Is Multifamily Investing For You? Everything You Need To Know

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I am really excited for today's guest. You know why, Scott? I'm excited for today's guests.

Why, Mark?

Because they're gonna help us make a lot of money.

A lot of money.

It's not all about the money. It's about making money and also improving your life and doing it in a way with integrity and in a way that really improves your life. It's not just like, hey, we're all about the money, right? Kind of like this. Living, breathing, walking, mentors, giving value to the world. The fact that they're even on this podcast. I don't even know how we got them on the podcast. Kind of big deals.

I ride my bike over here, right?

What's that?

They were my bike over here.

Yeah, so. But I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, you're not automating Craigslist postings, hosting domination.com the landgeek. Scott, are you excited, Mark?

I've been excited for a long time for this one.

Yeah, yeah, same here. So let's not even plug. Let's just get right to it. Do you care?

No, let's do it.

All right, I'll just do a quick plug. Lonegeek IO no Boom. All right, done. All right. Gino and Jake. Gino Barbero is an investor, business owner and entrepreneur. He's been investing in real estate for 15 years. He's grown his multifamily portfolio to 674 units in three years. He has teamed up with with the Jake stanziano to create jakeand gino.com a real estate educational company that offers coaching and training in real estate investing. He is the best selling author of Wheel, Arrow, Profits and he's an also graduate of Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching and is a certified professional coach. He's also the author of the best selling cookbook Family Food and the Fryers. He's a floating Scott.

I love it. Multifaceted, bro. I'm bringing the pain today.

Exactly. He currently resides in New York with his beautiful wife Julie to their six children and six children. My gosh. This podcast could just be about parenting advice for me.

We can go there if you want.

But let's just not all just focus just on Gino. Let's talk about his partner in crime. Because Jake Stanziano is The best selling author of Wheelbarrow Profits and also the co founder of Jake and Gino. Com, the only multifamily real estate investment company that teaches investors the three pillars of of sound apartment investing. Buy right, manage right, and finance right. If you get any of those three wrong, Jake and Gino, what happens?

You die.

Wheelbarrow crumbles.

All right. Jake is also the founder and chief operating officer of Rand Property Management, the first property management company with a focus on modern affordability. I don't even know what modern affordability means. That's like compassionate conservatism. I'm excited. As creator of the multimedia multifamily investing framework Realm no Profits, Jake is the leading expert on investing in the multifamily space. He also currently owns 604 multifamily units. Guys, Jake and Gino, welcome to Art of Passive Income podcast. How are you guys?

Good, Mark, how you doing?

Great.

Pulse is still normal by the way. I'm all caffeine up. Like I went to the coffee shop this morning with my wife. They're like, can we give you an extra shot of espresso? I'm like, sure. We're having Jake and Gino on the podcast today, so I better be wired.

Last time we spoke, you said sitting down was the new obesity. So that's why you're on that treadmill today, aren't you?

No, sitting is the new smoking.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

So how did you guys pick multifamily? There's so many different real estate niches, right? I mean, we're in land. You know, you could have been house flippers, you could have gone commercial, but you chose multifamily. What was the logic behind it and what do you like about it? What sucks about it?

Well, Mark, when we first started, I started about 15 years ago and I had a full time job. I was a business owner. I liked what I was doing. I was in the restaurant business, cranking it. We were making money 15 years ago. Different, different economy. Now there was no Internet. The small mom and pops are doing really well. It was just a different, different model. So I needed something on the side that I could do. I didn't see myself flipping and doing that part time. That's a full time job. I was paying taxes. I want to Shelton defer some taxes. So I said, you know, multifamily fits a lot of these buckets. I can still buy property, still do my full time business, still be a part time landlord. It just fit my model. Fast forward to 2011, I meet this guy. The economy has completely changed. The mom and pop real estate restaurant model just stinks. I'm barely creeping along. And I say, what's my reason why? I always thought, as you said, success was making tons of money. And as you get into your 40s, it's not. It's really serving up others and really doing what you really like and what you really feel passionate about. So your 20s and 30s becomes an evolution into your 40s. And I said, multifamily, I think, is the way to go. I said, jake, you want to get out of your corporate job, I want to get out of my rat race. We need two things. We need passive income and we need to create wealth. And we thought, and I still think that multifamily is one of those best vehicles to achieve that.

