Tate Siemer's Pivot to Multifamily Investing Let's Him Keep Snow Skiing and Help Others do the Same!

Foreign bowling here with Pivot to Prosperity, the podcast brought to you by Pivotal Real Estate Investments. And today we have Tate Seamer with us. Tate, did I, did I say your last name correct?

100%. You got it. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I didn't. I should always ask that in advance and I fail to sometimes that. But yes, you have an amazing journey that you have followed thus far and I want to give you the chance to tell the audience about where you're from and how you got to where you are today.

Sure, sure. Well, first of all, it's awesome to be on your show and talk to your listeners and I hope I can add a ton of value and some inspiration maybe, and maybe some, even some action points. So, yeah, in a nutshell, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and you know, out in the suburbs and kind of upper middle class background. I went to an all guys private high school in Cincinnati, Catholic high school, which I wasn't Catholic and have never been Catholic, but it was a really great school and I tested into that. And then I went to college in Ohio as well at Ohio University Bobcats. So, and, and then after, right after college, I had a degree in psychology and was really like, kind of like struggling to find myself and my direction and like really was kind of stressing and because I just wasn't locked into any sort of vision at all, much less any sort of sense of purpose really. So I had a few sales jobs in Cincinnati, you know, two, three, the, for the two, three years after college, after graduation, then I turned 26 and, and that was N. This was 1999, so that dates me right there. But for some reason turning 26 was a little bit of a, a wakeup call for me in, in the sense of like, dude, I'm going to be 30 soon. And like, for some reason that felt really old at the time, you know, and, and I just decided that I needed to kind of shift the questions I was asking myself from like, what should I be doing? How am I going to make money? You know, how am I going to climb the corporate ladder? Because quite frankly, in the 80s and 90s in Cincinnati, that's really what we were trained to do and kind of conditioned to do. And so basically I just, I asked myself the question of like, what do I want to do? Like, if I was going to take a year and just go do something cool and fun, like, what would that look like? And to be honest with you, I'm not sure how I kind of had that breakthrough around asking that question because it wasn't something I'd ever asked myself before and it wasn't something that I had any coaching on or anything else, but I basically, you know, I had skied probably 25, 30 times as a kid out east in different places, including a little.

I'm a water skier. He's talking snow.

