55. Networking and Lessons Learned with Brandon Magierowski

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Just like anything successful anytime you want to make a living and good money and build a business is that it's just brick by brick you know there's no there's no Fast Track unless you come across and win a massive amount of money and put it to work but there's no Fast Track it's building relationships. It's finding the right team and just we you know, we have a saying within our group which is move the needle every day.

Welcome to the Average Joe Finances podcast. Are you trying to get out of debt, invest or just not sure where to start? Then this is the place for you. We discussed different ways to get out of the rat race and build your wealth. Join us on this wild ride to financial freedom. What's going on everybody? So today's guest is Brandon Mega loski and he's a native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, he came to Shreveport Louisiana back in 2004 to join the LSU Shreveport pilots baseball program. After three years with the pilot, Brandon graduated with a bachelor's degree in general business administration. In 2008, Brandon joined the prairie baseball Academy. It's a junior college as an assistant coach before returning to the LSU baseball program in 2010. As the graduate assistant coach Brandon's coaching position with the pilots ended in 2011, after Brandon graduated with his master's degree in business administration. In the spring of 2013, Brandon turned his attention to hosting baseball tournaments in the deep south region to provide players a better opportunity for exposure to next level recruiters. In 2014. Brandon aided in the creation of diamond dynasty 2d sports. since inception, the company has grown over 25% year after year, and now hosts over 100 events per year. Brandon is an active partner in real focus capital investments, a co host of the gorilla estate podcast, and currently owns several multifamily properties in Louisiana. He is a graduate of the multifamily University, a member of multifamily University investor group, and leads the multifamily mastermind 318 Meetup group in North Louisiana. So Brandon, absolutely awesome background. Thanks for coming on the show today. Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here. All right, awesome. So the first thing I'd like to talk about, or I guess, elaborate a little more on is your background. And this is the way I like to start every podcast episode. So if you could, you know, besides the bio that I just gave, can you share a little bit more about yourself? And how did this all get started for you? What's your story?