Yeah. And I always said, you can't live in the Internet. You can get just about everything you want on Amazon today, but you really can't get an apartment. You can go online and shop for apartments and things like that, but you're not going to get it delivered. So I felt really good about that, wanted to create wealth. I thought it was a good spot to park money and buy and hold. And Gino just mentioned it freed me up. I posted something on the Jake and Gino Facebook page today. It was a picture of the Taco Bell. I actually fired my boss at Taco Bell about two years ago. I was working for a pharmaceutical company. And it was at the end of the work, contact brought her in and I said, look, the company's changed, but I haven't. And we got to part ways, essentially. And it was, it was pretty empowering. And then, so if you guys want to check us out, I got a picture of that Taco Bell up on the page today. And it's freed me up. And, you know, I owe a lot to real estate and multifamily because it enabled me to be on this podcast today, you know, speaking to you guys. So pretty happy to be here.

Yeah, I mean, I love the model of this one time sort of purchase. You do your due diligence and then you've got that, that passive income coming in every single month. But the due diligence aspect of multifamily is very different than what Scott and I are used to. So walk us through, like your last deal and what you had to kind of look for and what were some pitfalls.

Yeah, so our last deal was actually a flop. This was the first time we actually had to walk away from a deal. It was about 100 units. It was in Knoxville, and everything looked good. The numbers worked. We buy for cash flow. We buy an actual. So if the numbers work today, we feel like we're going to force the appreciation over time. So the numbers have to work on the front end. It's like they say, you know, in football, it all starts up front. If the cash flows there, we get. We kind of move on to the second level. When we got into the inspection of this property, though, we saw them. You know, the common things that you see. You may see a downspout missing. You may see some vinyl siding that's off. But what we noticed was there was some plumbing things going on. Because in the initial inspection with the general building inspector, we saw in the crawl space that there was actually feces being thrown onto the floor. There was busted pipes. We started to inquire further. We brought a plumbing specialist, and we talked to the property manager, and they were actually jetting these lines out twice a year from the. Basically the crawl spaces out. And it was built in the 60s, and it just was. It was done. You know, the guy for the guys out there on YouTube, the plumber came out, took a knife out and was in the laundry room and started scraping away at the paint on some of the pipes. And you see this. He goes, you see this? And he starts scraping away. And literally it was corroding. They painted it, trying to cover it up. But we're talking 7,000 minimum per unit, just on the sewer side, not on the incoming water side of things. So to do the whole thing, you would have been 7,000 minimum plus from the bottom, the crawl spaces going out. So it would have been. It was really a deal killer. And that was the first time we had to walk away. And they said, well, do you want to renegotiate in the price? And we said, look, we're not. We're not retraders. We're not here trying to shake you down. This deal just doesn't work for us anymore. So the key is, you know, we're patient, persistent, but willing to walk away. We're really patient during the negotiation phase. You know, if the numbers don't work on the front end, we walk away. Or if something craps out during due diligence, you got to be willing to walk away. Gino called it the hot potato, Right? Someone's going to get that and get burned eventually, but it wasn't going to be us. Mark.

There's a three step repositioning framework that we use when we do due Diligence. The first step is the financial numbers. You want to take a look at the numbers. At a hard numbers, we have a parameter. We want to buy with the 10% cash on cash return. We want at least a 1.2 debt coverage ratio. And we're looking for a caps. That's what we had in this property. It met all the criteria. Once those numbers work out, we go to the second part, which is the physical due diligence. You don't want to do physical due diligence unless you know you've got those numbers. Because if you're going to spend money on inspection and the numbers don't work, you're wasting your time. 70 to 80% of the deals crap out because the financial numbers don't work. So you don't even get to the inspection phase. We got the inspection phase. We were pumped because we had Freddie Mac. We were assuming the loan. We weren't putting that much money down. It was right in our niche. It was in our wheelhouse. It was another hundred units we could assume roll into the portfolio. So we were really jazzed about it. The third one is the legal due diligence, which I made tons of mistake on. If you're buying a 97 unit property, make sure it's a 97 unit multifamily property zone. Multifamily. It's up to code. It has all its fire inspections. It has everything. Make sure you do a municipal search on the property. Made that mistake before. I'm still paying for it 10 years later. So the due diligence is probably one of the most important things that you have to do on a property.

