yeah, so like right now I'm borrowing right around prime, which is really good. And like I just did a private money loan for somebody at 15%, and I'm borrowing that money at like seven. It's a there's a good little good little delta there.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

No, it's a good business.

SPEAKER_01 58:19

So that that's like one strategy that I've learned recently from, and I I have I have to give it to George or my my guy at Merrill Lynch, who who has kind of like brought me into this world because he I was like always like, I'm just doing everything in real estate, I'm just putting everything in real estate. Then I started doing some stock trading a couple years ago and started I was doing it myself on Robin Hood, and you know, I made some good money over the course of a couple years, and then once I gave it to gave it all to him, that portfolio just went through the roof. Like he they it's actively managed every day. It's traded in and out. We'd go shorts, we go longs. Like I'm right now trying to get into the private equity um space. They have a capital raise for the SpaceX IPO, so you have to be accredited and all that. But once you get into that space, like the private, the private side of things, your money can 5x in a couple of years. Because the the employees of those companies are selling their shares in the private market, right? And then you're getting those shares pre-IPO. And like with SpaceX, for example, if he wraps that with XAI and Tesla at some point, the money's gonna have 10x. And that's you've seen it like time and time again from private equity to IPO, people have just made like an insane amount of money. There's a lot of risk, and you're not liquid, it's not liquid anymore once you go into that space. It's not liquid until it goes public.

SPEAKER_00 59:43

Well, and it's so much more valuable now because companies are taking so much longer to go public because they can raise so much money in the private markets now that often, like by the time SpaceX hits its IPA. I mean, the IPO might go crazy, I don't know, but it should theoretically be pretty much fully priced. Yeah, because they've done price, they've done so many rounds already. Yeah, it used to be back in the day, you know, I wasn't really around for it, but I, you know, I've re read about it. I mean, companies used to go public way sooner in the game, but it is so it's so much different, right? You can raise in the private market so much more easily now.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:19

This isn't investment advice, but with private equity space, if you are an accredited investor and you have a good runway, a timeline, like because like what you said, like some of these companies will take four or five years to go public from the time that they even start their initial raise. So what if you buy into that, you cannot liquidate it. Like you're you're bought in until it goes public, then you can sell your shares on the public market. But when you do that, you're buying pre-market at such a discount that it's it's a real serious, like you could you can 10x your money in five years. Yeah. So that's um not investment advice again, I should say. Because we could lose it all too. But I feel like SpaceX, there's a couple companies that I'm trying to get in on the private side as they're as they're doing raises with these, you know, Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan and all those big, you know, the big people are raising private money. It's um it is something. It's something to to consider. You should look like you're about to say something.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:23

So, Matt, how many properties do you currently have right now, and then how many employees do you currently have?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:28

We are at 65 doors right now, and basically have three full-time employees. I've got people that do other stuff for me, but really just three full-time.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:40

Okay. And then myself, obviously. And last week I asked a guy in a similar space as you, but how did you go about creating that team? Um, so like for anybody thinking about getting into commercial base and and building that team, like, how did you go about building that team strategically? Like, who was your first hire? And then how did you hire someone?

Affordability Narratives And Risk

Rewards, Watches, And Networking Upside

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

Yeah, so I hired my first VA the second I finished that book, Buy Back Your Time. I was like, this is this is the thing. Like, I gotta do this right now. And I encourage people to read that. Um What was his role? What were her role? Uh her role right off the she was doing everything. Like, I was teaching her property management. I was just slowly adding tasks to her plate. I had her doing some social media stuff. Um, but the process was, you know, she started off just like doing social and collecting rent, and then I taught her how to do maintenance and so on and so forth until I mean today she's still with us three years later, and she's like, I mean, she's basically like my, I don't know, you'd call her like my chief of staff or COO, whatever. She has one of those. Yeah, she knows how to do everything. And then she referenced me through to my second VA who I hired. He runs our podcast, does some social stuff, and then she referenced me to our third VA who's helping her with the property management now, um, because we have enough doors that it's like too much for her to do by herself. So um, I mean, yeah, re- reference hiring is great because people can can fake interviews, people can sell you a bill of goods, but if you get one person you can trust, they're usually going to be able to reference you through. Like the VA world's a perfect example. People kind of bounce around different jobs. Some companies have a hundred VAs, so they're meeting all these people and they know that 90 of them suck, five of them are pretty good. These three were awesome. Let's see if one of these three is looking for work right now. And so that's how we've built it. Um, yeah, from the property management uh to the social media side. And then we want to grow it because we want to ultimately, I don't want to run a huge property management business. No, you don't. Um, like this. So this 19 unit we just bought, I gave that to third party management. I want to ultimately, we're we're in the process right now of selling all, especially these properties I bought during COVID that have a bunch of equity, but they're like single family or duplex. We want to slowly sell those off, uh 1031 the money into these bigger deals, give it to third-party property management and and then scale this thing because it's uh, you know, I mean, I know you're doing the property management, it, but it is a full-time business. And it's uh you got to build amazing systems. You get it's uh, and I just don't want to be in that business long term. It's a really good business because you get recurring income from it. You know, you're you're burning, you're running 8% of everybody's rents, but we want to get out of that business. I want to have her uh doing higher level stuff, almost like transaction coordinator, running these big deals where I can her name's Angela. Like Angela, we're buying this 50-unit building, handle all my the lender wants a hundred documents, go hand that handle that for me. So I want to just keep moving my team up to higher and higher level stuff the longer they're with the company.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:48

