BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 170: The Journey From Flipping Houses to Owning 1,470 Units with Andrew Cushman

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

On this inspiring episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we sit down with real estate entrepreneur Andrew Cushman to learn how he went from a full-time job as a chemical engineer to a house flipper and finally a real estate syndicator, buying over 1400 units in less than a decade. You’ll learn how Andrew finds deals, manages the rehabs on a large scale, raises money for large apartment purchases, and more. Don’t miss a moment of this powerful show! In This Episode We Cover: How Andrew started as a chemical engineer — then got into investing Why he trusted his mentor from the outset How many flips he has done so far Tips for scaling from 0 to 24 flips in 5 years The details of his first flip A discussion on buying pre-foreclosure properties The story of making 4,575 phone calls before getting his first deal The importance of believing in yourself and believing in the system How Andrew has flipped 24 properties and 1,470 apartments How he made money on the first flip How to scale by building a system How to find pre-foreclosed deals The best flip he’s ever completed Tips on weird houses His first apartment deal Why he doesn’t recommend a heavily distressed deal The difference between single family and multifamily properties How to become a “sophisticated investor“ How he find apartment deals And SO much more! Links from the Show Webby Awards Bloomberg DowJones HarvardBusiness Wired Forbes CNN Money BiggerPockets Calculators Foreclosure.com PropertyRadar Realtytrac How to Buy a Foreclosure : The Comprehensive Guide to Buying a Foreclosed Home General Foreclosure & Pre-Foreclosure Forums BRRRR Strategy GoBundance BP Podcast 157: A Simple Morning Ritual to Help You Dominate Every Area of Your Life with Hal Elrod BP Podcast 166: How Modeling Greatness Can Get You To 100+ Deals with Matt Aitchison BP Podcast 169: Using Hustle and Persistence to Build Wealth Through Real Estate with David Greene 1 Life Fully Lived Organization Slack Books Mentioned in this Show Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber Emerging Real Estate Markets by David Lindahl Multi-Family Millions by David Lindahl Start with NO by Jim Camp Tweetable Topics: “This system will work so I’m going to make it work.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Andrew Andrew’s BiggerPockets Profile Andrew’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 170. And on our first flip, we basically made as much as I made all year at my job. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dorkin host to the Bigger Pockets podcast

here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's up? Hey, not much. What's up with you? You know, excited about today's show, phenomenal, phenomenal show. I'm a phenomenal show. Excited about something else that we learned about today, which I think is a great honor for Bigger Pockets.

We were named an honoree by the 20th annual Webby Awards for the business website category, which is pretty cool. For those people who don't know what the webbies are, it's literally like the Oscars for the internet. And we're listed with Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Harvard Business Review, Wired Forbes, CNN Money, Bigger Pockets. I mean, you know, it's, yeah, that's a big honor.

Congratulations. I'm being an honor. Congratulations to Bigger Pockets. That's pretty sweet. Fancy. Yeah. Next year we want to be top five so we can, attend the show and get in. So if you're on the Webby committee or whatever it takes to get us in

there, help us out, guys. Come on. Yeah, I don't even know how that's all done, but whatever. I don't know. We just paid a couple hundred dollars. I don't even know what we did. We should have like an award show for like real estate investors, you know? Oh yeah. That's a great thing. Biggest douchebag, Brandon Turner. Congratulations. You've won for the fifth year in a row. I want to win for tallest. I want to win for tallest. That's all I want. Yeah. If I can get voted tallest, it'd be great. Yeah. The, Oh, look, there's a squirrel award. The award.

I could also do that award. I could also do that award. Oh, yeah. Well, we'll do it someday. The biggest big mouth award, Josh Dorkin. There you go. You can do that. Nicely.

Yeah, yeah. Great idea. I wasn't going to talk about your shortest. Wow. We won't go there. All right. That's great. Let's go to the quick tip.

Quick tip. All right, what's today's great tip, Brandon? Today's quick tip is a new feature on bigger pockets, actually. And it actually technically only, well, technically only goes for pro members, but I think free members can use it a little bit. And that is, you know how we have the calculators, Josh? You should probably know that, by the way. Well, it's a little bit complicated.

