$50 Million In 8 Weeks?! || Veena Jetti Interview

Welcome back to the show, people. Today we've got with us Veena Jetti. Veena, welcome on.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

This is going to be a fun episode. So we first met in Cancun.

Yes.

You actually got invited out to our events. This is just for our Black Card members. You were invited out and it was funny enough. So people know, I didn't know who you were.

I know.

You're just in the group. We were just talking, hanging out. And actually the first night my dad spoke and we just mentioned this, you were up till 3 a.m. talking with him. He just stayed up and answered everyone's questions in the crowd.

Oh my gosh, he's incredible. You know, at one point he was like, do you have any other questions? And I was like, sir, you have a $40 billion EUM. I'm not going anywhere until you tell me you're done answering questions. Like, I will stay here the whole night. And he stayed till like 3, 3:30 in the morning.

It was pretty impressive. We were just in this ballroom and just slowly whittled down. People went to bed, went to bed, and like it was like a group of like 5 people or 6. And you just all just stayed up talking. It was really cool.

I was like, I'm not going anywhere. I might not ever get a chance like this ever again.

about Vino though. So, we're in Cancun and we did Lincoln, one of the nights we did a pitch competition. So, every table everyone would pitch each other and we had like 90 seconds to pitch your fund and then the whole table voted on their favorite pitch. So, what happened was we'd pick each table as the winner and then the winner of the table would then compete against the other tables and we had this whole thing and you won your table, I believe.

I did.

So, then you— that's the first time I heard you speak. You got up with the microphone and you were so confident. You're talking about your fund. And you threw out all these cool data points and everything about your fund, and it was only 90 seconds. I mean, it's a quick pitch. You ended up winning the next group of tables. I don't remember, did you win the whole thing?

Yeah.

So you took first. You were the favorite pitch of the entire group, which was amazing.

Yeah, it was awesome. I mean, it was so much fun. The format was great.

It was a fun format.

Yeah, the energy was amazing. You know, just being in a group of like-minded people is— it's life-changing to be in those rooms.

Yeah, it was pretty fun. So, you killed it. So, congrats. Also, Veena has now been invited to speak at Funnel Launch Live. So, it's going to be so awesome. So, you guys can come hear her live at Funnel Launch Live in Miami. Your talk is entitled How You Raised $50 Million in 4 Weeks.

8 weeks.

8 weeks.

I needed 8 weeks.

8 weeks.

OK. Next time, next year, I'll talk about $50 million in 4 weeks.

In 4 weeks. Alright, we'll give you a leeway. It was 8 weeks. So, we'll unpack all that today. If you can, for people that have never met you before, can you give us maybe a 1-minute overview of who Veena is, your companies, all your businesses, kind of what you do?

Yeah, so I'm Veena Jetti. I mainly am a multifamily owner-operator. I run a company called Vive Funds. I'm based out of Dallas, Texas, and we focus on Class B value-add assets, mainly in the Sunbelt plus Arizona. That's probably changing actually with like some of the AI technology that's coming out. We're reevaluating some of our markets, but generally we do really boring vanilla deals, nothing like crazy or exciting. We want like very even-keeled deals so that we can generate strong double-digit returns for investors.

Yeah, that's cool. How much, how much AUM or how much volume has your group done?

Yeah, so we've bought and sold over $900 million. AUM currently is somewhere in the $400 million range. We sold 7 deals last year. So yeah, we got rid of a lot of assets.

So AUM drops a little bit.

Yeah, AUM has dropped significantly. But now we're back out there buying and looking for opportunity here.

Oh, it's amazing. What's an average deal size? What's like, give us an average vanilla deal that you guys look at.

So today really we try to look at anything $75 million and up, 200+ stores. So the last few deals that we bought have been $80 million, give or take a couple million bucks. The largest one we've done is just over $100 million.

No, that's awesome. Do you have a favorite value add that you've done to one of your projects?

Oh gosh. Well, yeah, actually the one that we sold to your dad. Okay.

