Keith Wasserman – Real Estate Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.120]

My guest this week is Keith Wasserman, co-founder of the real estate investment firm Gelt. This was my first fully dedicated conversation on direct real estate investing, so we cover many different topics, including the pros and cons of different types of real estate, current valuations, risk vs. reward, tax protection, and the most interesting emergent areas. You can tell Keith is an entrepreneur at heart so I enjoyed his energy and all that he has learned. Please enjoy. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Show Notes 1:15 - (First Question) – Their interest in apartments and mobile homes as investments 2:32 – The returns spectrum for different classes of real estate 4:03 – His early entrepreneurial ventures and the start of Gelt 7:45 – Don’t be afraid of negotiating 8:34 – Going through early deals in real estate 11:57 – How he determines when it’s time to sell a property 14:13 – How do they think about taxes in their investment offerings 16:57 – Depreciation strategies in real estate investing 18:27 – The evolution of the types of real estate properties they’ve invested in 21:41 – Most important factors when evaluating a building to invest in 23:50 – Barriers to entry 25:41 – Changes in his cost of capital 28:51 – Cost of debt and deciding how much to put into a building 30:33 – A look at the competition 34:51 – Effective marketing strategies 37:07 – How demographics impact their strategies 39:11 – The co-living space 40:34 – Cloud kitchens and how he would invest in these 46:11 – How autonomous vehicles will impact real estate 47:52 – Pros and cons of developing new properties vs buying existing ones 49:59 – Early stage investing interest 53:48 – Favorite business/entrepreneur story 55:10 – Advice for younger entrepreneurs 57:09 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Keith Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is the CEO of O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest this week is Keith Wasserman, co-founder of the real estate investment firm Gelt. This was my first fully dedicated conversation on direct real estate investing. So we cover many different topics, including the pros and cons of different types of real estate, current valuations, risk versus reward, tax protection and the most interesting emerging areas. You can tell Keith is an entrepreneur at heart, so I enjoyed his energy and all that he has learned. Please enjoy.

• 1:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Maybe we could begin with a sort of taxonomy of this world. So I know that Gelt specializes in apartments and mobile homes. We'll talk a lot about that in some detail, but maybe you could begin by describing why those two were attractive and kind of where those sit in an overall. Grouping or lineup of potential types of real estate investment.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  That's a great first question and definitely we started with apartments due to the size and when you're leasing an apartment, if it stays vacant for too long, essentially you just lower the rent a little bit and you'll have someone that moves in. My family's been involved in office buildings and shopping centers and when there's vacancy, it could sit vacant for a long time. And once you get find a tenant, you have to pay a broker's fee, which could be very sizable. You have TIs, tenant improvements, dollars that have to be spent, a lot of free rent upfront has to be given. So the cash flows are more lumpy on those kind of asset classes, whereas apartments, it's more stable and pretty recession proof. If you if you buy it without over leveraging it and be very conservative, it's more of a guaranteed way to build wealth over time,

• 2:50Speaker 03

  whereas commercial, you know, office, retail, if you have any one large tenant that has a lot of space, it just a lot more risk and we like low risk. So that's why we're into apartments and mobile home parks primarily.

• 3:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Is there some sort of compensation for, let's call that a risk, like a sitting in an empty space in an office building or a commercial building or something? Do you then tend to get higher returns out of those places due to that higher risk? Like, talk me through the the return spectrum offered by these different subclasses within real estate?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  I'd say when the market's good, you could potentially have have higher returns in office and those more riskier asset classes, hotel, especially hotel, where you have, when there's a recession that occurs, hotel changes the rates daily essentially. So it's the first one to really get hit. But when the market turns, it's the first one to really come back strong. And I'd say there's potentially higher returns in that, but it's offset by the the heavy capital expenditures that are needed. Hotels, you have a lot of FFNE that constantly needs to be updated, you know, every few years. It's really running a business per se. And I'd say for the risk adjusted return, I really like the multifamily space and the the best,

• 4:03Speaker 03

  in my opinion, which we just started getting into is the manufactured housing space. Essentially, I'll explain for the listeners, you're renting a piece of a space, a pad, they call it. And you don't own any of the actual structures, the homes. The resident has to take care of all the, the buildings themselves, anything that goes on within the four walls. So you're just literally renting them the space and it's affordable housing at its core. The lot rent is three to $500 a month. And when you're having rising home prices, rising rent prices, this is really marketing to people that own, will own their own homes and have affordable living at, at its core.

• 4:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Maybe you can walk me through the specific history of Gelt, how it was founded, what the reason you founded it at the time you did, and then a little bit of the history of what you've done.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Definitely. So I've always been very entrepreneurial. To tell you the truth, I've never had a job in my life. So when I was 10 years old, I, I would go with my parents to Costco and we would buy candy bars wholesale and then go to the park and sell them retail one by one. When I was 13, I had a bar mitzvah and I started investing my bar mitzvah money into the stock market. I wish I still held, held on to those stocks, one being Netflix, was my biggest holding back in the early 2000s and I, I wish I had that one still. But real estate, like the stock markets, you know, buy and hold is the best strategy if you're holding on to good securities. And then I, I'll take you to high school. When I was in high school, I, I really learned how to make money on the buy, which has brought me into my real estate career. I bought a hundred leather jackets for $10 apiece. They were irregulars, IRs.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  They had small little blemishes on them essentially. They retailed for $300. They were Perry Ellis, beautiful lambskin leather jackets. I bought them for $10 apiece and I sold them for $80 to $100 apiece to all the students, the faculty, the teachers, the parents. I had a whole car of leather jackets. I, I smelled like a leather jacket, but I made around 10 grand at, at being a high school student. And I realized the importance of negotiating and making money on the buy, which led me to my next business, which was Keith's Bargain Center. All through my college years of 2003 to 2007, we ran one of the largest eBay stores. We sold around 200,000 items, ranging from electronics, DVDs, clothing, whatever I could buy for, for a good price and resell for a higher margin. That business sort of slowed down as eBay got more and more competition, PayPal kept

• 6:15Speaker 03

  raising their fees. And, you know, I, I realized my next venture might be in real estate, once I saw the market turning and crashing in late 2008. So my cousin and I, he came to me with the opportunity to buy a single four-unit building in Bakersfield, California, which for the viewers is around an hour and a half to two hours north of Los Angeles in the Central Valley. It's based on oil and agriculture and we felt that through the recession that those industries would really fare well and add a lot of jobs, which it did. So really started very small. We, as an entrepreneur, without a lot of resources, we figured out, you know, how to do this. We got an FHA loan, only put down around two and a half percent down. We borrowed $5,000 from a friend.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  We got a cash advance of $10,000 on our credit card and that's what got us into the first foreplay. So just being really resourceful and that's how we got started in this business.