I'll explain why. So we have the calculators on BP. Anybody can use them up to five times for free and you have to be a pro member to use them unlimited. Well, now you can actually share a calculator report. Like when you do an analysis, for example, my assistant, she'll do an analysis on a property. Then she can share that with any colleague on BP, so she'll share it with me. Now that calculator report is now in my calculators.

Now I can go in and make changes and edit a little bit as well. I can even send it back to her so she can see what. what I did. Just kind of a cool little feature. So I think in your first five times, free members can do that as well. Pro members can do it all they want. So pretty cool. How do they do that? Oh, on page four of the calculator. So if you're analyzing a deal on page four at the bottom right hand corner, it says share with a colleague or something like that. Check it out. Pockets.com slash calc. Yeah. It's really helpful. Yeah, it's just helpful for you want a second set of eyes in your numbers and say, hey, you know, here's a mentor that I look up to, somebody that I like on the site that we've been friends for a while. I'm going to ask them if they can

help me out and I check out my numbers. It's a good way to do that. Perfect. Cool. Sounds good. Great idea. Great idea. Great idea. Nicely done getting that made, Brandon. Thank you. I really made it because I needed it. I know. I know. There you go. My assistant's analyzing all these deals and I'm like, she's sending me PDF reports, but I want to edit them. So that's now we made it. Perfect. All right. Cool. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was such a easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense.

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could save this tax season. Let's get into today's show. Today's guest is Andrew Cushman. Andrew is a real estate investor in the Southern California area. He invests all over the country. The guy has done dozens of flips. He's got 1,400. 1400 units. And he's done this in less than a decade. I mean, the guy's absolutely killing it. this is probably one of the higher level shows that we'll do. We dig into stuff like real state syndication, buying large apartment properties, you know, 90, 100 unit plus, how to finance them, how to how to manage, not really the management, but how to kind of do turnover, how to take these properties and build a portfolio, and build a team, how to find them. How to fund them,

syndication, all that stuff. Yeah, it's a great show. Absolutely a must listen for folks who've been in the game for a while. Absolutely, I must listen for the newbies who are like, well, you know, how far can I take this? Well, you could take it pretty far. So check it out, listen up, and let's bring him in. Andrew, welcome to the show. It's good to have you here.

Awesome to be here. So we're going to talk about apartments today, a lot about that. But before we get into that, let's get into your story. Where'd you come from? How'd you get into this real estate game? I used to be a chemical engineer, but that was, I always knew that was a placeholder. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't know

what that was going to be. So I might as well, I might as well get a good job until then. And then I was an engineer for about seven and a half years. And in that time, got married. And my wife and I kept trying all these silly little businesses. We tried vending. We tried making popcorn in our kitchen. We destroyed the house. Maybe some good tasting popcorn. You know, and all these. And she did stuff on WordPress and sold t-shirts and all that. And every time we made a little bit of money, we're like, this is just going to be a full-time job. It's not going to be something that's going to bring financial freedom. And so after, I don't know how many years, and I think it was in 2006, we discovered a person that was teaching how to buy pre-foreclosures.

So people, you know, buy the house from the person right before they lose it as opposed to get at the auction. And so we got that course and learned it, and then we hired a coach and made that happen. And on our first flip, we basically made as much as I made all year at my job. So I'm like, woo-hoo, that's it. I'm done. I quit. I'm out of here. here. We did that full time for, oh, I guess about four and a half years and had a really good

year in 2009, 2010, and then said, well, okay, this has been great, but what's the next big thing? What's about to start a huge cycle? And we said, well, we think that's apartments. And so we kind of did the same thing. Went out and I actually talked to my mentor for single flipping and said, hey, do you know anybody who's doing apartments? He's like, actually, I know a guy who's got about 800 units. Contacted him, said, will you be my mentor? He's like, yeah. I was just about to start a mentoring program. And he helped us through the first deal. And once we bought our first apartment, which was 92 units on the other side of the country,

you know, we got along so well that I said, hey, would you like to be business partners? He's like, yeah, absolutely. And we've been doing apartments 15, five years now. We've done 1,470 units. Wow. Wow. So I want to go back and unpack that a little bit because, I mean, the first thing I want to ask is a lot of people when they get into real estate, They get pitched by these, you know, real estate educators, gurus, whatever.

