From Drop Out To $50 Million In Real Estate Deals: Investing In Yourself With Dylan Marma

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, investments and and your life to the next level. I'm your host Chris Larson. Get your free copy of our book@nextlevelincome.com book today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use this strategy to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthy for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth and increasing stability for their investments. Money Insights can help you develop a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement and optimize your investments. Find more information by checking out NextLevelIncome.com and clicking on the banking link. On today's show we have Dylan Marma. Dylan Marma is a principal of the Requity Group, a multifamily real estate company. He has five years of real estate experience participating in $50 million in real estate deals as a general partner or joint venture. He's worn many hats in the business including acquisitions, investor relations, asset management and business development. With a passion for scaling businesses and helping facilitate great deal, he co founded equity tree in 2020 to provide a platform backed by software solution for investors to become better operators. Dylan, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much Chris. Excited to be here.

Yeah man, we met during Podmax a couple months ago. So for the audience, for somebody that for some that are listening for the first time, that don't know your background, give us a little more detail on how you ended up where you are today.

Well, I definitely didn't go out and buy 50 million in real estate all on my own. It's something I' if I take a step back to when I got started in real estate investing, I got started 26 years old. Now at 21 years old I bought my first single family property. I took a leap of faith moving from New York, buying the one way ticket out to California with the goal of creating a lifestyle by design as they call it. And I started to reaching, reaching out to people and throwing the intention out there that I wanted to get involved with real estate to in some form or fashion and ended up getting a job working for a real estate investment and education company. And there I was surrounded by a lot of good mentors that really opened up my eyes to the different facets of real estate investing. And like many, I started off with a single family property and from there I bought a duplex. And as I continued to learn. I realized that if I were to work a W2 and continue to buy one property at a time, there was something about that path that, for me, just didn't quite align with my own value system. In a sense, I think it was just too certain of a path. And it almost bored me to think about if everything goes right where I would be in 10 years following that road. So I sought out to find a way to scale and to get into bigger investments and to entertain the entrepreneurial part of me. And multifamily syndication was the answer to that. I was able to invest into myself heavily, into education and into mentors, and learn the space inside and out. And after enough of that, I eventually felt confident enough to leave my W2 when I was really didn't have all that much experience. But I had the cash, and I was working 70 hours a week. So I found it really difficult to make the progress that I needed to because I was on the other side of the country from the deals that I was looking at. So I said, now I have some cash saved up, I'll be able to free up my time. I moved out to Atlanta a few years back with the intention to get into a multifamily. I bought a 21 unit that was a joint venture with a few partners. And then from there, I got into syndication, which is really the art of finding big deals and pulling together investor capital to purchase those deals, providing them with great returns that are truly the most passive form of real estate investing. And allowing us as the operators to put in this sweat equity in exchange for a small share of the profits on the other end of it. Starting off with the syndication space. Start off with 132 units with a few partners, and one deal led to the next, led to the next. And now at this point, we've done about 750 doors, about 500 of that being syndicated and 250 being joint ventured. Now at this point, as of a few months back, I recently started a new brand as I split off from a former partnership. So going through that and as I continue to grow, I'm looking at multifamily and also mobile home parks. So that's long.

Awesome, man. You know what? That was phenomenal. And what I love, you know, we both got our start around age 21. I just love having people like you on the show, Dylan. You're such an inspiration. Short period of time, I talk to people, I say, you know, if you have a plan, anybody can achieve financial independence in seven years with the right plan. And you're living proof here. By the age of 26, right? That's right. You've come out of the doors and done it. And I love your two goals. To create a world class real estate investment company and to reform modern day education. I'm sorry, let me repeat that. To reform modern day education and that aligns really closely with next level income which we talk about helping investors achieve financial independence through education and opportunities. Can you please share with the audience how you came to those guiding principles and how that works in your day to day experiences?