• 7:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So I want to go through the, the history since then in a lot of detail. Always loved these early entrepreneurial stories. I'm curious where you found or sourced the leather jackets?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so downtown LA. My father is an attorney and he had clients in the apparel business and I started talking to them and one person led me to another person and I went downtown and I scoured the market and I found these, these leather jackets that a jobber had and literally they were just sitting rotting in the warehouse. They weren't able to sell them and I negotiated them down to that $10 price. They wanted $20 or $30, but I paid them all cash on the spot, you know, a thousand bucks for those 100 leather jackets and learned not to be fearful of negotiating. One of my mentors really taught me that and said, you know, just come in and negotiate and don't be fearful of... The guy had these jackets, they were just sitting there and it sort of reminds me of the Dollar Shave Club story where the gentleman who started that, I think he, he literally

• 7:58Speaker 03

  had a gentleman that had a warehouse full of these razors that they were, they were in import, export business and he started with those razors. He was entrepreneurial and he started that business because he saw, you know, a need in the industry, but had the opportunity to buy these things for a great price and started just with the, you know, warehouse full of razors essentially.

• 8:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you say more about what you mean by don't be afraid of negotiating?

• 8:19Speaker 03

  I think in business, you know, you have to be tasteful in how you negotiate, but everything in life is pretty much negotiable. You can't be afraid to sort of turn someone off and you make money on the buy and just like in real estate, if you buy something right. And you buy it below market where you think it's below market, you're going to have an immediate profit margin built in and a level of safety. So in today's market, we've had 10 straight years of a strong market in real estate. You're not going to essentially steal anything, but if we feel that there's a good story behind something and we see value where maybe our competitors don't see value and how to add value, we'll pull the trigger and make the purchase and we feel like we're buying something right

• 9:01Speaker 03

  and have that margin of error built in, then you're going to be much safer on an investment.

• 9:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So let's go back to the early days of the real estate business. So four units to begin with. Talk me through sort of a generic deal, maybe that first one or one subsequent, kind of what it looks like, what the major levers are. Like when you say you're making your money on the buy, what are the considerations that go into making sure that that calculus adds up and that you don't get trapped by overpaying for something? Like what is the evaluation process of a property?

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Looking back, the first 15 buildings where we bought were all these small little fourplexes. They previously sold for $400,000 to $500,000 during the height of the market, '05, '06. They were financed with residential mortgages because they're under four units. One to four units you can finance with those residential mortgages. People were getting them without any credit and money. So they were really driving the prices up. We purchased these for $100,000 to $150,000. So immediately it was well below replacement costs. So when you're buying something, if you could buy it below replacement costs, that's the first thing we look for. Second, they value it based on the income approach. So our mortgage payment for these little fourplexes were $600,000, $700,000, $800,000. Each unit rented for around $600,000. So if we had two units rented, it was paying for itself.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  If we had three or four units rented, it was cash flowing like crazy. However, little did I know, these were in the rougher parts of town and they had a little bit higher vacancy and higher turnover, higher repair and maintenance costs. So we didn't do as well as we thought and we learned an important lesson of really focusing on buying in better areas and maybe paying a little bit more to buy in those better areas because operations will be a lot healthier and stronger. But we learned the business by doing. We were driving to Bakersfield two hours each way, two, three times a week. Buying these buildings, overseeing all the due diligence, doing all the renovations, leasing them out. And I think the best way to learn any business is by doing. And literally, we had nothing to lose. We were buying these small little buildings, still living at home. And so if you're making mistakes, the mistakes are very small.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  We weren't, you know, we had one investor, then two investor. And we literally built this business one building at a time and one investor at a time. And literally, I think the biggest breaking point was a year later, we brought on two new partners. We call them the gray hairs because we were young guys. I was 24, my partner was 29. So we brought on a gentleman that could help us get on larger loans and another gentleman that could help us raise more money. So in December of 2009, we bought a 78-unit property for 3.9 million. We raised 1.3 million of equity from around eight investors. And we invested around 300,000 into that property, upgrading the property. All the fencing around the property was shot. We put in new fencing, gave it a facelift, new paint.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  It had two clubhouses, one that was totally shut down and closed up. We converted that into a gym. We feel like adding amenities, you know, people love having amenities on the property. It makes it a better community to live in. And literally, so people don't have to pay for gym membership now that you have a gym on the property. They weren't allowing pets, for example. We started allowing pets and charging $25 per month per pet, which is immediately just adding to the bottom line. So we did a lot of, and we added washers and dryers to the community. So just made it a better community and lifted the rents in the process. And we obviously upgraded the interiors, spent probably $3,000, $4,000 per interior. And we added a lot of money to the bottom line, to the NOI. And real estate's based on comps and then the income approach.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  So if you have higher income, the property's worth more.

• 12:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Talk me through the decision. I know over the years, I'm not sure how many individual deals you've done, maybe you could tell us. But you've had certain properties which I think you've held for longer, maybe just managed them for cash flow yield, others which you've sold. Talk me through the decision to sell. Obviously, we know you're a, you like to buy cheaper, make money on the buy. But how do you determine when it's time to sell a property?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  We have bought around 7,500 to 8,000 apartment units in total over the last 10 years. We've sold around 2,500 of them. We sold them primarily to create a track record. We went full cycle on these buildings to return capital to investors. And then whenever we found a new deal, they essentially gave us all that money and then more and told their friends, family, et cetera. And that's what's enabled us to grow to around 600 accredited, you know, high and ultra-high net worth investors. Everything and anything we've sold, we've essentially regretted selling because they've gone up in value so much more. So our philosophy is right now to really just build a portfolio and sell occasionally if we feel like, you know, someone makes us an offer that's maybe way above market

• 13:32Speaker 03

  price and we could either 1031 that money into a different property that has a lot of upside. But if it's a golden goose laying the golden eggs, why get rid of it? That's our philosophy. So really, our long-term goal is to build a large portfolio and just hold on and keep refinancing over the years and pulling out money that way and literally just hold on to these assets and take good care of them. Don't over-improve them. We have a saying, run it like a Honda. We take really good care of it. We're buying workforce housing built in the 80s and, you know, 70s, 80s and 90s. If you spend too much money renovating a unit, you're not going to get it back in terms of ROI. I mean, depending on the market, we've spent up to 40, 50,000 per unit renovating, but that's when the rents were maybe 800 to $1,000 and the market was $2,500 when something

• 14:15Speaker 03

  was just being totally mismanaged and slumped. But primarily, we're buying workforce housing where the rents are around $1,000, $1,200, you know, very affordable here on the Western United States. We're in 10 different states now, but primarily markets like Denver, Colorado, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Reno, spending $2,000 to $8,000 per unit and lifting the rents $100 to $250 in the process. So really, you know, making sure we don't over-improve the property, but taking good care of it because we want to hold these for the long term.

