There is no greater path to wealth for you and your future generations than through real estate, but the biggest challenge is getting started on that journey.
Today, Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Brett Hadley about how to get started in real estate investing and the need to network to find deals.
Brett started at ground level with nothing and built up his investing into multifamily and syndications. He explains what that journey was like for him, how the market looks right now, and what he did. Brett offers insight on what you should focus on, putting teams together, and how to approach real estate investing.
Highlights/Topics:
- Brett’s Backstory: Where he came from and what it took to buy his first house
- Biggest Mistake: Getting in the game before getting educated first and foremost
- Lesson Learned: Value of investing in yourself via education is extremely important
- Anderson Advisory Group: Guides, leads, and establishes asset protection to grow
- Accelerators and Masterminds: Network enables ability to execute vast amounts of deals
- Start Small: You can have capital to execute a deal and go in and do what you promised
- Real estate is real estate—understand the basics and the foundations to build a house
- Changing Minds: Show people results from hard work, dedication, and ability to execute
- Like-minded People: Portfolio grows faster with those who know more than you that help
- Yin and Yang: Partnership is a marriage; be careful who you partner with and can trust
- Team Effort: Get experienced people who have done it, been there, and closed deals
- Preferential Treatment? Build relationships to benefit from network and close deals
- Finish Line: Find a great deal, know it’s going to cost you, and be able to execute/close
- Current Market: Find area with tailwinds—it’s going to be a competitive environment
Resources
Service Academy Business Mastermind (SABM)
Personal Mentoring: The Apartment King – Brad Sumrok
The Secrets of Successful Syndication Seminar – Radio Real Estate Guys
Full Episode Transcript:
Clint: What’s up, guys? Hey, it’s Clint Coons here. In this episode, I wanted to go completely off script and talk about something that is so different than what we normally do here on my channel with asset protection, tax planning, and talking about various ways of house hacking or whatever strategies we’re discussing as far as investing goes.
I wanted to bring you someone who we’ve been working with for a few years now—he’s a client—and talk about the journey. Many of you, when you get started in real estate investing—I hear this over and over again or I see comments about it—say hey, how did you get there, Clint? I know you need asset protection, but you have to have assets to protect, and I’m not finding opportunities in my state. There are always those challenges that we throw up for ourselves.
I wanted to bring someone on who has worked through these challenges and has started at the ground level with nothing, and built up his investing now into multifamily, syndications, and just explain to you what that journey was like for him, how the market looks right now, and what he did so you can glean some insight out of it, things that you should be focusing on, putting your teams together, and how you approach real estate investing. I can tell you that there is no greater path to wealth, to creating wealth for your future generations as well than through real estate, in my experience and my opinion.
With that, I want to invite Brett Hadley. Brett, how are you doing?
Brett: Clint, thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate you having me on today. I’m really looking forward to our discussion and getting through some of these items that you just talked about, so thank you. I appreciate it.
Clint: I appreciate you coming on and I know you’re really busy with everything that you’re doing, but your story is inspiring. From where you started, I really like you to lay that backstory and spend a few minutes here just telling the audience where you came from and what it took to get to that place where you bought your first house.
Brett: Absolutely, Clint. Most importantly, I want to throw it out there at the very beginning, which is that we made our first huge mistake coming out of the gates, not doing what you had preached and what you do on your channel here and getting educated before you jump. Yes, we wanted to get in the game, and being in the military aspect, I wanted to execute. Get in the game and execute. Sometimes you make mistakes if you do that, if you don’t get that education piece first and foremost.
How does that impact where we were and where we came from? We jumped in, we said hey, yeah, we’ll go ahead and open that LLC and we’ll start our real estate journey down and we did it. We got on the website and we made it happen. We opened it. Sure enough, in our military mastermind group, they educated me, and they guided me towards your direction on the Anderson Advisory aspect.
I called Corey up and they recommended that I get in touch with Corey because he’s prior military and the Marine he was, he looked at me and laughed, of course as Corey does. He said I’m going to educate the uneducated Air Force guy here so thank you to the Marine and Corey. He educated me on asset protection and what you do so well on all your education pieces out here on your YouTube channel. That was the first mistake that we made.
