Ep 169- Tim Bratz:4,800 Doors, Multi-Family Consistency and Creative Deals

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the hive mind CRM podcast hype with us today we're sitting here with NAV as always, Daniel Martinez and Anthony Guana. Gonna I apologize if I'm butchering your name there, Anthony. And today, our special guest is Tim broths, the commercial family empire. Tim is here to talk to us about a wealth of commercial real estate information, investing experience, and his newest software as a service, which I believe is here to help take over the internet. Welcome. What's up, guys? I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Awesome, awesome. One of the first things you're really asking is like, how did you end up in real estate because a lot of people like sometimes people fall into it, or they kind of like appearance to it, but I think you had a purpose. So can you talk about how you got into commercial real estate? Yeah, man. Well, I mean, I was go through college when the market was going crazy before so Oh, 3207 numbers making money in real estate. I get into real estate. I think a lot of the same way that a lot of other people do is, you know, I thought you had to become a real estate agent. So I first started out I had like a painting company in college. So I understood a little bit of the trades. I interned for a big homebuilder, and then I ended up getting my real estate license and I moved up to New York City. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, originally. And when I was out there, I ended up putting my license with a commercial real estate brokerage and I brokered like leases for office space, retail space, and brokered a lease that was a 12 year term, with 4% annual increases. And it ended up being that the owner was going to make like $2 million on this little 400 square foot space over the next 12 years. And I was like, damn, I need to be on that side of that coin. So I decided I want to become a real estate investor. But then I got into, you know, I think we all kind of go through this graduation. And we start out as an agent, and then we start wholesaling. And then we start flipping and we start buying single family rentals, and you get into some smaller multi. And that's kind of what my journey did, too. And then 2012, and it was December 17, of 2012, I bought my first apartment building, it was an eight unit building in Cleveland, Ohio, in a C class neighborhood, and but it's bank owned, and you could buy anything for pennies on the dollar back then. And so I bought that eight units and do just the scale of being able to negotiate with one land with one seller instead of eight sellers, right, being able to look at one roof instead of eight roofs, looking at one foundations of eight foundations, meeting my contractor at one location set of eight locations like the penguin tax bill, instead of eight tax bills set of utilities one time instead of eight times, like do there's so many scales and efficiencies that come in place with commercial real estate that I was like, this is really what aligns with my goals or what aligns with my ambitions and aligns with, you know, my that sense of, of efficiency that I've always, you know, kind of pursued. And so I just went I dove deep into into apartments after that. So fast forward today, I was up to about 4800 doors. Last time in my portfolio, I sold off a little over 1000 of them over the past 12 months, actually selling another 14 1500 right now. And then we're going in acquisition mode, again, big time just kind of trimming the fat from my portfolio, selling off some of the smaller buildings, the C Class buildings, you know, more the tenant friendly states, like some of those properties and just focusing kind of like in my own backyard. I live in Charleston, South Carolina now. So doing a lot of stuff in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, that kind of area. Outstanding. Hey, how long was that period men from buying that first eight unit until now? What's the time was 2000 December of 2012. So we're talking about nine years. That's a lot of a lot of information, lots of deals looked at. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, what's funny is when you take a look at the trajectory is like, I bought that eight unit and I got for the next three years from 2012 to 2015. I collected about 140 doors. And I thought it was like my goal was $100 million in Portfolio values get to $100 million portfolio and and then I had a couple exclusive partners that partnership ended up holding, we ended up going different ways. We had to liquidate the entire portfolio. So like Damn dude, like I press the reset button. And it was like a big setback in my mind. But really, you know, some of those things that you think are setbacks are really set ups for better things in the future. And that's exactly what that was. All of a sudden people started coming out of the woodwork saying, dude, I want to partner with you. I want to joint venture with you. How do we do some deals together? I knew that we couldn't before because you had that exclusive partnership, but now you know that you're on your own. Let's let's do some deals. And so I started rebuilding my current portfolio in 2015. And, you know, 2015 I picked up at doors in 2016. I picked up another about 100 and bought 190 194 doors, I think so and then in two days I was in 17, I bought another, like 300 doors. And then in 2018, I picked up over 1000 doors, right in 2019, upwards of 2000 doors. So it's like, there's this, this snowball effect, this doubling every single year kind of a thing that happened. But it all started out with buying an eight unit in 2012. And, you know, for the next three years kind of grow and grow and grow in and then all of a sudden, I was able to find some momentum. So it looks like you know, what do they say, like, if you took a look at a pond, and those lily pads, they double every single day. And, you know, I don't know how long it takes, but let's call it three weeks in order to fill up the whole thing, you realize, on the 20th day, only half the pond is filled, the other half of the pond gets filled the next day, right all in one day. So this, this momentum that that is gets created. If you just keep your head down and you don't look left, you don't look right, and just keep on doing the activities that you know yield results, eventually, you'll catch some momentum, and then do it when it starts, you're almost like afraid to lose it right? Like I came into real estate in oh nine, when I first started investing, realizing like there was no momentum. And when you come from not having ever, ever having momentum and you get it, you're like almost afraid to lose it. And so then you start working harder, and then you get more results, right, and then you're like, I can't lose that things are working harder, and you just keep on doubling down. And that's, that's kind of what we've been doing. So really wasn't we didn't really chill out until a little bit after COVID hit, and the eviction mode moratorium was in place, and we couldn't get appliances and a bunch of our value add deals. And then you know, the labor force was non existent, because everybody's getting paid to stay at home. And we're like, you know what, let's just focus on our existing portfolio. So really, for the past, like 18 months or so, I've been really focused on stabilizing my current portfolio, selling off some of the things that I don't see myself holding on to for the next 1015 20 years. And then and selling off some of the smaller things, and just kind of, again, trimming the fat, you