$50M Portfolio of Multifamily and Strategic Projects with Wayne Courreges III, Ep. 715

If you're looking to scale as a multifamily or commercial real estate investor and you need a little bit of help, you want to check out today's show, we sit down with Wayne Courageous III and he shares how despite having 13 years in the commercial real estate industry, he brought on a mentor to help him learn how to grow and scale his portfolio. He shared that one of the reasons was because he wanted to cut down the learning curve and he knew having the right people on his side would make his job a lot easier. Now Wayne invests not just in multifamily but also in what he calls entrepreneurial endeavors such as boat and RV storage, as well as ground up development. This is something you want to learn about. Just to understand how to wrap your head around investment choices and building the right team, make sure you check out today's conversation with Wayne Courageous III right here on Multifamily Insights. When you think you found a great deal, asking the right questions could be the difference in finding a stud or a dude. Listen, we've put together a new guide to help you out. It's called 7 questions you must ask before investing in apartments. Now in this guide, you're going to learn how to uncover red flags quickly, identify underwriting risks, vet sponsors and team members, and confirm key assumptions. Now this is the guide that's going to help you be a better investor. Whether you're an active investor or you're a passive investor looking to partner with other operators, asking better questions is the key to identifying great opportunities. So download this free guide. Go to our website kasmancapital.com seven questions. That's the number seven questions. And you can access this free guide today. To make it easy on you though, we've put a link in our show notes. So you go to the show notes, you can click that link and access the guide right now. This guy's going to help you make better investment choices, asking the right questions to build your portfolio. So be sure to download it today. Now Wayne Courageous III is the founder of C We are EI Partners, dedicated to helping busy professionals build generational wealth through passive real estate syndications. Now, his Firm manages over $50 million in assets across Texas, Louisiana and Alabama, focusing on acquiring apartment communities and developing rv, boat and business storage solutions in strong markets. Let's welcome to the show Wayne Courageous iii.

Hey, John. Excited to hopefully add value to the listeners here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Wayne, I went over your background at a very, very high level. Why don't you take two minutes and Fill in some of those gaps.

Yeah. So I went right into the Marine Corps right out of high school in 2003, and that's where I started our my real estate journey. I was 19 years old in 29 Palms, buying my first. I think it was a two bed. It was a two bed, one bath, single family home that I rented out to a good buddy of mine. And then when I got out of the Marine Corps, I joined CBRE in Washington, D.C. a large commercial real estate company, and was with them for a total of 16, 16 years. About 1312 to 13 years into that career, I decided to start my own real estate investment company. So I started that in 2019, and then in 2023, we built that company to a point where it was hard to do both. Even though I was enjoying my W2 work with CBRE, there wasn't anything that I just really disliked. It was a really great experience, but it just was really hard to do both. For a while there, my nine to five was paying for my five to nine. And I think a lot of people on the show are listening, can relate to that. But it got to a point where it was just, it's hard to do both. And so I took the leap and went all in on our company in June of 2023. And here we are in 2025 and continuing to build momentum and going strong.

Wayne, I appreciate you sharing that. Right. Just to recap a little bit of that straight into the Marine Corps out of high school. From there, once you wrap that up, you got into real estate on the brokerage side, work for CBRE. You did that for 16 years and about 13 years into that, you decided to start investing yourself. When that 9 to 5 was covering the 5 to 9, that was great. But then ultimately you got to the point where you had to make a decision, decided to go full time as an investor. And then today you've got a $50 million portfolio that you oversee. I want to take this to that moment. Right. Because there are many people listening who are investors and kind of moonlighting with a day job or whether they're in the commercial real estate industry or not, they've got something else they're doing and investing on the side. You mentioned, you know, a few years ago, you kind of made that decision to go all in. Take us through that time, take us to the decisions that you were weighing, the financial situation had you kind of replaced your W2 income, or I know you probably were more commission based as well, but walk us through kind of that process. When you were deciding, hey, should I go all in on real estate investing or should I maintain this day job?