What did we learn from that? The value of investing in yourself first and foremost. Let’s be honest, getting educated is extremely important and that’s what I try to do now and help and that’s one of the biggest reasons I appreciate you having me here today, just giving the ability to give back to others.
We started off our journey, my brother and I were business partners, badass brothers, and he is my best friend. We grew up together in Wyoming—a small town, just an oil and gas industry—and wanted to do and had that entrepreneur aspect and that spirit in us. We went all the way through.
I started active duty. I went down that path of getting educated. You need to get educated, you need to go get a good job, and down that pathway of what the normal aspect is before you read that purple book, if you will. That’s what we did.
I did that and my brother went and got a good job of doing maintenance and commercial industry where you’re in the mining industry in Southwest Wyoming and it’s a really good job. We were going down that pathway of investing in your 401(k). I love it. Clint, you do a lot of stuff on 401(k) and it’s been an absolute blessing on that.
We did that and sure enough, when 2019 came around—my brother and I had been talking about it and hadn’t jumped yet. We’ve been getting educated, but not as much as we should—we said hey, the time has come. Let’s do it. So we started that LLC by ourselves. That’s where the journey started in 2019. It’s been a journey.
We said hey, Corey, we’re not going to make that mistake again. You guys and your business advisory group helped guide us, lead us, and help establish that protection that we need in order to grow. And in order to grow, you have to have assets, right?
Clint: Exactly.
Brett: That’s where our military accelerator—it’s a service academy business mastermind group—came in. I was like hey, there’s no better way to learn than to jumped right in and do six months of hardcore every single month, meeting twice a month, going in, and actually executing deals with people that are just like you, like-minded, and ready to do deals. That’s exactly what I did.
I jumped into Buddy Rushing’s accelerator. He does a phenomenal job with our veteran community, people that are ready to go and do what you just said and what we all do now is invest. They’re all around the world, that’s what is awesome. Our investors are all around the world and they’re wanting to invest in operators that are local and that they can know, like, and trust. With the incredible network that they have there, we were able to execute a vast amount of deals.
When I jumped into the game, Clint, it was all about hey, what is it that we need to do, Brett? How do we need to help you out? We were already getting ready to execute some deals in Wyoming. By deals, I say quadplexes and duplexes. We were into the deep value add aspect because my business partner JJ is incredibly hands-on and he does a really good job. He was the maintenance guy out on a large industrial complex and helped in maintenance. That’s what he does for a living.
No better way to have an asset manager than JJ himself and I’m on the business aspect side of it. We were looking at deep value-added properties where we can do conversions and we take a duplex and convert it into a quadplex and do that deep value add.
We didn’t know the financing piec,e so guess what? We were like hey Buddy, I need your help. We went through a creative financing aspect. It was amazing because during that discussion we were talking about seller financing. I was like, hey, we have a motivated seller because she has to drive all the way from Colorado to manage her property and she was pretty motivated. At first, she said no. A couple of months later, she was having to drive in the snow of Colorado back to manage her property. She said yes after that.
We were able to do our first deal, a seller finance deal, a five plex out of Wyoming and still have that property today. It’s an incredible property, doing really well for us. Then we moved right into that conversion I was telling you about, added a duplex and made it into a quadplex, and instantly added significant value to that property.
Again, using a lot of those techniques that we had talked about in Buddy’s accelerator and asking the questions and being able to bounce those ideas off of everybody that was in there and saying hey, what are your thoughts about this? We ended up getting eleven units in Wyoming over the course of a year and it was incredible.
We transition now, Clint, to what do we do now? Because we were at that one-year point where we’re like, how do you scale and how do you do that? That’s where we were trying to find that next piece of the pie. We’ll go into how we do that next, if that’s okay with you, Clint.
Clint: I have a question for you. When you got these eleven properties within one year, that seems like a ton for somebody that’s just starting out or they’ve only been investing in one property. How are you able to accomplish that? What would you say is necessary? For somebody that’s listening, watching this right now, and they’re thinking, there’s no way I can do that, what would you say to that person?
