Financial Freedom in 8 Years by Investing for Equity (NOT Cash Flow)

What if, within ten years, you could reach financial freedom? Imagine it. You may have a high-stress job where you’re working long hours and making good money but feeling burnout creeping in. You NEED an exit strategy if you’re going to keep up with this lifestyle because before long, you may need an early retirement. That’s precisely how Benjamin Aaker, emergency medicine physician, felt. Benjamin loves his work, and he’s still working today, but now, he has the option to leave when the burnout gets too much. After becoming an “accidental landlord,” Benjamin quickly saw the benefits of investing in real estate. He bought a few more houses and a multifamily building, then went bigger and bigger. Now, he’s equity-rich with a real estate portfolio that can support his lifestyle if he decides not to work. Even if you’re not stressed out at your job (yet), Benjamin encourages you to financially prepare to exit your career, if just for peace of mind. He talks about how you can scale smarter, faster, and better with partners, why sometimes you need to get dirty to succeed in real estate, and how to juggle investing with your full-time job. In This Episode We Cover: How to scale your real estate portfolio fast and reach financial freedom The crucial mistake Benjamin made when he bought his first big property Determining your financial independence timeline and when you want to be able to quit Appreciation vs. cash flow and the surprising choice Benjamin made to reach financial independence faster Vetting a real estate partner BEFORE you invest and red flags to look for Syndication investing for beginners and using other people’s money to buy real estate And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Invest in Turnkey Properties with REI Nation Grab “The Intention Journal” Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area How to Build a Real Estate Portfolio & Quickly Scale Your Investments Connect with Benjamin Connect with Dave (00:00) Intro (00:48) Got a High-Stress Job? (02:30) The “Accidental” Landlord (03:54) Becoming Work-OPTIONAL (10:22) Equity Over Cash Flow (14:31) Multifamily and BIG Syndication Mistakes (23:55) A Really Crappy Problem (27:30) Finding (and Vetting) Partners (30:35) WAY Bigger Deals Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1045 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  Maybe you're not getting into real estate because you want to quit your job today, but you want to quit in a year or in a decade. Today's guest is going to explain how he used real estate to create a safety net in case the stress of 24-hour emergency room shifts ever became too much to handle.

• 0:22Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone, it's Dave and today we have an incredible investor story with Benjamin Aaker, an emergency room physician in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Benjamin became an accidental landlord, then realized that real estate could be the exact solution he was looking for and has since scaled up into some seriously impressive properties, even if he had to jackhammer at least one sewage line himself to get there. Let's bring on Benjamin. Benjamin, thanks for joining me today. It's good to have you.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's really exciting to be here today.

• 0:54Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, let's jump into this thing. Tell me a little bit about how you first got started investing and what else you were doing at that time.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Sure, so I'm a physician, an emergency medicine physician, and got started doing that, not wanting to do any kind of real estate at all, just never even thought of it. But I kind of realized early on that burnout was a thing and it's very high in medicine and it's even higher in emergency medicine. And so I was wanting to do other things, but that was stock market. That was anything else other than real estate at the time. And I was an accidental landlord. That's how I really got into real estate investing.

• 1:32Dave Meyer?

  And how old were you at the time?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Let's see, it would have been nine years ago. So that would have put me at 35 years old.

• 1:39Dave Meyer?

  Okay, and I would imagine that being an emergency room physician is extremely time intensive. So what was it like becoming an accidental landlord?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you're right. It is time intensive. The nice thing about emergency medicine is it's a shift work. So you're, you can kind of schedule your day and pack it all in. And once you get that schedule out, then you have other time to be able to do other things. So I was able to make that work with that, that time constraint and real estate. Investing, at least for me, starting out was very much, you know, do the things and then hopefully let it run, be ready to answer the phone, you know, tenants, toilets and telephones, as everybody says. And that was my experience as well, starting out. The only problem was if I was on a shift in the emergency department, I wasn't able a lot of times to answer those telephone calls.

• 2:30Dave Meyer?