know, refining what our current portfolio looks like, keeping all the properties that we do want to hold on to for the next 20 years. And, and then just doubling down on stuff like that, that meets our buying criteria. What does, what does that look like? Because I know you guys probably make a ton of offers. And, you know, like your KPIs as far as what it takes to acquire a deal at operating at such a high level. Yeah, so the changes, though, you know, like something that you guys might be willing to buy might not be something that I'd be willing to buy, you know, or something that you're not willing to buy something that I might buy, you know, so you know, if you're just getting into multifamily, like when I tell a bunch of people that come to me for coaching and consulting and stuff is like to just get the momentum going right like that is that's the most important part, it doesn't matter if it's a six unit building or a 60 unit building or a 600 unit portfolio. Like the important part is just getting the momentum built up. So that's what I ended up doing in order to get the momentum is I started buying smaller deals. And anything that was a deal, I didn't look for homeruns. You know, baseball games are not one with homeruns. They're one with base hits, right, more base hits, you can have the more runs of your score. So I just looked for base it after base hit after bass hit. And there's good deals in every market, you know, despite what they're saying on the news, and like the values are out of control, there's motivated sellers, every day, there's somebody who wants to retire, there's somebody who got kicked in the nuts. And because of COVID, there's somebody who is getting divorced and needs to liquidate their entire portfolio before they can finalize their divorce, right? Like there's stuff like that that's going on, where people are like, hey, or hurricane came through or storm came through, I got the insurance check. I don't want to rebuild this thing, come and take the property, you know what I mean? Like I got paid from the insurance man, like do their stuff like that all the time. And we come across it even in this market. So, yeah, there's, I can go over some cake. Like we look at over 400 deals in a month in order to try to take out one, right, but we have a Buy Box, you know, we have, we're only looking at 100 units of bigger, built in the past 20 years, it's got to, you know, hit a certain return metric for us and our investors. It's got to be the landlord friendly state, you know, like so like, there's very, very specific things. Whereas if I was just getting started or talking to somebody who's just getting started, I'd be like do just start taking stuff down. If it's eight units, 18 units, you know, 40 units, start buying, get up to a couple 100 doors, and then you can get a seat at the table to go and bid on 100 unit apartment complexes but go out and make sure that you get in front and start building the portfolio building your balance sheet first. That's the most important thing that you could do. Wow. Okay, so building a balance sheet. This is being bankable having your numbers in order getting cash flow having you have capital tucked away I guess it's different properties having equity. How do I As one go from having very little to no cash flow, you know, to becoming bankable. Yeah, man, so So think about. Alright, so think about, like, what are the most important things that you could be doing in real estate. And really, dude, if you boil it down, it's down to like, three things is what I've been able to boil it down to. One is sourcing deals, right, always out there, finding great opportunities and always making offers. I remember early on in my career, I'd have like these feast and famine cycles of, we would pour a bunch of fuel on the marketing, we get all this deals, all these deals come into our pipeline, all these phone calls and sellers reaching out to us. And I'd be like, turn off, turn off the marketing, right? And then and then let's work all these deals, we take all the deals down, we renovate them, we'd get it back on the market. And that'd be like, alright, what does the next 90 days look like? And it was like crickets, right, because we have no deals in the pipeline, because we turned off the marketing funnel. So I was like, What the hell. So like, one thing you always have to be doing, regardless of how many deals you have or not, it's always been marketing for deals, right? Always, always be sourcing new opportunities, always be looking at deals like we haven't really been an acquisition mode for the past 18 months, but we're still looking at deal after deal after deal after deal. Because it keeps a finger on the pulse of the market. And if a homerun does come through, or a really, really good opportunity that we're looking for it does pop up, we'll turn forward, and we'll we'll snag it. So always be sourcing deals, it's number one, if you don't have money, that's a great way to bring value to somebody who does have money. You know, typically people with money are kind of lazy, they don't really want to do the work, they want to pay somebody else to go out and do it. You can go out source opportunities, bring those opportunities to them and need to get a fee, or earn some equity in those projects. So that's a great way where if you're just getting started, you're trying to figure out where do you fit into this big puzzle of real estate, learn how to find awesome off market direct to seller deals, and underwrite them and lock them up. Like if you can do that you can bring a ton of value to the marketplace right now. So that's number one. Number two is I would say learn how to raise money. There are a bunch of courses out there on raising capital, we talk a lot about it in our Mastermind and in in my commercial Empire course. But like I have, I just saw the legacy wealth, YouTube channel pop up, appreciate you guys share that. But there's a video in there about how to raise $4 million in 48 hours before when my back was against the wall on a deal that was closing on Monday morning. And my investor had to fall out on Friday morning. So either raise $4 million in the next 48 hours for Monday morning closing. And I talked about the psychology of raising capital where to go and find the money, what to say how to say it. It's it's a science and an art kind of a thing, right. And so, learn how to go and raise capital, if you can just go out and raise capital, chances are you can find somebody who knows how to who can find deals, right, and you can buy their deals from them, or partner with them or bring capital and get a piece of the equity in that project because of it. So always be raising money. This game is a lot about a balancing act of deal flow and money flow. And you know, sometimes your deal heavy, sometimes your money heavy very rarely are you both at the same time. So go ahead. No, I was gonna say I have a million questions popping up in my mind. And I would like to take a little bit closer look at some of this stuff, like even raising capital. So just to circle back to it. So I don't forget, if you have a couple of tips and raising capital, and without giving away the secret sauce. Yeah, then we would love to hear about the mastermind. And where can we go to dive further into raising? Can I give a ton of value for free out there? You know? So it's like, I'm not I'm not like I'm happy to share the secret sauce. Secret Sauce is always be raising money. Always be talking to people all the time about what you do and how you do it. All these people are like, oh, yeah, I want to become a real estate