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thing where I like move to Texas. So I'm spending my last week here in Washington, did a half move last week, wrap up business and have a couple of updates for y'all. Pretty soon, by the way, I'm going into our actual— is the last time running this, but doing a Creative Finance masterclass. It's a webinar, it's totally free. You guys are welcome to join that. I think the invitation's here in the, in the comments, but would love to see you guys there. But I'm about to be on that. Invitation's also in the Facebook group and all over my socials. So you guys are welcome to join me there. But, um, yeah, big updates. As you guys may know, sold the PM company, so finalizing those details. I'm still involved, by the way. I'm still an employee of that company for a little bit while they're winding down, but really, really excited for that. I wanted to free up room to launch Apex Asset Management, which is now live. We've brought on our first few clients. We manage a little bit over 50 units now and growing rapidly. So if you happen to be in the Fort Worth, Dallas. Like, basically it's like Denton, Texas, south all the way to like Belton or Temple, Texas, so south of Waco. We manage all in there and are actively taking multifamily properties. So if that happens to be you or you know someone, I'm growing that company. And I sold my first property management company specifically to open up the ability to grow that one. So very, very, very excited for that adventure. It's off to a phenomenal start. And the company that bought my PM company here in Washington is adding some systems that I am super excited about. So if you're one of my existing clients, congratulations, this handoff is, uh, I'm still involved but the company is even better. So very excited for that. For Texas, I have a big team down there. I am actually a little bit less equity in that company and a little bit larger team, so really excited for that. That's Apex Asset Management. But welcome to, uh, my rental house for the last time shooting outside, so My lovely wife has the ability to work on our last table in the house, but we have in fact hit all the goals. About to have the first kid, retired the wife, built the dream house, selling this one. If anyone wants to live in Renton, Washington, by the way, comes with a hot tub. Good deal. But those are the major updates. I think it's really cool, and I wanted to talk about this. The PM company, that's the systems that I needed to do leasing and really just dominate Grant County, Washington. That's something where we got to build a lot of relationships, but not just the relationships I got to influence market rent. We managed enough one-beds, enough studios, where we actually had a significant impact in market rent. When you are an owner and the other owners around you benefit from you being a good operator, you build all these systems. It was really cool being able to sell that company. It was only a quarter million dollar sale, but being able to sell that company, those are the systems that I used to support the millions and millions of dollars of real estate that I purchased. So not only do I have better performing assets, I got to build my team and have a level of control over my income, I had a salary in that company which helped me speed my way to financial freedom. And, uh, you can buy a lot of furniture in Texas for a quarter million dollars. I did seller finance $140,000 of that, so it's gonna be paid out over the next 3 years, and it's done in chunks. So it's like a $50,000 chunk, $50,000 chunk, $40,000 chunk, uh, that will get paid off. But really excited about that. I think I did 8% interest, might have been 10. I need to double-check that. But I'm getting monthly payments, which is the exciting thing. So I'm going to get paid monthly. I'm going to be paid a salary for a little bit to be taken out of the company, but I get a little bit more salary. I get monthly payments on my note. I get money every year for the next 4 years. And I did it all just selling systems that I already needed to do what I wanted to do. So if you're someone who's wondering like, hey, should I self-manage my portfolio? If you're going to scale a big portfolio, it may be for you. If your goal is passivity, you have other income streams— PM is a really hard job. I wouldn't recommend it for most. If you happen to be good at it, it could really help benefit you. It's really going to be helpful if you have more than 50 units yourself. So if you're building a larger portfolio— I'm definitely not saying do it, I'm just saying look into building your own company. You may find that it's actually of value. And when you get a little bit larger and you've stabilized your own portfolio, you have cash flow you can live on, You can then look at just selling those systems, and there are always people in the market to buy a great PM company. By the way, my wife made this backyard just absolutely gorgeous. I'm gonna miss this. This is the piece of the, uh, the little tiny Renton house I will miss. We have a lot of greenery up here. We had this really cute yard. Um, look at the background while I'm talking here. I'm like, you know what, this used to just all be crappy grass and a swing set that was falling apart. We did a pretty good job on this house. I'm not going to miss Seattle all that much. I will miss the people and I'm going to miss this