3 secrets to apartment investing in 2024

Hey, what's up guys? It's Jonathan. Today I want to talk to you about the three biggest things you need to focus on. If you are in a place where you want to get into multifamily large apartment complexes, just say in the next six months, you've never done it before. And especially if you're trying to utilize limited partners and through syndications, or even find just killer creative financing deals where you own 100%. And either way, there's three critical keys I want to bring to you about 20, 24 and just your focus really at whatever stage you're at, but especially in the beginning stages. If you don't know who I am, I run a mastermind with my partner Larry, where together and collectively amongst the mastermind and network, we have around 100 million in assets under management. And in our leadership team we have people that represent about a billion dollars in transactions, commercial real estate. And so we've seen a lot, we've worked with a lot of investors and seen a lot of things. And I'm literally going to dive into the three biggest things you need and I may even throw in a bonus tip at the end of how to actually raise capital and really biggest tip there. So number one, okay, biggest thing you need to start with setting clear guidelines. Okay. I would really encourage you write this down. Set clear guidelines and goals. Your buying criteria, what does that actually look like? Okay. And again, you probably want to link up with someone who's experienced, do this, has done this before and can give you advice on geographic, you know, criteria. But as far as your buying criteria, I'm just going to recommend if you're a beginner and you really want to scale quickly and like I said, within six months I would focus on things between 20 and 100 units. Okay, 20 and 100 units. One, it keeps you in a place that's optimally scalable and it's also a good range. It's too small for the big guys, too big for the small guys, and it's going to be highly potent. Your pricing is going to be really good at that, at that level. So that's my first thing. Get set really clear goals. So then when you're going to the next step and you're finding deals and you're fighting, you're getting out there, you know exactly what to tell people, you know exactly how to run lists, you know exactly how to position. Okay, number two, you ready? Time, efficiency. Alright, I couldn't stress this enough. If there's one thing I talk about so much in Our mastermind, it's that you have to first be a successful investor of your time before you're a successful investor of commercial real estate. And yeah, you can say, well, this person, you know, whatever, there may be people that don't abide by this, but I'm just going to be honest, especially in the beginning, you have to be a master of your time, okay? You need to have, especially if you're in a full time job right now and you're trying to transition and you're trying to add this to your plate, this isn't your full time occupation. You know, you have five, ten hours a week. You need to know where every minute of that is going. You need to be direct, you need to be efficient, you need to be productive and super targeted with that time, okay? And you need to use the highest leverage activities you possibly can to move the needle forward, okay? So in other words, you need to get quick at underwriting. You need to get quick at knowing, is this deal something that I need to waste my time on, you know, right? I need to spend my time on versus, you know, looking on market and looking at all these deals, you know, taking them through a lengthy underwriting process to find out they're not a good deal. And then you just wasted half of your week, right? Because you only have five to ten hours a week. You know, we had a guy recently, a good friend. Now he had three to five hours a week coming in to work with us. He literally, he's an attorney and all kind of stuff. He said, I only have three to five hours per week, right? I don't have a whole lot of time. But we got him in and he went all in, stayed really focused, did the things I'm telling you right now and even said he had no access to capital. And within like two to three weeks, he had something locked in and raised about $1.7 million to close in about four months, okay, on a 51 unit deal. So time efficiency, be a master, master, master of your time. Get linked up with somebody who is good at the time. I always say if you want to master a certain skill or you need something, whatever you need, whatever's in the way, you need to link up with somebody who's good at that, okay? And then last tip number three, all right? Take above average. If you want above average results, you got to take above average action, okay? So it sounds so simple, but you've got to take massive action. And the key here is motivation won't work. Motivation is an emotion. It's A feeling that doesn't last. You have to create rhythms in your life that are long term sustainable. This is something that I had to learn. So it was such a rough journey for me to learn this because I'm such a emotionally driven, you know, I get excited about an idea, I go execute on the idea. But then it's so easy to just give up right before the results. Right. Right before you see the fruit. Right? So what you need to do above, you know, optimizing health, optimizing your energy levels, just physically above all that, which that's huge. I'm going to strongly recommend here, you need accountability. All right? You need somebody. We call it dragging you up the mountain whether you want to go or not. Because there's going to be times where it's hard. I don't care what you're trying to do. If you want results that are above the typical, above the norm of most people out there, you need somebody in your corner that is calling you up to above average action. All right, I'm just going to be brutally honest here. Most people say they want to change their life. They say they want passive incomes. They say they want to make an impact. They say they want to do this and do that and do all this. They want to change their family's future. They want to make generational wealth through apartments. But most people don't have what it takes because they're not willing to do the things that the people who are successful do. And that is be lean into