Yeah, so back in 2004, I was playing junior college baseball up in Canada and I was my dream was to come down to the states to play college baseball, and I was lucky to get recruited down to LSU Shreveport, and played three years at LSU Shreveport. In that process I met What is my wife now, we moved back to Canada for a couple years. And then I got offered the Graduate Assistant job to come back and coach at my alma mater, LSU Shreveport. And the nice thing about that when you come back as they pay for your master's degree, so I was coaching college baseball, which was my passion. And alongside that I was getting a free education. Two years after that, after I completed my graduate assistant, I graduated with a master's degree. And at that point, I kind of knew that maybe college baseball, the coaching of college baseball was not the route I wanted to take. I wanted to have an opportunity to provide more for my family. I have a huge entrepreneur. I think I thought I could start a business and really provide more for my family, year after year after year, then what college coaching would give me. So I started I met a guy in Louisiana who was running baseball tournaments, high school baseball tournament, Louisiana is running about two or three of them and I said, you know, I'd like to help you with those tournaments. Long story short, we went from running three tournament seven years to go to over 150 per year. To date. I'm actually like you said I'm in a hotel room right now in Memphis, Tennessee. We have over 250 teams coming to play with us this coming weekend across the southeast, and we are in the heart of our baseball season. Along that route in baseball. I met Randy Blankenship who is now my partner with real focus capital. We invest in apartment complexes, mainly on the I 10 corridor between mobile and Jacksonville, Florida. how I got into real estate Ramsey and I were doing big Baseball tournaments together and Ramsey was bragging about, you know how great he was at real estate and Panama City and all these properties he had and all this cash flow that was coming in. And I was just like, I just kept listening to it and listening to it. I was fine. Like, how the hell are you doing this? Like, I love real estate. I've made some money off my residential houses on accident. But how are you buying these properties and renovating them and creating this cash flow and this mailbox money that everybody talks about? And he started to kind of teach me little by little each year about how he was doing it. He gave me a couple books to read, you know, the Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a couple other investing books. I read him I said, Okay, I want to do this. This is what I want to do. Ramsey, I love the baseball, the baseball business we have going on, but I can do this on the side. This would be a great side hustle for me to get a couple of properties and have some cash flow and get my foot in the door in real estate. So he said, All right, where do you live wherever you live, you probably should buy your first property where you live. Fast forward four years I was a huge mistake. But I'd love to get into the weeds on that. So we bought a six unit apartment complex and a triplex a three unit in Shreveport, Louisiana. That was four years ago. I self managing properties for about a year. And then I ended up having another kid and we turn the property the properties over to a property management group. We still hold those properties today. But the whole deal was it was going to be a 5050 split with Ramsey but I was going to do the property in my backyard. So I did all the work on the properties negotiated the deal did the property management panel Property Group. And along the way, Ramsey was just giving me little nuggets of information on how to do that properly. So that was four years ago, you know about three years into owning those properties. We they were not performing like they underwrote so we underwrote them to perform and probably cashflow about five 600 bucks a month. But that wasn't happening. They were breaking even sometimes we were losing money each month. So we said you know what did we do wrong? Because Ramsay's properties in Panama City were cash flowing like crazy. And he used the exact same formula. He gave me the underwriting. He gave me his criteria. We bought the properties in Shreveport. It was the same. It was the same deal. Cookie cut it from Panama City, put it in Shreveport, they should cash flow. Well, what we made the mistake was we didn't do, we didn't know how to do the proper market research to make sure that Shreveport was a viable market to invest in, especially when you're doing larger three unit and six unit complexes. And then we saw a guy on YouTube named Neil Bauer and Neil bow is doing a presentation on market research, how to use data from the internet free data to find the best markets to invest in. And in this presentation about 45 minutes in he started going through the list that he compiled of cities throughout the United States using the data and guess what city landed as the worst city to invest in in multifamily. Whoo, maybe Shreveport, Shreveport. And Ramsey and I looked at each other and said, we're going to this guy's conference. So we went to his boot camp in San Diego, California, a year and a half ago, we spent Where's probably two grand each 2500 each, I can't remember. But it was two and a half days of really learning the ins and outs of syndicating apartments going after bigger properties pooling investor money together to buy these bigger assets. But mostly I wanted to learn, you know, why not Shreveport and why these other cities and how do you compete in these other cities. So we walked out of that the lightbulb went off that weekend that syndicating apartments was what we wanted to do. So we started building our team. We grabbed a guy named Joey become out of Panama City, Joey's 15 years in the Navy under project management. Then we just recently picked up another partner in Shreveport named Chris kunam. And Chris is a entrepreneur, he runs a home inspection company, but he's been an LP on six or seven deals. He went through the Brad some rock mentorship program out of Dallas. So he's got six or seven years experience. And since we built that team, we just recently closed on a 10 unit deal in Panama City. We're closing on an eight unit hotel down in South Louisiana. And we just got brought in on a larger deal in Texas that really is just on the ground floor as of yesterday. So hopefully, by the time this podcast come out, we can we can talk a little bit more about that deal. So that's a long winded but that's kind of the background of how I went through, you know, college baseball to coaching to building a baseball business meeting a partner, providing some sort of, you know, trying to ask for some mentorship from him buying the properties in Shreveport and learning the mistakes from our mistakes and treatment. And fixing them building a team on the syndication side. And here we are today.

Right on man, what a story what a way to get started. So, so you guys met? It was at a baseball tournament, right?

Yeah, he's a partner in the baseball business. So there's five partners in the baseball business, he was one of them. His brother is a big baseball guy. And that's why me and his brother kind of started the company together. And Ramsey was a really, really good business mind because of his experience in the Navy. So he was brought on board. And we just met through tournaments, run them together and kind of hit it off with which is kind of like minded like hearted, have fun together. But we kind of know that real estate is our end game. This is this is what we want to do, because he's got about six years left in the Navy could be five when he retires, and he wants to go full time as a an apartment syndicator. So we're just building the blocks right now over the next five years to gain momentum so that when he does retire, we hit the ground running. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I'm doing something very similar right now. You know, prepping for my retirement from the Navy here shortly myself. So. So when when you approached Ramsey, like, how did that conversation go? How did you initially so you heard him talking about all this stuff with real estate, it piqued your interest? How did you approach him to say, hey, I want I want to join your team, or I want I want to invest with you Like, how did that go?