• 14:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned 1031 exchanges and taxes is something that is always interesting to me around real estate, using depreciation, et cetera. Talk through your thinking on taxes. I'm assuming since you've got high net worth investors, these are taxable investors. What do you offer or think about real estate as an investment asset class from that lens?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  It's literally, in my opinion, the best asset class in terms of Tax savings, all the income you're receiving, especially if you do cost segregation or accelerated depreciation, they call it, all that initial cash flow in the beginning years is essentially tax deferred until you sell that building. But if you sell that building and 1031 it, you could keep kicking the can down the road and not have to pay that tax either. So you have the depreciation, which is a phantom expense, which essentially it'll offset all the income in the beginning years until the income starts building up to where maybe it doesn't, it's over the depreciation and that you'll, and then you'll start having some small income on paper. But we send our investors K1s prepared by the CPAs that show paper losses because of

• 15:46Speaker 03

  that depreciation and that accelerated depreciation especially. So there's literally no, they're making 6% to 10%, call it initially on their money, cash on cash from the cash flow operation of the properties. And that's like earning double, you know, if you're in a high tax bracket as ordinary income. So that's one thing. And then, like you said, the 1031 exchange allows you to, you could own a building 20, 30, 40 years. We know people that have owned buildings have huge gains and just roll their whole capital gain into the next building and not have to pay any taxes. So it's an amazing way to build wealth that's compounding if you don't have to pay the tax. We've paid the tax on a few buildings just to put a few bucks in our pocket and to put a few bucks in the investor's pocket just to show that track record. But anything we're selling now, we're really trying to 1031.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  However, we don't want to just 1031 just to avoid the tax. We're only going to do it if the deal stands on its own two feet. We don't want to buy something just to buy something. So as long as we find a suitable property to exchange into, we'll do it. I'll give you an example. We just sold a building we bought four years ago for 25 million in Salt Lake City. We sold it for $40 million four years later. It was a huge gain. In the process, the investors were making great cash flow every year, averaging 8% to 10%. And this was at the end of last year. We couldn't find a suitable exchange property to buy, so... Literally, everyone got their money back and paid Uncle Sam. And but it's long term capital gain, just like selling a stock. So it's not as much as ordinary income. And I think just real estate is a great way to build wealth over time.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  It's not a get rich quick, but if you're patient, you sock away money into owning your own buildings or investing with a group like us, and you get good cash flow. You have appreciation of the building. You have depreciation that offsets the income. You could 1031. It's the best way to build wealth over time, in my opinion.

• 17:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you talk through the details of the depreciation side a little bit more? And whether or not that figures into buying strategies? So one thought would be you somehow identify buildings where the prior owner has burned through their depreciation, their potential depreciation expense. And they're not forced to sell, but they're almost, it's the time at which they would want to take advantage of the 1031 exchange and maybe therefore are willing to offer it at a cheaper price or something like that. But does that sort of thing happen? And talk me through the various depreciation strategies.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it happens all the time. So I think a commercial compared to multifamily, one's like 27 years, one's 33 years, if it was a straight line depreciation schedule. So long term ownership, we're buying a building right now from an owner that's owned it around that time period. And that's probably part of the reason why they're selling it, because now all the income cannot be sheltered. And literally, they could sell that building and exchange it into a new building and then have that depreciation.

• 18:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Restart the clock, yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Restart, yeah. So I think a lot of long term ownership has done that. My parents have owned a building around that time. And I bet they're going to start thinking about potentially wanting to exchange it because of all that cash flow is starting to be not sheltered. So it's definitely, I think, in people's mind, if they've owned buildings a long time. But a great thing that we're doing now is that cost segregation. They break out personal property versus real property. And some of this personal property has shorter term amortization schedules, like 10 years compared to the 27 years. So it front loads the depreciation. So you get that higher depreciation upfront, which. We'll definitely make sure you're not paying income taxes on that income on those properties.

• 18:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So talk me through maybe the timeline, the major stages of evolution that you've gone through from the original four-room apartments, you know, you mentioned a 78-unit one. What are the kind of major leaps that you've made in size and style over the years?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the first major leap was jumping from the four-unit buildings to the 78-unit. That was definitely a major leap. The second leap was geographically, I'd say. So we started in Bakersfield, we bought 13, 14 of those four plexes, bought the 78-unit December of '09. In 2010, we made another jump. We moved into Phoenix. So looking back, Phoenix was decimated by the housing bust. Literally rents dropped 20% from peak to trough in the apartment space. And they had around 100,000 people leave due to the immigration bill that passed, 100,000 illegals left, and they had buildings that were half vacant essentially. So there was blood in the streets, and I've been going to Phoenix my whole life because my grandparents lived there. And it's the fifth largest city in the United States. I had a good feeling it was going to recover from the recession.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  I didn't know it was going to go be so quick, but we started buying buildings in Phoenix, large buildings. The first one we bought was 415 units on Camelback, right by the Bilmar Hotel. I don't know if you're familiar with Phoenix. Amazing piece of property, 10 acres of land from a major REIT that had owned it for a long time. We paid 16 million for the property. It was 415 units. A lot of people were just fearful at the time because of the environment. Also, the building was mainly singles and studios and maybe some small one-bedrooms. So people were like, oh, they're small units. But I actually liked the small units because it's more affordable in terms of absolute rent. So we were undercapitalized. We only raised five and a half million dollars. It took us a long time to raise that money. I think we had to close with our lines of credit and we just kept raising money.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  But literally, that was one of the best deals we bought. We put maybe a million dollars into the property, into interior renovations, fixing some deferred capital items. We sold it a few years later for 27 million. But then that property, the new investor put eight million dollars into it, did a proper large renovation, they were well capitalized, and they sold it for around forty-five million dollars. So you've got to capitalize the projects right. At the basis that we bought it, the best and highest use was to scrape the site and probably develop. But at the time, we had no development experience. We probably could, I guess we could have partnered with a developer, we could have contributed the land and partnered with a developer and, you know, built even more than four hundred units on the site and made it luxurious, brand-new building because our cost basis was so low and it was such a prime piece of real estate.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  But that was the next major jump. And then after that, I'd say next major jump was literally just new markets and rinse and repeat. We kept buying larger buildings that were larger and larger in terms of number of units and purchase price. I always tell everyone, it takes the same amount of time and energy to buy a twenty-unit building as a two-hundred-unit building. There's less competition for the larger assets, there's more economies of scale. So on a two-hundred-unit building, you could have five, six, seven employees on-site between the management office, you have your onsite management, leasing staff, maintenance techs. On a twenty-unit building, you can't afford to have that. And on a fourplex, for example, if you have one unit vacant, you're seventy-five percent occupied only. On a two-hundred-unit building, you're always going to have people coming and going, but

• 22:08Speaker 03

  you're going to consistently maintain that ninety-five, ninety-six percent occupancy. So you're going to have more fluid cash flows coming in.

