369: Escaping the Day-to-Day Grind to Work ON Your Business with Jefferson Lilly

This is the BiggerPockets podcast show 369.

I've kind of gone through what I call Mobile Home Park 1.0 to now. Mobile Home Park 2.0. 1.0 is, you know, you're doing everything yourself. I'm now and for several years have been at mobile Home Park 2.0 where I do directly almost nothing with the properties, but I have to now hire and manage and incentivize people.

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What's going on, everyone? This is Brandon Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with a slightly different type of show today with my co hosts, plural, Mr. David Green and Mr. Ryan Murdoch. Ryan's joining me in the sea shed. David's over there in California. What's up, guys?

It's amazing seeing the command post from this side of the screen. Yeah, this is a new perspective for me. Yeah, appreciate you guys. Let me tag along today.

Yeah, we're.

Treat whenever we get the mercenary in studio with us.

I like it.

It was a full house today.

It was a full house today. And we brought Ron Ryan today. One because he was like sitting outside my window with like his face pushed against the glass puppy dog. Because he knew we were going to be talking with Jefferson Lilly today. Jefferson Lilly is a real estate investor who actually got me excited about mobile home parks in the beginning. He was the first one introduced me to the idea. Then Ryan got excited about it and we've learned a lot. And we're actually buying a property right now, actually a couple of them from Jefferson. So we thought it'd be kind of a cool show to bring them in, talk about kind of what we're doing. But this show goes a lot deeper than just mobile home parks and this fact, we talk a lot about moving, what he calls moving from 1.0 to 2.0, which means working in your business to on your business. So whether you're buying your first property or your hundredth property, you're doing a million dollar fund or a $30,000 house hack, it doesn't matter. You're going to learn a lot about how to kind of transition in your investing phase and your investor cycle to kind of the next level. Very cool stuff today. So stay tuned for all of that. And before we get to that, though, let's get to. Today's.

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No, definitely not.

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And now it's time to get in today's show. Anything we got to cover before we bring in Jefferson? I feel like I dominated this intro. I didn't let you guys talk at all here.

You dominate everything. The dominate.

You watch me on the basketball court, I'll dominate. No, I. I don't even know how to shoot basketball. David texted me the other day and the text just said, I had a dream last night I was a basketball player. I've been dreaming a lot about basketball lately. It's like, oh, we haven't talked about that, but what's up, David? Are you considering a career?

You want to get into that now? This is like the deep, dark depths of my soul. I don't think we have time to get into it now. Maybe we'll do a Facebook live about that or something.

Maybe we will. This is awesome, man. All right, well, without further ado, let's get to the interview with Jefferson Lilly. Jefferson, welcome back to the bigger pockets podcast, man. A3 Peter, glad to have you here.

Third time's a charm. We'll get it right this time, Brandon.

That we Will. And today we brought in a special guest, of course, Mr. Ryan Murdoch, sitting here next to me, along with David Green. And the reason why is because as we talked about and probably mentioned in the introduction, we're actually in process, Ryan and I, of buying a couple mobile home parks from you right now. Which is funny because you're the one who taught me about mobile home parks like years ago when you were on the show the first time.

Yeah.

You were the, the impetus. Is that the word?

I think so.

Okay.

Yeah. Have you bought any, anything from any of your other guests? I have any other assets?

I don't think so. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a guest before. So this is the first. So.

Anyway, the reason why that's cool and the reason why I think that's so neat is because it showcases like that kind of investor life cycle where like when you bought those, you were at a certain phase of your business, you grew them to a certain point and now you're ready to sell them, move on to something else. So we're going to buy them from here, take them further and someday we'll sell them and probably sell them to a random other guest or something. You know, like, it doesn't mean like I think that's important. Yeah. Okay.

There you go. That's that, that's that. It's so cool because like it's not always a win lose in real estate. It literally can be like, hey, this benefits you at this point in your career, benefits us at this point and it benefits somebody else later on down the road. And so real estate moves in these ebbs and flows. That's kind of a lot of fun. So I like that.

Yeah, yeah, we're, we're happy with it. So I hope you are good. Should be, should be great. You can have me back on for a fourth time in another couple of. You can, you can talk about how the deals have done and.

It'Ll be awesome. Yeah, it's fun. So just, just throw it out there. Everybody listening is like, you don't like, like you can seek win. Wins in any kind of real estate thing. Especially like I find, especially when you're dealing with like buying from investors. Like different investors have different parts, you know, like we bought that mobile home park from your friend Ed.

Yeah.

So Ryan had a friend named Ed. We bought his mobile home park. Ed's great. He's still investing, but at his point he wasn't prepared. He like, he didn't want to do the, were willing to do so Instead, he just ended up carrying the contract on it and he made, yeah, win, win. He makes passive income now. And we got ourselves our first park like a year and a half ago. So, anyway, cool. All right, well, let's get into this before we talk. Like, you know, we can go through mobile home park stuff. We can go through a lot of stuff today. But before we get all that, can you give us a big, I mean, a quick introduction? Who are you? How did you get into real estate in the beginning? Like, what was your very first deal?

Yeah, so I got into it. Well, really, it was sort of 15 years ago. I think it was 2005. I was just thinking about it. I working in high tech. I was on, I think at that point about my second of what would be three different startups. And I was just looking for some passive income. And I thought, hey, I'm a big fan of Warren Buffett. I love value. I want to stay within my circle of competence, whatever that was. But I figured I would buy an apartment building just because that was all I knew. I figured I had always lived in a house or an apartment building. Let me buy an apartment building, I'll fix it up, maybe some new kitchens, new roof, make it better for the tenants, make it better for me. And then just in going online, like at LoopNet, I kept looking for apartment, well, multifamily, and there'd be these 1 in 100 mobile home park things. And I just say, like, that's absurd. I'm not buying a frigging mobile home park. And I delete the search result and look again and again. Peoria, Illinois. Lubbock, Texas, Ames, Iowa. These things kept popping up that were priced better.

Anyway. So I got hit over the head several times, but then finally just decided to look into it. So I had my day job at that time. I never at any point was so taken with mobile home parks that I just said, hey, I'm giving up all the sexy Silicon Valley stock options and I'm going to go do parks. But I ended up. It then took about a year and a half from when I started getting educated about parks. Took just 17 months, I think, until I closed on my first deal. But even then I still had my day job, which I think is a great way to transition into real estate. The income from that first property wouldn't at that point quite have really been enough to support me, but it was a significant chunk of passive income anyway. Then eventually. So I moved on to a third startup. And I could see after about a year that that third startup wasn't doing real well, but my mobile home park was doing reasonably well and I was putting virtually no time or money into it. So at that point I had the confidence and left the day job, as it were, and got into real estate and then invested some more money in that property, built it up, improved the cash flow further, ended up buying a second park. And here I am 12 years later. I think I'm now up to 30 parks and we've got one more under contract and a second hope under contract this Friday. So we'll see how quickly I can get to 32.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Can you walk people through real quick? And I know we covered this in the first episode that we did with you back on episode. I don't remember.

262, 111.

Oh no, 111 was the first. You're right. 111 and then 262. So 111 we could really cover it is like, why mobile home bars? Can we give you a quick just under. Like what appealed to you about that? Besides them just being cheaper and popping up on LoopNet?