investor. And they don't talk about it. They don't share what they do on social media. They don't go and do a Facebook Live on when they're walking an apartment complex. They're not interviewing their attorney, they're not interviewing their mortgage broker, they're not interviewing the real estate broker, they're not talking to these people, and creating value for other people. Right? All of a sudden, even though you guys interviewing me, brings credibility to you, even though I'm the one doing most of the talking right now, right? Because you're the medium in which you're giving this value to your audience. So you guys get the credibility there. It gives me credibility to but it also gives you credibility. So that's something that I learned early on is like, I could just go grab my attorney and be like, Hey, man, what should somebody do if they want to invest in you know, in loan money on real estate, and he'd be like, Oh, well, you need a promissory note. You need a mortgage and you need your name added to the insurance. And this guy, the attorney is giving all the value to my audience, but my audience sees me as the credible expert. Because I brought him up. Does that make sense? Wow, yes. So really, you don't have to be the expert, you just need to go out and find the experts interview them, it gives them exposure to your audience, which is a benefit value add to them. And it gives your your audience a ton of value, which in which you get the credibility for. So that's, that's the secret sauce, right? And you're talking about it talking about and talking about it. And dude, it's, it's kind of like that, you know, that Penny compounding and doubling every single day with the deal flow. The money's the same way, eventually, you planted enough seeds. You've talked to so many people about what you do and how you do it that when a deal does come to, you know, come across your desk, and you'd go need to raise $11 million for it, boom, shoot out an email, and all these people are already in your database. They already know what you do. They're already comfortable with you as an individual. And now it's just like, does the deal work? Or not? Obviously, it wouldn't be. If you didn't, you wouldn't take it to him if it wasn't the deal. But more importantly, now it's about timing for them. Right. And that's, that's a big thing that I learned in raising $4 million in 48 hours, a lot of people, a lot of people were like, Dude, I didn't even know that you raise money this way? How can you ever told me about this before, and I was like, shit, it's my fault. Right. And then the second thing was like, I love this, I just don't have the cash, I just invested in another project, or I'm waiting for my other building to sell or I'm, like, you know, there's, there's always like some sort of a timing issue, which is why it's important to always be planting seeds. And always staying top of mind, right? When we make payments, we're making quarterly distributions this month. They go out January, April, July and August, and I'm sorry, October, for our business. And we reach out to everybody, we can quarterly updates, we make deposits into their bank account for the past three months of interest payments. And then we tell them about new projects that are going on, the best time to touch base with your investors is on Pay Day, that's a good time. They're a pretty good mood when they see money pending in their bank account. And they're like, oh, man, this actually works, right? It's a proof of concept piece. So make sure you're talking to people all the time, especially people that you're already doing business with, because you've already gotten past the biggest hurdle, the biggest hurdle is just getting them to believe in you, right, like real estate's not difficult to raise money on people are familiar and comfortable with real estate, the return is the second thing that they're looking at. So, you know, number one is the asset. Number two is the return and making sure that it's, you know, the reward is worth the risk, I would say and, you know, opportunity costs, where else could they put the money, so you have to pay attention to those things. But the most important thing in raising money is, is this guy gonna pay me back? Right? Do you have the fortitude to repay me my money, it's not about return on investment. It's about return of investment for most people. And as soon as you pass that return of investment, now, it's like how many deals? How much money can you deploy for me, right? Because now they trust you enough. We're now they're looking to do multiple deals, that first deal is the hardest one to do. So you got to go out there, do deals, do a lot of deals. You know, build confidence with your investors, and show them that you do what you say you're gonna do. You follow through on it, you pay them on time you pay them early, if shit hits the fan, you communicate it, and give them an action plan on how you're gonna overcome any hurdles that you face. Because it will hit the fan. It always hits the fan. So it's not like painting a picture of roses and rainbows and butterflies and shit. It's like, Hey, I just got punched in the gut and slapped in the face this and this and all these other things happen. But here's what we did. We got right through it. Here's the action plan moving forward, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And your money's in a good spot. Don't worry about it. Right. And now they're like, Man, I really appreciate that. And it's also how you handle situations like that the determines whether or not a they reinvest with you, but also, the 10 friends that they're going to tell, hey, you've got money. This is what happened when this guy had problems. We know they're going to happen. Yep, he performed. Yep. Our principle was safe. And we're still we're still solid. Yep, exactly. insane, man. Yeah. So the more you talk, like I said, I wish I was just writing stuff down, because I could probably drag this on for a while. But back to segway. So always be sourcing deals, let people know what you're doing. Right, learn how to raise the capital. And so we just talked about, it's kind of like public facing showing people exactly what you're doing. So to attract new people. And so Kay, so now we have the credibility, we have some cash put away. So becoming bankable itself, like having the proper business structure to where a bank would look at your balance sheet and say, Hey, this looks amazing. How do you get to that level analysis, like bringing on professional bookkeepers? And here's here's the good news, guys, like a team building is a very important thing, right? And you're like, Oh, well, you know, I don't everybody wants a real business. Everybody. Everybody looks at these big organizations and these people like, before, I had a big portfolio and a big company and all these employees and stuff. I would look at other businesses and be like, how the hell do you get there? Right. How do you build a big business like that? You know what I was doing? I was trying to turn 90 Nine, everybody, instead of putting anybody on on a W two, right, I'm trying to not pay early on, I was trying to not pay health insurance, I was trying to like I was trying to skip I was I didn't want it real business, but it wasn't treating it like a real business. Guess what you want a real company, you got to have a real company benefits, you got to have real employees, you got to be able to compete with real companies, right? If you want to attract a players on your team. And so that's, that's one thing to understand just, you know, kind of when you're building a team, but