Where are your VAs located?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:52

They're all uh they're all Philippines. Okay. And what did you go through a company or how did you go about hiring your VAs? Because we uh uh Nick, do you have VAs? Well, so me and Ryan have had VAs, as he mentioned, he took one of mine over, and we use the company, like you said, that outsources and finds them and then lets you interview however many you need to interview. Um and it's been really like it's a challenge. Ryan's been through a few, he's finally got one that's a killer. I found Juris who was very similar, like we were can comparing like profile personality charts, and I was like, okay, he has uh Carl, who is basically like his COO. And I was like, All right, well, Juris is pretty close on personality traits, like she's gonna be a killer, and she she was actually really good. So, how did you go about finding your VA?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:35

And um, yeah. Yeah, first one we hired is Angela, and it w it was through a company, they were called like VA House or something, and you know, they usually do a contract where they uh, you know, set and they take a cut of her pay or whatever. And she had been with us for like, I don't know, six months, and I was just like, Angela, do you wanna just come on full time with us? And I kinda hit the jackpot 'cause she was the she was the first one we hired and she's a freaking Su superstar. Um and that was lucky because that you know she's done an incredible job, but she's also introduced me uh to these other VAs um who are you know make up our entire team now.

Closing Banter And NYC Plans

SPEAKER_01 1:06:12

Yeah, mine um I got really lucky because my first VA was Carl, who's still with me almost three years now. And um I actually funny enough got to go to the Philippines and hang out with him. Oh, no way. So I had a ironically just had a a friend of mine um getting married in the Philippines to a he she lives here, but uh she's a doctor and she grew up in the Philippines, so she wanted to have her wedding there. We went there and then so I flew him and my Carl and his wife into the island that we were staying at first, and we stayed at uh like a resort together, and it just so happens like we're about the same age. He does triathlons, I do triathlons, like he does he's done like an Iron Man out there. We've we just like connected, and it was like the coolest experience because for two years we would talk on Zooms and talk every day, and like I mean, he knows about me things that nobody else knows. Like he's in my email, he does all my emails. Yeah, I was telling Paige um my wife the other day, yesterday when we were driving, or no, Sunday when we were driving home from uh the Super Bowl, and uh I was like, I was typing some weird stuff in Chat GPT asking questions, and I'm like, hmm, Carl's in my chat too, because it's like a pro account. He sees all of these wild ass questions that I'm asking. I'm like, I wonder what he thinks about all this. Like, he's like the only one. Like, and he's he's listening, he's gonna be listening to this tomorrow while he's editing it and like probably go into my chat and look at all the weird shit that I've looked up in the last like couple of months. But yeah, like having a VA, uh just to go off of like having a VA and then finding one that works and training them and and having them be um like a part of the the family and part of the team is a superpower because the your money goes a lot farther there, and the they're hardworking. Like, I he's the only VA that has like my credit card information. All the other ones don't really have access for like to payment portals or anything like that. Not that I don't trust them, I just really trust Carl to be you know honest with anything, and um, and they know like my bookkeeper would catch anything that would you know was fraudulent anyway, but like that once you find it and you trust it, it is a superpower. Like Eddie, our our buddy Eddie um called me the other day. He's like, dude, I am just so bogged down. He's a W-2 job, but he also is an investor and has some stuff. And he's like, I'm just so bogged down. And he's like, I hear you talk about Carl all the time. Like, can you link me up with Cyberbacker to to uh get a VA? He's like, I just need somebody to help me with like general tasks. And I'm like, first, you need to write yourself a so scope of work. Like, what exactly do you need them to do? How are they gonna do it? Because if you don't have that, they're just gonna be burning time, and they're just gonna be sitting around doing nothing. Like, first, you gotta build out the systems for that, and I can't stress that enough. Like, I learned when Carl and I, when I started with Carl, like we were meeting every single day, going through the workflows that I was doing, and I was basically like building out the training manual live with him. And then now, fast forward to like Jocelyn, who's here, she runs my property management company, she has two VAs. I work for her, Jurass is one of them. I made her go in and make videos, and I've done this a couple times in uh what's that app I use? Loom. Loom, make videos of every workflow, like how to pay a Baltimore City water bill, how to enter this into QuickBooks, how to use App Folio, how to do this in App Folio, how to do this in App Folio. Everything has its own video so that if, for example, jurist leaves us, we can say, okay, next person, watch this video 10 times before you ask me any questions. And that's that's my like standard operating procedures. Like, if you don't watch this 10 times and you come to me with a question that's answered in this video, I'm gonna be angry.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:56

