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Sep 1, 2021

Brandon Turner is an Active Real Estate Investor, Entrepreneur, Writer, and Podcaster. He is a Nationally Recognised Leader in the Real Estate Education Space and Has Taught Millions of People how to Find, Finance, and Manage Real Estate Investments. Brandon is about to Release “The Multifamily Millionaire” Volume 1 and Volume 2

 In this episode we talked about:

  • Regulations and Lockdown: NYC vs Hawaii
  • The process of Underwriting Deals
  • Asset Class Comparison
  • How Deals are Structured
  • Specifics of Mobile Homes
  • Scaling a portfolio
  • Macroeconomic Trends
  • Raising Capital for Private Equity Deals
  • Selling the Fund
  • “Multifamily Millionaire” book
  • The Investment Philosophy of Open Door Capital

Useful links:

https://store.biggerpockets.com/products/the-multifamily-millionaire-volume-i

Transcriptions:

Speaker 0 (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 guys and gals, my name's Jennifer galley, and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcasts. We have a returning guest on the show, Brandon Turner. He was our first guests ever on the podcast.

Brandon holds a lot of titles. He's an investor. He's a, one of those VPs that BiggerPockets, and most recently he is about to release the multifamily millionaire and brand of correct me if I'm wrong. That's volume one and volume two. That

Speaker 1 (49s): Is correct. That's all. That's a great introduction, man. Look well done. Well done.

Speaker 0 (53s): I appreciate it, man. Well, it's good to, it's good to talk to you. It's it's crazy to think that, oh man, what has it been? It's almost 70 episodes now. So a year and yeah, you're in change and change quite some time. You know, nothing's really happened in the world over the last a year and a half. So

Speaker 1 (1m 9s): It's been a pretty, pretty lame couple of years here. Nothing's happened in the world. So I don't really talk about today.

Speaker 0 (1m 14s): Yeah. Real quiet. Well, yeah, listen, thank you. As a, as always for, you know, giving your time here. I know it's always nice to talk to you. Catch up, see what's going on in your world and, and talk real estate. So maybe on, you know, on that note, it has been a urine change. How how's everything been going with you? I guess first and foremost, you know, you, the family, everybody's all good. Yeah. It's been

Speaker 1 (1m 38s): A weird year. I mean, Hawaii was like kind of like, you'd go to the beach. I live in Maui for those who didn't know that, but I go to the beach and it was like empty. Like, you'd be the only one on the beach. And we went from that to now you go to the beach and there's people sitting on you like everywhere you go. So it was such a stark drastic change. So yeah, life has been weird. A real estate stuff has been nuts. I don't remember exactly what I had when I was on last time. But in the last 18 months, roughly we've picked up a, what is it like 10 or 12, large mobile home parks. We have 1700 units now that we bought in the last year.

We have another 1800 under contract right now. So it'll be at 3,500 by the end of this year, which has been wow. Crazy. Yeah. I don't want from zero employees to, I think, 13 now. So it's been a, it's been a growth year and a half. I love the

Speaker 0 (2m 24s): Unbanked up. Just, just pick up, I'm going to pick up some milk after this. That was

Speaker 1 (2m 28s): A milk and some mobile home parks and a couple apartment complexes down in, you know, in, in, in Houston and you know, whatever. Very cool. Cool.

Speaker 0 (2m 36s): So before we jump into that, cause I want to talk, talk about that and you know, some of the details there in, we talked a little bit about the, the lockdown, everything before the show in Hawaii. So you guys are, you know, I didn't even think about it until, you know, it jogged my memory when I was like, oh, I'm talking to Brandon. And that of all the people that come on the show, I kind of compare the, I guess you would say New York state or California to, you know, us north of the border in terms of how extreme they've been. Even though it hasn't been as extreme as our lockdowns, but it sounds like Hawaii was pretty, you know, pretty high up there in terms of the regulations and the lockdown.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (3m 13s): A similar stuff to what you guys have. Like, they wouldn't let anybody in for a long time, like six months, they just wouldn't let people in the state hardly at all, unless you quarantine for two weeks. And it was pretty, pretty locked down in that way. So nobody really came. And then even like the mat, like we still wear masks everywhere. Pretty much here. We're like the one state left that. I mean, now everybody's wearing masks again, but yeah, that never really went away. I mean, you're outside for awhile. It was like, you had to wear a mask at the beach outside by yourself. That was weird to me all the time. I never, that was weird. Everyone. They're like what? And they were walking around, giving people tickets, if you were sitting on the beach alone without a mask and were like, you had to come over to me.

I mean, I never got one, but you had to come over to people, get in their space, infect them with your disease to give them the ticket that like, what, how, how does this logically make sense? It didn't make sense. But finally they did away with the needing to have a mask on the beach, which was nice. We had

Speaker 0 (4m 2s): A, there was a point definitely in, in Toronto where it was like, if you were outside jogging, there was like the public shaming of like people looking at you. Like what's going on over there. You're walking and jogging.

Speaker 2 (4m 14s): Yeah. Oh yeah. There was, yeah, there was a

Speaker 1 (4m 16s): Lot of that. So after the, you have to wear a mask everywhere, then it went to, you have to wear a mask if you're not exercising. So like there, their stories of people like riding their bike and they stopped for like, they just like stopped the bike from moving into copperheads, runs over and give them a ticket. He was like, come on, I stopped for a second to look at something or whatever. And they, yeah. So you had to pretend like when that happened, you had to pretend you were working all the time if you're outside. So somebody walks by, you're just like, you know, doing jumping jacks or something like I'm exercising, I'm exercising here by myself. Yeah. It was weird.

Speaker 0 (4m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what, at the end of the day, it's, it's one of those things where at least, you know, as it relates to real estate, I am sure you have come across people in our industry that they, they saw, oh one or 2000, 2001 as their badge of honor or oh 8 0 9 as their badge of honor. Or if you go back further, you know, the, the early nineties in, in the real estate market, commercial real estate market in the states and Canada, and it just, you know, this is one of those things, were, it is a technical recession. And it's something that I think it will be a benefit to investors down the road because they will have to have dealt with things that, you know, they had never had to deal with in a lot of markets.