Yeah, we just talked about this. Yeah, you just had it. You just sold one. Yeah.

Yeah, I sold— we sold a pretty big deal to them. In June of 2022. And that was a favorite deal for me because we went into the asset, it was kind of a little bit of a rougher area than we normally go into, but it had so much potential. But we bought it in the middle of COVID And so we bought it in 2020, at the end of 2020, when like the whole world was still shut down.

Yeah, yeah.

And we were like, are investors going to invest? Is this going to be a good thing, a bad thing? And we really tried to like mitigate all of the risk that we could 4C on the asset. We ultimately ended up selling it 18 months later, made a great return for our investors, and I'm sure that Ridge is doing great with it now. And is— there was a lot of meat left on the bone for them, so I think it was actually a really great opportunity for another group to come in and realize the value add because we had some rents that were like $600 over where we bought it at.

Oh wow, you raised rents that much? Hey, yeah, cool.

It was just bringing up to market. It wasn't even like anything crazy or out of line with the market. It was just not managed as well as it could have been. And I'm sure that the next group that bought it, you guys are able to like really push that even further and realize the value-add plan that we just didn't have to complete.

Yeah, it's funny. You're— well, you're nice being on both because it's funny when someone's on the other side of the deal. I know, I know. You want to be like, we won and you lost.

Overpaid for that deal.

Isn't that funny? One of my mentors was telling me he had a story where they bought an office building. They were in the office building.

Yeah.

They bought it for a great price from this existing guy. Then they moved in. Then they raised rents. They sold it back to the same owner for like $10 million more. Then the market turned.

Oh no.

And they then moved out and it dropped another $8 million. And they, they put a bid in to rebuy it again from the same guy. At the lower price. Twice at the lower price. And the guy just out of pride just said, I couldn't, I can't, I can't do this.

It's hard because it's such a small world, right? Like just because you buy and sell from one person, it probably isn't the last time that you're going to Interact with them again. Yeah, and transact again. So, but the thing is, with multifamily and value-add multifamily is if you exit it when there's still enough renovation and rehab left, it's actually still a great deal even at a higher price point. For us, it was just being able to turn it and push it so quickly during COVID that was like, feels like an accomplishment.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, it's funny, it's just funny when you're on both sides of a deal. So, and inside your funds, what's your role? Do you, are you more on the capital raising side? Are you more on the deal side, the fund management side? Where do you fall?

I actually touch all pieces because we're cradle to grave. So we do everything from acquisitions to capital stack to operations. My favorite role that I play is on the capital side, raising capital from investors, but we play a pretty significant role throughout the process.

Yeah, gotcha. Okay. Well, walk us through, you know, capital raising has been a lot different, I would say, the last 12 months.

Very.

What have you seen in the capital markets when raising capital?

Investor, retail investors are scared right now. They're just not writing checks as quickly. They're pulling back. They're getting burned on a lot of assets that they're invested in right now, which, I mean, they're probably also getting burned in the stock market too. So it's not like there's any one winning strategy right now. But, you know, multifamily remains one of the best risk-adjusted returns that you can have in any asset class.

As an asset class.

As an asset class. And it's tax efficient, right? Which is why we love real estate in general, but especially multifamily, because at the scale we're at, we enjoy really great tax benefits. I'm also seeing family offices and more wealthy investors are coming out of the woodwork now. Now they're putting more and more cash into real estate and multifamily because it's a great inflationary hedge, right? When you're in a cash-producing asset.

So you're seeing smart money.

Yeah.

Not retail's money as much, but smart money's coming out of the woodwork to start investing.

Interesting. And then the smart retail investors are following the smart money that's coming out. So we're kind of starting to see that, and I think now investors that were just here for like the big returns and the flash and the, you know, multifamily sexy, right? And so for the people that were there for that, I think we're starting to kind of see them wane a little bit. But the people that are really here for investment purposes are really coming out and making larger investments, actually.