And, you know, we rag on them a lot here on the podcast because there's a lot of bad guys. Yeah, there's a lot of bad ones out there. So what set you apart differently? I mean, you paid for a course. You learned from an educator, and it worked for you. So why did that work for you and so many of the people that doesn't seem to work for it? I think part of it is, is we really vetted the person teaching the course before we took it. It wasn't one of the $30,000 ones, but it wasn't one of the $200 ones either.

It was kind of in the middle. And so we read everything on the site. We talked to people who had gone there. And just reading through the information that was being put out, our gut said, this is legitimate. And our gut said, okay, if we commit to doing this, it should work. We couldn't find a reason that it wouldn't work. So that was why. And then again, some of the people and the coaches that we talked to were real.

They were actually doing deals. They weren't just gurus who that's all they do is teach. their main job was doing deals and they were coaching on the side. They said, okay, that sounds like the kind of people we want to be involved with. Right on. No, that's great.

All right, so, you know, this is a fascinating story. I mean, you did four and a half years of flips. How many flips did you do in that period? We were high margin, low volume, so we did 24. That's a lot of people wouldn't call that low volume. I know, I was going to say,

I think that's more flips than I've done in my whole life. So that's good. Yeah, that's pretty significant. So how did you scale from zero to 24 flips over a five-year period. How did you kind of build that out? I'm assuming you were doing multiple flips at the same time.

Talk to us about kind of the transition from first flip to infrastructure to build up and be able to do something like that. Yes. So the first flip, which was a really interesting story on how we obtained it. So the first flip, once we got it, you know, my wife and I, we went to Home Depot, We picked out all the fixtures, you know, the rehab. I mean, it was this huge time-consuming thing. And we were, frankly, in retrospect, way too involved.

And because of that, we didn't get another deal for six months down the road. So then what we did is we hired, we finally got to the point where, okay, our highest and best use of time is finding new deals, talking to homeowners, following up on leads. We've got to get out of this. So we hired a general contractor. and over the course of the next couple of deals, trained him on exactly what we wanted, what kind of lights, what kind of colors,

what kind of finish, so that he could just, we could walk him through it, he'd give us the bid, we negotiated a little bit, and then he'd just run with it and be done. And then, you know,

we continue to scale from there, just brought in a stager, and instead of us making those decisions, say, look, we trust you, you've done a, you did a great job on the first two. You handle this.

And just, and same thing with a realtor. We've got an excellent local realtor said, all right, you're actually going to do some of the design decisions. You're going to guide the contractor when he has questions of, well, do I do this color or that color, you know, whatever. We outsource that to him. Again, we trusted him. We paid him well. He handled it so that we could focus our time on the most important thing, which is keeping the pipeline full of deals coming in.

Yeah. So I've got a few questions on this one. Let's start with the first slip. You said it was really interesting how you found it. Let's hear that story. All right. So I went into buying houses pre-foreclosure is a cold-calling business, right? Cold-calling and knocking on doors.

Real quick, can you explain what that means pre-foreclosure? Sure. So someone gets three months behind on their mortgage, and the bank files a notice and says, okay, we're going to foreclose on your home in 90 days plus 30 in California, so in 120 days. So that means the bank has started the foreclosure process, but the house hasn't been taken back yet. So we call it pre-foreclosure. Okay. Yeah.

Thanks. So, you know, I was an engineer. I was actually horrible on the phone. You know, before my wife became my wife, she used to make lists of things to talk about on the phone to keep the conversation going. I mean, that's how bad I was. But with you. Yeah, with me. Yeah, I'm lucky.

Oh, that's all. You've come a long way. You're not bad on the podcast here. I mean, we've had a lot worse. So, you know, kudos to your wife. for training you well. I give her all the credit. She trained me. So yeah, so then I go into a business that's dependent on cold calling, right? So the less so the sub lesson there is you can learn anything, right? So I had made 4,575 phone calls and had not got a deal. Was that a real number?

That's the real number. I track. Whoa. No, I do metrics. Yeah, I'm all into the name. Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. How many calls did you make before you got? Yeah, let's hear it. My first deal was a result of call number 4,576. That's amazing. 4,576 phone calls. And mind you, most of those people did not want to talk to me. You're calling as a stranger saying, tell me about your financial problems. I mean, you know, that's not a fun call.