Speaker 1 (5m 23s): Yeah, very much so. I mean like this is when, like it sucks to go through difficult times and insanely difficult as much as it's uncertain times. Right. There's just no certainty, but that also trains us to be better. You know, it makes us better people, better investors, smarter, more nimble, you get caught in this. Like everything's always going to be the way that it is right now. And you start forgetting that the world changes all the time. Like nobody forces anybody. That's why they call them black Swan events. Like they're just, they're so rare and you can't predict them. The only thing you can predict is that there's going to be unpredictable things.

And so when we, instead we change our mindset around unpredictability and say, this is like, this is a life. So how can I be an investor that can handle unpredictability? And how can I be nimble and how can I be liquid and how can I be make this light and have a team? And like those things for us, I will be better investors because of 20, 21 and 2020, not worse.

Speaker 0 (6m 17s): Yeah. I think there at least the way I saw the way people under, under wrote deals or are underwriting deals now, you know, the, the percentage you have in reserves, you know, will be, has been affected by a lot of investors. And I'm talking from, from just, you know, the mom and pop shops to institutional companies that we deal with that they're starting to think a little bit more about, you know, how levered do they want to be and just having outs because they don't want to be in a position where we have, you know, economic situation like we have had over the last year and kind of be, be caught, be caught in the rain there.

Yeah. That's

Speaker 1 (6m 55s): Exactly it. And I think again, yeah, hard times make good people. So it's

Speaker 2 (7m 1s): So positive

Speaker 0 (7m 2s): On your, on your agenda. It sounds, I mean, clearly there was a 3,500 units. You guys have been busy what I'd like to actually for, for listeners that don't know the asset class, you know, we've had people that come up have, come on the show before we get to the apartments. Just the actual moment, mobile home parks, especially for the listeners, you know, half of the listeners are, are, are Canadian half, roughly, half are in the states. And the mobile home park is, it's not a particularly large asset class at all in the Canadian market, but we always have people on and from the states.

And I'd love to just get your, you know, what is it and how were the deal structures in terms of leasing as opposed to ownership and, and maybe how, how you stumbled, stumbled into that virtual. Sure.

Speaker 1 (7m 48s): Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of different types of mobile home parks out there. I mean, there's RV parks and there's like combinations and there's mobile home parks. Where, where the, the, I mean, essentially we're talking mobile home for those who really have never heard of one before. We're talking about these little houses that are typically two, three bedroom, maybe one bedroom, they're typically 10 feet wide, 12 feet wide. They have double-wide 14 foot wide, or they have double wide ones, but they're like shells that you then put little rooms inside of it. And it's typically a cheaper building material to be typically a flat roof. Not all, always there are really popular back in like the fifties.

They, they started getting prevalent here in north America and there's millions of them. Units, not properties of millions of people in America still live in mobile home parks. And in Canada, some do again, they're not as popular, but they are up there and they come across our plate. Occasionally we don't buy them there, but just cause it's not our, we don't, we don't know what we're doing there. So I'm a big believer in having a focus, interrupt

Speaker 0 (8m 43s): You for just one second on that. I'm just curious. Are you, are they predominantly in Eastern Western Canada? Like were where have you seen deals come up? I've

Speaker 1 (8m 51s): Seen him all over the place in Canada. Yeah. I've seen some, I've got someone was to, is that the name? Yeah. So I've seen them there. I've seen some out east, maybe one or two have ever crossed my plate. We don't get them. They're so rare. And they're also, sometimes they're usually more on the RV park side where it's, somebody has a bunch of RVs and maybe they put a bunch of mobile homes on them, but they're not real great in cold weather. They do them. I mean, we buy them in Minnesota. We buy them, whatever, but they just don't work quite as well in, in cold weather.

So I got my first one was in Maine. So it's definitely possible. Maine is the cold north, about as cold and north as you can get in in America. Okay.

Speaker 0 (9m 29s): So we're, we're on the, we're on the mobile home parks where these are the smaller houses, millions of millions of people in the U S are still live in these. What, what kind of, you mentioned there's a, there's different variety of these.

Speaker 1 (9m 43s): Like sometimes the owner will own the land and the homes and they just rent the homes out. That's that that's done. I don't like that model because mobile homes tend to break easier. They're one step. They're like a cross between a car and a half a house. And when we say mobile homes, typically they don't move. I mean, they can move, but it's not like, oh, it's not like an RV or a motor home or whatever you call them. Do you guys call them RVs and RV or motor? So, okay. Yeah. So same terminology. So it's not like that where you just like pick up and drive it. They have to be moved on the trailer. You have to put wheels on them and they require between five and $10,000 to move them.

So they're not, they don't get moved very often, but they are movable. And so sometimes the land, again, the owner will own the land and that, and they'll rent them, but they're usually not very good quality. They break easier. And so I don't like telling them, I'd rather have a tenant who can go and fix his own toilet for, you know, $30 rather than me having to fix a toilet for $400 with a plumber. Because knowing that things are going to break a little more often and there's a little more, you know, they're a little thinner walls and a little bit thinner studs and a little bit thinner, everything a little bit, just not as good quality wise.

It's like a traditional stick built house. So we like to buy them where we own the land and the tenant owns their own house and the tenant, maybe they moved the house in. Maybe it's been there all along. Maybe we buy a house, we move it in and we sell it to a tenant and they buy it and they own it then. And the beauty of that is that they're just paying lot rent. Like they're just paying for the right to have their house on my lot. And typical lot rent is 250, 300 5400, maybe on the high end. I think we have some nicer parks that might be up to like 600, but most of them are usually in the $300 range that they pay for the right to have their property there.

Then they typically pay their own water and sewer bills. It's just like, they own a house, but they have to pay to keep their house somewhere. And it's a relatively low-income way. Like it kind of addresses a low-income problem in America, which there's just not enough housing. In fact, I was looking up some stats today and it's like 30 or 40%. Okay, let me, let me, I'll read it to exactly. It was from the, where is it? One more, the national low income housing coalition. They put out a report and it said that 40 was say 40%, 44% of all workers, 18 to four are low wage workers in America.