  I'm interested, Benjamin, to learn more about your accidental landlord experience because if you haven't heard this term, everyone, it's basically a lot of people get into real estate out of some, you know, unforeseen circumstances where you inherit a property or someone asks you to take over management of a property. And for some people, that's a nightmare and they want to sell it and get rid of it. But it sounds like for you, Benjamin, there's something clicked about real estate that you liked. What was it?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  This thing was just a house that we bought, my wife and I, in order to live in while we were building our, our primary residence. I had promised her that I would build her a beautiful house. Once we paid off the one that we had and we just, you know, you need a place to live while you're building. And that was my situation. So then our real estate agent said, you know, we were going to just sell it. It was kind of like a flip, but we didn't really know what a flip was at the time. And the, and the real estate agent said, hey, I've got two people who want to buy a house. They're, they're, they're my clients, but they found lots of houses that they like. They just can't, they don't get their credit's not quite there and the bank has denied them. And he said, do you think you might want to rent to these guys? And then you don't have to go through the whole, you know, thing about selling it. And I thought, that sounds really nice not to have to

• 3:44Speaker 01

  go through that. And we didn't do any kind of background checks, nothing, just relied on what he said and what the bank had. And so it could have been a bad experience, but it actually worked out really well.

• 3:54Dave Meyer?

  You mentioned that you didn't have a specific goal when you first started out. And I think that is, it's a tough spot to be in with real estate because there's so many different ways that you can go. You could flip houses, like you said, you could buy rental properties. So. After that first one, where did you decide to go next with your investing career?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  What happened was then I heard about the freedom number. I heard about, you know, you need to make a plan. You need to have a five-year goal and a 10-year goal. And so then I kind of started formulating something around that time. And it was all about wanting to be able to hedge for burnout. Way back in residency, which is what you do after medical school for a couple of years, the burnout was kind of like, I'm feeling a little bit and I need to have something that at some point I can leave. And luckily, throughout that time, I have not felt like I had to leave emergency medicine. I love taking care of patients, so I can have continued to do that. And so I grew. But from listening to the podcast, I learned that, you know, the economies of scale of multifamily were there. So I started looking for multifamilies at that time.

• 4:57Dave Meyer?

  I want to touch on something you just said before we talk about multifamilies is just about liking your job and wanting to stay in it. Because I think for a lot of people, especially guests who come on the show, people, their whole goal is to quit their job or, you know, they want to go full-time into real estate investing. But it sounds like for you, you want to hedge that, you know, which makes sense to me. But it sounds like you've never just thought, hey, I'm going to get into real estate so I can quit being a doctor, right?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Right. I was never at that point where I just have to get out of it. And I know some physicians and even other careers where people just they they're they're just burnt out and they're done. They will need to get out. And oh, man, I'd hate to be in that position. Some people are, and they have to deal with it. And you can get into real estate from that. But if you can keep your W2 for as long as you can, as many people have talked about on the show, that, you know, that gives you a great way to get the bank loans. There's just so many more doors are open for you if you can keep that. So that's what I did and have done. And, you know, that really has helped me with having that income to be able to go to the bank and get loans. So that's kind of my advantage that I have over a lot of people is that I have that big income that I still continue to be able to report to the bank.

• 6:10Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, that is a huge advantage of maintaining your W2 is that you're more lendable. I don't know if that's actually a word, but we're going to make it one. But I think the other thing that's really interesting about and super relatable to people about staying in your W2 is that it allows you to be a little bit more patient, I find, and maybe take on a little bit less risk. Because if you just think about what you would need to do, the type of deals, how intensive they would need to be to replace your income or to go full time in real estate in two or three years, it's very different than if you're approaching it the way Benjamin might have been and saying, "Hey, you know, I'm going to buy deals opportunistically." That sort of puts you in a different mindset to the types of deals that you look for and ultimately end up buying.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Totally agree. Yeah, for me, it was a, I called it a 50-year plan, which is kind of a silly name. It was when I turned 50.

• 7:02Dave Meyer?