coaching and accountability, have someone that is focused on pulling them up the mountain. So, and, or maybe you don't want to do a coaching, maybe you don't want to do account. I would say go all in to the point where it's live or die. It's either make it or break it. Yuri, I've seen people go all in. Once they create like $2,000 a month in passive income, right? They go all in full time. They quit their job and literally they got, they got themselves six months to succeed. And those people do extremely, extremely well. Why? Because they, they didn't give any plan B. They didn't, you know, and, and they had a full time effort. So I hope that helps. Bonus tip. Let me, let me just. I told you I would give a bonus tip. The big thing for us when it comes to raising capital. So if you're struggling in that area, raising capital, I want to talk about that. We call it, we coined this reverse funding system. Okay, I want you to write that down. Reverse funding system. All right, what this is, is we give it all. What we focus on is we give it all to finding the deal. Alright? This may be like counter to what some people might say, but even as a newbie who has no connections, you are going to get out there and give all your focus to finding off market deals. Be the best. You don't have much to bring to the table. You're new, you don't have property management experience. Maybe you do, but you typically you're new, you don't, you know, you don't have asset management experience. You don't have the money or the capital or the net worth that you need to secure the loan. You don't have all these different things, right? You've never done a deal, you don't have any of this. The biggest value you can provide is finding a really good deal. People stress about this, making money. Most people come to me, I would say 90% of people who come to me saying I need money, that's all I need. That's my biggest hurdle. I would say 80 to 90% of those people, I take a deep dive in their business and they actually don't have a funding problem, they have a lead problem, they have a deal problem. The deal doesn't make sense, it's not attractive, right? I'm telling you, in the world of apartments, you give everything you have to finding the deal. Money will be attracted to it, okay? So that's critical. Now apart from that, let's talk about actual like a tactic, a tip when you're at the funding stage, okay? Because there are some tricks and tips and you do want to be in strategy but in the finding the deal phase, right? Focus on the highest leverage. Things you can do to really get off market deals and not waste your time on market with mediocre deals is first off going direct to seller, so implementing streams of off market leads. But what you're doing is you're building a brand, right? You've got to hit whether it's, you know, pulling list. You're going to also repurpose all these leads, all these people you're talking to, you're going to figure out, you're going to keep it in a database and repurpose all these leads, potential sellers. And even for us, we have a done for you cold calling like lead generation system where we actually hire VAs for clients and we, we manage that. A big key here is you can make a disposition button for your va, your virtual assistant, cold caller, right? You can make a disposition button for limited partners, right? Like this Person I talked to doesn't have a property sale. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But they would be a good fit for to be a potential capital partner. Right. They can ask them about that. So we set up disposition buttons and then that's one way to do it. And every single person you talk to when networking to find the deal now is a candidate to invest in your deal when you have it. So sounds simple, but little things like that, little tweaks like that can mean a massive difference, right? So again, focus everything on the networking and finding the deal and then just repurpose all that. And I appreciate promise your money will be attracted to that deal. Now how do you do that? How do you really focus everything on the deal? And the other side of that is once you find the deal, do you have several eyes, a lot of people that are looking at the deal to kind of guarantee that it's going to be what you want it to be, or it's going to produce what you want it to produce, or at least guarantee as much as they can. Right. Nothing's guaranteed. But with that, you're going to be outrageously successful. You need to be a part of groups that are helping outside of that, you know, today, in about two hours, no, one hour, we have a call. The vice president, senior vice president of capital markets at Marcus and Millichap is visiting our mastermind to talk about the current commercial lending state in the market and what it's looking like in 2024 for interest rates and for cap rates and everything in between. You know, what's it look like in commercial lending? I would strongly advise, and we have several events like this. We have a commercial analyst on our team that's doing calls frequently. We have, you know, people like commercial acquisition director. So you need to be surrounded by people like that. Now, it may sound like I'm talking about how cool our mastermind is. It is really cool. But I'm just going to advise you to find a group like that, be a part of things like that. Because you got in this industry, you definitely have the ability to make millions, but you also have the ability to lose millions. Okay? So if you want to play the high risk game, you want to be a part of this. Now, I say high risk, but this is also the most stable, most safe investment in my opinion, or one of the safest that you can be in. Now, you could argue, well, it's, you know, safer to be in stabilized properties or the stock market, whatever. But to see the kind of returns we're talking about even from a limited partner standpoint, being able to get 20, 25, 30, even 40% annualized returns in the next two years. This is going to be your best option to see those kinds of things and the best option to weather downturns in the market. So hope that helps. I rambled there a little bit, but yeah, if you want to check out our mastermind, you want to check out, be a part of the call today. We'll drop the link in the description. So hope that helps. God bless. See you soon.