Yeah, so like I said, he was, you know, bragging about his Panama City properties and real estate, he read a bunch of books when he was on deployment, and he loves real estate. And I read business books, too. And I was reading, you know, you know that all the millionaires in the world are in real estate, you know, mailbox money, cash flow, this that the other right now, all my eggs in one basket, it was the baseball business. So it was it was good. It's going really well. We're growing 25% year after year, gaining events, gaining revenue, bringing on new employees, but you know, you have to diversify yourself on the business side as well, you've got to have side hustles in different branches to build off that tree. Because if the baseball business ever failed, I have nothing to fall back on. There's no income coming in. Now I got to get the nine to five job that I've dreaded for my entire life. Don't want to do that. So I said, you know, I'm reading these books. Everyone's telling me to get into real estate. I don't know how but I've got a guy in front of me that does know how. And I was fortunate enough that Ramsey kind of took me under his wing and taught me that, you know, this is how you do it. We made some mistakes in Shreveport. But, uh, you know, Randy, and I chalked it up, as you know, the junior college education of investing is, yeah, not every deal is going to go perfect. We've learned a ton off of that deal. But again, I did everything for those deals, Ramsey basically just kind of steered the ship a little bit and gave me information and kind of let me go as a mentor, but he got 50% of that deal. When I was doing, you know, 80% of the work on site in my backyard. And that's kind of how, you know, kind of prove myself to Ramsey to go, you know, it's kind of maybe a test for him to see if, you know, as Brandon for real, you know, he sent me two books. I read him in a week. He said, Let's buy some properties. We closed on him in two months. You know, we moved fast. But I think it was a test Ramzi was testing to see you know, is this guy is this guy for real and is this guy, someone, someone I can bring on my team for the long term. And like I said, fast forward five years, we're, we're growing along with two other partners, something that I think is gonna be really, really special.

Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. And I think another part of, you know, what happened Shreveport, right? It was it was definitely a learning experience for the two of you. But at the same time, what that's going to turn into value wise in the long run is going to pay off so much more than than what you guys lost or you know, when you were breaking even or even losing money, it's gonna pay back in in droves because of the the experience that you've learned from it. And so that value that it that it added to the two of you, is knowledge. And that knowledge, you can turn around and take that into the future. It kind of pushed you too to go check out Neil Bauer, right and go check out his boot camp, you weren't afraid to shell out a little cash to go go learn, you know, multifamily real estate and go to his boot camp. So I think that's another part of you know, what people mix things up, as, you know, sure, you could probably just jump right into it, but if you if you do, you're gonna have some painful learning experiences too. I also learned the hard way with buying some property back in Virginia. And it was a painful experience but I got through it and I think it made me better. So the key thing is just making sure that if if this is something you want to do that you're educating yourself and you know with the right education and getting yourself you know hooked up with the right people to Build the right team. And I think that was something that Ramsay and I talked a lot about was When, when, when everything came together for the organization and for your, for your team, it was, it was because of the team. It was everybody that was involved. It wasn't just one singular person. And I think that's the other thing, too is you know, you don't want to go in it alone. You want it you want to build a goodwill you

want to build bring teammates on that complementary to like, you know, I'm sure ranks for sure. And I have weaknesses. Ramsey has strengths and weaknesses, but my weaknesses are his strengths and vice versa. And Joe is the same way as project management on construction. I mean, that's not me. That's Joey Joey's unbelievable at it. But just to backtrack on what you're talking about in this report property, I sometimes I think about what of Shreveport would have went perfect for us, and we cash flow and it was great. And everything was awesome. I don't know if we ever would have ever went to the Neil Bauer boot camp. I don't know if we would have ever said let's syndicate apartments. And so I think why Ramsey and I talk so much about treeborn, you think you know we we put it down and we laugh about it. But in reality, it paved the path for us. That mistake paved the path for us to get into bigger deals and bring on new teammates, learn our lessons, spend some money on education, and look where it's gotten us today. And we're just keep growing day after day after day. And just to all the other syndicators and investors out there, from the smallest level to the biggest level is don't be afraid to talk about your mistakes. So many times, you know, you see on social media and LinkedIn and Facebook about this deals close. And this is the greatest thing ever. And I'm making this and everything so phenomenal. Nobody ever posts on there. Man, I made a terrible investment. These are the mistakes I made this much money I lost. I don't know it's because they're just trying to promote greatness amongst themselves. But Randy and I are not afraid to talk about the mistakes we made in Shreveport, because those mistakes, we will not make them again, we will not make them again. And they lead us to a path to where we're at today. What we're going to do bigger and bigger deals every single year.

Yeah, that's that's fantastic. Again, like I was saying before, it's the value that those mistakes and lessons learned that you got is worth more than any type of cash flow that you can get because it's going to earn you some more cash flow into the future. So So the next question I'd like to ask you then, so you live in Shreveport still right? I do. Yeah. And you travel all over for the baseball tournament. You're in Tennessee right now. So where are you currently investing? What what markets are you in right now?