early on, and you know, you don't have a lot of capital, right? You don't have a lot of cash, how do you attract a players to your team? Or not even a players? Right? It could be anybody to your team, when you don't have a big amount of cash to go and deploy. Right? Like, like, how do you hire an assistant. And I remember thinking, like, I needed to pay somebody $3,000 a month, or I have to pay him $36,000 A year in order to hire somebody, I was like, you know, I made 100 grand last year, that's like, 36% of what I made, you know, and, and then I sat in a mastermind, right, I sat in a room, I paid $5,000 for a two day event, to go and sit in a room full of a bunch of people who were further along in business that I was, and to get their feedback on how I could be where they are. And I sat there and I was like, I just can't, you know, I can't stomach paying somebody $36,000 a year, you know, and somebody's like, do pump the brakes. It's not $36,000 a year, it's three grand a month, can you risk $3,000 a month for the next two months? And if and if it doesn't work out, you let them go. And you go back to being in your head against the wall and being the solo act that you already are right? And I was like, Oh, that's a different thought process. That's a different philosophy, different way of looking at it, you know. And so all of a sudden, dude, I go and hire somebody. I launched my first mastermind in February 2015. Where that was the advice that I got. I did two things. I hired an assistant for $3,000 a month. And then I joined that mastermind, which was another $40,000 A month there was actually 35 grand paid. Within I had to pay it within five months. It was like seven G's a month actually for like five months. And I was like, Dude, I just went up to this event, this guy took about 50% of what I made last year about risking it right? Yeah, I would, I was like, these guys have a lifestyle that I wanted. They were doing things and I had enough competency and belief in myself that I knew that if I did, I knew there was one or two tweaks that I was just missing out on that if I could get those couple of things there and implement it. And I was an action taker, I already already was doing things. It's just I couldn't figure it out. And I was banging my head against the wall. And I did those two things. I joined the mastermind, and I hired that assistant. You know what happened over the next 10 months from March 1 to December 31. I made $400,000 I more than tripled my income because of what I did the year before. By doing those two things, I attribute 100% of the success to those two things. Because guess what, man? Even though I hired Hey, Tim, if you just hired that person, could you have still made 400? I don't think I could have because guess what, each level has another level of problems. Every level has another level of hurdles, there's another level of obstacles that come with each level of success. And the beauty of like being in a mastermind, a group that meets on a you know, few times a year, three, four times a year. The beauty of that is like you implement something that's a great takeaway. And over the next 90 to 120 days, typically you hit that glass ceiling and then you're like nailing found out what the new problem was. And that's when you have the next meeting. And then you're like, boom, got to take away smash through that glass ceiling on to the next level. And that is what took my growth. Not that like a stair right like stairwell when you go up everything success is like this. No, success was like this. For me. It was like a hockey stick. And then it went like that all because I joined a mastermind, dude, I attribute a lot of my success to that. What do you think the catalyst was like bringing on another person? Was it just like freeing yourself up to do that getting rid of the menial tasks? So you had more time to focus on like, you know, real money generating activities? Or where do you think the magic sauce wasn't implementing 100% That it's figuring out what generates revenue and what does not. And if you're doing activities that you could hire somebody else to do for $10 an hour. And you're doing those do if you're doing a $10 an hour activity, guess how much money you're gonna make during that hour? Fucking $10.02 bucks, right? Like, it's not a surprise, like, you don't have to be a friggin, you know, neurosurgeon or to figure this out. If you do $10 An hour activities, you're going to end up at the end of the year, making $10 An hour times however many hours you did that activity. That's it, right? If you do activities that pay you $100 An hour, or 500 or $1,000 or $5,000 an hour think Guess how much money you're gonna make at the end of the year. You're gonna make that much money times however many hours you dedicated to that activity. So So, understanding that simple concept, you all of a sudden you're like, hey, here's how much money I want to make, boom, boom, boom, alright? And it's never really like, you know, we're entrepreneurs, right? So it's never really like, Oh, let me go and work for an hour. And then I made $1,000. No, that's not it's like, it compounds kind of a thing, and then you do a deal. And then you make $60,000, you know what I mean? So I don't want you to think that you're just gonna go out and trade your time for money. It's a make an investment, make an investment, make an investment of your time, that eventually yields to a big yield on that time, so, but I do know that if you continue to do those $10 An hour activities, like you will not make big money. So you have to figure out, if you want to make more than $100 an hour, you got to take everything that you can staff out for under $100 an hour, and you got to hand it off to somebody else, whether that's an assistant, or it's a joint venture partner, which I don't think I'd bring out a joint venture partner who only wants to make $10 an hour. Or it's like a fractional employee. So like you mentioned a bookkeeper earlier, you don't have to hire a full time bookkeeper, right out of the gate, like I hired a service that I paid, I don't know, 150 bucks an hour or something, or $75. I don't even know what it was 75 bucks an hour or two. And I gave him the receipts at the end of the month. And they worked on like my on my account for like two hours a month just kind of thrown the bookkeeping in there. And then as I continued to grow, that I needed them one full day, a month, right, or like, every two weeks for half a day, you know, and then all of a sudden, I needed a day every two weeks. And then all of a sudden, I needed a day week, and then all of a sudden, three days a week. And I was like, You know what, now it makes sense for me to just bring on somebody full time because that's, that's how much I'm paying this third party service. But it allowed me to not outlay too much cash and take on too much overhead of having employees. And it allowed me to then grow my business with like variable rate employees, right. And their rate went up as as the how much I utilized them went up as my as my company grew. So yeah, I mean, that's, that's what I would. That's what I would focus on. Genius, man. Yeah, I think we're right now we're right there in hive mind, like we're starting to delegate tasks, businesses starting to feed itself. So I think we're right there where we can start getting more strategic about our books to get to the next level, but then the organisms doing very, very well. So exciting, Man, that sounds amazing. Another if you have something you want to cover two minutes, it's a live show everybody that's watching. So if you have