Yeah, so when I worked for cbre, I was heavily on the property management, asset management side. So it wasn't as much on the brokerage side. And so. So that was really. A lot of that was transferable because I would say it's easy to get a property. I mean, there's always hard. You know, it's hard sometimes, you know, raise capital, et cetera. But really, the hard and the crazy amount of work happens day one of closing, through the process. And so a lot of that, I already had a lot of experience with that, and I did get a mentor for the multifamily. And I think that is key number one for anyone that's entering the space is to. To get a mentor. But, John, answer your question. So, yeah, I mean, it was. I mean, I was making really good money, and I had really great benefits. I've been with the company long time. I was a director, associate director in Houston. So I had people that were. That I was leading, that were doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And so on paper, it's like, man, why don't you just continue doing both? And I find a lot of our investors and a lot of people I talk to, not necessarily do they want to leave their day job. They enjoy their day job. There's people that definitely want to try to get out of it, but for the most part, people that are in my circles enjoy what they do. I would say for us, it just became a point where, you know, I had fiduciary responsibility to my client, you know, with cbre, and I felt like if most of my mind is thinking about our investments, it's not fair to them. And as much as I could probably have dragged it on, because, like I said, I had a team doing, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting. And so at that level that I was at, it's more like hurting, keeping the herd in the right direction. And, you know, if one goes out, you know, like, keep them, you know, it. But if my heart and stuff, it's like when they would come to me with, know, whatever thing they were coming up with, I was. My mind was on, you know, my company and not. And so I knew. It's like, at that point, it's like, okay, I need to. Need to do what's best now. Absolutely. From a cash flow standpoint, it is something that, you know, you know, I had our investments, whether it was through our properties or through 401k and such. But I had, I started building enough with asset management fees like we were leading, you know, our 50 million assets under management that term around. Assets under management gets used loosely where it's like people can raise capital and they can be part of it, but they're really not part of the day to day for us. We are the lead sponsors. We do run day to day. We're on the asset management calls, we're leading those. We are the manager, we are the loan signer. And so with that we do get a bulk of the asset management fees. And those asset management fees helps keep the lights on. You know, of course there's acquisition fees as well and those are important because, you know, like for example, I'm going under contract today on a property in San Antonio. Well, that Property is a $60,000 earnest money that I have to, you know, that we'll be putting up and 30,000 of that is hard day one. Well, if the deal doesn't go through or like I do due diligence, you know, further in, you know, there's, there's risk capital involved. And so all that said, you know, I think of real estate investing on the active side, John, as multiple streams of income. And so for us, and I'll just be very transparent, you know, we make income through asset management fees, acquisition fees, and then we're also doing development. So you know, when I did our 20x50 storage in Brian, you know, we were the general contractor, so we, we were able to get fees through general contracting. We were the developers, we got some fees through that as well. And then when we do value add work on our properties, there's construction management. Now all these fees help support our company. I have two full time employees plus myself. And, and so we have, you know, we have, you know, a company and you know, if that reoccurring income makes it so that way we can best support the properties which obviously helps our investors because they're getting the returns and everything that we set out for.

Wayne, let me play back from what you said, right, because it sounds like you were kind of building out this model of investing while you were still kind of working the day job, right? So what you're getting at for those who are following is you kind of had the role. You're associate director, you're building out that business, you're herding cats, you're making sure everyone's doing what they're supposed to do. But as you're building out your business, there are three ways you are getting paid on those Deals, right? You're getting paid acquisition fees, you're getting paid asset management fees, and then you're getting paid development or construction management fees. So because of the income coming from those activities, you were able to offset what you were doing in your day job. So it made that transition plausible. So for our listeners, I want you to think about that. You know, if you're going to get into multifamily or if you're already in multifamily and you're thinking about, well, how do I replace my W2 income? You might want to step back and just say, okay, well, what kind of deals am I doing? Are you working with others? Are you only doing your own deals? If you're working with others and you are going to be the one taking on that risk, you're going to. You talked about the deal you're getting under contract today. You're putting up earnest money. Like there's legit risk. You are putting up. If that deal doesn't work, you flush $30,000 down the drain, day one, right? So that is something that you are taking on as a risk. And because you're taking that risk on, it's okay to charge certain fees, acquisition fees, asset management fees, development or construction management fees. And that is one way to kind of keep the business going, keep employees going and be able to scale while you wait for these properties to be able to deliver either cash flow to you or you ultimately sell and exit those properties to deliver that return. So great way to just think about, well, how do I actually make sure that we're getting compensated in this business so that I'm having income come in and not solely relying on my existing job so you can make that transition. You know, one other thing you said, right, and you obviously have a background in the industry, right? You were in the construction management side. You were working, you know, on the property management side as an asset manager as well. So you understood how that side of the business worked. You talked about bringing in a mentor. Why was that important given the background and the experience that you already had in the space?