Number one, creating a world class organization is something that really just gets me excited more than anything. I find I'm a system builder. If I could really define myself and what I really gravitate towards, it's building stuff, right? It's creating. And when I think about creating an organization, I think about building the infrastructure that the organization operates off. One of my biggest virtual mentors, we'll call him, is Ray Dalio and he talks a lot about creating an idea meritocracy and his book Principles is basically the blueprint on how to build a winning culture within an organization. And I think for me long term I would love to build a company that operates like a real estate private equity company where I have great people around me that are extremely smart and challenge each other's ideas and create that idea meritocracy environment. As I think that's just the type of culture and world that I'd like to live in and I would love to be a part of building the infrastructure that makes it all tick and makes it all work. So that is goal number one. Goal number two pertaining to reforming modern day education. I think when you look at a lot of today's problems in our society, a lot of it stems from the very bottom which is education, right? And there's a disincentive in terms of the incentives are not aligned when you look at today's authorities and political leaders because they're really focused on getting the maximum results out of four years. And investing back into education is not something that is going to reap rewards over a four year time period. It's something that takes many decades to see come to fruition. So I think that it's going to take external forces from people that are sharing the mission to reform modern day education and investing reinvesting resources into modern day education. I think that it's going to take and that could be through the format of just investing funds back in the schooling systems, getting teachers paid more, that could be getting resources in the schooling systems that could also be through alternative ways of schooling and just changing. I think there's a lot of the current way, the current system for teaching is outdated and needs reform when it comes to, you know, financial education or thinking like an entrepreneur or, you know, prepping people as we continue on the age of the information age. So I think doing that in some capacity would definitely be something that really motivates me. And my mom was a teacher. I have several teachers in my family. So I think that's, that's why it's probably. It's close to home and you're getting.

Me fired up, dude. So my mom was a teacher as well, had a lot of frustrations with the education system when I was younger. We're actually launching a new venture here locally in Asheville with another nonprofit to help teach financial literacy to those that just don't have good backgrounds in that. So I think you and I are going to talk more about that. This is a little bit of a tangent here. We talked a little bit about some stuff before the show. So going off on a total tangent, I think that higher education is heading down the same path that housing was. If you look back 15 years, we've seen 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% increases in cost of education over the past decades. And you're 15 years or so behind me, what cost me $25,000 for a four year education is now costing students $25,000 per year. And my children are on track. And I just wrote a blog article about this. It's going to be published by the time this goes out. The estimated cost for a four year education for my children in the next 10 years is going to be $200,000.

Wow.

And you have to ask yourself, for somebody like you, Dylan, I want to get your perspective on this. So I'm looking at this and thinking, okay, first off, how much do I need to save to give each of my children $200,000? And two, is it even worth the money? Because if I can take that $200,000 and invest it, I mean, is it going to achieve a payoff? What do you think about that? Kind of. I think we're kind of talking about a very broad scope. But as far as higher education, I.

Love this topic, definitely. So for me, I'm actually a college dropout. So I actually was doing that math two years into school and I ended up leaving because I was taking on an enormous amount of student debt and I couldn't really connect the dots. I was looking at the average salary I was going to school for accounting and looking at the average salary and thinking about how much time it's going to take for me to be able to pay that back. And then I got this entrepreneurial kick. So it was a combination of the entrepreneurial kick, a little bit of naivety, admittedly, and also just doing the math in terms of the roi from a logical standpoint that pushed me at that time to leave school. And I don't really fully regret it, although I will admit that I think I'm an exception in a lot of ways as to I had the ambition and the drive to do what it takes to make it without school. I do think that the way our current society is set up, a lot of entry level jobs do require you to have that degree and it makes it very difficult, especially if you're not, say, an extrovert. Right. I think there's more opportunities for extroverts and I'm not always super extroverted, but I'm willing to work with people. I think for the people that are, say, more introverted, need technical skills, school's the most viable path because that's going to get you into some kind of a space that can lead the next things. But not to go too deep on that.

Go for it, man.

