If you are a real estate investor, you’ve probably been thinking about multifamily investing because there’s going to be scale in that space. Start house hacking and raise capital!
Today, Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Matt Faircloth from the DeRosa Group about how to get started in multifamily investing. Matt is a full-time investor and has successfully completed projects involving fix and flips, single family homes, apartment complexes, and office buildings.
Also, Matt is a regular contributor and podcast guest on BiggerPockets and has an active YouTube Channel dedicated to educating investors. He is the author of Raising Private Capital – How to Build Your Real Estate Empire with Other People’s Money.
Highlights/Topics:
- Getting Started: Matt read Rich Dad Poor Dad and discovered the power of passive investing, creating assets, and not trading hours for dollars.
- Bigger and Better Deals: Matt and his wife didn’t get into real estate to start investing in multifamily, but worked their way up into larger deals with apartment complexes.
- Self-managed Properties: Matt learned about tenant relations, how to select tenants, and what it takes to manage and scale single-family properties for a small portfolio of rentals.
- Best Bang for Your Buck: Start with a small multifamily deal because it’s cheap debt and very little money down.
- Real Estate Syndication: Scale into larger multifamily assets faster by selling equity and raising capital.
- Words of Wisdom: Observe the masses and do the opposite to be competitive.
- Affordability Analysis: What’s the median income in the city and surrounding area of multifamily space?
- Can tenants afford a rent increase to justify improvements? Property management companies tend to approve tenants that make more than 3x the rent as their earned income before taxes.
- 50/50 Mix: Matt recommends seeking multifamily properties with a mix of one- and two-bedroom units, then add amenities, such as family oriented and pet parks.
- Self-manage vs. Property Management Companies: Depends on if you want to stay small and retain control or reduce vacancy rates and execute business plan to scale.
- Affordable/Low-Income Housing: Owners should perform due diligence because despite the stigma, tenants don’t want to lose their Section 8 status. They must follow rules or face penalties and be evicted. Low-income housing tax credits can be lucrative.
Resources:
Raising Private Capital: Building Your Real Estate Empire Using Other People’s Money
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki
Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Protection Event
Full Episode Transcript:
Clint: What’s up guys? Hey, Clint Coons here. In this video, what I wanted to do is bring on a friend of mine that I’ve known for years, and he’s an investor in real estate. I want to talk about multifamily investing because, in a lot of my videos, I barely touch on multifamily. It’s always about single family using LLCs, land trusts, and corporations and how to set all that stuff up.
But in this video, I want to delve into multifamily because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it. I know that if you’re an investor, this is something you’re thinking possibly wanting to get into at some point in time where you’re ready to actually move into multifamily because there’s going to be scale there.
I’m not an expert in the field at all, but any information I can give you that helps you with your investing I think is going to be advantageous for you and it really meets my goal for this channel, which is to provide information that is relevant to the investors that follow me.
With that, I want to bring in Matt Faircloth. He’s the founder of the DeRosa Group. He’s got some really interesting projects that I’ve seen over the years that he’s put together. What makes him so unique and qualified I feel to talk on the subject is that a lot of people do multifamily but it’s hands-off. They find projects through other people, they’re not really into it, and they have a whole group working for them.
What Matt does is he goes out there and he finds some really interesting projects. You can see him on his website if you go and you check that out. If you go to derosagroup.com, you’ll see I’ve got a link below in the show notes. You can go look at some of the deals that he’s put together. That I think really speaks volumes. He’s an expert and I’ve known him that way. Matt, thanks for being on here.
Matt: It’s awesome to be here, Clint. Thanks for having me.
Clint: Why don’t you tell me just briefly how you got started in all of this from a real estate investor perspective and start investing?
Matt: Sure. Well, let’s flashback to 2003 when I started dating my girlfriend, now wife, and she got me to read the little purple book called, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It tuned me into just the power of passive investing, the power of creating assets, and the power of not trading hours for dollars.