Yeah. So part of it was price, but then really at least as much was just kind of structurally why this is such a compelling niche, which I'm sure you've now found getting into it yourself, Brandon. But a couple of quick things. So first, the supply curve is actually shrinking. It's effectively illegal to build any new mobile home parks, zoning laws, density, other things have been changed. So even if it's not literally illegal in your city or county, it's almost certainly not economically feasible. And then about. So the supply curve right there would be fixed, but about 1% of these get plowed under every year and become redeveloped into some higher and better use. So the supply curve is actually king. My estimate is about 1% a year. Demand continues at 1% a year. Just as population grows, same demand for apartments and multimillion dollar houses and in general grows about 1%. The interesting thing about this business shrinking though is when say 1% of the mobile home parks get redeveloped every year, those mobile homes have to go somewhere and they're infilling the remaining mobile home parks. So the fact that the supply curve is shrinking actually creates its own roughly 1% demand. Plus just as population grows, there's another 1% demand growth. So it's probably about a 3% supply demand imbalance between again, growing demand about 2% a year, shrinking supply about 1. The other interesting thing I think about shrinking supply and just that you can't build these anymore is that frankly what gets a lot of real estate is get over leveraged. They get into a property and then 10 more developers come and open self storage units or apartments or build office towers all within one mile of the property. So in the boom times in virtually every other kind of real estate you get overbuilding and you can get then frankly a lot of people going bankrupt because of excessive price competition. So that doesn't happen here because there is, there is no over building. So it's just a very, very stable business. And then secondly, I'll just mention again, most of our tenants own those mobile homes. So all those things that cause all of us landlords headaches, which usually are the proverbial leaky toilets and leaky roofs, almost all of those maintenance responsibilities are on the tenants because the tenants own almost all the homes. So you have reduced repair and maintenance expenses. Plus again you actually have a more responsible tenant base than your typical apartment renter. These folks don't live in a house as nice as you and I do, but they do own that home. They do have, by and large they do have an ownership mentality rather than a renter's mentality. So you've got really a better quality tenant base, lower repair and maintenance expenses and a fairly favorable competitive dynamic with your competition slowly but surely going away. There we just summarized episode 111. There it is, done.

Let me ask you Jefferson, a lot of our listeners are newer investors and they're trying to figure out which niche would be right for them. Can you share a little bit of. In your experience of working in mobile home parks, what type of person or what type of mindset tends to gravitate towards this and do better?

That's an interesting question. So I've never worked in any other real estate niche so it's hard to do a comparison and say hey, you know, this is so different than self storage or office or what have you. My general sense is again, this is not sexy. So folks that tend to like to be able to about owning a sexy gleaming office tower or brand new hotel or what have you, this wouldn't be the thing for them. What's sexy about this business is the cash flow, it's not the properties. Let's be frank, there are very few sexy looking mobile home parks. Somebody who's comfortable, I think, thinking outside the box and again not afraid to roll up their sleeves. And we can talk a little bit about this, but I've kind of gone through what I call Mobile Home Park 1.0 to now Mobile Home Park 2.0. 1.0 is. You're doing everything yourself. You're scheduling the plumber. You're answering the tenant calls, you're putting the ads up on Facebook and Craigslist for your property. I'm now and for several years have been at mobile Home Park 2.0, where I do directly almost nothing with the properties. But I have to now hire and manage and incentivize people and have systems in place so that people who work for me do all that. And that's a fairly big leap going from managing properties, managing people. In a way, it's almost like being in a separate business.

I'd say it's a big leap going from having no rental properties at all to buying a mobile home park. I mean, that's a big step. A lot of people go with a single family home or a duplex or a small multi family that's close to them. You went from, from no rental properties to a mobile home park. And I don't know the size or the distance away from you, but how did, how did, what did that look like and what kind of systems did you have to build out and what kind of mistakes and things that you learned from that?

So I made pretty much every mistake in the book.

I bought a park with a sewage lagoon and well water.

Good times.

That's the bad news. The good news is it's all up and to the right from there. It doesn't get any uglier than that. But yeah, so, you know, I got started doing everything myself. Well, first off, I got educated. So, you know, I started reading books. I built up an unofficial advisory board of about 10 guys that were already in the business. And so I was, you know, bouncing deals off and they would give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I did attend the mobile home park boot camp. The original founders, not that the original founders were.

Two other guys.

Steve and Corey. Anyway, so I got educated that way and just started meeting other park owners and again, reading all the material that I could and there's a lot more of it out there now. I got as educated as I could. I bounced deals off folks and finally found one that seemed to pencil out and that my advisors thought was decent. Again, in retrospect, I would not advise buying a park on private utilities, at least not for your first park. But anyway, that's what I cut my teeth on. And so I was traveling out to the park. It's in Oklahoma City. I'm here in San Francisco, that's obviously 12, 1500 miles away. So I had an on site manager. I was also traveling out there and living on site one out of about every three weeks as I was bringing in houses. I was my own general contractor. I would bring an air mattress and my toothbrush and some breakfast cereal and milk for the fridge, provided the house again was hooked up to electricity and had running water. I would sleep in the park for about one week out of every three. I did that for a couple of waves. But it was a total of about a year that I was effectively living site 1/3 time and just being my own contractor, general contractor. Getting the plumber to do this and getting the guy to grade the roads and getting the painter to paint and overseeing all that. And then I come back to San Francisco and make more phone calls and find more houses to buy. I was buying mobile homes and bringing them in, infilling some vacant pads and obviously improving my cash flow. So anyway, that's kind of how I got into it. I didn't even. I got started just doing my own QuickBooks. We've now evolved to manager. We now have someone else who posts ads. We have someone else who does that sort of general contracting, asset management work. But again, I'm operating at a much larger scale than that first park. It was only about 66 pads and it was only about 2/3 full when I bought it anyway. So that's kind of how I got into it again, starting with the day job. So most of that live on site was really in the second year. The first year I wasn't doing too much. I was still working the day job and just kind of seeing how things went with the park before making that switch to doing it full time.

So there's a couple things I want to dig into here because this is cool. First of all, you mentioned, actually let me go here first, that going from version 1.0 to 2.0, I think that that is a theme that applies across the board. Whether you're buying home parks, single family houses, duplex, whatever that I work in the business to working on the business. Can we talk that transition for a little bit? So how did you first of all, like, why did you make that shift? And then what's the beginning? How does somebody who's listening to the show right now, I mean, there's people listening to the show right now who have headphones in. They're at their rental property right now. They just got finished yelling at a contractor and now they're painting a wall right now as they listen to this and they're laughing now because I'm calling them out like, and I did this for a decade. So like. And I'm not, I'm not all the way over it sometimes. How do you go from that to. I don't even deal mostly with the day to day of the properties. I got people that handle all that, like, what's that transition look like?