Interesting. Very interesting. How have you changed your pitch or presentation the last 12 months in this current landscape?

So it changes. Pretty much all the time. Before, we used to talk about return potential. Now we're talking a lot about downside risk, protecting the downside. And that was always at the core of what we did. We just didn't talk about it or emphasize it as much.

Well, in, yeah, mid-2021, everyone's like, no one cares.

No one cares.

Yeah, but now it's—

If this thing will never go up.

In 2023, it's like, okay, how do we protect downside? That's the most important thing.

Yes, that and then like debt protection, right? Like, how are you planning for debt? How are you going to protect us from Debt rates continuing to go up. So that's kind of the conversation that most of our investors are having now. Our family office money is really looking for, okay, where are the opportunities? Who's in trouble? Like, I don't care if I get a return for the next 5 years, but if I can make a big exit at the end, I'm interested in that. So we're seeing a lot of opportunity or rescue fund capital.

Well, really cool. Now, I— we kind of teased it before. Your talk— don't give all the secrets away.

Okay, don't give all of them away. All right.

Your talk is how you raise $50 million in 8 weeks.

Yes.

You want to tell us a little about that story? What did that entail? When was this? What happened?

Yeah, this was last year. We were buying another asset, and at that time we weren't leveraging as high as we had been. So we had to bring more equity to the table. It was a value-add plan, and we had 8 weeks to close the deal. And because we didn't raise our funds ahead of time, we actually went in and we raised from $0 to $50 million in that 8-week time period. Wow. Yeah. Yep. Closed the deal. I probably lost a lot of sleep. sleep then because it's just busy.

Yeah. Oh yeah. How many investors filled up that $50 million?

A little over 100.

About 100?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so we— my first deal, by comparison, I cried myself to sleep every night for 6 weeks because I was like, what did I do? What was I thinking? And that was a small deal. That was like a $1.2 million fund. And it's just like wildly different to go from being able to do that Over 6 weeks to like being able to do that in a phone call.

That's amazing. Well, and 100 investors to get contracts signed and documents and then back and forth and they want an addendum, like that's, that's a ton of work in it. So people that have never raised from 100 investors, that's a lot of work in a short period of time. Just that piece.

Yes.

Not alone, probably you probably pitched 500 investors to get 100, right? Many. Thousands. That's a lot. I'm excited to hear your whole talk at Funnel Launch Live.

I'm excited about that too. And I'm gonna actually give you guys like the real meat and potatoes. I'm not gonna like give you the fluff. I have like actionable items that anybody who's starting out or has raised $1 million or $10 million or $100 million can use to kind of get to that next level.

I love it.

So yeah, I'm excited.

Okay, shifting gears.

Yes.

You have the World Economic Forum and other economists talking about this effort, and actually millennials that don't want homes anymore.

Yeah.

That love, you know, the low maintenance of living in an apartment or living in a townhome. And, you know, the World Economic Forum says by 2030 you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

Yeah, probably.

Kind of a, kind of a huge, a huge push towards, you know, this overarching theme of multifamily or, you know, condensed living. Do you see that trend still happening in the United States? And, and if so, where do you think we're headed?

Yeah, no, I do see that happening because millennials who are right now in the prime of like home buying age are delaying getting married, delaying having kids, delaying buying houses. I think they call us like the Suitcase generation. Isn't that what they say? I think that's what they say about millennials. I myself am an elder millennial. So listen, I—

You rolled up with a suitcase, though, to our episode.

I did. See, I'm the suitcase generation. But no, it's like, I don't know if you own your home. I assume you probably do. Okay, so every time you have like your water heater breaks, then you have to spend like 7 grand fixing it. You're like, Gosh, it would be so nice to just have like a landlord that'll take care of this. So I understand the appeal of it.

And you can move to different places. There's no really attachment to an area.