• 22:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm always interested in, I'm convinced that often, the variables for evaluating a given investment, you can typically boil it down to like five things that matter more than anything else. So if you were to identify, if I could, if you could only know, let's say, five things about a given building that you're evaluating, what types of things would those be?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the first thing we do is we study a market. So we really figure out which markets we want to be in, what cities we want to be in. Then we get boots on the ground, introduce ourselves to all the local brokers, the business leaders, the economic development corporations there. And try to find markets that if possible have higher barriers to entry. That's always a good thing. Have, we want to have a market that has major employers that are growing. Schools, hospitals, large employers. And then we try to buy buildings that are a little bit on the older side. Like I said, seventies, eighties, maybe nineties built. Typically, the unit sizes are larger. The rent is very affordable and we're not competing with the new supply that's coming online. There's a lot of, you know, the listeners are all over the country.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  But in a lot of major markets, the like downtown areas, especially certain pockets are being overbuilt. So we try to avoid those and just buy older buildings where the rent differential is so great that we're not really competing with them. And I'd say we always look to buy a story. Long-term ownership is great because they've sort of left, you know, taken their eye off the prize, off the ball. And there's usually ways we could come in and cut expenses, increase rent essentially through renovations, fixing deferred maintenance items. We like buildings that are, that have these kind of issues where the, maybe the ownership and management company doesn't, you know, respond to service requests within 24 hours and just have angry tenants in general, tenants that are, you know, not the highest quality.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  So we always need to make sure our residents earn two and a half to three times the monthly rent, for example. And we literally like finding buildings that have low market rent in gray areas that are growing, high barriers to entry if possible, below replacement cost and do our magic to the building. Don't over improve, you know, run it like a Honda, but take good, good care of it for the long term.

• 24:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What would the barriers to entry be?

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Like in California, you have sequo, you have like in LA, there's no available land essentially. In Phoenix, you have, it keeps pushing outward and sprawl. So we're not really buying in the outskirts of town. We're buying in the heart of suburban areas that are not too far from the, you know, the downtown CBDs and stuff. In certain markets, you have rent control and it's just very tough to build. You have geographic boundaries, mountains in certain areas or the ocean, obviously. So geographic boundaries. So areas that cannot see a lot of supply. We looked at Houston, Texas, for example, one time. And we just couldn't get our heads wrapped around. They don't really have zoning. You could have industrial building next to an apartment building and you have very high property taxes

• 25:04Speaker 03

  and they could build, I mean, literally 20,000 units a year with no problem. So you're always, I'm always concerned about oversupply. That's one thing that really could put downward pressure on rents and values. So we try to buy in higher barrier to entry markets that it's tougher to build in and have that growth. Obviously, I mean, Texas is growing tremendously. We finally did enter Texas. We bought in San Antonio because we bought it at an amazing price from a seller. We bought eight of the last nine properties. We bought from the same seller. And I didn't really go into this yet, but it's all about reputation in this business. You want to be a closer. The broker at the end of the day controls the shots and really, you know, you want to have a great reputation as a closer, not someone that comes in and re-trades.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  They say, oh, there's all these phantom issues with the property and they have trouble raising the money maybe, or they try to come in with a big price cut. We literally are good to our word. Brokers know that the commission's like money in the bank when they pick us with the sellers. And we know we have great reputations with the sellers also. We bought multiple deals from the same sellers. They like working with us. We don't nickel and dime them. We're easy to work with. So it's really all about reputation and relationship in this business.

• 26:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'd love to hear the evolution of your cost of capital. So both from the equity side and on the debt side especially, how that's changed over the years and kind of what that looks like today versus the past.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  In the beginning, I'd say we had different like deal structures with our investors that were probably a little even more friendly for investors. As we've developed that track record, we've tried to push it a little bit more in our way, but not too much because investors sort of get used to the deals being a certain way. We started, you know, with small deals, raising 1 million, 2 million, up to 5 million on that Phoenix deal, for example. Nowadays, we're raising 15, 20, up to even 30 million of equity for these large purchases. Our largest purchase was a two-property portfolio for 107 million. We raised north of $30 million from probably around 120 investors, give or take. We have a lot of investors. Our minimum per deal is like $100,000. Once in a while, if we know someone's going to put into a lot of different deals, we'll lower it to 50.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  But it's skewed because we have some larger investors that put one million or multiple millions per deal. But the most common check size, I'd say, the mode is like a hundred thousand. And it's literally just spread word of mouth. People tell their friends, family, friends of friends. There's a lot of people that have worked their whole life or are starting to earn good money and just don't know where to park it. They don't want to park too much in the bank because of the, you know, low interest rate environment. The stock market, you know, sort of scares them with the volatility. I like the illiquid nature of real estate. You don't see the fluctuation of price. You're not inclined to see your stock go down or your real estate go down in value quickly and say, oh, I need to click the button and sell this thing, which is the worst thing to do, obviously. I mean, you like Warren Buffett, you want to be greedy when people are fearful and fearful when people are greedy. And the same goes to real estate, but you don't see that that fluctuation in value. And it's more illiquid.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  So I always tell our investors, only invest money that you know you don't, you're not going to readily need. We do have a mechanism where if someone does need to sell, which we haven't had that yet in the last 10 years, but if we have someone that's needing that cash, we would have to offer their their share to all the other investors in that deal. But they're going to, they're going to get a small discount to the whole building because it is a fractional interest and it's more of an illiquid position. But, you know, the costs, so back to the question on cost of capital, the way we structure our deals is we offer a preferred rate of return between usually six to eight percent, meaning the investors get the first six to eight percent of cash flow from the property. If it's short for any reason, that will accrue. And then once we, if we sell the building, they get their full money back in full, whatever they put in.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  And then it's a 70 30 split. So 70% to the investor, 30% to the gel team. And they call, we call that the promote. And that's where the large money is made. In terms of fees, like we charge like an acquisition fee, one to 2% of the purchase price and an asset management fee of 2% of the gross revenues. We don't do the day to day property management. We hire third parties that are better positioned, they're large third parties in these markets that have buying power, they have the personnel on site, and we just really oversee them. We have weekly conference calls with them, make sure we're hitting all our numbers, make sure we're setting the rents properly. We oversee all the major capital expenditures on the properties. We're very hands on, but we'll, we'll pay these management companies between 2% to 3% of the gross revenue. And that's sort of how the business.

• 29:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, it's kind of a remarkably straightforward business right at its core. It's not all that complicated. On the debt side, how has that evolved? How do you determine how much leverage to put on a given property? Have you gotten cheaper and cheaper cost of debt capital over the years? Kind of like following that same reputation arc you talked about with some of the sellers? Does the same thing happen with banks?