At that time, I was renting an apartment and I had come across a few bucks at 25, 26 years old and I was able to put together enough to buy a home. I decided, let me take my two buddies that are renting with me now in the little apartment I had. Let me ask these two guys if they want to move with me. The two of them moved with me to the house that I bought. Each of them paid me $500 a month and my mortgage was $960.
I was living there for free and at 26, 27 years old, I’m now making a couple of dollars and I got an earned income salary, but I have no housing expenses. That right there was the Kool-Aid, that was the little blue pill that I swallowed and said, okay, I’m in. I’m going all-in on this. Fast forward from there, I quit my job and just started to invest full time. My wife and I, once we got married, invested a bit in a small real estate. We’re in single family homes. We got into small multis and worked our way up into larger and larger real estate from there.
Unlike a lot of the other folks that are in multifamily, we actually worked our way into larger and larger deals, which eventually grew into bigger and bigger apartment complexes. We didn’t just get into real estate to start investing in multifamily. We actually grew up into multifamily. Now, as of today, we’ve got assets in Kentucky and North Carolina. We crossed the thousand-unit mark about six months ago, and we’re really excited about the way that it goes. We used to self-manage by the way, Clint. We managed a lot of the properties ourselves.
I learned about tenant relations. I learned about selecting our tenants. I learned about a lot of things that it takes to hands-on manage and scale a single family for our small portfolio of rentals. I still carry those lessons today into my business. It’s been an exciting journey, and we’ve scaled and grown from a mom-and-pop into a fairly corporate-sized company now.
Clint: I mean, you started out house hacking before that was even a term is what you did there. If they’re investing in real estate or they’re just getting started, do you think that it’s best that they start with single family homes and then build up, or can you just jump right into multifamily?
Matt: It depends on your age or your familial status and your desire to be a little uncomfortable to reach your financial goals. If you are in a situation, I’m talking about listeners who are in a situation where they’re able to live in a small multi, let’s say you live in a duplex, triplex, or four-plex because you can get agency debt. You can get the FHA first-time homebuyer financing at 5% down and live in a duplex.
If your family, your spouse, or just by yourself are comfortable living in a […], if you’re used to living a lot larger, you’re comfortable moving into a small multi, that is by far the best bang for your buck because of the debt that you can get on these properties. The debts are very, very cheap with regards to what the interest is. It’s locked for 30 years and it’s very, very little money down to get into a small multi deal.
If folks have the means and the desire and willingness to be a little uncomfortable to hit their financial goals, I recommend that’s the path. That’s one direction, we can talk multi from there.
Clint: That’s where you would start out if you’re just starting in the business. Let’s assume that you have two or three rental properties and you’re wondering, should I continue on the single family route or should I go to the multifamily route?
Matt: It depends on how hands-on you want to be in the business. I have a friend that has 200 units of mostly single families. Now, he runs all by himself with a small team. He makes a very good income on it, but he wants to be in it, he wants to be micro, and it’s also taking him about 15 years to build that. The plus side for him is he owns 100% of that portfolio. That’s all his. He has not taken any dilutions or anything like that.
Now, if you want to scale into big multi, you want to do it faster—a friend of mine maybe would like to get in the bigger multi but he can’t because the resources to scale into a larger multi typically requires that you start selling equity. As I mentioned in my book, Raising Private Capital, talks about how to find people in your network that are interested in contributing passive equity into real estate.
If you’re a single family operator, you’ve got some assets, you’ve cut your teeth a bit, and you want to scale into larger, the way we did it, the way I recommend you consider doing it is by finding larger assets that are probably larger than you can take by yourself and bringing together a small group of investors to join you as passive investors on the deal.
You step in as the managing operator, then those passive investors step in behind you and you form an arrangement, and you pretty much sold them security to invest in your deal. That involves the SEC a little bit, but it’s not that complicated. In essence, that is called syndication, and it could be small.
My first syndication was a small group of single family homes that one investor put in $50,000. Syndication does not need to be millions of dollars, they typically are, but it’s not even millions and millions of dollars. It could be way, way, way smaller than that. Syndication simply means a group of people doing something that one of them couldn’t be by themselves.