So 44% of everyone who works is making a, what they call it a low wage. There's 38 million Americans in poverty. There's 36. So it says for every hundred, extremely low renter households, like poverty households for every hundred of them, there's only 36 affordable properties in America. So in other words, the majority of those people can't afford to live. And so they're having to live multiple people in one house. So this kind of addresses that it's like, Hey, you can, you can live here for 300 bucks a month or maybe 600.

If you're going to pay for the house as well, you're gonna make a payment for the house, which is how we oftentimes will do it. But yeah, so there, it addresses that problem of low-income it creates kind of community feel a lot of mobile home parks have a stigma because there's has been a lot of bad management of mobile home parks has been a lot of violence. You get, when you get low income people, it tends to drive more drama and violence for whatever reason. And so we buy them, we fix them up, we make them nicer and then we make money.

Speaker 0 (12m 55s): So ma maybe walk us through what it would look like. So you have, you're looking at the type that we're, you have somebody that will actually own their unit. Right. And then pay you basically some right to be on that, on that land. Is that right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13m 10s): Yeah. So they own their own house. Typically. That's what we want. We don't want to own the house. So yeah, they own the house. They pass through 300 bucks a month that they pay their own water bill. And the cool thing I like about these is that they don't, the cashflow can be very stable because I don't like the water bill. Doesn't go up and down the sewer bill. Like people stay for a long time. Cause it's so expensive to move a home. They don't want to leave. It's their home. They're not gonna leave it on like an apartment where people leave every two years, a mobile home park, they might stay for five or six or seven years on average. And so we get much more predictable, stable cashflow that I like to say is very recession resistant.

And I say that like this, let's say the market crash. We have a big recession and you're a millennial living in Toronto and you're paying $3,200 a month for rent. I don't know what rent is, are five grand per month for rent four grand a month for rent. So let's say your $4,000 a month rent during a recession. You're like, oh, I got to tighten my belt here. I gotta, I gotta say some money. Those $4,000 a month people they're not going to suddenly start paying 1200 bucks a month over in the worst part of town. Right? What are they going to do? They're going to tighten their belt and they're gonna go from 4,000 to 3,500, the 3,500 people.

They're gonna be like, oh yeah, tight times. I'm gonna go down to 3000. And, and everybody, it condenses from the top down, but it's not like the people paying 300 bucks a month are going to go, well, I got to go live under a bridge that they just keep paying it. It can press us from the top down. And so I would be worried about owning a rental with $4,000 a month, rents in a recession, knowing that there's, who's going to rent that in bad times, those people get stuck and you have to drop the rents down to 3000 and Ellison. Their NOI is just in the, in the hole and they're upside down. I like the mobile home parks because it's a much smaller number, but let's say you have average lot rent.

You buy a property or average lot rent is $200 a month, which is not an uncommon thing. And you raise the rent over the next couple of years to $300. You're only raising a 100 bucks, but what did you actually do percentage wise to the NOI? You increased it 50%. Imagine buying an apartment, increasing your, your rent 50%. Like that's a, that's a huge jump that you'd be on the front page of every newspaper for, you know, gentrification and, and kicking out tenants. But we're talking about a hundred dollars can make a 50% difference in your NOI. So it allows for pretty massive growth in an industry where cap rates are the same as they are in apartment complexes.

So if you're buying at a four cap or a five cap, you can do some dramatic increases with value edges by, by raising rent or by infilling putting more units into it. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (15m 39s): I think it speaks to, to the last, whatever the, during COVID a lot of the AAA A-class property that, you know, took the, took the hit, right. That's where it first took off, took it on the chin because you know, you're not, you're not thinking, like you said, of, of doing four or $5,000 rent for a two or three bedroom anymore, you're doing, you know, you're going to break down to be class and then the bees are going to come to see, but you're right. See, doesn't just,

Speaker 2 (16m 2s): You know, they're still around. They're still around. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (16m 4s): So in, you know what, the, the thing for me, conceptually, I've always tried to understand with the, the mobile home parks you're talking about is that when you have an apartment building, say it's a 50 unit apartment building. Part of the strategy is the rent. Clearly the other one is the, how you allocate your capital. As it relates to, you know, say there's equity appreciation. You have a, a capital event you refinance in five years, take that money out. And you know, in, in, you know, play with the equity component, how does it work in mobile home parks when you're taking on, you're taking this kind of rent that they're going to give you because they have the lot, but you technically don't own the, the, the structures.

Do you own the land? Yeah, we

Speaker 1 (16m 46s): Own the land. And so it really works the exact same way. I mean, we, we treat it exactly like you would buy an apartment complex. Like there's really no differences other than the fact that you don't have to send in a plumber to fix the toilet. The tenant takes care of their own. And we still deal with a lot of rehab stuff because we're constantly buying houses. Our strategy is actually not the jack-up rent. Like that's actually some, some companies, this is where mobile home parks get a bad name. They will buy a property where a lot rent is $200. They will then go in and they'll Jack the rent to 500 and they'll say, well, tenant, what are you going to do?

You can't afford to move your house. So screw you. That's what people and like, it's, it's sad. I understand it's capitalism. This is how it works. Right? The, the, the it's business of whatever, but it still hurts. And I don't, I don't like that. What I would rather do is say, Hey, your lot rent is $200 a month. Okay, fine. We're raising at the 2 25 and the next year or two 50 next year, maybe 2 78. So we raise it over time. But what we want to buy is we want to buy a property that's 80% occupied and make it a hundred percent occupied because unlike multifamily, let's say you like, you buy an apartment complex.

And then I buy apartments too. I'm not saying they're bad, but if you go and shop for an apartment right now, and it is 80% occupied, you are likely pain and like cap rate as if it was completely full, because they will assume, oh yeah, you're just going to add those 20 units, you know, 20%. And you'll be fine. So you're paying actually for those units that are empty on a mobile home park. That's typically not the case. If it's an empty lot, it's not included anywhere. Even in the brokers, like the pro forma, it's not included in there. It's just like, yeah, that's not rented.