yard. This is my favorite piece. So I'm going to share this with you guys one last time before we head out. No more ads from the hot tub. If you guys have seen that annoying ad that we do in our suits in the hot tub, no more of that. There'll be new hot tubs and pools in Texas. But this is the last hurrah from Seattle. By the way, one of the questions that I've gotten several times that I will answer here: am I still buying in Washington State while I'm in Texas? While I am focusing more of my efforts on Texas, I am still a Washington buyer. I do still have business here. I am still running the Robin Hood here, though if you have a buyer for that for $5.5 million, uh, that and the adjacent property are purchasable. There may be some seller financing available from the prior seller. So, uh, just let me know your thoughts. I don't know if that's true or not, but, um, it's always possible. But, um, for the time being, I still have the resort and it's doing well. This is the best summer it's ever had in its history. It did very, very well this summer. I have the resort, I have, um, quite a few rentals here. I don't actually know how many now. Well over 100 rentals in Washington. Um, I will surpass that in Texas in the next few months. Under contract for 116 as we speak. So very excited about that. Um, other than that, I'm seeing if we have anything in the comments, and if we don't, that's totally fine. This can be a short live because I'm late to my own live. Those who are a fan of the channel, I do that more frequently than I want to. I'll share one more awesome piece with you that I'm really excited about. The new studio in Texas. I actually built a whole studio room specifically for the YouTube channel and for our mentorship, Multifamily Strategy. If you're not part of the mentorship, of course you're invited. Check it out, multifamilystrategy.com, or shoot me a DM on Instagram. But beyond just the mentorship, YouTube, I'm having a more set schedule. Like, I have an actual real studio that's gonna be gorgeous, decked out I will be a slave to the schedule for Multifamily Strategies. So for those who have enjoyed this, who want to see more of this and want to see me be more consistent on my timing for the live questions, with questions, just let me know and I'll, I'll definitely get right on it. Emmanuel says, hey Christian. Emmanuel, hello to you. You guys have any other questions? Do let me know. But if not, I can always do a 6-minute live and those are always fun and acceptable. Um, I wanna— in case we don't get any other questions, I do want to, um, I do want to leave everyone with a piece of advice. Oh, and I do see one coming, which is great, so we'll start answering. But piece of advice, if you're just watching this, you're like, okay, what did I— what did I learn from today's episode? If you're getting started and you're trying to scale, I talk about deal debt equity all the time. Seriously, just learn how to find deals. Like, set your target, just look for the deals. If you can find a great deal, or even a good deal, and you can close it, you move forward and you start getting the building the muscle for it. It's like anything else, you get really good at it really fast. You can actually buy a ton of real estate. Highly recommend that people do that. But if you haven't bought your first property yet, your only mission for the rest of the year is I'm gonna find one deal and I'm gonna close it regardless of money. Just focus on the deal. I'm gonna find a deal, I'm gonna find a way to close it. If you can do that, you'll move forward. And what you'll find is law of the first deal. Once you do that first deal, you're gonna buy real estate, most people find financial freedom within the first 5 years. So that is a target for everyone, and anyone can hit that. All right, putting the messages up here on my screen. All right, Emmanuel was wondering how you handle filter changes for your apartments. Uh, do you let the tenants do that themselves? It's usually on the annual inspection. We'll check them out. Uh, For any like filter sets, like there's a couple of filters that actually go into an apartment. There's usually one above the stove, uh, and there's filters in the actual, uh, conditioning. Filter changes is usually part of the general maintenance. That is part of the program and done on annual inspection. I do have some tenants who just swap them out themselves though, but that's usually on their own prerogative. Patrick, I have a triplex in Washington State and both tenants— had both tenants move out. I am struggling with knowing all of the regulations of what I can and cannot do. Should I partner with a local property manager to figure it out? Well, if you're saying just what you can do about lease— oh, there's a little bit more to it. Or maybe join a landlord association, start networking with landlords. I mean, at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is you're trying to find tenants for them, right? If you're trying to market for those, you just can't discriminate by anything. So I would just copy a lot of other listings that look really good as far as just like a basic, like, get it up on listing sites. Yes, you can work with the property manager. Yes, they might be able to do it faster, but for just a couple of units, I think you should have no problem leasing it yourself. Put it up on Facebook Marketplace. Just don't discriminate by anything. So don't