Yeah, that's that's the skill set you need. Like it is you don't you don't need to go to a fancy school, you don't need to have whatever certification. You need to be a problem solver and you need to know how to figure things out. Like with chat like my staff, they will go, they'll ask Chat GPT how to do something, they'll watch a YouTube video on how to do it. Like, if you're asking me questions how to do shit all the time, and and most of it's document. I mean, we did the same thing when Angela was starting. Like, I told her, Angela, you need to document everything as if we hired someone tomorrow to take some of these tasks off your plate, and they should be able to do them basically day one. And that's exactly what happened. We hired uh Michelle, and she could basically plug and play into this stuff because it's all you know, it's all documented. That's how you build a business, right? Like everything has to be repeatable, it has to be documented.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:48

Yeah, systems are boring, but they're scaling, you know what I mean? You gotta do it though, yeah. You gotta do it this and you're welcome because I trained jurors every time she had a question. I made her go put it in the spreadsheet. And then before she asked me that question, she had to go research it on ChatGBT. And when she found the answer on ChatGPT, she then had to put the answer into the spreadsheet. So now she had the answer to the question anytime she needed it for a reference. And if she still didn't think it was good enough, then yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:12

The other one I'll do is all I'll just I'll go, I don't know. What do you think? What do you think we should do? Yeah, and there they're you start to re the more people you work with, you start to realize that you're not so fucking smart. Like you can you can let up you can let other people like you you'll just I don't know if you've never hired somebody or hired a good VA, like you will realize the second that you just empower them to start doing stuff that they're gonna be better than you at half of it, and they're gonna be less distracted too, because it's their job and they're not running around doing a hundred different things.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:44

Um Carl will like mistake uh correct my mistake, but I think he has a degree in mechanical engineering. And I was a gym teacher, he's clearly smarter than me. Like I could not get a degree in mechanical engineering, I can barely read. So knowing that he is smarter than me in certain things, I do say, like he'll, you know, for website stuff or whatever, I'm like, I don't know, Carl, whatever you say. Yeah, what do you think? It's it's up to you, and like I you know more than me at this point. And I think that is admitting that you aren't the smartest person and just surrounding yourself with people that are smarter than you and you know that they're smarter than you, is its own superpower itself. Like knowing that, okay, this is the person that I'm trying to be like, so I'm gonna put myself in that room. And that's how I found my first investors and how I've learned like lessons, and that's why people now pay me to coach them to learn lessons that before it's a mistake that they made, I've probably made it. Let me, you know, let me help you. Um, not saying that I'm smarter than anybody else, but I've just been there. So like it is one of those things, like knowing that that person is smarter than you and putting them in the place that they belong is is barring on one of the most important skill sets in like running a business, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:08

So, do you have any other partners, Matt, or is it just you as far like in the syndication process, like with your team? Because you have three VAs you should say general partners, I guess. General partners.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:18

I've been no, so I I you know I I bring on investors, but they're uh I I run the deals at this point. Um, we do it's funny you mentioned we just offered on a 22 unit today that I I am if we get it, I'm partnering uh with my buddy on it, who's a b who's a big uh Portland syndicator as well. But yeah, so far I've I've just done it on my own.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:39