Clint: Before we talk about that in more detail, let’s assume that I want to go into this. What are some of the top five things that I need to focus on or I should look for in evaluating whether or not this makes it a great investment? Because what I’ve heard a lot is that it’s overvalued. It’s hard to find properties that produce a good return. What would you say someone should look for?
Matt: First of all, you’re right. It is overvalued. Things are getting a bit up and up and up. Part of that has to do with the interest rates have gone down and has caused cap rates to go down along with it and money has gotten cheaper and cheaper especially on the agency debt side, borrowing money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do larger multifamily deals.
But aside from that, there are a lot more people in this space. It’s become a place where a lot of money’s gone to seek shelter and to seek protection as inflation happens, then COVID happens, and things like that. People have run to essentials which are housing being one of them. It’s a way more competitive space.
To find good deals in the multifamily space, you have to find something that has some undesirable element to it that you’re willing to deal with that the next investor is not. That could mean that the property needs a lot of physical work. It could mean that it’s a market but not everyone is shopping.
Maybe not Downtown Atlanta or Downtown Denver, which is a very, very high affinity for those markets. Maybe Detroit, maybe Winston-Salem, North Carolina where some of our properties are. Maybe not a number one market, maybe a tertiary or a secondary market. Those are some things that you could do.
My father once taught me a long time ago, observe the masses and do the opposite. You’ve got to find a way to work your way in the multi that you’re not competing with a couple of hundred of your best friends that are all looking at the same deal.
Clint: How do you know you’re going to get the tenants to fill the property? How do you analyze that in a particular market? What should I look for?
Matt: Well, here’s what we do. Let’s just say, for example, that Matt and Clint are looking at a deal. It’s a 50-unit and it’s in Downtown Albuquerque. I love to pick on the city of Albuquerque because the name’s fun to say. We’re looking at a deal in Downtown Albuquerque and we want to charge $1000 for a two-bedroom apartment.
What I will do is I will look at the surrounding area around that multifamily. I’ll look at the city of Albuquerque, to begin with, and figure out the big number. What is the median income for the city? Then I go the next step down and there are websites you can use to get this data. What is the median income around the property? What’s the expendable income that people may have? I looked at that and say, okay, can someone earning $40,000 a year afford to live in my complex?
That’s how I determine if I’m going to be able to get rent. Most of the time, in multifamily, you’re going to buy it for a number and then you would try and create some value by adding a playground or renovating apartments and doing granite and stainless, repainting, even floorings, some upgrades, and then commanding a small increase in rent to justify those improvements you’ve made.
But you want to know, to your point, is the market going to bear me going taking the rents in Albuquerque from $1000 to $1200? You’re going to look around the surrounding area to see if folks can afford to live in those apartments.
The equation you want to use there is that most property management companies are going to approve tenants that make more than three times the rent as their earned income before income tax. If the person is earning—let’s just say easy numbers—$3000 a month before income tax, they can afford to pay $1000, not $1200, not $1300 in rent.
If I push rents, I’m pushing above the person that makes $3000 a month. I need to see a large population of people that are making $4000, $5000, $6000 a month that are maybe willing to live in my apartment complex in the surrounding area.
What you’re really doing is an affordability analysis, which is very important to do in the beginning because to your point, what if the market can’t afford what I want to do to this property? The same thing that comes in fix and flip or other real estate venture, you’re going to make sure that there’s enough demand which you want to supply.
Clint: When you go into those buildings, you’re looking to do something with what we would call a value add?
Matt: Yeah.
Clint: You’re looking at materials right now that are up 30%.
Matt: Yes.
Clint: How is that factoring any of the projects when you’re evaluating these to make sure that you’re going to recoup your investment, get a decent return?
Matt: It’s an interesting question. We’re not a new build company. If we were doing a new build, I’d be tracking copper and lumber quite a bit because as you know, those things are up a ton right now. The work that we do typically involves finished products, so laminate or vinyl plank flooring and appliances. The problem we’re having on materials is not so much price bumps because we’re not buying raw, we’re buying finished things. The problem we’re having is lead time.