So we're not including that. So you were literally buying them for the value of a 70% occupied property. And so when we add in those 30 more percent or 24% or whatever, it dramatically increases the value of our property. So now we're combining slow rent raises that keep our tenants like, you know, taking care of them with this idea of infill. And so combining the two together creates a pretty massive increase in NOI, which then allows us to refinance, do the same stuff, take out capital or sell a few years later and take a, you know, property that you bought for 5 million and go ahead and sell it for 10, three years later.

It's like, those are doable things.

Speaker 0 (18m 54s): Yeah. It's like truly you're creative in the, in the sense that you're going to actually bring each, you know, vacancy, whether it's 20 or 30% actually value add dollar for dollar. So of that 3,500 Brandon, the, so that was all in the last year, year and a half. And what percentage of that, or how many units of that are, or if any, are apartment buildings as opposed to mobile, mobile home parks. So the

Speaker 1 (19m 18s): Apartments, the apartments we have, we haven't closed on yet, but it will out of it because 3,500 is the ones that we have under contract and the ones we own. So all we've closed on so far since I, you know, the last two years have been mobile home parks, that's like 1700, the other 1800 out of them. About half of that, is it a park is an apartment. So I think there's three in Colorado and one in Houston that we're buying. So total, maybe 700 units combined of all of that. And so, and I like the apartment stuff too. There's nothing wrong with it. And it's great. And I want to do a lot more of it. In fact, it's way more scalable.

This is why we actually going into it. There are only 50,000 mobile home parks in the entire country or in north America that are left 50,000 of them. And that might sound like a lot, but there's more multi-family in Houston than there are mobile home parks in the country. Yeah. Small number. I

Speaker 0 (20m 3s): Was going to say in the states, I can't remember the latest stats, but it's something like 25 million units in the country or something like a apartment. Cause I think that the actual housing units is like 50 million or something, but the, we were talking with Jay Scott, he was on the podcast a couple months ago, or maybe yeah, maybe a month ago. He, and he was talking about that sweet spot when it comes to multi-family where he's like, you know, the smaller multi families are great. You can find good property management. He's like the big, big stuff, you know, 80 plus a hundred plus is great.

Cause you, you know, you can hire one or two full-time people. You can have a really qualified management and he's like, it's that stuff in the middle. He's like, it's very challenging to have good management.

Speaker 2 (20m 44s): So maybe on that yeah.

Speaker 0 (20m 47s): On that point for, for you scaling. So th th those sound to me, like still pretty expensive markets, Houston and Colorado. Right.

Speaker 1 (20m 56s): They, they are, but there's also, that's where everyone's moving to. And so that's why we, like, we're looking down the road, like where is the macro economic drivers happening? And it's in those cities, like, it's the Nashville, it's the Austin, it's the Houston, it's the Denver. And so if we can find a deal, that's pretty good. I think we'll be able to, I mean, we're not, we're not buying based on appreciation, but I think we've got a really good shot on appreciation because of just the population growth. And the fact does not build in enough in those areas. And so that's why we've kind of focused to the apartment side, like mobile home parks.

We have our criteria for location, but it's not as strict as apartments because like even in a smaller area or an area that's not massively growing, there's always going to be a low-income people. They need a place to live. And so I'm not worried about that on the apartment side though, like I want to make sure that we're about a 500 unit apartment building. I want that area to be going up in value because I need appreciation to play a piece in the growth versus mobile home parks. I don't really need appreciation to play as much of a piece. That's kind of more of a cashflow game and a, and a forced appreciation game.

So, yeah, it's challenging

Speaker 0 (22m 1s): Too. I mean, if you have investors, you know, you, at the end of the day, we, we talked about this last time cashflow is, is crucial and you don't want to just, just bank on appreciation in any way. But the reality is when you have investors and you're showing them some exit cap rate, some, you know, something that influences IRR, you have to, you have to factor that in. And hopefully you're in a, in a market where you can justify that and illustrate that to them.

Speaker 1 (22m 25s): Exactly. Yeah. So if we're, if we're projecting, let's call it 3% per year appreciation. If we're going to say that, like, I would feel comfortable saying that in Houston, I would not feel comfortable saying that in Cleveland. Right? Like, I'd be like, that would be a stretch. And at the end of the day, like we're only as good as our last deal. If we start doing crappy, like, you know, giving, you know, 3% IRR because we, we underwrite a F on the road, underwritten, underwritten by underwrit underwrote eighth, like a 5% per year growth. And really we're in an area that's losing 2% every year.

That's a problem. So that's why we're betting on the better markets. Yeah. You don't want a

Speaker 0 (23m 1s): Hundred unit apartment building in Buffalo with a hockey stick graph for, for appreciation. So what, what is your, you know, call it apartment perfect apartment avatar in terms of unit count, some of the economics, maybe some of those macro economic trends you're talking about. Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 (23m 21s): The big, the biggest thing that we look for is the, a we're looking for the population growth. Like we care a lot about that. We care about the, a decent amount of what the landlord tenant laws of the area. We'd like it to be a little bit easier. I don't want to be in California or Hawaii for those reasons. I mean, everything's got a price, right? If you buy a good enough deal, maybe I'd survive California. But I prefer that a unit size, anything over a lots, I mean, a hundred lots or a hundred units, depending on if it's apartment, I don't want the middle, that middle spot.

It's too hard. Right. I want to be able to have staff and to have people, I want a clear path for a forest appreciation. I like value. And I'm not saying I want to buy a completely junk or property. I like to have cash flow today. We call them cash growth deals, one word, cash growth. It means like you get cashflow from year one. I'm not doing development. I'm not doing projects that won't make any money. I want to make money from day one from year one. But I also want a clear path for growth in a value. That's not dependent just upon, let's do 3% per year for appreciation.

Absolutely. Right. So yeah, the property we bought in Houston and they we're buying in Houston right now, there's 530 units, but three of them have been 300 of them have been completely remodeled and are achieving a way, way higher rent. So we have a very clear path, okay. The other 200 or whatever, two 30, we're going to remodel them. And now we can get the same rent that these other 300 are add. So I don't have to guess on, like, I wonder what will happen if I remodel this unit. So we have a very clear path towards growth and it's in a great area. It's got all of their benefits to it, but yeah, and for me right now, bigger is better because we, we can raise money better than most people can because of my position, you know, in the, in the world of BiggerPockets and everything.