  Oh, okay. Yes, yeah. 50-year-old plan, not 50 years from now.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Not when I'm 100 years old. But yeah, when I turned 50, that was, and I wrote a thing down. I was just like, you know, when I turn 50, I don't want to have to work in the emergency department anymore. So, you know, people that listen to this have to take home that one thing. If they can think about, you know, when in the future do you want to be able to leave what you're doing? Not necessarily that you're going to leave, because hopefully you still like what you're doing. Maybe you love what you're doing, and you're just looking for something on the side to prepare for the future. And that's, to me, that's what real estate investing is all about. That's the goal, is setting that time and being prepared for it. And once you get to that, I'm there now. I mean, I'm not 50 yet, I'm 46. And, you know, I'm there.

• 7:46Dave Meyer?

  You beat it. Nice, man.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Such a great feeling. Thank you. Yeah. So now I can just do whatever I want and work when I want to. And, and I think a lot of people can have that as well if they set their goal right. You know, not that I want to be a millionaire and sit on the beach, you know, wouldn't that be great? But, you know, that wouldn't be fun for a lot of us, I think.

• 8:03Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, I'm in the exact same boat and in a fortunate position where I sort of set a goal for myself to be what I would call work optional at 40. I'm there, 37. So that's great. Yeah. I intend to keep working, you know, like my, I like working. I like, I have a great job, as you can tell. So I get to do this every day. So now I've sort of readjusted and, you know, I, you know, I was planning to Sort of deleverage my portfolio and lower risk around 40 years old. But now I'm pushing that back out a little bit and I'm willing to take on some bigger projects because I want to keep working. But I think what you said a few minutes ago about time horizon is just spot on.

• 8:45Dave Meyer?

  And just, you know, 15 years, if you look at that time horizon, you can accomplish so much in real estate in 15 years. And I know if you hate your job, you know, that sounds like a really long time. But if you're someone who can manage it and can stick with it for a while, thinking that I think that 15 years is like a totally realistic goal to be able to replace your income, really whatever income level you are. And so it sounds like it only took you, what, seven or eight years, though?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, right around there.

• 9:13Dave Meyer?

  Do you attribute that to going into multifamily because of those economies of scale?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, that and just real estate in general, because I think people can do it with single family if they wanted, you know, just a house, they can get a massive group of houses. But exactly like you said, the economy of scale, I learned from this show that, and then I went ahead and bought a six unit in a small town outside of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And, you know, just kind of a small community, had eight people in there. And, you know, it's just like you only have one bill for snow. Now, maybe you don't have any bills with the single families, but you have, or snowbells for a single family, maybe where you live, you don't, lucky you.

• 9:51Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't think everyone knows about snowbells. I have a, I have one where I have a short-term rental in a ski town and it is pricey to have them come plow. It's insane. I should just drive a plow. It's a great business.

• 10:08Dave Meyer?

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• 10:48Dave Meyer?

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• 11:32Dave Meyer?

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• 11:46Henry Washington?

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• 12:27Henry Washington?

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• 12:37Dave Meyer?

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• 13:20Dave Meyer?

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• 13:39Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast with our guest Benjamin Aker. So that six unit, was that your first one after the accidental landlord? Or did you do something in between?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  So I started in that thinking, well, single families is the way to go. So I ended up buying three, well, it'd be four total. So three more after that first one because that's all I knew. You know, buy a single family and rent it out and go on to the next one. It wasn't, it wasn't the BRRRR method. Just I didn't, I never thought about refinancing, but I had them all set up so that they would be about cash flow neutral. And that's, for me, that was another thing that I learned from this is, this podcast is just like to set up how you want those mortgages to be. A lot of people are going for cash flow. And when they're starting out, especially if they are quitting their job, they gotta have cash flow to stay, you know, eating.

• 14:30Dave Meyer?