We buy them from GE. I could get them from GE five kitchens in a truck. We just show up and deliver five kitchens worth of supplies, and I would order it on a two- to three-day lead time. Now, we’re four weeks out for appliances. We have to anticipate needing appliances when the units are occupied. You have to start developing storage. We put C-containers to a few of our properties and put appliance sets in there or a material that I want to stockpile.
To answer your question, Clint, you have to start with, what am I going to need in the next three to four months? You want to try and get ahead of it and order to the site. That’s what we do. We try and stockpile materials all on-site and just let it sit under lock and key until I need it just because, since COVID and even stuff that hasn’t really flowed out to society like the blockage in the Suez Canal, the ripple effect of that has not fully made its way into our consumer side results yet. We’re starting to see the beginning of it, but I don’t think we’ve seen all the effects of that.
Clint: Okay. When you’re looking at the building, one of the questions I always have is, how many one-bedrooms, studios, two-bedrooms, three-bedrooms? We disclosed earlier this year in Winston-Salem on a 140-unit complex.
Matt: We’re neighbors.
Clint: I know we are. That came across my mind and I was talking to a good friend of mine, Sunday, he’s a developer. We’re putting in a project near where I live, and he said they’re doing micro-units. They have 15% or 20% of the space to micro-units are about 500 square feet. It looks like a hotel room on how he explained it to me. Here I am, I’m evaluating this. How do you go and determine what is the right mix for that investment and that market?
Matt: It’s different. As a developer, there are a lot more demographics that they have to do because they’ve got to build something that’s going to have longevity for the next 10, 15 years. For us, there are just deals that we will and won’t do. I’d like to see a nice blend of ones and twos. The sizes of the deals that we do are typically mid- to large-sized multifamily, so you typically don’t see that many three- and four-bedroom units but a lot of ones and twos.
We were offered a deal on 71 bedrooms. We wouldn’t do that deal because you got to have some blend of demographics, a blend of people in different stages of life and things like that.
If you’re looking at who’s going to live in a one-bedroom, it’s either going to be an adult looking to get their feet on the ground or it’s going to be someone towards the senior, likely not someone in the middle age spectrum, and hopefully not somebody with kids because you wouldn’t want to have some of the kids living in a one-bedroom. They might try and make it work, but they’re going to be not a stable tenant, let’s say.
You also don’t want to have a bunch of two-bedrooms only because you’re going to have an overwhelming amount of kids, you’re going to have an overwhelming amount of families, and they’re probably bursting at the seams and stuff like that.
We look for around a 50-50 blend of ones and twos. That’s what I look for on units and we’ve turned deals down that were full spectrum two-bedrooms and full-spectrum one-bedrooms. I look for a 50-50 mix of the two in the middle. I will try and create amenities to make the family stick. I’ll do playgrounds. I’ll do things that are just family-oriented and then a lot of people in one-bedrooms tend to have—believe it or not, people that are in one-bedroom are more likely to have a pet. I’ll do pet parks and things like that that are more pet-friendly as well.
I’ll do things to try and make both those demographics stick in their units and stay long. When I say stick, I mean, I want them to stay longer than the average, which is about seven years per unit is what people tend to stay, but I want them to stay longer than that because the biggest thing that hurts you in multifamily is vacancy. If I can reduce vacancy to add on your zero, we just make more cash flow as owners.
Clint: You recommend self-managing at first or just hiring professional management?
Matt: I got started self-managing. I think that if you have the gut for it or if you want to thicken your skin up then self-managing will do that. I know people that have bigger multifamily that they self-manage but they’re hiring in-house teams and they’re not truly self-managing. They’re just owning the management company. I think that most multifamily owners rely on professional property management companies that manage large properties that know multifamily very, very well, they know how to run it like a top, and they could execute business plans.
I believe in third-party management wholeheartedly on bigger multifamily. In a small single family, it’s tough to outsource management. I would say if you want to stay small, duplexes, triplexes, maybe a 10-unit here or there, self-management might be the way to go. It will give you a lot more control, and it’s tough to find a professional company that can run that size asset for you.