So it, it takes less work to buy a 500 unit property than it does to buy a 12 unit property. I don't know why, but it's just the way that it is. And so I would rather buy a big deal since I can afford it, then buy a little deal. It's just way, way more bang for way little effort. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (25m 17s): So the, the Houston market right now, w like, where would you guys be in on a per unit? Is it, are they in the 200,000 per unit range? Are they generally,

Speaker 1 (25m 26s): Yeah, generally in the 200, 220,000 range, we're buying ours at one 18 and still, like, we felt pretty good about that. And again, it's a larger deal, which you can tend to get a little bit lower cost per door, but yeah, we're buying out like one 18. And so I think we got a lot of, a lot of room. Yeah. Growth.

Speaker 0 (25m 41s): Our are at the, at the brokerage house I work with. I think we're on average now Toronto's is just kinda gone insane. We're at 300, 330,000, and those are the big, those are big ones. Those, those aren't like, yeah, it's, it's pretty crazy. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's good to hear that there's still deals like even in, in a good markets in Texas, because I totally share your view on the, the landlord tenant or the regular regulatory framework, because like you were saying before, at the end of the day, there's there's extremes, right.

You don't want to just Jack up somebody's rent three times, but you also don't want to, you know, with rent stabilization in New York rent stabilization. And I believe DC in California, you know, 1.2% a year is it's kind of a joke. And, and like, it's it's to me and I won't, I won't get into it, but it's fairly paternalistic to say that people can con can't contract on their own. You know, it's not it's of like consumer protection laws, everybody, all of a sudden is a little old lady that can't can't help herself, which obviously we've got to look out for those people.

But anyways, the, so these deals, I want to talk a little bit about how you started in terms of the structure of how you you're raising capital for these deals. You mentioned the bigger pockets, because, you know, if these are syndicated or private equity deals, it seems like you're using I guess, 5 0 6 C or are you where you're, you're able to kind of advertise. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 (27m 16s): Yeah. So we got the file of six B and five or six C options. Right. I don't know. Do you guys have those in, in Canada

Speaker 0 (27m 20s): Or call them national instruments, but they're very similar. There's, you know, credit investor or family and friends, all that jazz.

Speaker 1 (27m 27s): Exactly. Yeah. So we, most investors started the 5 0 6 B level in America and they family and friends, they start there. We kind of just started with C because of my position on the podcast and having a big platform. And I got a quarter million followers on Instagram. And so we, we just, I have to be able to advertise. And so we went, we went five with 60. It means we can't take unaccredited money or non-accredited money, but that's okay for now. Maybe we'll figure that out in the future with, they have things called the reg A's, which allow for both, but I probably won't go that route. Was that okay? Was that

Speaker 0 (27m 55s): Kind of the grant Cardone? Like that's the root cause? Cause there was, there was like, I think there was as low as like five grand or 10 grand. Okay. And here's why

Speaker 1 (28m 4s): I don't want to go reggae, but here's the, here's the truth. Like grant Cardone got sued. I don't know if you'd knew he got sued by a guy who put in 10 grand. Like he didn't get sued by the guy that put in a million. He got sued by the guy put in 10 grand. And like, I'm sure that I don't know where the lawsuit ended up. I don't know much about it. Other than that, I heard about it and they probably will settle or did settle. I don't know. But that's the annoying when you bring in uneducated money and unaccredited money, you get the people who are like, well, he said where I was going to make 15% every year. And I only made 3% this year.

And he's like, yeah. I said, IRR, like over time and the it's IRR, like that's where, that's where you get those people. The more money people put into my fund, the less questions I ask, just a phenomenon that I love. And it's the people that put in 30 grand that are asking all the questions and the people that put in the millionaire, like where do I send my money? Yeah. Which is great. You keep sending me emails. Can you stop sending me money? Yeah, exactly. So five. So we did file a six C we on, on the first, I mean on everything we've done has been five or six C's or we did funds for the part.

We do funds for the mobile home parks, because the average price of a mobile home park is three to $4 million. We've steadily increased that because we want larger and larger properties. It's now like right now, our average this quarter, I think is like seven, but there's still smaller deals. And so I don't want to just put plus their mobile home parks with people view as a little riskier. And so I don't think they are, but people view them that way. So if we package multiple ones together, everyone feels better and it's a bigger amount of money and it's less paperwork. So what typically put fi between three and seven parks into one fund, probably average of five.

And for example, our newest, we raised $19 million on fund four. It was a 19 and a half minute. Well, it was a $20 million raise. We shut it off and money has been trickling in the last few days. And we're at 19. I think we're just gonna call it good. Cause that's about what we need to close on the five or six parks we have ready to close. So that's how we do that side.

Speaker 0 (30m 1s): So I'm curious. I was, I was listening to, I can't remember what podcasts now, but it was a, it was talking about the funds and I was, I was explaining it to a colleague of mine that, you know, there's, there's callable capital, you know, there, there is capital where you actually have to, you have it fully invested and then you better have pretty or, you know, they actually give you the money. So you better have pretty good deal flow. If you're going to have money sitting somewhere, how do you structure it in terms like, do you have a commitment that they have to actually give and then it's called.

And then the second question, when you actually have investors that do that, do you have a, a percentage allocation that they make or is it kind of first come first serve?

Speaker 2 (30m 45s): So we

Speaker 1 (30m 46s): Do a little bit of a hybrid, but basically we, we raise all the money to begin with and we just have good deal flow. Yeah. We are very meticulous on our outreach, on our broker relations on our off-market search. We're very detailed and very systematized in it. And so for example, we like, we get 10 point, whatever percent of our offers accepted. We just like, we just get that. We just like, so we're like, okay, so we made 74 offers or whatever it was. Or 76 offers, I think 74 offers. And I'm like that in quarter two and we got seven offers accepted.

