You need to take into account a lot of different things when doing syndication deals. As an investor, you must understand every single detail of the property before closing a deal. At the end of the day, real estate and syndication are team games. You won’t go far in your deals if you aren’t transparent enough or communicating clearly.
Join Moneeka Sawyer as she chats with Chris Larsen, the Founder and Principal of Next-Level Income, all about evaluating syndication deals. Chris breaks down a deal in real time to highlight the most crucial parts of the process and the essential lessons to remember. Be sure to take notes because you wouldn’t want to miss this episode! And if you love to learn more about this topic, check out Chris’ book, Next-Level Income.
—
We have a webinar with Chris Larsen. We’ll be talking live about the biggest topic you ladies have questions about regarding syndications and how to evaluate syndication. It’s going to be a great conversation, so come and ask all of your questions. We’ll stay live as long as you need us to. To sign up, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar. Also, what you might not remember is we held a webinar in 2022 with Chris where he did a complete detailed breakdown of a deal, he was real-time raising funds for.
It was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had about syndications, which is why I wanted to bring Chris back for another webinar. He is so good at explaining how things work and is patient and thorough in answering questions. Join us for our upcoming webinar. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar. In the meantime, since many of you didn’t get to hear the webinar in 2022, here is a replay of it. Read it. You will learn a lot.
—
Chris, I know you have a new deal that just went live. I want to hear all about that. One of the best ways to get to learn about these deals is to walk through one. This is super exciting. Do you want to share that with us?
Absolutely. I’ll share my screen here and I got a ton of stuff. If you were new to the syndication space and if you’re reading, first off, I’d recommend going to the website NextLevelIncome.com. I wrote a book about why I feel multifamily real estate is the Holy Grail of investing. To be clear, I was an investor before I started syndicating deals. I was buying properties. You and I talked about this when we were together on the show.
Multi-family real estate is the Holy Grail of investing. Share on XI managed my own portfolio of real estate for 15 years, and then I was working 60, 80, and 100-hour weeks. I was on call twelve years out of my career and it didn’t interest me in doing that. Also, I’m an engineer by training, so I want to figure out the best way to do things. I’m always looking for a better way to do things and I was introduced to multifamily. After having this conversation many times, I decided to write a book about it. You can go to the website NextLevelIncome.com/book, and get a free copy of the book here.
Go to NextLevelIncome.com/bliss. We’ve got our page for my ladies. There’s a bunch of other things that are on there, ladies. Go to that website.
This is what we’re going to be talking about. We have even more stuff that we’ve added. You can always email me. We added five ways you can set your kids up for a lifetime of financial success. These are some tools you can use for five different things. Start a bank account, pay your children, teach them about investing, start a business, and teach them about the value and cost of college. I’m big on the why. As we get into tonight, it’s like, “Why do we do this? Why do you invest?” You invest for time, you invest for freedom, and you invest for the ability to do different things.
I’d like to talk a little bit more about the deal. Before I get into this, Moneeka, I want to talk about the process. If you’re new to syndication like, “How would I look at a deal?” If you sent me a deal and said, “Chris, what do you think about this?” By the way, this happens to me at least once a week. I had one of my fellow mastermind members set it up. He sends me this deal, and it was in this little town in Alabama, and he’s like, “What do you think about this deal?”
As investors, we look at the numbers. We’re like, “What are the returns going to be on this deal?” I looked at the deal and my first question to him was, “Why do you like this town?” His response was, “I don’t know if I like this town.” I searched for this town. It was 18,000 people. 11,000 of those 18,000 people in the population were students. If you look, you’d be like, “This town’s growing like crazy.” If you’re in a decent-sized city or town, 18,000 people is a small concert in some towns. That can blow that out.
One of the things you need to be conscious of is, “Why are you investing in a specific area? Why multifamily?” That’s what I talk about in my book. I’ll talk about that here in a minute but, “Why a certain geography of a country are you going to invest in?” I’m going to walk through a lot of that as I unfold this deal here. The first thing I’m going to talk about is why multifamily real estate. Why do I call it the Holy Grail of real estate? The reason is multifamily is very stable. People always need a place to live, and it waxes and wanes. It’s hot. It’s lukewarm at times but multifamily real estate apartments never seem to be cold because people always need a place to live.
We have a few trends as well, and I talk about these in my book. One of the big trends and problems we have this decade, 2020 onward, is that we have not built enough housing. If you’re anywhere in the country that’s even remotely desirable, you can’t get a house. It’s hard to find a place to rent and we haven’t built enough apartments. We haven’t built enough homes. The question is, “Why would we not do that? Isn’t this a capitalistic society? Wouldn’t money flow into that area?”
The problem is we didn’t build at all coming out of the Great Recession and the banks tightened up lending. My wife and I started building spec homes in 2012 and 2013. We called over 30 banks and there was one in the town of Asheville, North Carolina, which isn’t huge. Out of almost three dozen banks, there was only one bank that would lend to us to build a house and this was in 2012.
In 2013, 5 years after the Great Recession started, you almost couldn’t get money to buy or build a house. If you think about that, we have to make up for that law, and then you have the Millennials. You have 20 million potential households or more living with their parents still. They’re all moving out and looking for houses. They’re looking for places to live. Guess who else is looking for places to live? Their parents because they’re downsizing. They’re moving to better areas of the country.
If you find an area of the country that is desirable, there’s a housing shortage already. We don’t have enough homes. Millennials, Baby Boomers, and Gen Z, 36% were the article I read that about a third of Gen Z say they want to own a home. It’s only a third. 75% of immigrants rent. You have all these trends that are pushing the multifamily market. That’s number one, the multifamily market.
Only 36% or a third of Generation Z want to own a home. Share on XNumber two, what areas of the country do you want to invest in? I’m going to show you this deal in Florida. It’s probably no surprise. Moneeka, I know you’re in California. I’m sure you don’t love the state tax rate as my guess. I have friends in other areas of California, and they don’t like the local policies. There have been stories in San Francisco about stores getting looted and these problems. There are people that say, “I don’t want to pay the tax and I don’t want to deal with this. By the way, I’m remote now. I can live wherever I want.”
They move to places like Idaho, Colorado, Oregon, Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas. All these states are in the top ten of the country. I can dive deep. I don’t want to get too into this. I’m an engineer. I can get nerdy about all this stuff but I can go through all the statistics of how you look at this. If you listen to those states and most people nod their heads and say, “I’d rather live in an area with a lower cost of living in a better quality of life,” although I do love California.
I love California, too. You’re right. In every place that you live, build or grow a business, there are advantages and disadvantages. I still love being in California but I know there are things that are not working here. We’ve never had someone do a deep dive on those numbers. Would you mind maybe going a little bit more high level? I would love to hear some of that.
I can do this probably in a pretty succinct way without getting too crazy here. The easiest thing to do is look at census data. You don’t have to go and look through all the US census data, although that’s where this comes from. I was doing a presentation, as I mentioned, and showed this slide. These are the fastest-growing states in 2021.
I searched and looked for the fastest-growing states in the United States. Again, I’m not saying I like or don’t like states. This is just data from where people are moving. The darker the states, the more people are moving to these states. On the West Coast people are moving typically out of California to states like Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado.
Texas, I joke around and call Austin the least expensive city in California, and then also the Southeast. The Southeast is so dark here and that’s because people are moving out of the Northeast. This goes down here, talking about the fastest-growing states in the United States. This is with a little bit of a grain of salt. Idaho has a population of less than two million. If you’re going to be buying properties like big apartments or multifamily, you want to be buying in areas where there are a lot of transactions. We like cities that are typically 250,000 or above.
Even a million are nice-sized cities because a lot of transactions occur there. A state like Idaho, maybe that’s not a good fit for us. Arizona, for instance, has over 7 million. Nevada, Utah, Texas, and South and North Carolina, I’ll show you down in there. Montana and Delaware are other one that is fairly small states. If you look down here, you see those states I mentioned, North and South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Washington. Washington State is growing but there are some issues with some of the cities in Washington that make me shy away from it. Also, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho all are great states to look into.
What is it that about Washington, for instance?
You know this because you’re a landlord. When you’re looking at states to invest in, you want to be in states that have landlord-friendly laws and also are business-friendly. I ran into a neighbor down the road and his business. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina. They’re based in Seattle. He was like, “I got back. I was in Seattle for three months.” I said, “What were you doing there?” “I’m shutting down our office.”
I said, “Why are you shutting down your office in Seattle?” He goes, “They drove us out of the city. They don’t want businesses there. They didn’t force us to leave but it doesn’t make sense for us to do business in Seattle anymore.” Amazon is divesting from cities like Seattle as well. You also have to be considerate of that, and you have to look at what the businesses and the trends are doing. When we look at crime, when it comes to neighborhoods, it’s okay if the crime is within a certain range but you don’t want crime to be rising.
You don’t want state taxes to be rising. You don’t want businesses to be leaving. A state that has less businesses but has more businesses moving in, is better than a state that has more businesses but businesses moving out and taxes rising because what you want is growth in an area. What we’re looking for is growth in an area and a state like Washington State may be growing but it’s very rural in some different areas. You have to be conscious of that as well.
You want to know that there are more businesses coming in. You want to know that crime isn’t going up, that it’s maybe stable or going down. Is that the stuff you can find out online also?
Absolutely. Again, this is a whole hour and an hour half.
It’s its own thing.
Given it a level but if you’re an investor, I don’t think you have to go and pull all this data. I would be conscious of you can go and search like, “Chris has shown me this deal in Fort Myers. Let’s look up our businesses growing there.” You can search and see that, and I can show you some stats on Fort Myers. Even more importantly, when we get into the analysis of a deal at a high level, you ask the operator, the syndicator or the general partner and say, “Chris, tell me about the situation in Florida with businesses or what this city is doing to draw in businesses.” You don’t have to have the answers as an investor but certainly, whoever you’re investing with, if we’re talking about syndication, that person should have the answers for you.
My husband is an engineer like you. We had a deal come across our desk and the numbers that were put in the deck were wrong. He was saying things like, “These numbers are a little bit misleading. I still like this deal because of this. They have a lot of business but businesses are going down that’s not stated.” For him, he was able to go do that deep dive and the syndicator was not forthright, forthcoming on that stuff. Maybe they found their numbers a different way but we lost our trust in that dealer or syndicator.
Details are important in this business because the math and the multipliers are big in the multifamily space. This is another article I pulled up talking about the two generations that are clashing. They’re both battling over gaining housing in these different markets. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. I’m going to show you this deal in Fort Myers. You’re an investor and you search and you’re like, “Why should I be interested in Fort Myers?” It’s the number one, fastest-growing city in the US. This is one of the reasons that we were interested in this market.
Now, it’s a smaller market. In a market that’s less than 1 million people, I’m wanting to see a lot larger growth rates than a market like Orlando, where we bought two properties. I don’t expect for Orlando to grow as fast because it’s a much larger market. It’s going to take a lot more to move the needle. I’m going to want to see faster growth rates there. I was talking about that deal in an 18,000-person pound. You might see some impressive growth numbers but 1,000 people one way or the other are going to move that fast and that’s almost too small.
I’m going to get into all those different subjects as we get in here and stop me and we can discuss this. First things first, when you’re an investor and you look at a deal, don’t get distracted by the pretty pictures. We like pretty pictures. Investors like pretty pictures. It’s appealing. The property should look nice but you want to look at the meat of the presentation. You want to look at what’s inside the presentation. That being said, I mentioned details matter. I’m not going to say we’ve never had a typo in our presentation.
When looking at deals, investors must not get distracted by pretty pictures. They must always look at the meat of the presentation. Share on XWe’ve transposed some numbers and done different things but you want to make sure that your operator or your syndicator in a deal like this is buttoned up. I said a big word, syndication. If that intimidates you, if you’re reading this, syndication is simply finding a deal. My partners and I go out and find a deal and we partner with investors and bring those investors together.
To purchase a deal together as a team is syndication. It’s buying a property as a team. Like on a baseball team, you have management, the pitcher, the catcher, and people in the bullpen. Although I heard, we can’t say bullpen anymore. Somebody got upset about that during the World Series. I’m not even kidding. You have people that don’t even play. You have the staff, the assistant coaches, and those things.
Syndication is a team sport. I talk about how real estate’s a team sport in my book. That’s a great way to think about syndication. It’s a team coming together to buy a deal and everybody has their place. Investors like the players on the field are important, even though they may not be the management staff. This picture driving into the property here in Fort Myers. Let’s talk about some of the high-level points here. We are buying this property in Fort Myers, Florida, and a lot of these numbers, if you haven’t seen these before, can be intimidating like, “What’s a cap rate?” We can talk about that.
Expense ratios, occupancy, and this occupancy number are not even correct because when we put this together, it’s 67% almost a few weeks ago. Now it’s about 75%. We’re leasing up very rapidly. It’s 100% leased and it’s 75% occupied the day we’re having this interview here and the day we take ownership of it. This is a $109 million deal that we’re raising $38 million. I can talk about the structure. One of the things that are unique about our group is that some other groups have been doing it as well.
We have a two-tiered structure. We have what’s called a Class A structure, which is a fixed return. Those Class A investors get a fixed return. They get paid first. It’s a very secure position. It’s not guaranteed but very secure. The Class B investors, get the actual cashflow from the property, which is typically less than the Class A investors get from a cashflow perspective. The Class A investors don’t get any upside. The Class B investors get all the upside on the deal. If you see this here, that’s why we have the two-tiered structure there.
I want to comment on that. That’s the way Chris does it, which is very interesting. It’s also different than the way many other syndicators do it. A lot of other syndicators that I’ve looked at are Class A. The first people who come in, they’ve only got a few units or this many units at Class A because they commit sooner. That’s often for the purchase of the property. They’re trying to get into the deal. They’ll offer a sweeter deal. They still get some of the upside and stuff like that but in a situation like what Chris is talking about, he’s giving everybody the same opportunity so you can choose Class A or Class B. It’s not a limited time only. There are benefits to both of those.
There are, and it depends. A lot of people are like, “If you’re retired, you’re on a fixed income.” I’m in my early 40s. I have a good friend, a former business partner. We’re the same age. We’re two months apart, and he called me a few months back. He sold the business and said, “I have $1 million. My goal is to generate $100,000 a year in passive income. Do you have anything that can help me achieve that?” I said, “You’re looking for a 10% return. We have a 9% fixed return.”
I’ve flipped the page here to show this. If you look down here, the Class A partnership structure varies. Sometimes we raise 10%, sometimes we raise 30%. The Class A structure varies based upon the structure of the deal. It does two things. It provides that opportunity for investors because we had investors that wanted a higher cashflow like my friend, and then it also lowers the leverage on the property, so we’re not having to borrow as much because it almost acts like a second loan in effect.
Our loan-to-value ratio goes down, which makes it more secure for all investors, and then also if you’re a Class B investor, it raises your overall return because the Class A investors, while they’re getting higher cashflow, they’re not taking the equity on the backend. In this deal, maybe you’re starting at a 5% or 6% return in the first year or so. If you’re a Class B investor and it goes up in year two. These are all performative projections but on the back end, your returns are higher.
We’re able to provide something for investors that want to hire cashflow upfront that maybe isn’t as concerned with growth. We’re also able to provide higher growth for those investors, even though we’re in an asset class that has had returns that are shrinking to a degree. It’s been a way that we’ve been able to provide something to investors on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to that.
Again, these are projections. This is what we like to gravitate towards as investors. I would say flip through all this, and the first thing you want to look at are the details of the property itself. You want to say, “How many units does the property have? What’s the current occupancy? What’s the rent per square footage? When was it built?” You can then start to get an idea of what the general partners and operators are going to do. I’m going to go out of order here.
Why Fort Myers? As I mentioned earlier, we want to be invested in areas of the country that are growing. Fort Myers and the county, it’s in 300,000 workers, 17% job growth since 2014. I like to see a small city and I say a small city with 250,000 roundabouts like that. I like to see 2% per year job growth. If you look at 2014, ‘15, ‘16, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, and ‘21, we’re looking in seven years, I’d like to see about a 14% job growth.
That’s way higher than the national average, by the way. Seeing 17%, which is even higher, that’s 20% higher than 14%. That’s a significant difference. I had a friend, who looked, and he’s like, “There’s not a lot of businesses in Fort Meyers are there. It’s 33,589 total businesses. Now, are they all huge businesses? No, you probably have a lot of small businesses there. 55% population growth in the past decade, and it’s projected to grow almost another 50% as well in the coming years. I got the title Fastest Growing City in America. We know Florida’s growing by about 15%.
If you look at the population growth since 2010, look at Fort Myers. It’s incredible. We bought two properties in Orlando. Orlando is 1 of the top 5 markets in the country, and Fort Myers is totally different. Again, this is what you’re going to see between a smaller market and a larger market. The next question an investor would be asking is, “Chris, why are you guys buying in a smaller market?” There’s been a lot of money flooding into core markets over the years. There are big markets like Austin, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Miami around the country a lot of these big markets.
What we’ve seen over the years, a lot of money’s been flowing into the secondary markets. That’s what we focused on in the past years, markets like Atlanta, Georgia. Raleigh, Charlotte, Greenville, Charleston, South Carolina, and then Orlando. Now, as these secondary markets have gotten more and more investors and money flooding into them, again, a lot of international money is coming overseas as well.
We’ve started to look at opportunities in the tertiary markets. If you think about it, we’re not doing this because we’re running around and seeing what’s going on. This is where the population is flowing. People are moving out of the city centers, moving to the suburbs, and now they’re saying, “I don’t even have to live in suburbs. I can live somewhere that’s even nicer, smaller, a better quality of life, less traffic, and less taxes.” We’re following the population where they’re moving. That’s what we’re doing.
You mentioned something on the last slide where you said you’re in an asset class that’s shrinking a little bit. Could you explain that?
I touched on that. The more money that flows into an asset class, it does a couple of things. It provides a great opportunity for operators like us that are selling deals. We’ve had some tremendous exits here this 2022 in terms of returns but there’s more money chasing these deals. That means, as the demand goes up, the returns go down. If you wanted 20% returns a few years ago, maybe you were okay with 18% returns, and then a couple of years ago, 15% returns. Now, I’ve seen deals with 10% returns.
You have a lot of people that don’t have anywhere else to put all this cash that they have, all this liquidity and you have a lot of big players overseas that are coming. We look for deals that need a little bit more work because we’re okay. We have a team built to put in the work, and I’m going to walk through our strategy on this deal while we’re doing that. We also look for markets that aren’t as exploited yet. We’re looking at the next top market. It’s important to point out our group.
We are a private group but we’re buying institutional quality assets. Group like ours, there are not a lot of groups our size that can go and acquire a $100 million deal like this within two months. We’ve put together a team and a process. We can vet deals, we can have our team on the ground very quickly, and we have the capital to close on a deal like this in a fairly rapid fashion. We’re prepared to get in there and improve the asset. Some might say like, “Chris, this deal was built in the last year. How are you going to improve it?” I’m going to get into some of the ways we do that here in a minute.
It does look gorgeous, by the way. It’s beautiful right up front.
I’ll talk about what that leads to in terms of the quality of residents that we have but real quick, employment drivers. This is the next thing. After you’ve said, “This is the geography. This is the state. This is the city that I’m interested in investing as an investor,” you say, “What is driving this?” You have a diversity of employers. Let me give you an example. Back several years ago, Houston was dominated by oil. Now Houston has a lot more of an employment base. If we look at the Fort Meyers market, what we’re going to see is these employers here, we have healthcare systems with 10,000 plus employees.
We have local as well as state governments here. We have county and local governments that are employed and very stable employers. We also have private. We have a public supermarket, Walmart, and Arthrex, which is a medical company that I’m familiar with. I have a lot of friends that work for them. We have McDonald’s, another city here, US Sugar, Home Depot, Winn-Dixie, and Ritz-Carlton. I look at this list as an investor and I like this because not only do I have a lot of employers on this list but I have a lot of different types of employers on this list that is going to draw in different types of individuals from around there.
You can see the proximity. I have a better picture here of the map. If you look at where these employers are, you can see this property has easy access up to 75 to all these employers here that you can get around. I’ve worked for a six-month period down in this area. It’s very easy to get up and down. Number two here is Southwest Florida International Airport. It’s the fastest-growing airport in the country in terms of seats added. When an airport’s growing that fast, it means that there’s demand, and there’s a lot of travel in and out of the airport. People are traveling to and from that area.
Another thing you want to look at is the proximity to the employers that you have here. Forgive me for flipping back and forth through all this stuff but I told you I’d go out of order. I mentioned you have employers. Look at the average income. Now you’re in California, you’re a little spoiled out there, Moneeka, I got to tell you. Around the country, if you’re looking at $50,000 or $60,000 of average income in a property, that’s pretty good. We’re at $172,000 per unit. That’s literally off the charts. This area is very affluent area, $2.5 million net worth. 88% of the residents in this area have white-collar jobs. 79%, almost 80% are college graduates.
Those that are living in the homes, in the area locally are making almost $200,000 a year. These are strong numbers. It begs the question, “Why rent? Why not buy a home?” Homes in this area are $800,000 or $900,000 starting. 20% some of the residents that are here have relocated, and they might not have the savings built up yet.
They might not know if, “This is where they want to live.” They might have started working for a company. They may be retirees and don’t necessarily have the ability to buy a house in terms of financial means or there might not be a house available for them to buy. They want to live in this area. A portion of this property is townhouses. They’re very nice. It gives you a much more residential feel out there. I mentioned a few minutes ago, how do you improve a brand new property? We have acquired three properties already that are lease-up deals. They’re new properties.
The pandemic has driven a couple of trends that have benefited some of the choices we’ve made in the past couple of years that have also allowed us to utilize different strategies. If you listen to some of my interviews at the end of 2019, I said, “We need to be careful going into 2020 based on some of the research that we’re facing a mid-cycle slowdown.” When you come to this point in the real estate cycle, which typically is 18 or 19 years that’s a whole another episode that we can talk about. It goes back to the 1850s.
When you reach a mid-cycle slowdown in the real estate cycle, you must have higher-quality renters to buffer your downsides. Share on XAgain, I’m a data guy. I’m a nerd. I love this stuff and I can tell you all about it. The thing is when you get to this point, you want to have higher quality renters, higher quality residents that’s going to buffer your downside. My former partner and I were buying in Atlanta. Those properties had about a 90% collections rate of the properties that we bought over the years in these higher B plus. B plus was built in 1990 and after A quality assets were built in the last several years, 98% collections we had in 2021.
Collections, you mean they paid their rent. They’re collecting rent.
They pay the rent. You can be 100% occupied and when there’s an eviction moratorium and people don’t pay your rent, you can still only have 90% collections. We’ve seen a lot of that. That’s a good indicator of the stability and how robust this asset class is. Now the challenge is how do you create value if you have this nice asset?
First off, the new rent. We almost bought another property up the road from this property. I was looking through my notes here. You might have noticed here in one of the prior slides the average rents in this property are about $2,000 a month. That’s market rent. They’re lower than this in this property because they gave away some concessions but for the ones that are renting now, about $2,000 a month, renewals right up the road in a similar property are increased by $300.
People are coming out and they’re increasing rents by $300 a month. We’re going to be able to buy this property and as these leases come up for renewal, over the course of the next year, we’re going to have this organic rent growth that’s coming from the market. We normally underwrite 4% rent growth. In a property like this, it’s 4%.
Being able to get 15% rent growth from the market forces that are coming in because of the scarcity and the demand for this area is incredible. The nice thing for us is that if you’re selling a property, you can’t sell a property based on what it’s going to rent for. You can only sell a property for what it’s renting for, and then somebody might say, “Chris, why would the seller sell this property?” The seller is 1 of the nation’s top 5 builders. Their business is to build, lease-up, and sell the property as fast as possible. That’s their job.
I paid $4,000 to have my condo unit painted. I needed it painted in 48 hours. I could have probably had it painted for $3,000 this weekend but I needed it painted in 48 hours. I was willing to pay that extra money for it because I was going to make a lot more money by getting that renter a month sooner. That’s what’s important to me.
What’s important to the builder is they get out of the property, collect their capital, and can invest and start their next project. That’s how they make money. Sitting in this project for another year and maximizing the rent is going to cost them money because they’re not able to necessarily build another project that they may have.
That’s not their business model.
It’s not their business model. That’s our business model.
You said that you had 100% pre-leased, and 75% already full but you’re counting on this growth of the new rents. As you have renters in, you can’t increase someone who’s already in. You can’t increase their rent to the same level. Usually, with these, it takes some circulation. Some attrition and people moving around to make that happen. How are you addressing that?
We’ve underwritten that. We have the actual rent roll, so we know when all those leases are going to turn over. We’ve baked that in and we don’t assume that we’re going to get that full $300. We underwrite that and have a buffer in. I’ll talk about how our estimates are lower than what we typically actually see. That’s a great question. The new leases will start coming due, and I believe it’s March. That’s when we’ll start seeing these increases. It’s going to take us about eighteen months. If you look at the pro forma, you’ll see it starts to happen in year two.
We’re starting to see the full realization of these increased leases. We assume it’s going to take longer than it probably is in reality. That’s step one. Step two, running the technology package. In a property like this, people like to have Nest or Ecobee. I have a picture of the Ecobee thermostat here. It’s the same one I have right back there. If you’re renting a place of this caliber, we underwrote $1,250 per unit for all 300 units. We have a quote for $800 to do this. We try to be a lot more conservative when it comes to this.
DISH fiber is something that we’ve done over the years in these properties. Everyone is accustomed to having the internet these days. Most people, I don’t know about you, Moneeka, but we haven’t had cable TV in five years. It was the 2016 election. I was like, “I’m done watching the news. Things are crazy. I can’t listen to it anymore,” and I canceled cable but we still pay more for internet and subscription services. Instead of letting Charter, Spectrum, AT&T or one of these other companies come in and sell the internet, we bring in a company.
We’ve been working with a company called GigaFi. Now we work with Dish Network, which people are familiar with. They have a product called DISH Fiber. They come in and install it. We do a profit split on the backend, and the residents get a lower cost for their internet. We charge a technology fee for that. They get the base amount. They can also choose the mid-tier or the higher tier to do that. They get better economies when it comes to that for them.
This is showing increased clashflow of $136,800 per year. If you do the estimate of what we’re collecting per month, it’s going to be significantly higher than that but we don’t expect a full adoption rate. We usually estimate about a 50% adoption rate when it comes to that but we’re seeing 60%, 70% plus adoption, and for a property like this, it’s probably going to be even higher than that.
In private yards, a lot of times, you get less money for first-floor rent. You get more money for the top floor rent. We get more money for first-floor rent because we build little private yards. If you have a kid, you can let your kids play outback without them running away. If you have a dog, you can put your dog out back. Most of the time we use turf instead of grass, and then the dog’s not peeing back there like my dog did in our condo several years ago and killing all the grass in the front yard. We’re getting a significant premium.
This is showing $100 per month. We’re seeing more than $150 per month. These are all “value ads.” If you read my book, you’re going to say, “Chris, how on Earth do you do a value add strategy in a property finished in 2021?” Those are some of the strategies that we use to add value to a property that looks brand new. Most people would assume you can’t do anything to that property. These are some areas in which we’ve been able to find value.
What’s so interesting about this is over the last couple of years, anybody who has been trying to do value add has had all the problems that COVID brought us. Supply chain, lumber, and all sorts of materials are going way up. We’ve seen a lot of projects still be profitable but not have the margins that they have originally planned. This is an interesting way to do the value add without having to deal with a lot of those issues specifically.
There are a couple of things. When you have an older value add property, there are a few factors that you have to take into consideration. One, if you’re investing, say $5,000 to $10,000 per door, which is typical for a medium-value add property, you have to raise that much more capital. You’re raising significantly more capital. You’re not going to get the same quality of loan typically because the banks are going to require you to hold more in reserves. They know that the property and the residents are of less quality. They also know that your turnover is going to be higher. We can install DISH fiber and not kick anybody out.
We can install a technology package in a day while somebody’s at work. We can install a private yard outside their home and they’re still living there and paying rent. They don’t have to spend 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months with that unit vacant. We also know just asking the person, “Do they want it? Will they pay for it ahead of time?” and doing it that way. The other thing is with these value add properties, the cap rates are higher. If you invest $1 to get $2 out, if you have a 6% cap, so $1 divided by 6% that’s 16%. I’m trying to remember exactly what that is.
I’ll do the math quick. The multiplier is about 16. A cap rate is simply if you pay $100 for something, the cap rate would be how much you would get in cashflow. A 6% cap on the $100 purchase price would be $6. A 6% cap rate would be $6 of cashflow per $100. It’s a 16.7% multiplier. If you increase the cashflow by $1, you get $16 of value, $16.7. That’s pretty impressive. At a 4.5% cap, we’re buying this property and we’re assuming we could sell it at a 4.5% cap rate, which is a little bit higher than what we’re seeing in the market.
That’s a 22.2% multiplier. It takes us less money, and less time to produce. If you’re looking at this, we’re assuming, say $100, $190, that’s $200 per resident at a 22.22% multiplier. That’s times 200 times 12 months by the way. In this case, we don’t have to invest anything in Dish. They pay for that $2,000, $3,250. and the first year we’re creating $444 in value in doing that. That value persists in perpetuity. That’s blending all those things together. It’s an easy way to create a significant return on your money very quickly in these properties.
That’s some of the high-level stuff. We spent a fair amount of time on this. If you’re an investor and you’re looking at the unit mix, you don’t need to spend a tremendous amount of time on this. You don’t want anything that’s too crazy. If there’s a property, it’s all three bedrooms, is it all townhouses? Why is it all three bedrooms? It’s because three bedrooms, they rent for more but you’re not going to have as much demand for those.
If it’s all one bedroom, why one bedroom? What about people that work from home? What about people that can’t have two roommates in there and do that? If it’s all two-bedroom, maybe that’s okay. We like to see a nice mix of those. You want to see less 3 bedrooms, more 2 bedrooms, you know, more 1 bedrooms. This is a little skewed because this is high for one bedrooms.
A lot of these one bedrooms also have a den. There’s a difference here with that. We have 1 bedrooms, and 1 1/2 baths. Some of these 1 bedrooms, 946 square feet, that’s pretty big for a one-bedroom apartment when it comes to that. Several of these three bedrooms that are down here are townhomes, as you can see. There are 24 townhomes that are associated with this. We have this nice mix in this property of townhomes all the way down to 1 bedrooms, including 1 bedrooms with a den.
You could have a couple where they work out of the house. When my wife and I rented our first apartment, it was a one-bedroom but it had a loft. We were very comfortable in that space. This is a very flexible property that has a lot of diversity when it comes to the different unit mixes. This is a lot of the details of the property here. I mentioned it earlier, the property is one of the top five builders in the country with a terrific reputation. If you’re talking to an operator of the deal when you’re buying a property, you want to say, “Are there any structural issues? Does the roof need to be replaced? Is it slapped together?”
In a new property like this by a builder of this caliber, these properties or apartments are built like condos. They’re phenomenal. When you see the amenities in this property and you see some of the finishes, they’re well done, stainless, you have nice quartz countertops, and nice layouts in here. You see these two-car garages in some of these units. We also have one-car garages and some storage units here that also add additional rental revenue that comes in. These are some of the numbers. When you get into the finances, you want to know, “Does the financing line up with the hold period?”
You can hold a property that takes less work for less time than a property that’s going to take a two-year project to complete. If you’re investing in a property and your operator says, “We’re going to spend two years executing our value add strategy,” and they only have debt on there that lasts for three years, what if something goes wrong at the end of that couple year period?
A property that takes less work can be held for less of a period of time than a property that will take two years to complete. Share on XIt’s going to take two years. You mentioned this earlier, you can’t just move people out right away. It’s going to take a little while before you can start to implement that two-year value add plan. You’re about three years out before you finish it and even start to see that revenue. If you’re done and have to refinance the property at that point, you may be bumping up against the problem.
In those types of projects, we’re putting ten-year debt on those properties. A project like this is different. We have a 1-year loan with two 1-year extensions, and it’s variable but we have an interest rate cap to cap our risk when it comes to interest rate fluctuations. We typically model our hold periods for five years. All of our exits have been significantly less than three years. We’re comfortable with a five-year loan on this type of property.
Our interest rate is 0.35% in the underwrite but we are looking at potentially getting that down to 3%. It’s a very nice property. We also get a nice quality loan when it comes to that. The other reason we’re choosing this is the exit fees on a loan like this are a lot lower. What happens is on some of these agency loans that you get from Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, you end up having to pay a significant exit fee that eats away at your profits on the back end. As an operator, we have to balance the loan terms, and the loan duration, along with the fees that we have to pay on the backend.
The other thing is, I wanted to mention it to the ladies because they read all of this. When you’re doing financing, a lot of times what happens is you either have to refinance it, turn it into a regular loan, or they do these rollovers. Every project that I’ve ever looked at, the rollover seems key to me because there’s a rule in real estate and it looks like you do a great job of keeping to your timelines, and doing expense lines. A lot of times they will say, “If you have a project and you have a budget and a timeframe, double the budget and double the up timeframe.”
That’s why our 5-year projects, we have 10-year debt. This project, when we were like, “This project is going to be stabilized in a couple of years, and if we exit it in 3 years, a 5-year loan is ample for that.
I like the rollover opportunity.
As an investor, you want to say, “Does it match up, and is there a buffer?” I’ve seen some projects with two-year bridge loans, and I’m not saying those don’t work but if you have two-year debt on a value add project, it’s worked out well in the past several years for investors certainly but there’s an additional level of risk when it comes there. This slide can take a ton of time. I’m going to point out a couple of things and then we can go into a couple of sections. As an investor, you want to look at the comparable rents that are out there. This doesn’t have the walk on here.
I mentioned that property that’s seeing those $300 rent premiums. We can only fit so many rent caps on this slide but I have a full accomplice on here. If you look at this, there’s something you want to look at as an investor. This property finished in 2021. It came online, average rent per square foot, $1.95. Now our actual rent per square foot is more like $1.75. This is not taking into account some concessions but I would note as an investor if you look at this, where are we in terms of the market? In some markets like California, you might say, “This is low.”
In some markets like the Carolinas, you might say, “This is high.” What you want to know as an investor is, “Where does the property fall on the market, and where there’s definitely room to move in terms of rent per square foot in this market?” Both are in terms of rent per square foot. Also, in terms of rents per unit, there’s only one property here. If you look at average rents per unit, are lower than this but if you look at the average square feet, they’re smaller. You want to know that you have room to move into the market. We also talked earlier in the presentation about the tremendous income levels in this property.
The rent per income was 27%. I believe it’s correct. There are plenty of rooms for residents in this property. Also, there are not a lot of other options to get a lower rent in the market. Now, Moneeka, you were talking about like, “When are you going to see these realized rents?” We are basing this year one rent over in-place leases that are there. People might be like, “63% increase, that’s insane.” That is coming because if you note here, over the past year, this property has been leased up, so there’s been a huge loss that gross potential rent.
This is a lease-up deal. It’s a little different than a stabilized property. That vacancy loss, it’s a fake number because that number’s like, “What if all these units were rented?” It takes a while to rent those up. Also, there are a lot of concessions that were given away. If you notice, we’re going to have to burn through some of those concessions going into our first year but they’re going to come off, and that’s why these concessions are going to drop pretty substantially here as we go into year two.
Year one, it’s not an anomaly but it’s hard to judge anything. This 17% rent growth in year two, that’s where we’re looking at, “What are the comps in the area?” That’s revenue growth. That’s not total growth. That 17% is coming from rent growth. We talked about all the other income that we were bringing in in terms of the technology package and the dog guards. You can see that the other income is going to be growing to $966,000 almost $967,000. That’s not a 17% rent increase that we’re looking at. It’s a combination of burning off the concessions, other income, and rent increases as well. We’re only baking in an organic 4% rent increase into those numbers is what we’re looking at. You can see that in years 3, 4, and 5.
Some people may look at that and say, “17%, that’s insane. You can’t get a 17% rent growth number.” We think that number is quite realistic based upon the fact that that’s coming from three different buckets of income in here. The other thing I would point out, operating expenses. These are our total OpEx budgets for our properties that are older than this which are usually about 36% with our property management company. Seeing OpEx budgets of 39% and 40% for Operating Expenses, that’s pretty high for us. We have two other properties with the same management company in Orlando that are of similar quality.
As you can imagine, the higher the quality of the property, the lower the operating expenses. You’re going to have a lower turnover. You’re going to have less issues going back and forth, and less maintenance. Also, we use a big regional operator. FCA is the management company that we use, and they know this market well.
We are basing our payroll and our numbers on all this. You’ll notice the payroll here. We’re stabilizing this at $398,000. This is a lease-up payroll, so it’s going to be a little bit different. We’re stabilizing this based upon the Florida market numbers that we’ve seen in our markets as well as that FCA is providing us that operates in that market. The other thing of note, if you’re buying a property, if you look at it, there’s a huge jump here in our operating expenses and property taxes. This builder bought a piece of land. They’re paying significantly less taxes. We’re going to be paying more in taxes on a monthly basis than they’re paying on an annual basis.
That’s something you want to know as an investor. Look at the taxes and make sure that they’re adjusted, and ask your operator, “What’s the tax situation and how’d you figure that out?” We know what the tax rate is. We’re assuming it’s going to be 85%, which is the discount rate. 85% of the purchase value going into this market is how we’re calculating that.
Investors who are buying a property should look at the taxes and make sure that they are adjusted. Share on XWe also have some soft insurance quotes that we’re using to get these insurance numbers. That’s also another great question. If you’re looking at a coastal market or Florida, people are like, “Why aren’t you worried about hurricanes?” We’re always worried about natural disasters but we’re not worried to the point where we’re not going to invest. We’re worried to the point of how are we going to ensure ourselves and our investors against those risks.
Like in any market, you’ll be out there. Again, that’s a high-level overview of the pro forma and the numbers there. The questions to recap as investors as you want to ask are, “What are the assumptions you’re using to get your income growth?” If you say, “Chris, it’s not realistic to see rents grow 10% in year one,” I would say, “How did you get that? What are you seeing? If we’re seeing 15% rent growth in the market, then 10% is not unreasonable.” I talked to my partner. He’s down in Atlanta at a conference and he said they did a panel and the rent growth that they all shared on stage was 10% to 20% in the southeast year-over-year.
These are not just very specific markets. These are the actual rent growths we’re seeing in this market. Again, we’re not projecting that out for five years or worse. We’re assuming that they’re going to slow down significantly. These are sales comps, and then we get into the pretty pictures again like we were talking about with Fort Meyers. We covered a lot of this. This is why is it such a great place to live. This goes through a lot of the properties that we’ve had, some of the closings that we’ve had.
That’s the final question, which is should be your first question, which is, “Who are you investing with? Do your operator, your GP, and the partner that you’ve chosen to place your money with have a track record?” I should know this exactly. This is my fifteenth department syndication that I’ve been a GP on. We’re limited partners or owners in twenty different properties currently. We invest in every deal that we present to investors. That’s another great question, “Do you invest in your own deals? Why? Why not? How much?” When we profit from a deal, we roll that into the next deal. We believe in this strategy and like to buy properties that we want to own ourselves, and we see this as a way to share these opportunities with other people.
There was one other thing you said at the very beginning. You are able to do projects that are institutional size rather than the smaller ones. Could you talk a little bit about how that works out for you? Why it’s different for you than for other syndicators? Give me some perspective on that.
There are a few different pieces of the puzzle that you need on the front end. I mentioned I was on the mastermind call and we had two other syndicators. One had a deal that was falling apart. One had a deal that he is putting together. We had a deal that came through and we joked because it’s like a dance, the middle school or the high school dance.
On one wall you have investor capital. On the other wall, you have deal flow and it depends on who is on the floor at the right time. You have to have the right deal at the right time with the right capital coming through. If you have 2 people come off 1 wall and 1 person off the other wall, only 2 of those people can dance together. You could have three people dance together.
That’s where the analogy falls apart.
It depends on which wall they’re coming off of if you ask me but it’s overly simplistic. I crushed my own analogy. You have to have the right deal and the capital comes together at the right time for a long-term partnership. How about that? Maybe we can agree on that. You have to have the right mix on the dance floor at the right time. We have created a deal flow. We have five people on our acquisitions team. We’re constantly looking at deals. My team told me they’re going to underwrite 450 deals this 2022.
This young team is out there my main partner, and then we have the team underneath him. They’re out there. That’s two deals a day on average that they’re underwriting. It’s like looking at the matrix if you look at our spreadsheets. It’s deal after deal but the good thing is because of the number of deals that they’re looking at and I mentioned this deal, they knew. They’re like, “This property up the road that we almost bought is getting rent premiums of $300.” By the way, the reason that the seller didn’t sell was that he decided to hold onto the property and get those rent premiums.
They’re good that seller decided to hold onto that. That broker that was selling us that deal, because that deal fell apart, brought us this deal. We get deals because of our knowledge of the markets, our relationships with brokers, and the frequency with that we’re in there. The big pieces are reputation. We have a 100% track record of closing. We typically close deals the size of a very short timeline of 2 to 3 months because we know so much coming in. We don’t have to spend a month after we get the deal under contract or run through all this process.
This deal was under contract, and we were able to put the package together. Our team’s ready to go, putting everything together. I started reaching out to investors saying, “Heads up, I had some investors on a waitlist. We have a deal coming through. Are you still interested so I know how much capital and what we can move to get a deal done?” We’re always tracking those numbers. It comes down to communication.
It’s sharing information with investors, being transparent, and then also explaining the process so investors know that, “Our deal, our agreement on our end is we’re going to find you this deal. We’re going to share the details of this deal. Your part of the bargain as an investor and as part of the team is that you’re going to get 2 to 4 weeks to look at the deal and fund the deal.” We’re going to close about a month after that. Our last deal was oversubscribed. There are investors that didn’t fund on time and didn’t get into the deal. That’s why we had a waitlist.
The big part on our end is I’m sending out investor updates every month. Our investors get distributions every month. They get quarterly updates as far as financials that come in there. We try to be as transparent as possible when it comes to that. We have the deal flow. We have the investor relations and the capital side of things. On the backend, we’ve had four exits with the team this year. They’ve all exceeded our pro forma expectations by a significant margin. Our average returns are well into the twenties or are higher than that.
You can see our projected returns here. I certainly don’t promise those returns on every deal we do. I would look at every deal on a deal-by-deal basis but the bottom line is the 3rd piece of the puzzle or the 3rd leg of the stool, if you will, is the operations side. Our Head Asset Manager, Brian ran a portfolio of $1.5 billion significantly more units than we have now. It’s a factor of three. This is cute for him to run the number of doors that we have at this point.
You need somebody that’s comfortable. That’s the other thing you need to ask the operators that you work with, “What’s your track record? What’s your plan? Can you handle this?” We’re only going to buy 1.6% or 7% of the deals we underwrite this year. It seems like people are like, “You bought 7 or 8 deals. It seems like a lot.” When you have a team built to handle a portfolio three times your size, we’re very comfortable with that. We’re built to scale and grow. We’ve built a team to grow into.
Have you ever had a deal that went south?
It’s yes and no. Personally, I’ve not had a deal in that I’ve been a general partner that has not performed to expectations. That being said, if you asked me in the middle of COVID, “Are your deals performing to pro forma it?” the answer was no. If you look at them overall, I didn’t have any investors. I increased my investor updates to every week because we wanted to tell investors, “Here’s what’s going on.” That’s our pledge. We want to be as transparent as possible.
A lot of deals were gone south in 2021 but they were bobbing. They were bobbing up and down and all of our all-over deals stayed afloat. This is a great question to ask, “What’s the worst-case scenario?” It was one of the first deals I invested in, and it was the group that my original partner and I originally partnered with on our first deal. They bought a deal on Houston. I mentioned that Houston was one of those markets that had a lot of oil industry and they didn’t have a lot of diversity. This was several years ago. The oil was $120 some a barrel and it crashed to $50 a barrel if I recall correctly.
The oil market tanked, and the group I invested with had a third partner. Two of them, a third partner. They split. That third partner went a separate way. They were distracted. They switched the management company. Things were not great, in general. With the group, they weren’t great in general. With the economic market, the management team got switched out. At a local level, it wasn’t great and then the hurricane comes through Houston and blows the roof off about 20 units, out of 200 units. It was this perfect storm of events.
That deal still made money. I averaged about 5% returns on that deal. I didn’t lose capital but we had a capital call because they had made a big distribution early in the whole period, so I had to send a check-in. I’m like, “This isn’t fun. I’m supposed to be making money from this deal.” This is an important thing to ask the operators that you work with and also it’s a good example of one of these stable, high-quality, multifamily deals. They shouldn’t lose money. They might not perform expectations but if you don’t sell in a fire sale, they shouldn’t lose money. That should be your first question, “Am I going to get my capital back and how am I going to get my capital back?”
Stable and high-quality multi-family deals may not exceed expectations, but they shouldn't lose money. Share on XIf you read everything I said, you shook your head and said, “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think the interest rates are going to be that. I don’t think the rents are going to be that. I don’t think your numbers are correct.” The next question is, “Do you still want to invest?” If you said, “Yes, I don’t agree with you but I still want to invest in this space.”
That’s why we have Class A because you can decrease your risk and say, “I don’t think I’m going to get this return, so I’m going to take a slightly lower return that’s more secure and get more of a bond-like return that’s 9% on a monthly basis was at 0.75% and take that.” I’m not going to argue with an investor that says, “I don’t like where the multifamily market’s going but I want to be invested.” We have an option for that type of investor as well.
Wasn’t one of your personal syndications that did this going south thing that the Houston story?
Not technically, but they’re friends of mine and they were partners in a deal in ours. Again, I have to temper all this with, if you look at the past years, it’s been a fairly easy time to be in multifamily. You’ve had cap rates compressing and if I sit here and I flashed up all of our deals and how great they did, that’s not worth anything. The track record is important comparatively.
Anybody reading this, I can show you all of our distributions to date as well as all of our dispositions so you can see our track record in real-time. We update that on a quarterly basis. That’s important. The past isn’t necessarily predictive of the future when it comes to the actual number. If someone tells you, “You’re going to get a 20% return on this,” run away.
If somebody says, “This is our best guess. This is what we’re striving to do. We strive to get 7% cash and mid-teens return. These are the things that could change that. It might be a little bit worse. it might be a little bit better but this is our plan to do it.” You need to be confident in the plan. If you’re confident in the plan and their numbers make sense, then to me, that’s an operator you can rely on if they have a consistent plan that they’ve executed. Everything that I walk through, we’ve done those yards, the first floor, the private yards.
We’ve done the internet service provider. We’ve done the technology package. We’ve hired the property management staff in the area. We know what that’s going to be. We know what the numbers are going to be. We know we can execute that plan. We can’t control the economic environment. We can’t control the cap rates. We can’t control interest rates and all that stuff but we can control the plan that we have and we’re very confident of that.
What is the minimum investment into winning projects?
Our minimum, it’s $50,000, which is on this page, we typically have a $100,000 minimum for the Class A investors because it’s a lot smaller equity slice, so it’s in higher demand but $50,000 is our minimum.
That was a lot of information.
I ran out of water. I should leave with my contact information, of course.
I don’t know if anybody who’s online with us has any questions. If you do, please let us know.
I’ll pop on here. We have a terrific team. This is my contact information here. These are my three main partners that live here right down the road. This is our terrific staff. They do a tremendous job here. If you have any questions, Tracy, I know you’re joining us here, feel free to throw any questions in the chat box or if you want to come on here live and talk. That’s great too.
Tracy came off of something that she was hosting. I’m sure her brain’s a little bit fried but she says, “No questions.” Tracy and anybody else who’s reading this, I will be sending this out. Remember that a lot of talking about a deal, why I wanted Chris to go deep into a deal is, part of the learning curve is to do something real and live. To talk about syndication theoretically, it’s not easy but that’s a lot of what we hear.
Chris, thank you so much for giving us an hour and a half time. When you go deep into the evaluation of the particular property and you get to see what’s going on in the mind of someone who’s good at this, who’s done a lot of this, then you can ask questions and you also learn through that process. This is 1 deal and 1 perspective. Chris has done other deals and we’ll do other deals. Thank you so much for going deep on that.
That was fun. Terrific questions. I’m glad we could go through that because we certainly couldn’t have done all the other presentations as well as that in addition. If you’re reading this either later on, you can reach out. My information’s [email protected]. We can set up a time. On the website, NextLevelIncome.com, you can get ahold of me. I can go through any of this and if you want to see our deals that come through, you can click on the investment link and put your information in there.
There’s a bunch of free gifts at NextLevelIncome.com/bliss, so you can get his book and get to know Chris even deeper and the way that he thinks about this. We got a ton.
I got plenty more. We got all kinds of free books up there. We got our awesome podcasts with you, Moneeka, that was on there. We keep trying to put more and more resources up there to help people out. Our goal, the first two tenets of Next Level Income are making money, keeping money, and then growing your money. We talked about how to grow your money in investment but it’s a great time of the year to figure out how to keep more of your money through tax strategies and those things. We have a ton of stuff as well that can help out with that.
Ladies, you can go to NextLevelIncome.com/bliss to get that book and get more of those freebies that Chris is so generously shared with us. Thank you.
Absolutely. Thank you, Moneeka.
Tracy, so I’m going to assume you don’t have any other questions. Thank you for joining us. Everybody who’s reading later or was here, always remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. We’ll see you soon.
—
Wasn’t that an amazing webinar? Chris does a great job, doesn’t he? Don’t forget to join Chris and me this Thursday for our live webinar on how to evaluate syndication. I’m so excited to share this with you. Bring all of your questions and don’t miss it. To sign up. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/SyndicationWebinar. See you then.
——————————————————
To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com
Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.
Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com
Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
Raising capital is an important part of starting a business. And private money is one way to get your real estate investments financed. In this episode, we examine how as Moneeka Sawyer deep dives into raising money with real estate investor and educator, Amy Mahjoory. Amy has helped thousands of real estate investors with private money, walking us through each step. From building relationships to crafting your pitch, Amy lets us have a look at her process. Tune in and learn more about building a real estate business right here.
—
I am excited to welcome to the show, Amy Mahjoory. She is a real estate investor and educator, HGTV personality, bestselling author, and keynote speaker. Her life didn’t start in real estate. After fourteen years in Corporate America, she had her fill working for other people. Although she was a highly recognized global leader in procurement, logistics, and operations management for Dell Computers, she decided that a traditional education combined with the false security of a 9:00 to 5:00 was not producing the results she wanted.
Real estate was the game-changer. She has been investing in real estate over the last several years. During that time, she has raised well over $20 million in private money. As a result of her immediate success, she went on to resign from her corporate job to pursue her passion for real estate. Shortly thereafter, she signed a contract with HGTV and began coaching real estate investors all over the country on the same creative rapport and trust-building strategies, systems and scripts that she still uses in her business now. Here is the best part, all of this can be done without having to depend on friends and family members for private money. This is her new passion and focus.
She helps her students transform their minds so that they can feel confident raising private money. She takes the fear out of raising capital and breaks her systems down into a methodical and easy-to-follow system. Her greatest achievements go beyond what she has accomplished herself. Many people become successful in real estate, but her talent is helping others become successful themselves. She has a genuine interest in helping others succeed. Most of her success originates from her streamlined operations and proven systems. She changes people’s lives. Amy, welcome to the show.
How are you? It’s great to be here with that warm welcome.
This is what I love about you. Your bio is so much more about what you’ve done for others. It’s not all about, “I’ve accomplished that,” because you’ve accomplished quite a lot. It’s pretty amazing. Thank you for that. Can you talk a little bit about your story? How did you transition from corporate to entrepreneurship?
Surround yourself with people on a similar path. Believe in yourself, and you will do great things.
My background is very traditional. Like many people out there, I was raised to go to school and get good grades, get a job at a secured stable company, and collect my paycheck for the next 25 years until I retired. The transition for me was easy because once I realized real estate was my new path, I had goals and was committed. I invested in coaching and mentorship. Where it became challenging was the lack of support from my friends and family members, specifically my dad. That’s a whole other conversation.
For me, I’m a product of the system. A lot of people out there can relate to similar situations and losing friendships along the way. It’s always like, “Perseverance will prevail. Keep your head down. Surround yourself with people who are on a similar path. Believe in yourself and you will do great things.” For me, it was an easy transition because I knew I was going to do it. I was committed to doing it.
Some people are committed but they second guess. I love the power of, “I’m committed, even if my dad doesn’t like it.” Many of us are influenced by our families. “People may not like it. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing it.”
Once you know your role and you’re confident in who you are and what you’re doing, it makes that decision-making process so much easier. At the end of the day, I still have to do what’s right for me and my family while respecting my dad, for example. That’s why I believe so much in coaching. The reason I had so much immediate success was because of my coach. If I didn’t know what I was doing, I worked at the corporate for fourteen years, but they helped me with that fast track to success which was cool.
Talk to me a little bit more about overcoming the roadblocks that maybe family and friends put in front of you. A lot of us women are susceptible to that and experience that.
The hard part for me was I’m very sensitive. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I don’t like disappointing my parents, even as an adult. I always seek out my parents’ approval. I want them to be proud of me. They are now. My dad is my biggest cheerleader now. It was very hard for me, more so losing my two best girlfriends during that transition because I was so excited and passionate. I know real estate can be a game-changer for everyone. That’s why I coach and preach it. They didn’t want to hear it. Until this day, I still believe that I drove them away from me.
It was very hard. I cried for years. Even when I speak on stage, I share this example and I get emotional. However, I’ve also learned that friendships are seasonal. People come in and out of our lives for a reason and their purpose was served. I made a bunch of amazing friendships along the way. I never expected my entire inner and outer circle now to be other real estate investors, entrepreneurs and business owners. Our girls’ trips are masterminds. Don’t get me wrong, I still have my OGs. We have fun and go out. It’s just different.
For me, it’s the same way. When I do ladies’ weekend away, we’re ten real estate investors and professionals in that industry. Not a single one of us is an agent. Just because you’re in real estate does not mean that you need to be an agent. I want to emphasize that again. There are a lot of people in the industry that do a lot of this stuff around what we do. It’s so interesting because I remember when I got started with this show, I’m so passionate about real estate anyways, but it’s always been my side hustle. This is what brought me into this fear of learning more about real estate, expanding my own influence, and also my own learning. That’s why I keep going because I learned so much.
Suddenly, I’m having these real estate conversations with all my friends. That’s not what we used to talk about before. People are getting a little bit uncomfortable. I had several friends that were like, “I’m totally inspired by you. I’m going to go get my real estate agent license.” I’m like, “No, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about getting another job and not investing and not growing your own wealth, and doing that for other people. We’re talking about this.”
Over and over again, “Don’t get your license. Don’t spend all your time on a license. Go get a mentor, learn to be an investor.” I lost so many friends because they got tired of hearing, “Don’t spend all your time and money becoming an agent,” because I was pretty bullheaded about it. I can see what happens when you spend all that time and money doing that. It does not grow your wealth and freedom. In a lot of cases, it takes away your freedom. Some people want to do that. That’s great, but that’s not the strategy for becoming an investor necessarily. I had the same experience, lots of nights crying because people dumped me.
It’s part of the process and journey. We’re going to have the highs, lows, wins, losses, make money and lose it all. I had this conversation with a girl who was at my LA event. She was like, “I’m going to go get my license,” and I was like, “Why?” She said, “Don’t I need to?” I’m like, “No. Don’t get your license.”
For those of you who may not already know this, there are so many ways where we can still generate referral fees and additional income without being a realtor by referring people to realtors. I always believe in working smarter, not harder. I’m not going to spend time getting a license when I don’t need it to list my own properties. I don’t want to list someone else’s properties because that’s another job to your point.
The other thing is once you have a license, you have to hang it. You’re legally obligated to hang it. You have an obligation now to a broker. That broker is going to have expectations. Every year, you have to do your education to renew and to get your hours. You have to renew your license every four years. It’s been a long time since I had my license, so these numbers may be different and they’re different in different states, but there’s a lot involved in that.
In California and a lot of states, you have to disclose that you’re a realtor, which means you often lose offers because people don’t trust a realtor-buyer sometimes. I found that to be the case for me too. It was a complete hindrance in my business and took all this time and energy. I want to work 4 to 10 hours a month. That was a lot more time and energy that was getting put into my business that wasn’t necessary. Talk to us about your transition to HGTV. How did that happen? What did that do for you?
I did have a goal when I first started to be on TV. I didn’t share it with many people. I wanted my own show. I was in the middle of hiring a virtual assistant. She was 21 years old. I was surprised when she asked me, “What are your short and long-term goals?” I was like, “Who is this girl?” I loved it and appreciated it. I ended up hiring her and I said, “One of my goals is to get on TV,” and by having a voice. I always talk about word of mouth going a very long way. She responds with, “My mom knows a producer at HGTV, would you like an introduction?”
I said, “What show?” She said, “House Hunters,” which many of us know that show. I respectfully declined her offer because I thought to myself, “I don’t want to be on House Hunters. I want my own show.” Two days later, I thought to myself, “Amy, what are you doing? You wrote a book on networking. Get your foot into the door with this lady and see what happens.” That’s what I did. I had a snowball effect. I hit it off. I was on House Hunters. We did a four-part mini-series, but it’s cool because they broke the mold with me.
Everyone you encounter is a prospective private money lender.
In the 12 or 15 years at that time that they had been filming, they had never had an investor on the show. They showed my transition out of Corporate America into real estate on the show. My contractor walked through projects before, during and after. That was cool and it was great for credibility. The relationships, I still have and cherish until this day. I realized I don’t want my own show because it is a lot of work and that’s not a priority for me anymore.
For a long time, I thought I wanted my own show and then I realized there’s this thing. Ladies, this is relevant to you too. How many times are you shooting for something because you think it would be cool? You’re afraid of missing out. You want to have that credibility and whatever it is in your life that you’re looking for that lifts you, but so much that we drive towards is not serving our core values or serving our dreams. This is something that I’m focusing on now on the backside of the pandemic where I’ve been sitting at home for two years. I’ve had so much time to think about, “What is it that makes my heart sing?”
Traveling and speaking, I was gone every single weekend. I remember the year before the pandemic, I was home for six weekends out of the entire year because I was traveling. I miss my husband, my little dog, my family and my life, but I was doing it because it was what was expected, it gave me more credibility, got my voice and message out there, and all of those things, but it wasn’t doing it in a way that supported the bliss of my own life.
As we move forward, I’ve realized, “No, I don’t want a television show. I don’t want to be working that hard. I want to be working hard on the things that are going to reach my goals and are aligned with my own core values and the things that make me happy.” I love that you mentioned that because we can have so many opportunities. Which ones do we choose?
I hear you talking and I hear myself. We were the exact same. That’s the only reason I wrote the book. I wrote this bestselling book because all my friends were writing a book and I’m like, “That’s the next thing to do. I got to beat my friends. I got to be bigger and better.” Now, I love what I do and it’s the only thing I want to do. I’ve cut back on speaking and all these other things. I don’t care anymore. I want to do genuinely what makes me happy, but I also treat it as a business and capitalize on it. How do we do that?
Talk about what you do.
I never thought I would be a nationwide coach showing other investors all over the country how to raise private money. That’s what I do now. I was a leader at Dell, but I was never a manager of people. I was always an individual contributor. When I got into real estate, I never thought I would be hiring a team of twenty people and getting on stage and being on TV. I was super shy growing up. For the first eight years of my real estate career, investors kept saying, “How did you raise all this capital? You must have asked your friends and family.” I was like, “No, it’s the opposite because I’m so stubborn.”
Once they heard that out, they were like, “What list did you buy?” I have never bought a list to target private money lenders. If you have, great. I would love to hear how your experience was. I launched a coaching program a few years ago, once my daughter turned one because I wanted to be a soccer mom. Now, I get to still stay connected with investors all over the country from the comfort of my own home while changing their lives and showing them how to raise capital to get 100% funding for their deals. That’s my main focus now. I’m still an active investor so is my husband, commercial, residential and all that stuff, but now I’m a coach myself and it’s on one topic.
The topic that you focus on specifically is private money. I want you to dive a little bit deeper because the very first time that you and I connected, everything you said was like magic. I was like, “That’s so cool.” That’s why I wanted to bring you on. Tell us a little bit more about the private money angle. I know that the way that you approach it is different. You’re not going after friends and family. At least, in the beginning, you opted out of that.
I still don’t because I’m stubborn. If you guys get out there and you listen to podcasts and read books, you take other coaching programs, the majority, if not every real estate educator out there will say, “Raising capital is easy. Go ask your friends and family members.” What if you don’t want to? What if they’re not supportive? What if they’re not in a position to invest? How do we get out there and build rapport and trust with strangers?
I’m talking about your Uber driver, cashiers at a grocery store, people at airports, church communities, sporting events, happy hour, anyone and everyone you encounter is a perspective private money lender. How do we make those mindset shifts? Start planting seeds to open up those conversations to coffee talks where you get them to ultimately invest with you. What I teach is raising capital from people who aren’t even a part of your inner circle. I have students who want to target their friends and family members, and I show them how to have those conversations as well.
I have taken her online course. It’s phenomenal. Ladies, you know that I will not recommend a course unless I’ve vetted and liked it. Many of you asked me, “Moneeka, if you’re only working 4 to 10 hours a month on your real estate business, what’s all this other time? Why are you always so busy?” First of all, this show takes a huge amount of my time because I want it to be the very best for you, but the other thing is I will not recommend anything to you that I have not been through myself.
I take a lot of coursework, not that I need it. I’m not doing this for me. I’ve got my business, but I do love to learn and I do want to get to know the people that I am doing business and partnering with, so I vet their courses. Over the last few years, I’ve vetted twenty courses and only two that I have recommended. It’s a lot of work that goes into that. I’ve never shared this before, but this is what I do. If I’m going to recommend it to you, I’ve been through it or one of you have been through it.
I meet with some of you and you tell me, “I have this great coach. I’ve got a great program.” That’s how I met Mark Willis. Someone else recommended him to me because they loved working with him. You’ve heard from him a few times. A lot of it is recommendations and coursework. Many times, I’ve done the investing with them before I’ll recommend them. I don’t vet everybody that’s on the show and that we do courses for, but I will tell you if I’ve gone through their coursework and I have with Amy. That allows you to feel a little bit more comfortable about the recommendation. I do want to be clear, I don’t vet everybody on the show.
Some of the people out there who know me or many of you who may not know me, I’m raw, real and direct. I’m very approachable and easy to talk to. I am not scripted. It’s a proven system. It’s stuff that I’ve been doing for many years. I’m tested and fine-tuned. If you are coachable and can follow steps, I’ll hand you everything you need on a silver platter, “Do this, call this person, say that. Call me back when they do this.” You will have success and can raise unlimited capital if that’s aligned with your goals. All of our goals are different.
Having money is a good problem to have.
It’s cool because, with private money, there are endless opportunities. You don’t have to flip or wholesale. Buy five rental properties tomorrow with private money. Start a fund and invest in commercial syndication. Invest in a multifamily deal. There is so much we can do. I’ve got mortgage brokers and realtors who learn how to raise capital because all they want to do is generate referral fees for their investor clients. Having money is a good problem to have. Let’s educate people on why they should invest with us.
Do you find that when you raise the money, you should have some idea of where it’s going to go before you raise the money? They’re excited about giving you money and then you stalled.
The answer is no, we do not need to have a deal right now. We don’t want to wait until we have a deal. For those of you who are looking for a deal, whatever your strategy is, we want to be looking for deals and raising money at the same time. Even though I’m telling you that you’re going to raise money from your Uber driver, which is what I did and what you can do as well, it is rapport-based lending. We’re building a relationship and developing trust. You can do this in as little as three weeks, but you don’t want to wait until you have a property under contract. You want to be proactive in that skillset.
You’ve told us a little bit about what makes your course different. You’re talking about not going to friends and family, and doing the fundraise simultaneously. There are some other special things about your course.
I know a lot of big and small name educators out there and nobody teaches private money the way I do. No one teaches how to get creative and think outside the box. I have over 54 different creative trust and rapport-building strategies scripts and templates. My course is a done for you system. I give you all twelve of my credibility pieces, all my contracts, and my list of FAQs. What’s cool about the program is the online portion is eight different modules. Each module is built upon the previous one. In order to have success, you want to come and watch the videos, and do the action items in order of priority because it all means to one another.
I don’t guarantee success and I never will. I have a 90-day money-back guarantee because I can and it works if you follow the system. What’s also unique about my program is I give you lifelong access. Not just to your online curriculum which I’m also fine-tuning and tweaking because I’m still an active investor, but you get lifelong coaching with me that does not expire. I’m not going to call you six months later and be like, “Your coaching is expired. Would you like to reinvest?” That’s it. One investment, lifetime access. It’s a no-brainer.
It’s unheard of. While we’re talking about the course and since you ladies already know a little bit about it, Amy and I are doing a few things together for you. We want to do a webinar. We’re calling the webinar Grow and Scale Your Real Estate Empire with Private Money. We’re going to be doing that together so you can meet Amy, ask questions live, and all of that stuff. If you want to join us, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/PMWebinar. The webinar is going to be held on Thursday, April 7th, 2022 from 1:00 to 2:30 Pacific time. Let’s talk about that a little bit more. What are we going to be covering, then I’ll talk more about the coursework.
My webinars are pretty insightful and eye-opening. People are walking away mind blown, which is cool. We have plenty of time in the end for Q and A so I got you. I always keep it simple and to the point. I always focus on three things. Number one, what is private money? Who are we targeting? Who aren’t we targeting? Where is it? Number three, how do we obtain it? How do we get our hands on it?
When you understand all three of those points, you can obtain 100% funding for your deals moving forward. This is regardless of your experience, credit, and whether or not you’re doing this part-time or full-time. None of that matters. Follow these proven systems, be coachable, and you will have success. We’ll get into some of those strategies during the webinars, so make sure you guys attend.
Grow and Scale Your Real Estate Empire with Private Money, Thursday, April 7th, 2022, 1:00 to 2:30. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/PMWebinar. Some of you may be like, “I’m all-in. I want to do the course,” join us for the webinar also. If you want to do that, Amy’s already shared a little bit about the coursework. Do you want to give us a few more details before I give them some links?
One of the first things I have my students do is start building our foundation and getting ready to raise capital as early as module one. One of the key takeaways from module one is what I refer to as our Four-Second Power Pitch. In four seconds, you are going to explain to anyone and everyone, the minute you leave your house, who you are and what you do by dangling that carrot and getting them to ask you more questions about it.
The Four-Second Power Pitch is how I got Larry, a retired physician who was my Uber driver to become my money lender. That’s going to be step one. As we build our foundation, and there are a lot of things that go with building a foundation, how do we start to take action? It’s with your Four-Second Power Pitch. The minute you leave your house, anyone you encounter is a prospective private money lender. What do you say? It’s your Four-Second Power Pitch.
For our ladies that are subscribed to EXTRA, she’s going to give us a Four-Second Power Pitch in EXTRA. In that first module, she’ll be covering that. That’s the foundational building block. That’s where we start. From there, there’s a world of information in the course.
That’s opening up the door to having ongoing conversations with each of your private money lenders. Step two is, how do we take action? How do we find the people to book these coffee talks with? At these coffee talks, what do we even say to them? That’s going to get into all your credibility pieces and all the content that I give you. Don’t worry about what that looks like.
If you are in and ready to go, you can get her course. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com/PrivateMoney. That’s for the full-pay option. Her courses are insanely inexpensive. I can’t believe that she offers all this information for this little amount. It’s a good deal. If you can’t make the full payments right away, you want to do a payment plan, she offers that. She wants to make sure that everybody can get the advantages of this coursework. If you want to do a payment plan, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/PrivateMoneyEasy. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
I don’t think so. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a tight-knit community. It’s like a family. We got each other’s backs. A lot of us develop friendships and end up hanging out outside of our work and coaching environment, but you think about what if you could raise six figures in as little as 21 days. If you can raise six figures, how much more can you raise? What would your business and life look like?
You never know who you’re talking to. You never know who is standing in front of you. Be respectful, and follow the golden rule.
You can sit out there and go read a bunch of books and listen to a hundred podcasts, but why not leverage from my years of experience, lessons learned and mistakes? Stop posting desperately on Facebook groups. I see this all the time. Get the system in place and position yourself as a polished professional poised for aggressive growth. Get out there and do everything you’ve ever dreamed of when it comes to growing your real estate business. You can do it.
That’s the thing. Us real estate investors, what is it that we love? Leverage. Leverage when we’re purchasing and other people’s information. I love that you said it that way. Leverage her years of experience to fast-track yourself. Thank you so much for all that you offered in this part of the show.
It was great being here. Thank you so much for the opportunity to chat with you and your audience. I look forward to coming back.
We got more on EXTRA but before we move on to that, let’s talk about our three Rapid-fire questions. The first one is, what is the super tip on getting started investing in real estate?
Number one is to commit to it and decide that, whether or not it’s for you. Commit and then set your goals up.
What is number two? What is the strategy for being successful in real estate investing?
Once we have our goal, because thoughts expand, number two is to get after it. Get out there and take action. For example, take my Four-Second Power Pitch and start implementing it every single day. Practice it at home. Don’t just sit there and talk about it and do it. That’s why I could do a lot of these implementation workshops. We can sit here and talk about it and take a bunch of notes that you’re going to throw in the garbage, or we can meet up live and start taking action and see results. Just do it.
What is one daily practice that you use that you would say contributes to your personal success?
For me, it was treating anyone and everyone I encounter the minute I leave my house as an equal and specifically private money lender. I have struggled in the past with anger management. I had an anger management journal. I had a very low tolerance for poor customer service regardless of the industry. I’m comfortable saying no. I would go off on people. I would be rude to them if they were rude back.
Once I decided to commit to being a real estate investor and a business owner, I said to myself, “You can’t talk to people this way. You never know who you’re talking to. You never know who is standing in front of you.” Be respectful, the golden rule from here on out. Anyone and everyone you encounter, treat them as equal and better yet, target them as private money lenders. How do you do that? My Four-Second Power Pitch. Everything is very closely linked to one another.
One of the things is that how we do anything is how we do everything. If you have to improve yourself or your business, you’re improving yourself for your life. That’s what blissful investing is all about. It’s who are you getting to become as you’re building your wealth because that’s the person that you are going to be when you’re wealthy. As you improve yourself, you’re treating people with a little bit more respect or a lot more respect whatever. That’s going to show up in every area of your life.
It’s going to show up in how you bring up your children. Our businesses help us to grow. They help us to become a better version of ourselves. I love that example. Nobody has ever admitted something like that on this show but it’s so amazing. Being vulnerable and allowing people to see that we all grow is a perfect example of that.
Thank you. I had a therapy session. I got personal and professional coaches. I’m like all of you. I’m still an investor and a student. All I’m doing with you is sharing the secrets behind some of my success. I’ve had plenty of failures too. What you choose to do with it is on you. I invite you to consider taking action, invest in coaching whether it’s with me or someone else, and start seeing results sooner than later.
Join us for our webinar. You can get to know Amy more. I always love meeting with you, Ladies. I’m trying to do this once a month. It’s like a community. Let’s get together. Several of you come to every single webinar, so I’m getting to know you. I’m loving that. Again, it’s on Thursday, April 7th, 2022 from 1:00 to 2:30 Pacific time, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/PMWebinar. Come join us for that. We’ve got more.
Stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to be talking about the Four-Second Power Pitch. You get that for free if you are subscribed to EXTRA. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA, but would like to be, this might be the time. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get the first seven days for free. For those of you that are leaving Amy and me now, thank you so much for joining us. I always love spending time with you and I look forward to next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon.
I’m a Real Estate Investor & Educator, Best Selling Author, HGTV Personality & Keynote Speaker who built my business by Networking w/ A Purpose!
I am lucky to be able to travel the country, doing what I want – when I want, with who I want.
After building multiple businesses and through many lessons learned, I am able to enjoy my time coaching and mentoring real estate investors all over the country on how they too can grow and scale their real estate business by CONFIDENTLY raising private money!
The most important concept I teach is that with the right attitude, anything is possible.
I was born and raised in the midwest in one of the tightest families you’ll ever meet!
My mom and her two sisters married my dad and his two brothers before immigrating to America and no, none of it was arranged. They decided to buy homes within three miles of one another which is where they raised all of us! Although I technically have one brother, I always say that I am one of seven since I have five double cousins, we all look the same and we grew up within three miles of one another.
After attending undergrad at Michigan State University, I moved away from home for the first time to Austin, Texas where I landed a job working for Dell Inc. After working in Corporate America for over fourteen years, I was doing well, but felt like my true potential was elsewhere. I was completely burnt out and had no passion for the work I was doing. I knew I needed a change.
During my spare time, I was glued to all of those home renovation shows. I absolutely loved the idea of taking an old dumpy house and turning it into something new and modern!
Although it may have sounded a bit ambitious and even unrealistic, especially since I had no previous knowledge of the real estate market, my mind was set! I was on a brand new mission prepared to learn how I too could learn how to buy, renovate and then sell distressed properties.
In my hunt for quality real estate investing education, I found mentors Than Merrill, Paul Esajian and JD Esajian from A&E’s hit TV show, Flip This House. With their ongoing support, guidance and trust, my very first company was born.
______________________________________
To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com
To see this program in video:
Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku
On YouTube go to Real Estate Investing for Women
Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.