Yeah. So I wish I had done it faster. That's kind of one of my greatest regrets is I'm doing the right things. It's just taken me too long to get where I am and I just should have done things faster. But it started off, I think in about month four or five of operating that first mobile home park when I said, okay, I really hate putting numbers into QuickBooks. And I went, I think on Craigslist and found somebody to do my QuickBooks. I still wasn't at the level of rent manager or that sort of real multifamily accounting system. But that again was somewhere around four or five months into my first deal. I outsourced the accounting. I think probably within that first year. I also found somebody to be putting up ads like on Craigslist back then, more than Facebook. So I outsourced kind of pieces of it and then frankly hiring somebody else to be an asset manager, really sort of a general contractor and super property manager, a manager of the managers. That didn't happen until about five years ago when I started raising outside capital and really started growing. And so at that point we hired somebody from within the business, I think off Indeed.com, but we found somebody that had been trained and had spent almost, I think almost a decade working for some of the largest mobile home park operators. And so we hired her to come work for us. Now with my new fund, I've done basically the same thing. Hired a guy who again has some fairly deep multifamily and actually self storage experience to come work for me. It's easier. Those are six figure heads. It's not like you're getting somebody at minimum wage to really drive your properties towards full potential. But with a fund.

This fund is right around 15 million. Cumulatively, I've raised about 35 million. It's not that money's no object, but when you have that level of funding, frankly you can afford and you have to afford to start bringing in quote unquote, real help to help grow the properties. So anyway, it was impression I like this.

The definition of 1.0, 1.0 is doing it and 2.0 is managing others and providing others opportunity to do it, you know, pretty much. And Brandon was, Brandon was kind of laughing at me because this is my life right now. I'd say 80% of our talks are just, I can't do this. This is hard. You know, it's hard enough to learn how to be really good at something, but it's ten times harder when you're trying to get, get someone else to do it to your standard in your way. So I think, I mean if you're, if you're at that point trying to make this transition, I know these listeners 100% are relating, they're just on the edge of their seat to hear this. And if you're not there yet, you're going to get there. So this is good stuff for you to start hearing, to prepare for. This is exactly the problem that I'm having is you'll, I either get newbies who come and they say, hey, I want to work for you and learn everything there is to learn. Which is great, but it doesn't necessarily help you in your position where you're managing a fund and your investors are expecting a performance. And what you've done is what, what I've heard you say is I found people that had experience and you're willing to pay. But I think what I'd like to know is can you walk us through the process of what they said that made you stand out and recognize, oh, this person could be good what you were looking for, how you knew this is the guy. I'm willing to pay six figures for the gal as opposed to giving someone a chance and seeing how it goes.

Yeah. So for us it was basically just hiring and really only interviewing people that had already been in the business business and then just figuring out a little bit about cultural fit and a little bit about still the experience level. So there's some people, for instance, that are asset managers in this business that really have never done anything other than sit in front of a spreadsheet. So we'd ask questions like how many mobile home parks have you actually visited for your company? And sometimes we'd hear like, oh yeah, last year my manager took me out for one day and we looked at one of the properties close to headquarters.

I was like, so what do you do with your time? Well, I'm analyzing the variances, the rental variances, the utility collections. So for us that's valuable, but that's not going to be a full time job for a still relatively small fund like ours. The big equity lifestyle and yes, communities and other big publicly traded REITs with, with hundreds of properties can afford to have somebody that's really a financial analyst, even though their title is asset manager. So we weeded out those people and then you'll have some asset managers that again, don't. They're a little bit more like a cheerleader. They're like running programs and trying to get all the managers to clean up their communities or get the most number of outside move ins, that kind of thing. But they still haven't necessarily like hired, trained, fired a manager, hired a subsequent manager, or changed a compensation plan for a manager. I call those kind of folk coaches. So what we need, being relatively small, need that coach, asset manager, somebody that's gotten traction, hired, fired managers, changed compensation plans, that kind of thing. We don't need a cheerleader who's sending out emails saying, Hey, $500 bonus for whoever has the most outside move ins. We need more than that, some of that, but more than that. And again, we're not yet at the level of needing anybody at least full time to do financial analysis. We will likely be hiring somebody to do that here in Q1 of this year, part time anyway. So we're really looking for folks that have that sort of coach mentality that can change the players on the field. They've done that already, frankly. That means we're taking less of a chance, you know, less of us see how, you know, see how it works out. Presumably we're hiring somebody that's actually done all that, proven they can do it, and they just come right in and hit the ground running with us.

You know, I struggle a lot when I'm hiring because I, you know, what I'm trying to do the last year, to put it in the terms you described today, which I like, is I'm trying to build a 2.0 business from the ground up, which is hard because most people start with the 1.0 and then they build in. But I'm like, okay, well what do I need to have a 2.0 from right now? So I hired like four people right off the bat and brought in a bunch of partners like Ryan here is one of them. And we're, we're building this thing. But here's what I struggle with in doing this. Do I hire for heart and for passion and for culture Fit and they're just great, but they have no experience in mobile home parks at all. But they're just like, they're perfect for, like, I love them on the team or do I hire for they. They've been working in mobile home parks for 20 years. They get this. They can teach me how to run things. I struggle with that. At Bigger Pockets, when we're hiring people at Bigger Pockets, do you hire for experience more or culture fit more and let them learn the skills or you hire for skill and let them learn the culture more?

The latter more. Hiring for skills. Culture is certainly important. And like what you guys are doing at Bigger Pockets, you've got I don't know how many dozens and dozens of employees now.

Are you over on 30 something? I think we're like 30 something.

30 something. And you're all kind of. You're all kind of in an office there in Denver, right? Yeah.

All under one room and a couple others.

Yeah. Okay.

We get. We get to stay in Hawaii. It's pretty fun.

I know you were on the beach in Hawaii working hard.

Yeah, working.

Brandon, the owner is working in Hawaii. Working hard on his tan. No, sorry. Working on the collections. This show. That's what he's working.

I'm here just to keep him on track.

Yeah.

I let Ryan do the work in the back.

Yes, there we go.

But no. So my organization, for better or for worse, is fairly remote. Speak. I'm here in San Francisco. Frankly, I'm kind of like the or one of the few guys in San Francisco that knows anything about mobile home parks. If this were all software and social networking and chip design, I would have a deep bench of folks to hire. So I don't. But I like living here. Coincidentally though, our business, the mobile home park business, has really always sort of been tri headquartered. The big companies have always been in Denver, where you are in Detroit or in Chicago. So my asset manager is from Denver and he lives and works there. And I anticipate as. And then of course, our managers are all on site wherever the properties are, which is now South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas and Idaho in my new fund. And then we're in about 12 other states with my previous funds. But anyway, for better or for worse, frankly, I think we've had less of a culture simply because we're all remote. Then when you have a whole company and a literal and figurative water cooler to gather around. We've never had a company meeting where absolutely everybody that works for me has been together under the same roof at one time. That would mean flying in all the managers from Wyoming and from Wisconsin and from New York state and whatnot. So anyway, so, you know, I certainly want to build a culture of accountability and I want people to have fun, but at the same time, when everybody's working remotely, at least for me at this stage.

I'm more about hiring for somebody who can actually deliver results rather than somebody who's specifically a cultural fit. And then I've got to train them on how to do what they need to do.

Hey, do you offer any equity in your deals or in your fund or GP for your asset managers or your people or are you sole owner? Basically, how do you structure incentives, I guess is what I'm curious about.