And so like, we just know that like, we're pretty, we're pretty like straight when it comes to our funnel and, and we treat it very much like a business. So I feel like our deal flow has been, been pretty predictable as from the beginning. Now there are, there have definitely been moments where we're like, okay, well we got $6 million sitting in an account right now and we don't have any properties. This is like, we're just losing money right now. And like, we're draining, like our investor returns are going to drop a little bit, but it's not as substantial as people might think, like over a five or seven year, time period, if you have money. Yeah. It moves out. If you have money sitting for six months doing nothing, it might drop your IRR by a quarter percent.

Like it's not a, it's not the end of the world that said that hasn't really happened when we just continually, we typically what we want to say hybrid, what we kind of do is we raise in, in chunks based on what we need at the moment. Right. So like, or what we think we're going to get. And so it sounded like we'll have a $20 million fund and then we'll go raise like a bunch when we launch and we'll have five or six or 7 million with trickle in. And then we'll start using that with our buying properties. And then it's like, okay, we're getting kind of low, better put on the gas again. And then we'll go and I'll talk about it on my Instagram and on my podcast.

And all of a sudden more money comes in and then we pull off the gas. And so we can, we can throttle it based on what we kind of need. And that's been really helpful. The downside is that means we're typically raising for blind funds. It means that people that we can't say here's a property. This is what the numbers are. Instead. It's like, this is the team. Trust us. We're going to take this take care of you. And that's a little bit harder sell. So it takes a little longer, but as we will, the track record, and as we get more and more deals, we start going full cycle on.

I think that'll be easier. So we've raised $75 million in the past 13 months or something like that. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, it's been, it's been crazy, but I think that's just the beginning of what we could do. Cause now, like we're looking at selling our first fund and we're moving into the next. And so like as we get that track record and we say, look, what we did over here, it's going to be easier and easier to be able to have people trust us. And then the apartments a lot easier in terms of like, this is the apartment and those are, those are one-off deals that we can explore.

Speaker 0 (33m 23s): Yeah. The a I'm reading the a hands-off investor. And we had, we had Brian, Brian on the show for, on Burke for anybody that, that wants to look it up. And he, he, he said, you know, you said trust. He's like the fund is the trust vehicle. He's like, that's what the fund is. You know, the building, if it's a syndicated one-off, you can go, you can touch it here it is. But like you said, it's, here's our investment philosophy. Here's our track record. Here's the team trust us. So on that, on that point. So 75 million that's raised for that. And you're talking about now potentially selling the fund.

So the fund, would that be the mobile on a mobile home site?

Speaker 1 (34m 0s): The first one we've done for mobile home parks. So it's our first one was small. It was only five, $5 million. I think total, we raised, maybe it was four. And then we bought, you know, $8 million with the real estate. And so we're looking, or I don't know what it was somewhere in there. And so now we're looking to sell that one. In fact, we should have decided for sure, we're not, we're not a hundred percent committed to it because I think there's still a lot of meat on the bone of a we're only selling it. So we can say, look what we did. We've got a track record. We've gone full cycle now in our, in our first fund. Now we can go to the next level, but I don't really, I'd rather not say, I think we can make more longterm if we don't, but I need the reputation that to grow.

So yeah, I'm the

Speaker 0 (34m 33s): Same way. True real estate guys. No, no, no, no, no. I never saw, so I'm like, I don't

Speaker 1 (34m 37s): Want to sell it. There's so much there. And I think we're, it's such a good point. Yeah. Right now in the market to buy. Yeah. I think we're going to see. Yeah. So when

Speaker 0 (34m 44s): You, the logical buyers for that, so it would be kind of a portfolio sale of whatever assets are rolled up in that fund. And, and then I assume it would be the same down the road for, for the apartments. And on that note, just on exits, you know, when you talk to investors, for instance, you know, stuff that you're purchasing say 20, 21, 20 22, when you talk to investors and I'm sure you get the question, like everybody in our world gets is, you know, what's, what's the exit strategy when, you know, when do we realize a return?

What, you know, what constitutes a capital event, you know, and how did they get the return of capital? What do you, what do you kind of, what do you do with these, these funds on the apartment side now?

Speaker 1 (35m 27s): Yeah, on the apartment side, as a side, typically say five to seven years is our expectation, but I always make the disclaimer. I don't want a thing. I said five years to go to when we sell, I want performance today, state when we sell. So if that means we're going to do it in four years or seven years or nine years or five years, like if you can't be flexible, then we don't want your money. And we're very blunt about that. Like, we want to work with people who are flexible enough because we it's all about managing expectations. If I said five years and then it was six. And then you get a bunch of mad people. But if I said six, they'd be fine.

It's all expectation management there. So kind

Speaker 0 (36m 1s): Of like you were talking, I don't know if it was before the show or at the beginning of the badge of honor of going through certain recessions where some investors won't invest with people, if they haven't gone through, you know, some sort of financial or economic calamity, but it is one of those things with, you know, if you said to investor, I don't want something five years ago that I say, I said in 2015 to dictate and, and you know, COVID happens and now, and now I have to, you know, commit to that. Five-year.

Speaker 1 (36m 27s): Yup. And so I'd rather give, I would rather give myself some flexibility. So on the apartment size and on the mobile home park side, both of those, we say five to seven or we like, we're flexible, be flexible with us and let's just make sure we're getting the maximized return that we can get everyone the most amount of money because that's what matters.

Speaker 0 (36m 44s): That's awesome. All right, Brendan, I want to shift gears, you know, time flies when, when we're chatting and I want to talk a little bit about the book you mentioned, correct me if I'm wrong. August mid August.

Speaker 1 (36m 55s): I think it's mid August, 1918. Something like that comes out. Yeah. I should know that exact date, but it's moved a few times.

Speaker 0 (37m 1s): So yeah, for listeners, a little bit of the backgrounds for the book I know is I assume it's under the BP brand a lot. You guys always have great, great content, great books. I'm sure you got some amazing Amazon stats for all those books, but yeah. Give us a little bit of a background on it.

Speaker 1 (37m 16s): Yeah. So the, the, it started with Brian Murray, who was my partner and opened our capital. We invest in the multifamily together. I was talking about how, like there's no like S like book that we thought could be like the definitive book on just multifamily, residential multifamily, real estate. And so we started talking about, well, maybe we should write one. Maybe we should talk about this. I mean, he's written one on commercial real estate before, and it included apartment stuff, but it was just more on general, large commercial. And then I've written obviously like a bunch of books on residential, but it was, it was very wide. And so we thought, how do we go a mile deep on one topic that's very popular right now is commercial and or sorry, apartments.