questions, please pop them into the chat box. Yeah. I don't know if you had something you wanted to cover, Tim, but something that I wanted to chat about now. So Anthony, I apologize to him. I have to take off. I will be listening to the rest of this live, but I have to go pick up my kids from school. I'll be listening all time. I'll keep this open. So it's still broadcasting? Let's go bro. No, I was gonna ask now because what I'm thinking okay, now I'm excited about commercial, I'm ready to rock and roll. I guess now can we kind of segue into how you generate those leads now. So you have a software that would help us find these leads? Yeah, well, well, first of all, like you can source deals the same way that you source deals on the single family side, like what do you guys use direct mail, you guys do outbound phone calls. You guys drive for dollars, you dial for dollars, you guys. You know, pull, pull lists and send mailers to those lists, right? Like, there's a lot of different ways you can guess what you could do the exact same thing with commercial. So you pull these lists, and you get lists of owners, you could send them direct mail, you can you could do a skip trace, and then get their phone number, get their email address, send an email, send them a text message, make a phone call to them. And the beauty of it is there's not as many as there are in the single family world and they're all investor minded, right? They're all buying property as an investment property. This is commercial real estate. So it's not like you're dealing with somebody who, you know, is temperamental, has emotions on whether they love their house, or they don't love their house or anything. And, and for every 10 of those that you send out the single family side, you have about 1/10 as many that you need to send on the multifamily and commercial side. So yeah, it's like where do you go and get those lists. So you can go and buy a list of list source and implement it yourself and do much skip tracing kind of stuff. Costar is out there. That's kind of the 800 pound gorilla in the data sourcing world. But if you want national access to costars $25,000 a year for investors and developers 25 grand and then there's a reonomy, but they got bought by private equity kind of fell off the cliff so their customer service isn't good. Their data is not that good. So about nine months ago, a buddy of mine who is one of the largest data aggregators on a single family side. You would know his company name. His name's Greg Coleman. Real flow is the name of his company. And we got together and he's like, Listen, man, I'm thinking about launching a product on the commercial side of things. We'd love to partner up with you and joint venture and have you been kind of the face of it right like you got a great rep. rotation on the commercial side. So I was like, let's do it. So he, you know, delivered a product about four or five months ago, four months ago, let's call it. And it just, it was like a three out of 10 of where we wanted to be. So we've been given feedback and feedback and working with our team who has been amazing, they've been so good. And they've implemented all these benefits, all these things that we wanted to see. And do now. It's like eight out of 10, there's a couple more tweaks that we're still making to it in order to like skip trace, right in the software, we can do direct mail right in the software. And skip trace is a little bit tricky with commercial real estate, because it's not an individual name. It's an LLC name. But we're going to have something implemented in that. partner up with buddy Mike, Jason nickel, who owns lead Sherpa, and lead Sherpa has has the best software out there for skip tracing on commercial real estate. So right now we're kind of, we're linked up with him, where it's like, hey, take this list and partner up with them. And then it'll be fully integrated in the next couple of weeks is what we're hoping but it's called commercial Empire deal flow. If you guys have interested in you could look up any property you want. Any commercial rezone property, apartments, mobile home parks, self storage facilities, student housing, retail, office, hotels and hospitality. You even like like like goofy, special use, like if you want to buy golf courses, you can buy golf courses on there, you can search golf courses, or gas stations, like like legit, anything you possibly could want. You can search in there. And there's there's filters where you can search something that's been around for at least 10 years or longer, something that doesn't have a mortgage or the or there's a certain amount of equity built up because of you know, how long they've owned it for tax delinquent property, so like, where are you guys out of what city? I'm in San Antonio. Okay, let's use in LA, you can pull up San Antonio, Texas, all multifamily apartments at all of San Antonio, Texas plug in whatever zip codes you want. That are that are tax delinquent, meaning they have not paid their property taxes, wow, their own free and clear. And it'll give you the list of every single owner that owns that apartment, over 50 units, right however you want. And you can Yeah, you could do Jacksonville, Florida to Frank, like anywhere you guys want. In the country, you can put as a specific of data as you want in there and filter it all out. And it'll give you a highly motivated list of investors. So you can target by asset class, like you can go Mini Storage or whatever just you can pick any self storage, that somewhere that's under 500 units and self storage, right. So it's kind of like below what all the REITs in the hedge funds are willing to buy. But bigger than that, maybe some of the mom and pop investors, and you're able to go in and target 500 units and smaller, you know, 100 to 500 unit storage units, and that are owned in somebody's personal name and not in an LLC, you know, now you're dealing more with a mom and pop instead of like more of a sophisticated investor who buys an LLC, right? And a corporation name. So dude, it is a ninja ninja software. And it's we have packages that are run at $1,000 A year $2,000 A year or $3,000 a year. That's it. So it's it's better than Costa harvest better than reonomy. And it's a fraction of the price of what those ones charged. So C E deal flow.com Like Commercial Empire deal flow, see deal. flow.com is a website but it's up its operational. Check it all out. Can you search by type of loan for multifamily? Ah, I don't think type of what like recourse non recourse it'd be whatever's in public data, whatever. What are we going to access by public data? That's a great question. Sammy, I'll look into that. Let me let me double check with the guys and see if that's one of the filters. But yeah, I mean, I mean, it, you know, if it's on the mortgage, you know, we can look at mortgage signers, you can do all sorts of stuff. So it's, it's pretty cool. That's really cool. We're super excited about it. Dude, I was gonna say, I hope we don't breeze right past this, if anybody's watching this show right now. Because I've been looking for I'm just starting to lean into commercial now. So a tool like you're offering and that you just talked about just it's simplified. My brain was starting to do all this crazy marketer stuff and that marketing background for 15 years. So I was already going down all these rabbit holes of how I can find these properties. And you've already consolidated it all into one interface. Yeah, I mean, you can pull the list, you can skip trace it and then you can attack any way that you want. You can do direct mail, you can do outbound phone