Well, so in Portland, um not we don't like to talk too much about politics here, but it's very liberal there. Correct. And so are you guys seeing like laws and stuff change? Like, um I'm not a huge fan of the new mayor of New York with his real estate like becoming uh, you know, it's it's racist to own real estate, and we're gonna make that uh a public, you know, they're gonna basically take take away private ownership of real estate. Are you seeing the same thing happening in Portland or like signs of it happening in Portland?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:17

It's uh all yeah, I could do a whole Mumdani rant, but I'll I'll just put it this way with Mamdonny. I th I don't think his idea, they're all they're horrible ideas. They've been tried a hundred times throughout history. It's called communism. Anybody that studied history can look it up. It doesn't work. Um, and I don't think it'll happen in New York. It's the mayor doesn't have as much uh as much power as people think they do. Um as to Oregon, yes, it's it's very left, left-wing, liberal. Um, there were mistakes, big mistakes that were made a number of years ago. Uh the namely like the decriminalization of drugs was a total disaster in 20, I think it was in 2021. To their credit, they've gotten rid of that. They admitted it was a disaster. Some of the politicians that were um I didn't agree with, I'll put that uh simply, have been voted out. Um, another one of the key mistakes was they started allowing camping everywhere, like just tents anywhere in the city. That has changed. So um, I mean, in fairness, there there is a contingent there that's like, you know, landlords are evil, anybody with money is evil, blah, blah, blah. Now, with that said, if you look at historical returns on housing, the mo the markets that have the highest returns are the ones that are the most tenant-friendly, right? Because if you go down to Texas or the Sunbelt or whatever, you can go like it's happening right now. They get overbuilt like crazy because you can just build housing. Now, that's a good thing for society, right? We have a massive affordability problem in America. We need to build more housing. But if you're an investor, that's horrible, right? So the same thing, you know, we as investors, we frankly, we we we play the ball as it lies, right? Is that good that Portland it's a nightmare to build housing there? No, it's not. But if we're gonna invest there, that's good for us. And so there is a massive shortage of supply. And it's it's kind of a catch-22 because those exact same things, like tenant-friendly, uh, not business friendly, all those things that are downsides to a city like Portland or Seattle or San Francisco, they're also up because those factors are the exact same reason there's a supply shortage. People don't want to build there because it's a pain in the ass. It's it's hard to deal with. And so um, yes, I mean, there are I I'll be any any LP that I talk to, you know, that that's one of the first questions they ask. And I will be very honest about it. Yes, it's a nightmare if you want to evict somebody. Um, but there are, you know, it's you run property management. You guys just have tenants. Like if you if you screen people properly, somebody that has a 650, 700 credit that wants to own a home someday and get a home loan, they're not gonna, you know, they don't want an eviction on their record. You rent to somebody who has a 500 credit rating, they don't really care if their credit rating drops to 450. So, um, you know, it's I uh to be blunt, it's not an easy market to operate in. But some of those um, I guess red flags that some investors would point out are some of the things that also make it attractive to invest in. That's an interesting take.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:34

Speaking of Seattle, do you have any properties in Seattle?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:37

I don't. I was born in Seattle. I've uh I've spent a decent amount of my time up there. I do not own in Seattle, though, but it's it's a similar market. In fact, Seattle's probably uh even more tenant-friendly than than Portland is. It's pretty, it's pretty rough. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:53

Yeah, Baltimore's tenant-friendly too, but if you have the right systems in place and stuff, I mean evictions are taking, you know, three months, probably right from start to finish, yeah. 90 days, which isn't like crazy now. It during COVID, obviously, that that change that was like a little bit worse. But I just see some of these cities, like Baltimore is just so small, so it's not really like on the map as much, but like, you know, all I see on Instagram is New York mayor, who's like literally pasted all over there, like he's like the new face of the Democratic Party, it seems like. And I'm like, this is not a good path for for society. If like because you said, oh, the mayor doesn't have that much power, sure, but you know, he can't be president because he's not from here, but like that kind of paves the path for somebody to come in and be the president and run the like they do have that power.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:46

Yeah, it nor it it can. Like it can change the what's the term for it? Like, it opens the Overton window where people start to uh you know, it's it starts to normalize these ideas, and it stems from it stems from inaffordability. Like that's what that's what he ran on. Frankly, I read a really interesting article on this a few weeks ago that said in some ways Trump and Mimdani are at opposite sides of the spectrum, but they sort of ran on the same thing. Like affordability, I'm gonna fix it, we're gonna tear the system down, and it's uh, you know, whether they actually have the the ability or what whether they're actually gonna execute on it is almost irrelevant. They're just telling people what they want to hear. And and New York is the most unaffordable place in the world, practically. And this guy comes in and says, I'm gonna fix it and we're gonna do everything for free. And, you know, people like us can hear that and be like, yeah, that's we've seen this before. These are horrible ideas. But the people who can't afford anything, it's he feel they they feel like he's speaking to them. You know, he was good at social media, he had clear messaging social media, and it worked. I don't agree with a single thing the guy stands for, but he he ran a good campaign and he spoke to uh this problem. I mean, affordability is the it it is the theme in America right now, and he spoke to it. And what else do they have to lose?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:07

