Unlock Hidden Profits in Real Estate: Tiffany Mittal Reveals How on Jake & Gino's Podcast!

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Hello, everybody. This is Jake Sanzani, host of Jake and Gino Podcast. Here with my co-host, the multifamily mentor, the coach, chef, father of 6, the bestselling author, the G-Daddy back from Ireland, Gino Barbaro. Gino, how's it going?

Jake, I'm doing good today. We may talk a little bit about your anger issues in the past few days. We may get into a little bit of emotions. I want you to sit with it today. And I want to let you know that I had an amazing time in Ireland. Couples retreat, never did that before. It was painful. It was long. We discussed the past. We looked at our present. We looked into the future. And Jake, I need another vacation, my friend. I'm not going to lie to you. It was a long week, but it was really— it was an amazing week, amazing week about discovery and where you want to go and growing as a couple. And I learned a lot of things about myself and maybe we'll dive into it a little bit on this podcast. How are you doing, my friend?

I'm doing great.

And that's why you have partners, folks, so one can go find himself and the other can make the money. That's how we do it around here. So hey, we have a great guest today. Today's guest is an executive in the PropTech industry who is also a seasoned multifamily professional with over 13 years of experience. So without further ado, Tiffany Mittal, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Hey, it is our pleasure. Uh, let's get to know each other a little better.

Please share with us your background and how you got started in So my husband and I, we're apartment owners, I'm sure like many of your listeners. And, you know, like many of them, we were getting really frustrated with our water bills that would come for each of our properties. We would start to realize that the prices were going up so much that we could no longer get to a point where we felt the profit was you know, making sense anymore. And so we, you know, looked all around and tried to find utility billing companies. We'd heard of this thing called Rubs and we couldn't find anyone to help us. They said, you know, you're 100 units, you're not, you're just not that big. And we got really frustrated because we realized that this big side of the market of beginning investors isn't getting served. And so rather than, you know, just taking it as it is, I'm not someone who takes no for an answer very easily. So—

Didn't we just become best friends? She doesn't take no for an answer and she hates the water companies and the water bills. God, I love this show already.

So I went to go work for one of these companies, learned everything there was to know about utility billing, and realized there was a huge gap in the market of everyone servicing these beginning investors. So we started our own utility billing company that is actually a SaaS version, which means software as a service. So it's a tool for apartment owners to do it themselves, completely cut out the middleman and just do your own billing, take control of your operations and grow the value of your property. And so that's what we did. We started our own tech company and, you know, only out of a need for our own, you know, business, and then figured we could help this not only grow for ourselves, but help it grow for other people.

Jake, it's SaaS, not ass. Okay, baby? It's software as a service. Okay. Tiffany, talk to me about the huge gap that you saw. I mean, because a lot of listeners may be just getting into multifamily and not even know what ratio utility billing system is. Give us some of the advantages that your company offers. What was that huge gap that you saw that you're trying to service right now?

So what's really funny is if you— it's not really about the water bills. A lot of people think that RUBS or ratio utility billing as a way of transitioning your water bills from property paid to resident paid, right? So everyone kind of pays their fair share, but it's not really about the water bills. You know, there's a little secret that I've learned. I saw it on our own properties and I learned it once I started working for these utility billing service companies was once we implemented this, because they had to take us on as default once I kind of backdoored the system. Once we implemented this on one of our properties, it was 36 units in San Diego. We saw about $36,000 of additional revenue that year one. But when we went to go refinance that property, Freddie Mac valued our property at $1 million more just for the $36,000 of additional revenue, which then they gave us a cash-out refinance of $500,000. And we were like, whoa, we didn't put any— this is not a traditional value-add where you're putting a lot of money into the properties. All we did was transition our water bills from you know, owner paid to resident paid, and we saw, you know, $500,000, we were able to, you know, use that cash to buy another property. That's when it really rang the bell for us that this wasn't just about utility billing or transitioning these owner utilities. This is about creating a mechanism to grow, a mechanism to grow your portfolio, a mechanism to grow your wealth. And that really, if you're a small investor with under 1,000 units, no one will service you. And so how can the little guys grow as fast as the big guys have been growing for And I realized they just don't need the service from these guys and be the tier 10 client because they just don't have enough buying power. They just need a tool to do it themselves and have control over it. And so it's really about creating a mechanism to grow your portfolio with another tool in your tool belt of a different value-add strategy that requires no capital output.