  That's right.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And so I totally get that. And I'm not discounting cash flow as being important. But for me, and for I think a lot of people that maybe don't realize it, equity is the way to go and you, you want that. So I've got an income right now from my W-2 job. I pay ordinary income tax on that. And when I do real estate investing, unfortunately, it does not help me offset that. And if I'm taking income from that, it's going to be just more income that I'm paying that tax on. It's not capital gains taxes or any income tax that I have to pay. And I'm at a high tax bracket and every, and it doesn't even matter if you're a high tax bracket, whatever tax bracket you are, if you increase that income, then you're going to go potentially to a higher one. You're paying more money on that than otherwise.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  So I'd rather have that money coming in to me when I don't have the W2 income. So I want to be building that equity right now. So I set all of those loans up to be about cash flow neutral, knowing that I could float something loan to the project if the AC unit went out or whatever. I could do that. Another benefit that I had with my W2 job.

• 15:34Dave Meyer?

  Well, it's, it's exactly what you said. Benefit of having a W2 job, but you were able to craft this strategy because you had that time horizon, right? Like you knew this plan to be retired by 50, the 50 year plan allows you to make those decisions, right? You could say, hey, you know, when you were just started, it sounds like you're in your late 30s, you were saying, hey, I don't need the cash flow right now. And so the deals that I select and the deals that I design, like you didn't just select these deals, you created the mortgage in a very specific way to support that long-term goal rather than just doing what, you know, a lot of people on social media or in the forums or

• 16:17Dave Meyer?

  on this podcast of saying that you should pursue cash flow. And like Benjamin said, there's nothing wrong with cash flow, but it's ideal for people who have a short time horizon and time horizon is just how long till you want to live off your investments. So if you have a short time horizon of two or three years, yeah, go for cash flow. That's super important. But if you're like Benjamin and you've thought far enough ahead to know that I'm not going to need this cash flow for 10 years or 15 years, you can make totally different decisions. And I think I, I'm sort of on the same page as you, Benjamin, that when you have that longer time horizon, pursuing equity is a more efficient way to build overall wealth. If you have your expenses covered from your normal income.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I totally agree with that. Yep. The equity for, for many of us is the way to go. And long-term, that's really what I want and what I think a lot of people should be wanting and going after as well.

• 17:11Dave Meyer?

  For sure. And I just, I should also just mention that that could change over time. Like my first deal, I was waiting tables and I really wanted the 300 bucks a month of cash flow. You know, that was, that made a meaningful difference to me in my life at that point. You know, fast forward, I got a higher paying job and I didn't need the income anymore. And so then I could start pursuing equity more in my deals. And so I just encourage people to sort of think about where you are in your life and your own personal needs and not just, you know, listen to whoever saying, oh, you need cash flow, or it's just about equity. There's no right or wrong answer. It is about your own individual preferences and your own financial circumstances.

• 17:52Dave Meyer?

  So this is super cool. So you, you went from accidental landlord, three more single families. Then you went to a six unit?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Eight unit.

• 18:02Dave Meyer?

  Eight unit.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I think I said six.

• 18:03Dave Meyer?

  Excuse me. Um, eightplex. Okay. And then where'd you go from there?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  So after the eight unit, I don't know if it was after or before, but I got into my mastermind group.

• 18:13Dave Meyer?

  Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  I gotta say, that's another huge benefit from BP. Thank you to everyone at BP who came up with this idea with, with Brandon Turner's 90 Day Intention Journal.

• 18:23Dave Meyer?

  Yep.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  That was in 2019 when that first came out and I bought that and it's a great journal. I went through it. But what BP did at the time was they would hook you up with four other investors that were kind of in a like-minded area. And got with a group and three, three of us are still around. We're still meeting every Wednesday.

• 18:41Dave Meyer?

  Really? That's so cool.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  I know. So shout out to Pete and Rob. I mean, these guys are great. And, you know, they were kind of, they're in single family, multifamily kind of starting. And we just able to bounce things off of each other. And I remember talking about multifamily with them and, you know, I don't know if it was, you know, whose idea. I mean, that's part of the mastermind is just this one group mind thinking together.

• 19:02Dave Meyer?

  So cool.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  It's so cool. And, you know, and that, so we've just really, and all, all three. Three of us have just really taken off with what we're doing. And for me, it was multifamily. And that's, that's, I credit them a lot and BP for getting us hooked up. We're still doing it after all these.