So we love the panhandle of Florida, which is the I 10 corridor mobile across to Jacksonville. And Joey lives in Panama City. Ramsay owns property in Panama City. We have a construction team, we have a property manager in Panama City. So that whole corridor, Joey can reach it via in his car. The other markets that we're really looking at is the East Texas market. Because Chris and I live in Shreveport. It's two, three hours away. Texas is super competitive. But we've decided no, we want to focus specifically on two locations that are within reach of us. I wish Shreveport was the greatest market to invest in because we can make a killing here because it's in our backyard. It's easy, just like Joey in Panama City, but it's not reality. And another thing we're not, you know, my family's not moving from Shreveport and my wife, we have kids, my wife's family's here, everything's great. We got a lot of support. We're not going to move. We're not going to invest here. So what are the markets we're looking at? So we took those data points, those data metrics, we ran them, what's reachable to us via vehicle. And we ran the data points that we learned about markets, and we found the markets we wanted to invest in. And so far, like I said, we just we just closed on the 10 unit in Panama City. We've got an eight unit and stuff, Louisiana, and we've got a deal on the pipeline in Lubbock, Texas.

Fantastic. All right. So when you're scoping out these deals in like these two specific specific areas that you're looking at, how do you know what's a good deal? What what what type of data are you looking at?

So you're talking about the for the market or the property itself?

Well, both actually you know so the you know, I know you have to do your due diligence on each property you go look at but how do you know which market or or area in like that specific town is going to be a good spot for you guys to go look at apartments. So you know, how do you how do you pick out which ones you want to go and make an offer on

the first thing we did we started developing relationships with the brokers in those areas and the agents and then we we did that as we we built some credibility through our branding through our website, you know, places that they could go look us up. So you call a broker. Hey, man, I'm Brandon. These are the deals we're looking for, you know, 50 to 100 units 1975 vintage, we're looking for class B and C. little light, light value. ad. That's and they're going to go Okay, great. Who are you? And what we did is we back that up with some some nice branding a website really set it up for them to go, Okay, these guys, they're a legitimate group, they're not just tire kickers that are just calling me and wasting my time. So that took us, you know, three or four months to build this relationship. So we started getting deal flow in, you know, when you say the I 10 corridor, there's a lot of cities along the I 10 corridor, right, mobiel, Pensacola, Panama City, Jacksonville, Tallahassee. And inside those cities, there's sub markets that you have to analyze as well. So just because the city meets the metrics, there's certainly no this you can, you can talk about your own city you live in, there's good parts and bad parts. And without being boots on the ground on those cities, you have to find a way to figure out, you know, get information from the broker, but also look at the data. And the data we use is it's free data from from the internet, that just monitors the population growth, median household income, median household value, the crime rate and the job growth. Those are the five data points that we're looking at, we're looking for certain trends over the past 20 years. And for us, really, the three drivers for us is the population growth, the job growth and the decline in crime, right, that's what's gonna hit. And then the other two are just bonus metrics that we put into our spreadsheets. So we'll get a deal within a city. First, we're going to look at the deal, make sure that it meets our criteria that we're looking for. And then we're going to look at the sub markets, it's in that sub market meets our metrics, then we're going to dive into the underwriting on the deal, we're going to do a quick 10 minute analysis, see where the price points at based on the cap rate. And then if that passes, then we're going to go into deep dive underwriting, come up with an on offer, as a broker some questions go back and forth, submit another Why? That's kind of the process we take. Right on.

Yeah, it sounds like a very good process. And and you have a lot of, I guess, stop gaps in there too, to, to know when you're going to move forward. And when you're when you're going to back out. So

yeah, so let me just touch on that. Because early on, you know, you start getting deal flow, you get super excited, and every deal, you think is done deal. So you spend hours on that deal, and you get another one. And all of a sudden you got all this deal flow coming in, there's no way to filter it out. So we set up procedures within our group to say, if you get a deal sent to you do not send it to anybody else until it passes a and b. And if it doesn't pass a and b, just reply to the broker and say this is just not our deal because of this. If it passes a and b, it goes to step C which goes to our underwriter, the underwriter it goes back to the team. And that's how we started vetting our deals. But early on, we made we made some mistakes. And we're overwhelmed because we thought every deal that came across our table was the deal.