And as we did that, we realized we couldn't do that because multi-family when I say multi-family, some people think duplex and some people think 300 unit apartment complex. And that the truth is they are very different, very different, right. Every, and so where do you draw the line? And, and, and at first went, okay, well, four units in smaller is residential and five units or greater as commercial. Okay, well, who's syndicating a five unit property. No one is right. Yes. The financing is a little bit different, but that the game is the same.

If you're buying a three unit or a five unit, or even an eight unit or a 12 unit, it's all kind of the same. So where do you draw the line? And I'm like, I don't, I don't know. But at the same time you could syndicate a duplex if you want it to. And you could have a team that buys duplexes. So it's not unit number. And so we define it as approach. There's two approaches to real estate. There's small, multi-family real estate approach and there's large multifamily approach. And the way the best, I mean, there's a bunch of definitions we've defined here, but the one I like the most is if you know your tenants names, you're probably a small multifamily investor.

If you don't, you're probably large, right. Because if you you're, if you don't know who your tenants are, it means you've got people in place. You've got systems, you've got teams, you're probably raising the money for it. You're probably got quarterly meetings and you're issuing distributions and all that stuff. That's the large game. So we wrote two volumes that are like, I wrote most of the first one with some input from Brian. He wrote most of the second one, some input from me. And so volume one is on small deals, like how to buy that first apartment. I mean, the first, you know, duplex fourplex, eight unit, 20 unit, how to self-manage or find a local property manager.

And then his book is more on like, how do you build a team? How do you syndicate? How do you raise money? What's a mezzanine debt. What does that mean? Like all those things that are on the, on the larger scale. And so we're just launching them together at the same time. Cause most people are probably gonna end up going from book one to book two over the course of their career. So that's, that's the books.

Speaker 0 (39m 42s): That's, that's probably the direction you want to go. And I really, I liked the, the breakdown of that because it kind of gets to the, the, the different markets that we have, you know, like we were just talking before a very expensive markets, whether they're in the states or Canada, when I hear somebody's bought, you know, X amount of units for 5 million, you know, and that gets you, like you're saying before, like a six unit in, in a certain market. And it's like, well, you know, raising $5 million, you could definitely syndicate a $5 million deal. You're raising, you know, whatever it is, you know, a couple million dollars worth of worth of equity.

Whereas, you know, that size unit deal would be like a couple hundred thousand dollars in, in some small markets. So I like that. That's, that's really cool. So the book itself, the, the volumes, it sounds like kind of the progression for each one is the same. Like, are they structured relatively the same? So that they're kind of a companion. Yeah. Pretty

Speaker 1 (40m 34s): Similar. So, you know, you walk through all the basics that you'd get. So how to find, you know, how to, how to build them, how to build a business plan around it. Like what, what are you gonna do? How do we make that real? So I'm a big believer when I write books, I love to make things real for people. So not just theory, but like, let me, let me show you how this plays out in real life. So for example, I have a chapter in there called like, oh, shoot, what's the title of it, basically like financial freedom in five years. I think like that. And it basically walks people through a, let me see if that's actually correct on the title. I know we changed that a little bit. Yeah. Financial freedom in five years. And it walks through a concept that's a little bit complicated, but the idea being a lot of people are overwhelmed by the idea of owning a 20 unit or a 50 unit.

It's like, that's so many units. I'm just getting started. How I do that. I'm like, don't worry about the 50 unit, but it doesn't mean you have to be stuck on single family. So imagine you bought a duplex this year and I walked people through the story. Like you bought a duplex, here's what it makes. Here's how much it brings in. Wow. You're making $300 a month in cashflow. Good job. Like, but that, that first deal is so important for forging your identity. And then next you buy maybe a five unit and then maybe a 10 unit and then maybe a 30 unit and then maybe 50 unit. And so that concept really shows you that in five years you could get to like five, 10, $15,000 a month in passive income and you just scale up slowly.

And so I could tell somebody that, or I could paint it into a picture. So that's an example where I, I did that in and then walk through the chapters, obviously like how to find deals, how to fund them off market on market, how to, how to finance them some creative strategies. I spent a lot of time talking about the different types of multi-family like, you know, like the monster house, which is like, those single family has been converted into like Frankenstein Frankenstein. Exactly. They just add on units here and there. Like how many of us have those? I have a few of them still where they're like, they were not meant to be a multifamily, but they've made them there and I've walked through the pros and cons.

And like, how, like, how do you deal with that? Or the side-by-side like, I love side-by-side duplexes and triplexes and fourplexes. Cause the water meters can be separated usually. So you can shift the water under the tenant, like that little tip, like things like that versus a up and down duplex where the water meters are all pro all the water lines are connected together and it gets really difficult to separate. So there's a lot of like specific about that in, in the books. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (42m 38s): That's very cool. Yeah. It just kind of got me thinking too, like we don't have Costech here. I don't think you're actually allowed to, but, but separately meters is like, it's huge. Right? When if you can get everything where suddenly your expense ratio goes from 50 to 30%.

Speaker 1 (42m 52s): Yeah. Yeah. And, and there are property types that allow for that easier than others and there's rubs and there's all that like that you can throw in there. But yeah. It's like knowing those little intricacies that, that can make or break a multi-family that's, what's kind of the goal. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (43m 4s): Yeah. No, you know what? I think it's not cost sake. Really. It's a ratio. Utility billing is rubs, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's I know there are certain states allow for it to like certain ones. Yeah. So that's cool. Different, different building style and yeah, just a it's funny when you talk about scaling, it's so true. It's so much easier to, or at least, you know, I'm a visual person. So to me, stories are the, the visual words and you can kind of conceptualize it, but it's so true that when you come to somebody that says, Hey, a 30 unit until you do do a 30 or 10 15, whatever it is, it's you don't realize that it's actually less of a headache because then, you know, you can have support.