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'd say 90% of the borrowing we do is from Fannie and Freddie, the quasi-government agencies. And we've always gotten pretty good pricing and it's probably gotten maybe a little bit better because of our size. They put out billions and billions of dollars a year in debt. We've had leverage as low as 65% and as high as 80%. It's sort of they under it, underwrite it to a 1.25 debt coverage ratio. So there needs to be enough cash flow to cover the mortgage and then some. So they have that that ratio. And on some deals where we're buying it, where there's a huge amount of cash flow, they'll go up to that 80%. And we will feel comfortable doing that. There's significant cash flow to cover that mortgage payment. However, as pricing values have gone higher, sort of leverage has come down a little bit.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  And we've sometimes, even though they'll give us 75%, we've come in maybe 65% leverage. And this way we could get 10 years of interest only. So we don't have to have any amortization. I'd rather be able to put all the cash back into our pockets rather than paying down the loan. So we've elected to do these interest only loans the last few deals. And we're very conservative. We do 10 years fixed rate financing, whereas some of our peers do floating rate financing. And they've sort of gotten burned the last few years as rates have really started rising. They do it based on LIBOR. The rates we're getting are based on the 10-year treasuries, which have popped a little bit. But historically, they're still very low. We're borrowing in the four and a half percent range for 10 years, even 12 years fixed rate. You know, we know what our mortgage payment is going to be every single month for the next 10, 12 years.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  It's the more conservative way of going.

• 31:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Talk me through the competition. So usually when you find a repeatable structure like this that can be scaled out to some degree, and you can earn nice rates of return, risk-adjusted rates of return, it invites other people trying to do the same thing. So how much has what you've done created competition? And how much competition was there already there?

• 31:22Speaker 03

  In the beginning, there was a far less competition. I think. Because it was during the recession, we didn't see as many groups bidding for assets. We sort of had our pickings in the beginning. Nowadays, it's very, very competitive. We had one deal that there was literally, I think, thirty-nine offers on. We're friendly with the broker and we knew the seller and it helped us win the deal. But at the end of the day, it's getting very competitive out there. And that's why we've shifted into looking into different asset classes. And that brought us to the mobile home park space. So we bought around a thousand mobile home park pads. I think we own seven mobile home parks and one RV park even. But we saw that as an opportunity that wasn't really too much institutional capital yet going into the space. You're starting to see a lot of more of that right now with like Brookfield and Carlisle.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  And you have Blackstone Private REIT, they're starting to really pile in. But when we started a couple of years ago, they weren't really big in that space. And you could get a lot higher risk-adjusted returns, we felt, in there, in that space. The cash flow is a lot higher. You could put the same kind of debt on it. Fannie and Freddie, a lot of people don't know, they'll lend on these kind of properties. Great loans in place there. And so we started buying manufactured housing communities. I'd call them two and three star. So not the real beautiful ones on golf courses with double and triple wides, but more workforce housing, affordable housing. And we've done extremely well with that. It's tough, though. It's a real niche and it's not as transparent as the bigger apartments. There's far fewer brokers dealing in it. A lot of deals are sort of done off-market.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  It's hard to break into, but once you're in, it's a great business to be in. We poached a top regional manager for Sun Communities, which is a publicly traded company. It's the second-largest owner-operator of these manufactured housing communities. And he's really running the charge. I wanted to start buying these five, six years ago, but my partners, we didn't feel comfortable. We didn't have the operational experience, so we brought someone in. We made them a partner in the operation. And literally, we helped raise money for them and we helped with the underwriting. But he oversees all the management and acquisitions. And we're going to continue buying in that space. We love that space. There was only ten manufactured housing communities built last year. We don't have the same supply issues. They're not building any. The cities don't want them, really. They don't create the same kind of tax revenue. Neighborhoods don't want them.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  They think it's going to lower their property values. You have some parks that are expanding. They expand ones that are already built. But we're not worried about the same. Problems that we have in the multifamily space with supply. You have a huge amount of supply coming online. So you have a lot of factors. It's affordable housing at its core. So, you know, more people can afford it. Three to $500 lot rent. You know, you don't have to worry about spending a lot of money fixing the buildings because the residents own the buildings. Once in a while, you'll have something called a park-owned home, where you will buy a park where the owner owns those homes and you'll inherit some. But we try to get them off the books by selling them to the residents and get that lot rent going. It's just a great business. It's like a parking lot essentially. But I'd be afraid only parking lots now, for example, with autonomous vehicles coming around the corner.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  So I feel like this is recession-proof, kind of bulletproof real estate. It could be a big win if you buy a park on the outskirts of town and town keeps growing. And, you know, they buy a lot of these to redevelop into higher and better uses like, you know, condominium project or apartment building or shopping center. But we're buying them essentially to run them as cash flow businesses. And they throw off tremendous cash flow. We have one park in Foley, Alabama, throwing off 15%, 16% cash on cash return. Just phenomenal return. The lowest one's throwing off 8% to 10%. We're seeing higher cash on cash returns. But the trade-off is you can't really push the rents as hard and as fast as per se an apartment building. But I think the counterargument is during the recession, it's literally the next step down from that is living in your car on the street.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  I mean, it's literally the most affordable kind of housing. And, you know, people own their own homes. It's nice to live in a nice community that we take good care of. We've added like basketball courts and just take, you know, better landscaping, improve the clubhouses, make it a nice community. You don't have to worry about having neighbors on all four walls, you know, being in an apartment. It's a nice form of living for a lot of people.

• 35:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you tell us a little bit about what you've learned on the marketing side over the years? So if you've got, you know, however many thousands of different units that you own and are ultimately responsible for, what have been some of the more effective ways of getting those things filled?

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the number one way that we fill the units is drive-by still remarkably in this age with computer. So we try to buy buildings that are on major thoroughfares. We have a lot of signage. We always try to boost the signage, appeal, uh, flags we put in. Just really the drive-by, the curb appeal, make it nice, presentable curb appeal. I'd say is number one. Number two, internet has, has definitely, so we're, we're pushing our management companies to really put the money into SEO and online marketing to, to attract users. The best is resident referrals, I'd say. When someone has a friend that's living in the community or a family member, they're, they're typically going to stay longer. So resident referrals, sometimes we pay our residents to, um, you know, successfully bring in a new resident to, to live there.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Surprisingly though, turnover is pretty high in the, in the apartment space, in, in the markets we're in. Up to 50% we see turnover. People are, are pretty transient. They don't live there too long. In markets like California, New York, you might see it lower because you have rent control, so maybe 25%. Uh, so people stay in their units because, you know, the, the rent's going to be pushed, you know, a low amount per year and by year 10, 15, they're paying, you know, half of what the market is, so they're, they have no incentive to leave. But typically apartments could have up to 50% turnover and we're constantly, you know, it's a, it's a revolving door. We're constantly having to fill it, but the last 10, eight, nine years have been pretty strong being able to fill these units because when we started, they literally stopped building and you had, I think around nine million households that were homeowners, you know,

• 37:04Speaker 03

  turned to renting. A lot of them went to rent, you know, homes and you had the, the Blackstones and the American Homes for Rent and all these guys buying up single family. We actually looked into buying single family homes when we started this business and we, we, we like the business model of owning instead of a hundred disparate, you know, spread apart, single family homes. Managerially, it's just crazy to manage. I'd rather have a hundred units in one complex that's professionally managed. And I, I think the stocks of those guys haven't really done, done as well as the apartment guys. Maybe they've seen some appreciation in the assets, but I didn't like the whole aggregating single family home strategy. I really feel bullish on just professionally managed, larger apartment communities.