• 19:17Dave Meyer?

  Man, I gotta say, I remember before, I guess before 2020, I never really made content for BiggerPockets. I've been working there for nine since 2016, but I was like more in the operations part of the business. And I was involved in creating those mastermind groups. I love hearing that this was so impactful for you. It makes my day. If anyone else listening to that is still doing their mastermind, please shoot me a note on BiggerPockets. I would love to know that. That's super cool information. And I'm so glad to hear that other people are, your guys are still meeting. Cause just getting around like-minded people, it really makes just a huge difference in your investing career. It sort of just like normalizes some tough decisions. Like I can imagine if you, you know, you're working full-time,

• 20:02Dave Meyer?

  you bought one single family, a couple of single families, like without encouragement from other people, it might be really daunting to go into multifamily.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And these guys have, you know, their own perspective and all their knowledge that they've built up. And, you know, you say, hey, I'm going to, I want to do this. And they say, well, have you thought about this? Have you, you know, and it's just so many times they have helped me in coming up with new ideas or new strategies. And might say about the bad week that you had when the candidate needed a new toilet or something like that. They say, oh, sorry. You really should get someone to do that for you. Oh yeah. I didn't think about that, you know? Get a property manager, you know, any kind of these ideas. It's just been wonderful.

• 20:39Dave Meyer?

  Oh, that's great. And so that was 2019 when we started the mastermind, you know, during the pandemic era, were you buying multifamily?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I was in multifamily and started selling off the single family just because it's hard to do two different things at once. And, uh, you know, even though they were profitable, there was the profitability of the, of the multifamily was so much more. After that eight plex, uh, then, then it just really took off. Then ended up buying a 16 plex. And I did that as a syndication and, uh, that, that went really well. And so then I just have continued doing that since then.

• 21:11Dave Meyer?

  And for anyone listening who doesn't know, syndication is just an industry term for raising money from. A bunch of investors pooling your money together to buy larger assets like multifamily. And it can be super beneficial because as I'm sure you can imagine, if you want to buy a 50 unit, that's a lot of money. And usually individuals don't have it. And so you have different classes of investors. You have what's known as a GP, a general partner or a sponsor who organizes the deal and sort of takes the lead on decision making, finding deals, doing all the operations. And then you have people called LPs or limited partners, who mostly just invest passively by contributing capital, money to the deal. And so Benjamin, had you ever been a part of a syndication like passively?

• 21:55Dave Meyer?

  Or did you just go straight for being a general partner and running deals for yourself?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I was involved in a, it was more of a joint venture JV deal that one of the guys was the leader of it. So kind of now, looking back, feels like a GP LP thing, even though I'm considered a general partner in that. But that wasn't a syndication. So to answer your question, no, but I did have that experience where this one guy put together the deal and found the investors and brought everybody on and just seemed like such a great thing. You know, for me, being able to just invest passively on that. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be great to be able to bring people together? Because you do get to a point, if you keep on getting bigger and bigger, where you just don't have that money, especially if you're not looking for cash flow, you know, to start out with, you don't have a huge pile of cash to get the down payment.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  So you need to put other people together. So I did have a little bit of experience, but this was the first one. And it was a definitely a learning curve.

• 22:49Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. How'd it go?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  You want to know the way, you want to know before the end, before the end, it did not go great. The end was good. I'd love to tell you about that. But it was a, it was a 16 unit and it was owned by a nonprofit organization that helps people who are kind of like, like a halfway house kind of a thing. So people who are down on their luck had some trouble and they can't get maybe either the money or they don't qualify to rent in other places. So they would help those people out. They would get grants and then they owned this place themselves and they subsidized it. So I think at some point they kind of thought, you know what, we're kind of taken from one hand and paying the other hand. Maybe that's not. Our mission, I don't know that for a fact, but then they, they, they wanted to sell.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  So, and it was a great deal, great price and went in there and bought that from them. And my, my big mistake there was thinking that they would just continue to have all the tenants in places. It was like, look, great. The whole place is full and they're paying the monthly rent for them. So I just get this big check at the start of the month. It's great. Kind of like what, uh, what you've talked about in podcasts, section eight. This is not section eight, but it's a similar sort of a deal.