Yeah, so no, there isn't equity that gets a little sticky. It's not an impossibility. But so what we do is we do allow folks to actually write a check and invest in our fund if they choose to. Folks that are employees and folks that are employees of a company don't have to be accredited to invest if they're a full time employee, really regardless of what their net worth is, they can invest. Yeah, so we're a 506 fund and so Park Avenue can only take accredited investors as far as the true pure investors all have to be accredited. But again, yeah, our own employees can invest if they choose anyway. But we do pay, we pay out bonuses. That is mostly geared around occupancy. What drives our basically, very simplistically, there are two things that drive our profitability. It's bumping rents and it's then getting homes occupied, getting lots occupied, be it either through renovating a house that's already there or buying say a new house from a factory and trucking it in. Frankly, we don't need an asset manager to just put out a notice that says, hey, your lot rent has gone from 295 to 315. So we don't compensate our people.

Based on rents. We do based on occupancy. Every house that comes in between our manager, our on site manager and our asset manager, we're paying out a low four figure bonus for every house that comes in. Right now, again, we're growing, but so far we've got, call it 110 vacant pads. So that's not going to get filled across our portfolio, across six properties. And we're about to close. Well, I think in about another six weeks. We're about to close on a property that's quite large but has approximately 100 vacancies anyway. So that'll be say 200 vacancies at a couple thousand in bonus. That's potentially 3 to $400,000 of bonus to pay out within my organization. That's not going to happen in one year. I mean, if it did that'd be great. I'd happily pay it. But realistically that's going to be spread out across probably a four or five year infill process. And I'm sure we'll buy additional properties and have additional offers, opportunities for our employees to earn money. But the real heavy lifting, getting a crew to actually renovate that house and get the mover to move in a new house. Did he level it? Oh, he gotta call the mover back to re level the house and submit the invoice. Cause it cracked in the back bedroom and it was 300 bucks to get the roof crack fixed when the mover moved it. And then you gotta advertise it and get people to come in and you know, there's a fair amount of heavy lifting with the business. I think still less than apartments, but there's certainly, certainly upfront at the infill. There's a fair amount of heavy lifting in this business if you've got properties with vacant baths. So again, we pay out significant bonuses to managers that can do that. We also promote managers. We've had two particularly good managers, including the one there at the property you're buying from us, whom we've promoted to be a regional manager. So we give them some additional pay and additional responsibility to help us in turn manage other managers. So getting that sort of upward career trajectory for folks also helps compensate them. They get compensated on infilling others as well. But they also just get the psychic benefit then of being promoted of managing then other people. They get that experience. That's cool. So that's another thing we've done for some of our best managers.

That's cool.

One of my buddies is AJ Osborne. He was on the podcast a while back, but he's one of the larger self storage operators in the US him and his family own a ton of self storage. But he mentioned to me that his entire leadership team of his company, he's got a large company, lots of employees, his entire like VP team or like leadership team, they all came from like ground level at their company. Like one guy was like the maintenance guy at a random storage unit. And like over the, over the last 10 years or whatever, they've just like certain people have proven themselves and they promote from within and they give people opportunity to excel. And I just, when I heard that I was like, I love that idea. So it's very cool to hear you doing the same thing. Is promoting from within to encourage, to encourage growth and growth mindset between with employees.

That's cool.

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Can we you mentioned the the fund. You know you Have a fund. Can you go through the difference real quick between a fund and a syndication? And I know I'm hogging all the questions here today from Ryan and David here, but like why fund? What's the difference? And why did you choose a fund?

Yeah, so I think what you mean by syndication is when you raise money just for single deal. And we call that deal by deal. Yes, that's syndication. I still consider raising money in a fund. Syndication, fundamentally syndicator is anybody that raises money from others to buy real estate or other assets and split the profits. We like the fund model really is kind of for an investor, the difference between a sort of traditional one property syndication and what we do is the difference between buying a stock and buying a mutual fund. So we are a focused, if you will, mutual fund. We only buy mobile home parks. But the advantage then for our investors is that they get geographic and deal diversification. For instance, if you do a traditional syndication, you invest in one property and heaven forbid something goes wrong, you could get hit with a capital call like, hey, we just need to come up with another quarter million bucks to fix the sewage System. And you're 20%, and so you gotta write a $50,000 check to help fix that property. Again, we've got a fund. Our first fund here in the new partnership's about 15 million. We may, well, we'll certainly keep, I would guess about 5% of that in cash. 7,50,000, we may go upwards of 10%. That would be a million and a half. So I can't guarantee that we would never do a capital call, but it's highly unlikely when you're in a fund, and again, they're liquid reserves. Plus I'd say within a year the fund might well be cash flowing. A million and a half or more a year. Call it 100 some odd thousand a month. When you operate at that level of scale and something is bad and you've got a quarter million dollar whoopsie, it's just a lot easier to cover that, take some cash off the balance sheet or just earn out that money unless it's an absolute emergency, just earn it out over two or three months. There's your quarter million bucks. Maybe suspend a dividend for a quarter, which we've not had to do, but you could, and then just take care of it that way. And our investors get a lot more diversification and a greatly reduced risk that we would ever have to go back to them for a capital cost. And then frankly, we as a fund, the advantage for me is I Just closed again. I bought six properties this year. They've all been at reasonable prices for cash quick closings. So we don't write offers that say, hey, if after 45 days we don't have financing but we have a letter from a bank, we get an automatic 30 day extension, blah blah blah. Our offers generally aren't that way. It's just hey, we've got 10 million bucks in the bank. Your property costs two and three quarters. We can do this all cash and we can close in 30 or 45 days. Let's just make sure committing any fraud, let's make sure the rent is there. We'll do a phase one, make sure the property is clean, but we'll just then wire over the money out of our fund. We don't need to deal with the bank.

The first four properties we bought as a portfolio back in June. We just closed on some CM MBS financing last month, borrowing out about 5.25 million against what was a seven and a quarter million dollars acquisition. But we had plenty of cash in the bank. We didn't need the money until about last month, December. So now we've got an extra 5 million in the bank. We've already got our next acquisition lined up that'll probably use up about 3 million of that anyway. So that's the advantage for a fund is you, you can usually get better pricing rather than having to scramble. Our first deal almost fell apart because we had a big investor drop out. But again, as a fund we don't have to scramble. We've just got the cash in the bank and we will just close quickly at a little better price.

Do you find it more challenging to raise money to sit in your fund if you don't have deals lined up to deploy that capital with? Or what does that look like? Do you get pushback from investors like are you going to sit on my money for X amount of months or.

Very little? Frankly what tends to happen is investors that think that way tend to sit on the sidelines until I've bought a deal or two. Our fundraising over this last year grew exponentially and we had almost in the last month prior to closing. So some investors will join, get on the train very late after they already see the fund has made a number of good acquisitions, so be it. But it hasn't seemed to be a major problem. There's a fair amount of interest in space and we've got a pretty good track record. We're very aligned with investor interests. We don't take fees, we're just A straight up split of profits. That's very different. So perfect fund, but there's certainly some telling things about our fund and we've had 100 some odd folks write us checks.