Brett: One thing I would want to stress most is that, yeah, you can have the capital to execute a deal and go in and do what you said, start small. I’ve always had my mentors tell me you want to start small. You don’t go into the weight room and bench 300 pounds right away. You go in there and you work up to it. That’s the most important thing that we got out of starting small. Does everybody have to? No, you don’t have to.
This is one way and it was very successful for us. We went in and we started small, we got our hands wet, we got our feet dirty, and we literally have to the asset manage. We had the property manager, and we were like, oh, man, this isn’t why we got into real estate. That’s one of the big things I would like to stress is that you want to do it, though. You want to get in there and understand what it takes to manage the assets that you’re going to manage at a much larger level.
Real estate is real estate. I know I’ve heard you say that many of your podcasts, is hey, it doesn’t matter. It just adds a few zeros onto it. If you understand the basics and the foundations, you can build the house. That’s what we wanted to make sure that we understood.
And it was painful. It is painful being a property manager. I salute them, the property management groups that manage our properties now, because they are awesome. They’re incredible people, and they are what makes our asset function and they’re the ones that have the return on the investment.
Clint, that’s the one thing I would want to stress the most, is that, yes, you can do it. You have capital. You got your 401(k). There are ways of getting capital that is yours and you can make it happen. And that’s what we did. We consolidated as much as we possibly can, but you ran out of capital. You can’t scale. You can only scale as large as your portfolio has and that’s where we ended up having because we were tapping into our 401(k)s. We were tapping in any way that we could because we were going to make this happen.
Then as you get traction, as you gain traction and you start gaining people’s oh, well, the piece that we should have started at first started to happen when we started gaining traction and people seeing the results of our hard labor and our hard work, and they’re starting to see how are they doing what you just said, Clint? How are they getting property after property?
It’s people starting to understand. We had my father saying, hey, I don’t think this is a smart idea. This is not good. Doing this real estate stuff, you got toilets, tenants, and termites. Why would you want to do that? That’s okay and that’s fine. He was like, I don’t know if you guys are going to make it.
He came around full circle and now he’s an investor in our work. He loves it and he’s getting into it. He’s getting ready to retire and he’s going to jump in as well. That’s absolutely the best thing that’s happened, to be able to turn people’s minds who weren’t on board and then be able to show them the results that come from hard work, dedication, and the ability to execute.
As you said, first and foremost, sometimes people get on the edge and that’s one of the big things about Buddy and the accelerator. When you get around people that are like-minded and they’re highly motivated, that’s what you want to surround yourself with. That’s one of the most important things that’s happened in our business, is that you surround yourself with people who are executing at a much higher level than you. Then you actually change your mindset. You get a mindset shift and that’s exactly what happened with us, Clint.
Clint: That I think is really important. Something I just pulled out of that is as you start to go along this journey, you start to find success. People are going to notice. Your friends are going to notice, your family is going to notice. At first, I still get this to this day from my father saying you’re nothing but a blank damn fool. You’re going to do that. You don’t listen.
I said, dad, you’ve been doing this to me since I started this business, and look where it’s at. It’s this transition. You’re going to hear that from family members, from people that you’re close to, and you can’t let that stop you from following your live streams and getting out there and actually doing something. Then there are going to be those people that see that success.
I have this now all the time. Hey, can you help me get a property? You got a deal that I can invest with you on, a joint venture with you on? Why is that? Because I don’t tell them how much I’m making, but they notice things have changed in your life. Maybe get a little nicer house or you got a new boat or a new car. They’re wondering, I know he’s been doing real estate, but things must be going pretty well.
That then becomes, as you said, I think for a lot of people, they don’t realize that that’s the money that helps propel that business going forward. You got any different takes on that?
Brett: Absolutely, Clint. You nailed it and that’s exactly what we experienced, and that’s one of the biggest things that we experienced with JJ. My business partner was obviously in a very good job in Wyoming, and it’s one of the best jobs you can get, and he stepped away. He was like wait and people are like what? If you’re doing that well, it’s got to be something going right.