• 37:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm curious how you think demographics change or affect this overall strategy? So if you've got this like massive millennial generation that is, I guess at an important stage when it comes to housing and maybe they have a, I don't know how much this is true, but maybe they have a different set of preferences than prior generations. How do, how do demographic shifts and trends affect how you think about things?

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're always monitoring the homeownership rate. I think it was up to 69%. It's dropped to around 61, 62%. Every 1% drop is like a million new rent renter households. So definitely, there's been a proclivity for people to rent. They, you know, they saw their their parents lose homes and lose equity in homes. And I, I don't know, I, I see. You know, I have friends that could afford buying homes, but there's there. They like the, you know, renting, they don't, they don't have to be stuck to a mortgage. And it's just easier to move and with jobs being more mobile and people moving. I think just apartment living in general, you have such amazing amenities on some of these new built apartments. And I think apartment living's not going away. But I don't, at the same time, I don't think it's, you're going to see like a Berlin, you

• 38:44Speaker 03

  know, in Germany, I think it's around half the people, maybe even more rent. It's a huge amount of renters. It's really interesting, it's different countries. There's not many countries that have this whole renter apartment building kind of culture. But culturally, it's, it's looking okay, more and more okay to rent. Whereas like in China, everyone owns their own home. If they can't afford it, they'll have a, a family member chip in or live at home until they could afford, you know, to buy their own home. Renting is seen sort of down on, but like in America, it's not bad to rent. It's, you can live in an amazing community and have all these amenities and, and pay a lot less potentially than, than homeownership. I mean, there's always a, you know, what people are always looking at renting versus, versus buying. That's why we, we try to buy in markets that it's, it's just extremely hard to buy. It's very expensive. You have to have a big down payment and, and the rents are much more affordable.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  We're always monitoring that as well, you know? Like in San Antonio, I think we, we could actually push rents a lot more because the average renter is only spending 22% of their income to rent, whereas in California, it's up to maybe 50 plus percent even.

• 39:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  Yes, pretty crazy.

• 39:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It seems like you've been pretty good about shifting around towards wherever the most interesting opportunities lie, the mobile home communities is a good example of that. Let's say today you were starting out in real estate and you were excluded from buying apartments and mobile home communities. What other category do you think is most interesting today, prospectively?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  I'd say I'd focus on sort of a riff on apartments. I think in major markets, you're going to start seeing more and more, they call it co-living. I think we, we work, try to do the we live component concept. I don't know how, I don't think it's really taken off that much, but I'd really. Buy in really dense urban areas where the millennials want to be and you can essentially charge a lot more per foot because it's smaller spaces, but it's more affordable because it's it's smaller essentially. And you have the communal aspect where I think now in today's age, especially with people on their mobile devices and social media and they crave that interaction with people. I think having co-living both on the millennial front and on the when people get older also, it could be a great kind of business concept to have, you know,

• 40:45Speaker 03

  55 plus communities, you know, age restricted communities that are built in this co-living model where people could walk places, restaurants and plays and whatever, you know, movie theaters, just really infill locations, but where it's very affordable because of the amount of square footage. So I think that would be really cool. Another one is I like what Travis Kalanick at Uber is up to. He has something called Cloud Kitchen, which I think is an amazing real estate play. So he's building, he's buying and repurposing industrial buildings that are, you know, well located in infill locations and making them into commercial kitchens. And it's a technology play because he's in, I think he sort of is in with like the Postmates and the Uber Eats of the world where he knows where everyone's pinging to get these, these food essentially.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  You can locate these based on where all the demand is. And in restaurants nowadays, you don't even have to have a physical location. You could be built on these, these platforms and, and create a thriving business. I, I believe the next McDonald's, the next large, huge restaurateur is going to be built upon just delivery and not having a physical footprint. Also, a lot of restaurants are now being bogged down by all the takeout from these Uber Eats and Postmates and such, Grubhub, where you could be ordering on the app and it doesn't have to be actually made in that restaurant. It could be made in, in a, in an industrial kitchen and you wouldn't even know. But it's the same exact, as long as it's the company and their quality control and it's same food, it would be the same exact thing. I think there's a huge market for that and it's going to, you're going to continue, continue seeing

• 42:11Speaker 03

  that, you know, technology with food delivery.

• 42:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Let's say you wanted to become an investor in that space like how you know that's something super emergent, right? I guess it remains to be proven. Someone you know unlike someone leasing an apartment that you know that's an obvious and repeated use case. How would you think about that as an investor? Like what would you wait to see? What would be the minimum criteria for you to be interested? And then how would you attack it?

• 42:34Speaker 03

  We have a small VC fund. We're the main investor and we invest in a lot of early-stage companies. And I was just a little too late on some of these. There's one called like I think it was United Kitchens that Google Ventures backed. You have the one that Travis Kalanick came into Cloud Kitchen. He essentially bought, you know, he's now he runs it now. He bought out all the shareholders and stuff. And you have you have a few other upstarts in the LA area. I'm sure in other markets, too. I think there's a lot of technology behind it, too. It's not just building out the commercial kitchen space. I'd say find a partner that's technical and we could bring the real estate and build on this. We're in so many different verticals now. I mean, literally, I didn't even talk too much about it, but we're doing new development, ground up here locally. We have the mobile home parks and RV parks. We're buying apartment

• 43:16Speaker 03

  buildings. We have the, you know, seed stage fund. We have our 501(c)(3). I'm sort of pulled in a lot of different verticals. And my partners are like, we can't, we can't do anymore. But I'd say if I was starting now, trying to merge state and especially in this sector would be a really interesting one. Also, I'd say another one that's interesting is living the sort of hotel apartment kind of concept. You have companies like Sonder that are going big into that where I think it's like a minimum 30 day stay, but you've got you have a lot of hotel like amenities, but it's shorter, shorter term furnished housing. I think that's another big one that could be become really huge. I'd say multi-tenant industrial I like because you have that multi-tenant component. You're not relying on one big tenant. I think you're gonna have