So how does that tool work? I mean, let's talk about the company you created. And I know, you know, Jared's a friend of mine as well.

Talk about how you got into that initial idea and how you built it.

Initial phase. I mean, everyone—it's education times action. Tiffany goes out and works for a company, understands the business. She just doesn't say, "Hey, I'm going to start a company. I've got no experience." She actually put in the work, which is really, really important to understand. First, it was her portfolio. Then it was like, "Well, how do I implement this for other people? Let me go and work." And that's part of you know when you're when you're raising capital for a multifamily deal, you need the credibility. And I think Tiffany got the credibility by working with companies and understanding their platforms. So how did that work initially as far as creating that that? that this is a SaaS company and getting investors on board?

Well, I realized, you know, once there was this gap in the market, I was working in fintech at the time. I left my day job and said, you know what, I want to create a tool for these small investors. And so I dumped a bunch of money in myself. You know, I spent about $250,000 initially to get the company started. And then a year later, I was out of money and they said it was going to be another year to finish my software. And I had this idea, I'm like, I needed to bring this to life. So I went out and I said, you know what? I need a partner. And I realized that most of the big prop tech companies aren't going after these smaller investors because the market itself is very fragmented. If you think to yourself, like these small investors, they're not advertising on LinkedIn. Hey, I work for this company and I have 20 units on the side. You know, they're not advertising their side gigs. So how do you find all these people? And you find them by finding a node. And at the time I realized that that node was Grant Cardone. And I said, he needs to be my partner. His whole audience are these small investors who need the same help that I needed. And so I pitched my company to Jared and Grant and they said yes on the spot. I was so excited. This is the perfect opportunity. They finished my product through the Project 10K and 10X incubator. And then we just launched it in February. It took about a year from start. We did a friends and family round. And then again, took another year. So I partnered with them the end of '21, took all of '22 to finish building it, and then we just launched it in February of '23.

What are some of the pushbacks you get from people listening to this? Is this too good to be true? Is the platform easy to use, hard to use? What have you heard from your friends and family?

Well, I've actually had really great feedback from all of our beta users and our initial customers. But if you think about utility billing, I actually think it's a really simple concept. I always say utility billing is about as sexy as doing your own taxes. You don't want to do your own taxes.

You can say that about multifamily too. You could say that about apartment investing. It's not super sexy, but it can make you rich.

But it can make you money. And the hard part is it doesn't need to be that complicated, right? Like doing your own taxes doesn't need to be that complicated. So what we've done is we've really simplified the process and made it really, really easy for anyone to pick up and quickly implement on their properties. And so the feedback that we're getting is great. Most of the time is, is this legal? You know, can I do this is a question that I get mostly from the smaller investors. And the answer is yes. In 99.9% of the country, this is perfectly legal. Now, there are some regulation hotspots like Miami-Dade County. You can't do this in New Jersey. It's difficult in, you know, a few spots in California, but most of the country This is not a problem to transition your bills, and you should see a lot of benefit, not just from money you're getting back in your pocket, but also conservation at the property level. Residents are more accountable, right, for their usage. So it's, if it's almost like you go to a hotel, right, and your shirt's a little wrinkly and you've put your shirt in the, in the bathroom and you put it in the shower and you turn on the hot water and you let it go. And we all act that way because, you know, what happens after you pull out the iron? Yeah, you get all the wrinkles out. But our tenants think the same way.

That is the hack for the day right there.

Never did that. I'm going to start doing that.

Our tenants think the same way. In fact, I actually had a tenant who called me to tell me that her neighbor was leaving her water on all day. When we actually entered the unit, we found out that that neighbor wasn't even home and she left her water on because her dog had anxiety and she didn't want her dog to bark while she was at work. And if you're footing the bill for that, you need that behavior to change. So even if it's a small bill, you're modifying the behavior of your residents to be more accountable.

Wow. Say something about that, Gino. How's that make you feel? Leaving the water on because the pet has anxiety. Tell me about that. You want to go into emotions, Gino? How's that make you feel?

So I'm thinking of my parents back in Italy when it was 10 degrees outside and they had to walk to a fountain with Glass jugs and bring in water. 100. We have become so wow, Jake. The anger is over. Is just taking me over right now. So I'm gonna transition my next question.

I thought he was gonna say punt the dog, but okay. Anyways, no, I'm not. No, no, no. Here comes Peter.