Yeah, a lot of it was transferable, especially on the accounting side. An income statement or, you know, you know, the rent roll or general ledger. And really, you know, I always tell my asset manager, you're really not an asset manager, you're an asset leader. A big part of my experience over the years was leadership. And a lot of times the people that are boots on the ground doing the business plan, executing the business plan, sometimes they're so into the weeds of what's going on? Resident relations, collections, property maintenance type items, that an asset leader is, you know, sort of the helicopter, just making sure, okay, again, we're, we're going in the right direction based on our strategic plan. And so, you know, I felt like, you know, from that standpoint, you know, being an asset manager, having that asset leadership, that was all very transferable, but from a multifamily side because I had a lot of experience with office, retail and industrial. One of the reasons why in the beginning I even went to multifamily is because it did not compete with the day job. And that's something too. When people are working W2 and looking to do multifamily, they got to make sure, especially if you're starting to post on social media, do podcasts, your employer might find out that like, hey, you're doing, you know, the side hustle. And so I had to be very transparent and go through the whole process. But I also chose multifamily aside from that, because I did see the ups and downs of office, retail and industrial. When times were good, times are great. But when times were tough, economy wise, recession, then a lot of those, some spaces we call it, went dark at night, they moved out and they started working from home because they didn't need the office space. So I got the mentor, John more so to teach me to underwrite, teach me how to look at deals, say from a multifamily, analyzing, going through due diligence, having really quick access to their team, you know, who their attorney is, from an SCC attorney who they use for, you know, construction or renovations. And then really, you know, there were many deals. I'm so grateful for my mentor for those, you know, few years that I had them because in San Antonio, I was looking at deals time and time again. I'd keep getting outbid, outbid, outbid. And you know, if I would have gone and been aggressive and I, you know, and without a mentor, maybe I would have been more aggressive. But because I listened to them, I didn't bite when everybody else was biting. And now a lot of those people are really unfortunately struggling and having a lot of capital calls a lot of deals, you know, going back to the bank. Not everybody, but there are, there are those properties that, you know, we all know about. So I don't know. That's why I feel like just having a mentor, just having someone to talk to and be able to ask questions, having a community I'm still part of masterminds today and tomorrow we're going to Phoenix for one of those masterminds and being around like minded people and understanding what other people are going through and the challenges and what's been successful. So it's this constant learning, John, that's like you never, even if you have a whole career in commercial real estate, things are adjusting and you just gotta be on top of it for your business and for your investors.

There's two things I'm taking away from what you said, right? One is this continuous learning journey, right? Constantly being able to educate yourself, being around people, different programs, whatever it is, just continuing to educate yourself on this space, which requires some humility. Right. And the second thing is just that, being humble enough to recognize that you need help. And even if you think you know it, just be humble enough to go and get that assistance. Even though at that point you had 12, 13 years of experience in commercial real estate, managing these assets, it's easy. I think many people from the outside would say, oh, you've been doing this for a dozen years, or you know, a dirty, whatever it is, right? You've been doing this for 13, 12, 13 years. Yeah, go out there and buy your own stuff and see what happens. But you didn't, you were aware enough to say, yeah, but there are things I don't know about this particular asset class. And if you're going out there, particularly if you're going to raise money and work with other people's money, that's where it's really important to make sure you've assembled the right team to guide you. Because to your point, you could have been more aggressive and got some of those deals, but you could also be in a situation today where now you're trying to keep the lights on and not giving those keys back. So surrounding yourself with the right people is really, really important. And mentorship can help you do that. No matter how much experience you have coming into the space, were you going to add something there?

Well, I think you. Right on. And I also think it accelerates your path because you don't have to learn all the gotcha moments or like, oh man, I wish I had known that. It's like if you have a mentor, and I still do, I mean, I'm still again, a part of masterminds, and those masterminds change over time because it's like, okay, when I've maxed out what I'm learning here, level up, who's, who's going, you know, who's doing or. And then you start going and they get more expensive as time goes on. But that Value turn on investment, right? Does. Does pay for itself. And so it just excel every step. It just accelerates, you know, the learning and the action. And if you're just joining these and not taking action, then it's unfortunate. But because there's a lot of those people too. They do. And I'm sure they're in your circles too. Like you. You go to these. The masterminds of these events, and great talk. But then when you're like, okay, I've got a deal, or whatever, they're like, oh, I can't raise capital, or I'm not doing anything right now. I'm just holding. So there. It's more than just getting a mentor, John. It's more than just going to these events, these conferences. It's actually, you know, by the way, you got to take action. You know, that's the. That's the hard part, that people. And. But for us, I have no other choice. I have to feed my family. We gotta find deals. We gotta take care of our investors so they keep coming back and we can still provide.

I love it, man. You're absolutely right. You gotta take action. That's a key component of growing and scaling, and that's the whole point of getting around these people. Because these obstacles and hurdles that may want to hold you back, right? Or maybe your gut or your brain is telling you, ooh, don't do this deal right now. We've got this situation, or we got this problem we gotta solve. I promise, you're not the first person with that problem. Right? There's. There's been investors for hundreds of years, and we've all faced the same kind of issues. So being around those people and hearing how they've navigated it helps tremendously. If I could give one little tidbit, one of my mentors, I was talking to him, doing an interview, and he had a deal that went terribly wrong. And he went out and ended up buying another deal at the same time. And I asked him, I said, how did you have the confidence to go out there and buy another deal when you literally are about to lose money on an existing deal? The first deal you bought, right? And this is just his second deal. So his first deal lost money. Second deal, he's going out there and buying. And he said it was tough. But one of the things that helped him so much was his mindset. And specifically, he would remind himself where he had this mantra of thinking like a billionaire real estate investor. And he would ask himself, what would a billionaire do? And a billionaire real estate Investor wouldn't let one bad deal ruin every other deal that they could potentially invest in. They would learn from that mistake, go out there, you know, make the adjustments, and go out there and get another investment. Right. And that was really pivotal for me. And when we talk about surrounding yourself with the right people, because I think that's one of the things that holds so many people back. Right. There's this fear of making a mistake. And it's not to say a mentor is going to eliminate that issue. Right. There's still a chance that you can make a mistake, but you're going to reduce that risk by being around somebody who understands the market and can help guide you through certain situations. But it's also the mentality of, even if you do make a mistake, let's not make a mistake that wipes you out completely. But if you make a mistake, you can come back from it, you can learn from it, we can adjust from it. And it's the right mindset to say you are an investor, and investors invest. They don't sit and wait forever. They don't, you know, wait three, four years to take action. Investors are constantly evaluating the market, constantly putting in offers, and constantly looking to buy properties. So it's a different mindset that you have to take. And if you're around the right people, that can really help you grow and scale your portfolio. With that said, Wayne, you've got a couple things you're doing right. So we've talked about, you know, you getting into multifamily, having the mentor to help you there. You're also doing some development deals, you're doing some RV and boat. When you're looking at different asset classes, how do you decide which ones are going to be worth your time and energy, or how do you kind of build out your portfolio?

Yeah, I want to go back a little bit on the mindset piece. It's huge for anybody that's getting into multifamily or gone through the ups and downs. It's. This is tough. You need grit, and. And part of that is having the mindset. So really, I couldn't have said it better than what you said previously, but just having that mindset of moving forward and that's one step at a time, and you know you're going to get hit two times harder and you just keep going. It's this constant. But. But that mindset is important. So our bread and butter is multifamily real estate investments, value add. Primarily Houston, though. We're going to be going into San Antonio pretty Quick, we've got two properties that one we're already under contract for, one we're about to be. So we'll have about 250 units right in a 10 minute distance from each other in San Antonio pretty quickly. So Houston, San Antonio is primarily our markets or surrounding outside of Austin, not Austin itself, but surrounding areas. So that's 80%. And then the other 20% is very entrepreneurial. So when I we have a RV boat, they're all 20 by 50, RV boat, business storage. So individuals, businesses, RV owners, I mean, the use for a large 20 by 50 space is limitless. There's so many opportunities. And we got one in Huntsville, Alabama. And you know, I really got into that space. One of my partners there, he found the deal and, you know, I came in with him to, you know, partner because I had an rv and I know like, you can't park those in your neighborhood and you spend a lot of money and you want them taken care of. You want them in a, you know, enclosed unit. And so I went out there changing out some keys with them, doing out, you know, changing leases after we bought it. And when I was starting to interview the customers, and not a formal interview, but just like, why do y' all need this space? I mean, a lot of the businesses were like, we need it for our inventory. We don't need an office space, but we need inventory. And so I had an aha moment. It's a very entrepreneurial moment where when I came back to Bryant College Station, there's nothing like that in this area. And so, you know, we bought land and, you know, developed the 20 by 50. We opened up in July and we're close to 60% occupied. And so I would say probably in another six to eight months we'll be fully occupied. And it will cash flow just like the one in Huntsville, Alabama, where it just cash flows extremely nicely. We don't have a lot of turnover. The expense ratio is low. In Texas, the multifamily expense ratio could be 52 to 56% of income. While on RV boat storage, I'm seeing about 30 to 35, 4%. So the cash flow is really nice. I don't have to worry about toilets and, you know, renovations. It's concrete and steel. So that was one big reason why I doubled down on that. And then the other entrepreneurial journey is like living in Brian. This is a massively growing area and getting to know local, the local mayor, the council members, landowners. I'm able to find opportunities. And so one of the opportunities was right off Highway 6 here next to the Imax theater and several restaurants. And there are three parcels and we bought all three parcels through seller financing on all three and we're working on one of those. So it's 12 acres total, 6 acres will be a 150 unit multifamily development. We had to rezone that from retail plan development to a multi family development. So a lot of sitting on couches and talking to neighbors and council members, but we were able to get that approved and we should be shovels in ground in September. That's been over a year project. So development much slower, but that will be hopefully shovels and ground in September. And then we've got a hotel that we're putting in there, a Spring Hill Suites and then we have retail slash office. So that's very entrepreneurial. Now it's in my backyard. I can take the risk and do undevelopment because I can be there every day. I can control a lot of the stuff. Now we'll subcontract, you know, we'll, we'll contract to a general contractor who would subcontract to their contractors. But I'm not doing development two hours away from me. I'm buying properties that are already, you know, stabilized in a sense, you know, two, three hours away. But any of the higher risk development stuff, which is that 20% of our portfolio, it's in my backyard. And so that's sort of how I do it. 80% multifamily, 20% RV boat slash, you know, other entrepreneurial. I mean I wouldn't mind doing like a big, I mean it sounds crazy but you know, you see all these car washes that these big 18 wheelers, they need a place to like have long term parking. Like there's a lot of overnight parking. But I get calls at our storage facility. Hey can I parked my 18? We were there for a month. I live in town, I just have no place to put it. Well, that's an entrepreneurial opportunity. There's a need there. So you know, finding you know, some land, you know, doing a secured fence, having a bathroom. But it's really meant for long term parking. And then based off that John, like maybe we put in an 18 wheeler car wash station. Like there's, there's not those big car washes here in Brighthouse station. So it's very, that 20% is very entrepreneurial I guess is what I'm saying.

Yeah, you talked about having that mix of the portfolio or 80% is your bread and butter. That's multifamily investing 20% is kind of a combination of RV and boat storage as well as just development opportunities that you come across, particularly if they're in your backyard. You know, on the. Let's start with the RV and boat stuff, right? Because I think that's interesting. You mentioned that you're not dealing with toilets and running water and all that kind of stuff. It's really just kind of the space, it's concrete, it's steel. And you're really looking for those owners and you're trying to learn from them. What are you looking for? What do you need? And based on that, you're recognizing where there's additional opportunity. Are there any other things you're looking at maybe from a demographic standpoint or traffic or infrastructure and proximity to the freeway? What are you looking at when you're making an investment in say, car or RV and boat storage?

Yeah, so this type of storage, so many. I don't invest personally in mini storage because there's a lot of them and they're easy to pop up. This. There's a. It's a lot of concrete because the drive lanes in between buildings is like 60ft because these RVs and boats, trailers, they need room. So it's a lot more expensive and it's definitely more a niche market. And so one of the things I took from Huntsville, Alabama on that location that's been 100% occupied since we bought it. And we've pushed rents over $300 in the year and a half. We've owned it and still maintained occupancy. But it's right off the highway. And the biggest advertisement is right off the highway they see the facility. And so I took that. When I came back to Brian College Station, as I was driving home from the airport, I was literally driving from IH to Brian to Texas, looking for land off the highway that was available. And so in this case there was a big sign says build the suit. And so I went to the next door neighbors like, hey, do you know who owns this? And really just going through that rabbit hole of finding who the owner is, and then they were open to doing seller financing. We raised capital, bought off that land and started building. That's one. I also don't invest in any type of investments if the town is less than 100,000 in population. I think that's just a general rule for multifamily or anything. I mean, there's definitely a lot of towns that are doing well and growing, especially in the Texas Triangle, but 100,000 or more population is something I look at. I also for our rents for 1,000 square feet of the storage, it's 75 cents a square foot, so it's 750 per month. And so I want to see that there is a demographic of people and with the university here of Texas A and M, a lot of medical and a lot of defense, like there's, there's definitely enough people to do it. And to me it's also, I mean this is not on the multifamily. This is, I'm just thinking the storage. But then it was like simple math. It's like, okay, I have 70, so there's 70, 300,000 people, right? And of those 300,000, maybe 10% of the population needs something like this. Like businesses, orders, whatever it is, like 10%. And then maybe 90% of those people, maybe those 90% already have something like this. So really my population, and I'm doing horrible math in my head, but I may need a thousand. There's probably a thousand people in this market that would even need something like this. I just need 72. So in my mind as I'm justifying, I'm like, I only need 72 of a thousand people in a 300,000 population. Right. To pay this and do that. So that's sort of how I worked it through. There's not really you can hire feasibility studies people, but they typically do it on many storage and proximity. These large units, people 20, 30 minutes away would drive to this type of facility where you couldn't say that in mini storage, it's all within the mile.

And such convenience is more important there.

Yeah, yeah. So it's just so. But we're learning a lot through it. The other property, John, and this is where it's just constantly learning. Like the other property was already built and already leased up when we bought it. And so when we built this one, you know, I, my proforma was eight units per month. Well, we'd be getting about six to seven. But then I get like two move outs. And that's frustrating because you're like, oh, you know, you're making progress, boom. So we're okay. I mean, we're 56, about 60, 60% occupied today. And so it's like, okay, if you're, if we're there, you know, we'll probably be about 56 by the end of the month because we'll have some move outs and move ins. But you take three steps forward, one or two sets back, and then. But every month we're positive growth and so that's why I say, you know, another six months or so, we'll be, we should be, you know, full. So that's how I've been looking at the market now. I want to wait. I get a lot of people, John. I've got one guy in particular, he's like, hey, we should do a massive scale of this. Like do 10 to 20 of these at one time. And I'm like, maybe. I mean, I definitely would want to hire full time people to run that. But right now I'm all focused on my investors on this particular one. I want to get this stabilized. I want to get this one really cash flowing. And then I'll look at a different business model. And I think you want that in your operator. And I think for anyone that's listening out there, it's easy to get caught up in doing more than you can handle. Like, there's just the opportunities. You're just out there and you're just saying yes to everything. Um, but the reality is, is like, you gotta take care of your investors and you take care of your investors by, you know, providing new opportunities, but taking care of the ones that you have. And for me, that meant, John, that I had to add an asset manager to my team. I had to add an investor relations person. Because the scary part for me was leaving the day job to be a solo entrepreneur. Yeah, well, guess what? A year from now, which was, you know, two years ago, I was like, okay, well now I need to add an employee. Cause I need help. And then you add. So you keep growing. That uncomfortableness never ends. For those entrepreneurs out there, listening is, you're always, you know, trying to scale and grow to the next level.

I love it. Wayne, you talked about really understanding this new space, right, for RV and bolts. You had the successful investment in Huntsville recognized there was an opportunity to do something similar in your backyard. So you kind of did that as well. And it sounds like, you know, 80% of your portfolio is kind of that bread and butter, tried and true approach with multifamily. The 20% is more, you know, entrepreneurial. You know, taking advantage of opportunities that you believe in. Maybe not fully fleshed out, maybe not a 10 year, 20 year track record on it, but you feel pretty confident you're mitigating risk as best you can. So maybe the investor silos are a little bit different, but you're taking an approach where there's a nice blend of, you know, tried and true investments with, you know, 90% occupancy and multifamily Whatever it is. And then hey, there's some development opportunities or some, some, some larger upside opportunities that you're doing as well for, for, for those deals. Last question, I want to get to our, our round of insights here. But last question on that front. You know, you mentioned businesses are some of the clients as well. What are they looking for? Are they doing vehicles or are they doing other, are they storing other assets?

So we have at our facility we have H vac generator companies, disaster recovery companies. I've got one tenant who has like this giant freezer that has beef in there. And so when you order your half cow, your quarter cow off the line, you know, like he, he stores it there, I mean he's a rancher, stores it there in the storage. We have staging companies for housing. They have, you know, multiple units where they have the, you know, furniture. So when a realtor calls for a staging house, they, they pull it that way. I've got a basketball athletic like he installed actually a basketball court at my house and so that's what he does. But his trailers and everything is in there. I've got Texas Parks and Wildlife, they take, you know, a couple units where they put their boats and such. I've got a cabinetry company. Most recently last month I had hail damage. There was hail damage, a lot of hail in the Brian Club Station area. So all the hail companies came. So I leased out, which was crazy, John, because I did 12 month leases and I required that they pay everything up front. And so you know, those, and those companies, I guess they make really good money in the hail business. Something to look out, look into for those looking for alternative side businesses. But they make really good money. And so yeah, they paid upfront in 12 month leases. They may only need the space three or four months, but we got them in long term. So it's a variety of things. So the businesses I really like today, I literally did a lease this morning. There was a company, a popular retail chain, restaurant chain that is closing. And I don't know the full story, but I don't know if it's one or two restaurants or whatever it is, but you know, they're putting their furniture in the storage. So I've got a lot of oil. There's an oil company does rigs, There's a guy that does tenting on vehicles. I mean that's what I loved about this is like there's just such a huge range of. And oh, by the way, you know, we've got guys have like three units where it's like, they're $700,000 plus RVs. In one, he's got multiple cars in the other that he trades out, you know, by the week or by the day. And then he's got another one just for his other toys. And I've got a few of those guys. And then for Texas A and M for football season, they. They drive in or they. They'll park their RVs in our facility, then they'll go to the Texas A and M game. So like one guy comes in from Kansas, drives in on game day, takes his RV to the tailgating place, stays overnight, you know, on campus, and then Sunday morning, you know, comes back, parks it in our. In his unit, and then drives back. And he's paid for the entire year because he wants a spot. He doesn't want to think about it next year, finding a spot. So anyway, just a huge range of people. And that's the type of stuff it's like when you go in, when I look for my next location, because there will be a next location. It just, you know, I want to learn as much as I can on this one, and then that will better tighten my underwriting for the next one. And I think, you know, to me that's just really important. Even though I really would like to do the next one, I just think there's so much more to learn on this one before we go to the next. So, you know, hopefully that answer your question. But there's.

Yeah, it's a lot of different.

A lot of different uses. And a lot of people don't need offices. Like, there's the Flex warehouse space, which I think is doing. Will do extremely well where you have the office and then you have some type of warehouse component. But a lot of people, they don't need that. They just need a place to store their inventory or have a convenient location for their employees to get supplies and go that are working out of their house or maybe they have another location or they're working out of their truck. And so they don't need to spend all that money on an office. They just need 20 by 50,000 square feet of, you know, warehouse type space.

No, I love it. Lots of good information there, Wayne. I think it's great for us to be creative on how we can find and create value and opportunities. And my takeaway there is that, hey, sometimes there isn't the playbook, right? Like, there's not a model, an underwriting model for what you're doing, you know, like, that doesn't exist. So you've got to do some trial and error, you got to learn from the previous experience you saw in Huntsville. But you also have to listen. And my big takeaway from you is listen to people, right? When people are saying, hey, I wish I had this, or this is missing, that could be an opportunity. And as an entrepreneur, your job is to create something that isn't there, right? I mean, yes, we could all come in and be business owners and buy existing assets and tweak this or tweak that. There's nothing wrong with that. I love that approach. But as an entrepreneur, part of your job is to solve problems that exist, right. And create things that don't exist today. But that also means you're going to be making some educated guesses along the way. So, you know, for those who have the ability to do that, great. But don't miss the underlying point from Wayne. That's a small portion of the portfolio. 80% are the things where he absolutely has, you know, a T12 and a track record, understands what exactly he should be trading for, what the value is and what rents he can get. And then where he sees an opportunity to be more, you know, entrepreneurial, that's only a smaller portion of his portfolio. Wayne, for folks that want to learn more, they can check out your website, See. And then for folks who are looking to be more passive, I know you got a resource that's available to them. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I found we did a monthly. We do a monthly virtual meetup, fourth Monday of every month. Texas multifamily active and passive investor meetup. And so I had investors who were doing it like, you know, 12 months of learning. And I was like, you know, there's. There's these people want to learn faster and not necessarily want to read a book. They want to watch videos, they want to get. Be a little more interactive. So I did a passive Investor coaching. It's passiveinvestorcoaching.com. it's over five hours of content broken up in small video clips. And it's me going through how to look at a deal, how to look at an area remotely, how to vet the deal sponsor. It's very heavy. It's all focused on passive investors educating them. And there's no cost, there's no gimmick, there's nothing. It's just getting them educated and, you know, being able to, you know, ask the right questions, because that's the heavy work for a passive investor. Like, we've been talking about all the heavy work on active and you know, all the stuff that we do, but the passive, it's all up front. And then once you wire your funds and you determine that you're comfortable with the jockey, you know, on the horse leading the investment, you know, sign the paperwork and all, then, you know, you're, you're passive. And that's, you know, that's amazing. I mean, that's an amazing tool. I had a meet up last night and she's just like, I don't want to, I don't, I want to invest, but I don't want to be where she has in her career. She doesn't want to be worrying about day to day. And so that's a great way. And another thing too, John, is I get a lot of active investors who don't want to go active until they go passive. They want to see what it's like to be a passive, get that quarterly, you know, those updates to see how things progress and so that they could be better active investors by starting passive. So I see that too.

I love it. Well, check out that resource that's available at passiveinvestorcoaching.com we will link to that in our show notes. Right now we're going to transition to our round of insights. They say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So if you want to grow as a multifamily investor, you have to spend more time with other multifamily investors. And an easy way to do that is to join our apartment investing Mastermind group today. Just go to kasmancapital.com and click on the Mastermind button. Now as a part of this group, you'll get access to expert trainings, group coaching calls, industry news and updates as well as all of our webinars and workshops, including our three hour workshop on raising capital. Again, if you want to be around other multifamily investors that can help you scale your portfolio today and grow your network, make sure you're a part of the apartment investing Mastermind. Just go to kasmancapital.com and click on the Mastermind button today. Wayne, give me a failure or an apparent failure that sets you up for later success.

Wow, man. So I would say one of the properties we bought in 2022 we bought with bridge debt, but we paid with fixed rate debt. And like many, if you talk to a sponsor that hasn't had a rough deal, they haven't been in the business long enough. But you know, we over communicated to our investors. We did not put our head under the pillow we worked our tails off. A aged me probably 20 years. There are things that I learned from that that I will never do again. But we modified the loan, got fixed rate debt on it and we were able to show our lender and our investors that we, you know, we're the right team to see the project through. And so you know it's not a, you know we're out of the woods completely down the road. But I mean those are the type of things like you know the investor updates, you know, working through occupancy and management changes and being frugal with the Catholics and the reserves, all those things. You know you want to have a sponsor that has gone through that and how do they get through it. And so I would say that would be be one for me that I, I view as a huge win. I've not lost, not gonna let you know because anything can happen to anybody. But I'm like we have not lost investor capital. We, we've just worked really hard during rough times and not get. And I've given up. And that's what you would expect in your sponsor.

Give me a digital or mobile resource. We recommend for our listeners.

Passiveinvestorcoaching.Com I think is great for you know those are wanting to learn about passive investing. I would say you know some resources for active investors that are listening in. I mean costar I mean there's those applications that you got to pay for and have access. But for the free resources check out bestplaces.net you can get a lot of demographic and area location. There's also you know, you know, simple stuff like Google Earth to be able to like say like you're looking at another city but you can't make take a flight there. Well go to Google Earth sort of see where you know, you can street view and look at the area. There's justicemap.com I believe where you're able to see crime and that org. Yeah, yeah there's a dot org. Thank you. So that's a great, that's a great resource as well. And the last thing one I would say is as simple as the FEMA website. Real estate is already risky, John. Like why add a flood zone to it? And so that's the first thing I look at where whatever city comes my way, are we in a flood zone or touching it and if so for us it's everyone's risk tolerance we pass. But you know checking out those type of resources as well.

Great resources there. Give me the book. You've recommended or gifted the most in the last year.

Well, I've done a lot of mentoring with kids and so it's going to sound corny because I'm sure everyone says this, but like I've passed out rich dad, poor dad books, but then there's like teenager, there's the teenage version of that. So I trust that that's always a good book. Speed of Trust is another one. It's an older one, Stephen Covey, but without trust, things happen at a much slower pace. So that's another book that I've given out as well.

Love it. Give me a daily habit that helps you stay focused on your goals.

Oh gosh, it's not a day. Okay, so this is going to sound a little crazy, but I've organized my days by, and this is through strategic coaching, Dan Sullivan's program, another mastermind I'm part of. But every day has sort of a it's free day, buffer day and focus days. So I have a certain amount of focus days. So Monday, Wednesday and every other Friday morning are focus days. I don't really check emails. I don't do anything but like what's generating income for the properties or for the company, I should say. So that's underwriting deals, maybe doing some investor calls, calling brokers, et cetera. Tuesdays and Thursdays, like we're. I think this is Tuesday, right? Yeah, we're Tuesday. So like a lot of the podcasts and my meetings, phone calls, email follow ups happens Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then every year, Friday, Friday I have free days so that I take 24 hours off. So every day it's categorized. And so instead of my calendar controlling me, I control our calendar by making sure I have time. Because there's many weeks, John, and you may have experienced this too. It's like you got through the whole week. You're like, man, I've been working for the business but not on the business. And so when I shifted my days and sort of like categorized, okay, this is the, these are days I'm focusing on the business and these are the days I'm focusing on, you know, for the business, whether it's an employee meeting or team meeting, whatever it is. So that's been a huge help to me just to stay on track and make sure that we're growing the business and having the time for it.

Give me your number one insight for investing in multiple asset classes.

You know, whether it's passive or active, you want to always surround yourself with people that have done it or can Add something to the team that you cannot add. I am not. Whether it's a development, I surround myself with civil, architectural. Other people have gone through similar developments. On the multifamily side, I'm surrounding myself with other co GP partners, strong property management. So I would say partnerships and teamwork. But realizing, and this goes back to what you said earlier, John, about humility, you got to sort of see like, okay, this is what my strengths are. This is what I'm doing not as strong in. And so finding those people to offset those strengths, or maybe, maybe it's, maybe it's a strength, but something you just don't enjoy then, you know, just augmenting those personality and those, those gaps with people to strengthen the team.

I love it. Last question. Man, you are in Bryan, College Station out there outside of Houston. Give us your first favorite place to grab a bite to eat.

It's a chain. It's gonna sound bad, but gringos, Tex Mex, I can eat tacos and, and enchiladas, fajitas, but gringos especially. But it's, it's a chain. It's gonna, you know, but it's good. It's really good. And there's also, if you, if you're into fried food and you just want a heart attack, Sodalax, like when that's where the locals eat, this place called Sodalax. So anything fried, they got for good. Fried pickles, you know, onion rings, good chicken fried steak, you know, go there and then, you know, there's a lot of good barbecue places, but I love it.

Some good options there to check out if you want that Texas barbecue, that Tex Mex out there as well. So good options there. Wayne, really enjoyed our conversation. A couple things stand out. One, just you mentioned the humility, but just your experience in industry, working in asset management, working in project management and working on different properties. But recognizing that, hey, I want to get into this business, I want to get into multifamily. I need a little bit of help just making sure that I have someone who can help me accelerate this, cut down the learning curve and avoid any major mistakes. Through that, you're able to build up your portfolio about 80%, multifamily, 20% and some more entrepreneurial endeavors. Building up this $50 million portfolio and sharing how you're able to identify some of these opportunities. Right. What are you doing, the conversations you're having with people, if and how you're surrounding yourself with other experts who can help you mitigate maybe some of the gaps in the learning, knowledge that you have so that you can ultimately take care of your investors. You also shared ways that other folks can get in touch with you. And for those passive investors, creating a resource so that they can wrap their head around what questions they need to be asking when they are looking to make an investment. Again, we will link to both of those things on our show. Notes I want to thank you again for coming on the show today and being a great guest. Thank you. Thank you for being on Multifamily Insights. We look forward to staying in touch with you and I hope you have a great day.