Right? Right. Yeah, this is a this is a good way to save some time to with with your underwriting, right. So you're not underwriting every single deal that comes across your desk you have, you know, if it doesn't pass the sniff test. It's not going any further. That's right. That's right. All right. Awesome. Okay, so was it strictly going to the Neil Bauer conference that made you decide to get into multifamily? Or did you know for sure, like as soon as you were working with Ramsey, that multifamily was the way to go instead of like doing maybe single family homes? Yeah,

so from day one, Ramsey, was all about multifamily. And that's what he taught me from the very beginning. Basically, don't mess with single family multifamily multifamily multifamily. That's why we brought bought the three unit, and then the six unit and not any single family stuff. And then from there, it just, you know, you drive by these apartments and these bigger complexes and just look at them and say, How the hell are people buying these? Like, how is this done? There's no way someone's just stroking a check for $46 million to get the deal. So you know, your wheels start turning and you want to get bigger than six units and bigger than eight units, you want to buy 2030 and get up to 200 units. And that's why we went to the conference and we spent some money on the education to say number one, how do you do it? And number two, is this realistic for us to do as w two employees? You know, we came back from the conference and it was information overload you're excited as can be and then you dial it back and go, Okay, how much time do I have to commit to this? My w two is my job. That's what I do. That's how I make money for my family. And this real estate is my passion and side hustle, how much time Can I put into it in is that enough time to be able to syndicate apartments, and if it's not dial it back a little bit? It's okay, what how much time do I have and what can I accomplish within that timeframe?

Right on Yeah, that's, I think that's another aspect that people don't really look at too is the the time commitment it takes especially when you guys are having deal flow. You know, the time commitment it takes to actually sit here and analyze those deals. Is it gonna overflow into your W two job or are you okay with having some late nights Making sure you do proper due diligence and not just jumping into something because you rushed it. Right. So that's a great point. Because there's a lot of people that listen to this show, and myself included who you know, are w two employees right now, and are investing in real estate, and they want to take it to that next level to that next step and get into multifamily. And they're just not sure where to start. So I think, you know, some of some of the things we're getting out of this conversation right here is number one, education to build an awesome team people that compliment you, you know, people that can pick up on your weaknesses, and you can pick up on their weaknesses. And then three is finding the right market. And then for, you know, making sure you have the right time commitment that you can provide to be involved in something like this. Now, let's say somebody wants to get into multifamily real estate, and they just don't have the time to commit. You know, they're they're busy working professional, they have some money, they want to invest, but they don't have the time to come in and be a general partner, what else what else could they do? Let's take a brief moment to hear from our show sponsors. What's going on everybody? So today, I want to talk to you about the podcast editing service that we use for the Average Joe Finances podcast that is editpods.com. And what I really like about them is it's a subscription based service. So the prices are fantastic. And not only do they do the podcast episodes for us, but they also make us videos, audio, Graham's social media caption videos, they do our show notes, thumbnails, it's just fantastic products, go check them out at editpods.com What's going on everybody. So today, I want to talk to you about Buzzsprout. The Average Joe Finances podcast recently switched over to Buzzsprout. And I gotta say, I am super happy with the progress. Our podcast is now on every single major platform and reaching audiences that we couldn't reach before, which is just super awesome. So thank you to Buzzsprout for being such a great platform. But also I want to say, Hey, guys, if you sign up for Buzzsprout, and you sign up for their paid plans using our link, you'll get a $20 amazon gift card. So go check them out. It's AverageJoefinances.com/buzzsprout. And we'll make sure the link is in the show notes below. Let's get back to today's episode. You're listening to the Average Joe Finances podcast, whether it's single or multifamily real estate, the stock market or side hustles, we discuss it all strap in and enjoy the ride.