I got to dig back into that because, A, the fact that you had the stamina to make 4,576 phone calls says either you totally believe in yourself, You're the biggest moron in the final one or the other. I'm going to say it's the first. So you did, I mean, like 4,500 calls. How many calls were you making a day? That's crazy. I did calls during lunch and immediately after work. So my goal would be to make a couple hundred calls a day if I could.

You know, sometimes I'd get someone on the phone and talk for 45 minutes, so it'd be a lower number. But I worked seven days a week, many, many hours to make it happen. because I had a full-time job at that time, too. Wow. That's crazy. That's persistence. So why did it take so long? Why did it take 4,000 something?

Were you just doing it wrong? Number one, I wasn't good on the phone. I was learning it as I went. And I had a coach. Well, I had two coaches. I had my wife who would be sitting there next me going, okay, on the next call, honey. And then I had a hired coach that would help too.

So that's how I, and then I would, after I got done with each call, I would say, okay, what went well, what didn't go well? How can I fix it? And just reiterate it over and over again. That's unbelievable. Yeah.

And to get to what, Josh, what you said earlier, I believed in myself and I believed in the system. I really believed that I wasn't just doing something that made no sense to do. I'm like, no, this system will work. So I'm going to make it work until I get a deal. After I get a deal, if I don't like it, then I can quit, but not until then. Okay. Okay. So that's insane.

Regardless, congratulations on your success. That's amazing. By the way, I just want to, how many actual real estate deals have you now done in your career thus far? How many units or deals, whichever metric you want to use? I have flipped 24 single family properties and purchased 1,470 apartments. Yeah, that's amazing. Okay. So for everyone listening, that's 24 flips and 1470 apartments and had a stuff.

stopped on phone call 4,575. Probably that would be zero. That would be zero. So just pay attention. That's key. All right. Let me jump ahead a little bit. That's crazy.

That's amazing and good for you for doing it. I know I would not have made it that far. You said you hired the GC training them, the Stager trained them, the realtor trained them, and then you talked about how well you paid them. And how are you paying the realtor outside of commission on sales. Were you paying some kind of consulting fee as well,

or was it just giving them a good commission? No, it was just giving them the full 6% and not trying to squeeze money out of him and say, oh, let's do it for four or something like that. And that works for some people, and that's fine. I just say, you know, if I expect someone to perform really well for me, then I should pay them really well. Cool. Cool. Awesome.

All right. Next question really quick is, where are you where are you located and where were all these deals? I live in Southern California and all of our apartments are in Texas, Georgia, and Florida. And what about the flips? Were they also in California then? Yeah, the flips were local. Those were mostly Orange County and a few LA County. Okay. And when was this that you started the whole thing? What year was that? We bought our first flip in early 2007. The second one was the month before the financial crisis. Okay.

And we flipped right through the downturn and into the bottom and did well on everyone. That's awesome. So you never lost money on a flip yet. Never lost money on a flip. Yep. Just got to buy it right. So, okay, I was going to say, what's your advice for people today that are worried about losing money? Because I've said that before, and I probably made people nervous by saying that a lot of people lose money on their first flip.

It's very common. What made you different? I made sure I had the numbers right, and I made sure I didn't overpay just to get a deal. Yeah. And that was the key. So, you know, I made sure that when the market was dropping like a rock, I would buy at 50 cents on the dollar, planning to sell at 80 cents on the dollar so that when I listed it, I would still be below everyone else and get offers right away. And we made big profits as things were crashing. And it worked great. It worked great. Yeah, that's great. That's good. I want to ask just one more question on the flipping stuff. And then I really want to dig in a lot more on the, I know Brandon's got a bunch of questions too. But before we dig in on the So you scaled the business by creating a system, right? And the system was, I'm going to get my hands out of this thing. I'm not going to pick out all the appliances. I'm not going to pick out the tile. I'm not going to do all this. I'm going to find somebody qualified, hand the reins over to them, have them pick it out. Obviously, I'm assuming you're paying them to do so. That was your GC, right? How did you come about to trust that person? Because I think I could speak for everybody listening and say, that's how. sounds awesome. I think everybody would love to do that. But getting to that point where you find the GC and the