Clint: When you’re looking at properties, are you looking for middle of income B’s or C’s? I’m curious because right now there’s an area of the market that my partner and I have identified, and that’s low-income housing, that really needs housing to be made available for them. We’ve put a lot of effort into finding deals that fit that demographic of the market and providing that. We’ve Section 8, but you also find charities, the United Way that will help supplement the rents for individuals. That’s a different style of investing. I grew up in that.
My dad, I remember as a kid, we took an old hospital and converted it into that type of housing. It was a great investment for my parents to do that. If you’re out there and you’re looking around, do you shy away from that, or would that be an area where people aren’t really looking right now maybe that’s an opportunity for the people who are watching?
Matt: I think that what you described is a perfect niche. Remember I’ve said observe the masses and do the opposite?
Clint: Yup.
Matt: There is a stigma with affordable and low-income housing that a lot of people are trying to avoid. It’s like, it’s going to be hard to collect rents, or there’s going to be […] issues or there’s going to be, or whatever made-up story you have in your head about affordable housing that’s likely not true. It’s going to keep people away from affordable housing. I think it’s certainly a niche that’s worth pursuing. We are a little bit fit.
I am workforce housing, so we pursue Class C. There are some Section 8 blended into what we do, but it’s probably in the 5% to 10% of the total unit count range. The biggest competition you’re going to see is in class B real estate, class B and class A. A is like a newer construction top end, B is stuff that was built maybe in the ‘80s or ‘90s that maybe could use facelift, some value add, but it’s probably fairly up with the market.
People that earn way above the median typically live in B class real estate, which would mean a little spruce. C is typically stuff that’s built in the 70s and 80s, maybe some functional obsolescence, but you can bring it back. It needs a little TLC. The best value-add places that I see are in C class or in the ‘70s, ‘80s vintage. It doesn’t go down.
There’s D class, but that’s just property that just hasn’t been maintained. I’ve seen D class stuff that was built in the ’80s, ‘90s, and 2000s. It really has to do with how it’s managed and whether or not they kept up with deferred maintenance, whether or not they let the place just get torn apart by the tenants or something like that. We tend to not go to D class. We’ll go and do a C and value-added it up to a C plus, and do what I call a workforce luxury.
Clint: You brought up something that I find intriguing, that people have preconceived notions about lower-income housing, and I’ve never experienced that. I mean the tenants that we deal with, they’ve been great. They’re maybe having hard times, but they still want to pay. They have self-respect and they don’t tear the places up. I mean, sometimes you run into that. One of the things that I looked for, which I’m going to pass on Section 8 that I ran into in Oklahoma is that the city doesn’t take them off.
If somebody does trash your place and then you got to get it re-Section 8, qualify, bring it up to standards, and you report the individual tenant, they won’t do anything. They won’t cut him off. That’s something now that I realize before I begin offering that in the future in the different locations where we invest. I’m going to make sure that there are some penalties. That keeps people on so they’re not going to destroy your place because they realize then they’re going to lose their Section 8 that they’re on, and no one wants to lose that.
Matt: That’s right, and there are rules around that where the tenant doesn’t pay. Single families, we still own a lot of single families. If the tenant doesn’t pay their side of the water bill, if they don’t pay their side of the rent contribution, you still can evict. If they get evicted, then they’re supposed to lose the Section 8. As you said, the Section 8 office sometimes doesn’t process that.
It’s still important to do a background check, to do a rental history check, and to do a credit check. It might not have the income required to live in your unit, but with some help from the government, they can likely qualify. You still have to do due diligence as an owner.
I’m doing affordable housing so anyone that’s on the program can now live in my apartment. That my friend is how you end up with the element you don’t want—drugs, people not paying, people that are going to damage your units, and stuff like that because there is data you can get out there. It’s a great point, but the folks that I’ve encountered don’t want to do LIHTC, Low- Income Housing Tax Credits, but those can be very lucrative.