calls, you do text messages, you can do email blasts, right? The like the skip tracing is, depending on who you want to skip tracing, how many you want to skip trace, I think it's 12 cents per skip trace or something. And then if you want to integrate like there's, you can upload your own direct mail piece and say, hey, I want to send to all these and then they'll they'll figure it all out and It's like, I don't even know like it's a buck or something, maybe not even per direct mail piece. And, and they'll figure it all out for you, you don't have to worry about coordinating any of its students all right there. So it's pretty cool. And again, we're still making a few more tweaks, we're gonna keep on adding stuff. So if you guys use it, and you see something that you want, the good news is, you know, the owner, right, so like, hit me up, and I will make sure that we that we do offer that. So like, what, what Sammy was saying was, you know, Can we can we search by loan type? I don't know, it depends on if that's public record or not. In certain states, it could be in certain states, it might not be whether it's a recourse or non recourse and, you know, an agency loan or Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or CMBS, or life insurance company, or whoever else. But yeah, I know that you can search by mortgage amount, I know that you can search by when the mortgage obviously was was put on the property, and all sorts of other things. So it assumes a certain amount of of equity that's in the property based on principle pay down and all that kind of stuff of when the loan and how much the loan was when it was put in place. So it's it's pretty ninja. Yes, it covers the entire country, Frank. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. We have a question about a four Plex and eight Plex. So as you mentioned, building the balance sheet starting from four Plex, eight Plex, how does that make you bankable? Nice. So lender? Yeah, because you've done you've done deals, right? Like, if you go and you you own 10 single family homes? Well, first of all, if you've never done a deal, and you want to go and get a 10 unit apartment building, it's gonna be a little bit hard, right? You gotta, you gotta then sell yourself to the bank. Right? If you own 10 single family homes, and then you want to buy a 10 unit apartment building, that's gonna give you some credibility. If you already own a 10 unit apartment building, and you wanna buy another 10 unit, apartment building, that's gonna give you the most credibility, right? So if you're looking to eventually take down 100 unit apartment complex, which I assume many of you guys are, you want to get into some bigger deals, larger projects. Have you been more scale than in smaller multifamily? How do you get there, if you try to jump right into 100 unit complex right out of the gate, and you don't own 100 doors, you're competing with guy like me, not not pounding my chest or anything? I'm just saying, like, I have a big ass portfolio, right? Like, no offense. But if even if your offers higher than mine, they're gonna go to me because they know that I can execute, they know that I can close on that deal. Right, Gary, I get, I get a seat at a table to make offers on projects that most other people don't because of my reputation, right? So I want you guys build that same reputation be able to get a seat at the table with brokers and with sellers and with banks. So how do you do that? If you can't come to the table and compete with these big real estate, landlords right out of the gate? How do you do it? Well, you do it the same way that I did, which was organically grown about an eight unit. And then about a 14 unit. And then about a 23 unit, they bought a 31 unit. And then I bought an 80 unit, because I had 80 doors by that, you know, so like, I just organically accumulated properties. And eventually I got up to 234 100 units. And then I got up to like, 500. And then I bought a portfolio of 700 doors. Can we talk about creative financing, because I've watched a couple of your presentations in the past about utilizing creative financing because most people think it's a myth that you can do creative finance deals in the commercial sector. So can we talk about we've talked about some deals you've done and as far as creative financing, because a lot of people think they need a lot of money to do those type of transactions. But if you do it creatively, you can create those opportunities. Dude, I love creative finance. It's like my favorite part of doing real estate is structuring deals in a in a creative way. But still a simple way that we're everybody can understand it, investors can understand it, sellers can understand it, the team can understand it, wrap their head around it, will most people say Hey, I gotta go get a loan, I need to save up my own money, and then I need to go and buy a property. It's not the case, that's not the only path to go and build a portfolio. I built up a $400 million portfolio using 125 grand in my own cash. That's it, right. As an equity investor. Now I now I throw more money in. But early on, I didn't have the money, right, and I or I needed to stay liquid in order to then qualify for some of these loans. So how do you do it? How do you creatively finance? Well, first of all, understand the components are usually there's the loan, and then there's the downpayment, right or the private money. And so the loan can come from a bank, or it can come from the seller, right? The private money can come from you, or it can come from private lenders, or can come from the seller, right? So like there's a few different components that are involved of ways that you can put the pieces of the puzzle together. So do I syndicate apartments, right? I go and buy an apartment building. I can go get a mortgage for it. 80% And then for the 20%, down, I go and raise private money. So I'll talk to, you know, let's say I buy a $10 million building and I need $2 million for the down payment, I can go and raise that $2 million from one person who writes one check for $2 million. Or I can bring 20 people on. This is called syndication, I could bring on 20 People with $100,000 a piece or anything in the in the middle, right? And so it allows more people and it's easier to raise $100,000 than it is a $2 million check. Right, right. So it allows you to then go and raise capital from multiple people for the downpayment on that project. If the bank didn't give me the money, I could just ask the seller to finance and say, Hey, listen, if you let me give you 20%, down, you carry back 80% of it. And, and I've done that I did that with my island, I bought an island, in out like right next to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, about 110 acre island, they're doing like like tiny cabins and like a fishing, hunting, work out fun outdoorsy kind of retreat. And on this island, I got the seller. Last summer, nine months ago, when I bought this August of last year, we got the seller to carry back 70% of the deal at 4% interest only for three years. And then the rate bumps up a little bit for another two years thereafter. So I got him to carry back 70%. And then I went to my investors and I raised the 30% down for my investors. Now I did that the trouble with some of these like short term rentals, they don't cashflow that much, right. But the beauty of it is that they're usable. And especially on that island, what I'm able to do is I went to my investors, I said, Hey, I can't pay you guys a 10% return, which is what I typically, or you typically pay my investors eight to 10% I can't pay you guys a 