You know, they already can't afford stuff, so that's that's the yeah, that's the problem. It's like those people aren't really moving the needle. Um, they don't have employees working for them. They can't, they don't need to provide for other people, they're just trying to survive on their own, and that's a tough position to be in. And I think, yeah, he spoke to a lot of people, he was very good at social media, but we'll see if some of the stuff maybe we'll have a follow-up pod where you know if the city doesn't burn down, I'll come up there and we'll do something like there. But like I think it's an interesting um what am I the word I'm looking for, like test, you know, like a beta almost of what that uh society will look like if if rent control comes into play again. And like you guys still have rent stabilized apartments there, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:51

Yeah, the c I'm admittedly, despite living there, I'm not an expert on New York real estate because I'm so locked on Oregon. But it's uh yeah, what is I think 60% of NYC apartments are market rate, and then there's like 30% is affordable and 10% is rent stabilized or something like that. Um, but the problems are obvious. If you freeze the rents, which is his stated policy, you know, if inflation goes up and your rents can't move with it, you have a failing building. And that trickles down to tenants because you can't if you if you're not making any money, you can't you can't fix the units, you can't provide a good place to live. And it's you know, anybody that is is honestly looking at the issues knows this is a horrible idea. But again, it comes back to the same thing messaging, landlords are evil, capitalism sucks, let's uh let's stick it to the man. And it's uh that's the the sad irony of it is it it does not it doesn't even help the people who they think who it's in supposedly intentioned to help.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:51

Yeah. We will see. We will see soon how that plays out. But I know we gotta get you to a train, so soon, probably. I don't know what time you're I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:03

I'll I'll I'll find a way back to I'm all screwed up. I'm at the wrong station. I don't even know, yeah. Yeah, my bad about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:09

I I text him like we're real close to the train station. I didn't say which train station, you just knew I was in Baltimore somewhere. There's gotta be more than one train. No, there's a train like every every couple minutes going up to New York, so it's not a big deal. But um so one last thing. How much did you pay for your watch and how much is it worth right now? Because we've we we've we've talked about watches the last couple podcasts or a couple podcasts ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:33

Yeah, so this date just, if you're on the video, I but this was the first watch I ever bought. I I like to do them for like I do a big deal or hit some sort of landmark or whatever. So I don't really buy a lot of toys, but watches are my one thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:46

This was don't say toys because I'm arguing it's an investment.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:50

Yeah, let's let's go let's go with that. This investment on my wrist that tells the time, just like my phone does. Um but I have to turn it all the time when it's run. No, I think I bought this for it was like just under 10, I think. And I bought it in 2021, which I think right was it? It was I think I bought it like the height of what well, that was the everything bubble. Um, it's probably worth less now, honestly. I I have no idea. I'm not selling it, so but my my in investment, I I would think, has probably not gone up a ton in value since I bought it.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:25

I've done some research and I was just like, okay, if I bought this watch in 2000, what would it be worth today? And it's like there is an argument to be made that it is uh a quote unquote investment. So that's why I just got into watches like last year. I started doing like digging and convinced my wife to let me buy the first one, and then hopefully she doesn't watch this podcast, she never watches the podcast because this is supposed to be for a special occasion that's happening in a couple of months from now. But I bought it in New York uh uh because I got a good deal on it, and um I think that it is a good com like it's a good commodity, like gold's at an all-time high. Um, I think it's a good diversification if you have the funds to do it. I think it's a fun game and it's a good conversation starter. And like I I'm pro watch, but they're cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:18

It's okay to buy stuff, it just makes you happy, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that mindset. Yeah. Everybody like if you look around, everybody buys things that they enjoy, right? Like you either travel, you like your house, you like your car. You can tell what people are into by where their money goes.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:31

Yeah, nobody nobody likes the guy that's like, well, if you had invested that in 30 years, it would compounding interest, it would be like I don't know, dude. I just wanted a watch and it sounded fun, so I bought it. Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:42