• 23:55Dave Meyer?

  Is it state funded or something?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of their, I looked up their funding afterward and, and 70% of it was federal grants that they were getting.

• 24:02Dave Meyer?

  Okay.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  But it is a local organization. And so after I bought it, uh, just out of the, out of the blue, they started finding reasons that their tenants didn't qualify. You know, so kind of like one of them was, oh, you're making too much money now. So we're going to drop you off the plan. And so the people who were making some money, they had a certain percentage that they needed to pay. And the group was paying, and so that group amount was gone. And then they just didn't have enough money for the rent. And so then I started to try to find other sources to, to help them, you know, assistance sources. And in some cases I could, but some cases I couldn't. And so they ended up, many of those people leaving, but after that we were down to 25% occupancy.

• 24:46Dave Meyer?

  Oh my God. Whoa. And what were you when you bought?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  We were at nearly a hundred percent. I think it was a hundred percent.

• 24:51Dave Meyer?

  Oh my gosh.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  You know, right where you would expect it to be, you know, when you're buying. So nothing alarms off, but I didn't think about, I, I don't even know if this is a thing, but it would have been nice to have some sort of a guarantee in the contract that said, hey, you're going to keep on paying this for the next year as we stabilize or whatever. I just didn't even.

• 25:08Dave Meyer?

  That's a unique circumstance. Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  So a huge mistake.

• 25:12Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. Interesting. So how did you rectify this?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Well, luckily I had saved up an extra $40,000 to do a rehab of a garage. So there's a, there was a big garage that they had on this property. I was going to divide it into little garages and then rent those out. It was a great idea, right? Well, I guess in the end it was the best idea that I had. It didn't turn into a garage. It just sat there as a big nothing, but that money was, uh, paying the mortgage. So I notified the investors right away of the situation, which you have to do. Communication is so important. Investors, by the way, that I do, they're, they're people I know. They're coworkers, they're friends. I don't advertise to, to do these deals because I want people that I know.

• 25:50Dave Meyer?

  Can I ask how many people, uh, how many limited partners you had?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, um, in, in this deal, uh, there were five LPs.

• 25:59Dave Meyer?

  Okay. So people you probably knew decently well, I would imagine.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know them well. And because of that, I, I think I'm much more concerned about their money than I have about my own.

• 26:10Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, right.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  They will not be losing money on this deal if I have anything to say about it. And I'm in control, so I better not lose their money. And that, that point, that kept me up at night. I can remember waking up at 3am with this 25% occupancy. What's we gonna have to do when we run out of that money?

• 26:24Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  And I, I would be subsidizing myself, a capital call, those kinds of things. You just never want to have that. I luckily didn't. So I ended up finding a contractor who was looking, just calling around, looking for short-term rental for his workers as they come in to build some of these big barns for hogs in, in South Dakota here. So they'd be bringing them in, they'd stay there for a few months and then they would go. And he wanted 10 units and I thought, oh, this is gonna save me, you know? But the one thing that stopped me, and I'm glad I did it, was I thought, what is gonna happen in, you know, six months when he moves out those 10 units?

• 26:59Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Right back here.

• 27:01Dave Meyer?

  Yep.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Desperation leads you to do some dumb things, but luckily I didn't do 10. I did, I said, we're gonna do four units. So, you know, that four units would bring us up to 50%. That was enough to keep us just in, you know, above water. And so we got them in there and the, I remember this, uh, the last real big thing was that the sewer had backed up in one of those four units that I wanted to get these guys in. And he needed to move in on Monday because they were gonna start working. And this was Friday, sewer's backing up. And I could not get a plumber out there. They just, not the weekend, there's nobody. And this, this was a pandemic was kind of in around. I can't remember exactly the dates, but it was just hard to get contractors. And so I had to go in there in that basement unit and rent a jackhammer and jackhammer out the floor.