Also inspect every unit. A lot of guys that we speak to go in, they'll look at a few of the units. Okay, I got an idea. We've been, you know, we buy mom and pop properties. We look for larger properties that are owned by families owned, you know, by couples, whatever the case may be out of town owners that don't have professional management, because we find value in those. What you also find in these types of properties is, you know, there may be three units that are being used for storage. You may, you know, go into a unit and find that it's totally gutted. So you got to get through when you're talking due diligence, getting every single one of these units, it doesn't matter. Pay a little more on the front end because, you know, if you have to go in and, you know, put 5,000 into a unit that's totally gutted and you didn't find that on the front end. That's on you. That's not on the people that sold it to you. So.

So you're buying, right? You're managing, right?

Right.

And when you say manage right, let's.

Talk about that because, well, that means a few things. One, it means, okay, once it's stable, we want to make sure we're continually raising rents at least 3% a year to stay up with inflation. But what it means on the front end is it means we're repositioning these properties. We have a three step repositioning process. We focus on number one. Again, we're buying from mom and pops. We want to buy something that has a decent amount of vacancies. We're going to go in and we're going to fill those vacant units at market rents. We're going to do that by updating light fixtures. We're going to do a two tone paint scheme. We're going to go and freshen up the carpet if we have to. We're going to maybe go in and resurface the countertops. Okay, that's going to go in and that's going to command a market rent. We know what the market rents are. There's multiple ways to calculate that. After that, what we're going to do is we're going to implement a ratio utility billing system. A lot of people refer to it as rubs. Again, we're buying for mom and pops. They're probably not billing back for water, they're probably not billing back for garbage. We're going to recapture on average $35 per unit, okay, per month on that big money there. Once this is done, we're going to then go through and say, okay, remaining tenants, we're going to get you up to market rate. So we're going to raise those remaining tenants over probably a year period up to market rate. Maybe take a building or two at a time, get those folks bumped up. Classic example. Our Park Place deal was doing 53,000amonth. Last month we did 93,000 on it. We've only owned it for 20 since 2014. So you, you know, going on three years now, this stuff works. If you're buying right on the front end. Again, it all starts up front. You got to buy right on the front end, find a real deal that's a mom and pop and then implement the strategy going forward.

I think the important thing about management also is you have to think of it as a business we've evolved. So basically, you know, your management company has to look At a tenant, as a customer, you have to have customer service. I think one of the reasons why people lose tenants or don't keep their tenants is they don't offer the customer service. When a customer or a tenant moves in, he's paying the rent. You have to think of him and service him at every point. That property that Jake alluded to, Park Place, we took over. The first week we're there, we had a tenant come in the office and started crying. Why was this guy crying? Because we fixed his freaking stove. Can you imagine that? I mean, there's no service going on. And these mom and pops Jake likes to call the death spiral, they won't do anything. That's why these rents are so low. Give me 400 bucks a month. Don't call me. I mean, we love to see that because we know there's a lot of value there. Those tenants are being underserved. They want to pay more. If you're giving them the value, they. They will pay more. We don't just go in and start jacking up rents. We're going to go in there, we're going to take care of these units. We're going to take care of the safety of the property. We're going to change the name of the property. We're going to get a different, you know, look to the property, different feel to the property. New laundry, and then.

Exactly.

Implement all of our, you know, all of our value adds onto that property.

Scott, Todd, are you loving this?

I love you guys, man. Like, I love. I mean, you guys have this down.

To a science, which what we do every day. You know, the thing is, we're doing it, though. Okay. This is vertical integration. Right, Gino?

That we're in vertical integration. Well, you know what it is? It's evolving. So we bought a 25 unit property, and we bought that, and we were landlords and we were working it, and we didn't have any systems in place, and we took our lumps. 25 unit. We bought a 36 unit. So we learned a little bit more. We had a resident manager. He destroyed us for a few months. We took our lumps. It's not easy. We went to court with him, the whole nine yards. But after that, we bought our third property. And the third property, I think the light bulb went off and I finally said to myself, I've got a viable business here. We actually have to start implementing systems. The book from Gino Wickman, Traction, talks about building systems within your business. And we started doing that. We started hiring good people. We started trying to create a culture within our business. Yes, he reads it. He puts it right next to his bedside. And he goes to bed every night and reads about Gino, not Barbara Wickman. And it's great. You just want to think of it as being a business and what happens. A lot of multifamily operators consider themselves as landlords, and we did in the beginning. Think of yourself as an asset manager. You're managing an asset. You're not managing just the tenants and the toilets. You're looking at the performance and it's really based upon numbers. That's what you're.