Yeah, you gotta you gotta you gotta reward yourself for the hard work. And if you don't, and you just you're just like spinning wheels for no reason. And when you get to a certain point and you have the money, like you need to enjoy it. And I I truly believe that like I just started spending money like a couple years ago. Like I was just grinding away, building these businesses, buying houses, almost bankrupting myself, buying more houses, almost bankrupting myself, running the businesses, and like once you start being able to enjoy it, it makes running the business and working more fun.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:14

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:14

It's just like okay, now I have another goal, another goalpost. It's moving a little bit now. Like, well, I got it. And it's also like the the more toys and stuff you get into, the more doors open up. Like, I started racing cars last year, BMWs. Like, we we go to these car events. Now I'm meeting people that are racing Porsches and BMWs. Like, that's a whole market of people that are future potential investors of mine that are racing BMWs. I know they have money, like I don't know how they have their money, but I know they have money, so I could be pitching them deals. Like there's watch clubs, there's car clubs, there's all these country clubs, right? Like, people look at country clubs as a dumb investment, but I will say that I know plenty of people that do all their business at their country club. Yeah, and there's one across the street from from where I live that's like one of the most exclusive country clubs around here, and it has people in it. Like, I mean, the owner of the Ravens is a member there, and like there are people there that are super influential, and like I think if you put yourself in those spaces, you're gonna open doors that wouldn't have been opened before.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:22

Totally. You want yeah, you want to be in rooms with people who are further along than you, or preferably smarter than you, or you know, or or where you want to be five, ten, fifteen years from now.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:33

Just don't buy the shit to impress other people. That's that's all I say, right? Like the Gucci belts and the like if you enjoy it, you enjoy it, right? Like that's your thing. But like if you're just buying it because you want to impress the next guy that doesn't give a fuck about you, like you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:48

Yeah, yeah. You gotta have the right reasons in place, and it's gotta be something that truly makes you happy. I think that's the biggest thing. It's like if you look at your purchases and you're like, well, that was a dumb, that was a dumb thing, like that's just that's that was a bad investment. But if you look at something, even if it's depreciating and you it made you happy, fuck it. That's a good investment, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:08

Yeah, you you go on a trip, there you're you go on a retrip. There's there's literally zero return. And it's and I would argue it's the best money you could ever spend.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:16

100%. Like our company trip every year. I spend a lot of money and it makes a lot of people happy. We go to Cabo usually or like Costa Rica or whatever, and it is like the most uh rejuvenating week and it brings everybody back, and like everybody's just like hungry for more, and like spending that money and doing that stuff and making yourself fun. Like, I mean, Nick travels a ton, um, and a lot of people make the excuses like, you know, well, I have kids and I can't do this. Like Nick and I went and interviewed Brandon Turner um in Hawaii and he just brought his daughter with him. And it's like it's if you want to do these things, you can do them. And like that was um that was like my like opening, like, oh well. He he has a kid. All these other people that have kids are like saying, Well, I can't do that because I have a kid's like no no no. You can, you're just choosing not to. So I think that's like a I I give Nick kudos for that because you'd never you didn't let like having a kid slow you down at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:15

Yeah, no, not one bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:16

So that um that's all I got. What anything else you guys got for Matt here? No, I appreciate you coming out. We'll have to get up to New York and do something up there. Please, yeah. I like taking the train up for the day or one night and then coming back.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:31

Well, uh we'll go see Harry Potter again. You uh told off air we talked about this uh epic uh Broadway stage with a pool on it or sorry. Yeah, I didn't quite hear it. I haven't brushed up on my Harry Potter in some years, but it sounds cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:47

Either I had no idea the storyline the entire time, but I was just mesmerized by all the effects and stuff, and I would change my wife, like, what's this person? And like that, I will say, admittedly, I had a great time, and I highly recommend the Harry Potter play that's currently going on in New York City. It was truly amazing. Some of the characters from from the movie are in the play that are playing themselves 20 years in the future. Oh, no way. That's cool. Really cool. Um, they were the actual actors that were kids at the time and now are fully grown adults, and they're playing themselves as the adults, and it's like the next generation of wizards that are the like the main characters. It it was it was cool, it was cool. So I have to give shout outs to that. I thought I was gonna be s nodding off and sleeping the whole time, and and I was fully engaged. So shout out to shout out to Harry Potter. That's that's should we leave it with that? Wrap it right there. Shout out to Harry Potter. All right, guys, until next time. Thank you, Matt, for coming down. Thanks, guys. Thank you.