Well, that's where you come on as a limited partner on these deals, which is is how these apartment complexes are purchased is there's a general partnership group which basically leads the ship, they're running the business, they're creating the business plan, they're going out and finding the deal, negotiating and get it under contract. And they come back to these busy professionals that have additional capital sitting in the bank account making 1% interest fighting it's inflation that that money needs to get to work. But they don't have the time to vet the deals, or negotiate with the broker or do the underwriting. So we bring the deal to them and say, Hey, here's here's an opportunity to put your money to work. As a passive investor, you give the money, you put your feet on the desk, and you get your returns. And these returns that we're looking at are you looking at 10 to 12% cash on cash returns 15% IRR, basically doubling your money in five to six years, plus all the tax advantages. And that's why these busy professionals that are super successful in real estate are just getting in on the passive side, finding a GP group that you trust, looking at their track record, seeing who the partner partner GP are on that deal. And saying if I give them 50,000 I know it's going to be protected. And I'm more more oftentimes and not they're going to hit the returns that they're promising. So that's how you do it if you're a busy professional and you have capital sitting in the bank, put it to work on the limited partner side and there are hundreds of solid GP groups around the country putting deals together and they are looking for you

right on yeah and you know that's that's part of your your job as limited partners to do your due diligence on the group you're going to go in with making sure that you know you look their history and understand what they've done what their experiences. So that's that's all fantastic advice. Really appreciate that. So now for you guys, you you currently You said you have a hotel under contract right now right or is it already did you guys close on that yet?

We close on June 11. That's fantastic weeks. We didn't close on the tenure the tenure deal was a cash deal. Right that it hit our inbox at 1pm we had an offer and dead day at five best and final was due the following day. At five. We ended up paying $50,000 over asking to get the deal as a cash deal and it's it's Going to be the birth strategy, right? Nobody cash we're going to go in, there's five units down to the studs. We're going to go in refinance to a construction loan, fix up the five units, get them all rented refi into a long term, get our capital back out the eight unit. Hotel was actually a true off market deal. Ramsey family friend, wife and husband owned a eight unit hotel used to be a bank, they converted into an eight unit hotel really unique property. I mean, turnkey class, a no capex, no rehab needed, her husband passed. She doesn't want to deal with it anymore. And she brought the deal to Ramsey because she knows Ramsey and trust Ramsey, and Ramsey negotiated it. We're getting in at a very, very good price. eight units close in a couple of weeks. So yeah, within a matter of a month, we've just added 18 units to our portfolio.

Yeah, that's, that's amazing. Yeah. Are you? Are you guys planning to keep it a hotel? Are you going to convert it into an apartment? what's what's the deal with that?

So the plan is to convert probably two units to Airbnb, short term, keep six units and just test the process, try to bring a younger crowd into the Airbnb units. test set out for six months, if it's super successful, we'll convert to more units and have half and half. With that hotel, there's a lot of 40 plus people that come to the small town that are looking for that hometown feel they've been going there for years, we don't want to just strip that away from home and give them a key code with no PR, no hospitality and say, Hey, have fun. So we're going to go in with a little bit of a hybrid strategy.

Okay, right on. So you guys have like a team on site that you know, like turndown services and things like that.

What does others have right now, there's a property manager that's been running that property since they converted it 10 years ago, I believe it was Wow. So she's born and raised in the city. She knows the entire history of the city. She's a phenomenal person. And she's already provided several ideas on how to cut expenses, improve processes become more efficient. There's right now we're looking at if we can cut the expenses by 20% and increase occupancy by 5% data via cash flowing machine. And that's very executable. So we're going to keep the current property manager in place. Because I think she's kind of she's kind of the icing on the cake on that property.

Okay, right on. Yeah, that's, that sounds like a pretty good win right there. So good deal

And back to the team, you know, we set it up, there's, there's four people in that deal as a JV and back to, you know, building the team and building off each other's strengths. Ramsey's project lead. So Randy is going to take the vision, implement the Airbnb, the decor, the processes, and I'm going to come in on the back end and implement all the administration requirements to have that property performing. The other two partners are basically voting rights, they live far away, you know, they check in on the property here and there. So that's, again, we, we found the team that can complement each other to execute that property.

No, that's phenomenal. I mean, that's, that's the right way to do it. Like I like the way you know, when you explained earlier, like when you have somebody that can pick up where you're weak, you know, and then you can pick up where they're weak and just, you know, kind of cover each other's You know, you're covering each other's backs. And when you have a relationship like that, where you can trust a trust each other like that, it just makes it you know, flow so much better, and build a really good cohesive team. And that's, you know, back to the whole point of why it's important to have such a good team, especially when you're investing in larger multifamily, you know, assets,

accountability and trust absolutely. With Randy's experience in the Navy, Joe, his experience in the Navy, my experience in, in sports and collegiate baseball, and rugby ball. In running a business, we've all interacted with different people from different cultures, different backgrounds, different personalities, for the last 10 years. So we were we were able to vet each other out to say, Okay, yeah, this person is really skilled. But more importantly, does he fit in with this team? You know, can Kenny can contribute, but can we trust them? Can he be held accountable? Is he gonna hold me accountable? So it's more than just a skill set. It's really finding a bond amongst that team that's going to last for forever. And that's very, it's very difficult to find it really is.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And again, though, it's you did you found you found those individuals that you can trust, right, and that's like the key part. But speaking of assets, I want to ask you for you personally. Are there any other asset classes that you personally currently invest in? So besides real estate, Are you involved in anything? And like the stock market? You got some crypto? Are you like a Doge? head? Like, what's, what's going on over there?