That opened up a lot of eyes because he was like, hey, I’m stepping away doing this full-time and that’s exactly what happened. What was awesome about that is that we could send them your way. We had a lot of them coming your way, listening to your videos, and getting educated because there’s a lot of 401(k) and it’s a $3 trillion business and there’s a lot of money out there. They just didn’t even know they could do it.
That’s what the eye-opening piece of it, Clint, has been incredible because you get to see the people that are hard-working individuals, and then you start to educate them. JJ has done a phenomenal job in the hometown holding meetups, educating them, and helping them understand that it is possible to take your 401(k) and utilize it towards an alternative like this type of investing because they didn’t know they could invest in apartment complexes. They didn’t know they could invest in the short-term rental on the beach in Jacksonville. It’s like you can be a part owner of that, absolutely.
Then you start educating in there and start getting excited, and then the wildfire happens because then they go talk to their friends, and pretty soon the branding and the marketing happens by itself and that’s been incredible. Clint, absolutely, you nailed it right there.
As far as my side goes, when I’m going on to these eight o’clock Saturday calls with a lot of my veteran community, and they’re all war room, and they’re all getting ready to retire, and they’re just like I don’t know what I want to do when I get done. We all have that service mentality.
What better way to do it than to understand that you can get into this business and it’s all about the team. You can get into syndication and you don’t have to be the expert, but you can be an expert in one thing and you can be a part of the GP team. Helping them understand that piece of the pie, Clint.
It has been incredible and you see the eye-opening and the success that people are having out there in the veteran community and in the community back home where my brother is from and seeing that we can own a piece of the short-term rental.
We went into a JV just recently, a couple of weeks ago with a guy in Wyoming, and he’s just ecstatic and his family is ecstatic. That’s what’s awesome. You’re actually impacting lives. I love it.
Clint: Yeah, and the thing about it, you and I talked about this, Buddy and I talked about it last week, is that people see themselves many times that they’re going to invest in real estate. It’s just an investor. Someone is going to come in and buy someone else’s house and they don’t understand the other side of investing. If you really want to find these deals because of what you said about finding that person in Colorado and getting her to seller finance you the property, a lot of people say those don’t exist.
They exist. They just don’t exist where you’re looking. You have to change where you’re looking and you have to change the way you approach things. You’re not just approaching someone saying, I want to buy your house. You’re finding out what their problem is. You’re identifying their problem and then you’re solving that problem. I think that that is a fundamental roadblock for a lot of people who invest.
They don’t understand that you’re not just going out there and saying, I’m going to buy this, buy this, and I’m going to find these sellers. No, find the people who don’t necessarily know that they want to sell yet and expose the problems that they’ve been talking about at their kitchen table, their spouse has been complaining about, and saying I can solve that for you, and here’s how we’re going to do it and show them. That’s where those opportunities start coming from.
Brett: Yes, sir. Like you said, as long as you surround yourself with those people that have that kind of mindset, that’s what it’s all about and that’s exactly what my brother and I recently did when we joined the Sumrok Group here in the local Dallas area. He is called the apartment king of all of Dallas because his group is well-known.
Why not surround yourself with people who are doing thousands of doors a year and getting educated from these people and always being in those circles that you just talked about, Clint? If you can’t do what you’re doing in the circles that you’re in, maybe you need to step up a level and that’s exactly what you have to do in order to be able to produce the results that you want.
That’s what I love about what we’ve done and that pivot that we’ve done because then you start running into people that you have. One of Buddy’s graduates is now one of my partners, and he jumps out of airplanes with Buddy. Greg Butcher is a 20-year marine. He was my experience on my last deal and has multiple syndications under his belt and multiple ones have gone full cycle.
That’s what’s awesome is you bring those types of people that know, like, and trust you because of the circles that you are in and then everybody rises to the top because guess what? Now he’s got an extra deal and he’s got people like myself that are willing and able, and like my business partners, full-time job is to asset manage now. What greater way to make his portfolio grow faster than to get with people that are ready to do it and ready to execute. Yes, Clint, I think that’s been an incredible journey.