10% return, here's what I can do, I'd pay you for. Well, Tim, that doesn't give you too excited, let me wait for the one of the others. But you'll also get a piece of the equity of the deal of the island. And you can come out and stay in the main house, which is a four bed four and a half bath, built in 2005 fully renovated in the past couple of months. And it's got an inground pool and everything's beautiful, beautiful home, you could stay there for one week a year, we would typically rent that for $10,000. So now you bring $100,000 to my deal, you get 4% return, which is $4,000 a year, plus you get access to utilize the property, which is another $10,000 in your rental use. And if you don't use it, hey, sell it on your buddies for 678 grand or whatever. And you could pocket that money yourself. So now you can essentially hit that 10 12% return if you really want to, or you can utilize it and take your family out there and show them how cool the property is. And then you get a little fraction, a little sliver of the cash flow from the property and the equity upside in the property. That's a pretty sweet deal do even though you're only making a 4% fixed return on your money. So it's you know, we did that with that when I've done it with my with my Mountain House, I did the exact same structure. And then I did it again with another just like ridiculous. riverfront property, it's actually right next to the island, we utilize that for the dock and everything. So I've done it multiple times, on short term rentals, it works dude, I have people lining up, like we always get over committed, just because the way that we structure it, and it's cool sexy projects. Sometimes people aren't always looking for the highest return on their on their money. You know, they want that lifestyle element to it, just like some sellers on the single family side. Dude, it's not about getting the most they can possibly get for the property. Sometimes they want to alleviate a headache. And so if you can figure out a way to either reduce pain or increase pleasure for people, by being able to structure deals in a creative way to you're gonna have limitless amounts of capital. I like how you because most people think creative financing, they think of the front end getting the seller to carry back and all that stuff, but you're doing creative financing on the back end to where you're giving. And now let's think about that as far as like, hey, we'll give you a week week at the spot to creative financing financing on the back end. So So yeah, that's that's an amazing strategy. And now my mind is my mind is working. Yes. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Some other people kind of duplicate it, and it's worked out for them too. So yeah, it's exciting. Another thing that you could do is you can go get if you have the ability to go and get 80% of the money. Maybe you can go and get 80% of the money from a bank, you know, and then you get the seller to only carry back 20% down. So you say Hey, mister seller, or miss seller, listen, I can give you majority of your money right now. You know you bought this property 10 years ago do you cash in and big time that gives you everything plus millions more? And then how about we carry back the other 20% at 0% earn interest, I think you might have to do like 2% or whatever. Like, there's some ways you can creatively structure it, but say 0% interest for the next 10 years, and I'm just gonna make principal only payments to you over the next 10 years as a nice little kind of annuity to you every single month. Right? How does that sound? It sounds pretty damn good, you know, my price. And then the biggest tax liability right now is residual income long, ongoing on a long term basis. You know, that sounds really good. And like, that's a great way where you don't have to give up any equity to them. Or any of your investors, you can still maintain 100% ownership of your deal. And get 100% financed. No, it's amazing. I got my mind wheels. I'm not gonna say this could easily turn into a two hour episode, but we won't keep you there. I gotta I gotta jump off in about 10 minutes or so guys. Happy to answer any other questions. What else you guys got? I'm an open book, man. Anything that you guys want to know, happy to provide some value any way that I can? I just same question, isn't it? You sorry? The normal equity, right? But then, you know, no, no, I wasn't. Yeah, that's it right there. That's what I was going to ask. So if I bring you a plus plus plus deal, can I stay involved on the backside? What kind of percentage can we expect? Yeah, yeah. So I'm here. Here's something to understand. Is this? It's great question. First of all, it's a different deal than a flip, right? Or a wholesale deal, right? If you're wholesaling something, and you bring the deal, I sell the deal. And we split the fee 5052. That makes sense, right? Because it's like a snapshot, it takes 60 to 90 days of our time, and we make a $30,000 rip on it, you get 15 G's I get for 10 G's when you're talking about something that might take you 3060 90 days to go find a deal. But you're talking about a deal that somebody else has to renovate for the next two years of their life, and somebody else needs to asset management for the next 30 years of their life. You realize it's not like, there's some long timelines, right? So it's like, yeah, how how do you quantify bringing a deal versus asset management of managing this thing for the next 30 years, right, or who's signing on the loan and is responsible for the next 20 years? Who's bringing the actual cash to take this thing down? It's not like an assignment of a contract where it's like, yeah, it's a snapshot 5050 I get somebody bring me a deal. They're like, hey, I want 50% of the deal. On this 100 unit apartment complex, and it's like a best of me. I'm like, bro, let me just explain this to you. Right, it's not, I don't try to talk down. It's just different. It's different than wholesaling. But there's a lot of moving parts who brought the deal? And here's the other thing. How much work did you do? Did you afford an email? I see that shit all the time. Hey, let me forward an email. I want 3% rip on this $70 million project? Like? How about you go and contract it? How much due diligence? Have you done? Did you walk the whole property? Did you contract the property? Did you put up any earnest money? Have you gotten any scope of work bids? For all the work that needs to be done? Have you done any due diligence on the other prop property from the aspect of you know, are there are there any violations? Are the taxes? Current like like, do something right? Like? Or are you forwarding an email? Those two things are working a very different amount of money. Does that make sense? Yeah. And then again, somebody's got an asset, manage this thing, somebody's got a project, manage the renovations, somebody needs to go down there be boots on the ground and oversee this and meet with investors and meet with insurance adjusters and meet with the lenders, representatives. And we will do for the next 20 years. 