Clint: Yup.
Matt: Section 8 didn’t miss a beat during the COVID crisis. If you remember, during the government shut down in 2016, 2017 when the government was playing chicken with each other on signing off on the budget bill. The government got defunded for a month or something like that. Section 8 did get affected by that, but they got caught up. Hold your breath for a month and then you get a double check.
The worst that could happen is you make a delayed payment of something like that happen again but, COVID didn’t really affect low-income housing.
Clint: No, not at all.
Matt: Yeah. You didn’t miss a beat. We did. The properties that you’re talking about probably didn’t blink.
Clint: Yeah, the rent was really strong. Financing-wise, if I want to get into this, what are some things, just off quickly, that somebody has to be prepared for? If you’re looking to take down a unit, what should I be doing ahead of time to make sure I can qualify from a financing perspective?
Matt: Well, it’s less which you got to go through to qualify for a single family home, a small purchase, or something like that. It’s less about like, well, let me make sure that my credit score is up, let me make sure I’ve got three years’ worth of my tax returns and my financial statements together. We’ll likely need a lot of that, but they’re more going to be concerned with the property and with your or your team’s resume in managing something of this size.
I would make sure that you have a business resume, not like you’re going to get hired for a job, but your track record resumes together. Everything else you’ve managed. The bank may tell you that they might see a strong response or somewhere on the loan that has a deeper experience resume and that maybe something you might have to look and find in your network.
Above that, make sure that you on the property side have clean understandable rent roles, trailing 12 financial statements, and a pro forma showing what you want the property to do. It can be a vetting on your skillset and ability to run the property and on the property itself versus your finances and everything like that. I think that’s what you needed to prepare to get truly vetted for a loan on these types of things.
Clint: I’ve told people in the past during consultations that when they’re getting started on that, if they want to go a little bit larger than a four-plex, they want to get into something that’s 40 units, 50, 100, that they should find someone like you described because those are going to be an experience-based loan. If they’re asset-based loans, that means you don’t have to get guaranteed, but they’re also going to be based on the experience that you can prove to the lender you know how to operate it. I’ll tell them to partner with someone that has that experience.
Now, my assumption has been that if I partnered with you for example on a deal, I found the deal, brought you into the deal to help me put this whole thing together, that experience that I get from working with you on this deal, could I then parlay that in the future to get my own deals going where I wouldn’t need a partner? Does it work that way with lenders? Because you can show, hey, I did this deal. I was working with someone else, but I get to take that as my own experience now?
Matt: Yeah. Well, I mean, they’re going to see that you had another sponsor on the last deal, but you’re going to get to add the deal you just did to your net worth statement and to your balance sheet. Eventually, the lender will see a resume and a balance sheet that makes sense to them.
Yeah, we have had a few people that worked with us initially and now are able to do deals on their own. That we came in, we’re the balance sheet, we’re the mentorship, or we’re the structure for them that enabled them to get their lending. Now, they’re able to go on their own now. You can graduate beyond using what’s called getting a sponsor, co-sponsor, co-GP, or whatever you call it. There are folks that have grown beyond that, and you can certainly grow out of that as well then you can go on your own.
Clint: Yeah, because a lot of people need to own the entire thing and they need to make all the money off it. I was taught one time, bulls make money, bears make money, and hogs get slaughtered. I use that a lot when I talk to someone. I want it all, I’m not going to share. It’s like, you’re not going to get this deal. It’s either rather than have half of something, you’re going to have all of nothing unless you’re willing to share it and then you can grow from there.
I know you set up syndications where people can come and they can invest in your projects.
Matt: We do that. I mean, I went from owning 100% of a lot of the deals that we do. We just got a […] put in a deal with Kentucky, and my company ended up with 11.5% of that deal. That’s okay. I’m fine with that because like you said, it’s 11.5% of a big, large multifamily asset that will put plenty of equity in my pocket and our investors are going to do very well. It gets it more into just a bigger picture type of thing. I mean Bill Gates didn’t own all of Microsoft.