• 27:46Dave Meyer?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  To the sewer line and I I was digging around in the sand that's underneath the cement with my screwdriver, just kind of trying to see and I hit that pipe and this hole just filled up with black ooze from that and I thought it's going to go everywhere. So I started bailing this out into the the bathtub was right there. So I bailed it out of the bathtub and finally it stopped. And then I got some Ferencco fittings, which are these rubber fittings that you connect pipes together and I replaced that pipe. This was Saturday.

• 28:16Dave Meyer?

  Oh, my.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And then I poured cement that evening. The next day I put sticky tile floor on and reinstalled all of the fixtures and had them in there on Monday when I had to go back to work.

• 28:29Dave Meyer?

  Oh, my God. So that was a you triage the situation and that was an emergency.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. It was an emergency.

• 28:37Dave Meyer?

  So, but it sounds like eventually you you made this all work. You made everyone whole. Do you still own that property?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  No, we sold it. So I wasn't even so that when you do a syndication, you oftentimes will have a horizon, which is telling the investors, hey, we're going to sell it. They want their money back at some point. Money goes in there, becomes very illiquid and then you want to tell them, you know, hey, I'm the one who's making the ultimate decision when I think the time is right, I'm going to sell it or refinance it or do whatever. Some people refinance and keep it forever. But this was, we're going to sell it. And the horizon on this was five years. However, as the, you know, the GP of the deal, the operator of it, if you will, I can choose or it was set up so I could choose when. And there was a group out of Nebraska, I think, that was looking to do

• 29:26Speaker 01

  a 1031 and another broker in town called me up and said, you're interested in selling. And I said, no, we're not interested in selling. It's only been two years, but if you really want to buy it, here's a price. And I kind of slipped on that price and he went to his guy and they said, yep, we like that price.

• 29:43Dave Meyer?

  I love it.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  We want to buy it. So we went under contract.

• 29:46Dave Meyer?

  Excellent. So you're very aggressive with the price, I assume.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  I was, yep. Yep. And because I, you know, I had I held all the cards at that point or all the chips, you know, I could do anything I wanted because of. I don't really want to sell. So and then, you know, when you have a 1031, those are great, but they encourage you strongly to do things that you might not other do, otherwise do like buy something.

• 30:06Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, you can buy a thinner deal for sure. Oftentimes it's still pencils for the for the 1031 to to buy a bit of a thinner deal.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  So I'm hopeful it worked for him.

• 30:15Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  So we ended up selling two years. The ROI to the investors was 80% on that. So 40, 40% every year, if you can look at that.

• 30:23Dave Meyer?

  Man.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  So just huge. I was just

• 30:25Dave Meyer?

  Good for you.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Please. Thank you.

• 30:27Dave Meyer?

  You know, go from 25% occupancy to an 80% return in two years is that's a that's a great turnaround. Congrats. We have to take a final break, but stick around to hear more of Benjamin's journey all the way from single family deals to syndication sponsor. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple, but honestly, it was really overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming and still the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried hosting her and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for

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• 36:08Dave Meyer?

  Let's jump back into this week's investor story. So what's happening with you now, Benjamin? Obviously, the investing climate has changed. What are you doing with your portfolio these days?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Still doing syndications, just had that great experience and doing more. So we, a partner that I had found on BiggerPockets and met, by the way, Vet Your Partners, he's a local partner. And we met a bunch of times, kind of talking it over, wanted to work together. So he's kind of the operations side of things. And so he found a couple of other deals, actually. So a 32 unit and then a 56 unit locally. And so we've done those now.

• 36:47Dave Meyer?

  So can I ask you how you met on BiggerPockets?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he found me just on the forums. So I am active on the forums. I like answering questions. I think even starting out, just if that's something that you want to do, just, just get in there and ask a question, or maybe you have an answer to a question. Just get yourself out there as just being helpful. I think that's all you gotta do. Don't say, I want to do a syndication. You know, I mean, I guess you can say that, but you know, people don't normally have a lot of advice for that, but they do have advice if you have that issue and, you know, some problem and solve it. And it's just a great community for being able to do that.

• 37:22Dave Meyer?