stager and the realtor who you trust, who you can count on, I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges that we all face is getting there. So how did you actually get to that point and find those folks? We got a short list by getting referrals. And I mean, that's not a guarantee that the guy's going to work out great, but it definitely helps if you can talk to other people who have had good experience with him. And once we got that short list, it was trial and error. You know, we had one GC that we used for a couple of houses and he was okay, but we found he kept trying to upcharge us on stuff as he got more comfortable and we said, that's not going to happen. And then the guy that we ended up with, it was the same thing. After a few houses, he was doing the work right. He never

tried to come back and gouge us for more money. He made good decisions without us having to hold his hand. And it's just kind of a, you know, it's like a dating experience, right? We went on a few dates with the contractor do this house. Okay, now do this house. That's going to be our new website. Picker pockets. Contractor dating. Contractor speed dating, yeah. And so, yeah, it's just over experience. We grew to trust and understand each other more. And now I just give him a phone call, go walk the house, and it's more or less done. But I mean, that took time. It's not an instant thing. You do have to invest in it. Yeah. Cool. And you had talked about you wanted to transition to the point where your job was to get the deal. So,

What exactly did you do in those deals? Once you had found all those folks, what was your job? My job was cold calling, door knocking, getting face to face with the owner of the house, negotiating the deal, getting under contract, and closing on it. And then once we closed on it, that's where I became a lot more hands off. Got it. Were you still doing pre-foreclosure for all these 24, or did you use other methods? The vast majority of them were pre-foreclosure.

I think we did a total of five off of direct mail. And we actually bought some REOs towards the end. Okay. Cool. And really quick, Brandon, sorry, because I don't think we asked us. I'm not sure you're going there. Where does somebody go and find pre-foreclosures? I know they're in the papers and things like that, right?

Yeah, that's one source. There's a website. We were getting them from a website called foreclosures.com. I don't think they actually do it anymore. But I know property radar is propertyradar.com. Most of the guys I know that are in the foreclosure world use property radar to get those leads. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think property radar is only California, I think, right? Now, like, they're branching into like a few other Western states.

Actually, yeah, you're right. They're regional. So I'm not, I actually, I don't know where you'd get the best source of leads somewhere else. I think you can also get them from Realty Track and foreclosure.com as well, I believe they sell them. But there are free sources where PEODs and things like that are notice. of default are posted publicly before anything. So you can find that. And we've got lots of articles on how to find pre-foreclosures on BiggerPockets for anybody listening. And we'll link to a few on the show notes at BiggerPockets.com slash show 170. There you go. All right, my last question

before getting into the multifamily is what was your best flip you ever did? I'm just curious, like profit-wise, what was the best flip you ever did? Sure. So we bought a weird house, which is we try not to do. Yeah. That's what I always tell people, don't buy weird houses. Why not guys? Why don't people want to do that? Number one, it takes more time because you have all kinds of decisions to make. Well, what do I do with this funky wall or bedroom? You know, we had a master bedroom that led into the garage. I mean, like, who does that, right?

So, and then, but when you're going to either rent it or, or in my case, sell it, it's going to appeal to a narrower subset of buyers because it's a weird house. I would say weird houses attract weird people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, but so ironically, it was a weird house. And we bought it. We bought it really well. And during the three or four months that we held it was the time they came out with,

that's when they came out with that whole, the government came out with that $10,000 tax credit if you buy a house. Yeah. So all of a sudden, values jacked up. And then on top of that, we sold it to a veteran who actually is a police officer who was able to get 100% VA loan. So he came in at top price. So we ended up netting $155,000.

on that house. Wow. So what was the payment price? I don't remember the prices. I remember we sold it for 540 and we put about, I think we put 52 into the rehab, but I don't remember the exact purchase price. It might have been 273 actually, but I don't, that was years ago. That's all right. I mean like 150,000. That's an amazing for a flip and congratulations on that. So whatever. Josh makes out always sleeping. I mean, you know, I bought this course the other day and it taught me how to do it with my eyes closed. I literally can just like tap around the keys with my keyboard and suddenly I'm gonna

yeah. That's it. That's it. Congratulations. Actually, that's very impressive. Oh, thank you. I liked it. I think that might be our best flip profit that we've heard from somebody on the podcast so far. I might be. All right, Andrew. So now that you're the big fat winner of nothing. Thank you. It's okay. So you have this massive you've done really well flipping.