If you look at any company, any company eventually, either through a partnership with other resources or through selling equity with investors is going to need to get diluted. If you can let go of it needs to be all mine as you said, then it enables you to grow. I know no one that owns thousands of units and owns them all themself. Even Sam Zell, a lot of the huge names, maybe billionaires in real estate, but they also had to work with investors to help them get to that level and then sell off a lot of equity to enable them to get the larger assets.
It’s just the way it goes, and it’s a good symbiotic relationship. Not only am I okay with it, I love it. It enables me to benefit other people’s finances through what I do in my company. By helping people reach their net worth goals through investing with the DeRosa Group or investing in apartment complexes made available for syndications that they couldn’t have found on their own.
Clint: Which brings me to this point that I want to end with, what about resources that are out there that if someone is considering moving up to this next level, where should they check out on the web to find areas, evaluate properties? I mean, is there anything that you use or you highly recommend to go to?
Matt: Well, I’ll go to three M’s, Clint—money, market, and management. We’ll start with market. I know you should have started with market anyway. If they were getting into the game and scale-up in the larger real estate, they cannot be one of these people out there talking about how do you want to buy multifamily anywhere in the continental of the United States. They have to choose their market, Winston-Salem, Albuquerque, Bismarck, North Dakota. That’s where I want to buy my multifamily. Get to know the market, get to know the people that are players in the market, get to know the brokers, and get to know the good blocks and bad blocks.
Then the money side, just to mention my book, Raising Private Capital, talks about how to find the money in your network and structure syndication deals with people that are in your network that want to be passive. On the management side, you’ve got to find who is going to run that asset for you because the right deal with plenty of money is still going to fall in that space if the business plan isn’t executed properly.
You got to have all three of the M’s met—market, money, management—to be successful in this game, and getting those three foundational items set up first is what it’s going to take to be successful.
Clint: Are there any websites that you would tell people they can look at that could help them along this road?
Matt: Sure, biggerpockets.com is a great place to get started. Once you’ve chosen your market, LoopNet is a great place to start. LoopNet is not a source for lots of great deals. Most of the deals on LoopNet have been picked over, but LoopNet is a great way to get connected to brokers that are offering in a market. If you choose Charlotte, North Carolina as your market, you can go pull up Charlotte on LoopNet and connect with brokers and say, listen, the deal you have here is not the right one for me but […] the deal.
LoopNet is a great way to network, believe it or not. People don’t look at it that way but it should be used that way. I would consider even going on the agency websites, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and understanding their financing guidelines, understanding what it is you need to put forth to get finance on deals. What’s their high end and low side? You’ll get to know deals that may work for the federal agencies that can finance deals, which is pretty much the best financing deal you’re going to get. Those are some resources out there.
Of course, BiggerPockets as I mentioned, is a great networking site for meeting other investors, lots of articles you can read, books you can read, and stuff like that on the subject. That’s a great place to start too.
Clint: I’d like to end on this point, is that when you’re talking about money, that’s important if you’re going to take it down. But if you find a deal that you can’t qualify for based upon the lending guidelines, still if it’s a deal, tie it up because you can always partner with someone like yourself.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, a deal is a deal. There are plenty of people like me out there that are looking for opportunities. You either got more money than you got deals, you got more deals than you got money. There’s no balance between the two. You either have more of one or more of the other. It’s what it is. If you got more deals than you have money, find someone who has more money than they had deals or vice versa, and find a way to structure a partnership. It will just help you raise your game and get things to the next level for your investors and for your business.
Clint: Hey, Matt, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate this, and I know the viewers that watched all the way through this point are going to get a lot of information out here. We’ve got some links down in the show notes that they can click on to find your website and some of those other sites that you mentioned. Anything you want to leave or say in passing?
Matt: No, it’s been great. Just check us out at derosagroup.com. Clint. It’s great having you here. Derosagroup.com is a place to go. If they want to learn from us, invest with us, check out my book, check out my YouTube channel, all of that is there at derosagroup.com.
Clint: All right. Thanks, man. Take care.
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