discriminate by race, gender preference, familial status, income. In parts of Washington, criminal background can't even be used, which is kind of a bummer. That one you should be able to discriminate on. You shouldn't have to rent to violent criminals, but be careful on that one. But you can set your own standards, so you can choose like, hey, this is what rent is, this is what I want in reserves, this is what security deposit needs to be. This is the income requirement. For me, it's usually 3 times the monthly rent. Occasionally I'll bring that down to 2.5. And I do credit scores above 600. There's lots of websites where you can run these background checks for quite cheap, and you can have tenants go through an application portal. So I'd absolutely, absolutely look into that. Highly recommend. Also, though, not a terrible idea if you want to join a landlord association. They have other resources there for you as well. I found it's pretty easy and the best way to find people really quickly for a small building. Facebook Marketplace, 100%. You do that from any Facebook profile, go to the marketplace, take some great listing photos, uh, list the rent and the deposit and what you're looking for, and request applications. You'll be surprised how fast most of these fill in most places. Of all the free stuff, I've actually learned that my company's Facebook page was taken down for a little bit, and our leasing actually slowed down quite a bit. It's funny how much Facebook Facebook Marketplace does. We push out to 84 different websites. Facebook Marketplace is about 25% of our activity, which is insane. It goes 84 places and one of them brings in 25% and it's completely free. So food for thought for those wanting to lease. Manuel says, for annual inspections, do you have a professional inspection done each time? No, I have an employee do it. I've also done this for a long time, so I know more or less what we can afford. But we do an employee walkthrough. They take pictures of absolutely everything. And they report back to me. I don't do a professional inspection. That would really cut in, especially on some of the smaller properties. But the way that I do it, I just want to see how are things looking. Does it look fairly clean? There's a lot of maintenance items that you may not need to do. Or if you have tenants who cause a little bit of damage but they do the same thing every year, say like the walls are always dirty, if you spend a bunch of time to go clean them every single time you do the inspection, they're just going to be dirty again the next time. You're just adding to your NOI. Usually I let or sorry, take it away from your net operating income. Usually what I let people do is I just go through, and as long as everything looks like it's in good repair, they're not smoking in the unit, they don't have pets that we're not expecting, there's no obviously damaged things, leaks, mold— as long as none of the major problems are in there, we're good to go. Most of the stuff is pretty obvious. You do a little heavier inspection on a turnover, but even then, I want to make sure that I have an employee who knows what they're looking for. I have had instances where I had newer employees they didn't know what they're looking for and we've actually missed some pretty serious stuff. So I make sure I have an experienced person who knows what they're doing. Otherwise, on turnover, your first few times, it might not hurt to get a professional in there. Just a— not, not really an inspector, but a professional maintenance person to give you an opinion. What's your unit limit for self-managing? I pseudo self-manage for about 235, soon to be about 300 50 units. Um, but I've added employees to that, right? So it's like, it's self-managed. I'm directly involved in all of it, but you do have to scale. If you're just like a one-man show running, running your portfolio, um, the max I would push without employees, I would probably go up to, depending on the amount of time you have, up to about 50. And the reason I say that is because a 38-plex would not be too hard My original one, even though it was a heavy lift, that was absolutely something that I could do in the time that I had, even with a full-time job. So I know the 38 wasn't too much. Uh, my business partner Cody Davis was like 21, self-managing 30 units. Did he do a perfect job? No. But did he do a great job? I think so. He did a really good job with the pieces he had. He learned a lot. It made him a better manager. 30 wasn't too bad. 38 wasn't too bad. Once we started getting to like 80, 90 units, we had to add our first employee who became a partner named Hannah Caldwell. Who I just actually sent the— she was one of the owners of that first company. She became an owner with us and eventually, as of today, got paid for being an owner, which is kind of fun. How are you finding your off-market deals? Are you happy to pay for a building if you can get soft terms? I'm always happy to overpay for a building, but not by too much. You don't want to get negative net worth. I've seen people do that where they only buy deals where they overpay. They get great terms, they up their cash flow, and then they can't refinance anything to bake debt because they've just absolutely shot themselves in the foot. Don't do that. Don't hamstring yourself doing your deals. That would be unwise. That being said— sorry, loud car going by. That being said, for