Clint: To that point, what we’re referring to is to find people who know more than you, and then they’ll help you along the way. For example, I assume that the first property you did with that Colorado investor, what was her problem? Driving all the way over and trying to manage a property out of state. If you target those types of people, figure out what their challenges are in managing real estate out of state, then show them a way in which you can alleviate that issue because what they’re expecting is a return. That’s why they have that rental property, but it comes with headaches.
If you can say, hey, let me show you a way in which I can get you X amount of income a year from this property. Another challenge somebody has is they don’t want to sell. They’re tired of it, but they don’t want to sell because they’re going to have to pay tax on that money when they sell.
The other issue is where are you going to put the money? If I gave you $200,000 a month and you sold a piece of property, where do you invest it? In the stock market? No, it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to be able to find another property out there. You have to figure out ways to address those issues. People who have been doing this for a while, if you surround yourself with them, they can show you.
I had a client in here last week, a service member at that Joint Base, and he’s just getting started. He wanted to pick my brain. He’s a platinum client. I sat down with him and I said okay, because it wasn’t about asset protection. I said this is how you need to approach people. Here’s who I would identify and then look at it from this perspective, find out what those issues are, and then show them. Lay it all out. This is what I can do for you, and this is what the benefits are going to come from this strategy, and those deals will start happening.
You’ve been doing that and it helped then take you from the single families and the duplexes into the multifamily. What was that transition like to go from? Because that’s a big leap for people.
Brett: Absolutely, Clint, and it’s kind of scary. To be honest with you, signing on a $7 million loan is kind of difficult sometimes if it’s your first deal. But you surround yourself with the Greg Butchers that have done that multiple times and those are the folks that walk you through it, they’re by your side, they’re not going to do all of the dirty work. That’s us. He’s just there to be a mentor and that’s exactly where I want to be, and that’s where we will be, is exactly where he’s at.
The next step is now being able to take what we’ve learned, do more deals, and become the expert at what we’re doing, because we feel very comfortable now in the multi-family space. But until you’ve got a track record, you can’t become a Greg Butcher. That’s what the most important thing is, that we’re building that right now. We have brokers now in that deal flow that we always talk about.
I just like to look at real estate in two different avenues and that’s what I’d love for your audience to know. I like to look at it as: (a) you got to find the deal, and (b) you got to find investors. That’s how the syndication world works. Obviously, there are mechanics that go into that, but that’s stuff that you can learn. That’s the stuff you can get your teeth sunk into. You can do it yourself and actually get educated on those pieces of it. That’s fine. Those are the two pieces that make it simple.
My brother is on that piece of it, the one that runs the mechanics. He’s the operations guy and he loves it, but he doesn’t like the investor relations that happen. That’s mine, I love that. I love that aspect of it and getting people excited and educating people about what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
That’s the yin and the yang, if you will. It’s just an incredible complementary skill set that you can bring. That’s the most important thing that I can stress to your audience. That partnership is a marriage, so be careful on who you partner with. That’s why I was so excited to be partnering with someone I know I can trust 100% because I know the type of person this individual is. That’s why we’ve gone into a partnership together.
That’s one of the big things I’ve seen in multiple groups that we’ve been a part of. They get into bad partnerships and they can tell you that’s one of the biggest mistakes that they make. Some of these deals are 5- and 7-year deals, 3–5 years at least. You’re in a marriage, and you got to make that work.
That’s one of the things I would like your audience to know is that when you’re getting into that partnership, make sure you’re taking the time. And the most important piece of the pie is making sure you’re building that team, that partnership, to take down these deals, these multifamily deals that we’re talking about here.
Clint: Yeah, actually, I’m going to cut a video on that. I’ve got a few on joint ventures, but that’s an upcoming video I’m going to have where I’m discussing not just the LLC structure, but that partnership aspect of how key that is to find success. With your deals—now you’re into the multifamily—how did you start identifying properties? Because that seems so daunting. People think mentally, from a single family to a multifamily that you’re dealing with a whole other set of cards, a different deck you’re playing now. Is that your experience or have you got a little different take on that?