• 43:58Speaker 03

  and then infill industrial like, you know, Amazon has an insatiable demand for more and more infill.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Centers that could deliver within like an hour or less goods. So I'd say buying industrial infill. It's sort of expensive now, but if you believe that there's going to just be more and more demand for people to get goods quickly, you have the omnichannel retailers. You could go to the store, pick it up, they could deliver it to you. I think that's another big one. I still like hotels, to tell you the truth. It's a big money suck, but if you do it right, maybe on a conversion, you can make good money. People still want that experience, even though Airbnb is a monster. I've stayed at Airbnb's before. I still crave going to hotels, meeting people, going to the restaurants, going to the bars, getting the experience, staying at these boutique hotels. I think some of these smaller boutique hotels could do pretty well. Retail, people are scared shitless of retail and they have Amazon, the 800 pound gorilla.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  I think retail is just evolving. I think the retail, you're not going to see as many of the big box stores. You're just going to see smaller footprints. There's one huge shopping center called The Grove that's more of an experience here in LA. Rick Caruso, a billionaire gentleman owns and built that. He built another shopping center with the same number of tenants, but it's literally a tenth the size and the sales per foot are astronomical. It's also here located in LA area in the Pacific Galistas region. And a lot of the retailers there are omnichannel and internet first. They had internet first and then they opened retail footprints. I think as Google AdWords and it's just getting more and more expensive to advertise online. And I think having that physical footprint, but maybe smaller and more experiential, I think you're going to just see more and more of that.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  So I'd say maybe repurposing older retail centers into this. But the traditional like neighborhood grocery center, I just don't see it. Like I literally haven't stepped foot into CVS and Walgreens in years. I just order everything on Amazon and I was ordering my meds, for example, with Pill Pack and they were delivering it. I didn't even have to wait in line and drive there and find parking and literally it's about the same price. And Amazon bought them, Pill Pack. So I'd not be bullish on those kind of like large CVS, Walgreens kind of stores. Even Target, I used to shop at Target a lot. I haven't been at Target in a long time. Grocery stores, my friend started, I have a friend that started Instacart and they're just crushing it. They're partnering with a lot of these retailers. I mean, I just the experience of going to the grocery store, I don't know where the

• 46:19Speaker 03

  hell anything is. I get lost in there and I start. If I'm hungry, I start buying too much. Like, literally, I think you're seeing more and more of that transferred into online sales and, you know, real estate, the way real estate is going to change, especially with autonomous vehicles, that'll be the biggest one. That's going to change the landscape completely. I just don't know when that'll happen, but definitely where people live, how they live, it's just, it's gonna be an exciting future.

• 46:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  A lot of questions coming from a really interesting survey. So first, I guess, since it was the last thing you mentioned, what are the major ways that you think, we don't know when it will happen, but if and when it happens, that autonomous cars or vehicles will change real estate? What do you think the major, the one or two biggest changes will be?

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Probably where people live. I think people might, I don't know if they're gonna want to live closer or farther. I think they might want to live farther and more desirable, like, where they have more land and literally, so I just bought a new Tesla and it has, I don't know what they call it, L3 or whatever, it has that self-driving capabilities. Literally, from on my 30-minute commute today, I clicked the turn signal a few times, so it changed lanes, but other than that, it did 90% of the driving. It was pretty remarkable. I was on the phone and laughing with my friends and stuff. It was pretty crazy. And I think, you know, people are gonna move a little further out and have more land and live in more desirable areas. And I think that could be one set of people. Another set, I think, a lot of the cities are gonna not need all this parking requirement. You have huge surface parking lots that you're

• 47:42Speaker 03

  not gonna need anymore. I think there's gonna be so much less cars on the road because you're only utilizing your vehicle 4% of the time. Why, you're spending so much money for it in terms of your payment, car payment, you got gas, you got, you know, the future's electric and autonomous, there's gonna be less cars on the road, there's gonna be fleets owned and run by the Ubers, Teslas, Lips, I think, or you're gonna have partnerships with the car companies. I think, like, GM has really been in the farm on this. You know, they bought Cruise for a billion dollars. And I think you really, it's a time to bet the company kind of thing, or else you're gonna be... A big fat zero in the long-term future. I don't think it's about manufacturing millions of cars anymore. It's going to be about mobility and just renting out the space in your vehicles, I think.

• 48:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned this idea of development, which we really haven't talked about. And I'm always curious in kind of any business on the decision between building and buying. And this could be shrunken down to, you know, a house. Like, how to decide whether or not you want to build something yourself or buy a different house? What are the relative pros and cons of development and building your own properties versus buying? And then why have you started doing that?

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Building has a lot more risk because when you buy a property, if it's unentitled, especially in like LA, it took us a year and a half to get this building entitled. We're building a 250-unit project a mile from our office here in the San Fernando Valley. So it took it from the time of buying the site to breaking ground was a year and a half. It's going to take about a year to a year and a half to build it, you know, the project. And then it's going to take another year to lease it all up. So you have no cash flow for four-plus years. You're going to have interest rate risk when we try to take out that construction loan. You don't know exactly what the rents are going to be four years from now. So there's a lot more risk, but then there's also a lot more potential reward. So I'd say if you could buy the land at a really good basis, it de-risks it a lot. Construction costs have just been going up astronomically.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  So I'd say it's just very cyclical development. You want to buy when you could buy something really cheap, the land, and build when it's, when these contractors don't have a lot of work and it's sort of, you know, the raw materials are cheaper, the labor's cheaper. At certain point in the cycle, it doesn't really make sense to build. And we're building only locally here in LA where we know all the local rules and regulations, have good connections here. We could go to the project site every day and be very involved. Whereas we're buying existing projects elsewhere. It's not as involved. Development's just very hands-on, very capital-intensive. The lenders are very gun-shy now. They're only lending up to maybe 65%, tops on a project. Could maybe go higher if you have personal recourse, but we're very into just non-recourse loans.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  So we had to come up with a lot more cash to do new developments. But in general, yeah, at different times of the cycle, it makes sense to build versus buy. And we're only building really locally so we can see and feel it and be involved more and in high barrier to entry markets as well on the building.

• 50:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Really interesting. Last kind of category you mentioned was was early stage. I was a little bit surprised to hear that. So talk to me about why you've done that and maybe specifically what you're looking to do in that in that area of the market.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  Being an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, I love supporting other entrepreneurs. We started making some angel investments, my business partner and I, probably three, four years ago. And we said, why don't we start some kind of, we have, you know, maybe at the time, four or 500 investors. Now we have 600 investors. They're all accredited, high net and ultra high net worth. They don't have opportunities to do these kind of investments. Why don't we start some kind of pool vehicle? We created a small fund. We closed it out at 5 million bucks. We put around 1.5 of our own money. And so we're a major shareholder in that. And we brought in a gentleman who's in the Bay Area who was working in the VC space, five years as a VC attorney, five years as a sort of a junior partner. We made him a majority partner and we let him run with this in terms of picking the companies

• 51:24Speaker 03

  and doing all the, he's up there meeting with entrepreneurs and founders every single day, other VCs. We literally helped, you know, we put a good chunk of our own money in and then helped raise money. And that was our first fund. And I just love being around entrepreneurs and supporting them. And we have some amazing companies in that portfolio. My favorite one is Lambda School, for example. I don't know if you've been following that on Twitter. So we invested in Austin. He's an amazing founder. We participated in their seed round and their A round. And it's just, he's been growing tremendously and he's really reimagining education. It's a modern day trade school that's retraining the workforce into its computer science and coding and modern age jobs that are paying