Yeah, but that's actually why I think millennials and Gen Z and younger generations are so attracted to the suitcase lifestyle is because they're not tied to any one location. In the middle of COVID we saw people who were like based in New York pick up and move to Florida because they wanted to be on a beach and they didn't have to work in an office. We're seeing more and more remote or hybrid workspace setups, and that's just all conducive to being renters. What I think is going to be interesting about it, though, is the vast majority of Americans have historically held most of their net worth in their primary home.

Exactly.

Yeah. And now either they're not wanting to or they're being priced out of those homes, right? Because you have the large funds like Blackstone and Starwood buying entire neighborhoods and—

Well, 1 in 7 homes purchased in 2021 was from Wall Street.

Yeah.

1 in 7 residential homes. It's crazy.

I think last year it actually went to 1 in 5, I thought.

Really?

Interesting. Yeah, I think for 2022 was 1 in 5. And so that's a lot of investment properties. So I think like homeownership in general is just not really as attainable as it used to be. And like—

Well, what's funny is people, they're like, I don't know why I'm not rich. I don't know why I don't have money. It's because you're not following the rules of money.

The rules that have been working for generations.

We're just going to Like, you're not going to copy what wealthy people do, but you want to be rich.

Right.

And it's funny, I read another report. Baby boomers have $1.2 million. Average baby boomer net worth is $1.2 million.

The average.

That's pretty amazing. Which is pretty significant when the average wage worker makes like, what, $60,000 a year?

Yeah.

That's pretty interesting for baby boomers. And most of it's developed through their homeownership.

Right.

That's almost all their wealth is developed by homeownership. And inflation actually works towards you.

Yeah.

I mean, inflation is a great thing if you have hard assets over a long period of time. It destroys debt.

Yep.

We live in a world where, you know, 200 central banks around the world love inflation. They tell us we want 2 to 3% inflation. And you hear someone like Jerome Powell actually say deflation is one of the biggest risks to our economy.

Which is true.

Yeah. So like, it's like, either follow the system or— but people aren't. So with that, what do you see? Do you see a huge continual rise of multifamily, just more units being built and developed just into the eternities? Or what do you think?

Well, I mean, I don't know about to the eternities because there's only so much land. But what I think is interesting about development of multifamily Because we do existing value-add, right? We don't do new dev. But what's happening is we're at this like interesting point where last year replacement cost was like kind of catching up to where pricing was, or pricing was catching up to where replacement cost was. So it's getting really expensive to buy value-add multifamily instead of just going out and building.

Just build new units.

Exactly.

Which historically is usually more expensive to build than to just buy existing. Yeah.

And now we're kind of getting to that point in the market cycle similar to 2008 where a lot of builders are no longer building or they can't because debt is so expensive. They can't get—

Finance their building.

Yeah, they can't get enough debt or the proper debt rather to be able to finance their assets. And so it's causing this issue where especially the markets we trade in, that there's just not enough supply. There's so much demand because there's a lot of migration to these states and these cities. But there's no supply. And so that's obviously going to cause upward pressure on rental rates. Do I know if it goes into eternity? I mean, my crystal ball is broken today.

Yeah.

But I would assume that if you look back historically on multifamily assets, they've historically continued to rise. And some people like point to these like small slivers of any time in the market where real estate's kind of gone like this and dipped. But Like you said, it's over long periods of time. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint. So you can't look at a snapshot of a few months or a year or 2 years and make like a snap judgment based on that. So what I, I would love to see is people who are not buying homes taking what they would have used as a down payment instead, and then investing that money into real estate still, even if they don't want to live there.

Interesting. That's kind of a different— so imagine like an economy where everyone rents, but then invests into Blackstone or your funds, and then they Through that, own their properties they're in. It's kind of an interesting concept at a macro scale. You're like, is this like a dystopian novel? Like, you know what I mean? Because everyone doesn't own it, but they pay into a REIT.

Dystopian.

And then it pays their rent back. It's really, it's a really interesting thing. And I don't know, I own now 3 properties, just they're single-family houses. I'm looking to buy another couple.

Okay.