Can you walk me through what the process is like to go from buying your first park to running a fund?

Yeah. So we ended up doing three deal by deals in 2014, and then in 2015 graduated to the fund structure. So it was some of the same investors and it was very similar legal paperwork and we used the same attorney that had advised us on our individual syndication as on the fund. So in that respect, from a process standpoint, the paperwork, what have you, it was really quite similar. What we did start doing roughly at that time was I came on the BiggerPockets podcast and then started my own podcast, which is the mobile home park industry's first podcast, simply called Mobile Home Park Investors. So that started getting us.

Improving our marketing. So then we started getting much more traction, more interest once we were podcasting more. So the marketing probably changed more from individual syndications to fund syndications. The marketing changed more than anything else.

Yeah, it is interesting how podcasting, I mean like podcasting and things like social media, it's like, it's all like new world stuff. Like the old school guys would never even consider podcasting to raise money. Yeah, like, I mean, like I. For the last fund that we did that we like, we, you know, we raised all the money for it. I think we raised, what was it, 4 million bucks, something like that? Yeah, almost 5. Like, I literally put out a thing on Instagram and it was like, not even a post. It was like in the comments on Instagram, I said, hey, got a new 506C fund. If you're interested, link in the bio. And like we filled that thing. I mean, we had, I don't know, I think we have a thousand people on our list right now of accredited investors and we're like, just out of that. Yeah, it's crazy. Like crazy what social media can do. So I would encourage people listening to this. Even if you're not right now raising money, it would not be a bad idea to start developing your. Your presence on social media as, as an expert or as somebody who's, who's trustworthy. Because social media builds trust and credibility in a way that, that previous generations would never even imagine. And it's hard to believe.

Yep, huge.

Hey, Jefferson. So you're raising money that way, I'm wondering. Let's talk about finding deals real quick, because you have a lot of deals. A lot more than we've got, definitely. How are you feeling finding them? I mean, how are you staying competitive? I mean, I'm assuming you're working through brokers, but are you doing also off market stuff? And then how are you staying competitive against those big REITs that can take a 3% return and everyone's happy?

Yeah. So as far as sourcing, that's changed a fair amount now for me in my new Park Avenue partners fund. So so far those six deals and the seventh we have under contract are all off market. There's no broker involved. They were Never up on LoopNet or mobile home Park Store or any of the any website. So we've built network now of some folks that basically just do the heavy lifting for us of phone calling, mailing letters, driving through parks, just literally knock on a door, see if you can find out who the owner is.

That's cool.

Network of folks. Those aren't six figure head employees, those are people that work basis. Several of them are made. It's just not a base salary. It's just, hey, you brought in a good deal, we'll pay you a nice commission on it. And frankly having the podcast and having the website that we do, we do get some people that just send in a lead. So that's great as well. They know we buy mobile home parks and they'll just reach out and let us know. It might be the only time we hear from that person because it's just like, hey, my uncle has got health concerns and he needs to sell his park. But we're happy for those one off leads. And then again, we've got a solid handful of folks working for us that are just, just working the phones. And I'm sure in this new fund we will eventually buy from a broker. We bought a lot from brokers. Probably 2/3 or 3/4 of the deals in my previous funds came from brokers. Again, those deals tend to be priced a little more highly, a little more richly now. So we're making a very concerted effort to source deals in a proprietary and off market way. But there is no panacea, there is no single thing to do that's guaranteed. We kind of do a little bit of everything, brokers and sourcing and sometimes we see things posted like on Craigslist or something.

You never know where you're gonna see a deal.

And then as far as competing, you asked also about competing with the REITs. So we tend to buy deals. Our average deal size has been about two and a half million and that's still fortunately, relatively below the radar screen of most of the big REITs. They're looking for five and certainly $10 million deals.

I hear that advice all the time. When you're trying to avoid the big dogs and whatever thing you're in, you just got to go smaller. And you can go smaller because you're usually running a leaner operation than what they are. You know, I find that when you're competing with people that are doing things at a big level, they just do not have the ability to do the level of diligence that a smaller person can do. Right. Like if you're buying 50 homes a month, you cannot look at every single house, make sure that it doesn't need a lot of work. Right. So you're gonna just take on losses. And you understand that's a part of your business model to be that big, you know, and when you're small, you can, and you're leaner, you're quicker. It's like this analogy of you're this jet ski that can zip in, look at a deal and zip out where your, your competition's a battleship. It's gonna take em four days just to get completely turned around. I'd like to know in your Jefferson, how have you divvied up the responsibilities that go into this? You've got analyzing deals, looking for deals, purchasing deals, managing deals, doing rehabs. Can you share the different roles that you have within the organization and how you're structured?

Yes. So again, we've got a handful of folks that are sourcing deals. We've got then our VP of operations who still does, I'm guessing 15 or 20% of his time on acquisitions. So he's sort of 80% actually managing the managers. But that's obviously property level stuff. But he does still help out some with the acquisitions level. We've got an internal model that basically cranks out a number. It ranks and.

It'S not scientific, it's not pure science. We're still going to do other diligence. But just having a fairly simple model to just put in some numbers. What's the price, what's the location, what are the lot rents, how strong is the economy? Just to have it kick out a number also helps us just filter through which deals we want to pursue. But then frankly, a lot of the analysis still comes to me. Again, we may and probably should have already hired that out. But for the deals that we're actually pursuing, I'll do a simple financial model and put together some budgets as well on that so that's kind of how the deal is processed. And then I'm closing it and with help from attorneys. None of those folks are on staff, those are all outside firms. And then it does get turned over to my VP of operations to actually operate it and deal with the capex and fix the roads and get the three mobile homes fixed and get four new ones and on and on. We'll work out that plan. That's part of the budget. We'll work that out for each property and then again it's his responsibility to execute against that and get the property cash flowing better.

So you've got someone who loads up your pipeline, that's your VP of operations, you've got you that analyzes it, decides to pull the trigger and then sees.

It through to close.

That'd be like the filter of the funnel that gets it through. And then once it's done, then you turn it over to another member who manages the asset. Are there any other positions in there?

It's back to that asset manager. Yeah.

Oh, so you're running it really lean. You've got the same person who's like loading you up with deals and then once you get in there and close it, they take over again.

Yes, he principally runs the deals, but he also helps do some of the analysis.

So his job basically has evolved. I hired him again, trying not to repeat every single one of my previous mistakes. I have hired largely ahead of the curve with my new fund. So for instance, I brought him on before we did even our first deal. So he was initially 100% acquisitions screening through things and his job has now shifted to be 80% operations, which is his background. But yeah, just being a smaller fund, I wasn't in a position to hire on a six figure head just to look at and screen deals anyway. So that's kind of the, that's the way I've managed things so far. We'll see. As we continue to grow, we may well bring on somebody full time to help screen and source. We'll see.

And how about you, Brandon and Ryan? How are you guys structured?

