BPI Episode #1: Educate. Invest. Repeat. Wayne’s Path to Passive Wealth

Welcome to Building Passive Income, the podcast for professionals, entrepreneurs and investors who want to build wealth, diversify beyond Wall street, and create financial freedom through passive commercial real estate investing. Your host is Wayne Courageous iii, a seasoned investor and founder of CREI Partners, a leading commercial real estate investment company. He spent nearly two decades navigating and educating others on the commercial real estate, from multifamily to storage to retail. Each episode is under 15 minutes, intentionally short, easy to understand, and packed with insights that help you grow your income and protect your capital without becoming a landlord or sacrificing your time. If you're ready to learn fast and invest smarter, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Welcome to Building Passive Income Podcast. This is our first episode. I'm excited to launch this new podcast where I really want to focus in heavily on educating passive investors on commercial real estate investing. I'm your host, Wayne Courageous iii. I wanted to start off this podcast really just going through my background, a little bit about myself, just to add a little bit more of a background on why I started this podcast and what I'm excited and hopeful to do in the future. So I' go back to my high school days. Back in 2003, I graduated from high school in Austin, Texas, went right in the Marine Corps two days after graduation, where I served four years. I was with 1st Tank Battalion. I was in Okinawa, Japan with 1st Marine Air Wing. And throughout all that, I was heavily focused on, you know, getting my education through my undergrad and part of my graduate school. But I also started my real estate investing there. So when I was in 29 palms, I was 19 years old, I bought my first two bed, one bath and we treated it just like a rental where I had one of my good buddies, Maureen and his wife living there while I was in Okinawa, Japan. But early on, always had the bug of real estate investing. It started in high school where, you know, I was dating someone and her dad was a developer in Austin. And it just really intrigued me and something that, you know, exposed me to something that I knew I wanted to do for my life. So starting that real estate journey in the Marine Corps. And then in 2007, when I got out, I went into an incredible company called cbre. That was a time where I was trying to actually become a developer and join Trammell Crow Co. But CBRE and Trammel Crow were merging, going through an acquisition process. And so Trammel Crow didn't have any opportunities. So I joined CBRE, where I was with them for 16 years and during that 16 years, I was in Washington D.C. i was in Houston, I went to Austin, then a little bit back to Houston. And each time was a great opportunity to manage and lead teams on and the life cycle of commercial real estate. So my whole background has been executing and operating real estate investments for institutional clients for, you know, those 16 years. In 2019 had this. It was right after, you know, I went back for my MBA and I was getting a lot of entrepreneurial juices flowing in my head and I was getting excited to potentially start my own real estate investment company. But I was like, what real estate asset class am I passionate about? And what is something that also didn't compete with a day job, you know, with cpre and multifamily really came into my lap. And we're going to go through over the episodes, we're going to go through those, you know, the multifamily investing heavily in detail from an investment side. But we'll also look at storage, we'll look at build to rent communities and also new developments. In 2019, I started Crei Partners. It was something that I just really wanted to do, you know, have those that entrepreneurial spirit to start a company. But I wanted to also do it in a way where I could take care of my family and not have the risk of not being able to support my family the way that they are, they were accustomed to and that I was accustomed to. So I would say my 9 to 5 paid for my 5 to 9 and got a mentor. James Kanasami was one of my mentors during that time, and he was teaching me how to underwrite, sharing his team. A lot of the stuff that I had learned with CBRE definitely transitioned very nicely to multifamily investing in particular. So kept going through that process of learning to underwrite, check out properties. I was having a really hard time finding deals because things were just way overpriced. And so we're going to talk through that on future podcasts as well. But it was something that I just, you know, I'm very blessed in the sense that like all these brokers are like, hey, you know, the deal that you passed on is the deal you're going to regret later in life. And I look back now and I'm like, man, I'm so glad I didn't do so many of those deals because I wouldn't be here right now sharing my experience and talking through this podcast because I would have a, you know, my portfolio would be in major distress. Right. So. But again, I started in 2019, we scaled it to a place about 2023, and it was becoming very apparent to me that working a W2 at CBRE and working at CRI partners or, you know, growing this business, that I wasn't able to do both the way that I had been. And part of that was that my passion was all into CRI partners. So in 2019, excuse me, 23, you know, gave my notice to CBRE. At that point, you know, we had grown the company to a point