• 52:08Speaker 03

  a lot more than what these people were making. And he's transforming lives. It's really amazing. Where he's making money, transforming lives. This thing is literally, in my opinion, going to be, I don't want to scare anyone, but it could be as big as Uber. I mean, we're literally, it's unbelievable business model. And he's just a passionate gentleman who's

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Just transforming lives and scaling like crazy and the education space is just bloated. You have these stupid huge tuitions and funded by debt, you know, with the government. It's just terrible model. I think, you know, certain people should go to university, but others, why get yourself into $200,000 of debt if you're going to be making $50,000, $40,000 a year? Why not do, you know, on the Lambda School is the income share agreement. You're spending $0 upfront. They've even paid people a living stipend essentially to, uh, to help them get by where they could, you know, because it's a full-time learning. I think it's like eight, nine hours a day for nine months and very intensive. It's not your typical coding bootcamp thing. So he's really teaching the people well with top educators in the country in these computer

• 53:13Speaker 03

  science, machine learning, programming, you know, new age kind of jobs. And they come out of there with no student debt. Lambda School is only making money if they get a job over, I think it was 60, 70, I forget the exact dollar amount, but only if they're certain, they're in a nice higher paying job than they were and they pay back a percentage of their earnings for two years and then Lambda School is gone. So it's an amazing business and I'm so happy we're in that one. We're in a lot of other cool businesses, but that one I'm just the most passionate about. But literally we, we provide diversification for the investors and for ourselves, obviously. That's one thing. I'm a big believer in, I have stocks in my SEP IRA and 401K, so I, I still love the stock market. Wish everything I bought 10, 20 years ago, I held on to though. Like I said, Netflix is 80 or 100X.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Literally if, if you were passionate about business, you think they're running it well, you have independent thinking in, in there, you don't follow the herd. And I think, you know, I just read like Charlie Munger's Almanac and stuff and the importance of compounding interest and it just, it makes sense. You know, people are into making the quick buck and not wanting to put in the time and energy and, and hold on to something. And I think it's, it's, it's, it's just great to find good companies and hold, and hold them for the long run, you know?

• 54:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What is your favorite excluding your own story and, and any, any story that you personally invested in? Um, so the fund is the VC fund as well. What's your favorite business or, or entrepreneur story?

• 54:30Speaker 03

  I'd say Netflix with Reed Hastings and what they've done there has been unbelievable. You know, I, I bought into them 2002 when they were just doing envelopes and they, they were, that was even really innovative, right? They, they sort of crushed blockbuster with that, but then they saw, you know, that business model being at risk and they, they transformed that into a, they started doing streaming and I started watching on my computers and streaming stuff and. They've created a monster and now they're investing, they're betting the company on original content and just being, you know, even though you're getting bigger and still still be very entrepreneurial, you know, big companies could get complacent and they're just milking the company for money. You gotta continually be, bet the company kind of events and build to what, you know, you think the future's gonna be, I'd say. And that's the

• 55:14Speaker 03

  only way to stay around. I mean, even a lot of these big incumbents in the like consumer space like Procter and Gamble and I, I know people that have created these direct to consumer companies that have sold out for huge money because they've been able to scale so fast and they're taking market share away from these legacy brands and stuff that just haven't really innovated in a long time. So I just think you gotta continue innovating in whatever business you're in. And I think Netflix has been one of the best stories to watch.

• 55:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So a couple of closing questions for you. So the first would be, you know, obviously a really interesting entrepreneurial story. I love things that start really small and obviously you've deployed a lot of real capital into this idea. If you could give advice to younger entrepreneurs, what would you tell them?

• 55:56Speaker 03

  I say you gotta start small. It's always the best thing. My next favorite saying is Rome wasn't built in a day. You just put every day, you make sure you're advancing the ball up the field. Make progress on one thing every day, one single thing. And eventually those little things start adding up. It's, it becomes a snowball effect. And, you know, the first few years I was living at home, we weren't making any money on those little fourplexes. All the acquisition fees we made, we kept rolling back into the properties. And I'm so thankful I did that because that, you know, became even bigger and better. So I'd say deferring immediate satisfaction for future satisfaction, living beneath your means and finding a partner that, having a partner is great. I love having my business partner who's also my cousin, someone I trust and love and we complement each other so

• 56:38Speaker 03

  well. Like I'm more of a outside guy, he's more of the inside guy. He oversees a lot of the CapEx and the construction aspects of the business. I'm more of the marketing, investor relations. So solo founders out there that, that do great, but. I thrive on having a good counterpart and a lot of businesses are like that. So I'd say find yourself a good counterpart. If you're, if you're technical, find yourself maybe a good salesperson that knows how to grow a business or vice versa. And I think every business nowadays is really a tech business. There's technology implemented in every single business. So knowing which technologies and how to, how to improve your business, utilizing technology, that's another big one. Put your own money at risk. I'd say people always want to see you have skin in the game if that's in terms of money or resources. That's another big one as an entrepreneur.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  And then find a small group of passionate first customers, I'd say, that will really stick to what you're doing and spread the word like gospel. And that's what, that's what I'm seeing in Lambda School. I mean, I can't believe the success stories and they, they share it with, for every person he has graduating. I'm sure they're, they're sharing it with all their friends and family.

• 57:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, of course.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  That's the best way to grow is just word of mouth.

• 57:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Find viral coefficients, right?

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 57:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My closing question for everybody is for the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  I'd say my father, he's been an amazing mentor, friend, father. He didn't need to support us in the beginning in terms of, literally, he opened the door to his clients as potential investors. He did all the legal work for us, for the company. He really raised me right. He didn't just give us money. And anytime I borrowed money from him, it was with interest and I paid him back. I grew up in a pretty well-off family and, but just, he raised me right. And I see that in some of my other friends that come from well-off families. Some of them are like that and some aren't. So I'd say the kindest thing he, he really did is the parenting and, and being able to allow me to, to grow and blossom, but just being able to be there if I had any questions and, and needed advice.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  So having, having a good role model and, and mentor, and I've had a lot of them in my, in my life. And I think, I, I try to pay it forward and be a role model and mentor to others. I'm always available. I love Twitter. You can always find me on Keith underscore Wasserman. DM me. You can email me, Keith at geltinc.com. You know, I make myself available and try to help as, as many people as I can.

• 58:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, this has been great. I've learned a ton, totally new territory for me. So I appreciate the education and all the time.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks so much for powering me, Patrick. And I, I enjoyed listening to you as well. I'm going to be an avid listener on all the future ones as well.

• 59:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hey everyone, Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away, and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter @Patrick_OShag. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening. [music]