So we have. So yeah, I was, like I said earlier, I was trying to build from the ground up this like ahead of the curve thing so. Or this 2.0. I will preface it with this. I have like I'm making this up as I go. So I didn't actually build this off anybody else's model really other than bigger pockets. But I looked at and said okay, what would I need if I was going to own a thousand pads Maybe a dozen parks or you know, seven to 10 parks, maybe call that what would I want to have? And so I said, okay, well I'd probably want somebody in charge of acquisitions. So I found somebody. Everybody. Everybody here came from within Biggerpockets, meaning members of Biggerpockets, not employees. So we have an acquisitions guy who just pretty much runs acquisitions now and financial analysis. Analysis. Analysis is. So that's Walker. We have investor relations, which is me and Mike. So Mike is half assistant, half executive investor relations. Mike does other things as well besides that, some bigger pockets related stuff. Ryan, who kind of oversees the entire operation, everything from top to bottom. He's kind of probably what Jefferson, what you do, which is kind of overseeing just everything to make sure the ship is always, you know, moving. And then Brian, who is asset manager, who is a partner. So he's not employees, it's a partner. He just is making sure everything's working right once we buy it. And then we brought in, actually we've had a full time person, mostly on commission based to do in park infill. And so we have Tristan Thomas, who was on the podcast a while back. We hired him. Just his only job is to fill parks that we're buying because we're buying just like you were Jefferson, like buying them that need a lot of, or at least have, have room for infill. And I know you guys did like the park we're buying from you. You guys did a lot of infill and now we're going to try to finish it up. And so we brought in Tristan to help with that. So I appreciate you leaving some meat on the bone for us. So thank you.

Jefferson, I've got a question about your analysis. How have you been able to avoid getting bogged down analyzing every part, every part that's on the market? Like you must have some quick sort of hard and fast criteria or a quick analysis that you can either weed these things in or out before you spend however much time it takes you to do a deep dive analysis. How have you been able to combat that? Because we found that that was a bottleneck for us early on and still can be where you just got way too much to analyze. So you've got to weed these things out quickly. How do you do that?

Yeah, so that's our financial model. It's not hugely sophisticated, but I put it together and again you're just putting in some of the basics. How many pads, what's the lot, rent, how strong is the economy based on things like what's the average house price in that metro area, that kind of thing. So that kicks out a number. I can't say that every single deal that's been emailed in that we've done, done that much on, some of them I'm sure have just skipped by and we missed them. But we try and run those through our model and then just prioritize things. We're definitely more interested in deals that come in from the folks that source deals for us and we have them already focused on healthier metros. So that right there, just knowing that whatever they find is coming from a healthy metro, so it makes it more interesting. We'll have some quick discussion around pricing. We're happy to fire off an offer. If a seller's like, hey, just make me an offer, great, that's the way we do it. It's not a perfect process. I'm sure as we continue to grow the fund and staff up, it'll be better still, probably never perfect.

It sounds like it's fairly targeted and you've got some sort of hard stop criteria that has to be met before it even proceeds to the next step. So you're not just doing the shotgun approach, looking at everything everywhere. You, you've got, you've got it fairly honed in as to what you want.

Fairly. Yes. Yeah.

And I think there's a lesson that any investor, whether they're mobile home parks or whatever is like, there are probably criteria that you just, Jefferson right now, top of your head, like, like internally, you just said, yeah, no way on that deal. Like, yeah, it's got a, got a separate sewer lagoon, blah, blah, blah. You'd be like, no pass or hey, it's located in a population of 300 people, live in the town and nobody else within a four hour drive.

Yeah.

So like you've got those criteria so you can screen them out. Yeah, you get a feel.

Yeah, that helps. You can look at things and just kind of ask a couple of questions. And you know, with 10 or 15 seconds you can be 80% certain whether it's interesting or not.

You know, let me ask you because it's very similar to every business that I see.

Right.

Like me as a real estate broker, when somebody calls me and they start talking about wanting to buy a house or sell a house, I know you're a good client or you're not within 10 or 12 seconds of talking to you.

What questions are you asking?

Yes, that's, that's what I'm gonna get with. Are they, you just know they're saying Things like, well, you know, I, I'll buy a house, but it has to be a really good deal and I really want something with seller financing and I'm hoping, you know, I can get it for 30 of what it's worth. But I don't want a lot of work. That's just a person that's going to wear you to the ground. Right.

Versus you're like, if I find that deal, I'm buying it myself.

Everybody's buying that house.

Right. You are getting that deal at 70% off.

That's exactly right. Versus, hey, I'm moving to California in a month. I need to find a place to live.

Right. I got a great job lined up, I got savings. I can do it down.

Just find me something, a wife and a little kid. We need to find a house. Like, I know that is a, a good lead that I need to pour my time into and prioritize.

You don't find a house, I'm going to look bad in front of my wife.

Yelling at me is because like.

We'Re not Brandon and Heather. We can't live in a Prius. Brandon rolls down the window to stick his feet out of it. Cause he's eight feet tall than the Prius, five feet long. Yeah. Can you. What do you look for when a deal crashes your desk and you were too, Ryan. What are those things that, that's why he was using that example that stand out that you're like, ooh, this looks good. I keyed in because I just saw.

That, you know, is it a met? Is it a metro of 100,000 people and up? That's healthy. Is it a park of a hundred spaces or more? Is it all city utilities? Is it at least 80% full with resident owned homes? Is it within 5 miles of a Super Walmart?

This is really, really good.

I rarely get all of that, but if the deal's got four out of five things.

That'S interesting. Three out of five maybe, but four out of five, yeah.

That's really helpful though because that's what people are looking for. They're like, how do I put this matrix together to know what I should analyze and what I shouldn't?

Yeah, yeah. That's what our financial model does as well.

I would encourage everybody, whether you're again, big time investor, just starting on your first property. Like define those criteria just like Jefferson just did. What are those five things that you want in a property? Okay. You want to, you want a house hack in Denver. Great. What are you looking for? Well, I'm Looking for either a house or a duplex in these five neighborhoods. Okay, great. What do you want? You know, like, how many bedrooms do you need? What? Like, get that criteria. And now know that accomplishes a couple things. One, it helps you narrow your focus on what you're searching for. But two, when you can get deliberate to other people, like, I mean, my criteria is almost identical to yours, Jefferson. Very much like, we have the same kind of numbers.

And for a while we were just like, podcast.

I know. It's just like, I listen to your podcast. Weird. You taught me everything I know. So it's like I, I once, like, I've had a team of interns. We have a team of interns. Not even interns, like a big. The team of individuals who are finding deals for us. Same thing that you kind of have, like people looking for deals. In the beginning, they were just firing so much at us. And finally we just like, no, we want these five things. We have to hit four out of five. And it was the same number. We, we said, if it doesn't have 4 out 5, don't even bring it to me because I don't want two out of five. And so by doing that, all of a sudden we started getting solid leads that came in. And again, if you're on your first house duplex, single family, talking about an apartment, identify what those things. Things are that you're looking for because you probably have in your head, it's probably somewhere back in there that you, that you. Everybody listening has what they want, but they haven't defined it on a piece of paper because now you can give that to other people. And now other people are more focused on bringing you deals as well. And they're not going to waste your time. It's just, it's a win, win for everybody.

Yeah, I think that's the single most impactful decision we made in our business is defining that.

Yeah, defining exactly.