Just because I just see the scarcity of real estate and I'm just like, and it's great for depreciation, all these other things. I like buying real estate. But I'm also invested in 2 real estate funds.

Yeah.

And I love that. I'd rather invest in real estate funds. Like, I'd much rather do that.

But it's easier.

It's way easier. I get paid one. Anyway, it's just funny that this whole thing. Okay, shifting gears.

Yes.

You are running a— you're part of a pitch competition that's happening this next week. That's why you're in Utah, which is so cool. So I want to talk about pitching. You're now judging people that pitch. You did such a great job in Cancun pitching on stage. If you were going to coach someone on how to pitch a fund, a presentation, what would be like your, your first couple of things you'd walk them through or coach them on?

Okay, so one, who are you pitching to, right? So I always tell people, know who your investor avatar is. And I think people, including myself, when you first start raising capital, you're just like, everybody with money is my target, which is great in theory. But the reality is, is if you don't know who you're speaking to, how do you know what to say, right? 2, perfect your elevator pitch. So you should be able to deliver this pitch in like 15 to 90 seconds.

90 seconds.

Yeah, to 90 seconds. The elevator pitch is like literally you get on an elevator with somebody. By the time you get to your floor, they should not be knowing everything that you have to say. The whole point of an elevator pitch is to prompt a follow-up discussion where you then can really pitch whatever your deal is or your prospect is. 3 is make sure that you are clear on what your messaging is. What are the benefits? What are the most important things to Say or communicate and convey and do it with confidence, right? Like most of it is just confidence. Actually, most of it's showing up. Then the rest of it is mostly confidence.

You know what's funny on that confidence thing? I was listening to Ed Mylett. He was actually speaking at Funnel Hacks Live.

He's the best speaker ever.

He really is amazing.

I've spoken with him on stages and like every time I get a chance to hear him speak, like I will move my flights to make sure I can listen to him speak because he's He is so good.

He is. He's funny. He'll make you cry. He'll teach you something.

He makes you cry for sure.

It's amazing. I heard him talk and this is at a private event. I was with just a couple of people with him and, and he mentioned something that just stuck with me. He said, when I'm telling you or pitching something, whatever it is, I'm not trying to convince you of something. No, I'm trying to convince you that I'm convinced.

Yeah.

And I thought that was so interesting.

So true.

When you meet somebody who's just so convicted about this NFT crypto random whatever thing that they're talking about, you probably, you're like, I don't even follow.

I don't know what you're talking about.

But I know that Veena's really smart.

Yes.

And the fact that she's convinced makes me kind of convinced. Convinced. Yep. And he's like, that's when you guys are talking or selling, that's the biggest key.

I totally agree with that.

And I loved it.

Yeah. You're not— I'm not trying to like convince you why you need to do it. I'm just— it's almost like a flex, right? Like, I'm just flexing a little bit so you know that when you invest with me, I know what I'm doing. You don't have to know because I know. Yep.

You hold that authority and then you're convinced, you're so convinced on this certain thing because you've done all the due diligence, you've gone through 100 deals and you found this one that was the best one ever.

And practice, right? Like practice makes progress. And the more you do it, the easier it gets, right? Like at Funnel Launch Live, spoiler alert, that was not my first time pitching, right? But that's the reason why I was able to get up and just do this. And I think a lot of people there were newer or just starting out, so they just, they didn't have the advantage of time and the number of times I had done it. But when you do it, it becomes It gets easier every time and you get better every time.

Yeah, it's just— I love you said step 1 though, showing up, right?

Yeah, showing up is the first step.

I had a guy earlier on my show today and he talked about, he's like, go to local meetups and just shake hands and talk to people and practice that pitch. You'll be surprised. Most people, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. Go to a local real estate meetup, a local little entrepreneur meetup tonight or whatever meetups, and you'll— you need to go practice meeting people.

Yes.

Practice introducing yourself. And think of it like practice.

Yes, absolutely.

And a lot of people don't do this.