a little overpay, for great terms to add cash flow, yes, because if you can get the value up, then you actually build a lot of net worth. It has to be long-term cash-flowing fixed-rate debt. Remember the rules. If you follow the rules, you You can do it from time to time, just don't do it on every single deal, but absolutely. To your first question there, how am I finding off-market deals? Set a target, you meet with people who've done what you want to do, which is the other owners in the market. You network with them as owners, not as sellers, and they will more or less deal you into the game. I'm running a whole webinar on that at 5 o'clock Pacific, so in just a few minutes I'll be popping up a webinar and running through that. On a relatively new acquisition, how do you handle a case where tenants still paid the previous landlord? Um, so if they pay the wrong place, the landlord needs to cut you a check. I've always had success with that. Or sometimes they pay the prior PM. There's always a little bit of that on a larger acquisition. You, you connect with them and it's part of your acquisition plan. I've never had a problem with it, but you do have to— you do have to be on top of it. Like, I've seen it happen many, many times. Tenants will still pay to an old place. It takes a little bit of communication. Always budget to have a little bit of reserve specifically for just the transition because your collections may be delayed. And I personally, even if I've sent notice, I don't penalize tenants for that first month. If they're late or there's some confusion, I always give people a chance to get used to the transition. And I just know that some mistakes will be made. Jay, what cap rates and price per unit you guys buying recently? Totally depends on market. Price per unit is not really relevant. I've bought stuff at $250 a unit, made a ton of money. I bought stuff at $45 a unit and made a lot of money. Um, so price per unit, depending on market, depending on deal, depending on asset class, there's way too much there. That's a— BiggerPockets pushes that and it's a stupid metric. Um, cap rates, also completely market dependent. I happen to be in a bunch of markets that are— a lot of them are 6 and 7 cap markets. This is where I've been investing, uh, but I've also bought in places where it's 3 cap market. All of those are 100% deal and market dependent. Thoughts on owning properties in New England? Do you see a problem with tenant laws? Uh, well, I invested in Seattle, Washington, and Washington State in general for a lot of my career. We have horrible laws out here too. Here's what I found. Blue states, traditionally, they fall behind on development a little bit, so you have a supply issue, so you end up with a little bit more appreciation in those markets. Also, we underbuilt, uh, particularly during the pandemic, as opposed to other places that had a lot of population growth. So as the, um, as interest rates are coming down, pricing is going up, like, actively. So that's, that's the big one. Um, blue states are going to, in the short term, continue to out-appreciate. You typically get more cash flow in red states, and it's a lot easier to run. I will say this, as I've gotten a little bit farther in my career, I'm buying more in Texas because the ease of running is really important to me, especially as I'm trying to be the best property manager in the state of Texas with my new company, Apex Asset Management. So you have something in the DFW area all the way down 35, uh, past Waco. I'll go as far south as Belton and Temple, Texas currently. Um, yeah, let me know. I'm always happy to, uh, always happy to chat. We are really freaking good at PM, and I'm committed to being the best. Have you ever bought an apartment that had a bad Google review? Yes. Um, my 38-plex, uh, has still— I believe still holds the record for most murders in Grant County. I believe more people have been murdered there than any other property. Um, it does not have high reviews. We turned it around. In fact, we bought it for $2 million and appraised for $4.1. Pulled $1 million out of that property and made it safe and beautiful and resided, and no one's getting killed there anymore. But yeah, that's a bad Google review. It doesn't really matter at all. That's bad management. It's a great reason to be able to buy a property. If you can manage better than the last person, traditionally commercial multifamily means you get more net operating income, which means property's worth more. All right. That's what I have for time here because I have to get ready for our— for the webinar. I apologize for launching this late. That's my fault. But if you guys want to check that webinar out, it's all over my socials. So hop over there if you guys want to learn how to do it. We're talking about 3 things. We're talking about how I set my targets. How you can do the same thing. We're talking about how I find deals specifically and how to fund them with or without money, because that's the main question that we get on this channel. I want to make sure that we answer that. So if you guys want to check that out, this is the last time I'll ever run that webinar. I run it 3 other times. I keep saying it's the last, and this will actually be the last because I'm not a webinar guy. I don't want to run webinars every 2 weeks. That's insane. So this will be my last run on it. If you guys want to join, I'll see you over there.