I think that the, I think that the ROI is going to be continuously harder and harder to justify and I think it's really important that people know why they're doing it. At 18 years old, how many of us really knew what we wanted to do? Long term, we jump into it and you have all of your family around you pushing you to just get the piece of paper they know. It's not really, it doesn't really matter what you're getting it for, it's just a matter of getting it so that you can have it and go and get your first job. And I think that as we see jobs are going to become more and more scarce and more and more specified to very technical, specialized education. So I think that it has to change. There's going to be a breaking point definitely to where there's always going to be value in investing into education. But I imagine that you're going to have much more specialized platforms to learn a specific skill set, be it learning how to code, which I think is going to become more and more important or.

Absolutely.

I think learning a trade or something to that effect, I think is going to become more and more important.

Yeah. I mean, what's amazing, I had a. Oh, can you see it here? There's My, So I had a discussion about five years ago and you know, younger gentleman at that time, he was probably about your age, and we were talking about the inequities of education and how everybody deserves an education. And I held up my cell phone, I said, everybody's got, you can have an education. He's like, how, what talking about, I held my cell phone, it says right here in your hand. So it really kind of caused me to think a lot. It's like, well, how am I going to teach my children this? And the, what we, what we decided upon, my wife and I was one, we're going to give our children the resources to go to school. Two, we're going to teach them. You nailed it. I love it. Two, we're going to teach them how to calculate the roi. And then three, they need to understand the opportunity cost. And if they can understand those three things or they can have those three components and they still decide that's the best choice, then I'm gonna feel good about that.

Yeah.

But we want them to have skin in the game too. So do you have any, do you have any active initiatives that you, you're currently doing to actively change education at this time?

You know, at this time, not really. The most I do in terms of helping other people is usually in the world of real estate. I do a lot of mentoring and working with other people and helping some younger people get into the space. Best as that, in my view, is almost a little bit of my idealistic long term view as far as the area that I'd like to make an impact in. But for the time being, most of my time is consumed with real estate investing and hopefully I'll find a way to tie that in in the next decade.

You know what, we'll work on that together. I can see it in the future. So college dropout, you know, you're, you're over. You said 500. How many units was it? I apologize. 750 units. Age 26. It sounds like a dream. Tell me about some challenges that you faced along the way. For the audience, that's saying this is too good to be true.

Well, it's definitely psychologically tolling to go through and take some of the risks that I've taken in the last six years. And I think that you have to have a certain level of pain or risk tolerance to make these decisions and hopefully end up on the other side successfully. Right. You know, for me, I think leaving, you know, I can go back to the beginning. Right. Leaving school, a lot of pushback a lot of adversity. I was president of fraternity. I had a lot of friends, great people around me that wanted me to stay in. I had a family, you know, loving family that wanted me to stay in. They thought it was best for me. You know, there was a lot of pushback there. Right. So that was, you know, a tough time to push through against the grain in that sense. And then from that time leaving, you know, eventually leaving the W2 job again, leaving kind of a security blanket to, you know, I was making pretty good income. You know, I was in a leadership role and doing well there. But, you know, again, I knew that for me, you know, it was not the path that I wanted to follow long term and I wanted to take. You know, especially being at a young age, I realized that I wanted to take the risk now to get into something entrepreneurial. I had the ability to. But I remember walking around every single day when I first got to Atlanta, literally just giving myself affirmations that I'm going to make it. I'm going to be an owner of 500 units. I'm going to find this next big deal. I felt like as soon as I got out there, it was one of the hottest markets we'd ever faced. I was second guessing myself constantly of, is there still deals out here? Is it still possible? Is it really going to work? That took a lot of resilience to continue to convince myself that I was making the right decision. And eventually one popped. But it took over a year of really searching before the momentum started. And then even from there, you have the trials of not every deal is perfect. I know on podcasts, everyone likes to talk about the fairytale deals that they do, but there's definitely all kinds of challenges that happen. Your occupancy decreases, you have all kinds of tenant issues, you have things that you don't dig up there in due diligence, you miss, and you have to learn from that later. Right? So there's all kinds of, you know, it's definitely a. It's definitely a roller coaster in a sense. And it's definitely been, you know, very consuming of my time and mental energy in terms of the, you know, the amount of input I've given towards real estate to get here.