30 years of ownership. So if you're wholesaling, and apartment building, that could be different. But if you're buying, renovating, and then holding it long term, you can't expect 50% Yet, it's just not realistic. And the only thing is like how good of a deal is it? If you send me a marginal deal, that's not that exciting. That's not worth as much as a Grand Slam, somebody that has a ton of meat on the bone. So, you know, there's a lot of moving parts, but what I would say as a snapshot is dude, I would expect to get paid. If I brought somebody else in deal, like I wholesale deals, I expect 2% I get 2% Either in like equity or a fee. Or, or I take my 2% instead of a fee, whatever that would be. I put it towards the deal as if I was investing as an equity investor in the project and get paid that way. That's what I would expect. So kind of like what a realtor gets paid. You know, I wholesale apartment complexes to students and people on our VIP Buyers list and stuff. And I say hey, just kicked me 2% of closing the deal. Kick me a 2% fee or kick me a couple of points of equity in the project. Um, but you know, that's that's typically what a realtor makes. And if you're wholesaling or sourcing the deal you can expect to make somewhere there. Have I paid more? Yeah, I paid 10% to people before, because they brought me a smoking deal. And if they forwarded an email, I pay him usually 1%. You know what, dude on a $15 million project? That's 150 G's before the email. That's yeah, not a bad day in the office. Somebody said that the commercial environment that you have the slides that shows the different breakdowns of the ownership deals. Yep, yep. Yep. I have Yes, a commercial importers might I don't have a but like, I didn't come on here to like sell shit, guys. But please, I'm sure you got everybody fired up. So tell us how we can find you. How can we work? Yeah, naturally, questions come up. Hey, dude, how do you coach? Do you mentor? Do you do this? Yeah. So I don't have a bunch of stuff. I don't have like a, you know, run to the back of the room with a $50,000 credit card? I don't do anything like that. I have, I have essentially two offerings. Right? Well, I guess the software's is offering number three. So I get the software. Cool. It's you bought the software you do on your own. And we're not going to have a Facebook group, we have a private Facebook group for anybody who buys that, where we jump out with my Acquisitions Director once a week on an Ask me anything. And he's just talking through, you know what to do, how to do it, all that kind of stuff. So if you buy the software, you get access to the private Facebook group. So it's number one. Number two is commercial umpire, that's my three day training event. It's done virtually. This used to be $5,000, when it was in person before COVID hit after COVID hit, we made it virtual, it's 1000 bucks, 997. Now, so you come out, I hosted only like three times a year. But you also got a recording of it too. So that's commercial empire.com, commercial empire.com and three day event on how to find off market direct seller deals, how to underwrite apartment complexes, how to raise private money, and handle all the due diligence, how to structure the financing, how to do the renovations, how to how to handle property management, asset management, business development, and then what it would look like, which is what Ryan's talking about, on, you know, like equity splits and stuff, too. So that's 97, you get access to another private Facebook group, a lot, a lot of money, a lot of deals going on in that group. And, and some cool conversations too. So check that out, you get access to the recording immediately. And then commercial, important deal flow CEE deal flow is the software. And then we have a mastermind called Legacy family. And we get together three times a year. And then we have daily boardroom calls that you can plug into once a week, once a month, every single day if you want with my executive team. And these aren't like coaches, right? Like these are multiple six figure executives who run at what does that a nine figure portfolio we own $400 million in real estate. And it's, it's my director of acquisitions every Monday on a boardroom call, you can ask them any question you want. It's my coo every Tuesday, who put all of our SOPs together, and KPIs and all of our processes and procedures and everything. He's there every Tuesday, my chief investment officer who's also my attorney is available every Wednesday for you guys to pepper him with questions about raising money we've raised over $100 million of mom and pop money before for our deals. And then my director of HR is there every Thursday and then it's either me or guests on Fridays just helping out and then we get together three times a year a big fun badass exciting events. We got a big one coming up in June in Denver and we got some really cool stuff we run out core stadium the one night so we'll go have a happy hour down on down the field and that's where the Colorado Rockies play and and then have dinner over there and just you know we got top of the show top line speakers discussion Panelists we do some roundtable hot seats and they just over the top kind of fun cool things to do and what are the cities we go to our so we're in Vegas we've been in Orlando we've been shoot Puerto Rico Oh Austin Texas we did want Yeah, so we got some cool stuff lined up for for this year. But yeah, that's legacy family legacy family mastermind.com is the mastermind so you got to check that out too. I'll be joining soon I recommend everybody does the same. I think we're gonna get out here Do you have one more question? Yes, I was like ending with this one is what is a quote that is yours or somebody else's that you resonate with? Who I mean, the one that I signed all my all my signature on my emails be your best. And if I was in my office in Cleveland, Ohio, like I live in Charleston, South Carolina, but it would say be your best real big behind me. And yeah, I'm a believer in not just doing right doing is like a one time effort in my mind, right. Like being is a state of being always trying to be be right. Yours, right? Not you don't have to be the best, right? Like there's always gonna be somebody who's further along, not better than you just further away. Obviously, there's no such thing as somebody who's better. They're just, they've been doing it longer, or they're further along in the process than you are so so I don't, I don't like sweat in that. And I don't like sweating and comparing yourself to other people. So be your best, right? Like compare yourself to you. That's the only fair comparison you can make. Make sure that you are better today than you were yesterday or a year ago or two years ago, and that you're better tomorrow than you are today. And then the best dude, like, why not strive, right, like a friggin? How tall? Will a tree grow? as tall as it possibly can? Like, we humans are given the dignity of choice. And we can either be more be everything or be less, right. Like, why not be everything? Why not go all out? So it's just kind of my thought philosophy and and I signed all my signatures on all my emails would be your best. So that's what I would say. It sounds like we can have a fun conversation about philosophy, man, I love that be your best. That's, that's amazing. Thank you so much, man. I hope we get to do this again. I can't tell you how grateful we are for you sharing your time with us. We know you're a busy man. Guys, please check out Tim if you don't know who he is. Please look this man up and all the value he provided today at the price that he's providing it at to me, my mind is absolutely freaking blown. Because I'm sure that would have took me at least the you know, 10 years to pick up all the nuggets that you can provide at that price point. That's insane. So thanks a lot for being on here. Man. We really appreciate you. I appreciate you guys. Thank you for having me. If there's ever anything I can do, don't hesitate to reach out. So I'm already looking for deals for you right now. Have a great week. Guys. Talk to you soon, man. Thank you so much.