Getting Your First Multifamily Deal - Part 1

The first deal is the hardest deal you will ever do. That's the law. The first deal is the hardest deal you will ever do. It's the most challenging, it's the most difficult, it's the most time consuming, it's the most confusing. But that's what you've signed up for. You've signed up to do a difficult thing, to take on a difficult task. A herculean, monumental climb. That's why we always compare it to going up the mountain. Renee lives in Colorado Springs. I used to live in Colorado Springs. And there's America's mountains in Colorado Springs. Beautiful Pikes Peak. Pikes peak is over 14,000ft. It's a huge mountain. You get up there and it affects your oxygen levels. It's very dangerous to climb it. You can take a train up there. And it's just amazing that the train can even make it up that high. It's above tree line, so there's not enough oxygen for trees to grow. The people who have been up on top of that mountain, I've hiked up Pikes Peak, and people who have hiked up Pikes Peak all had to start from different places, right? So we had some people who started down in Colorado Springs at the base of the mountain. We have people who took the train up, people who rode a car up. And you have people like crazy people like me who hiked it and put in the work. Depending on where they started from on their initial climb and depending on the route that they took, they had a very different experience. But once you get to the top of Pikes Peak, the view is the same. Everybody gets to enjoy and take in America's mountain. You can see all the way to Kansas, which, you know, Kansas isn't the most attractive thing to look at, but there's a lot of beautiful stuff in between. The point I'm making is that with real estate investing, if you think about having passive income, having financial freedom, being able to control your life, think about that as being the top of the mountain, right? To climb that mountain, you're going to have to put in a lot of work. You're going to have to do a lot of planning, and it's wise to have a guide. So that's where we step in. I can say, I've climbed Pikes Peak. I've climbed it a few times. Not really. I only climbed it once. But with the metaphor, I bought a number of apartment complexes and I can walk you through the process. We've walked other people through the process. We've had Other people be successful. That's what started this whole company, was people coming to us and saying, hey, teach me how to do what you do. People in our churches, et cetera. And so we decided to really start pulling people up that same mountain that we've. That we've been up. And so the challenge of owning an apartment complex and having that apartment complex replace your income is a significant one. But that's not the only measure of success. It's important when you're climbing a mountain to focus on the process, focus on the journey, focus on the steps that you're taking, and learn to enjoy progress. If you focus on getting your first deal and make that your obsession, then you have to take a step back and say, am I doing the activities necessary to get to that first deal? Right? Am I putting in the work necessary? Am I making progress? Am I putting in the effort? And that's kind of the value that we provide, is we're able to tell you what those activities are. We can tell you the things that you need to do, the steps you need to take, the turns you need to take on the trail as you're climbing the mountain in order to get to where you want to go. Along the way, you want to develop something we call momentum. You want to start picking up momentum, picking up speed, developing acumen, developing intuition to be able to recognize progress when you make it. So the number one most important thing if you don't have a deal is to focus on finding a deal, right? Finding a deal takes care of a lot of other problems. And so when you're looking at your calendar, and I talked a little bit about this in our live event a couple of weeks ago, when you're looking at your calendar, if you've got 10 hours a week, then you want to make sure that 80% of your 10 hours, so 8 hours per week is spent trying to find deals. Now, in the beginning, for those of you who know nothing about real estate, it's fine to take a couple of weeks where you're setting up systems, you're understanding what you're going to be doing. But after that period of time, your goal needs to be spent 80% of the time finding deals. Okay? So our goal needs to be getting our first deal. The number one activity is finding that deal. So what are we doing for lead generation? What are we doing for creating those opportunities to dive into a deal? And if this is our obsession, if our first deal is our goal, does our calendar match our objective in church? One time pastor shared, and he said I can look at your calendar and I can look at your. What we used to have a checkbook. And back, back then, he said checkbook. These days it's more like transactions. Your bank statements. I can look at your calendar and your bank statements, and I can tell you who you are, not who you want to be, not who you perceive yourself as, but who you actually are. And so as you are reflecting on the last week and the week before that and the next week and the week after that, does your calendar reflect who you want to be? If you have 10 hours a week, it's going to be critical to focus on making progress towards that first deal and spending 80% of your time trying to find the deal that's your target. And so there's two ways that we find a deal. Number one is direct outreach to property sellers, property owners. We've talked about this before, but that's what brokers are out there doing. That's what investors are out there doing. That's what you need to be doing, is you need to be reaching out to property owners, you need to be reaching out to the community. Number two is networking. So outreach is number one. Number two is networking. Now, the two of these have synergy, outreach and networking. Because when you're going to an REIA meetup, you're going to a real estate meetup, you're on a Facebook group, you're going to be talking to other investors. And guess what? Other investors own investments, Right? They own properties. And as they scale, investors will trade up. Makes sense. You do a smaller deal, you want to get into a bigger deal, you sell your smaller deal, and then you take the equity, you do a 1031, or you restart the depreciation clock by rolling into a bigger deal. So other investors are scaling in front of you. And so if you can come in behind an investor that's scaling, you can do multiple deals together. You can help them offload, stabilize properties, you can help them clean up properties that still need a lot of work, whatever the case may be. So you are going out and networking with investors. So I, I would encourage you to reflect for a moment. Are you spending your time on outreach? And I know some of you are killing it. Some of you are reaching out to property owners. You're right in Lois, and that's to be celebrated, and you should be proud of yourself. Are you also networking? It's not one or the other, it's both. And networking is something that never ends. Earlier today, we were talking about wholesaling, and if you weren't able to make it to that call, come to the next one. But it's a great tool to have in your toolbox wholesaling deals. When you are going out and networking with folks, you're learning what their buy box is. You're learning what their purchasing parameters are. Now, these are going to be potential limited partners. These are going to be potential loan sponsors. They could be private lenders, they could be investors that when you find a deal, you say, hey, I've got this deal tied up. Why don't I transfer it over to you? And I can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on a wholesale deal right through either assignment or double closing or just a bird dog finder's fee. I have people who work for me as bird dogs, so they send me deals. They know that they're in my buy box. If I end up buying it, I'll pay them between 1 and 5% for sending me that deal. That could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I'm happy to pay it because they provided value to me. They saved me a ton of time. So I'm not out having having to search and look for these deals. So are you spending time finding those deals and finding that network? Now listen, when it comes to network, a lot of you are in a network now that doesn't support your objectives. For a lot of you, step one is replacing your network, right? So if you talk to your friends, if you talk to your family, they can't even imagine owning real estate. They can't even imagine investing with you. They're living on shoestring. That is going to influence you. You start talking about investing, maybe they laugh, maybe they say you've got big unrealistic dreams. They're not supporting you. They're not going to be the type of people that are going to help you to scale to the level that you want to. So for many of you coming in, the first step on the path to success is replacing your network. Are these the kind of people, Are you surrounding yourself with the kind of people that you want to be? Because inevitably you will become them. Number one, when we're trying to find a deal, we're trying to do our first deal, we need to actually spend time reaching out to property owners and we need to spend time networking. Now that networking is going to include brokers, it's going to include, you know, private lenders, it's going to include going to meetups. But you have to continually do both of these. And you need to spend 80% of whatever time is available to you doing them. You need to mark it on your calendar and block it out. Otherwise it just won't happen. So you control your life by putting it on your calendar, and then when that happens, you have to go out and do it. That puts you in control. So you happen to your life, you happen to your schedule, you determine what the priorities are, and that's where that first deal will happen. As challenging as it is, sometimes people have to look at 200 deals, 300 deals, before they get their first deal. There's a process to actually recognizing it, opening up the pipeline, and that's where analyzing the deal comes in.