where, you know, it was taking a lot of my time, it was also providing income, it was taking care of our investors. So everybody was winning. And so I took the leap to go all in on myself. And here we are, it's April 2025. So depending on when you hear this first episode, you know, we're in April 2025 and we are about 50 million assets under management with another 50 million of new development and new acquisitions on the way. You know, by 2025, end of 2025, I hope to be at 100 million assets under management. And what's unique about us is that we are mainly the lead sponsor. We partner with amazing people that, and we'll talk through this as well as time goes on about vetting partners and knowing who's the deal sponsor and who's sort of the jockey that's running, you know, the full operation of the property. And so we'll talk through that. But that's sort of our, our lead role. That is our full time job. We have a full time team of investor relations and asset manager. And so we're growing the company in a way where we're taking care of our investors. But one of the things that I've noticed with all that is that there's a lack of education for passive investors. There's a lot of education out there for active investors. And so I've seen investors really struggle where they're not understanding and knowing how to evaluate a deal, how to evaluate a sponsor, how to evaluate a location. And so they're investing based on a sales pitch, in essence of what you know, why the sponsor believes it's a good deal, but they're not doing their homework upfront. And so when they invest, you know, the whole idea is that sponsor knows what they do, they have a track record, they're doing all these things, but they're not maybe vetting as good as well as they should because they don't have the education. So one of the things our team has really been passionate about, and I've done this for Several years is we do our monthly meetup, virtual monthly meetup on the fourth Monday of every month. We've now started a Bryan College station in person meetup here in Texas where we're based out of. We are doing this podcast. I had a previous podcast of the untold stories of real estate investing. We have monthly blogs and we have our website@creipartners.com that has a lot of information on Q and a, common terminology, etc. We also have a passive investor coaching program. It's called passive investor coaching.com and that program is free and it's over five hours of content, but just a lot of content. And so one of my purposes to do this podcast is strictly that just provide education, hopefully add value to the listeners and then be consistent with daily, you know, five days a week passive investor type tidbits where you know, you can be driving or you can be wherever you may be and give 10 to 15 minutes a day listening about passive investing and what's on my mind about real estate investing. What are some things that you should be looking out for? And so we're going to be doing that Monday through Friday, going to be posting. It's a challenge for me. I'm going to be disciplined and work extremely hard to provide great content. But Monday through Friday, we're going to be providing a daily podcast and the timeframe is 10 to 15 minutes and doing a bite sized 10 to 15 minutes education every day. It's a win win for everybody. For me, I can share my knowledge and feel like I'm giving back. And then for you, listening in and subscribing and telling your friends you can make wise, better decisions on investing and feel confident that what you're investing in was vetted through a clear lens and not, you know, a cloudy lens that you're hoping will work out at the end of the day. Real estate investing, there's always risk, but why add more risk by not educating and learning passive, you know all the things about passive investing that you know one should be, should know about. And so this is our first episode. I wanted to go through who I am, my background and my passion and my excitement for this podcast building passive income. Please tell your friends, family, anyone that you think may be interested about learning this topic and help me stay accountable, stay focused so that I can do these daily podcasts and get these up and continue adding value to you. Check out Passive Investor coaching. Com. It's a great resource where it's a lot of it's free content and it has short videos where it accelerates your learning. So we'll do this passive or, excuse me, Building Passive Income podcast. But we'll also just continue pushing the Passive Investor Coaching program, which is free. There's. There's no, nothing that I'm trying to upsell or anything that way. And then you're more than welcome to join and build a personal relationship on our fourth Monday of every month with our Texas Multifamily Investing Meetup. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of our group here and excited for this being one of hundreds of podcasts that will be coming out in 2025, 2026 and beyond. Thanks so much.

Thanks for tuning in to Building Passive Income. If today's episode helped shift your mindset or gave you a new tool to grow your wealth, do us a favor and like, subscribe and share this podcast with someone you care about. Want to go deeper? Join our Free Pass Investor coaching program@ passiveinvestorcoaching.com it's the perfect next step to start building wealth through commercial real estate the right way. Remember, financial freedom isn't a dream, it's a decision. And it starts with building Passive Income. We'll see you in the next episode.