  And it's free. Just go do it. Yeah. If you're waiting for to find a partner to answer a question, just go do that for free. So, okay, I'm curious though, because, you know, I, I talk to a lot of people and I hear about really interesting deals and partnership opportunities. How did you vet this person who approached you to partner with?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good question, because you have got to do that, because you're, you're making million dollar decisions, multimillion dollar decisions, and you don't want to have the wrong person. So looked at his track record. And so, you know, both of us have a little bit of it, had a little bit of a track record at the time. And, you know, I said, you got to open the books and show me. And I did the same for him. So look at the books. Now, there's, I, I don't know that there's anything that you can do to be 100% certain, but one of the biggest ways to do it is just meeting multiple times and looking at the numbers. And, you know, if the person that you're meeting with Can explain those numbers. You have questions about, well, where did this money go here? Whatever. Uh, then that's a good thing. That doesn't mean they're great. It just means that they're not terrible because of that.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  But if they can't explain that, or there's some other issue that you have that just, you know, they don't give you satisfactory answer, then that's, you know, you, you've got to be, what do they say? Uh, slow to hire, quick to fire.

• 38:42Dave Meyer?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Kind of the same with a partnership.

• 38:45Dave Meyer?

  Be patient. Yeah, for sure. I love that advice about opening the books. I think that's super important to just dig in. How profitable are you? How have you operated your business? You know, especially with these large syndication deals where, you know, these are more complex deals, the operations are more complex, the financing is more complex, the lack of liquidity, the additional investors. Like you gotta see if the people can do it at that point. I think if, you know, if you're partnering with someone on your first single family, it's a little bit different. But I think that's, that's excellent advice there. So what are the syndications? Are you in South Dakota still? And how are deals looking there? Cause multifamily is all over the place these days.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Uh, so everything's in South Dakota, except we just closed on one in North Dakota up in Bismarck. Uh, but yeah, it's slowed down because I, well, I mean, deals are in any market. So you can find it whether the interest rates are up or interest rates are down. But when the interest rates go up, at the start of that curve, I think it becomes harder and we noticed that because sellers have this vision of what it was like a year ago or two years ago, how great it was. And, you know, people are paying all these top dollar and they want that top dollar. And so they're going to go on the market for that and they just haven't realized that those aren't selling. So, you know, it takes a while for that mentality to kind of change. And I think it has to a large degree now. But so we had a dry couple of years where we didn't do anything, but I, you know,

• 40:07Speaker 01

  that's another thing about a syndicator is that you really don't want ones that are just all the time going, all the time going. You want to know ones that are really taking the time to find the right one. And sometimes it's going to be a dry time. And, and that's okay. And so now I think that it's, it's, it's starting to come back. We bought this, this last one was Bismarck was 226 units now. So we really went big.

• 40:31Dave Meyer?

  Big, okay.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Closed in August and we're stabilizing it right now.

• 40:35Dave Meyer?

  Awesome. Good for you. Well, so tell me, like, was this deal on the market a long time? Or how'd you find it?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  It was an off-market deal. Another one found by my partner, Austin, in his group. So he's just great at find, I'm not so good about finding deals. I'm much better with investor side of things. So that's another great synergy. Don't find somebody that does the exact same that you do.

• 40:56Dave Meyer?

  Totally.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  You know, why would you need anybody to help there with that? But so he found this. So he was just looking up in the area, knew some property management companies that were in the area, knew some brokers and just talking to people, just networking and just, he's fantastic with that.

• 41:12Dave Meyer?

  No, that's awesome. Good for you. All right. Well, Benjamin, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. This was a lot of fun and congratulations on all your success. If anyone wants to connect with Benjamin, we'll put his contact information below, but it sounds like we can find you on the BiggerPockets forums at the very least.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Sure can. Yeah. Thank you for inviting me onto the show. It's been an absolute pleasure and a dream of mine for many years. So.

• 41:35Dave Meyer?

  Oh, that's great. Well, thanks again, Benjamin. This was a great, fun conversation. And thank you all so much for listening. We'll see you soon for another episode of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast.