Dec 9, 2021
Founder and CEO of DeRosa Group Matt is a Regular Contributor and Podcast Guest on Bigger Pockets.com, Has an Active YouTube Channel Dedicated to Educating Investors, and the Author of the Amazon Best Seller, Raising Private Capital, how to Build your Real Estate Empire with Other People's Money
In this episode we talked about:
• Matt’s First Steps in Real Estate
• Scaling: the jump from 49 Units Up
• Raising Private Capital
• Advice to Individuals Who Haven’t Raised Capital yet
• Matt’s View on the Real Estate Market
Useful links:
https://derosagroup.com
https://www.instagram.com/themattfaircloth/
Transcriptions:
Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name's Jesper gala and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcast. My guests today are returning guests, Matt fare, cloth, founder, and CEO of the DeRosa group.
Matt has been a full-time investor for over 15 years. Just talked a little bit about the deal volume here over a hundred million in real estate transactions and controlling over 1000 units in multifamily mats, a regular contributor and podcast guests on biggerpockets.com has an active YouTube channel dedicated to educating investors and the author of the Amazon bestseller. Highly recommend raising private capital. How to build your real estate empire with other people's money. Matt, how's it going?
Matt (59s): Good. I'm good, Jesse. It's great being here, man. Am I, did I, did you tell me a bit at BiggerPockets conferences? This is that I'm your first repeat appearance on your podcast?
Jesse (1m 8s): No, the first repeat appearance was definitely the BR Brandon Turner. So
Matt (1m 13s): Yeah, you're right. Yeah,
Jesse (1m 15s): But you're there though. You know, you're very generous in the, the first, first few episodes. I think you were you're right on. I think that was right when you started marketing the book, but you know, I think at that point I read half of it completed it a long time ago. A great book. I thought it was, I thought it was just for us, at least it was very perfect timing, which is fine.
Matt (1m 37s): I gotta be here, man. I should get like, we should do like the SNL jacket thing, like finding it loud when there's repeat guests, you know, like we should do like the, like the special, like the number five collab or whatever it is. I'm in the number two clubs now at Brandon. So I want to, I'm glad to be back here with you, man. Thanks for that.
Jesse (1m 52s): It's great to have you, you know what, I didn't even ask before we started. Are you still, are you still in out of Jersey right now or
Matt (1m 59s): So we have an office building in Jersey, but we, we work, but my wife and I have since moved to Pennsylvania just across the bridge, across the river from New Jersey. And now we live just north of Philly in a little town called new hope, Pennsylvania.
Jesse (2m 14s): Nice, nice. And how long has this, how long have you been there now? Three years. Awesome. Cool. Is that you guys doing some deals out there or was it just more of a, a kind of a personal things to
Matt (2m 25s): We move? I, you know, Jesse, I never thought I would be the guy to live in like a, like a suburban development, you know, but you know what, man, I, I got like the whole modern family house. I got, I live in a cul-de-sac and everything like that. The kids go out and play. I know my neighbors, circuitry, Katrina, the bomb, that, that whole thing. So w my wife and I are both urbanites, you know, I've, I've lived in or around urban cores for most of my life. And now we're in the burbs man.
And I, and I love it. I don't know if I'll be in the burbs forever, but for right now with two young kids, this is kind of the, where you want to be. So, no, that's perfect. Yeah. It's been a big, big, big change for us. Well, that's great.
Jesse (3m 6s): So I guess, you know, for listeners, just to catch us up to speed, it's been a, it's been quite a while since we spoke, you know, we've had a couple of major global situations. We've probably the last few years for, you have been a pretty interesting with the book and to see how that's been going. So maybe you could catch us up to speed a little, what you've been up to the last, the last year or two.
Matt (3m 29s): Yeah, man, what's interesting is that when, at my I've been investing for 16 years full-time and what, what I've in, in the beginning part of our career, we were into single family homes. We were in a, you know, a small office complex that, you know, the one down there and Trenton, we would do a lot, a lot of mixed use buildings here and there. And we were invested in, in what a lot of beginning and newer investors would, would consider to be, you know, like the typical deal, like single family, home, small, multi, you know, those kinds of things.
And we ended up scaling up to a reasonable portfolio of those kinds of things. But then, you know, through, through just being able to prove the proof in the pudding for ourselves to show that we were able to, what we were able to do for investors at a scale out best practice as we grew. And so we did, like, we stretched up a little bit into a 10 unit apartment building. Then we stretched a little bit further and did an 18 unit. Then we special bowl further into 49 unit. Right. And that's probably about when you and I had talked, right.
Or is a 49 unit apartment building. Then we went and did 198 unit in, in North Carolina. And then we, we realized the scalability and, and the, and that once we had proven that street cred to our investor base and to ourselves and to prop and, and that we were able to take best practices. We had learned in doing the small stuff and to the larger staff that that's been, our primary focus is, is a mid to large real estate deals for, you know, mid-size multifamily.
And so what I, to answer your question, what I've been focusing on in my time doing the last couple of years, scaling out a team of people that helped me run the larger real estate stuff. And I've got an, a plus team now, th that, that run all that. And I've been spending my time leading that team and, and charging us through COVID and, you know, inflation and all that stuff, but also working on the things that we still own, right. I mean, a couple of years ago, we still owned a lot of that single family homes and duplexes and triplexes and that kind of stuff, and slowly divesting those things and, you know, taking, doing our best to care of the investors that are in those projects and giving them, giving them the best trends that we could so that we can put our focus on just on the larger deals while we still properly unwind and take care of the small stuff.
So we've really been becoming like all grows up, you know, in the last couple of years, as, as a real estate company, you really just focusing on, you know, bigger and large stuff, well, maintaining and selling the small stuff. So the last couple of years Jesse's been all about the focus, transition optimization of, of, of the optimization and of the smaller things while leading and growing into new territory for us on the larger deals.
Jesse (6m 21s): Yeah. It sounds like at that point, you're, you're dealing with scale scaling with systems in terms of the, I think it was the 49 unit probably was the last time we spoke. So that one that jumped from the 49 unit up, how was that different if it was two from the one prior to the 49? And I think that was like an 18 unit or something, right from the 1849. So was that, was that transition from the 18 to 49, different from that transition from 49 to the, to the larger stuff you guys are doing.
So
Matt (6m 52s): The 18 to 49 was probably the biggest chunk and he will here's. This is interesting. Here's why, right. So what we decided to do when we were running everything, I even wrote an article for BiggerPockets years ago. And the article said, why I will never buy a deal outside of 30 minutes away from my office. Right. I had to eat the, I literally, if I, if those words were on paper, I'd pull it up and eat them right now. Right. Literally like little hot sauce on it. Now it ethos words, because at that time it made sense for me to scale out with in-house property management.
Like these are my employees, in-house maintenance, property management interface between the tenants, office manager, bookkeeper, that kind of thing. So I had a reasonable size team. We ran, you know, like, like a north of a hundred unit portfolio with, and it ran well, and it could have, we could have scaled that up to, you know, in, in, into the mid to high hundreds, or even floated with a thousand units or whatever of in-house owned, in-house manages managed units. And when we, the 18 unit we managed in house, and so had that down at the protocol down, had the process orientation down for that, then this 49 unit shows up and that one's two hours away from the 18 unit.
And I was like, man, I wrote that article, I guess I probably, you know, I don't know, but it's in a great location, great market, you know, love the location that it's in. It's, it's just all everything added up and the numbers added up on it and everything worked. And we had proven ourselves on many other smaller deals to investors and private lenders that we get enough people lined up to get into a larger deal. So we said, you know what, let's tackle this larger project. Like, w let's give it, let's give it a bit, let's get into this. We think we can do it.
Problem is Jesse, we'd hire a third party manager to run that property. So I, and this, at the time, God blessed my wife. She's like my muse, you know, I told her we're going to scale up property management, two hours away from our home in Lancaster. And she was like, why don't you just give it a shot to run third-party management? Because if you don't like third-party management, or if they're not doing a good job, you could just fire them and bring it in house. But why don't you try using another management company? And I think that she saw that that's, that, that, that was really going to help us scale by taking a focus off management and focus on capital growth processes, you know, renovations, capital may, you know, capital improvements, those kinds of things.
And it was a huge shift in running a team, going from running a team that I managed and developed a protocol and they'll work for me. And they ran around. Yeah. Right. They're my people versus going to a team that was not my people, third-party property management. It's a major shift, but it was a game changer.
Jesse (9m 46s): So curious about that, cause we we've dealt with a third department property management and I'm sure listeners that are invested, you know, either having in-house or having third party. Was there anything specific or kind of the big things that, that were the hardest to get over with that transition, whether it's them, you know, having their systems as opposed to using your systems, was there anything major that, you know, it was, it was just really that it was a challenging one to, to kind of relinquish a little power.
Matt (10m 12s): Well, the accounting thing, you know, you figure out the accounting stuff, cause it's not like they're, they're keeping your books, you know, on the back of a napkin. Right. That's it, that's an easier transition than people think it is. They call, well, we use QuickBooks and they use that folio. How we can we get, you know, what give you, I'll give you an hour or two, you probably figure it out. You know, that's way, way easier than the real. Then the real deal stuff. It's like, well, what are the interfaces? And what are the decision-making what's the decision-making protocol? How much rent should I charge for that vacant apartment?
Right. Should I, or should I not replay, like I have a leak in the ceiling, should I patch the roof? Or should I open up the ceiling to see if there's something inside it that's causing the leak from HVHC doctor or something like that. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's the, if this, then that type of protocol, that is the biggest shift and this level of trust you have to have for the property management team and for their protocol. And just to understand that there's things that are going to happen over here and you're just not even gonna know about it, you know? And so there's a level of having the faith and trust to go a little bit more hands-off and trust that they're going to be able to implement your ideas and visions, but you still got to have your finger on them to the point where you can, you know, catch issues or be like, Hey, we've that ceiling's been leaking for the last three weeks, three months.
And the tenant keeps calling back and they're saying that their HVHC is not working, you know, or that tenants complained of bugs four times in a row. Well, maybe it's because they're not living. Maybe it's because of an issue they're causing versus something that's actually in the building. You know what I'm saying? Stuff like that, that, that you still have to have your finger on as an owner, you cannot hands off and too many owners just go like this completely. But it's like, what's the level of me letting them run their business while I still manage the asset. And that's where the concept of asset management comes in.
Jesse (12m 4s): Yeah. I was going to say, it's like the, you give up a little bit on the property management or everything, depending on what you're doing, but then your internal controls have to go up, right? You need to have those systems of, and it could be as easy as, even on a smaller scale, you know, you're spending X amount of dollars, anything over this, we need executive approval or anything related to this. We need, you know, you have a process, like you said, if then, you know what F and then have a decision tree, you know, between, between you, the property manager,
Matt (12m 31s): Except that their protocol is that, well, we don't call an owner unless we have an expensive of 500 bucks and you have to be okay with that. Like, okay, well, do I want to get calls at a lower number or whatever it is. It's about understanding the process and accepting certain things. And knowing like, this is something I could probably live with. And this is something that I needed to change protocol for. Right. That was probably one of the bigger shifts. And just knowing you don't want to, here's here, I'll give you the term because everybody uses this term now cause attraction and stuff like that, the book attraction is KPIs and determining what the KPIs are for property management, that you need to keep your finger on and stuff that you can just let them run.
And not that it doesn't matter, but it's not going to really affect the things that it's not going to go direct to bottom line. And, and if, if it gets really bad, it'll trigger a KPI, you know, and that, so what are the things on the property management side that I have to hold them accountable to? And what can I just let them run? And if it gets really squirrely, I'll see it. Yeah, yeah, sure.
Jesse (13m 33s): You know, you can control so much of the input, but it's sometimes easier to just have the output. Did we hit this? Did we hit, you know, whatever that KPI is, then you can kind of look back if, if things are, if there's an issue, something needs to be changed. Matt, how was the process of, you know, you wrote, you wrote this book, raising private capital, how did your journey with these properties going from 1849 plus, you know, you're, you're now over a thousand units, I think in terms of the raising capital aspect of your business, how did that, how did that evolve?
Matt (14m 3s): It's a, well, it's funny. The first one I talk about in raising private capital was like, literally somebody, my wife went to college with and she was, I think like we connected with them on like a column like Dan, or maybe she saw him at like an alumni event or w w w w whatever, the, whatever it was. She mentioned to this colleague of hers from college that her and I had gotten into real estate investing. And he was like real estate investing. That's interesting. You know, I've always, I've always wanted to get involved in real estate, but I've never had the time. And it's like, oh, well, you know, my husband has the time, you know, like you should, you should talk to my husband.
And so that you start there and it just something we just stumbled into. And I had to call a lawyer to say, Hey, I've got this guy wants to give me money. What should I do? And he's like, okay, slow down. Let's talk about what is this going to be a equity or debt? And my lawyer was very patient and talk me through, you know, loan agreements and whatnot. And this was, you know, 12 years ago when we were first figuring this whole thing out fast forward to, you know, taking it. Step-by-step one foot in front of the other to, again, you know, again, not to like be a systems dork again, but I guess I'm an engineer by trade.
So I just, that's just how I think in that we started to develop systems and processes around raising private capital and, you know, everything from webinars to funnels to it. Like, you know, having those that want to invest with you participate in some sort of a process to where you can understand who needs to go, where, and your system it's, that's been the journey in, in really taking us to the next level in, in, in marketing and making people aware of us, but also in, in making, you know, making sure that people, the right leads go to the right places.
And that's all been all systems and systems and processes and trial, trial, and error kind of thing.
Jesse (15m 49s): So on the, on the point of systems, I talked with a lot of investors that are at that point where they've raised capital maybe for one or two deals, asset specific, or property specific capital. They're not yet at the size, or at least they don't think they're at the size to justify, you know, a, an actual portal, a fund portal or syndication portal. You know, what point do you, do you see investors really starting to put the systems in? Is it a, is it, is it a size of deal perspective or is it a amount of investors perspective?
How do you think about that?
Matt (16m 21s): I think the most people wait too long to do it. I got talked to one guy who had like 20 million in an equity under management, and he was running it on Excel, bless for anybody, man, he's running it using Excel spreadsheet. Right. And, and, and that, and it almost like you need to go next level, man, you need to look at it. You've got to get this wacky internet machine here. You need to take a look at, you know, and so I, I find that most people probably wait too long to handle capital management investor.
And it just, it just makes your life easy. And you don't have to, like, there are softwares out there now that are not 20,000 a year, you know, to, to buy, we use a software called invest next. And I, you know, I, I'm not, you know, I just have, I happen to know they have a low dollar amount, buy it to get in. If you, if you're managing just a couple of investors, they're, they're, I think it's, it might've been, it might be a hundred bucks a month or a little bit more than that to manage a couple of investors.
And of course it scales up as you have people in, but I find that as an investor, if I were past it and I'd do some passive investing too. But if I, you know, if I were passing, investing with somebody, knowing they've got their web interface, that goes to a portal, I can split my K one there in my data's all in their portal. And I can just pull it down when I need it. And everything like that is so much easier than knowing I got to go ping somebody or bother somebody. If I got a question or want to know how things are going, or what did you send me last month or whatever it is. And it's all in the portal, it's all in that system.
So I think it also just makes your company feel a little more professional as a syndicator, or as somebody offering any kind of, whether it's debt or equity, whatever, whatever you're offering your investor base. Those portals, I think are phenomenal that you've covered is whatever you're using.
Jesse (18m 12s): It's a it's cleaner too. I mean, you, you trade so much paper in the deal, especially with deals like this, and you have a bunch of investors and, you know, even, even today with, with the internet and emailing, it's just a lot where you can just say, here's this area. And I dunno for invest next. That's actually the first time I've heard of that, I don't know if that's something where, you know, you have your accountants or lawyers have access to that where they can dump data there. But I find, yeah, it's just, like you said, it, it makes it it's a professionalism aspect, but then it streamlines a lot of what you're doing.
Matt (18m 42s): Yeah. I mean, and that, that world is changing as I think that, that people become more, have more affinity and trust for things that are not wall street based from an investing standpoint. I think that you're going to see more and more of these kinds of interfaces for people to show up people to participate in. And so right now that's who we use, but who knows. I mean, maybe like, you know, QuickBooks gets into the business of that. At some point it becomes like super easy plug and play or whatever.
And so as we, I think as, as people start investing in things that are outside of wall street, more and more, there'll be more and more options. And that, and people just want like an easy professional interface. I can go get the data I need without me having to go to an individual to, to get what I want. So I think it's, it's a changing, evolving space. And there's some, I mean, just a couple of years ago, there were no portals now there's like, you know, a billion of them. And so I think that we'll see more and more services like that, that allow people like, you know, real estate investors or whatever, kind of a syndicator or business offering a person to be able to put their things out there and have it feel more and more professional for investors to participate in.
Yeah. It can be, Hey, we're just getting started on what?
Jesse (19m 53s): Yeah. And it's funny, like 10 years ago you were 15 years ago, you would have thought, oh, you can't, you know, you have to be one of the big banks or you have to be this investment house to have that. Whereas now, you know, like you said, who knows if it's a plugin or add onto QuickBooks in a couple of years in terms of the, for investors. So I'm sure you've got, we were at new Orleans at the BP cons, a lot of good talks there. You know, we, we chatted a little bit about, you know, how you've, you know, what you've been doing the last year or two years. I'm curious, you've probably had a number of people come up to you about the book on all different levels of where they're at in their investing career.
For those individuals that are say they haven't raised their first property, or maybe they've done one, but for the most part up to up to today, it's been bootstrapped. What kind of advice do you give individuals like that that are, that are maybe don't yet think that they have the confidence to be able to raise capital? And the other thing, probably thinking that, you know, why would somebody trust me to raise capital if I haven't done it before?
Matt (20m 52s): I think it's more important that you've got some real estate investing experience or real estate exposure versus whether or not you've raised capital from your network before I, and I think that that has to do with whether or not your network believes that you know, what you're doing with regards to, you know, that site. So I, if I, I tell people, if you can, you know, do your own deals, your own money, you know, or borrow money with collateralized, collateralized loans and that kind of stuff, and do a couple of deals on your own before you go put it out there or attach yourself to a larger operator, that's got a huge portfolio with tons of experience and everything like that with regards to accessing your network or having the right to ask them for money or whatever.
Raising private capital talks about the concept that everybody knows people with money. And those that tell me, they don't know, people with money are likely afraid to go to their network or concern, or just embarrassed or whatever, to go and make the ask. You know, I mean, my own immediate family is invested with me, you know, and I'm proud to say that and people, and I've, I've asked people like, well, would you allow your mom to invest with you? You know, and like, oh no, no, no, no. I'd never put my mother's money at risk.
Is that, well, let's take an examination on your business, but you'll let your mom go buy something off wall street, but you won't let her invest in something that you are operating, that you are driving or you have your finger on, on her behalf or your father's behalf, whatever it is. So I think that there's a, there's a look yourself in the mirror moment that people need to do to make sure that they've got an, a faith in what it is. They're building. That the people that are closest to them, they would trust involved in it. If that's not the case, then tighten up your hat, your investment houses to the point where that, that, that is something you're willing to stand behind and then you'll have enough confidence to, to take it to the, to take it public by then.
Jesse (22m 43s): Yeah. And it's something you talked about in the book and we talked about last time was there's a lot of people thinking that what they're doing is an ask where a think you reframe it as your it's an opportunity. And it sounds, it sounds funny and like, oh, it's just a, you know, it's whatever it's nomenclature, but it really is. It's no, no. It's, if you really believe in what you're raising capital for, whatever it is, whether it's a, you know, a movie in LA or it's a real estate piece of real estate and, you know, in Pennsylvania, it's really you saying here's an opportunity. Here's something I think, you know, I'm not asking you for money. I'm, I'm giving you an opportunity.
And I think, yeah,
Matt (23m 15s): I've been that embarrassed person want to give me some money from a real estate deal. I've been there. You know? And I mean, I get that. It's embarrassing at first. And it's tough asking people for anything for money specifically. Right. But if you reframe it for yourself, like, Hey, listen, I got a question for you, neighbor Bob, what's the stock market going to do tomorrow? You know, I don't know. You probably don't either, right? But I'll tell you what I have tenants and they're likely going to pay their rent. And if they don't every course, or I have loans out, and if you loan me money for my real estate stuff, you have collateral, meaning like you have a lien on the property, which means you can come take it if I don't pay you back.
You know? So I, I, I believe that there's this level of Moxy, if you will love a confidence that it takes to, to take yourself, to, to really show people that, that the, what you've got is going to work. And once you've got has, if this, the gnats, and, and then in some ways it has a lot of mortar, a lot of more of those than a typical wall street paper investment does. Yeah.
Jesse (24m 18s): In terms of getting into a little bit more complexity, you know, that, especially in the states right now, the fund to funds model is pretty big. And for, you know, for those that don't know a lot of, a lot of what we talk about here is syndication where it's deal specific capital raising, where when we started getting into fund of funds, you can be an LP, but you represent a larger pool of your own LPs in a say, limited partnership structure. I'm curious your view on that. Cause I don't think we've talked about this before the fund to funds model in general and you know, the associated type of fees or, you know, the different return that maybe you can ask for or demand based on the fact that you're bringing in an outsized LP size.
Yeah.
Matt (24m 58s): There's a lot of those out there. And I mean, from a syndicators perspective, that's kind of what you want is to be in a fund to funds because I can't tell you Jesse, how many times people call me up saying, Hey, I want to invest with you. And I love your deal. They will love what you guys do. Love your website, love your transparency, love all this stuff. And like, okay, great. I don't know the deal. I'll call you when I do. And then a couple months later when we have a deal to call them up and say, Hey, we have a deal. Remember the, remember the whole song you were singing about a great I was. And how I greet you on invest with being, let's go back to singing that song for a second.
And they're like, oh no, no, no. We already give that money to the next person that we called five minutes after we hung up with you. Right. Forgot the words
Jesse (25m 34s): To that song.
Matt (25m 35s): Yeah. Right. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. What was that song again? Can you hold that only? Can you home the tone? Yeah. No. So there are, and I've been there myself and I think a lot of the syndicators out there just wanted to have a level of uniformity and a level of like an open door thing that's available whenever. And they just went, investors want to, are excited to get into something. You have the door open that they can hop in and that they can, you know, put their capital with a syndicator they trust. Right. What, what gets, and I see a lot of people that have a lot of deal flow, do that.
People that you and I both know that are, you know, talking heads in the world, I'll have, I'll have a lot of those now what makes me, I say nervous, but what you have to, as an investor, you have to make sure you vet completely as people that are raising capital. And then they're going to take that capital, invest with other people, right? Like who like, like, like it's a derivative fund, right. So it's like, well, why wouldn't I just go give it to that person? Oh, you're going to diversify me. I get it. Okay. Well, how much, what fee structure are you taking off the top?
You know, that I'm, that I'm now getting diluted by. Right. So I think it's just it's it's okay. Cause you do probably get diversification. You get, you know, diversified exposure across the board or whatever, maybe different asset classes. I know people that are running like a blended fund like that that's invested in self storage and flex industrial space and mobile home parks. Well, great. You get, you know, a little bit of everything and maybe geographic diversity to all kinds of cool stuff, but you want to make sure they're not just picking anybody.
They're not just shotgun approaching it. And just like, Hey, whoever's got a deal. I'll give you money. And th they, that they're properly vetting their operators. And then they're not taking too much of a fee in exchange for doing something that you arguably could do yourself too. You know, because I could call each one of those people. Now, it doesn't mean I don't believe in, in blended funds or whatever. It's something that we are doing as well. Although our blended fund does not invest in, it's not just a fund that invest in a bunch of multi-family. We see that there are things that are missing from syndications and those things are liquidity.
You can't get your money back in a syndication. If you will, if you invest in a syndication, you're locked in for five or more years, right. You can't compound your returns in a syndication. Right. I can't take the returns that you give me if I invest with you and recycle those returns back upon themselves and participate in compounding interest, which is Einstein said is the eighth merit eighth wonder of the world. Right. So I think more powerful. Yeah. So I can't, what, what a blended fund done properly can allow you to do.
If you invest with the right operator is something that allows you to compound your returns and get your money back when you want it. And not just how old the property is not going to sell for another four years and I can get you your money back. Right. So those are the, those are the things that we've worked on to blend in and you can't do just one asset class or one thing with one timeline, it's got to have multiple timelines of money coming in, coming out. Like it's got to have a short-term aspect and a long-term aspect. So that's the way we designed it. And in that, so it's something that we have active and it's something we did on a small scale because you don't have to have a $50 million fund.
It could be a couple million dollar fund and that, so that's something that we're doing, but I think that you're going to see more and more of them as capital becomes more. There's a lot of capital out there looking for a home. And so I think you're going to see more funds and not less because people are going to get, people are getting wise to it like, well, geez, I could just put up a sign that says I invest in real estate. And then, you know, I know a lot of luck. Well, a lot, a lot of capital's going to show up because there's a lot of capital looking for something different besides the wall beside wall street right now.
Jesse (29m 24s): And I think I'm just, I totally agree with your point where you're telling individuals, you know, just make sure that you're aware of what are the returns, sorry, what are the fees that are going to be taken on by the, by the person that's that is basically raising money for that fund, but then going to the other fund. And sometimes, you know, some people will say that absolutely not. They won't do fund to funds, but sometimes the returns are great. It's yeah, you're, it's a fee on a fee, but maybe you have an outsize preference promote that, that makes up for that, for that fee.
And the other thing too, you tell sometimes there's situations for investors where most likely, yeah, they have diversification, but most likely they couldn't have got into this particular dealer arrangement because you're putting, you know, you've raised 3 million for this one LP spot, so to speak. Whereas if you went in just on your own, you'd probably just be like all the other, you know, minimum say a hundred K or 50 K whatever the minimum investment is and your profile would probably look different.
Matt (30m 20s): Well, I mean, there are, when you get it, when you've aggregated that much money through a fund, you can kind of call your own shots, you know? And that's maybe what you're saying is that, you know, somebody calls up a syndicator in St. Louis and I see you're raising 10 million. Well, what if I give you half of that? Yeah. You know, w what would you be able to do for me? Can you pay my investors a little higher rate of return? Can you, you know, whatever. And instead of that investor, th that syndicator saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to go and raise this at, you know, I'm going to go and get the 150 of my best friends to invest in this deal with me.
You know, I can just go to you. And maybe some of my, some of my best friends to, and maybe you make my life a lot easier. I believe that's what they're doing. As I've seen that happen. We've been approached by that too, for people that, that have, you know, kind of like assembled a lot of money and you can call you, you know, what was your oyster at that point? And so maybe if you're a good negotiator, you can kind of like, you know, put up, put together a win-win.
Jesse (31m 19s): Yeah. And I think there's a, to your point of, we're going to see a lot more funds. I think we'll see a lot more of this too, just in the same way. Specialization usually happens in an industry and you might have somebody that's great at raising capital, but maybe it is not the operator. And they go to the DeRosa group and they say, Hey guys, do you have anything on the spigot right now? We'd love to be, be an investor on your deal. And they see you as a great operator. And they, you know, they want that LP spot. But I think, I think we're definitely seeing more and more of it in the market.
Matt (31m 47s): Yeah. And you will, and we will, as I think that, you know, what we do becomes less and less of a secret, and there are, there's even bigger wall street, you know, money working its way into like, not like owning it to an apartment building, but working its way into LP level syndications, you know, what broker dealers coming around going like, say, Hey, listen, we used to, you know, only raise a hundred million for big, big, big, big, big operators. Now, guess what, if you need 10 million, we'll go raise that for you.
Or, you know, like the broker dealers are dropping what they're willing to raise for because it's, they're seeing their clients wanting exposure to private placements and things like that. So we've been approached by a few broker dealers. I think it's beginning of the, of, of the amount of capital that's going to come into the real estate space. And maybe it's all through maybe a lot of it's through funds
Jesse (32m 40s): Problems. It's something that I'm very curious how this kind of rolls out because even in our Canadian context, in the U S similarly, the broker, it's always been a bit of a gray area where, you know, if you, if you raise for a fund, okay, you're, you're not necessarily a broker dealer, then you keep doing it and keep doing it. It's like, w you know, at what point do you have to be, to be a pure broker dealer, or, you know, I'm not sure how it works in your state, but I think there is, as, as it gets more and more, what would you say institutionalized?
You feel like some of the, some of the legal framework, I don't know if that will evolve or change, but definitely a lot going on there.
Matt (33m 16s): It's starting to the sec has already changed up the whole Kappa. They're changing the capital raiser laws. They've also changed up. There's some call that out, came a, it was a couple of years ago, but nobody's really, it's becoming popular now. And it's called regulation CF, which allows you to sell more micro sheriffs. The non-accredited investments. We did shares of one of our syndications that a thousand dollars a piece. So now that's not that wasn't, the, the whole syndication was much, much larger share prices, but we, we broke off a small chunk of the deal just to test it out, to see how it goes.
Cause not to, like my personal mission is to offer what we do as syndicators and his real estate investments to everyone. Like, I want everyone to be able to get into some sort of a passive investment if they choose to, without having to read an enormous check or go to put any of their tone time in or whatever. And so I think the world's going to change to the point where more and more people are going to be allowed to, or aware of alternative ways to make money and alternative ways to invest outside of just buying a stock off wall street. They can still do that.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I think it's wrong is that that's the only choice that many people have had, unless you're in the know or in like the country club or silver spoon network or something like that, then you knew about other things, other ways, other, you know, good old boy network plays that you could do investing well, that's all busted up and now it's a lot wider, but I think that there's a lot more widening that can happen for more and more people. And eventually everyone to invest in these kinds of things. And the rules are slowly, you know, it's it's government velocity, Jessie.
So the lows are there. The rules are slowly changing. Yeah.
Jesse (34m 59s): Well, it ties in with what we were saying before, too, as the systems increase, improve, you have the ability for operators like yourself to unitize and get smaller. And then you offer that down to the retail, you know, quotations, retail, I guess, customer
Matt (35m 12s): I'll give you a big vision. I have one day and I mean, I might make an, a, we have a deal under contract right now that I might try it. I don't know how it's going to go, which means like on this, but I want to buy an apartment building and I want to offer for people that live there, the right to buy equity in the apartment building.
Jesse (35m 30s): Hmm. That's interesting. That's almost like a co-op model.
Matt (35m 34s): Yeah. But they're not, they don't have to own the whole in a co-op typically the people that live there are the only ones that aren't all right. They all ages. If you live there, you own it. Right. And it's considered home ownership right now. I'm Todd. This still be a syndication to pass a mess, but I'm not. I'm talking about going to the tenants that are living in a 200 unit building and saying, Hey, listen, how about for 500 bucks? I'll let you own a little bit of the sticks and bricks of where you live. You pay him cash flow, you pay him upside residual. You give him a K one, you pay them the whole thing. And because of those portals, we just talked about, I can post a K one.
I can post their ACH payments and everything like that. It's, it's just as simple. It's all spreadsheets, you know? So 20 people or 200 people, or 4,000 people are technically just as easy to manage through an online portal. Right. And that's, that's a wacky idea. I have, I'll probably get talked out of it, but my team that are more, more pragmatic than I am, but
Jesse (36m 31s): I just don't write another blog Gus, and you'll never do it. I
Matt (36m 34s): Know. Right, right, right. Yeah. I will. I'll do it. I'll make it happen. If I go out there and say, I will never know you will, you know,
Jesse (36m 43s): Well that I want to be mindful of the time we were coming up to the end here, but I'd love to get your thoughts, you know, before we can talk a little bit about how people can reach you and talk, you know, we're where they can find the book. Cheers. Your, your view on the market right now in, I know you're an optimist like myself, but w you know, where do you see the opportunities in the next let's call it short term? Are you thinking differently given, given the last year?
Matt (37m 8s): Okay. I'll give a few different opportunities that I see that I think not in a people are focusing on right now. And then I'll think I'll tell you where I think the market's going to, you know, for, for, for go break out my crystal ball, right? So I think that not enough people are focusing on revitalizing industrial applications in the United States. I think that there should be more industrial flex space. As we continue to become more Amazon defied in our world, there's going to need to be more flex space. More people leasing like three to 4,000 square foot of small warehouse to do light, light, industrial manufacturing, or light storage with a little bit of office space sitting there as, as we get into more of, of the right now economy of, of, you know, shipping small products or whatever, to peoples it's in people's homes and selling things online or whatever.
And boutique brokerage buddy of mine owns a small flex space. And he's got a guy that sells exotic fish out of a little flex space. And he's got fish tanks, probably 30,000 gallons where the fish tanks and this little industrial space, and he's got every kind of fish you'd ever think of. And you can buy them from this guy online and they'll ship them off to you for a, for a crazy price. You can buy these really cool fish for people that are hardcore, you know, fish collectors that can't just go to PetSmart to get their, the fish that they want.
They want something really cool. That's been bred. And you know, that specific or whatever, because of the internet, the magic internet box, things like that are becoming more and more applicable. Right? So I think that there's, we're going to see, we're going to need a lot more of that kind of space in this country have a lot of spaces like that are tired and drawn down. Additionally, this could be an opportunity to repurpose things that are no longer applicable anymore in America. Like we don't, we probably got too much office space, probably got too much retail space in, in, in, in north America, let's say America and Canada.
So I think there's gonna be an opportunity for somebody to think of cool applications for the rundown strip center, down the street, from their house or for the office building. That's 50% dark. You guys think of that idea. You know what, whatever, whatever ways maybe it's living space, maybe it's a school. I don't know. You guys think of it and do something amazing right now with regards to multi-family as much as feel like it's overheated, it's overpriced or whatever. I think, unfortunately, we are going to be looking at some inflation in the next couple of years now. I think it's actually going to drive up.
It's going to drive up wages. It's going to drive up cost of goods and it's going to drive up breaths. And I think that that's going to overall, if not keep multifamily as a high priced asset, it'll maybe drive it up a little bit more. I don't see rates going up anytime soon, maybe a little teeny bit, but not like double or triple or whatever, because I don't think the fed the U S government can't afford to raise rates, you know, given what it would do to our debt if, if rates went up. So I don't think we're going to see huge, huge spike in rates. Maybe a little bit sticker just to try and keep up with inflation, but believe it or not, I think multi-family is going to continue to be a hot commodity.
It's not, I don't see any fundamental that makes it crash anytime soon. And so I think maybe it slows down a little bit. It'd be nice if it kind of hit a ceiling a little bit and slowed down just a nudge. But I do think that it's not, nothing's going to clip it anytime soon. And I think it'll be a good asset to be in for the foreseeable future because we're just not building enough housing and there's becoming more and more people. And we're the housing construction we're building is nowhere near keeping up with the population demand for it. So that's my 2 cents Jesse, and it could be completely wrong on all that stuff, but that's what I think I was going to say,
Jesse (40m 43s): No, that was the, the quickest crystal ball three minutes. And you heard it here first folks. Yeah. I could agree with you more on that. I mean, we pretty much, you know, what, what are we a lagging indicator for the states, despite what you would read and see in the media? You guys continue to be a big player when it comes to immigration and population growth in some of the major cities in the states and Canada. And I think that to your point, I don't know who is more supply constraint. I know we are from a multi-racial standpoint, continue to be.
So, you know, until, until we start seeing more supply, it's really hard to say that multi-family is going to do anything, but at least stay where it's at. If not, like you said in shop, I think for, from my point of view, it's, it's going to be the prices. The prices are going to get to a point where I feel that's not going to be the deciding factor of if they continue to go up, it's going to be the, the, the net operating income side. It's going to be the affordability side. Now, how much higher can that go?
Matt (41m 39s): You can't sit root capris. Can't go much lower. But I mean, I think America is finally realizing that maybe Canada has it, right. Maybe you ought to pay people a real living wage for doing what they do. And, and that $7 an hour is probably not enough, you know? And that, so you see companies like, you know, Amazon McDonald's Starbucks that are paying 15, 20, 20 $5 an hour, which is to be straight, man. That's really what it takes to get by, to raise them. You can't raise a family on seven or $10 an hour, $12 an hour, forget it. You know, there is a family you can feed yourself on that, you know?
And so the fat and the, and it's just not fair that some Americans to keep their lights on, have to work two, maybe three jobs, you know, that ain't right either. And so we're going to see, I think, a correction on living wage and a wage, one, what, what an acceptable wage rate would be in the U S and that unfortunately is going to push up cost of living so
Jesse (42m 34s): Well, I appreciate that Matt, we will look in a year if that prognostication is correct, and we'll hold you to it,
Matt (42m 41s): I've drawn a year from now. We'll just listen to this episode and disagree with everything you and I said, yeah, they're
Jesse (42m 46s): Just a bunch of talks about how
Matt (42m 48s): Wrong with those two guys, right?
Jesse (42m 50s): Matt, in terms of you've done the final four before. So I will skip that. But in terms of where people can reach out to you, aside from a Google search of Matt grouper DeRosa, where can I send them?
Matt (43m 3s): They can go to Instagram at the mat, fair cloth to check me out there. They can go to my company website, which is DeRosa right there behind me, D E R O S a group.com DeRosa group.com. And they can do all kinds of cool stuff, like check out a copy of my book, which they can buy on my website. They can, you know, check out our YouTube channel. They can join our mailing list. It can hear all about the passive cool stuff that we're doing as well@derosagroup.com.
Jesse (43m 28s): My guest today has been Matt Faircloth, cloth, Matt, thanks for being part of working capital.
Matt (43m 33s): Thank you, Jesse.
Jesse (43m 40s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five-star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one take care.Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name's Jesper gala and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcast. My guests today are returning guests, Matt fare, cloth, founder, and CEO of the DeRosa group.
Matt has been a full-time investor for over 15 years. Just talked a little bit about the deal volume here over a hundred million in real estate transactions and controlling over 1000 units in multifamily mats, a regular contributor and podcast guests on biggerpockets.com has an active YouTube channel dedicated to educating investors and the author of the Amazon bestseller. Highly recommend raising private capital. How to build your real estate empire with other people's money. Matt, how's it going?
Matt (59s): Good. I'm good, Jesse. It's great being here, man. Am I, did I, did you tell me a bit at BiggerPockets conferences? This is that I'm your first repeat appearance on your podcast?
Jesse (1m 8s): No, the first repeat appearance was definitely the BR Brandon Turner. So
Matt (1m 13s): Yeah, you're right. Yeah,
Jesse (1m 15s): But you're there though. You know, you're very generous in the, the first, first few episodes. I think you were you're right on. I think that was right when you started marketing the book, but you know, I think at that point I read half of it completed it a long time ago. A great book. I thought it was, I thought it was just for us, at least it was very perfect timing, which is fine.
Matt (1m 37s): I gotta be here, man. I should get like, we should do like the SNL jacket thing, like finding it loud when there's repeat guests, you know, like we should do like the, like the special, like the number five collab or whatever it is. I'm in the number two clubs now at Brandon. So I want to, I'm glad to be back here with you, man. Thanks for that.
Jesse (1m 52s): It's great to have you, you know what, I didn't even ask before we started. Are you still, are you still in out of Jersey right now or
Matt (1m 59s): So we have an office building in Jersey, but we, we work, but my wife and I have since moved to Pennsylvania just across the bridge, across the river from New Jersey. And now we live just north of Philly in a little town called new hope, Pennsylvania.
Jesse (2m 14s): Nice, nice. And how long has this, how long have you been there now? Three years. Awesome. Cool. Is that you guys doing some deals out there or was it just more of a, a kind of a personal things to
Matt (2m 25s): We move? I, you know, Jesse, I never thought I would be the guy to live in like a, like a suburban development, you know, but you know what, man, I, I got like the whole modern family house. I got, I live in a cul-de-sac and everything like that. The kids go out and play. I know my neighbors, circuitry, Katrina, the bomb, that, that whole thing. So w my wife and I are both urbanites, you know, I've, I've lived in or around urban cores for most of my life. And now we're in the burbs man.
And I, and I love it. I don't know if I'll be in the burbs forever, but for right now with two young kids, this is kind of the, where you want to be. So, no, that's perfect. Yeah. It's been a big, big, big change for us. Well, that's great.
Jesse (3m 6s): So I guess, you know, for listeners, just to catch us up to speed, it's been a, it's been quite a while since we spoke, you know, we've had a couple of major global situations. We've probably the last few years for, you have been a pretty interesting with the book and to see how that's been going. So maybe you could catch us up to speed a little, what you've been up to the last, the last year or two.
Matt (3m 29s): Yeah, man, what's interesting is that when, at my I've been investing for 16 years full-time and what, what I've in, in the beginning part of our career, we were into single family homes. We were in a, you know, a small office complex that, you know, the one down there and Trenton, we would do a lot, a lot of mixed use buildings here and there. And we were invested in, in what a lot of beginning and newer investors would, would consider to be, you know, like the typical deal, like single family, home, small, multi, you know, those kinds of things.
And we ended up scaling up to a reasonable portfolio of those kinds of things. But then, you know, through, through just being able to prove the proof in the pudding for ourselves to show that we were able to, what we were able to do for investors at a scale out best practice as we grew. And so we did, like, we stretched up a little bit into a 10 unit apartment building. Then we stretched a little bit further and did an 18 unit. Then we special bowl further into 49 unit. Right. And that's probably about when you and I had talked, right.
Or is a 49 unit apartment building. Then we went and did 198 unit in, in North Carolina. And then we, we realized the scalability and, and the, and that once we had proven that street cred to our investor base and to ourselves and to prop and, and that we were able to take best practices. We had learned in doing the small stuff and to the larger staff that that's been, our primary focus is, is a mid to large real estate deals for, you know, mid-size multifamily.
And so what I, to answer your question, what I've been focusing on in my time doing the last couple of years, scaling out a team of people that helped me run the larger real estate stuff. And I've got an, a plus team now, th that, that run all that. And I've been spending my time leading that team and, and charging us through COVID and, you know, inflation and all that stuff, but also working on the things that we still own, right. I mean, a couple of years ago, we still owned a lot of that single family homes and duplexes and triplexes and that kind of stuff, and slowly divesting those things and, you know, taking, doing our best to care of the investors that are in those projects and giving them, giving them the best trends that we could so that we can put our focus on just on the larger deals while we still properly unwind and take care of the small stuff.
So we've really been becoming like all grows up, you know, in the last couple of years, as, as a real estate company, you really just focusing on, you know, bigger and large stuff, well, maintaining and selling the small stuff. So the last couple of years Jesse's been all about the focus, transition optimization of, of, of the optimization and of the smaller things while leading and growing into new territory for us on the larger deals.
Jesse (6m 21s): Yeah. It sounds like at that point, you're, you're dealing with scale scaling with systems in terms of the, I think it was the 49 unit probably was the last time we spoke. So that one that jumped from the 49 unit up, how was that different if it was two from the one prior to the 49? And I think that was like an 18 unit or something, right from the 1849. So was that, was that transition from the 18 to 49, different from that transition from 49 to the, to the larger stuff you guys are doing.
So
Matt (6m 52s): The 18 to 49 was probably the biggest chunk and he will here's. This is interesting. Here's why, right. So what we decided to do when we were running everything, I even wrote an article for BiggerPockets years ago. And the article said, why I will never buy a deal outside of 30 minutes away from my office. Right. I had to eat the, I literally, if I, if those words were on paper, I'd pull it up and eat them right now. Right. Literally like little hot sauce on it. Now it ethos words, because at that time it made sense for me to scale out with in-house property management.
Like these are my employees, in-house maintenance, property management interface between the tenants, office manager, bookkeeper, that kind of thing. So I had a reasonable size team. We ran, you know, like, like a north of a hundred unit portfolio with, and it ran well, and it could have, we could have scaled that up to, you know, in, in, into the mid to high hundreds, or even floated with a thousand units or whatever of in-house owned, in-house manages managed units. And when we, the 18 unit we managed in house, and so had that down at the protocol down, had the process orientation down for that, then this 49 unit shows up and that one's two hours away from the 18 unit.
And I was like, man, I wrote that article, I guess I probably, you know, I don't know, but it's in a great location, great market, you know, love the location that it's in. It's, it's just all everything added up and the numbers added up on it and everything worked. And we had proven ourselves on many other smaller deals to investors and private lenders that we get enough people lined up to get into a larger deal. So we said, you know what, let's tackle this larger project. Like, w let's give it, let's give it a bit, let's get into this. We think we can do it.
Problem is Jesse, we'd hire a third party manager to run that property. So I, and this, at the time, God blessed my wife. She's like my muse, you know, I told her we're going to scale up property management, two hours away from our home in Lancaster. And she was like, why don't you just give it a shot to run third-party management? Because if you don't like third-party management, or if they're not doing a good job, you could just fire them and bring it in house. But why don't you try using another management company? And I think that she saw that that's, that, that, that was really going to help us scale by taking a focus off management and focus on capital growth processes, you know, renovations, capital may, you know, capital improvements, those kinds of things.
And it was a huge shift in running a team, going from running a team that I managed and developed a protocol and they'll work for me. And they ran around. Yeah. Right. They're my people versus going to a team that was not my people, third-party property management. It's a major shift, but it was a game changer.
Jesse (9m 46s): So curious about that, cause we we've dealt with a third department property management and I'm sure listeners that are invested, you know, either having in-house or having third party. Was there anything specific or kind of the big things that, that were the hardest to get over with that transition, whether it's them, you know, having their systems as opposed to using your systems, was there anything major that, you know, it was, it was just really that it was a challenging one to, to kind of relinquish a little power.
Matt (10m 12s): Well, the accounting thing, you know, you figure out the accounting stuff, cause it's not like they're, they're keeping your books, you know, on the back of a napkin. Right. That's it, that's an easier transition than people think it is. They call, well, we use QuickBooks and they use that folio. How we can we get, you know, what give you, I'll give you an hour or two, you probably figure it out. You know, that's way, way easier than the real. Then the real deal stuff. It's like, well, what are the interfaces? And what are the decision-making what's the decision-making protocol? How much rent should I charge for that vacant apartment?
Right. Should I, or should I not replay, like I have a leak in the ceiling, should I patch the roof? Or should I open up the ceiling to see if there's something inside it that's causing the leak from HVHC doctor or something like that. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's the, if this, then that type of protocol, that is the biggest shift and this level of trust you have to have for the property management team and for their protocol. And just to understand that there's things that are going to happen over here and you're just not even gonna know about it, you know? And so there's a level of having the faith and trust to go a little bit more hands-off and trust that they're going to be able to implement your ideas and visions, but you still got to have your finger on them to the point where you can, you know, catch issues or be like, Hey, we've that ceiling's been leaking for the last three weeks, three months.
And the tenant keeps calling back and they're saying that their HVHC is not working, you know, or that tenants complained of bugs four times in a row. Well, maybe it's because they're not living. Maybe it's because of an issue they're causing versus something that's actually in the building. You know what I'm saying? Stuff like that, that, that you still have to have your finger on as an owner, you cannot hands off and too many owners just go like this completely. But it's like, what's the level of me letting them run their business while I still manage the asset. And that's where the concept of asset management comes in.
Jesse (12m 4s): Yeah. I was going to say, it's like the, you give up a little bit on the property management or everything, depending on what you're doing, but then your internal controls have to go up, right? You need to have those systems of, and it could be as easy as, even on a smaller scale, you know, you're spending X amount of dollars, anything over this, we need executive approval or anything related to this. We need, you know, you have a process, like you said, if then, you know what F and then have a decision tree, you know, between, between you, the property manager,
Matt (12m 31s): Except that their protocol is that, well, we don't call an owner unless we have an expensive of 500 bucks and you have to be okay with that. Like, okay, well, do I want to get calls at a lower number or whatever it is. It's about understanding the process and accepting certain things. And knowing like, this is something I could probably live with. And this is something that I needed to change protocol for. Right. That was probably one of the bigger shifts. And just knowing you don't want to, here's here, I'll give you the term because everybody uses this term now cause attraction and stuff like that, the book attraction is KPIs and determining what the KPIs are for property management, that you need to keep your finger on and stuff that you can just let them run.
And not that it doesn't matter, but it's not going to really affect the things that it's not going to go direct to bottom line. And, and if, if it gets really bad, it'll trigger a KPI, you know, and that, so what are the things on the property management side that I have to hold them accountable to? And what can I just let them run? And if it gets really squirrely, I'll see it. Yeah, yeah, sure.
Jesse (13m 33s): You know, you can control so much of the input, but it's sometimes easier to just have the output. Did we hit this? Did we hit, you know, whatever that KPI is, then you can kind of look back if, if things are, if there's an issue, something needs to be changed. Matt, how was the process of, you know, you wrote, you wrote this book, raising private capital, how did your journey with these properties going from 1849 plus, you know, you're, you're now over a thousand units, I think in terms of the raising capital aspect of your business, how did that, how did that evolve?
Matt (14m 3s): It's a, well, it's funny. The first one I talk about in raising private capital was like, literally somebody, my wife went to college with and she was, I think like we connected with them on like a column like Dan, or maybe she saw him at like an alumni event or w w w w whatever, the, whatever it was. She mentioned to this colleague of hers from college that her and I had gotten into real estate investing. And he was like real estate investing. That's interesting. You know, I've always, I've always wanted to get involved in real estate, but I've never had the time. And it's like, oh, well, you know, my husband has the time, you know, like you should, you should talk to my husband.
And so that you start there and it just something we just stumbled into. And I had to call a lawyer to say, Hey, I've got this guy wants to give me money. What should I do? And he's like, okay, slow down. Let's talk about what is this going to be a equity or debt? And my lawyer was very patient and talk me through, you know, loan agreements and whatnot. And this was, you know, 12 years ago when we were first figuring this whole thing out fast forward to, you know, taking it. Step-by-step one foot in front of the other to, again, you know, again, not to like be a systems dork again, but I guess I'm an engineer by trade.
So I just, that's just how I think in that we started to develop systems and processes around raising private capital and, you know, everything from webinars to funnels to it. Like, you know, having those that want to invest with you participate in some sort of a process to where you can understand who needs to go, where, and your system it's, that's been the journey in, in really taking us to the next level in, in, in marketing and making people aware of us, but also in, in making, you know, making sure that people, the right leads go to the right places.
And that's all been all systems and systems and processes and trial, trial, and error kind of thing.
Jesse (15m 49s): So on the, on the point of systems, I talked with a lot of investors that are at that point where they've raised capital maybe for one or two deals, asset specific, or property specific capital. They're not yet at the size, or at least they don't think they're at the size to justify, you know, a, an actual portal, a fund portal or syndication portal. You know, what point do you, do you see investors really starting to put the systems in? Is it a, is it, is it a size of deal perspective or is it a amount of investors perspective?
How do you think about that?
Matt (16m 21s): I think the most people wait too long to do it. I got talked to one guy who had like 20 million in an equity under management, and he was running it on Excel, bless for anybody, man, he's running it using Excel spreadsheet. Right. And, and, and that, and it almost like you need to go next level, man, you need to look at it. You've got to get this wacky internet machine here. You need to take a look at, you know, and so I, I find that most people probably wait too long to handle capital management investor.
And it just, it just makes your life easy. And you don't have to, like, there are softwares out there now that are not 20,000 a year, you know, to, to buy, we use a software called invest next. And I, you know, I, I'm not, you know, I just have, I happen to know they have a low dollar amount, buy it to get in. If you, if you're managing just a couple of investors, they're, they're, I think it's, it might've been, it might be a hundred bucks a month or a little bit more than that to manage a couple of investors.
And of course it scales up as you have people in, but I find that as an investor, if I were past it and I'd do some passive investing too. But if I, you know, if I were passing, investing with somebody, knowing they've got their web interface, that goes to a portal, I can split my K one there in my data's all in their portal. And I can just pull it down when I need it. And everything like that is so much easier than knowing I got to go ping somebody or bother somebody. If I got a question or want to know how things are going, or what did you send me last month or whatever it is. And it's all in the portal, it's all in that system.
So I think it also just makes your company feel a little more professional as a syndicator, or as somebody offering any kind of, whether it's debt or equity, whatever, whatever you're offering your investor base. Those portals, I think are phenomenal that you've covered is whatever you're using.
Jesse (18m 12s): It's a it's cleaner too. I mean, you, you trade so much paper in the deal, especially with deals like this, and you have a bunch of investors and, you know, even, even today with, with the internet and emailing, it's just a lot where you can just say, here's this area. And I dunno for invest next. That's actually the first time I've heard of that, I don't know if that's something where, you know, you have your accountants or lawyers have access to that where they can dump data there. But I find, yeah, it's just, like you said, it, it makes it it's a professionalism aspect, but then it streamlines a lot of what you're doing.
Matt (18m 42s): Yeah. I mean, and that, that world is changing as I think that, that people become more, have more affinity and trust for things that are not wall street based from an investing standpoint. I think that you're going to see more and more of these kinds of interfaces for people to show up people to participate in. And so right now that's who we use, but who knows. I mean, maybe like, you know, QuickBooks gets into the business of that. At some point it becomes like super easy plug and play or whatever.
And so as we, I think as, as people start investing in things that are outside of wall street, more and more, there'll be more and more options. And that, and people just want like an easy professional interface. I can go get the data I need without me having to go to an individual to, to get what I want. So I think it's, it's a changing, evolving space. And there's some, I mean, just a couple of years ago, there were no portals now there's like, you know, a billion of them. And so I think that we'll see more and more services like that, that allow people like, you know, real estate investors or whatever, kind of a syndicator or business offering a person to be able to put their things out there and have it feel more and more professional for investors to participate in.
Yeah. It can be, Hey, we're just getting started on what?
Jesse (19m 53s): Yeah. And it's funny, like 10 years ago you were 15 years ago, you would have thought, oh, you can't, you know, you have to be one of the big banks or you have to be this investment house to have that. Whereas now, you know, like you said, who knows if it's a plugin or add onto QuickBooks in a couple of years in terms of the, for investors. So I'm sure you've got, we were at new Orleans at the BP cons, a lot of good talks there. You know, we, we chatted a little bit about, you know, how you've, you know, what you've been doing the last year or two years. I'm curious, you've probably had a number of people come up to you about the book on all different levels of where they're at in their investing career.
For those individuals that are say they haven't raised their first property, or maybe they've done one, but for the most part up to up to today, it's been bootstrapped. What kind of advice do you give individuals like that that are, that are maybe don't yet think that they have the confidence to be able to raise capital? And the other thing, probably thinking that, you know, why would somebody trust me to raise capital if I haven't done it before?
Matt (20m 52s): I think it's more important that you've got some real estate investing experience or real estate exposure versus whether or not you've raised capital from your network before I, and I think that that has to do with whether or not your network believes that you know, what you're doing with regards to, you know, that site. So I, if I, I tell people, if you can, you know, do your own deals, your own money, you know, or borrow money with collateralized, collateralized loans and that kind of stuff, and do a couple of deals on your own before you go put it out there or attach yourself to a larger operator, that's got a huge portfolio with tons of experience and everything like that with regards to accessing your network or having the right to ask them for money or whatever.
Raising private capital talks about the concept that everybody knows people with money. And those that tell me, they don't know, people with money are likely afraid to go to their network or concern, or just embarrassed or whatever, to go and make the ask. You know, I mean, my own immediate family is invested with me, you know, and I'm proud to say that and people, and I've, I've asked people like, well, would you allow your mom to invest with you? You know, and like, oh no, no, no, no. I'd never put my mother's money at risk.
Is that, well, let's take an examination on your business, but you'll let your mom go buy something off wall street, but you won't let her invest in something that you are operating, that you are driving or you have your finger on, on her behalf or your father's behalf, whatever it is. So I think that there's a, there's a look yourself in the mirror moment that people need to do to make sure that they've got an, a faith in what it is. They're building. That the people that are closest to them, they would trust involved in it. If that's not the case, then tighten up your hat, your investment houses to the point where that, that, that is something you're willing to stand behind and then you'll have enough confidence to, to take it to the, to take it public by then.
Jesse (22m 43s): Yeah. And it's something you talked about in the book and we talked about last time was there's a lot of people thinking that what they're doing is an ask where a think you reframe it as your it's an opportunity. And it sounds, it sounds funny and like, oh, it's just a, you know, it's whatever it's nomenclature, but it really is. It's no, no. It's, if you really believe in what you're raising capital for, whatever it is, whether it's a, you know, a movie in LA or it's a real estate piece of real estate and, you know, in Pennsylvania, it's really you saying here's an opportunity. Here's something I think, you know, I'm not asking you for money. I'm, I'm giving you an opportunity.
And I think, yeah,
Matt (23m 15s): I've been that embarrassed person want to give me some money from a real estate deal. I've been there. You know? And I mean, I get that. It's embarrassing at first. And it's tough asking people for anything for money specifically. Right. But if you reframe it for yourself, like, Hey, listen, I got a question for you, neighbor Bob, what's the stock market going to do tomorrow? You know, I don't know. You probably don't either, right? But I'll tell you what I have tenants and they're likely going to pay their rent. And if they don't every course, or I have loans out, and if you loan me money for my real estate stuff, you have collateral, meaning like you have a lien on the property, which means you can come take it if I don't pay you back.
You know? So I, I, I believe that there's this level of Moxy, if you will love a confidence that it takes to, to take yourself, to, to really show people that, that the, what you've got is going to work. And once you've got has, if this, the gnats, and, and then in some ways it has a lot of mortar, a lot of more of those than a typical wall street paper investment does. Yeah.
Jesse (24m 18s): In terms of getting into a little bit more complexity, you know, that, especially in the states right now, the fund to funds model is pretty big. And for, you know, for those that don't know a lot of, a lot of what we talk about here is syndication where it's deal specific capital raising, where when we started getting into fund of funds, you can be an LP, but you represent a larger pool of your own LPs in a say, limited partnership structure. I'm curious your view on that. Cause I don't think we've talked about this before the fund to funds model in general and you know, the associated type of fees or, you know, the different return that maybe you can ask for or demand based on the fact that you're bringing in an outsized LP size.
Yeah.
Matt (24m 58s): There's a lot of those out there. And I mean, from a syndicators perspective, that's kind of what you want is to be in a fund to funds because I can't tell you Jesse, how many times people call me up saying, Hey, I want to invest with you. And I love your deal. They will love what you guys do. Love your website, love your transparency, love all this stuff. And like, okay, great. I don't know the deal. I'll call you when I do. And then a couple months later when we have a deal to call them up and say, Hey, we have a deal. Remember the, remember the whole song you were singing about a great I was. And how I greet you on invest with being, let's go back to singing that song for a second.
And they're like, oh no, no, no. We already give that money to the next person that we called five minutes after we hung up with you. Right. Forgot the words
Jesse (25m 34s): To that song.
Matt (25m 35s): Yeah. Right. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. What was that song again? Can you hold that only? Can you home the tone? Yeah. No. So there are, and I've been there myself and I think a lot of the syndicators out there just wanted to have a level of uniformity and a level of like an open door thing that's available whenever. And they just went, investors want to, are excited to get into something. You have the door open that they can hop in and that they can, you know, put their capital with a syndicator they trust. Right. What, what gets, and I see a lot of people that have a lot of deal flow, do that.
People that you and I both know that are, you know, talking heads in the world, I'll have, I'll have a lot of those now what makes me, I say nervous, but what you have to, as an investor, you have to make sure you vet completely as people that are raising capital. And then they're going to take that capital, invest with other people, right? Like who like, like, like it's a derivative fund, right. So it's like, well, why wouldn't I just go give it to that person? Oh, you're going to diversify me. I get it. Okay. Well, how much, what fee structure are you taking off the top?
You know, that I'm, that I'm now getting diluted by. Right. So I think it's just it's it's okay. Cause you do probably get diversification. You get, you know, diversified exposure across the board or whatever, maybe different asset classes. I know people that are running like a blended fund like that that's invested in self storage and flex industrial space and mobile home parks. Well, great. You get, you know, a little bit of everything and maybe geographic diversity to all kinds of cool stuff, but you want to make sure they're not just picking anybody.
They're not just shotgun approaching it. And just like, Hey, whoever's got a deal. I'll give you money. And th they, that they're properly vetting their operators. And then they're not taking too much of a fee in exchange for doing something that you arguably could do yourself too. You know, because I could call each one of those people. Now, it doesn't mean I don't believe in, in blended funds or whatever. It's something that we are doing as well. Although our blended fund does not invest in, it's not just a fund that invest in a bunch of multi-family. We see that there are things that are missing from syndications and those things are liquidity.
You can't get your money back in a syndication. If you will, if you invest in a syndication, you're locked in for five or more years, right. You can't compound your returns in a syndication. Right. I can't take the returns that you give me if I invest with you and recycle those returns back upon themselves and participate in compounding interest, which is Einstein said is the eighth merit eighth wonder of the world. Right. So I think more powerful. Yeah. So I can't, what, what a blended fund done properly can allow you to do.
If you invest with the right operator is something that allows you to compound your returns and get your money back when you want it. And not just how old the property is not going to sell for another four years and I can get you your money back. Right. So those are the, those are the things that we've worked on to blend in and you can't do just one asset class or one thing with one timeline, it's got to have multiple timelines of money coming in, coming out. Like it's got to have a short-term aspect and a long-term aspect. So that's the way we designed it. And in that, so it's something that we have active and it's something we did on a small scale because you don't have to have a $50 million fund.
It could be a couple million dollar fund and that, so that's something that we're doing, but I think that you're going to see more and more of them as capital becomes more. There's a lot of capital out there looking for a home. And so I think you're going to see more funds and not less because people are going to get, people are getting wise to it like, well, geez, I could just put up a sign that says I invest in real estate. And then, you know, I know a lot of luck. Well, a lot, a lot of capital's going to show up because there's a lot of capital looking for something different besides the wall beside wall street right now.
Jesse (29m 24s): And I think I'm just, I totally agree with your point where you're telling individuals, you know, just make sure that you're aware of what are the returns, sorry, what are the fees that are going to be taken on by the, by the person that's that is basically raising money for that fund, but then going to the other fund. And sometimes, you know, some people will say that absolutely not. They won't do fund to funds, but sometimes the returns are great. It's yeah, you're, it's a fee on a fee, but maybe you have an outsize preference promote that, that makes up for that, for that fee.
And the other thing too, you tell sometimes there's situations for investors where most likely, yeah, they have diversification, but most likely they couldn't have got into this particular dealer arrangement because you're putting, you know, you've raised 3 million for this one LP spot, so to speak. Whereas if you went in just on your own, you'd probably just be like all the other, you know, minimum say a hundred K or 50 K whatever the minimum investment is and your profile would probably look different.
Matt (30m 20s): Well, I mean, there are, when you get it, when you've aggregated that much money through a fund, you can kind of call your own shots, you know? And that's maybe what you're saying is that, you know, somebody calls up a syndicator in St. Louis and I see you're raising 10 million. Well, what if I give you half of that? Yeah. You know, w what would you be able to do for me? Can you pay my investors a little higher rate of return? Can you, you know, whatever. And instead of that investor, th that syndicator saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to go and raise this at, you know, I'm going to go and get the 150 of my best friends to invest in this deal with me.
You know, I can just go to you. And maybe some of my, some of my best friends to, and maybe you make my life a lot easier. I believe that's what they're doing. As I've seen that happen. We've been approached by that too, for people that, that have, you know, kind of like assembled a lot of money and you can call you, you know, what was your oyster at that point? And so maybe if you're a good negotiator, you can kind of like, you know, put up, put together a win-win.
Jesse (31m 19s): Yeah. And I think there's a, to your point of, we're going to see a lot more funds. I think we'll see a lot more of this too, just in the same way. Specialization usually happens in an industry and you might have somebody that's great at raising capital, but maybe it is not the operator. And they go to the DeRosa group and they say, Hey guys, do you have anything on the spigot right now? We'd love to be, be an investor on your deal. And they see you as a great operator. And they, you know, they want that LP spot. But I think, I think we're definitely seeing more and more of it in the market.
Matt (31m 47s): Yeah. And you will, and we will, as I think that, you know, what we do becomes less and less of a secret, and there are, there's even bigger wall street, you know, money working its way into like, not like owning it to an apartment building, but working its way into LP level syndications, you know, what broker dealers coming around going like, say, Hey, listen, we used to, you know, only raise a hundred million for big, big, big, big, big operators. Now, guess what, if you need 10 million, we'll go raise that for you.
Or, you know, like the broker dealers are dropping what they're willing to raise for because it's, they're seeing their clients wanting exposure to private placements and things like that. So we've been approached by a few broker dealers. I think it's beginning of the, of, of the amount of capital that's going to come into the real estate space. And maybe it's all through maybe a lot of it's through funds
Jesse (32m 40s): Problems. It's something that I'm very curious how this kind of rolls out because even in our Canadian context, in the U S similarly, the broker, it's always been a bit of a gray area where, you know, if you, if you raise for a fund, okay, you're, you're not necessarily a broker dealer, then you keep doing it and keep doing it. It's like, w you know, at what point do you have to be, to be a pure broker dealer, or, you know, I'm not sure how it works in your state, but I think there is, as, as it gets more and more, what would you say institutionalized?
You feel like some of the, some of the legal framework, I don't know if that will evolve or change, but definitely a lot going on there.
Matt (33m 16s): It's starting to the sec has already changed up the whole Kappa. They're changing the capital raiser laws. They've also changed up. There's some call that out, came a, it was a couple of years ago, but nobody's really, it's becoming popular now. And it's called regulation CF, which allows you to sell more micro sheriffs. The non-accredited investments. We did shares of one of our syndications that a thousand dollars a piece. So now that's not that wasn't, the, the whole syndication was much, much larger share prices, but we, we broke off a small chunk of the deal just to test it out, to see how it goes.
Cause not to, like my personal mission is to offer what we do as syndicators and his real estate investments to everyone. Like, I want everyone to be able to get into some sort of a passive investment if they choose to, without having to read an enormous check or go to put any of their tone time in or whatever. And so I think the world's going to change to the point where more and more people are going to be allowed to, or aware of alternative ways to make money and alternative ways to invest outside of just buying a stock off wall street. They can still do that.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I think it's wrong is that that's the only choice that many people have had, unless you're in the know or in like the country club or silver spoon network or something like that, then you knew about other things, other ways, other, you know, good old boy network plays that you could do investing well, that's all busted up and now it's a lot wider, but I think that there's a lot more widening that can happen for more and more people. And eventually everyone to invest in these kinds of things. And the rules are slowly, you know, it's it's government velocity, Jessie.
So the lows are there. The rules are slowly changing. Yeah.
Jesse (34m 59s): Well, it ties in with what we were saying before, too, as the systems increase, improve, you have the ability for operators like yourself to unitize and get smaller. And then you offer that down to the retail, you know, quotations, retail, I guess, customer
Matt (35m 12s): I'll give you a big vision. I have one day and I mean, I might make an, a, we have a deal under contract right now that I might try it. I don't know how it's going to go, which means like on this, but I want to buy an apartment building and I want to offer for people that live there, the right to buy equity in the apartment building.
Jesse (35m 30s): Hmm. That's interesting. That's almost like a co-op model.
Matt (35m 34s): Yeah. But they're not, they don't have to own the whole in a co-op typically the people that live there are the only ones that aren't all right. They all ages. If you live there, you own it. Right. And it's considered home ownership right now. I'm Todd. This still be a syndication to pass a mess, but I'm not. I'm talking about going to the tenants that are living in a 200 unit building and saying, Hey, listen, how about for 500 bucks? I'll let you own a little bit of the sticks and bricks of where you live. You pay him cash flow, you pay him upside residual. You give him a K one, you pay them the whole thing. And because of those portals, we just talked about, I can post a K one.
I can post their ACH payments and everything like that. It's, it's just as simple. It's all spreadsheets, you know? So 20 people or 200 people, or 4,000 people are technically just as easy to manage through an online portal. Right. And that's, that's a wacky idea. I have, I'll probably get talked out of it, but my team that are more, more pragmatic than I am, but
Jesse (36m 31s): I just don't write another blog Gus, and you'll never do it. I
Matt (36m 34s): Know. Right, right, right. Yeah. I will. I'll do it. I'll make it happen. If I go out there and say, I will never know you will, you know,
Jesse (36m 43s): Well that I want to be mindful of the time we were coming up to the end here, but I'd love to get your thoughts, you know, before we can talk a little bit about how people can reach you and talk, you know, we're where they can find the book. Cheers. Your, your view on the market right now in, I know you're an optimist like myself, but w you know, where do you see the opportunities in the next let's call it short term? Are you thinking differently given, given the last year?
Matt (37m 8s): Okay. I'll give a few different opportunities that I see that I think not in a people are focusing on right now. And then I'll think I'll tell you where I think the market's going to, you know, for, for, for go break out my crystal ball, right? So I think that not enough people are focusing on revitalizing industrial applications in the United States. I think that there should be more industrial flex space. As we continue to become more Amazon defied in our world, there's going to need to be more flex space. More people leasing like three to 4,000 square foot of small warehouse to do light, light, industrial manufacturing, or light storage with a little bit of office space sitting there as, as we get into more of, of the right now economy of, of, you know, shipping small products or whatever, to peoples it's in people's homes and selling things online or whatever.
And boutique brokerage buddy of mine owns a small flex space. And he's got a guy that sells exotic fish out of a little flex space. And he's got fish tanks, probably 30,000 gallons where the fish tanks and this little industrial space, and he's got every kind of fish you'd ever think of. And you can buy them from this guy online and they'll ship them off to you for a, for a crazy price. You can buy these really cool fish for people that are hardcore, you know, fish collectors that can't just go to PetSmart to get their, the fish that they want.
They want something really cool. That's been bred. And you know, that specific or whatever, because of the internet, the magic internet box, things like that are becoming more and more applicable. Right? So I think that there's, we're going to see, we're going to need a lot more of that kind of space in this country have a lot of spaces like that are tired and drawn down. Additionally, this could be an opportunity to repurpose things that are no longer applicable anymore in America. Like we don't, we probably got too much office space, probably got too much retail space in, in, in, in north America, let's say America and Canada.
So I think there's gonna be an opportunity for somebody to think of cool applications for the rundown strip center, down the street, from their house or for the office building. That's 50% dark. You guys think of that idea. You know what, whatever, whatever ways maybe it's living space, maybe it's a school. I don't know. You guys think of it and do something amazing right now with regards to multi-family as much as feel like it's overheated, it's overpriced or whatever. I think, unfortunately, we are going to be looking at some inflation in the next couple of years now. I think it's actually going to drive up.
It's going to drive up wages. It's going to drive up cost of goods and it's going to drive up breaths. And I think that that's going to overall, if not keep multifamily as a high priced asset, it'll maybe drive it up a little bit more. I don't see rates going up anytime soon, maybe a little teeny bit, but not like double or triple or whatever, because I don't think the fed the U S government can't afford to raise rates, you know, given what it would do to our debt if, if rates went up. So I don't think we're going to see huge, huge spike in rates. Maybe a little bit sticker just to try and keep up with inflation, but believe it or not, I think multi-family is going to continue to be a hot commodity.
It's not, I don't see any fundamental that makes it crash anytime soon. And so I think maybe it slows down a little bit. It'd be nice if it kind of hit a ceiling a little bit and slowed down just a nudge. But I do think that it's not, nothing's going to clip it anytime soon. And I think it'll be a good asset to be in for the foreseeable future because we're just not building enough housing and there's becoming more and more people. And we're the housing construction we're building is nowhere near keeping up with the population demand for it. So that's my 2 cents Jesse, and it could be completely wrong on all that stuff, but that's what I think I was going to say,
Jesse (40m 43s): No, that was the, the quickest crystal ball three minutes. And you heard it here first folks. Yeah. I could agree with you more on that. I mean, we pretty much, you know, what, what are we a lagging indicator for the states, despite what you would read and see in the media? You guys continue to be a big player when it comes to immigration and population growth in some of the major cities in the states and Canada. And I think that to your point, I don't know who is more supply constraint. I know we are from a multi-racial standpoint, continue to be.
So, you know, until, until we start seeing more supply, it's really hard to say that multi-family is going to do anything, but at least stay where it's at. If not, like you said in shop, I think for, from my point of view, it's, it's going to be the prices. The prices are going to get to a point where I feel that's not going to be the deciding factor of if they continue to go up, it's going to be the, the, the net operating income side. It's going to be the affordability side. Now, how much higher can that go?
Matt (41m 39s): You can't sit root capris. Can't go much lower. But I mean, I think America is finally realizing that maybe Canada has it, right. Maybe you ought to pay people a real living wage for doing what they do. And, and that $7 an hour is probably not enough, you know? And that, so you see companies like, you know, Amazon McDonald's Starbucks that are paying 15, 20, 20 $5 an hour, which is to be straight, man. That's really what it takes to get by, to raise them. You can't raise a family on seven or $10 an hour, $12 an hour, forget it. You know, there is a family you can feed yourself on that, you know?
And so the fat and the, and it's just not fair that some Americans to keep their lights on, have to work two, maybe three jobs, you know, that ain't right either. And so we're going to see, I think, a correction on living wage and a wage, one, what, what an acceptable wage rate would be in the U S and that unfortunately is going to push up cost of living so
Jesse (42m 34s): Well, I appreciate that Matt, we will look in a year if that prognostication is correct, and we'll hold you to it,
Matt (42m 41s): I've drawn a year from now. We'll just listen to this episode and disagree with everything you and I said, yeah, they're
Jesse (42m 46s): Just a bunch of talks about how
Matt (42m 48s): Wrong with those two guys, right?
Jesse (42m 50s): Matt, in terms of you've done the final four before. So I will skip that. But in terms of where people can reach out to you, aside from a Google search of Matt grouper DeRosa, where can I send them?
Matt (43m 3s): They can go to Instagram at the mat, fair cloth to check me out there. They can go to my company website, which is DeRosa right there behind me, D E R O S a group.com DeRosa group.com. And they can do all kinds of cool stuff, like check out a copy of my book, which they can buy on my website. They can, you know, check out our YouTube channel. They can join our mailing list. It can hear all about the passive cool stuff that we're doing as well@derosagroup.com.
Jesse (43m 28s): My guest today has been Matt Faircloth, cloth, Matt, thanks for being part of working capital.
Matt (43m 33s): Thank you, Jesse.
Jesse (43m 40s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five-star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one take care.
Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name's Jesper gala and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcast. My guests today are returning guests, Matt fare, cloth, founder, and CEO of the DeRosa group.
Matt has been a full-time investor for over 15 years. Just talked a little bit about the deal volume here over a hundred million in real estate transactions and controlling over 1000 units in multifamily mats, a regular contributor and podcast guests on biggerpockets.com has an active YouTube channel dedicated to educating investors and the author of the Amazon bestseller. Highly recommend raising private capital. How to build your real estate empire with other people's money. Matt, how's it going?
Matt (59s): Good. I'm good, Jesse. It's great being here, man. Am I, did I, did you tell me a bit at BiggerPockets conferences? This is that I'm your first repeat appearance on your podcast?
Jesse (1m 8s): No, the first repeat appearance was definitely the BR Brandon Turner. So
Matt (1m 13s): Yeah, you're right. Yeah,
Jesse (1m 15s): But you're there though. You know, you're very generous in the, the first, first few episodes. I think you were you're right on. I think that was right when you started marketing the book, but you know, I think at that point I read half of it completed it a long time ago. A great book. I thought it was, I thought it was just for us, at least it was very perfect timing, which is fine.
Matt (1m 37s): I gotta be here, man. I should get like, we should do like the SNL jacket thing, like finding it loud when there's repeat guests, you know, like we should do like the, like the special, like the number five collab or whatever it is. I'm in the number two clubs now at Brandon. So I want to, I'm glad to be back here with you, man. Thanks for that.
Jesse (1m 52s): It's great to have you, you know what, I didn't even ask before we started. Are you still, are you still in out of Jersey right now or
Matt (1m 59s): So we have an office building in Jersey, but we, we work, but my wife and I have since moved to Pennsylvania just across the bridge, across the river from New Jersey. And now we live just north of Philly in a little town called new hope, Pennsylvania.
Jesse (2m 14s): Nice, nice. And how long has this, how long have you been there now? Three years. Awesome. Cool. Is that you guys doing some deals out there or was it just more of a, a kind of a personal things to
Matt (2m 25s): We move? I, you know, Jesse, I never thought I would be the guy to live in like a, like a suburban development, you know, but you know what, man, I, I got like the whole modern family house. I got, I live in a cul-de-sac and everything like that. The kids go out and play. I know my neighbors, circuitry, Katrina, the bomb, that, that whole thing. So w my wife and I are both urbanites, you know, I've, I've lived in or around urban cores for most of my life. And now we're in the burbs man.
And I, and I love it. I don't know if I'll be in the burbs forever, but for right now with two young kids, this is kind of the, where you want to be. So, no, that's perfect. Yeah. It's been a big, big, big change for us. Well, that's great.
Jesse (3m 6s): So I guess, you know, for listeners, just to catch us up to speed, it's been a, it's been quite a while since we spoke, you know, we've had a couple of major global situations. We've probably the last few years for, you have been a pretty interesting with the book and to see how that's been going. So maybe you could catch us up to speed a little, what you've been up to the last, the last year or two.
Matt (3m 29s): Yeah, man, what's interesting is that when, at my I've been investing for 16 years full-time and what, what I've in, in the beginning part of our career, we were into single family homes. We were in a, you know, a small office complex that, you know, the one down there and Trenton, we would do a lot, a lot of mixed use buildings here and there. And we were invested in, in what a lot of beginning and newer investors would, would consider to be, you know, like the typical deal, like single family, home, small, multi, you know, those kinds of things.
And we ended up scaling up to a reasonable portfolio of those kinds of things. But then, you know, through, through just being able to prove the proof in the pudding for ourselves to show that we were able to, what we were able to do for investors at a scale out best practice as we grew. And so we did, like, we stretched up a little bit into a 10 unit apartment building. Then we stretched a little bit further and did an 18 unit. Then we special bowl further into 49 unit. Right. And that's probably about when you and I had talked, right.
Or is a 49 unit apartment building. Then we went and did 198 unit in, in North Carolina. And then we, we realized the scalability and, and the, and that once we had proven that street cred to our investor base and to ourselves and to prop and, and that we were able to take best practices. We had learned in doing the small stuff and to the larger staff that that's been, our primary focus is, is a mid to large real estate deals for, you know, mid-size multifamily.
And so what I, to answer your question, what I've been focusing on in my time doing the last couple of years, scaling out a team of people that helped me run the larger real estate stuff. And I've got an, a plus team now, th that, that run all that. And I've been spending my time leading that team and, and charging us through COVID and, you know, inflation and all that stuff, but also working on the things that we still own, right. I mean, a couple of years ago, we still owned a lot of that single family homes and duplexes and triplexes and that kind of stuff, and slowly divesting those things and, you know, taking, doing our best to care of the investors that are in those projects and giving them, giving them the best trends that we could so that we can put our focus on just on the larger deals while we still properly unwind and take care of the small stuff.
So we've really been becoming like all grows up, you know, in the last couple of years, as, as a real estate company, you really just focusing on, you know, bigger and large stuff, well, maintaining and selling the small stuff. So the last couple of years Jesse's been all about the focus, transition optimization of, of, of the optimization and of the smaller things while leading and growing into new territory for us on the larger deals.
Jesse (6m 21s): Yeah. It sounds like at that point, you're, you're dealing with scale scaling with systems in terms of the, I think it was the 49 unit probably was the last time we spoke. So that one that jumped from the 49 unit up, how was that different if it was two from the one prior to the 49? And I think that was like an 18 unit or something, right from the 1849. So was that, was that transition from the 18 to 49, different from that transition from 49 to the, to the larger stuff you guys are doing.
So
Matt (6m 52s): The 18 to 49 was probably the biggest chunk and he will here's. This is interesting. Here's why, right. So what we decided to do when we were running everything, I even wrote an article for BiggerPockets years ago. And the article said, why I will never buy a deal outside of 30 minutes away from my office. Right. I had to eat the, I literally, if I, if those words were on paper, I'd pull it up and eat them right now. Right. Literally like little hot sauce on it. Now it ethos words, because at that time it made sense for me to scale out with in-house property management.
Like these are my employees, in-house maintenance, property management interface between the tenants, office manager, bookkeeper, that kind of thing. So I had a reasonable size team. We ran, you know, like, like a north of a hundred unit portfolio with, and it ran well, and it could have, we could have scaled that up to, you know, in, in, into the mid to high hundreds, or even floated with a thousand units or whatever of in-house owned, in-house manages managed units. And when we, the 18 unit we managed in house, and so had that down at the protocol down, had the process orientation down for that, then this 49 unit shows up and that one's two hours away from the 18 unit.
And I was like, man, I wrote that article, I guess I probably, you know, I don't know, but it's in a great location, great market, you know, love the location that it's in. It's, it's just all everything added up and the numbers added up on it and everything worked. And we had proven ourselves on many other smaller deals to investors and private lenders that we get enough people lined up to get into a larger deal. So we said, you know what, let's tackle this larger project. Like, w let's give it, let's give it a bit, let's get into this. We think we can do it.
Problem is Jesse, we'd hire a third party manager to run that property. So I, and this, at the time, God blessed my wife. She's like my muse, you know, I told her we're going to scale up property management, two hours away from our home in Lancaster. And she was like, why don't you just give it a shot to run third-party management? Because if you don't like third-party management, or if they're not doing a good job, you could just fire them and bring it in house. But why don't you try using another management company? And I think that she saw that that's, that, that, that was really going to help us scale by taking a focus off management and focus on capital growth processes, you know, renovations, capital may, you know, capital improvements, those kinds of things.
And it was a huge shift in running a team, going from running a team that I managed and developed a protocol and they'll work for me. And they ran around. Yeah. Right. They're my people versus going to a team that was not my people, third-party property management. It's a major shift, but it was a game changer.
Jesse (9m 46s): So curious about that, cause we we've dealt with a third department property management and I'm sure listeners that are invested, you know, either having in-house or having third party. Was there anything specific or kind of the big things that, that were the hardest to get over with that transition, whether it's them, you know, having their systems as opposed to using your systems, was there anything major that, you know, it was, it was just really that it was a challenging one to, to kind of relinquish a little power.
Matt (10m 12s): Well, the accounting thing, you know, you figure out the accounting stuff, cause it's not like they're, they're keeping your books, you know, on the back of a napkin. Right. That's it, that's an easier transition than people think it is. They call, well, we use QuickBooks and they use that folio. How we can we get, you know, what give you, I'll give you an hour or two, you probably figure it out. You know, that's way, way easier than the real. Then the real deal stuff. It's like, well, what are the interfaces? And what are the decision-making what's the decision-making protocol? How much rent should I charge for that vacant apartment?
Right. Should I, or should I not replay, like I have a leak in the ceiling, should I patch the roof? Or should I open up the ceiling to see if there's something inside it that's causing the leak from HVHC doctor or something like that. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's the, if this, then that type of protocol, that is the biggest shift and this level of trust you have to have for the property management team and for their protocol. And just to understand that there's things that are going to happen over here and you're just not even gonna know about it, you know? And so there's a level of having the faith and trust to go a little bit more hands-off and trust that they're going to be able to implement your ideas and visions, but you still got to have your finger on them to the point where you can, you know, catch issues or be like, Hey, we've that ceiling's been leaking for the last three weeks, three months.
And the tenant keeps calling back and they're saying that their HVHC is not working, you know, or that tenants complained of bugs four times in a row. Well, maybe it's because they're not living. Maybe it's because of an issue they're causing versus something that's actually in the building. You know what I'm saying? Stuff like that, that, that you still have to have your finger on as an owner, you cannot hands off and too many owners just go like this completely. But it's like, what's the level of me letting them run their business while I still manage the asset. And that's where the concept of asset management comes in.
Jesse (12m 4s): Yeah. I was going to say, it's like the, you give up a little bit on the property management or everything, depending on what you're doing, but then your internal controls have to go up, right? You need to have those systems of, and it could be as easy as, even on a smaller scale, you know, you're spending X amount of dollars, anything over this, we need executive approval or anything related to this. We need, you know, you have a process, like you said, if then, you know what F and then have a decision tree, you know, between, between you, the property manager,
Matt (12m 31s): Except that their protocol is that, well, we don't call an owner unless we have an expensive of 500 bucks and you have to be okay with that. Like, okay, well, do I want to get calls at a lower number or whatever it is. It's about understanding the process and accepting certain things. And knowing like, this is something I could probably live with. And this is something that I needed to change protocol for. Right. That was probably one of the bigger shifts. And just knowing you don't want to, here's here, I'll give you the term because everybody uses this term now cause attraction and stuff like that, the book attraction is KPIs and determining what the KPIs are for property management, that you need to keep your finger on and stuff that you can just let them run.
And not that it doesn't matter, but it's not going to really affect the things that it's not going to go direct to bottom line. And, and if, if it gets really bad, it'll trigger a KPI, you know, and that, so what are the things on the property management side that I have to hold them accountable to? And what can I just let them run? And if it gets really squirrely, I'll see it. Yeah, yeah, sure.
Jesse (13m 33s): You know, you can control so much of the input, but it's sometimes easier to just have the output. Did we hit this? Did we hit, you know, whatever that KPI is, then you can kind of look back if, if things are, if there's an issue, something needs to be changed. Matt, how was the process of, you know, you wrote, you wrote this book, raising private capital, how did your journey with these properties going from 1849 plus, you know, you're, you're now over a thousand units, I think in terms of the raising capital aspect of your business, how did that, how did that evolve?
Matt (14m 3s): It's a, well, it's funny. The first one I talk about in raising private capital was like, literally somebody, my wife went to college with and she was, I think like we connected with them on like a column like Dan, or maybe she saw him at like an alumni event or w w w w whatever, the, whatever it was. She mentioned to this colleague of hers from college that her and I had gotten into real estate investing. And he was like real estate investing. That's interesting. You know, I've always, I've always wanted to get involved in real estate, but I've never had the time. And it's like, oh, well, you know, my husband has the time, you know, like you should, you should talk to my husband.
And so that you start there and it just something we just stumbled into. And I had to call a lawyer to say, Hey, I've got this guy wants to give me money. What should I do? And he's like, okay, slow down. Let's talk about what is this going to be a equity or debt? And my lawyer was very patient and talk me through, you know, loan agreements and whatnot. And this was, you know, 12 years ago when we were first figuring this whole thing out fast forward to, you know, taking it. Step-by-step one foot in front of the other to, again, you know, again, not to like be a systems dork again, but I guess I'm an engineer by trade.
So I just, that's just how I think in that we started to develop systems and processes around raising private capital and, you know, everything from webinars to funnels to it. Like, you know, having those that want to invest with you participate in some sort of a process to where you can understand who needs to go, where, and your system it's, that's been the journey in, in really taking us to the next level in, in, in marketing and making people aware of us, but also in, in making, you know, making sure that people, the right leads go to the right places.
And that's all been all systems and systems and processes and trial, trial, and error kind of thing.
Jesse (15m 49s): So on the, on the point of systems, I talked with a lot of investors that are at that point where they've raised capital maybe for one or two deals, asset specific, or property specific capital. They're not yet at the size, or at least they don't think they're at the size to justify, you know, a, an actual portal, a fund portal or syndication portal. You know, what point do you, do you see investors really starting to put the systems in? Is it a, is it, is it a size of deal perspective or is it a amount of investors perspective?
How do you think about that?
Matt (16m 21s): I think the most people wait too long to do it. I got talked to one guy who had like 20 million in an equity under management, and he was running it on Excel, bless for anybody, man, he's running it using Excel spreadsheet. Right. And, and, and that, and it almost like you need to go next level, man, you need to look at it. You've got to get this wacky internet machine here. You need to take a look at, you know, and so I, I find that most people probably wait too long to handle capital management investor.
And it just, it just makes your life easy. And you don't have to, like, there are softwares out there now that are not 20,000 a year, you know, to, to buy, we use a software called invest next. And I, you know, I, I'm not, you know, I just have, I happen to know they have a low dollar amount, buy it to get in. If you, if you're managing just a couple of investors, they're, they're, I think it's, it might've been, it might be a hundred bucks a month or a little bit more than that to manage a couple of investors.
And of course it scales up as you have people in, but I find that as an investor, if I were past it and I'd do some passive investing too. But if I, you know, if I were passing, investing with somebody, knowing they've got their web interface, that goes to a portal, I can split my K one there in my data's all in their portal. And I can just pull it down when I need it. And everything like that is so much easier than knowing I got to go ping somebody or bother somebody. If I got a question or want to know how things are going, or what did you send me last month or whatever it is. And it's all in the portal, it's all in that system.
So I think it also just makes your company feel a little more professional as a syndicator, or as somebody offering any kind of, whether it's debt or equity, whatever, whatever you're offering your investor base. Those portals, I think are phenomenal that you've covered is whatever you're using.
Jesse (18m 12s): It's a it's cleaner too. I mean, you, you trade so much paper in the deal, especially with deals like this, and you have a bunch of investors and, you know, even, even today with, with the internet and emailing, it's just a lot where you can just say, here's this area. And I dunno for invest next. That's actually the first time I've heard of that, I don't know if that's something where, you know, you have your accountants or lawyers have access to that where they can dump data there. But I find, yeah, it's just, like you said, it, it makes it it's a professionalism aspect, but then it streamlines a lot of what you're doing.
Matt (18m 42s): Yeah. I mean, and that, that world is changing as I think that, that people become more, have more affinity and trust for things that are not wall street based from an investing standpoint. I think that you're going to see more and more of these kinds of interfaces for people to show up people to participate in. And so right now that's who we use, but who knows. I mean, maybe like, you know, QuickBooks gets into the business of that. At some point it becomes like super easy plug and play or whatever.
And so as we, I think as, as people start investing in things that are outside of wall street, more and more, there'll be more and more options. And that, and people just want like an easy professional interface. I can go get the data I need without me having to go to an individual to, to get what I want. So I think it's, it's a changing, evolving space. And there's some, I mean, just a couple of years ago, there were no portals now there's like, you know, a billion of them. And so I think that we'll see more and more services like that, that allow people like, you know, real estate investors or whatever, kind of a syndicator or business offering a person to be able to put their things out there and have it feel more and more professional for investors to participate in.
Yeah. It can be, Hey, we're just getting started on what?
Jesse (19m 53s): Yeah. And it's funny, like 10 years ago you were 15 years ago, you would have thought, oh, you can't, you know, you have to be one of the big banks or you have to be this investment house to have that. Whereas now, you know, like you said, who knows if it's a plugin or add onto QuickBooks in a couple of years in terms of the, for investors. So I'm sure you've got, we were at new Orleans at the BP cons, a lot of good talks there. You know, we, we chatted a little bit about, you know, how you've, you know, what you've been doing the last year or two years. I'm curious, you've probably had a number of people come up to you about the book on all different levels of where they're at in their investing career.
For those individuals that are say they haven't raised their first property, or maybe they've done one, but for the most part up to up to today, it's been bootstrapped. What kind of advice do you give individuals like that that are, that are maybe don't yet think that they have the confidence to be able to raise capital? And the other thing, probably thinking that, you know, why would somebody trust me to raise capital if I haven't done it before?
Matt (20m 52s): I think it's more important that you've got some real estate investing experience or real estate exposure versus whether or not you've raised capital from your network before I, and I think that that has to do with whether or not your network believes that you know, what you're doing with regards to, you know, that site. So I, if I, I tell people, if you can, you know, do your own deals, your own money, you know, or borrow money with collateralized, collateralized loans and that kind of stuff, and do a couple of deals on your own before you go put it out there or attach yourself to a larger operator, that's got a huge portfolio with tons of experience and everything like that with regards to accessing your network or having the right to ask them for money or whatever.
Raising private capital talks about the concept that everybody knows people with money. And those that tell me, they don't know, people with money are likely afraid to go to their network or concern, or just embarrassed or whatever, to go and make the ask. You know, I mean, my own immediate family is invested with me, you know, and I'm proud to say that and people, and I've, I've asked people like, well, would you allow your mom to invest with you? You know, and like, oh no, no, no, no. I'd never put my mother's money at risk.
Is that, well, let's take an examination on your business, but you'll let your mom go buy something off wall street, but you won't let her invest in something that you are operating, that you are driving or you have your finger on, on her behalf or your father's behalf, whatever it is. So I think that there's a, there's a look yourself in the mirror moment that people need to do to make sure that they've got an, a faith in what it is. They're building. That the people that are closest to them, they would trust involved in it. If that's not the case, then tighten up your hat, your investment houses to the point where that, that, that is something you're willing to stand behind and then you'll have enough confidence to, to take it to the, to take it public by then.
Jesse (22m 43s): Yeah. And it's something you talked about in the book and we talked about last time was there's a lot of people thinking that what they're doing is an ask where a think you reframe it as your it's an opportunity. And it sounds, it sounds funny and like, oh, it's just a, you know, it's whatever it's nomenclature, but it really is. It's no, no. It's, if you really believe in what you're raising capital for, whatever it is, whether it's a, you know, a movie in LA or it's a real estate piece of real estate and, you know, in Pennsylvania, it's really you saying here's an opportunity. Here's something I think, you know, I'm not asking you for money. I'm, I'm giving you an opportunity.
And I think, yeah,
Matt (23m 15s): I've been that embarrassed person want to give me some money from a real estate deal. I've been there. You know? And I mean, I get that. It's embarrassing at first. And it's tough asking people for anything for money specifically. Right. But if you reframe it for yourself, like, Hey, listen, I got a question for you, neighbor Bob, what's the stock market going to do tomorrow? You know, I don't know. You probably don't either, right? But I'll tell you what I have tenants and they're likely going to pay their rent. And if they don't every course, or I have loans out, and if you loan me money for my real estate stuff, you have collateral, meaning like you have a lien on the property, which means you can come take it if I don't pay you back.
You know? So I, I, I believe that there's this level of Moxy, if you will love a confidence that it takes to, to take yourself, to, to really show people that, that the, what you've got is going to work. And once you've got has, if this, the gnats, and, and then in some ways it has a lot of mortar, a lot of more of those than a typical wall street paper investment does. Yeah.
Jesse (24m 18s): In terms of getting into a little bit more complexity, you know, that, especially in the states right now, the fund to funds model is pretty big. And for, you know, for those that don't know a lot of, a lot of what we talk about here is syndication where it's deal specific capital raising, where when we started getting into fund of funds, you can be an LP, but you represent a larger pool of your own LPs in a say, limited partnership structure. I'm curious your view on that. Cause I don't think we've talked about this before the fund to funds model in general and you know, the associated type of fees or, you know, the different return that maybe you can ask for or demand based on the fact that you're bringing in an outsized LP size.
Yeah.
Matt (24m 58s): There's a lot of those out there. And I mean, from a syndicators perspective, that's kind of what you want is to be in a fund to funds because I can't tell you Jesse, how many times people call me up saying, Hey, I want to invest with you. And I love your deal. They will love what you guys do. Love your website, love your transparency, love all this stuff. And like, okay, great. I don't know the deal. I'll call you when I do. And then a couple months later when we have a deal to call them up and say, Hey, we have a deal. Remember the, remember the whole song you were singing about a great I was. And how I greet you on invest with being, let's go back to singing that song for a second.
And they're like, oh no, no, no. We already give that money to the next person that we called five minutes after we hung up with you. Right. Forgot the words
Jesse (25m 34s): To that song.
Matt (25m 35s): Yeah. Right. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. What was that song again? Can you hold that only? Can you home the tone? Yeah. No. So there are, and I've been there myself and I think a lot of the syndicators out there just wanted to have a level of uniformity and a level of like an open door thing that's available whenever. And they just went, investors want to, are excited to get into something. You have the door open that they can hop in and that they can, you know, put their capital with a syndicator they trust. Right. What, what gets, and I see a lot of people that have a lot of deal flow, do that.
People that you and I both know that are, you know, talking heads in the world, I'll have, I'll have a lot of those now what makes me, I say nervous, but what you have to, as an investor, you have to make sure you vet completely as people that are raising capital. And then they're going to take that capital, invest with other people, right? Like who like, like, like it's a derivative fund, right. So it's like, well, why wouldn't I just go give it to that person? Oh, you're going to diversify me. I get it. Okay. Well, how much, what fee structure are you taking off the top?
You know, that I'm, that I'm now getting diluted by. Right. So I think it's just it's it's okay. Cause you do probably get diversification. You get, you know, diversified exposure across the board or whatever, maybe different asset classes. I know people that are running like a blended fund like that that's invested in self storage and flex industrial space and mobile home parks. Well, great. You get, you know, a little bit of everything and maybe geographic diversity to all kinds of cool stuff, but you want to make sure they're not just picking anybody.
They're not just shotgun approaching it. And just like, Hey, whoever's got a deal. I'll give you money. And th they, that they're properly vetting their operators. And then they're not taking too much of a fee in exchange for doing something that you arguably could do yourself too. You know, because I could call each one of those people. Now, it doesn't mean I don't believe in, in blended funds or whatever. It's something that we are doing as well. Although our blended fund does not invest in, it's not just a fund that invest in a bunch of multi-family. We see that there are things that are missing from syndications and those things are liquidity.
You can't get your money back in a syndication. If you will, if you invest in a syndication, you're locked in for five or more years, right. You can't compound your returns in a syndication. Right. I can't take the returns that you give me if I invest with you and recycle those returns back upon themselves and participate in compounding interest, which is Einstein said is the eighth merit eighth wonder of the world. Right. So I think more powerful. Yeah. So I can't, what, what a blended fund done properly can allow you to do.
If you invest with the right operator is something that allows you to compound your returns and get your money back when you want it. And not just how old the property is not going to sell for another four years and I can get you your money back. Right. So those are the, those are the things that we've worked on to blend in and you can't do just one asset class or one thing with one timeline, it's got to have multiple timelines of money coming in, coming out. Like it's got to have a short-term aspect and a long-term aspect. So that's the way we designed it. And in that, so it's something that we have active and it's something we did on a small scale because you don't have to have a $50 million fund.
It could be a couple million dollar fund and that, so that's something that we're doing, but I think that you're going to see more and more of them as capital becomes more. There's a lot of capital out there looking for a home. And so I think you're going to see more funds and not less because people are going to get, people are getting wise to it like, well, geez, I could just put up a sign that says I invest in real estate. And then, you know, I know a lot of luck. Well, a lot, a lot of capital's going to show up because there's a lot of capital looking for something different besides the wall beside wall street right now.
Jesse (29m 24s): And I think I'm just, I totally agree with your point where you're telling individuals, you know, just make sure that you're aware of what are the returns, sorry, what are the fees that are going to be taken on by the, by the person that's that is basically raising money for that fund, but then going to the other fund. And sometimes, you know, some people will say that absolutely not. They won't do fund to funds, but sometimes the returns are great. It's yeah, you're, it's a fee on a fee, but maybe you have an outsize preference promote that, that makes up for that, for that fee.
And the other thing too, you tell sometimes there's situations for investors where most likely, yeah, they have diversification, but most likely they couldn't have got into this particular dealer arrangement because you're putting, you know, you've raised 3 million for this one LP spot, so to speak. Whereas if you went in just on your own, you'd probably just be like all the other, you know, minimum say a hundred K or 50 K whatever the minimum investment is and your profile would probably look different.
Matt (30m 20s): Well, I mean, there are, when you get it, when you've aggregated that much money through a fund, you can kind of call your own shots, you know? And that's maybe what you're saying is that, you know, somebody calls up a syndicator in St. Louis and I see you're raising 10 million. Well, what if I give you half of that? Yeah. You know, w what would you be able to do for me? Can you pay my investors a little higher rate of return? Can you, you know, whatever. And instead of that investor, th that syndicator saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to go and raise this at, you know, I'm going to go and get the 150 of my best friends to invest in this deal with me.
You know, I can just go to you. And maybe some of my, some of my best friends to, and maybe you make my life a lot easier. I believe that's what they're doing. As I've seen that happen. We've been approached by that too, for people that, that have, you know, kind of like assembled a lot of money and you can call you, you know, what was your oyster at that point? And so maybe if you're a good negotiator, you can kind of like, you know, put up, put together a win-win.
Jesse (31m 19s): Yeah. And I think there's a, to your point of, we're going to see a lot more funds. I think we'll see a lot more of this too, just in the same way. Specialization usually happens in an industry and you might have somebody that's great at raising capital, but maybe it is not the operator. And they go to the DeRosa group and they say, Hey guys, do you have anything on the spigot right now? We'd love to be, be an investor on your deal. And they see you as a great operator. And they, you know, they want that LP spot. But I think, I think we're definitely seeing more and more of it in the market.
Matt (31m 47s): Yeah. And you will, and we will, as I think that, you know, what we do becomes less and less of a secret, and there are, there's even bigger wall street, you know, money working its way into like, not like owning it to an apartment building, but working its way into LP level syndications, you know, what broker dealers coming around going like, say, Hey, listen, we used to, you know, only raise a hundred million for big, big, big, big, big operators. Now, guess what, if you need 10 million, we'll go raise that for you.
Or, you know, like the broker dealers are dropping what they're willing to raise for because it's, they're seeing their clients wanting exposure to private placements and things like that. So we've been approached by a few broker dealers. I think it's beginning of the, of, of the amount of capital that's going to come into the real estate space. And maybe it's all through maybe a lot of it's through funds
Jesse (32m 40s): Problems. It's something that I'm very curious how this kind of rolls out because even in our Canadian context, in the U S similarly, the broker, it's always been a bit of a gray area where, you know, if you, if you raise for a fund, okay, you're, you're not necessarily a broker dealer, then you keep doing it and keep doing it. It's like, w you know, at what point do you have to be, to be a pure broker dealer, or, you know, I'm not sure how it works in your state, but I think there is, as, as it gets more and more, what would you say institutionalized?
You feel like some of the, some of the legal framework, I don't know if that will evolve or change, but definitely a lot going on there.
Matt (33m 16s): It's starting to the sec has already changed up the whole Kappa. They're changing the capital raiser laws. They've also changed up. There's some call that out, came a, it was a couple of years ago, but nobody's really, it's becoming popular now. And it's called regulation CF, which allows you to sell more micro sheriffs. The non-accredited investments. We did shares of one of our syndications that a thousand dollars a piece. So now that's not that wasn't, the, the whole syndication was much, much larger share prices, but we, we broke off a small chunk of the deal just to test it out, to see how it goes.
Cause not to, like my personal mission is to offer what we do as syndicators and his real estate investments to everyone. Like, I want everyone to be able to get into some sort of a passive investment if they choose to, without having to read an enormous check or go to put any of their tone time in or whatever. And so I think the world's going to change to the point where more and more people are going to be allowed to, or aware of alternative ways to make money and alternative ways to invest outside of just buying a stock off wall street. They can still do that.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I think it's wrong is that that's the only choice that many people have had, unless you're in the know or in like the country club or silver spoon network or something like that, then you knew about other things, other ways, other, you know, good old boy network plays that you could do investing well, that's all busted up and now it's a lot wider, but I think that there's a lot more widening that can happen for more and more people. And eventually everyone to invest in these kinds of things. And the rules are slowly, you know, it's it's government velocity, Jessie.
So the lows are there. The rules are slowly changing. Yeah.
Jesse (34m 59s): Well, it ties in with what we were saying before, too, as the systems increase, improve, you have the ability for operators like yourself to unitize and get smaller. And then you offer that down to the retail, you know, quotations, retail, I guess, customer
Matt (35m 12s): I'll give you a big vision. I have one day and I mean, I might make an, a, we have a deal under contract right now that I might try it. I don't know how it's going to go, which means like on this, but I want to buy an apartment building and I want to offer for people that live there, the right to buy equity in the apartment building.
Jesse (35m 30s): Hmm. That's interesting. That's almost like a co-op model.
Matt (35m 34s): Yeah. But they're not, they don't have to own the whole in a co-op typically the people that live there are the only ones that aren't all right. They all ages. If you live there, you own it. Right. And it's considered home ownership right now. I'm Todd. This still be a syndication to pass a mess, but I'm not. I'm talking about going to the tenants that are living in a 200 unit building and saying, Hey, listen, how about for 500 bucks? I'll let you own a little bit of the sticks and bricks of where you live. You pay him cash flow, you pay him upside residual. You give him a K one, you pay them the whole thing. And because of those portals, we just talked about, I can post a K one.
I can post their ACH payments and everything like that. It's, it's just as simple. It's all spreadsheets, you know? So 20 people or 200 people, or 4,000 people are technically just as easy to manage through an online portal. Right. And that's, that's a wacky idea. I have, I'll probably get talked out of it, but my team that are more, more pragmatic than I am, but
Jesse (36m 31s): I just don't write another blog Gus, and you'll never do it. I
Matt (36m 34s): Know. Right, right, right. Yeah. I will. I'll do it. I'll make it happen. If I go out there and say, I will never know you will, you know,
Jesse (36m 43s): Well that I want to be mindful of the time we were coming up to the end here, but I'd love to get your thoughts, you know, before we can talk a little bit about how people can reach you and talk, you know, we're where they can find the book. Cheers. Your, your view on the market right now in, I know you're an optimist like myself, but w you know, where do you see the opportunities in the next let's call it short term? Are you thinking differently given, given the last year?
Matt (37m 8s): Okay. I'll give a few different opportunities that I see that I think not in a people are focusing on right now. And then I'll think I'll tell you where I think the market's going to, you know, for, for, for go break out my crystal ball, right? So I think that not enough people are focusing on revitalizing industrial applications in the United States. I think that there should be more industrial flex space. As we continue to become more Amazon defied in our world, there's going to need to be more flex space. More people leasing like three to 4,000 square foot of small warehouse to do light, light, industrial manufacturing, or light storage with a little bit of office space sitting there as, as we get into more of, of the right now economy of, of, you know, shipping small products or whatever, to peoples it's in people's homes and selling things online or whatever.
And boutique brokerage buddy of mine owns a small flex space. And he's got a guy that sells exotic fish out of a little flex space. And he's got fish tanks, probably 30,000 gallons where the fish tanks and this little industrial space, and he's got every kind of fish you'd ever think of. And you can buy them from this guy online and they'll ship them off to you for a, for a crazy price. You can buy these really cool fish for people that are hardcore, you know, fish collectors that can't just go to PetSmart to get their, the fish that they want.
They want something really cool. That's been bred. And you know, that specific or whatever, because of the internet, the magic internet box, things like that are becoming more and more applicable. Right? So I think that there's, we're going to see, we're going to need a lot more of that kind of space in this country have a lot of spaces like that are tired and drawn down. Additionally, this could be an opportunity to repurpose things that are no longer applicable anymore in America. Like we don't, we probably got too much office space, probably got too much retail space in, in, in, in north America, let's say America and Canada.
So I think there's gonna be an opportunity for somebody to think of cool applications for the rundown strip center, down the street, from their house or for the office building. That's 50% dark. You guys think of that idea. You know what, whatever, whatever ways maybe it's living space, maybe it's a school. I don't know. You guys think of it and do something amazing right now with regards to multi-family as much as feel like it's overheated, it's overpriced or whatever. I think, unfortunately, we are going to be looking at some inflation in the next couple of years now. I think it's actually going to drive up.
It's going to drive up wages. It's going to drive up cost of goods and it's going to drive up breaths. And I think that that's going to overall, if not keep multifamily as a high priced asset, it'll maybe drive it up a little bit more. I don't see rates going up anytime soon, maybe a little teeny bit, but not like double or triple or whatever, because I don't think the fed the U S government can't afford to raise rates, you know, given what it would do to our debt if, if rates went up. So I don't think we're going to see huge, huge spike in rates. Maybe a little bit sticker just to try and keep up with inflation, but believe it or not, I think multi-family is going to continue to be a hot commodity.
It's not, I don't see any fundamental that makes it crash anytime soon. And so I think maybe it slows down a little bit. It'd be nice if it kind of hit a ceiling a little bit and slowed down just a nudge. But I do think that it's not, nothing's going to clip it anytime soon. And I think it'll be a good asset to be in for the foreseeable future because we're just not building enough housing and there's becoming more and more people. And we're the housing construction we're building is nowhere near keeping up with the population demand for it. So that's my 2 cents Jesse, and it could be completely wrong on all that stuff, but that's what I think I was going to say,
Jesse (40m 43s): No, that was the, the quickest crystal ball three minutes. And you heard it here first folks. Yeah. I could agree with you more on that. I mean, we pretty much, you know, what, what are we a lagging indicator for the states, despite what you would read and see in the media? You guys continue to be a big player when it comes to immigration and population growth in some of the major cities in the states and Canada. And I think that to your point, I don't know who is more supply constraint. I know we are from a multi-racial standpoint, continue to be.
So, you know, until, until we start seeing more supply, it's really hard to say that multi-family is going to do anything, but at least stay where it's at. If not, like you said in shop, I think for, from my point of view, it's, it's going to be the prices. The prices are going to get to a point where I feel that's not going to be the deciding factor of if they continue to go up, it's going to be the, the, the net operating income side. It's going to be the affordability side. Now, how much higher can that go?
Matt (41m 39s): You can't sit root capris. Can't go much lower. But I mean, I think America is finally realizing that maybe Canada has it, right. Maybe you ought to pay people a real living wage for doing what they do. And, and that $7 an hour is probably not enough, you know? And that, so you see companies like, you know, Amazon McDonald's Starbucks that are paying 15, 20, 20 $5 an hour, which is to be straight, man. That's really what it takes to get by, to raise them. You can't raise a family on seven or $10 an hour, $12 an hour, forget it. You know, there is a family you can feed yourself on that, you know?
And so the fat and the, and it's just not fair that some Americans to keep their lights on, have to work two, maybe three jobs, you know, that ain't right either. And so we're going to see, I think, a correction on living wage and a wage, one, what, what an acceptable wage rate would be in the U S and that unfortunately is going to push up cost of living so
Jesse (42m 34s): Well, I appreciate that Matt, we will look in a year if that prognostication is correct, and we'll hold you to it,
Matt (42m 41s): I've drawn a year from now. We'll just listen to this episode and disagree with everything you and I said, yeah, they're
Jesse (42m 46s): Just a bunch of talks about how
Matt (42m 48s): Wrong with those two guys, right?
Jesse (42m 50s): Matt, in terms of you've done the final four before. So I will skip that. But in terms of where people can reach out to you, aside from a Google search of Matt grouper DeRosa, where can I send them?
Matt (43m 3s): They can go to Instagram at the mat, fair cloth to check me out there. They can go to my company website, which is DeRosa right there behind me, D E R O S a group.com DeRosa group.com. And they can do all kinds of cool stuff, like check out a copy of my book, which they can buy on my website. They can, you know, check out our YouTube channel. They can join our mailing list. It can hear all about the passive cool stuff that we're doing as well@derosagroup.com.
Jesse (43m 28s): My guest today has been Matt Faircloth, cloth, Matt, thanks for being part of working capital.
Matt (43m 33s): Thank you, Jesse.
Jesse (43m 40s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five-star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one take care.Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name's Jesper gala and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcast. My guests today are returning guests, Matt fare, cloth, founder, and CEO of the DeRosa group.
Matt has been a full-time investor for over 15 years. Just talked a little bit about the deal volume here over a hundred million in real estate transactions and controlling over 1000 units in multifamily mats, a regular contributor and podcast guests on biggerpockets.com has an active YouTube channel dedicated to educating investors and the author of the Amazon bestseller. Highly recommend raising private capital. How to build your real estate empire with other people's money. Matt, how's it going?
Matt (59s): Good. I'm good, Jesse. It's great being here, man. Am I, did I, did you tell me a bit at BiggerPockets conferences? This is that I'm your first repeat appearance on your podcast?
Jesse (1m 8s): No, the first repeat appearance was definitely the BR Brandon Turner. So
Matt (1m 13s): Yeah, you're right. Yeah,
Jesse (1m 15s): But you're there though. You know, you're very generous in the, the first, first few episodes. I think you were you're right on. I think that was right when you started marketing the book, but you know, I think at that point I read half of it completed it a long time ago. A great book. I thought it was, I thought it was just for us, at least it was very perfect timing, which is fine.
Matt (1m 37s): I gotta be here, man. I should get like, we should do like the SNL jacket thing, like finding it loud when there's repeat guests, you know, like we should do like the, like the special, like the number five collab or whatever it is. I'm in the number two clubs now at Brandon. So I want to, I'm glad to be back here with you, man. Thanks for that.
Jesse (1m 52s): It's great to have you, you know what, I didn't even ask before we started. Are you still, are you still in out of Jersey right now or
Matt (1m 59s): So we have an office building in Jersey, but we, we work, but my wife and I have since moved to Pennsylvania just across the bridge, across the river from New Jersey. And now we live just north of Philly in a little town called new hope, Pennsylvania.
Jesse (2m 14s): Nice, nice. And how long has this, how long have you been there now? Three years. Awesome. Cool. Is that you guys doing some deals out there or was it just more of a, a kind of a personal things to
Matt (2m 25s): We move? I, you know, Jesse, I never thought I would be the guy to live in like a, like a suburban development, you know, but you know what, man, I, I got like the whole modern family house. I got, I live in a cul-de-sac and everything like that. The kids go out and play. I know my neighbors, circuitry, Katrina, the bomb, that, that whole thing. So w my wife and I are both urbanites, you know, I've, I've lived in or around urban cores for most of my life. And now we're in the burbs man.
And I, and I love it. I don't know if I'll be in the burbs forever, but for right now with two young kids, this is kind of the, where you want to be. So, no, that's perfect. Yeah. It's been a big, big, big change for us. Well, that's great.
Jesse (3m 6s): So I guess, you know, for listeners, just to catch us up to speed, it's been a, it's been quite a while since we spoke, you know, we've had a couple of major global situations. We've probably the last few years for, you have been a pretty interesting with the book and to see how that's been going. So maybe you could catch us up to speed a little, what you've been up to the last, the last year or two.
Matt (3m 29s): Yeah, man, what's interesting is that when, at my I've been investing for 16 years full-time and what, what I've in, in the beginning part of our career, we were into single family homes. We were in a, you know, a small office complex that, you know, the one down there and Trenton, we would do a lot, a lot of mixed use buildings here and there. And we were invested in, in what a lot of beginning and newer investors would, would consider to be, you know, like the typical deal, like single family, home, small, multi, you know, those kinds of things.
And we ended up scaling up to a reasonable portfolio of those kinds of things. But then, you know, through, through just being able to prove the proof in the pudding for ourselves to show that we were able to, what we were able to do for investors at a scale out best practice as we grew. And so we did, like, we stretched up a little bit into a 10 unit apartment building. Then we stretched a little bit further and did an 18 unit. Then we special bowl further into 49 unit. Right. And that's probably about when you and I had talked, right.
Or is a 49 unit apartment building. Then we went and did 198 unit in, in North Carolina. And then we, we realized the scalability and, and the, and that once we had proven that street cred to our investor base and to ourselves and to prop and, and that we were able to take best practices. We had learned in doing the small stuff and to the larger staff that that's been, our primary focus is, is a mid to large real estate deals for, you know, mid-size multifamily.
And so what I, to answer your question, what I've been focusing on in my time doing the last couple of years, scaling out a team of people that helped me run the larger real estate stuff. And I've got an, a plus team now, th that, that run all that. And I've been spending my time leading that team and, and charging us through COVID and, you know, inflation and all that stuff, but also working on the things that we still own, right. I mean, a couple of years ago, we still owned a lot of that single family homes and duplexes and triplexes and that kind of stuff, and slowly divesting those things and, you know, taking, doing our best to care of the investors that are in those projects and giving them, giving them the best trends that we could so that we can put our focus on just on the larger deals while we still properly unwind and take care of the small stuff.
So we've really been becoming like all grows up, you know, in the last couple of years, as, as a real estate company, you really just focusing on, you know, bigger and large stuff, well, maintaining and selling the small stuff. So the last couple of years Jesse's been all about the focus, transition optimization of, of, of the optimization and of the smaller things while leading and growing into new territory for us on the larger deals.
Jesse (6m 21s): Yeah. It sounds like at that point, you're, you're dealing with scale scaling with systems in terms of the, I think it was the 49 unit probably was the last time we spoke. So that one that jumped from the 49 unit up, how was that different if it was two from the one prior to the 49? And I think that was like an 18 unit or something, right from the 1849. So was that, was that transition from the 18 to 49, different from that transition from 49 to the, to the larger stuff you guys are doing.
So
Matt (6m 52s): The 18 to 49 was probably the biggest chunk and he will here's. This is interesting. Here's why, right. So what we decided to do when we were running everything, I even wrote an article for BiggerPockets years ago. And the article said, why I will never buy a deal outside of 30 minutes away from my office. Right. I had to eat the, I literally, if I, if those words were on paper, I'd pull it up and eat them right now. Right. Literally like little hot sauce on it. Now it ethos words, because at that time it made sense for me to scale out with in-house property management.
Like these are my employees, in-house maintenance, property management interface between the tenants, office manager, bookkeeper, that kind of thing. So I had a reasonable size team. We ran, you know, like, like a north of a hundred unit portfolio with, and it ran well, and it could have, we could have scaled that up to, you know, in, in, into the mid to high hundreds, or even floated with a thousand units or whatever of in-house owned, in-house manages managed units. And when we, the 18 unit we managed in house, and so had that down at the protocol down, had the process orientation down for that, then this 49 unit shows up and that one's two hours away from the 18 unit.
And I was like, man, I wrote that article, I guess I probably, you know, I don't know, but it's in a great location, great market, you know, love the location that it's in. It's, it's just all everything added up and the numbers added up on it and everything worked. And we had proven ourselves on many other smaller deals to investors and private lenders that we get enough people lined up to get into a larger deal. So we said, you know what, let's tackle this larger project. Like, w let's give it, let's give it a bit, let's get into this. We think we can do it.
Problem is Jesse, we'd hire a third party manager to run that property. So I, and this, at the time, God blessed my wife. She's like my muse, you know, I told her we're going to scale up property management, two hours away from our home in Lancaster. And she was like, why don't you just give it a shot to run third-party management? Because if you don't like third-party management, or if they're not doing a good job, you could just fire them and bring it in house. But why don't you try using another management company? And I think that she saw that that's, that, that, that was really going to help us scale by taking a focus off management and focus on capital growth processes, you know, renovations, capital may, you know, capital improvements, those kinds of things.
And it was a huge shift in running a team, going from running a team that I managed and developed a protocol and they'll work for me. And they ran around. Yeah. Right. They're my people versus going to a team that was not my people, third-party property management. It's a major shift, but it was a game changer.
Jesse (9m 46s): So curious about that, cause we we've dealt with a third department property management and I'm sure listeners that are invested, you know, either having in-house or having third party. Was there anything specific or kind of the big things that, that were the hardest to get over with that transition, whether it's them, you know, having their systems as opposed to using your systems, was there anything major that, you know, it was, it was just really that it was a challenging one to, to kind of relinquish a little power.
Matt (10m 12s): Well, the accounting thing, you know, you figure out the accounting stuff, cause it's not like they're, they're keeping your books, you know, on the back of a napkin. Right. That's it, that's an easier transition than people think it is. They call, well, we use QuickBooks and they use that folio. How we can we get, you know, what give you, I'll give you an hour or two, you probably figure it out. You know, that's way, way easier than the real. Then the real deal stuff. It's like, well, what are the interfaces? And what are the decision-making what's the decision-making protocol? How much rent should I charge for that vacant apartment?
Right. Should I, or should I not replay, like I have a leak in the ceiling, should I patch the roof? Or should I open up the ceiling to see if there's something inside it that's causing the leak from HVHC doctor or something like that. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's the, if this, then that type of protocol, that is the biggest shift and this level of trust you have to have for the property management team and for their protocol. And just to understand that there's things that are going to happen over here and you're just not even gonna know about it, you know? And so there's a level of having the faith and trust to go a little bit more hands-off and trust that they're going to be able to implement your ideas and visions, but you still got to have your finger on them to the point where you can, you know, catch issues or be like, Hey, we've that ceiling's been leaking for the last three weeks, three months.
And the tenant keeps calling back and they're saying that their HVHC is not working, you know, or that tenants complained of bugs four times in a row. Well, maybe it's because they're not living. Maybe it's because of an issue they're causing versus something that's actually in the building. You know what I'm saying? Stuff like that, that, that you still have to have your finger on as an owner, you cannot hands off and too many owners just go like this completely. But it's like, what's the level of me letting them run their business while I still manage the asset. And that's where the concept of asset management comes in.
Jesse (12m 4s): Yeah. I was going to say, it's like the, you give up a little bit on the property management or everything, depending on what you're doing, but then your internal controls have to go up, right? You need to have those systems of, and it could be as easy as, even on a smaller scale, you know, you're spending X amount of dollars, anything over this, we need executive approval or anything related to this. We need, you know, you have a process, like you said, if then, you know what F and then have a decision tree, you know, between, between you, the property manager,
Matt (12m 31s): Except that their protocol is that, well, we don't call an owner unless we have an expensive of 500 bucks and you have to be okay with that. Like, okay, well, do I want to get calls at a lower number or whatever it is. It's about understanding the process and accepting certain things. And knowing like, this is something I could probably live with. And this is something that I needed to change protocol for. Right. That was probably one of the bigger shifts. And just knowing you don't want to, here's here, I'll give you the term because everybody uses this term now cause attraction and stuff like that, the book attraction is KPIs and determining what the KPIs are for property management, that you need to keep your finger on and stuff that you can just let them run.
And not that it doesn't matter, but it's not going to really affect the things that it's not going to go direct to bottom line. And, and if, if it gets really bad, it'll trigger a KPI, you know, and that, so what are the things on the property management side that I have to hold them accountable to? And what can I just let them run? And if it gets really squirrely, I'll see it. Yeah, yeah, sure.
Jesse (13m 33s): You know, you can control so much of the input, but it's sometimes easier to just have the output. Did we hit this? Did we hit, you know, whatever that KPI is, then you can kind of look back if, if things are, if there's an issue, something needs to be changed. Matt, how was the process of, you know, you wrote, you wrote this book, raising private capital, how did your journey with these properties going from 1849 plus, you know, you're, you're now over a thousand units, I think in terms of the raising capital aspect of your business, how did that, how did that evolve?
Matt (14m 3s): It's a, well, it's funny. The first one I talk about in raising private capital was like, literally somebody, my wife went to college with and she was, I think like we connected with them on like a column like Dan, or maybe she saw him at like an alumni event or w w w w whatever, the, whatever it was. She mentioned to this colleague of hers from college that her and I had gotten into real estate investing. And he was like real estate investing. That's interesting. You know, I've always, I've always wanted to get involved in real estate, but I've never had the time. And it's like, oh, well, you know, my husband has the time, you know, like you should, you should talk to my husband.
And so that you start there and it just something we just stumbled into. And I had to call a lawyer to say, Hey, I've got this guy wants to give me money. What should I do? And he's like, okay, slow down. Let's talk about what is this going to be a equity or debt? And my lawyer was very patient and talk me through, you know, loan agreements and whatnot. And this was, you know, 12 years ago when we were first figuring this whole thing out fast forward to, you know, taking it. Step-by-step one foot in front of the other to, again, you know, again, not to like be a systems dork again, but I guess I'm an engineer by trade.
So I just, that's just how I think in that we started to develop systems and processes around raising private capital and, you know, everything from webinars to funnels to it. Like, you know, having those that want to invest with you participate in some sort of a process to where you can understand who needs to go, where, and your system it's, that's been the journey in, in really taking us to the next level in, in, in marketing and making people aware of us, but also in, in making, you know, making sure that people, the right leads go to the right places.
And that's all been all systems and systems and processes and trial, trial, and error kind of thing.
Jesse (15m 49s): So on the, on the point of systems, I talked with a lot of investors that are at that point where they've raised capital maybe for one or two deals, asset specific, or property specific capital. They're not yet at the size, or at least they don't think they're at the size to justify, you know, a, an actual portal, a fund portal or syndication portal. You know, what point do you, do you see investors really starting to put the systems in? Is it a, is it, is it a size of deal perspective or is it a amount of investors perspective?
How do you think about that?
Matt (16m 21s): I think the most people wait too long to do it. I got talked to one guy who had like 20 million in an equity under management, and he was running it on Excel, bless for anybody, man, he's running it using Excel spreadsheet. Right. And, and, and that, and it almost like you need to go next level, man, you need to look at it. You've got to get this wacky internet machine here. You need to take a look at, you know, and so I, I find that most people probably wait too long to handle capital management investor.
And it just, it just makes your life easy. And you don't have to, like, there are softwares out there now that are not 20,000 a year, you know, to, to buy, we use a software called invest next. And I, you know, I, I'm not, you know, I just have, I happen to know they have a low dollar amount, buy it to get in. If you, if you're managing just a couple of investors, they're, they're, I think it's, it might've been, it might be a hundred bucks a month or a little bit more than that to manage a couple of investors.
And of course it scales up as you have people in, but I find that as an investor, if I were past it and I'd do some passive investing too. But if I, you know, if I were passing, investing with somebody, knowing they've got their web interface, that goes to a portal, I can split my K one there in my data's all in their portal. And I can just pull it down when I need it. And everything like that is so much easier than knowing I got to go ping somebody or bother somebody. If I got a question or want to know how things are going, or what did you send me last month or whatever it is. And it's all in the portal, it's all in that system.
So I think it also just makes your company feel a little more professional as a syndicator, or as somebody offering any kind of, whether it's debt or equity, whatever, whatever you're offering your investor base. Those portals, I think are phenomenal that you've covered is whatever you're using.
Jesse (18m 12s): It's a it's cleaner too. I mean, you, you trade so much paper in the deal, especially with deals like this, and you have a bunch of investors and, you know, even, even today with, with the internet and emailing, it's just a lot where you can just say, here's this area. And I dunno for invest next. That's actually the first time I've heard of that, I don't know if that's something where, you know, you have your accountants or lawyers have access to that where they can dump data there. But I find, yeah, it's just, like you said, it, it makes it it's a professionalism aspect, but then it streamlines a lot of what you're doing.
Matt (18m 42s): Yeah. I mean, and that, that world is changing as I think that, that people become more, have more affinity and trust for things that are not wall street based from an investing standpoint. I think that you're going to see more and more of these kinds of interfaces for people to show up people to participate in. And so right now that's who we use, but who knows. I mean, maybe like, you know, QuickBooks gets into the business of that. At some point it becomes like super easy plug and play or whatever.
And so as we, I think as, as people start investing in things that are outside of wall street, more and more, there'll be more and more options. And that, and people just want like an easy professional interface. I can go get the data I need without me having to go to an individual to, to get what I want. So I think it's, it's a changing, evolving space. And there's some, I mean, just a couple of years ago, there were no portals now there's like, you know, a billion of them. And so I think that we'll see more and more services like that, that allow people like, you know, real estate investors or whatever, kind of a syndicator or business offering a person to be able to put their things out there and have it feel more and more professional for investors to participate in.
Yeah. It can be, Hey, we're just getting started on what?
Jesse (19m 53s): Yeah. And it's funny, like 10 years ago you were 15 years ago, you would have thought, oh, you can't, you know, you have to be one of the big banks or you have to be this investment house to have that. Whereas now, you know, like you said, who knows if it's a plugin or add onto QuickBooks in a couple of years in terms of the, for investors. So I'm sure you've got, we were at new Orleans at the BP cons, a lot of good talks there. You know, we, we chatted a little bit about, you know, how you've, you know, what you've been doing the last year or two years. I'm curious, you've probably had a number of people come up to you about the book on all different levels of where they're at in their investing career.
For those individuals that are say they haven't raised their first property, or maybe they've done one, but for the most part up to up to today, it's been bootstrapped. What kind of advice do you give individuals like that that are, that are maybe don't yet think that they have the confidence to be able to raise capital? And the other thing, probably thinking that, you know, why would somebody trust me to raise capital if I haven't done it before?
Matt (20m 52s): I think it's more important that you've got some real estate investing experience or real estate exposure versus whether or not you've raised capital from your network before I, and I think that that has to do with whether or not your network believes that you know, what you're doing with regards to, you know, that site. So I, if I, I tell people, if you can, you know, do your own deals, your own money, you know, or borrow money with collateralized, collateralized loans and that kind of stuff, and do a couple of deals on your own before you go put it out there or attach yourself to a larger operator, that's got a huge portfolio with tons of experience and everything like that with regards to accessing your network or having the right to ask them for money or whatever.
Raising private capital talks about the concept that everybody knows people with money. And those that tell me, they don't know, people with money are likely afraid to go to their network or concern, or just embarrassed or whatever, to go and make the ask. You know, I mean, my own immediate family is invested with me, you know, and I'm proud to say that and people, and I've, I've asked people like, well, would you allow your mom to invest with you? You know, and like, oh no, no, no, no. I'd never put my mother's money at risk.
Is that, well, let's take an examination on your business, but you'll let your mom go buy something off wall street, but you won't let her invest in something that you are operating, that you are driving or you have your finger on, on her behalf or your father's behalf, whatever it is. So I think that there's a, there's a look yourself in the mirror moment that people need to do to make sure that they've got an, a faith in what it is. They're building. That the people that are closest to them, they would trust involved in it. If that's not the case, then tighten up your hat, your investment houses to the point where that, that, that is something you're willing to stand behind and then you'll have enough confidence to, to take it to the, to take it public by then.
Jesse (22m 43s): Yeah. And it's something you talked about in the book and we talked about last time was there's a lot of people thinking that what they're doing is an ask where a think you reframe it as your it's an opportunity. And it sounds, it sounds funny and like, oh, it's just a, you know, it's whatever it's nomenclature, but it really is. It's no, no. It's, if you really believe in what you're raising capital for, whatever it is, whether it's a, you know, a movie in LA or it's a real estate piece of real estate and, you know, in Pennsylvania, it's really you saying here's an opportunity. Here's something I think, you know, I'm not asking you for money. I'm, I'm giving you an opportunity.
And I think, yeah,
Matt (23m 15s): I've been that embarrassed person want to give me some money from a real estate deal. I've been there. You know? And I mean, I get that. It's embarrassing at first. And it's tough asking people for anything for money specifically. Right. But if you reframe it for yourself, like, Hey, listen, I got a question for you, neighbor Bob, what's the stock market going to do tomorrow? You know, I don't know. You probably don't either, right? But I'll tell you what I have tenants and they're likely going to pay their rent. And if they don't every course, or I have loans out, and if you loan me money for my real estate stuff, you have collateral, meaning like you have a lien on the property, which means you can come take it if I don't pay you back.
You know? So I, I, I believe that there's this level of Moxy, if you will love a confidence that it takes to, to take yourself, to, to really show people that, that the, what you've got is going to work. And once you've got has, if this, the gnats, and, and then in some ways it has a lot of mortar, a lot of more of those than a typical wall street paper investment does. Yeah.
Jesse (24m 18s): In terms of getting into a little bit more complexity, you know, that, especially in the states right now, the fund to funds model is pretty big. And for, you know, for those that don't know a lot of, a lot of what we talk about here is syndication where it's deal specific capital raising, where when we started getting into fund of funds, you can be an LP, but you represent a larger pool of your own LPs in a say, limited partnership structure. I'm curious your view on that. Cause I don't think we've talked about this before the fund to funds model in general and you know, the associated type of fees or, you know, the different return that maybe you can ask for or demand based on the fact that you're bringing in an outsized LP size.
Yeah.
Matt (24m 58s): There's a lot of those out there. And I mean, from a syndicators perspective, that's kind of what you want is to be in a fund to funds because I can't tell you Jesse, how many times people call me up saying, Hey, I want to invest with you. And I love your deal. They will love what you guys do. Love your website, love your transparency, love all this stuff. And like, okay, great. I don't know the deal. I'll call you when I do. And then a couple months later when we have a deal to call them up and say, Hey, we have a deal. Remember the, remember the whole song you were singing about a great I was. And how I greet you on invest with being, let's go back to singing that song for a second.
And they're like, oh no, no, no. We already give that money to the next person that we called five minutes after we hung up with you. Right. Forgot the words
Jesse (25m 34s): To that song.
Matt (25m 35s): Yeah. Right. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. What was that song again? Can you hold that only? Can you home the tone? Yeah. No. So there are, and I've been there myself and I think a lot of the syndicators out there just wanted to have a level of uniformity and a level of like an open door thing that's available whenever. And they just went, investors want to, are excited to get into something. You have the door open that they can hop in and that they can, you know, put their capital with a syndicator they trust. Right. What, what gets, and I see a lot of people that have a lot of deal flow, do that.
People that you and I both know that are, you know, talking heads in the world, I'll have, I'll have a lot of those now what makes me, I say nervous, but what you have to, as an investor, you have to make sure you vet completely as people that are raising capital. And then they're going to take that capital, invest with other people, right? Like who like, like, like it's a derivative fund, right. So it's like, well, why wouldn't I just go give it to that person? Oh, you're going to diversify me. I get it. Okay. Well, how much, what fee structure are you taking off the top?
You know, that I'm, that I'm now getting diluted by. Right. So I think it's just it's it's okay. Cause you do probably get diversification. You get, you know, diversified exposure across the board or whatever, maybe different asset classes. I know people that are running like a blended fund like that that's invested in self storage and flex industrial space and mobile home parks. Well, great. You get, you know, a little bit of everything and maybe geographic diversity to all kinds of cool stuff, but you want to make sure they're not just picking anybody.
They're not just shotgun approaching it. And just like, Hey, whoever's got a deal. I'll give you money. And th they, that they're properly vetting their operators. And then they're not taking too much of a fee in exchange for doing something that you arguably could do yourself too. You know, because I could call each one of those people. Now, it doesn't mean I don't believe in, in blended funds or whatever. It's something that we are doing as well. Although our blended fund does not invest in, it's not just a fund that invest in a bunch of multi-family. We see that there are things that are missing from syndications and those things are liquidity.
You can't get your money back in a syndication. If you will, if you invest in a syndication, you're locked in for five or more years, right. You can't compound your returns in a syndication. Right. I can't take the returns that you give me if I invest with you and recycle those returns back upon themselves and participate in compounding interest, which is Einstein said is the eighth merit eighth wonder of the world. Right. So I think more powerful. Yeah. So I can't, what, what a blended fund done properly can allow you to do.
If you invest with the right operator is something that allows you to compound your returns and get your money back when you want it. And not just how old the property is not going to sell for another four years and I can get you your money back. Right. So those are the, those are the things that we've worked on to blend in and you can't do just one asset class or one thing with one timeline, it's got to have multiple timelines of money coming in, coming out. Like it's got to have a short-term aspect and a long-term aspect. So that's the way we designed it. And in that, so it's something that we have active and it's something we did on a small scale because you don't have to have a $50 million fund.
It could be a couple million dollar fund and that, so that's something that we're doing, but I think that you're going to see more and more of them as capital becomes more. There's a lot of capital out there looking for a home. And so I think you're going to see more funds and not less because people are going to get, people are getting wise to it like, well, geez, I could just put up a sign that says I invest in real estate. And then, you know, I know a lot of luck. Well, a lot, a lot of capital's going to show up because there's a lot of capital looking for something different besides the wall beside wall street right now.
Jesse (29m 24s): And I think I'm just, I totally agree with your point where you're telling individuals, you know, just make sure that you're aware of what are the returns, sorry, what are the fees that are going to be taken on by the, by the person that's that is basically raising money for that fund, but then going to the other fund. And sometimes, you know, some people will say that absolutely not. They won't do fund to funds, but sometimes the returns are great. It's yeah, you're, it's a fee on a fee, but maybe you have an outsize preference promote that, that makes up for that, for that fee.
And the other thing too, you tell sometimes there's situations for investors where most likely, yeah, they have diversification, but most likely they couldn't have got into this particular dealer arrangement because you're putting, you know, you've raised 3 million for this one LP spot, so to speak. Whereas if you went in just on your own, you'd probably just be like all the other, you know, minimum say a hundred K or 50 K whatever the minimum investment is and your profile would probably look different.
Matt (30m 20s): Well, I mean, there are, when you get it, when you've aggregated that much money through a fund, you can kind of call your own shots, you know? And that's maybe what you're saying is that, you know, somebody calls up a syndicator in St. Louis and I see you're raising 10 million. Well, what if I give you half of that? Yeah. You know, w what would you be able to do for me? Can you pay my investors a little higher rate of return? Can you, you know, whatever. And instead of that investor, th that syndicator saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to go and raise this at, you know, I'm going to go and get the 150 of my best friends to invest in this deal with me.
You know, I can just go to you. And maybe some of my, some of my best friends to, and maybe you make my life a lot easier. I believe that's what they're doing. As I've seen that happen. We've been approached by that too, for people that, that have, you know, kind of like assembled a lot of money and you can call you, you know, what was your oyster at that point? And so maybe if you're a good negotiator, you can kind of like, you know, put up, put together a win-win.
Jesse (31m 19s): Yeah. And I think there's a, to your point of, we're going to see a lot more funds. I think we'll see a lot more of this too, just in the same way. Specialization usually happens in an industry and you might have somebody that's great at raising capital, but maybe it is not the operator. And they go to the DeRosa group and they say, Hey guys, do you have anything on the spigot right now? We'd love to be, be an investor on your deal. And they see you as a great operator. And they, you know, they want that LP spot. But I think, I think we're definitely seeing more and more of it in the market.
Matt (31m 47s): Yeah. And you will, and we will, as I think that, you know, what we do becomes less and less of a secret, and there are, there's even bigger wall street, you know, money working its way into like, not like owning it to an apartment building, but working its way into LP level syndications, you know, what broker dealers coming around going like, say, Hey, listen, we used to, you know, only raise a hundred million for big, big, big, big, big operators. Now, guess what, if you need 10 million, we'll go raise that for you.
Or, you know, like the broker dealers are dropping what they're willing to raise for because it's, they're seeing their clients wanting exposure to private placements and things like that. So we've been approached by a few broker dealers. I think it's beginning of the, of, of the amount of capital that's going to come into the real estate space. And maybe it's all through maybe a lot of it's through funds
Jesse (32m 40s): Problems. It's something that I'm very curious how this kind of rolls out because even in our Canadian context, in the U S similarly, the broker, it's always been a bit of a gray area where, you know, if you, if you raise for a fund, okay, you're, you're not necessarily a broker dealer, then you keep doing it and keep doing it. It's like, w you know, at what point do you have to be, to be a pure broker dealer, or, you know, I'm not sure how it works in your state, but I think there is, as, as it gets more and more, what would you say institutionalized?
You feel like some of the, some of the legal framework, I don't know if that will evolve or change, but definitely a lot going on there.
Matt (33m 16s): It's starting to the sec has already changed up the whole Kappa. They're changing the capital raiser laws. They've also changed up. There's some call that out, came a, it was a couple of years ago, but nobody's really, it's becoming popular now. And it's called regulation CF, which allows you to sell more micro sheriffs. The non-accredited investments. We did shares of one of our syndications that a thousand dollars a piece. So now that's not that wasn't, the, the whole syndication was much, much larger share prices, but we, we broke off a small chunk of the deal just to test it out, to see how it goes.
Cause not to, like my personal mission is to offer what we do as syndicators and his real estate investments to everyone. Like, I want everyone to be able to get into some sort of a passive investment if they choose to, without having to read an enormous check or go to put any of their tone time in or whatever. And so I think the world's going to change to the point where more and more people are going to be allowed to, or aware of alternative ways to make money and alternative ways to invest outside of just buying a stock off wall street. They can still do that.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I think it's wrong is that that's the only choice that many people have had, unless you're in the know or in like the country club or silver spoon network or something like that, then you knew about other things, other ways, other, you know, good old boy network plays that you could do investing well, that's all busted up and now it's a lot wider, but I think that there's a lot more widening that can happen for more and more people. And eventually everyone to invest in these kinds of things. And the rules are slowly, you know, it's it's government velocity, Jessie.
So the lows are there. The rules are slowly changing. Yeah.
Jesse (34m 59s): Well, it ties in with what we were saying before, too, as the systems increase, improve, you have the ability for operators like yourself to unitize and get smaller. And then you offer that down to the retail, you know, quotations, retail, I guess, customer
Matt (35m 12s): I'll give you a big vision. I have one day and I mean, I might make an, a, we have a deal under contract right now that I might try it. I don't know how it's going to go, which means like on this, but I want to buy an apartment building and I want to offer for people that live there, the right to buy equity in the apartment building.
Jesse (35m 30s): Hmm. That's interesting. That's almost like a co-op model.
Matt (35m 34s): Yeah. But they're not, they don't have to own the whole in a co-op typically the people that live there are the only ones that aren't all right. They all ages. If you live there, you own it. Right. And it's considered home ownership right now. I'm Todd. This still be a syndication to pass a mess, but I'm not. I'm talking about going to the tenants that are living in a 200 unit building and saying, Hey, listen, how about for 500 bucks? I'll let you own a little bit of the sticks and bricks of where you live. You pay him cash flow, you pay him upside residual. You give him a K one, you pay them the whole thing. And because of those portals, we just talked about, I can post a K one.
I can post their ACH payments and everything like that. It's, it's just as simple. It's all spreadsheets, you know? So 20 people or 200 people, or 4,000 people are technically just as easy to manage through an online portal. Right. And that's, that's a wacky idea. I have, I'll probably get talked out of it, but my team that are more, more pragmatic than I am, but
Jesse (36m 31s): I just don't write another blog Gus, and you'll never do it. I
Matt (36m 34s): Know. Right, right, right. Yeah. I will. I'll do it. I'll make it happen. If I go out there and say, I will never know you will, you know,
Jesse (36m 43s): Well that I want to be mindful of the time we were coming up to the end here, but I'd love to get your thoughts, you know, before we can talk a little bit about how people can reach you and talk, you know, we're where they can find the book. Cheers. Your, your view on the market right now in, I know you're an optimist like myself, but w you know, where do you see the opportunities in the next let's call it short term? Are you thinking differently given, given the last year?
Matt (37m 8s): Okay. I'll give a few different opportunities that I see that I think not in a people are focusing on right now. And then I'll think I'll tell you where I think the market's going to, you know, for, for, for go break out my crystal ball, right? So I think that not enough people are focusing on revitalizing industrial applications in the United States. I think that there should be more industrial flex space. As we continue to become more Amazon defied in our world, there's going to need to be more flex space. More people leasing like three to 4,000 square foot of small warehouse to do light, light, industrial manufacturing, or light storage with a little bit of office space sitting there as, as we get into more of, of the right now economy of, of, you know, shipping small products or whatever, to peoples it's in people's homes and selling things online or whatever.
And boutique brokerage buddy of mine owns a small flex space. And he's got a guy that sells exotic fish out of a little flex space. And he's got fish tanks, probably 30,000 gallons where the fish tanks and this little industrial space, and he's got every kind of fish you'd ever think of. And you can buy them from this guy online and they'll ship them off to you for a, for a crazy price. You can buy these really cool fish for people that are hardcore, you know, fish collectors that can't just go to PetSmart to get their, the fish that they want.
They want something really cool. That's been bred. And you know, that specific or whatever, because of the internet, the magic internet box, things like that are becoming more and more applicable. Right? So I think that there's, we're going to see, we're going to need a lot more of that kind of space in this country have a lot of spaces like that are tired and drawn down. Additionally, this could be an opportunity to repurpose things that are no longer applicable anymore in America. Like we don't, we probably got too much office space, probably got too much retail space in, in, in, in north America, let's say America and Canada.
So I think there's gonna be an opportunity for somebody to think of cool applications for the rundown strip center, down the street, from their house or for the office building. That's 50% dark. You guys think of that idea. You know what, whatever, whatever ways maybe it's living space, maybe it's a school. I don't know. You guys think of it and do something amazing right now with regards to multi-family as much as feel like it's overheated, it's overpriced or whatever. I think, unfortunately, we are going to be looking at some inflation in the next couple of years now. I think it's actually going to drive up.
It's going to drive up wages. It's going to drive up cost of goods and it's going to drive up breaths. And I think that that's going to overall, if not keep multifamily as a high priced asset, it'll maybe drive it up a little bit more. I don't see rates going up anytime soon, maybe a little teeny bit, but not like double or triple or whatever, because I don't think the fed the U S government can't afford to raise rates, you know, given what it would do to our debt if, if rates went up. So I don't think we're going to see huge, huge spike in rates. Maybe a little bit sticker just to try and keep up with inflation, but believe it or not, I think multi-family is going to continue to be a hot commodity.
It's not, I don't see any fundamental that makes it crash anytime soon. And so I think maybe it slows down a little bit. It'd be nice if it kind of hit a ceiling a little bit and slowed down just a nudge. But I do think that it's not, nothing's going to clip it anytime soon. And I think it'll be a good asset to be in for the foreseeable future because we're just not building enough housing and there's becoming more and more people. And we're the housing construction we're building is nowhere near keeping up with the population demand for it. So that's my 2 cents Jesse, and it could be completely wrong on all that stuff, but that's what I think I was going to say,
Jesse (40m 43s): No, that was the, the quickest crystal ball three minutes. And you heard it here first folks. Yeah. I could agree with you more on that. I mean, we pretty much, you know, what, what are we a lagging indicator for the states, despite what you would read and see in the media? You guys continue to be a big player when it comes to immigration and population growth in some of the major cities in the states and Canada. And I think that to your point, I don't know who is more supply constraint. I know we are from a multi-racial standpoint, continue to be.
So, you know, until, until we start seeing more supply, it's really hard to say that multi-family is going to do anything, but at least stay where it's at. If not, like you said in shop, I think for, from my point of view, it's, it's going to be the prices. The prices are going to get to a point where I feel that's not going to be the deciding factor of if they continue to go up, it's going to be the, the, the net operating income side. It's going to be the affordability side. Now, how much higher can that go?
Matt (41m 39s): You can't sit root capris. Can't go much lower. But I mean, I think America is finally realizing that maybe Canada has it, right. Maybe you ought to pay people a real living wage for doing what they do. And, and that $7 an hour is probably not enough, you know? And that, so you see companies like, you know, Amazon McDonald's Starbucks that are paying 15, 20, 20 $5 an hour, which is to be straight, man. That's really what it takes to get by, to raise them. You can't raise a family on seven or $10 an hour, $12 an hour, forget it. You know, there is a family you can feed yourself on that, you know?
And so the fat and the, and it's just not fair that some Americans to keep their lights on, have to work two, maybe three jobs, you know, that ain't right either. And so we're going to see, I think, a correction on living wage and a wage, one, what, what an acceptable wage rate would be in the U S and that unfortunately is going to push up cost of living so
Jesse (42m 34s): Well, I appreciate that Matt, we will look in a year if that prognostication is correct, and we'll hold you to it,
Matt (42m 41s): I've drawn a year from now. We'll just listen to this episode and disagree with everything you and I said, yeah, they're
Jesse (42m 46s): Just a bunch of talks about how
Matt (42m 48s): Wrong with those two guys, right?
Jesse (42m 50s): Matt, in terms of you've done the final four before. So I will skip that. But in terms of where people can reach out to you, aside from a Google search of Matt grouper DeRosa, where can I send them?
Matt (43m 3s): They can go to Instagram at the mat, fair cloth to check me out there. They can go to my company website, which is DeRosa right there behind me, D E R O S a group.com DeRosa group.com. And they can do all kinds of cool stuff, like check out a copy of my book, which they can buy on my website. They can, you know, check out our YouTube channel. They can join our mailing list. It can hear all about the passive cool stuff that we're doing as well@derosagroup.com.
Jesse (43m 28s): My guest today has been Matt Faircloth, cloth, Matt, thanks for being part of working capital.
Matt (43m 33s): Thank you, Jesse.
Jesse (43m 40s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five-star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one take care.