I think the other thing that you're doing that is key to your success is that you're doing what a business does and that's provide value.

Right?

Because if you're not providing value in someone's life, well, then you're not going to be in business because your customers, you said, is going to leave you versus providing true value and fixing the guy's stove. Something small that we would all, you know, expect. But then he will tell others within the community, these guys are great. And he's okay now spending another $10 a month on his rent because he sees that you're making changes to the community that he's living in and he wants these changes. Everybody wants to live in the best community they can live in.

It comes down to value for value transactions. I think you're absolutely right.

And we could talk about a couple of things that we do on our property. We want to give same day notification if you come in and you apply to a property. We want to give you same day, yes or no. We don't want you waiting there. We implement moving fees instead of security deposits so tenants can get into a property cheaper than actually just giving a security deposit. Something that Jake's starting to implement now.

Is when we turn some secret sauce here. Gino, come on, baby. You're going to get this.

Come on, come on, share it.

Talk to him about the nice tenant turn up, you know, when you turn over an apartment.

So. So we're actually, we're gonna start marketing this, but we're just kind of in. We're gonna use a tech term that I don't even really know what it means. I'm gonna say because it sounds cool. We're in beta. Okay. I don't really know what beta means, but we're in beta right now. So what we're doing is we. We're gonna be the first property, and we've actually already started first property management Company to actually start having a certified building inspector go in each one of our units before we turn it over to the tenant. Before that tenant actually moves in. We have a certified building inspector go in, do what he does on that unit. We have software through our appfolio where you go in, you actually have the phone, he's taking pictures. So that's getting uploaded to the manager. So if there's anything wrong with it, we're catching it on the front end before our manager, anyone even goes in there. And then we're correcting it because we know that a tenant is going to release with us based on that move in experience. So if we can make a great move in experience for that tenant, we're going to leave them a little gift basket. We're going to make sure the tenants looking sweet on the front end that we have a better chance of releasing. And we know that one of our biggest costs are tenant move outs. So if we can keep the person in there, keep them happy, provide value on the front end, then I think, you know, we're going to be in pretty good shape. So we just started doing this. We're going to actually get some marketing together, get on the website, get it out there. So, you know, it's going to be part of our. Why, why, why should you lease from me?

Right?

And it's going to be, you know, it's a big part of, it's going to be our service.

So what is your churn on like a customer? Like what, what's your churn on your tenants?

So like the actual cost if someone leaves?

No, like percentage. Like what percentage of your tenants like leave after, you know, one year or what percentage of your tenants leave? Yeah, your turnover every single year, you.

Know, it's probably like, it's probably like 7, 8%. And you know, you could be anywhere from, you know, on the high end, 4,000 to the low end, like 1,000 on a turn, depending on what has to be done. And again, we're going to go through and make there's consistency, right? We're implementing a franchise model. So when we go in, there's gonna be a certain standard that the countertops are gonna be. There's certain standard, the condition of the flooring has to be in. So if it's not, we're gonna have to put that money in and it's unfortunate we have to spend it. So therefore, if the tenant stays longer, it's better for us, you know, to continue servicing that tenant than having to turn it over.

And Scott, this goes Back to multifamily. The reason why we love multifamily is if you have 10 single family homes, you can't build a business that way. You can't build the proper maintenance staff, you can't have the proper management company. But when you scale up and you buy 100 unit property, you can hire a leasing agent, you can hire a full time maintenance guy to take some of that load off of you and you're not as encumbered and you can continue to grow your business, although you'll still be there three, four days a week, you'll still have time to look at other stuff and do other stuff. And it's given us the ability to grow. And on a platform of almost 700 units, we have maybe 12 or 15 vacancies this month starting out. So we have a very low vacancy, I'm very low vacancy, and then we'll.

Finish the month with less than 5 fluctuates.

All right, Gino, Jake. So we buy, right? We manage, right? But now we got to get the money, right? Now I imagine there's a few sources of financing, right? What's the Jake and Gino? Wheelbarrow profit way financing, right?

Safety, baby. We're looking for safety, right? We're trying to get away from interest rate risk. So you know, an ideal perfect deal would probably be like a HUD deal going out 35 years fixed, right? Low interest rate. What we're doing though is a lot of times we are going in and we're repositioning this property. So it's almost a three step. We'll probably go in on, if it's like $5 million deal, we might go in with a community bank, get it, you know, refi our money out within two years. Okay. So we may be on a low interest rate, maybe on a five year term. On that first note, then what we're probably gonna do is we're gonna go and refi it out to a 1025 with a local lender.