Why did you transition to multifamily? If you were having such success with one thing, why change it up? Good question. It gets back to what I say is determining your why. So the reason we want to have our own business was we want passive income or horizontal income. And flipping is great, but you make a chunk of money and you're done. I mean, you've got to go find another deal, right? So with the apartments, you buy 92 units or 100 units or four units or eight units and you fix it up and you rent it.

Now you've got a check coming in every month almost whether you work or not. And that was what we really wanted to be doing. Personally, that was our personal why and our personal driver. And then the second thing was what I alluded to before is we just felt like the market was shifting to a point where apartments were going to do really well for the foreseeable future. and that turned out to be a fortunate call. Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned earlier you found like a mentor who was doing it at 800 units.

He kind of helped train you up in that. So let's talk about your first deal that you did then. What was that like? That was the, my first apartment deal was the first apartment deal that no one should do. It was 2,300 miles away. It was a 1960s property. It was 75% vacant and needed a very, very, very, very thorough rehab. And so we bought that at the time it was collecting $8,000 a month. It was one of those

owners who just let the tenants, you know, oh, here's 20 bucks cash. Okay, fine. We'll let you stay for a little bit longer. And so that was that was the first deal. And I can say I still own it today. And let's see, March collected 37,000. So it's more than four times. Yeah, four and a half times but we bought it. And, you know, we bought it for $699,000, which is, you know, 76. Hold on. I'm trying to keep up with the numbers. You said you're collecting $8,000 a month. We bought it. We bought it.

We bought it. And now it's $37,000. Yes, we collected $37,000 this last month. And you paid $699 for it? $699,000, correct. All right. Okay. Not a bad deal.

Would you add up how much you put it into it? Yeah. We put another $700 into it. Wow. Yeah. And then right now it's actually listed for $1.95. So, you know, it's not a home run by the, the time you factor everything in, but it is still a solid deal. And that's part of why I would

not recommend someone do a heavy distress deal as their first deal, because not only are you learning apartments, you're learning major rehabs, you're learning deep properties, you've got, there's just a lot going on. There's a lot more risk. So, yeah. Okay. Got it. So you paid $699. You paid $700. You put $700. You're listed for $1.95. $700. You know, for those people who don't have a clue on this. And how many units was it? I don't think you said that. 92 units. 92 units. Holy cow. Where was this in Texas? It's actually, this one was in Macon, Georgia. Wow. Okay. So how did you go about rehabbing 92 units? I'm assuming you didn't do it all at once. I'm assuming you started with the vacant ones,

but can you walk us through that process? And, you know, obviously you had the experience flipping houses. So being able to do the work here. But what's the difference between fixing up these distressed units in a multi and fixing up a house. I don't think we've ever actually really talked about that. Sure. I mean, there's a number of differences. One with a house, it's pretty, I mean, it's really simply. You've got one house. You just, you know, you decide what you're going to do and you do it and then either you rent it or you sell it and you're done. Well, with a multifamily, you can't go in and spend $30,000 a unit, you know, unless you're, I mean, well, I guess I take that back. You can, but that's a whole other world. And it's not something.

something that most of us in the B and C realm are going to do. But you've got, so not only do you have your budget you have to determine and stick to, but you've got, well, okay, well, I've got vacant units, but what about the occupied unit? So you've got a balance getting units done and releasing them with collecting income from the existing residents and not driving them out. And then it's just a giant moving piece. So, for example, you know, when I buy something that's 92 or 150 units, we generally have an 18-month schedule of how we're going to do those units, as opposed to a single family who I just send the contractor in there and say, go, do it, let me know how it goes. With an apartment complex, we have a schedule, a spreadsheet, you know, constant check-ins, monthly reports on where we are with the budget versus what we projected.

It's just a lot more moving pieces to it. Now, what kind of contractor do you hire to do this kind of stuff? You know, it's not like your typical local handyman's going to be coming in there. No. Like, what kind of contractor is this? You know, in the beginning, I actually functioned as GC myself. Okay. And so I was taking bids and coordinated.