Yeah, man. Well, yeah, it is. It is a marathon. So, you know, anybody that's listening, you know, a lot of people, they. They get started and they stumble. They don't get through that first year that you got through. Same thing it took my partner and I, you know, we started our partnership in 2015. We syndicated our first deal in August of 2016. And, you know, it was. It was about a year that it went. Went down there. And you're, you know, it's. You feel like you're just literally banging your head against the wall as you do that. You talked about investing in your education. Can you talk about the importance of that component to get you to that first big success? Yeah.

So I'm a big believer in investing into education, be it in the form of mentorship, be it in the form of online courses. I'm also a pretty avid reader. So time, energy, money, investing, everything early into education, I think especially when you're younger. And it doesn't have to be age that can be just in your career. I think you should. Any money that you have, right. If you have, say, only $50,000 to your name, you should not be focused on spending 50 grand on a single family rental property. Because that $300 a month, I promise you, is not going to save your life or make life that much better. Right. What's going to change the quality of your life is the investment that you make back into yourself to figure out how you can increase your income or create a business, whatever that might be. I really think that it stems down to finding a way to first make sufficient enough income, be it through a business or advancing further in your career. And the best way to do that is to invest into an education. I started off with a leadership coach from the John C. Maxwell organization, and that was super helpful for me growing in my career to get to management position. And along the way, I invested into public speaking training. I did Toastmasters. I was constantly reading. And then when I got into multifamily, I invested into a mentor very closely with Vinny Chopra. And at that time, I didn't even know if he was doing a lot of mentorship at that time because he wasn't as widely open. But I said, hey, I'd love to learn from you. Let's do something together and invest it into his mentorship. And I, I spent. Funny story is I actually spent. It was like 6,500 bucks to go visit Grant Cardone. Must have been three years ago, because I was a fan of his mindset and his outlook on investing. And I basically said, hey, listen, I'm considering making this decision to go all in on multifamily. Is it really worth my time? I sat down with him, and I sat down with one other guy who was mentor to me, another guy who was worth 100 million at the Time and I had to hear it from people that were further down the road than I was to make me realize I wasn't crazy to take this leap and to invest all my time into the vehicle. And after conversation with them and the conversation with the others that I had, I really was able to say, okay, let's go all in. Let's not hold anything back.

I love it, man. Yeah, I still listen to Grant when I need a little bit, need to get fired up a little bit. I went to his event about 18 months ago now and it's, it's amazing what he's built. It really is. So he's, he's a little rah rah for me. But he, again, like, if I'm like, oh, like this is a grind, I'll fire up one of his books. And you don't even need. I listen to stuff at one and a half speed. I don't, I don't have to with him. I listen to it a regular speed.

Early on. Yeah, I don't go through quite as much anymore, but every now and then I'll revisit it. But yeah, early on the 10x or the be obsessed, those were just books that helped really open my eyes up.

Yeah, man. So you got a couple different businesses. Tell the audience about Equity Tree and how that came to be and what it is.

So Equity Tree is a software platform that essentially is an investor management system or investor management portal. As for those that are in the business you're probably familiar with. For those that aren't, it's basically a portal where principals or sponsorship groups, just like what Next Level has and what I have, we will invest into a software that then gives our passive investors almost like an online banking account, similar to when they log into a Vanguard where they can kind of scroll through and decide which investments they'd like to place offers on and be able to view any of their updates on their performance on their previous deals. This is something that's been neat. It's my first technology venture, so it's definitely been quite a learning experience. But I definitely really enjoy especially the product development and the ongoing building out. Something that I think is going to serve a quality purpose for the real estate community. Katerina started the project with the vision of helping her joint venture partners. And when I saw the. I saw what she had been putting together as I'd known her for several years, I said, well, this looks like something that could also open up doors for different people that are in the syndication world. I was spending 15,000 a year on software at that time. And I said, well, we need to create something that's much more affordable and we can put it in the hands of all these people that are earlier on or just don't want to getting sick of writing checks that large for this stuff. That's what we did. We've been live for several months now and it's been off to a great start. We're helping a lot of people through raises as we speak, using it for myself as well. And it's been a really good experience.