Where are you getting that initial money at?

That's Papa. That's, that's Papa Barber over there. He's made of it, right? No, it's, it's our money. So. But let me. This actually, it's called refine roll. Let me get into it. The money will come out. Okay? Follow the trail, Follow the money, right? So initially we're just, we're coming out of pocket. It was me, you know, our first deal is me, Gino and his brother. Okay. So we came out, I actually bought a house and spent all My money. Because we took us two years, we didn't think anything was gonna happen. So I was, I was out. I liquidated my 401k, best thing I ever did. Okay. So that's where I got the money from the first deal. Then what we started doing is we started getting it in, forcing the appreciation, doing the repositioning process and refine our money out of the deals on the second term. Okay, so you go buy community, refi, community. And then on the third, we want to take it to agency debt, either a HUD deal, long term, 35, 35 or 1030, Fannie or Freddie. Okay. But the refi and roll essentially is you get in, spend two years tops repositioning the property, then you refi for higher amount, get your initial capital out and then that, those, every time you refine those, you're deploying that capital to the next deal.

I think on the first deal, though, for everyone who's going out for their very first deal, I think the easiest and the best thing to do is look for a community bank. Guys who are like portfolio lenders who hold their loans within house because they're the easiest to work with. They know the market. You need to go out and make connections with bankers. You need to go out and look at three or four different banks. Money's become definitely money is a commodity like anything else you can go on the Internet. Everyone's lending money out there, whether it's private money, you know, the hard money. You're looking at this, like Jake said, agency debt. You're looking at tons of community banks. They're all out there with money. So you really have to go out and shop and get three or four different, you know, terms you're going to, you have leverage. Because when you're buying a 25 unit property, the bank sees demand deposits. Tell them you're going to bring your money in there and tell them you're going to bring the demand deposits. That's one way of using leverage.

What about these crowdfunding sites, guys?

We use owner financing for that.

I'm kidding.

No, it's a joke. We actually, I was actually going to start talking about owner finance in a little bit, but we have not done any, anything like that. Tell us about it.

You haven't done any crowdfunding, stuff like that?

No, that's what I'm saying. I think, Mark, you've probably done something like that, right? So I'm not.

No, I haven't done it. I've looked into it.

Oh, okay. They don't like I didn't know if you guys were, you know, using that or not. That's what I was saying.

Well, Mark, see, what we're doing right now is we've basically exhausted most of our funds. We're just sick of making a ton of money, putting it back into the next deal, making a ton of money, putting back the next deal. So with the experience we've had now, we're going to start a private equity fund. We're going to start syndicating our deals going forward. So that's the reason. But we can do that now that we have the track record, we have the credibility, we have the model. So I feel comfortable taking money from investors. I mean, people start out in their first or second deal and start syndicating from the very beginning. I give those guys a ton of credit because they have no fear. They know exactly what they want. I. I was stumbling and bumbling in the beginning with Jake. We weren't sure where we were going. But I think we've got the confidence now to say, listen, let's go out. If we need to raise a million dollars for a deal, we can do it. We can charge some acquisition fees, some asset management fees. We'll manage the property in house. We'll keep a percentage of the deal for ourselves. But I feel comfortable at this point of doing that.

So is it.

I think most people have this experience of going to the bank and borrowing money, and their biggest experience is their own house. Right. And that's terrible. That's a terrible experience. But commercial loans, am I wrong? It's not the same experience. Right.

It isn't. There's a couple of reasons why. Number one, a lot of competition. Number two, you can go through a mortgage broker who can bring the deal to you. Number three, anything over five units is considered commercial. And what they do is they look at the net operating income, they don't look at the comps as much. They don't care. The 17 unit down the street sold for 1 million for they really want to see what the property was generating in revenue. They don't look at your balance sheet as much. And that's one of the reasons Jake and I hooked up in the very beginning. When banks look at you, they look at your balance sheet, your net worth. As partners, the two of us, we're much stronger guaranteeing 50% of the loan, as opposed to myself taking the loan on 100%. You can go to the mastermind aspect of it. We work really well together. We feed off each other. I think partnerships really excel for that reason, for us. But I think that big thing of the net operating income and what's the property's doing really differentiates a single family home from a multi family home.

I love it. So I have to ask before we ask you guys for your tips of the week, what the hell is modern affordability?

So modern affordability. Okay. You know, and this actually goes back to sort of the part of the why. Right. You know, what we're doing, what we're about. And modern affordability is when we go into these places and it ties back to the repositioning aspect of it. We're going in, you know, to these. Maybe it was built in the 90s or the late 80s. Right. And they never updated the place. So when we go in, we're putting in the two tone paint schemes, we're painting the shutters, we're getting the landscaping looking right. We're taking something that. I'll give an example of a deal we did last March, didn't have a fitness center. We went in and the underneath the clubhouse, the maintenance guys were just throwing all their trash in there. It was, you know, there built an additional fence around it. Before you got to the pool. We cleared all that crap out of the way. We put a fitness center in. We have the concrete floor stained, it opens up to a pool. Now we put this huge 58 foot long sun deck on the back that's got louvered siding on. It's beautiful. Basically we're going into these complexes, they're a little bit older, we're upgrading them, making them very nice, making them modern. And we're able to charge rates that are still affordable to somebody that's working a manufacturing job, making 15 or 20 bucks an hour, someone that's maybe working retail, someone that's in the restaurant industry. Right. It's modern affordability. You're able to get in, you're not going to have to go rent that thing that's dilapidated. You're able to go in, get something nice that you feel good about, that you're proud to call home and you're still able to afford it.

And I think let's tie that into what's been going on in the political climate. That segment of the population that's been forgotten. Those guys that nobody services, those are niche tenants, the blue collar guys that just want a safe, affordable retail workers, clean and just to live. And I think we've really hit on something because our first property was really run down. It was a motel. There's a lot of drugs going on we went in there, the weekly renters, we cleaned the whole thing up. We changed the statement of the property. The mail lady, six months later was like, thank God, guys. I actually feel safe delivering mail here. So, I mean, it is about making money, but at the same time, it's about really offering a service to people that sometimes they don't have the leverage to say, I want a nicer looking place. So we took it upon ourselves to say, hey, there's a niche here that needs to be filled in this Tennessee market. And you can look all over. All over every parts of the United States, and there's a lot of these areas that need this kind of service and need this kind of value. So it might be a little cliche affordability, but it really. It really fits our. You know, I love it, man.

You know, I think it's one of the best things we've done. I'm so proud of that.

So it's great. So what question should we have asked you that we didn't ask you before we get to the tip of the week?

Hmm. What question should you have asked us? How the hell did we make it through our first deal and we're still here? That's the question.

I think you should ask.

Why?

Why multifamily? You already asked this out. But if I can expand upon that, for every person listening to this, you have to. You have to think about it from your own perspective. If you're listening to me, Jake, talk about multifamily. And it's great. And this is that you have to focus on your reasons why. Because if you have enough reasons why I got out of it. Two reasons. I hated my job. So my motivation was moving away from pain. My painful situation that I had, I was moving away from that. And I just latched on to multifamily, and I latched on to Jake. Either move away from pain or move towards pleasure. If you see a vision like we have now where we just keep expanding and offering our services, think of that in two ways. Why are you doing something? If you have enough reasons why, you'll figure out how you do it, decide.

And then take action, right?

Yep.

I mean, you guys are like the wheelbarrow Buddhas in a way.

Bring the pain, baby.

Great. It's great. Scott, you have any other questions before we get to the tip of the week?

No. We need more time, though, so can we have that?

Are you guys good with us using wheelbarrow Buddhas? I think we could. We could probably run with that on something.

I just. I Just took the domain as we were talking.

You can buy it.

You can buy it from us.

Yeah, you know what? I love that. Who said 50 bucks? Was that Gino?

Yeah.

These are real deal guys. Every aspect of it.

We just walked away from a deal though, actually. We were negotiating a website and their final price was 250 and we stopped at 150 and haven't heard anything back. So sometimes you got to walk away, right? That's right.

It's not. I talk about it all the time sometimes. You know, deals are like the bus, right? Be another one down the pike. Sometimes the best deals are the ones that you say no to and then, you know, somehow like they come back anyways.

That's a great tip right there. The great tip is be able to walk away from a deal. If you're emotionally attached to anything, you have less power and you don't want to lose that power.

Just say, hey, I got the tip of the week though, man. Come on. I was writing this down earlier. Can I still get my tip of the week?

What's your tip of the week?

Vertical integration. So, okay, this is an inside joke between Gino and I because we're like, we're starting this private equity firm now and all this shit. And so we're out there seeing a lot of these other websites and stuff and they're all talking about vertical integration. And look, I was in the pharmaceutical world. Gino's a pizza guy. We're simple dudes, right? We don't necessarily get in to all this MBA business speak, right? So we're looking it up. And it basically means you got everything, you got your stuff in house, right? You're controlling the lease and you're controlling the acquisitions. You have the on site management, you're controlling a lot of the aspects of the, the business. I'm like, dude, we're doing this, we're vertically integrated. We know it. So bottom line is start from the ground up, brick by brick. If you guys are going to get out there, you want to get in a multi family, some of these guys want to just get out there and start syndicating. My advice would be start your own company, start managing these things yourselves. You're going to learn it from the ground up. And then if you get into the big money, you know, some of these insurance companies trying to give you money, some of these funds, they're going to want to see this, they're going to want to see that you have total control of your business. If you guys are starting out, start from the Ground up. Don't be afraid. Start your own management company. Control every aspect of it, and grow from there. I feel like we actually did it the right way. I feel like we started off, did a few deals ourselves, built the company up, and it's gonna enable us to scale big time over the next 12 months.

And the book, Traction, which is which Jake flashed during the interview. So I love it. Great, great. Tip of the week, Gino. No pressure, but Jake really gave a good tip.

My tip would be start with the end in mind. Whenever you do something, start with what's gonna end up at the end. And I never did that. My career in investing, I'd buy a multifamily that looks good, but what am I accomplishing with that? Do I want to do a cost segregation study on that and get tax benefits in the beginning? Do I want to fix that up, flip it, and buy it something bigger? So always think of the end in mind. What do I want to accomplish? Like, now we didn't really do that, Jake and I, beginning, but now we see the big picture, and if we'd done that, we probably would have scaled up even quicker. So always think of what you want to accomplish.

But it's actually changed, though, because I, you know, we just were like, I was. I was. You know, I don't say I was younger. I was naive. And my main thing was I knew I wanted to own real estate to create wealth, and I wanted to. You know, I was working the corporate job, and I was bored. It wasn't enough for me. I wanted to do more. So it was like, okay, I want to make extra money, and I want to do it through real estate by creating wealth. Then I realized why everyone was doing this multifamily. More so after I already got into it and all these other things, like Gina was talking about the cost seg and all this other stuff started popping out. It's like. This is like, Nirvana is a sweet man. So, you know, I just got lucky.

I think what you call that, those cold growth. So you're growing through the whole thing. If you're a person who doesn't want to get out of their comfort zone and stays in your comfort zone, you won't experience. Experience those other things. So that's. I guess the other tip is to get out of your comfort zone and be uncomfortable, because it's okay to be uncomfortable, because that's the only way you grow in life is growing from a 25 to 36 to 136 unit. If we weren't uncomfortable we'd never grow, bro. Right.

Nirvana. Wheelbarrow. Buddhist. What?

Jake just dropped the mic on us, Mark.

We just got to hang up now, man.

That's it.

Nirvana, Wheelbarrow.

I just subscribed to their podcast, by the way. These guys are great. Like, if you haven't subscribed to the Wheelbarrow Profits podcast, you've got to do it.

Number one multifamily podcast on itunes. Just saying.

See, you can see why. You can see why.

You know why? Because we don't want to BS people. 35, 40 minutes is worth a lot of time to people. I want people to turn the podcast on. We had a laundry guy on last week talking about who wants to wear laundry. But if you're in the multifamily space, you want to know what, you want to know what a laundry provider is, right? You're going to go there, you're going to find out. The guy's going to give you a bonus. He's going to sell your machines, he's going to give you free machines, he's going to give you a vig, he's going to split the profit. You want to know content that you can actually use. That's what's important when you listen to a podcast. And our thing is really micro focus on what we talk. Specifically, we have great guests on. We had you on as a guest a couple months ago. So we want to bring value and that's what it comes down to, whether it's the real estate business, whether it's the education business, where it's a podcast.

Yeah. I mean, obviously having me as a guest is just shows, like, the kind of taste that they have.

My invite must have been lost in the mail.

Come on, man. He didn't invite Scott Todd. I was like, where's Scott Todd at?

I'm have to come on your podcast.

You know why? Because Mark is a selfish podcaster.

Damn, man. He wants it all for himself.

I want it all for myself. Like, actually, like, for the podcast. Like, I whisper Scott's intro.

Yeah, he does.

Hey, welcome to the Autopaths have become podcast with Mark Podolski, the Land Geek, and Scott Todd.

Yeah, Yeah, I gotta give my tip of the week.

All right, what's your tip of the week, Scott?

All right.

It's a book. It's Get Smart. How to Think Like Jake and Gino and act like the Most Successful, Highest Paid People in Every Field. You know, what is it?

It sounds sweet.

It's a book. It's a very good book.

What do you like about this book, I like Brian Tracy a lot, but he's more like. He's got so many books.

I feel like, dude, he's like, careful, careful.

That's like Gino's second father.

He's an old dude, but let me tell you, he's been around forever and he. It's like reading Think and Grow Rich. And he pulls out so many things and he gives you so much content. But as far as being able to teach somebody how to speak, being able to teach somebody how to think, and, you know, time management, he's over so many different platforms. And I love him. I love his message.

All right, Gino, let me ask you a question then. Okay? You're on a desert island, okay? Before I put you on the desert island, you can get one author's body of work of books, right? Now we're gonna assume that you're gonna build a business on the desert island. And the only way you're gonna get off that desert island is if by using, utilizing the knowledge, wisdom from these books, you'll build a big enough business to get off the island. Right. Obviously, it can't be about construction, how to build a boat. I mean, really, like a business, like business authors, Right? Who would you say would be your business author?

He's read everything too. So this is.

I know, I know. He's really well read.

So I mean, first I got to work on myself, right? So before I work in a business, I've got to work on myself. So I would personally go to Tony Robbins.

I knew it.

I knew he's gonna say that. Only because I need to work on myself and I need to see everything else as an external block on the internal block. Most of the blocks are going on inside of me. So if I work on myself and I can stretch my horizons and I can see my potential, then the mechanical part, I would go to Jake and Gina to learn about multi families. But just saying, who are you going.

To run to on the desert island? The turtles?

I'm getting off the desert island, bro. I'm gonna make up myself a little boat and get off the damn island, you know?

Scott, do you have an author you take on a desert island, like just one set of books? I think Tony Robbins is a great answer.

I think Tony Robbins is good.

I don't know.

Tony Robbins would. I think about it. I think Tony Robbins would be. Would be pretty good.

I'll throw another name out there.

Thanks. Thrown Ayn Rand out there. Atlas Shrugged, the foul.

Now.

Let me throw another name out there. I Don't know if you guys, you guys have heard of him before. Brendan Burchard. I just.

Just say, yeah, I know Brendan Burchard.

I think he's amazing. I think he's really done a lot of work with brain science and all that. He talks about high performance academy, experts academy. It's really a lot of work on yourself. And there you go. So that's.

I love me some Arnold, man, I'm telling you right now.

Scott, what about you? One author you'd bring?

I don't know.

I'd be tough.

I'd have to think.

It's a tough question. You know, I was thinking Seth Godin for me. I don't know.

He'd be, you know, on the island with that bald head. It'd probably be dangerous for him. He probably gets mess. SPF going quick, though, you know, I.

Don'T know, but I kind of like Gina's answer. You got to kind of start with yourself. But I think. I don't know. It's a good. It's a good. It's a good thought to think about. But anyways, my tip of the week is going to be learn more about Jake and Gino at the aptly named jakeandgino.com and certainly subscribe to the Wheelbarrow Profit podcast. Guys, are we good?

Good. Great.

Don't forget Insta, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and the website.

Yeah, absolutely. So these guys are ubiquitous. Also, I just want to remind everybody, the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like Jake and Gino is if you subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of your review, and we're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit.

Wow, that's pretty sweet, man.

Yeah, yeah.

You're doing that.

We're doing it. We're doing it. I want to thank all the listeners, Jake and Gino.

This is great.

We'd love to have you guys back because I'm sure you guys are going to be doing big, big things. And I just want to thank both of you for taking time out of your valuable day in the multifamily world to really mentor the art of passive income listeners. AUDIENCE so thank you, Scott. Todd, thank you. Learn more about scott@landmodo.com thanks, guys.

Bye, guys. Have a good day.