Spending so much time, inefficient use of time, analyzing stuff that we had no business even looking at because it was not anything we'd be interested in. So until we sat down and it was alarmingly simple to do that once the kind of light clicked that, okay, we have these, these six or seven criteria, like Brandon said, very similar to yours, Jefferson, probably blatantly stolen right from you. But yeah, now, now we can look at something and quickly, within, you know, two minutes, we can say, no, this one's, this one's going in the, in the trash pile. We don't want to spend any more time on it all. Let's move on to something else that fits. So.

Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. Cool. All right. Well, guys, before we move on to the next segment, I'm curious. Where do you see yourself headed? Jefferson, like in the next few years, like, where. How big do you have to grow this thing? Are you billionaire focused here? Where do you see yourself?

No, I don't think quite billionaire focused, but, yeah, I want to keep building the business. I would envision doing this for at least another decade and probably doing a fund sort of every 18 months or something like that. So that might be six funds over the next 10 years, something like that. I want to get better at hiring at systems, people, operations, that kind of thing. Thing. Maybe Mobile Home Park 3.0 will be hiring people to raise funds for me because I'm still doing. I'm still at fundraising 1.0, so to speak, where I handle most of the investor relations. You're already ahead of me if you've got somebody doing investor relations for you. But, yeah, I want to make it more of a machine that the fundraising and then the property operations. So I'm sure there'll be a lot of growth for me still in both of those areas over the next decade. But I also spend a fair amount of time with my family, and my wife and I homeschool our kids, and it's mostly her, but we're very family focused. So I'm not looking to work 80 hours a week in the efforts of trying to become a billionaire. I'm well to do enough that there are other things that are important to me as well.

Smart, Smart man. All right, well, let's shift gears here and head over to the deal. Deep dive.

Deep dive.

All right, this is the part of the show where we dive deep into one of your particular deals, Jefferson. So do you got something in mind that we can pick apart?

I do. We. Let's do the. We'll call this. Well, it is. It's the Cherry woods deal, which was the first deal of those syndication deals that we did in Ottawa, Kansas, us, so.

All right, let's go through that thing. What, first of all. Well, I was gonna ask, what kind of property is it? It's a mobile home park. Correct. Shocker.

You're talking to Jefferson.

Yes, it's a mobile home park. All right, David, next question.

We're just freestyling this thing, aren't we?

Yeah.

Are we going down the list?

Okay.

Okay. How did you.

Well, you said earlier, do we have process or not?

We normally do, but I thought Brandon wanted To try something different. When he said we're just gonna throw things at you, but he must have meant throw the process at you.

Okay.

I had to find this deal.

This deal came to us from a broker at a major firm. Yes, that's how it came to us. We liked it. It probably wasn't snapped up by other firms because it was a relatively small deal. 45 pads in a smaller town. Ottawa, Kansas is not Kansas City. It's I think roughly a 30,000 person town.

All right, number three.

Okay, Jefferson, how much was that property?

It was a total of 800,000 purchase price and we got 62, basically three fifths. I think that's 62.5% seller carry, a note we're paying on. So we had to come up with a relatively large down payment, whatever the 30, 37.5% down. But that also de. Risked the deal for us a bit because the mortgage was relatively low.

All right, so then on that note, how did you negotiate that? Were there any fancy negotiation strategies or anything, tips, stories that went with that?

No, that one was relatively easy. The seller indicated he was at least open and maybe even preferred seller carry. So that was fine. So we're still writing him a check every month. So it just worked out well. Yeah.

Okay, those are the best words to hear ever that the seller prefers. Seller carry. Yes.

Almost as good as clear to close.

How did you fund the portion that the seller didn't carry?

Yeah, the actual equity we had to come up with. So that was quite an interesting process, a story there. So we thought we had one buyer, sorry, one investor lined up. He happened to be out of Wyoming. We refer to him as Mr. Wyoming. And he had already been in real estate, although doing more like multimillion dollar fix and flips of fancy houses. But he had some real estate experience. We needed about 450,000 down. We wanted to have what we needed plus some cushion. Anyway, so he asked a lot of great questions, then wanted to follow up with my partner. We all got on the pH. Then he wanted to do a follow up meeting. Then he went radio silent on us for a week or so. Then he came back with some more questions. Then he asked if he could do just half the deal.

Somewhere along that part, that process a little too late. We had found him simply because I had been doing some blogging online. But anyway, so somewhere along that process, we've got about a total of about six or I think it was about seven weeks to close. So he, after several weeks of kind of stringing us along and Cumulatively burning up, I don't know, probably a dozen hours or more with us on the phone. Just sent us a one sentence email that said, I'm sorry, my wife won't let me do this deal.

Oh, man.

We had already started calling other investors, though not as soon as we should have, but we had already. So, you know, I had also sent an email to a guy, we'll call him Mr. Boston, a gentleman who had lived in a house that I had lived in, a triplex in Boston, wasn't a roommate, but he owned one of the other units. We had kept very loosely in touch by email over roughly 20 years. And I sent him an email. He knew what I was doing. He expressed interest, sent him an email, a presentation, and said, hey, if you want to do this deal, you know, let me know and, you know, I'll be happy to get on the phone with you. And he sent back a text and said, you know, I'm in. And I sent him a text back, like, okay, when do you want to talk about the deal this week so I can discuss it with you. And he texted back and said, jefferson, what's your bank account? I'm wiring you $100,000 in the morning. I said, okay, great. So. And we did raise money also from approximately six other individuals. But it was just interesting, in that very first deal we did, we went guardrail to Guardrail. We had Mr. Wyoming, who just dragged things out and was kind of frankly amateurish and never invested. And we had Mr. Boston, who I spent 10 minutes with writing an email and a couple of follow up texts, and he wires over $100,000. So to this day, I've never had another Mr. Wyoming, anybody that different, difficult to try and raise money from, and I've never had another Mr. Boston, anybody that easy to raise money from. But it's just interesting that on that very first deal for fundraising, we kind of went guardrail to guardrail. Wow.

Is it true that you guys are raising money with open door capital by having Ryan sell his hair to Locks for Love?

Yes, we were going to talk about that. Ryan's supposed to talk about that. Very few things are off limits with me.

That's. That's why Brandon's growing his beard out. He's trying to keep. That's it.

Shave the beard. Locks up.

Yeah.

Beards of Love. It's going to be. Yeah. For those you.

Jefferson, has anyone ever told you that your voice sounds like James Spader Ultron from Age of Avengers or Age of Ultron?

No. I've had People say I sort of have a radio voice, but nobody's ever gotten that specific. I will try and take that as a compliment. Compliment.

You might be able to make some money doing voice work for Ultron in like the spin offs.

Okay.

Good to know.

Thank you. In case the whole mobile home park thing doesn't work out exactly. Important to have alternate job skills.

Exit strategy is great.

So Jefferson, back to your park. What did you end up doing with it? Was it more of a conservative sort of long term buy and hold or was it a more aggressive value add reposition and sell it? What'd you do with it?