Brett: No, absolutely, Clint. By a whole deck of cards, I would like to say that it was a completely new deck, absolutely. It’s a whole nother different world that you’re jumping into. At the same time, I want to take it back to what we were talking about earlier. It’s just a little bit bigger property. When it comes down to it, it’s just a little bit bigger property, but you have to know the little pieces of the pie that you have to know in order to be sitting at the table for a broker to know, like, and trust you.
That’s what the most important thing is. When you’re brand new to the game, how do you do that? The answer is you get experience on your team and you utilize it. It’s a we because it’s a team effort. You get experience on your team of people who have done it, been there, and closed deals.
That’s exactly what our broker does. Our broker is amazing. It’s the old capital here locally. That’s exactly what Paul’s people tell us. That’s what he told JJ and me when he sat down with us at Starbucks. He sits next to me at church, by the way, he goes to the same parishes I do. He’s just incredible.
He told us straight up you’ve got to have somebody with experience. If you want to close a 100-unit deal, you better have experience with somebody who has 100-unit experience. Not only that, if you can find somebody that has that full cycle deal where they go five years and they can show that they’ve executed their business plan, what they said they were going to do, now he’s even talking even more.
As you gain more experience and you gain an actual track record, brokers start calling you. We have no problem with the deal flow anymore because that’s where the brokers understand that hey, it’s a surety of close. We know that you’re going to close because you’re a part of this group as well and being associated with the Sumrok Group puts you in a little different stack.
When we’re going out and doing these bus tours around Dallas, seeing off-market and on-market deals of people who are selling it from the Sumrok Group and I know these people. The one that we just bought was a firefighter for 23 years in the fire district here. I knew him personally. We were buying it from him.
That’s just the benefit of being in a network of individuals that are doing what you’re doing. You have the ability to have the buyer brokers that have relationships with all the brokers that are here local. And guess what? When they see a Sumrok team, they know that they’re going to execute.
They give us, I wouldn’t say preferential treatment. Behind the scenes, whatever it is, they do whatever business is done. Guess what? They know that you’re able to execute so when you get to the best and final, it’s because of that. Having that relationship built with the brokers that you have all around this area, you might as well join the group that is doing a lot of deals and they’re doing it effectively.
Clint: I heard from you that if I’m an investor and I’ve been doing single-family and I want to move into multifamily, I should find someone that has some experience. That means possibly giving up some of the upside or some of the ownership, because their contribution to your deal, their ability to get funding, to know who to talk to, dealing with the city, the county or whatever it is, those are what’s going to get that over the finish line for you because you’re going to stumble if you haven’t been through it.
I tell people this so often when they talk about how to start investing in multifamily. I said find somebody that’s already been doing it. Find the deal and get with them first and then see if they’re open to it. If you start building your team that way so you’ll when you go in, you can execute. I think the biggest mistake people make is they go out there and they find a great deal and they can’t execute.
Brett: A hundred percent. Being able to know that you’re going to get to the finish line is extremely important. As you said, I know groups that do nothing but this and they take people and they pretty much spoon feed them along the way, but as you said, you need to be able to know that it’s going to cost you. It may cost you a lot of equity in your first deal because it’s the law of the first deal. Michael Blank says it really well, that’s your first and hardest one is that first deal because it is. There’s a lot of learning that goes on in that first deal.
You’re going to have to cut your teeth, you’re going to have to get that person. In order to get that person, you might have to give them a hell of a lot more equity and know that the experience that they have is something and they need to be compensated for it. That’s exactly what I would preach to all of the folks that are wanting to get into the multifamily space is that piece right there. Know that you’re going to be paying for it on your first deal, but it’s getting you in the game and it’s getting you to the finish line like you said, Clint.
Clint: What do you see in this market right now? What do you say for multifamily? What are you looking at? What would you recommend?