Yeah, snow skier. Right. And our home hill in Cincinnati, which is like 45 minutes west of Cincinnati in Indiana is called Perfect North Slopes. And, and you know, I don't know what the vertical drop on it is, but it's, I mean, it's a, it's a sled hill basically with a few ski lifts on it. And, and that's where I learned to ski. The first time I ever skied, I was, I was in jeans. It was an all night ski session and it rained the whole time and I fell in love with it immediately. Even, even in those conditions. And I knew that it was for me. And that, that vision, that kind of, that passion or inspiration, if you will, just stuck with me even through college where I didn't ever have the money to ski. And then after college I was kind of, you know, just struggling to figure out how to make a living as well. And, and really didn't re. Engage skiing then, but just the love of it kind of lasted and stuck with me. And so I just decided that I was going to move out west and ski somewhere and I didn't know where. And I basically flew into Denver in the middle of the summer that year and drove around all the ski towns. And at the time I had a dog and needed a job, of course, wherever I was going to move to. And, and all the little ski towns are kind of tough to break into as far as housing and job market, et cetera. But Salt Lake City at the time, and even now just has, you know, it's a big city. Wasn't as big back then, but you know, at the time was incredibly affordable. I think my first lease in Salt lake was like 400 bucks. I was sharing a duplex with a roommate and it was one of these places where I knew I could get a job. And yeah, I had a lot of experience at the very least as a server in restaurants and whatnot. And so was there and the skiing here, and I'm broadcasting from Salt LAKE Right now, 24 years later. The skiing here is, is in a lot of ways kind of second to none, especially in the, in the United States where we just get incredible snow. We get a lot of it, really great quality of snow. And, and, and so I I actually became a professional ski photographer and was out on the mountain every single day, most of the day shooting skiers and families and that sort of thing. And learn, obviously learned how to ski well really quickly and, and just fell more and more in love with skiing the mountain, the, the lifestyle, everything else. And you know, we were talking before the recording like, you know, I've skied here now 24 seasons and taken a detour this winter. And we can talk about that a little bit. But you know, I even, even during a busy work season, which I've had a lot of those recently, I still try to get up there, you know, 30, 40 days a year. And you know, I'll go ski for an hour and a half, two hours and just kind of ski as hard and heavy as I can. And I'll be, you know, it's close enough, the resorts are close enough that I can do that early morning and then be back in my office by 11:30, 12 and work the rest of the day. So it's been a really fun lifestyle, really rewarding. And yeah, that's kind of how I got, how I got to Utah. You know, I mentioned that I was in photography. I really wanted to make that a full time, year round sort of thing. So in addition to ski photography, I learned from my mentor at the time who's now my business partner, his name's Carl York. He really mentored me on kind of all the things skiing, photography, business, mountain biking, et cetera. And he and I basically dove into shooting weddings, like photographing weddings, and also more formal portraiture work. And then eventually I started my own company doing that. That was kind of my first real foray into entrepreneurial ship. Although I did have some really good sales background at that point. But that was the first time I owned my own company, had my own brand. I did that hard and heavy for 10 years. And kind of in the midst of that, around 2006, it was really clear to me that I was kind of working as hard as I could, as much as I could, and I just wasn't producing the level of income and abundance that I wanted in my life. So I was in a friend's basement talking to his roommate. A real random thing. I didn't know the guy much at all and still don't know really know him. But he, he, he was talking about how he had just bought a triplex and was flipping it. And like, I was just fascinated by that concept. I honestly had never really been exposed to, to like real estate investing at all, but especially on like the individual level, like, it. It never occurred to me that that was possible or really anything else. I never had a vision. I never read rich dad, poor dad, blah. So, long story short, he was in a class and this was 06, so this was before online education, zoom, podcasting, et cetera. So the class was like almost an hour away. And I drove once a week to this class and just kind of learned the real basics of specifically single family investing, duplexes, that sort of thing. And I ended up buying my own. My, my first deal was a duplex, like 110 year old building. There was a tenant in one half and the other half was vacant. So I renovated the vacant half and, and turn around, sold the duplex and I think I made maybe 15,000 bucks. And I thought like I had just arrived, you know, and eventually got my real estate license, did a number of my own flips over the next couple years and worked with a lot of investors, or few investors anyway, on their acquisitions and dispositions in the single family space. And then the crash of 08 happened and all of the funding that we, and the programs that we were using to fund these deals pretty much went away. And I, I never really hit a stride, so to speak, in real estate at that point. I had some success and whatnot, but it always felt like a hard grind. And to be honest with you, when the crash happened and the, you know, kind of the opportunities went away, I was kind of relieved and gl to get out of real estate at that point, went back into photography. Carl and I kind of teamed back up in that front. And then in 2011, Carl approached me. You know, he obviously knew about my flipping experience and he had some money and I had a little bit of money. And we basically teamed up in October of 2011, bought our first single family flip in Salt Lake county, in basically Salt Lake City. And, and we were kind of off to the races there. And when I say off to the races, what I mean is we, we took all of, basically all of our own financial resources and all of our talent and time and kind of threw them. It threw all that into each deal kind of on a one by one basis. And thinking that was like the best we could do, like the best strategy we could come up with. And again back this was 11. So like, you know, Facebook was kind of a thing already, but, you know, podcasts weren't really a thing yet. Meetup groups weren't really there that just the kind of the intellectual thought leadership space in real estate wasn't There and the little bit that was there I hadn't connected to. So we, we were basically doing business in a vacuum, just trying to find the best deals we could when we could afford them. And in, you know, the next five, six years, we, we basically kind of almost operated in a vacuum in a sense that we, we were, we thought we were doing the best we could. And you know, what that ended up looking like was, I think probably like our biggest year. We maybe flipped five or six properties. You know, there were other years that maybe we did three and, and you know, we went from like kind of entry level, first time home buyer type product and at the end we were doing million dollar, you know, beautiful houses in, in Salt Lake. But it was a grind and, and there was a, you know, there was obviously risk in any real estate investing model, but we were feeling like we were taking risks that we weren't necessarily super excited about and we just kind of like kind of gave up. Not gave up, but we just kind of moved on to some other stuff. We actually went to work for a solar, solar company and we're working in sales together for that for a while. And then, and then we, we had a couple deals kind of fall in our lap. I, I actually at some point, I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I locked into our local real estate investor association networks, there's two of them, two big ones in Salt Lake, and started going to meetings and this was like my first exposure to coaching or thought leadership or like, you know, like high level strategy and real estate investing. And so we did a few land entitlement deals where we would buy single family lots or a couple single family lots together that were zoned so that we could basically bring in a site plan architect sort of developer and basically put projects together and then sell those entitled projects to developers and builders without ever breaking ground ourselves. And that was pretty good. And we did okay on a number of deals and then we had a wholesaler bring us a deal, a couple deals actually that were new build projects. So we were basically looking at buying these single family lots with old homes on them that were zoned properly for multifamily tear down those homes and, and build like really high end like million dollar units on, on those lots. We, you know, kind of three units per lot sort of thing. And the two projects that we ended up doing in that space turned out to be absolute disasters, like just in, in many, many ways and for, for a number of reasons. The genesis of which were that we were really green. We weren't builders or even developers really at that point, and we referred to a builder to do the project for us. That turned out to be kind of the fatal flaw, where we brought on a builder that didn't have the experience.