Yeah. So, about a year and a half ago, I sat down with my financial advisor and said, I want to take all my money out of this Roth IRA. And I want to put it into a brokerage account because I want to start buying stocks. Because this was, this was almost just pre COVID. I think when things started to really dive, I just told him, I said, I don't back in 2008. I mean, I don't know how old I was, I don't know 20. I didn't have any money to invest. But I said, I don't want to miss out. If there's a dive right now, I don't want to miss it, I want to get my money to work, other than just a Roth IRA. So he, we convert it all to a brokerage account. So I invested there, I pulled some money into a robin hood account. I started investing playing around kind of some play money playing with the stock market. And then recently I invested in crypto as well. So I played both interest stock market crypto and real estate.

What what cryptos you invested in?

So I had I have Bitcoin and aetherium and then I played with dodge coin or Dogecoin for I was playing around for about six months buying and selling well,

at least you said at the right way said you were playing around with it because yeah, I was playing I know that was one of those. It drove me nuts with the way the way that whole thing Yeah, at least, you know, Bitcoin Ethereum and stuff like that. Those are like, legit, you know?

Yeah, with with dojos, buying a few 100 bucks at 20 cents and then got to 44 and sell it and then it went back down. It did it again. I probably made a couple $1,000. But I was like, Oh, that's better than it just sitting in, in the bank account doing nothing.

Yeah, yeah, that works. crypto is one of those things. I just I just don't know enough about it. You know, I know blockchain is really great, especially when it comes to data. And I'm hopefully going to have somebody on here soon that that can talk smartly about cryptocurrencies and, and blockchain technology, because I've been talking back and forth with somebody on Facebook, and we're trying I'm trying to get him on the show. So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. But he's he's very knowledgeable about this stuff. And I'm pretty sure that some people that listen to the show that want to get involved in crypto, I'm just I'm not the guy that that really knows too much about it. So I got some money. You got some money in crypto, Mike. Okay, so I have one cryptocurrency right now. And it's only because I get paid in it. So I was approached by a group that asked me if I'd like to host my podcast on, you know, their website, and I put it up there and they say, hey, it's a voting system. And if people vote for your episodes, you get paid in this thing called hive coin. Am I Okay, cool. Well, I just checked, I went up on there, I think two or three weeks ago, and the last I checked, my last episode made me $30 worth of this hive coin. And I'm like, Oh, that's pretty neat. So that's, that's about the gist of crypto that I'm that I'm in now, a couple years ago, back when I was still living in Virginia Beach, I had some Bitcoin, and I had some Litecoin. And I had some aetherium. I sold it all many years ago. You know, back when Bitcoin went up to 19,000, and then dropped back down to like, nine, that's when I sold it.

So that's what it's doing now. I think it was up to like, 55 down to 30. I'm I'm just gonna let it sit. I don't I don't like I said, it's not it's not a ton of capital have in there. It's just it's just some to diversify. diversify myself. Oh, yeah, for sure. If it goes up, like they're all saying it's going to then great if it? If it doesn't, well, hopefully I can the money I put in real estate of the other stocks, I'll make up for it.

Yeah, for sure. I've actually interviewed a guy the other day, who is a day trader. And that was a very interesting conversation. So I'm looking forward to that episode coming out here in a little bit. It'll be out like maybe like right before yours. Cuz I just interviewed him a few days ago. But anyway, the The interesting thing is how there's so many different options when you're in the stock market. And that's actually one of things we talked about was options. I don't I don't do that. Because again, that's something I don't know too much about. And I don't have the time to sit down and day trade because of my day job. So I've been more like when it comes to the stock market playing it safe, and I invest, you know, more for long term holds. I invest in a lot of dividend paying assets, real estate, investment trusts, things like that. But so far, my portfolio this year is up 28.7% or something like that. So I'm pretty happy with where that's at, and I'm just gonna leave it alone.