Here comes Peter.

Tiffany, when when you have property owners, what what pushbacks do they have from you? I'm like Jake and Gina are here. We want to implement your your. your software, what are complaints that we have? Is it gonna be hard? Is it gonna be expensive? Can we do it? What are the things that you're hearing from owners?

Most of them, they just don't really understand how it works. You're talking about a billing platform, like, what can I bill for? How easy is it? You know, it's literally just entering the dollar amount of your bill that you get each month or every month or ever, you know, whatever frequency you get them on, and you're clicking calculate. It's as simple as it can be, and it's literally just put it in your bills and you can bill anything. It's— think about it's almost like triple netting your apartments. You know, if you think of all these industries, right, that when you have price commoditization, they need to unbundle, right? The airline industry's unbundled their baggage. The hotel industry has kind of unbundled their resort fees. You know, I think the future of multifamily is going to be you're renting the airspace and everything else is extra. Because how else can you deal with a lot of these regulations, especially in states like California and a lot that have rent control? How else can you account for all these other expenses that are continuing to go up?

And you're seeing right now Utility Ranger as part of that. Where do you see the company growing? Are you going to focus just on utility billing right now, or do you see anything in the future as far as expanding?

Right now we're definitely focused on scaling Utility Ranger. I definitely think there's brand expansion. Within utility ranger, so as we kind of move into our growth pattern, you know, I think it's you have to wait and see what comes next. What kind of ranger may come next?

And one one KPI that I love to see you track is actually getting NOI and and getting as far as increasing NOI. Have you done that yet? As far as like let's say you have 300 property owners, I've we've saved them you know. $300,000 in NOI and they've gotten an additional $20 million in value. Are you starting to do that?

So what's interesting on our platform is that's something that I think is very, very important is to track NOI. And we've actually used that as gamification. A lot of other platforms, they don't really have this as something that should be gamified, but you should be tracking your NOI growth because of the cap rate multiplier. I give people this really easy example of How to calculate how much money you're leaving on the table is you take how many units you have across your multifamily portfolio, and you times that by a thousand. So for the one property I was explaining, it was 36 units times a thousand, which is 36,000. You divide that number by your cap rate, and that's the value increase that you should see once you implement this because of the cap rate multiplier. So it's a really easy formula, and it's something that you're tracking that we're tracking in Utility Ranger. Everyone can see what their NOI year-to-date increase. is so they can really leverage that because everyone's going to have a different cap rate. So you can't necessarily predict what everyone's value increase will be. But if you're tracking the NOI, that's the way to do it.

And Tiffany, as you're growing the company and you're scaling, can you give us some tips on raising capital? I mean, starting the company, this is almost like you're buying a multifamily property and you're syndicating. What challenges did you have or what learning lessons did you have raising capital?

Well, I think you get a lot of people who want to commit verbally upfront, but they actually have to wire the money in, right? You have to put your money where your mouth is. And so getting the right team members and getting the right people to invest, I think initially we had a few investors that you realize as you're going through the process, maybe your values are misaligned and you really want people on your team that have values that are aligned so that way you can get through the tough parts of growing a business, right? If you don't have aligned values, those tough parts are going to be even harder. But going, you know, I think I had a lot of investors I was surprised by saying, I can't believe you have this much money sitting in your savings. And hopefully I can, you know, 10x this money for you. But I would say finding the right people, clearly communicating your vision of a company, having a lot of confidence in what you're doing, and choosing the right partners.

Tiffany, does this work also with single-family home investors? Let's say I have 30 single-family homes. This would work on that platform as well, correct?

It doesn't necessarily work as well for single-family investors. And the reason is, is because you're not necessarily dividing up a master utility bill between units. Could you use it as a billing platform that's not dividing up the bills if you needed a secondary platform to consolidate the bills? Yes, you could use it. Yes, you can use it in HOAs as well as a way of dividing There's other uses you could use. It's just not ideal for that scenario. The ideal scenario is a multifamily scenario where you're having to divide up a master bill by occupants, square feet, by unit, and separate that out.

Last question before we go to the short answer questions. Where do you see the company growing? There's gotta be hundreds of thousands of property management companies, property owners, syndication companies. Where do you see the company growing to?

I think that the growth is really unlimited. And the reason I think it's unlimited is because more and more people are wanting to bring things in-house and have control and kind of take on a vertical integration strategy. I think that you see a lot of companies pushing this vertical integration strategy, which is much more of, I want to control the entire system, right? I want to build a scalable portfolio. You know, but right now I'm trying to help the people just like myself, you know, help the smaller investors who aren't getting the help out there and want to grow their portfolio. And hopefully I can be a part of that growth for them. If we build an enterprise version at some point for the bigger guys, you know, they have solutions right now. The smaller guys don't have a solution. So my focus is really the beginning investor. But, you know, if there's a big player in the market who wants an enterprise version, I'm not against that, but that's not who I'm truly out to help.

All right, gang, let's take a quick timeout to hear from our sponsor. Now, we have had a great run in multifamily, going from 0 units to over $250 million in assets. That's over 2,000 apartment deals that we've been able to purchase through our framework: buy right, manage right, and finance right.

Now, Jake and I, we created the Jake and Gino community back in 2015. We launched our first book deal about our And since then, our students have closed over 60,000 units. That's over $4 billion in assets they've been able to close over the last 6 years.

And that's why this community has been so successful. We call it results-based education and we pour back into the community everything that we've learned on our journey from 0 to 2,000 units and all our systems and scale that we use on our very own property management and investing companies.

Jake, I love that. It's not just education. implementation. So what I want you to do, click on that link down below, apply to work with our team, see how we can help you on your journey in multifamily.

All right, we're back. You brought it up, vertical integration. What are your thoughts on that, Tiffany? Give us, give us the rundown on the, the VI here.

I think a lot of companies are looking at a vertical integration strategy because they want to control the entire system, right? They want to know Property management software. They want to have their contractors in-house who are doing capital improvements. They want to have control of the software and know exactly what's happening as they're scaling. They can predict a better future outcome if they know exactly what is going to go into it. I think that you're seeing this, and this has been happening in the big market. And can we take a little piece of this and bring it down into the beginning investor and kind of help them start this out early? and bringing their pieces in-house rather than outsourcing to vendors who aren't going to treat them as well because maybe they have 20 units and not 2,000 units. You want them to have control over their vendors by doing it themselves rather than outsourcing.

Is your portfolio that you own, are you vertically integrated currently?

So we just moved ourselves out of San Diego. We moved to Florida. So we went from owner-operator, which is what we've doing for a long time to third-party fee management. Um, so that has been a very different, not difficult, but definitely a challenging experience. Um, you know, so we've been a little bit more hands-off, but the company that we chose in San Diego to manage our portfolio is doing a better job than we were ever doing ourselves. And so, um, are they vertically integrated? They're pretty vertically integrated. They're not only using my software, but they do a lot of their things in-house. And so I think it's different.

That should have been part of the deal, Tiffany. All right. We're signing up the PM agreement with you here. We need you to adopt the software. Come on, help us out here, folks.

I'm getting great feedback from them. And so now I'm just working to have them implement it across their portfolio rather than just our properties.

That's right. That is right.

Don't take no for an answer. That's what I like about you, Tiffany.

So, you know, in the beginning of the show, you brought up, you know, tracking water as part of your portfolio. And it really resonated with me because every week we have a pulse report that comes out with our KPIs on it, and we review each property. And the 2 that I will without fail always look at is our vacant unrented units, because we don't do security deposits, we do a move-in fee. Mm-hmm. So once we get that hard money on the unit, it's sort of off the board. So I'm always looking at Where could we get more revenue from? And that's that comes from the vacant unrenteds. And then where are we bleeding? And literally water is bleeding, you know, money into the dirt. Essentially, if you're you have a leak or your water bill is high. So every week we have a tracker on there showing what the water bill is and actually how much it's costing per unit on these master metered properties that we have. So if you take away anything from this show, please. Track your vacant and rented if you're doing move-in fees and look at the water tracker every week. It will change your life. It'll change your spouse's life. It'll change your NOI's life. Okay. If you're talking about driving NOI, look at those 2 metrics.

So, Tiffany, did you hear Jake's comment there, though? Like the anger is being suppressed. He's saying bleeding money into the dirt. Here we go. Here we go. Is bleeding, bleeding money. He's got blood coming out of the pipes. Not even water coming out of the pipes. Jake, what's going on?

It's the lifeline, bro. It's the lifeline of your company, Gino. Gino, how long do you live if you cut your arm off and you're bleeding into the ground? It's the same thing. Okay.

Don't want to know that question. Don't want to know the answer to that question. Exactly.

And it's so true because like, guys, here's the thing. If I came at Gino with a battle axe sharpened on both sides and I cut his arm off, it's the same thing as a pipe bleeding on your property. Okay. I just want to be upfront with folks. They know what's really happening here. All right.

This is war.

If your arm gets cut off, it's the same thing as a leaky pipe. That's it. All right. We're getting back to sanity here. Tiffany, what, uh, you're obviously scaling your, uh, your, your rubs company right now. What is— what are some tips for scaling an organization? Because I think that's so— that's the pinch for so many people where they get caught.

I mean, I think the hardest part is scaling it at the right time. You have to have the right amount of revenue as you're bringing in, um, new people, right? You can't kind of front load and have too many people without enough revenue. So I think you have to watch your kind of employee-to-revenue numbers as you're scaling. And, you know, I would say I'm really fortunate partnering with Project 10K and the Grant Cardone's 10X team. I have them really on my back end, really doing a lot of the operations of the company. And that has been a huge benefit to most tech companies because I get to use some of their services in a fractional basis where most tech companies, you have to get the best people to get the best investors on board. And you can get great people, but you don't need them all the time. And so using like a fractional service, I think for a tech company allows you to scale as you need to. And so that's been helpful for me on making sure that we're scaling this and we're doing it right.

Sounds like Airbnb for entrepreneurship. We only need it for this weekend and we'll pay a little bit, but that's nice. Any book recommendations, anything that you've read recently that's added value to your life?

Oh, I, uh, what's the most recent one I've read?

Well, if you haven't read it yet, our first book, Wheelbarrow Profits, talks about ratio utility billing systems a lot. So it may be something you want to hand out. You may want to start handing that out to potential, uh, users of your product. Just saying, it will be a great plug for you.

I will, I will, I will. I haven't read much in the last year. I have a 9-month-old, and so I have not been focused on reading as much.

9-month-old company or child?

A child, child, child. So I've been a little busy the last year or so, but one of my favorite books is, I think it's Start With Why, one of the Simon Sinek books, of making sure that you're doing this for the right reason. And my reason is to help other investors just like me, help them scale their portfolios.

Very cool. Best place for folks to start with your product, where can they go? What's the website and how do they buy it? Let's make some money here for you.

It's utilityranger.com is the website.

No, Tiffany, stop, stop. Let's make some money for them. Okay? Let's increase their NOI through your product. So, okay. Go back to the pitch.

So, you go to utilityranger.com, sign up your units. It's $2 or $3 per unit per month. But what's nice is that it's actually free for the owners because the $3 that they pay per unit per month actually goes onto the bill of the resident. And so they can actually increase that fee to make a little bit more money. And so not only is your fee passed through completely making the product free, but you can actually use it as a revenue generation tool to help pay for other hard costs like property management software and other things like that that you normally can't recover or recoup from.

So utilityranger.com.

Utilityranger.com.

Gino, you're the Lone Ranger here, so bring us home.

I am the Lone Ranger. Jake, Tiffany Mittal out in San Diego with a 36-unit property. I know she— I know her family's got hundreds and hundreds of units, ends up moving out from California to Florida. And I know on that 36-unit property, she's the mom-and-pop, and she's like, how can I figure out this ratio utility billing? How can I actually get rid of this bill and actually, you know, put it onto the residents? Hopefully, number one, generating more income, and number two, Getting water usage down. So if you're an environmentalist, this is, this is a phenomenal tool as well because water usage is all about, all about the accountability. And from that 36-unit property, when you're, when you're increasing that NOI $36,000 a year, that adds an additional million dollars, million dollars of value onto that property. When, you know, you go out and you try to refinance that property, all of a sudden you're able to pull out an additional half a million dollars in that property to be able to go out and repurpose that into another deal. So for all you property management companies out there, For all of you small apartment owners out there looking to increase your NOI, become more efficient, and hopefully let's save the planet a little bit. Take a look at utilityrangers.com.

Yeah, I actually don't care about money. I'm just here for, you know, Greenpeace and the oceans. And so thank you for saving the planet, Tiffany. We really appreciate it. And, you know, great show today. So, hey, gang, as always, we believe in buying deals for the long term. Think in decades. I'm Jake. He's the G Daddy. And we make it happen. We'll see you next time.

Thanks, Tiffany.

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