Whereas you buy that one or two, it's like, it's more of a headache. Cause it's all you. No,

Speaker 1 (43m 50s): I bought, I bought a condo, a single condo here in Maui recently, not one condo has been more work than 3,500 units combined. Like it's insane. It's insane that that's, I'm saying that, but one little condo is more worth than 3,500 units and it doesn't

Speaker 0 (44m 5s): Yeah, 100%. Cause like you're, you're like, what did I do Tuesday? Some reason I was on the phone with a utility company for two hours.

Speaker 1 (44m 11s): Yeah, yeah, exactly what that is. It's constant problems and contractors not showing up. And of course it's not big enough for me. I just have a team to take care of the whole thing. So I just gotta do it. And I'm like, what am I doing? Like, this is stupid.

Speaker 0 (44m 23s): Yeah. And you know, it's w where are you talking about kind of growing to that, you know, you forge your identity to that. I think it's very much like a startup company and a lot of times the CEO or the founder of the company, although talented and we're in, we're in basically integral to having that company become something may not be the best person. Once it's an enterprise, as the manager, you know, where you have more people that may be more system oriented systematized or system oriented, but that's really cool. I, yeah, it sounds good.

So we'll, we'll take a look out for that. And if, you know, we release this after that, we'll put a, put a link up to it. So I just, I want to be respectful of your time, Brandon. I just want to let listeners know for Opendoor capital. And I'm just curious personally, what, you know, what do you tell people that are interested? Want to learn more, want to see what you're up to? And like you said, who is the team and what is the investment philosophy? Where should they head to?

Speaker 1 (45m 20s): Yeah, so we do something kind of different. So what we do is we go to an intersection. If you want to give us money, you have to put it in a briefcase, all cash. You go to intersection, we cross the busy intersection, you dropped the bag, we dropped the cash, you dropped the cash. We give you a little bit of a piece of paper and we're all good. Just no cops, there

Speaker 0 (45m 36s): Must be no, my cousins or something.

Speaker 1 (45m 37s): Exactly. Yeah. You got like tip your hat twice. That's how we notice you. Yep. Yep. That's it. ODC fun.com is our website. We put everything on there. Yeah. ODC fund, which I probably need a new website because now we don't just do funds. So now it's like ODC fun. Maybe we'll be OTC fun. Have fun with ODC

Speaker 0 (45m 57s): GoDaddy page. Exactly.

Speaker 1 (45m 59s): Yep. We have OTC fund. We put a lot of stuff there. I'm, I'm super active on Instagram. And so here's an interesting point for anybody listening to this that wants to eventually raise money is that I once had an investor say to me, the reason I invested in Opendoor capital is because of the way you talk about your wife. And that was such an impactful statement for me because not, not patting myself on my back here, what I'm saying is like, people are not investing in twin Oaks, mobile home park in Ohio, like whatever, like they're not investing in that. They don't know about that. They're investing in my ability to do what I say I'm going to do.

And so you are marketing yourself every second of every day in every interaction that you have in the public. So the way you promote the way you talk about your family on Instagram or on Facebook and the way you comment on other people's stuff, all of that is showing the world, what kind of person you are, can you be trusted? And five years later that people are gonna look back and say, like, I have been following you for years online. And I respect the way you do business, the way that you respond to people or the way that you're kind of the way that you're smart. So anyway, that's a, that's a big thing.

So I knew I try to put my life on Instagram and a lot of ways, which sometimes gets me in a little trouble, but it's good. Like when yeah, it's been, it's been good though.

Speaker 0 (47m 14s): Brandon just say, you know, I I'll pat you on the back, so you don't have to do it. But yeah, like just we've, you know, going back to the first time we spoke on bigger pockets, like, I don't even know now 6, 5, 6, whatever it is now. But yeah, it comes, it comes across authentic. I think a big thing of it too, is I've noticed, you know, much, much smaller scale with myself, the other pieces, they, they can tell how much you love real estate and you, you can't fake that. It's really hard to. So if I look at your page and not number one, it's authentic, I, you know, and say, you're the less, you know, you're more logic and, and you know, less emotion.

What comes across is that you obviously really give a shit about real estate. Because if you didn't, you know, you, you wouldn't talk about it all the time. So I think it's important to, for the principal that you're investing with to love the asset class. Like they, they want to eat, sleep and breathe real estate.

Speaker 1 (48m 9s): Yeah. I totally agree. I have a lot of people say like, yeah, I don't even like real estate. I'm just in it because it makes money. I'm like, well, that's cool. But like, like, man, I love, I love this game. I love every, every piece of it. It's a fun even dealing with nasty contractors. Like I'm like, this is, this is a game and it is a lot of fun to play and it's got real high stakes, but yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a lover. So before

Speaker 0 (48m 32s): We, we shut down here, BP con 21, I know it's, you know, fingers crossed everything's going in the right direction. New Orleans, October. Oh my God. Fourth now.

Speaker 1 (48m 46s): Yeah. Fourth, fourth and fifth where there's like a preview Dan. Third, if people want to go to that, I think that those might be sold out though. But anyway, yeah.

Speaker 0 (48m 53s): Some, some pretty, pretty amazing speakers on the, like the center stage. How L rod, I think he's in there. I am speaking. What are you thinking on a I'm on a rental panel. Rental rental real estate, but yeah. Sorry. I was talking to the center stage, like how L rod, but yeah, no, there's a, there's a bunch of really cool speakers. I I've kind of just reading through before we jumped on. So that's really cool. If anybody's interested at all in learning more about this, we were there was it now two years ago, right.

And Nashville, Nashville. That's right. I was like, why were there? I was picturing guitars. I'm like national. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yup. Awesome. Awesome,

Speaker 1 (49m 34s): Man. Well, yeah, I'm excited for it. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Hopefully the, hopefully COVID dies down a little so we can have a good time, but we'll see. Absolutely good sign no matter what, but it will be a good time with masks. We'll see. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (49m 44s): A hundred percent. We'll be there. Well, Brandon, thank you so much for being part of working capital. And like I said, when we started really appreciate you, you giving your time and your insight. No,

Speaker 1 (49m 55s): Thank you, man. It's been a ton of fun. So appreciate you. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (50m 5s): 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.