Yeah, it was kind of, kind of a nice in between. There was or had been I think cumulatively now over about five years, probably something around 30% rent increase upside spread out over about five years. That park also out of the 45 did have, I believe 12 empty pads, fully constructed, but obviously just empty. So we invested additional capital bringing in mobile homes there and that park is now virtually full. Anyway, so that was it. We got into the home business in a fairly significant way. We also used the 21st mortgage cash program, a fair, fair amount there to infill that property with brand new homes. Our test ads had pulled well enough and the, the economics there were good enough. We, we felt and we, we've been proven correct that we could infill it with brand new houses and really make quite a stellar community out of it.

Cool. All right, well, what, what was the outcome then? What did you end up doing? Did you still own it today? Like a party portfolio? Do you sell? It was the outcome.

Oh yeah. So it's part of our portfolio with the previous partnership that we're now selling. So I believe it's under contract right now.

Very cool as well.

Make some money on it.

Good.

Hopefully. So, yeah. What lessons did you learn from this deal?

Yeah, just don't spend that much time with an investor that waffles. That's the key thing. You need to have more irons in the fire. Fundraising has gotten easier since then. Then it can be precarious, frustrating when you're getting started if you're dealing with just one investor or some small handful. So I guess my lesson learned and my advice there for folks getting into the business, whatever your deals are, again, have more than one investor and assuming your numbers are pretty good, it will get easier in time. So hang in there and hopefully you'll get to the fund level fundraising, if that's what you choose to do, you know, within a couple of years.

Awesome, man. Very cool. All right, well, with that, I'm gonna move on to the last segment of the show. We're gonna bypass the normal fire round because it's been a long show and go right into the world famous Famous Four. This is the Famous Four, the part of the show where we ask the same four questions to every guest every week. And we're gonna ask Jefferson. But before we do, let's hear from J. Scott to see what's going on this week over on the Bigger Pockets Business podcast.

Hey There, Brandon and BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast listeners, this is Jay Scott, your co host for the Biggerpockets Business podcast. And this week on the business podcast, we have lifestyle entrepreneur Yarrow Stark with us. Yarrow tells us all about how over the past two decades he has built multiple businesses with multiple streams of income to generate passive income, which allows him to work from anywhere in the world and do what he wants when he wants. So if you're looking to build your lifestyle business business, check out this episode of the Bigger Pockets Business podcast. Now back to your Famous four.

All right, big thanks to Jay, Scott and Carol, of course, for running the Bigger Pockets Business podcast. It's an awesome show. Check it out and make sure you guys are leaving them ratings and reviews. All right? With that. Hey, speaking of ratings reviews, you know what? I saw you guys the other day. I saw that BiggerPockets, on terms of reviews and ratings, has officially surpassed Tim Ferriss's podcast on itunes a number of rating reviews. So thank you to everybody for leaving leaving reviews and ratings on itunes. Keep doing it. I still got Dave Ramsey to overtake, but thank you everyone. So with that, let's get to today's Famous for question number one, Jefferson. And you may have answered this last time. Maybe it's changed. Maybe it's not. Favorite real estate related book.

Do you have one? Well, now it's probably Sam Zell's Am I being Too Subtle? It covers his life. It covers when he was in college and started managing a college quadplex that his roommate's dad owned or something. So I think it does a very good job of stepping through at least how he got started managing a property, not even owning it, and then worked his way up into where he is now owning mobile home parks and office and apartment and annexider cable manufacturing for computers and all kinds of things. Anyway, so am I being Too Subtle by Sam Zell.

Cool.

The next question is the same question we ask everybody as our second question. What is your favorite business book?

Oh, general business, probably Snowball That's a particularly good biography on Warren Buffett. Again, covers his business career, but also, frankly, some of the sacrifices that business success meant for him and for his family. I think it's a fairly balanced perspective, again, not only just on his business and how he invests, but also what sort of a dad he was and just gives a very good overall perspective on Warren Buffett.

Awesome. He's one of those people that's very intriguing. Everybody likes Warren Buffett. You'll never find a person that says, I hate Warren Buffett. It's like, I hate Christmas. It doesn't make any sense.

Okay, what are some of your hobbies?

Ryan. Ryan hates Christmas. That's how I looked at Ryan.

Not a fan. He's.

He did not have a tree. He did not have a tree. He did not give. He did. His wife got me a present. Well, us a present.

But that's why he hates it.

That's why he hates it.

Yeah.

I still like Warren Buffett, though.

Okay, great.

Okay. Okay, great. I think that further proves your point. I hate Christmas. I still like Warren Buffett.

Anyway, keep going.

David, what are your hobbies?

My hobbies? Oh, gosh, you know, I don't have too many. I ski a very little bit. I've got three little kids, five and under. So maybe those hobbies now, just really spending a lot of time with my kids and taking them to the park and traveling a bit outside of our hometown here. Yeah. And I think I alluded earlier, we actually homeschool the kids. That takes time. So, yeah, I'm really pretty family focused right now, so we'll say that's my hobby.

All right. All right. Have you ever heard that book, Call of the Wild and Free? It's a homeschooling book. I just got it. It's pretty good.

I'm not. I'm not sure I have. Yeah, I'll look. It's pretty good.

Yeah, I have a read. It's called the Call of the. I think it's called Call of the Wild and Free. But anyway, I'm liking it.

Cool.

They'll probably homeschool Rosie someday. My last question, Jefferson, what do you think separates successful real estate investors from all those who give up, fail, or never get started?

I think a big thing is focus. I see a lot of people, you know, that'll email me or even talk to me on the phone, or they I'm seeing, posting online, and they get, like, totally excited about mobile home parks. And then a couple months later, they're like, oh, yeah, but I Found a great little fix and flip deal. So I've got this little three bedroom in Des Moines and I'm fixing it up and blah, blah, blah. It takes focus, I think, to do, well, whatever you want to do in life. Again, I've chosen to focus on this niche. Other people just kill it in raw land or self storage or what have you. But I just think the ability to really focus on, keep your standards, build your deal flow, and then only do deals that meet your focus is what leads to success. And a lack of that leads to failure or at least mediocre results.

I want everybody to go and rewind the last 30 seconds to listen to that again because that is some of the best advice ever given on the podcast ever. That's it. So good.

Yeah.

So good, man. Well, thank you very much. This has been fantastic. David, you want to take a session? Loudon, do your last question.

Yes. A lot of us have liked what we've heard here and think it was so good. So if we want to find out more, Jefferson, where can we find out more about you?

Yeah, so first off, hit my website. It's parkavenuepartners.com. you can literally just contact me there. Also, I would say again, I mentioned the podcast that I've started for the mobile home park business. We also produce an industry calendar of events and I run the largest mobile home park park group on LinkedIn and people can find all of that right@mobilehome parkinvestors.com. that's kind of all the social networking stuff. And again, the main website, Park Avenue partners.com.

Very cool.

Thanks, man. It's been good. It's been awesome. Appreciate all the advice and mentorship over the years. It's been awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ryan, any closing thoughts here?

No, just thanks for letting me hang out, guys. I appreciate it.

It's fun.

It's been fun.

Your hair does look terrific.

Appreciate that, David.

Thank you.

I'll sell you some.

Yeah, I'd love to help you guys raise some money. That's exactly what I want to do. All right, this is David Green for Ryan the Hairpiece Murdoch and Brandon Captain, Mobile Home Park Turn Turner signing off.

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