That's awesome, man. I love it. I've checked it out, we've talked about that. I encourage anybody listening if they're looking for a platform to reach out to Dylan. We'll have all that in the show notes. So with requity, Dylan, tell us a little bit about your strategy, maybe some of your recent deals that you've been looking at and how Covid has affected the whole process this year.

Yeah, so the big picture strategy is really focused on deals that are relatively simple, that have in place cash flow, that have some kind of a value add component and are quality risk adjusted returns. We're not swinging for the fences on anything that's ultra high risk and we're also not doing anything that's there's no more meat on the bone in a sense. Right. We want to really thrive off active management in the form of active asset management, in some cases active property management in addition to asset management. So that's the big picture as far as what we're looking for on the deals that we're targeting. And we're primarily going to be working with investors, so doing deals that are sizable enough to work with a large group of investors. I've been all multifamily up to this point. I'm also taking a strong interest and strong liking and making a lot of action in the mobile home park space. I have a few projects I'm working on right now and plan to really continue to grow and hopefully thrive in that space. The reason being I thought I was going to be in apartments forever and that that was the only thing I would ever touch. But as life goes on and experiences come up, then we change our views. And in this case I just think that multifamily. It's been almost a year since I've done a deal and I really never thought that would happen. I was doing a lot of deals each year and then the markets continued to get more heated up and cap rates have continued to compress and it's hard for me to make sense of a lot of the opportunities out there and I will continue to do multifamily. I'm definitely not being a niche naysayer and I'm sure there's been plenty of good deals out there in the last year. I just haven't been seeing as many that have got wet my appetite, so to speak. But I think when it comes to the mobile home park space, I think there's more breathing room as a whole right now in the sense of I think going in cash flows or especially after the value add, the yield on these is very high. I think when people really understand how these deals work, I actually go to argue that I think they're actually less risky. Obviously it's a deal by deal basis. There's very risky ones and there's very risky apartments. But I think as a whole, if you can get into that kind of your bread and butter, which long term is taking a deal, adding value to it and then eventually having a tenant owned home in a quality complex somewhere in the country, at that point they own the home. There's over a 95% retention rate. You're really just running a ground lease. You can have a really well managed community and you can have very fitting demographics of either workforce, families or retirees that really are going to be happy to live there and pay consistently. I really like the model and I really think that it can offer one of the best risk adjusted returns. And I'm working with an experienced partner. I think it's very important for me, especially working with some investors, is that I have experience on my team. My partner's done about 50 million on the mobile home side. I've done 50 million on the multifamily side. So together we're able to bring unique perspectives to the table. That's what I've been very excited about lately.

Awesome, man. No, I love it. I was visiting my uncle in Colorado last year and he lives in between Aspen and Glenwood Springs. We were driving to Aspen one day and we're talking about affordable housing and the crisis in this country. I pointed out the mobile homes. I said that's the solution, right? And I think you're right. I mean, you look at different areas in different parts of the country and there are a lot of similarities with mobile homes and multifamily and the aspect of the ownership side is something that is different. And again, there's a lot of cool things going on in that space. And again, we need to get creative when it comes to how we're going to make things affordable for people.

Yeah, it's very similar to the C class, multifamily, the workforce stuff in the sense of the resident base that you're serving. You're usually just serving different groups that have a little bit different appetites. Some value the homeownership aspects of it, but you know, very, very similar sort of a mission in terms of being able to solve a problem. And I think, you know, I think there's always a little bit of a stigma that kind of scares people off about it. It's also hard to self manage these or to find a quality third party manager. So I think that also kind of keeps a barrier to entry. But yeah, I think as a whole the affordability crisis is going to be an ongoing issue. So it's good to be able to provide those solutions and I think we're always going to be secure in those pockets.