Brett: Oh, man, I wish I had that crystal ball, Clint. As I said, this is a big talk in our Sumrok Group and it is. There’s going to be a correction, we know that, it’s just a matter of when, but it’s a way off for now especially in markets like this. That’s what I would highly recommend. I’m no adviser, but at the same time, what we’re hearing in our mastermind groups is exactly that. Find an area that has the tailwinds, and it’s going to be a competitive environment, that’s the key.
If you’re an outside investor in the DFW area, they’re not even looking at this area because they’re like wow, the cap rates are too low and there’s no way that you’re going to get your money and your returns on those. That’s not necessarily true. Because of the growth and because of the businesses that are moving here from the West Coast—I know you’re up in Seattle—but the California move here, and you can see it from the U-Haul statistics and all of that, it is unbelievable how many people are moving into the state of Texas and being a part of the utility business.
We see it and have to provide electricity for that, all the people that are moving here and we see it. It’s growing. It’s growing fast. The workforce housing is going to be here for a while. The most important thing that I can stress to the people that are just jumping into the game that want to reduce the risk and have that mitigation of risk is to find the properties that are the B and C class properties that have the value add that you know you can push a lot of equity into. That’s where the properties that we focus on are.
We love it when we go into a property that has a lot of deferred maintenance or things that have vast improvements, because guess what? We know that we can push that into it and the value that we can put into it. Then you have to do your due diligence around the market that you’re getting into, but I think everybody on your podcast is educated on where the market trends are, the Nashvilles, the DFWs. We’re invested in the Jacksonville area heavily, so those are the markets that are the primary focus.
As we look forward, Clint, I think we’re definitely going to do more deals here in the DFW area, in the Jacksonville area, and primary markets that have that tailwinds, for sure. We’re not slowing down.
Clint: Yeah. Just on a personal side of the way I look at it, too, is that when you find an area to invest and when there’s uncertainty as far as if the markets are going to stay or are going to turn against you as far as values go, first off, those loans you are taking are five-year loans. You have five years before they’re going to reset and you’re going to have to go back in.
What I’ve always looked for because after what I saw happen in 2008, is like you said. You’re looking for things where its value add, that the loan to the value—ARV value—is not going to be out of whack, and that the rent supports the debt. And as long as those kind of align.
If we do go through a minor recession like they’ve been talking about now and if people start losing homes and things like that, your rents will actually go up. Because they need places to live and you brought that up with housing having to come into the market, workforce housing. Those are all positive signs that can actually work in your favor, even though sometimes counterintuitively if people lose homes, then we’re going to lose money as well. No, they become your next renter.
Brett: Absolutely.
Clint: If somebody wants to get in touch with you, do you mind sharing any information they want to reach out to? Is that something you do?
Brett: Absolutely, Clint. As I said, the most important thing if you would want them, especially your veteran community, is if you talk to somebody that needs expertise or needs experience, The War Room is where I would send them on your veteran community. The War Room is an incredible resource out there. Stu and David do a great job and that’s the one that I go on every Saturday morning.
If you want to get in touch with our group, that’s one of the best ways to do it. Again, if you want to get in touch with us from a multifamily perspective and invest in some of the properties that we have coming down the pipeline, we’d love to have you on the call and talk with some of your individuals as well.
They can get on our site. Our website is probably the best, that’s www.babinvestment.org. That’s probably the easiest way because all of our contact information is on there. Our investing club is on there, so they can see all the properties we’ve done and what our kind of focus is.
Clint, the most important thing that we’re going to focus on and the biggest mistake that we made—and I want your audience to know this—the most important part of the business is marketing and branding. We didn’t do that upfront and we should have started that from day one.
I highly recommend the individuals that are getting into the game to be doing just that, that drip campaign and just getting investors to understand what you’re doing and being out there as a part of the community, telling people what you want to do and where you want to be. That’s the most important thing. We didn’t do it upfront, Clint, and I would love to have people know that that’s something that needs to happen first.
In any case, that’s probably the best way to get us, Clint, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to be on the podcast today. I appreciate you having us.
Clint: Brett, thanks for coming on. Take care.