That's it. That's my strategy. I don't know enough about day trading and the stock market to do it day after day. I'm looking more for stable stocks that, you know, bigger companies that I can just put my money to work and let it go until, you know, 2025 years from now.

No, you know, they're doing it right there. You're doing it right. And you have diversification which is super important. So you're not just strictly in real estate now that there's some people that are strictly in real estate and that's okay, because the beautiful part about being in real estate, especially multifamily, you're investing in all these different areas, is each apartment complex that you invest in is its own asset has its own numbers that work for each thing can be different. So it's not, it's not always the same with every single deal. And that's, that's one of the beautiful things about it is you're not always going to get the same rate of return, you can do better on one property than the other. So even if you are strictly just in real estate, there's a way to keep yourself diversified when you're investing in different different units. Okay, well, so for our listeners here, do you have any last tips or tricks that you would recommend for somebody who's just wanting to get started in multifamily investing?

Yeah, be patient, just just understand that it is not going to happen overnight, just like anything successful anytime you want to make a living and good money and build a business is that it's just brick by brick. You know, there's no, there's no fast track, unless you come across and win a massive amount of money and put it to work. But there's no fast track, it's just, it's building relationships, it's finding the right team, and just we, you know, we have a saying within our group, but just move the needle every day, you know, if you can just move it forward each day, that's going to compound and eventually things are going to click and deals are going to come and you'll be able to raise capital, but just gotta have you have to have a long term vision on things. And everything. It's, you know, kind of generation now, right, like these days is I want it now if I don't get it, now I'm gonna quit. And that's why they referred to those people. As tire kickers, you say you want to invest in real estate, you say you want to do multifamily, but you're not willing to put in the time and put in the long term time it takes to execute it. We've been doing this for four years. And our team has been built for a year and a half now. And we just closed on the 10 unit deal. And things are really starting to compound but it says there's gonna be bumps in the road. And just understand that this is a long game, with relationships and with your team and with deals.

That is a fantastic tip. You know, patients patients, they always say, you know, patience is a virtue. It's true. Because you can't just go jumping into something and diving into something, because it seems like it's the right thing for you. You guys learned that lesson in Shreveport. I learned that lesson with a duplex I bought back in Virginia, just because I wanted it so bad. I'm like I'm going in right now. And it, it was a painful process and a learning process. So patience is a fantastic tip,

it's tough to keep the emotion out of it for your first deal to is, you know, you want it so bad. And you just want to put your money to work and you want to buy that deal. And I think that's kind of what happened in Shreveport. I was very, very engaged and really wanted it and I just went and got the property. And looking back, you know, I probably could have been a little bit more patient. But again, if I didn't do that, and I didn't get that deal and make that mistake, I wouldn't be where I'm at today.

For sure. For sure. Yeah. So that Yeah, again, that's that's great, man. Where can people find more information about you, Brandon? So not only you but your team? Do you have a website? Do you guys have any social media? Where can we learn more about you guys?

Yeah, so you can find us at realfocus.org realfocus.org you can reach me Brandon@realfocus.org or you can text me directly 3186397303 hit me up. If you're interested in learning anything about real estate business. Want to talk? Maybe you want to teach me something? I'm always open to new conversations. Awesome.

And you guys also have a podcast that's going to be launching here shortly. Right?

We do. So this it should be launched by the time this episode comes out. It's Gorilla State Podcast. It's a real estate investing podcast. Ramsey and I post separate episodes together. And we're going to be launching that here in the next couple of weeks. And that can be found on our website as well.

That's awesome. Looking forward to that, that coming out. I'm definitely gonna be listening. Because, you know, after talking with with both you and Ramsey, you guys are really awesome. Definitely seems like you have a great team. You know, and of course, being connected on social media, seeing what you guys are doing. I think it's gonna be a fun podcast to listen to. So for my listeners, you know, hey, go check it out, especially if you're interested in multifamily real estate. Real Estate podcast is probably gonna be a fun one to listen to. So make sure you guys check that out. Brandon, dude. Absolutely fun conversation. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. And again, thank you so much for joining me today. Good deal, Mike. Thanks, man. I enjoyed it. Alrighty, Aloha. Thanks for listening to the Average Joe Finances podcast. Your source for beating debt, saving money and investing Learn more at Average Joe finances.com. The Average Joe Finances podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Do not use this for any real estate or investment making decision.