No, they don't. But that's the thing is if it were easy, everybody would do it. And the people that actually are going to be successful are the ones that actually show up and do these things. Because I can't tell you, and you probably have had this experience, right? Like you speak on a stage and then afterward people come to talk to you and like connect with you. I can't tell you how many times someone will come up to me and just start talking to me and I'm like, oh, hi, I'm Veena Jetti. You know, and I'll like shake their hand. They're like, I know who you are. I'm like, I wasn't saying it because I didn't think you knew who I was. I was saying it so you tell me your name. Like, introduce yourself to me so I know who you are, right? Because otherwise they'll just talk at you and you don't really get to build that connection because I have no idea who you are by the time you walk away. And so just the simple things, the little things. But yeah, showing up is definitely number one.

All right, 2 more questions. Yes, we'll wrap up. Second to last question. Okay, how do people find you? What's the best way to follow you? Like, learn all your stuff? Like, what's the best way to find you?

So, well, I'm going to be at Funnel Launch Live, so you can find me in person there. But I am on all social media as Veena Jetti, and I have my Facebook group called Mastering Multifamily with Veena Jetti, which I actually hang out in there a lot because I just like love the community. And so hang out there a lot.

That's awesome. What was the Facebook group again?

Mastering Multifamily with Veena Jetti.

Mastering Multifamily with Veena Jetti. Okay, go check it out, you guys. Go look. And then final question. Yeah. If this was your last interview today, Oh, okay. Okay.

You're going to— Like ever or just for today?

Ever.

Oh, okay.

You're going to die tomorrow. This is your last minute.

Oh, okay. Got morbid really quickly.

Oh yeah. And you had to leave this audience and the world with one thing that was most important or valuable to you that you wanted to leave the world with. Now you can talk about multifamily, religion, politics, family, whatever you want. I haven't prepped you.

I know you didn't.

But if you could leave the world with a last message or to this audience, whatever, you don't have to go that crazy. I know I'm putting you on the spot here.

No, no, no.

Something that you'd feel like is the most important thing in your soul that you want to share. Like with this group, what would it be?

Oh gosh, okay, well, if I only had 1 minute, it would be— I would actually spend that time talking to my family, like my kids. I have twin 3-and-a-half-year-old daughters. And actually, on my way over here, it was really a struggle for me to even like get on the plane because I'm gonna be gone for 5 days. And at this age, I feel like, you know, I'm here and I'm doing something that's really important to me, and I'm building this business, and I love what I do. But I'm like missing so much of their childhood by being on the road. And that's hard sometimes just as like a mom. The mom guilt is real. And so I would probably not even be talking to anybody else. I would be talking to my family if I had one more minute.

Well, what would you say? What maybe if when your kids grow up and they're going into the workforce, what would be some advice you'd give them? They're getting into college. What would you want to share with them?

Well, I think I shared a lot of the big things that are, I think, important for anybody is, and especially because they're girls, I would tell them, listen, you belong here. There is a seat at the table that you deserve to have. I always tell my girls, work hard, be kind. Those are like the guiding principles of how we raise them. And I would tell them, show up. Like, that is the hardest part is showing up. And people that are successful are not successful because they were lucky. They're successful because they worked hard and they persevered and they had grit. You know, like I've quit a million times. It's just I start again is the thing. Like every day when I quit, I wake up the next day and I start over, right? So I would tell them to keep showing up and keep persisting on the things that are important to them. It might not be private equity, it might not be multifamily, and that's okay. But whatever it is, they need to like go into it with 100% and give it their all.

I love it so much. That's amazing. Vina Jetta, everybody, thanks for coming on today. Go follow her on social media, go find her, and we're going to see you for Live at Funnel Launch Live, so if you guys haven't got tickets, funnellaunchlive.com, go grab a ticket, and it's gonna be a very fun event. So Veena, thank you so much. Again, go follow Veena, you guys are amazing, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you.

Okay, Veena.

I love it, this was so much fun. That was awesome.