Yeah, man, I love it. Well, you're throwing me a little bit of a challenge today, Dylan. So we always ask our guests, if you can go back to your 25 year old self and give them one piece of advice, what would it be? But I'm going to change it up a little bit for you. So if you could go back, you're still in college, you're 20 years old, I think you were still in College at 20 years old, is that right? You're just about to do that and you're thinking, okay, what do I do here now? You've already been through it. What would you give yourself or what advice would you give yourself back then? At age 20 when you're making this.

Decision, it's difficult to completely put myself back in my old self shoes because I wouldn't be the person I am without taking the journey that I've taken. But if I knew that I was going to go on the same path that I'm going on, I would have not spent time going into other spaces and dabbling with single family or going to work for mostly a residential company at the time. And I would have really honed in on the vehicle. I think that's where people miss. I think there's a lot of uncertainty at first for anyone getting into real estate. It's what vehicle do I take? Real estate is such a broad field. There are hundreds of different ways you can make a career out of real estate and many of them are all lucrative. There's no wrong answer, but I think you need to choose one and not necessarily go and dabble. Well, you might want to dabble for a little bit and Kind of figure out what actually resonates with you. Right. But for me, once I was able to find the vehicle I was ready to sink my teeth into and stick with, I think the sooner you can do that, the better. So I probably would have told myself back then at the time, admittedly, I probably would have finished up school and been learning massively at the same time, because I would have, I knew at 20 years old it would be very tough to go and buy a large apartment building. And I think I would have just been focused on my learning and education, both in school but also out of school. And I probably would have seen what I could do to find a mentor that I could work with in the summers and during any downtime to underwrite deals for, to handle due diligence for and basically find some sort of an apprenticeship that would be serving for me. That way, by the time I'm 23, 24, I have ample experience under my belt and then, you know, I'm ready to launch and do it bigger in the future. Right. So I would have, I probably would have stayed in school, looking back, if I knew this was my vehicle, I knew this was my plan, and then I would have found an apprentice or an apprenticeship of some sort.

I love it. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's one of the big pieces of advice we always give out, which is find a mentor. Find somebody that's done what you've done, that you can model. And I know a lot of people are sitting here shaking their heads thinking, oh man, the guy's so young still. He's still, he's done a phenomenal job. Such an inspiring story, Dylan.

I want to hear that too. Just because the school part too, of the. Why I say that because we're talking about this reform, I think that's because I'm in such a finance driven profession. That's the only reason why I would say for the most part, if I was an online marketer, there'd be pointless, right. There'd be no reason for me to stay in school. But the world, I mean, it is commercial real estate, right. So I've, I've had to, you know, I've invested in a CCIM classes and all these different, you know, real estate finance classes. So I would have stayed in school just to get a lot of the basic, you know, finance terminology and understanding down that. So that, that's, it's more specific to the niche that I'm in.

That's awesome. I mean, again, that's great advice and I think you know, that's kind of a nice overlay. Going back to the education side, I'm not anti education. You're not anti education. I mean, far to the contrary, we've talked about how much money we've been. I mean, I've invested tens of thousands of dollars in programs and courses and well over six figures. But it's about being focused on looking for the ROI and what you're going to do. And I think it's such a Challenge if you're 18, it's like, oh, go to college, get a job, get an education, get a job. Well, what about having an apprenticeship, figuring out what you want to do and deciding like you've done to be targeted and focused on getting the dollars back for where you've invested those. Well, again, inspiring story, Dylan. I really appreciate you sharing all this with the audience. If people have been listening and they say, oh, I want to learn more about equity tree, your platform or you're investing opportunities with requity, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

So you can Visit the website therequitygroup.com that's the Equity with an R beforegroup.com and on there I have a link to EquityTree which is EquityTree IO and you can also find me on any most major. You can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn and you can also shoot me an email@dylanherquitygroup.com I'm happy to jump on a call and chat with anyone about anything. Don't be a stranger. Definitely feel free to reach out.

Awesome, man. We're going to put it all in the show notes. If you're listening, please go on, subscribe and like if you haven't already, leave some comments. Reach out to Dylan. Dylan, thank you so much for all the value you've provided to our audience and look forward to catching up with you again soon, my friend.

Thanks so much, Chris. It's a pleasure.