I was flying out there a lot. That is a lot of brain damage and a lot of time. Yeah. So now, now I have, again, and this is something over time you develop through referrals. Now I have trusted GCs that I say, okay, here's my, you know, I'll, let them bid the project first, give me their number. And then I say, okay, here's my budget. Get it? If you can get all of this done for my budget, you have the job. And that has worked out extremely well because, again, at this point, five years down the road, I have contractors

that I can trust that do good work and that handle all that garbage. And then just I, you know, I have regular calls with them. They send me spreadsheets, reports, updates, and, you know, make sure they stay on track. Cool. Hey, Andrew. So, yeah, I did the dirty methods, about $7,500 per unit on this particular property. How bad? I mean, were some far worse than others? And then my next question is you talked about the 18-month schedule. Like we had talked about a minute before, you know, yeah, obviously you're going to get the vacant units first and fill those. But how then do you handle the units that are occupied? I wonder if you could dig it on both of those. Sure. For handling the units that are occupied, we tell the residents, okay, when your lease renews,

this is what's going to happen. And we'll tell them we can either, you know, move you to a new unit or we'll just go ahead and up and renovate their unit when they're in it. Regardless, they're going to pay the increased rent. And believe it or not, we actually have some people that are like, you know what, I don't want you in my unit. I'll pay the rent, leave me alone. I'm like, okay, yeah.

But yeah, so we'll sit down. When we take over, we'll go through, we'll do a part of taking due diligence is a full lease audit. We go through, look at every lease. And as we're doing that, we make a schedule of when they're all going to come up for renewal. And that's how we plan out and know how many units we're going to be renovating, you know, outside of evictions and skips and all that kind of stuff. Got it. So the units that you're renovating while people are in it, obviously a little bit more complicated. Yeah, it's not preferred, but we end up doing it to accommodate some people.

Okay. Perfect. Perfect. Well, that's great. And so at the end of the day, not a home run, but, you know, certainly not a terrible first deal. the next one. I know you had talked about 150 unit property. Yeah, so we actually, in November, we bought 151 units in North Florida. And that one, what we've shifted to is buying stabilized value ads. So what I mean is instead of a property like the first one where you drive through and the front doors are hanging open and there's just people sitting out doing what they shouldn't be doing, this property was 90% occupied. It cash flowed, but it was owned by somebody from, you know, Ohio. It was their only multifamily asset. They were self-managing it from Ohio. They were vastly underperforming its potential. And so we go in and we're doing about

6,300 unit upgrade. We're getting 18 to 25 percent increases on the rent for every renovated unit. And that is one where we're doing it on a almost completely on a renewal schedule. So it's a much safer way of doing it because you've got cash flow from day one. Whereas that first deal, we were negative day one. We had to get it up. We could just drop everything and stop what we're doing on the Florida deal and we have cash flow. So it's a much safer way to do it. Got it. And frankly, more profitable. Cool. Cool. Cool. And so was that, was that your second property or was that were there other deals in between? No, that was that was what's more recent one. I think that was number 10. So you want me to go to the second one? Sure.

Do you want to go to the test? Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, I want to hear it. First one, you made a lot of mistakes. I want to hear how you kind of recovered on the second one or improved. Sure. So on the second one, we actually ended up being in the same town from the same broker. And I said, yeah, I'm not doing this heavy distress thing anymore. And the second deal was maybe six or seven months after the first one. And we bought a 94 unit property. And this one was, it was 85. 5% occupied. It was all single story. It was newer, built in the, part of it was built in the 80s versus the mid to late 60s. So he had a lot less, you know, the deferred maintenance was much less severe. And the units were small. So we walked into a situation where it was more break even versus losing money. The renovation had a lot less number, the magnitude was less. And then there was a lot less risk to it. There wasn't like you walk into a unit. You're like, oh my gosh, the ceiling is on the floor. And, you know, there's daylight. coming in. So that, and that property actually ended up, that one is turned into an absolute home run. Really? Do you share the numbers on that? Yeah. Sure. We bought it for 1.3 and I think we put

about 400 into it and today it's probably worth 3.1, 3.2. Wow. Yeah. And then we actually did a cash out refinance and so our investors got 80% of their capital back a couple years ago. So now there's very little invested, but we still own it and have all the equity in the cash flow. Can you explain that a little bit more in detail like that entire? I mean, I want to get to financing here in a little bit, but can you kind of explain how did you put together that deal? What do you mean by cash out refi? How'd that all work? Sure. So all of my properties are syndicated. And what that means is it's like if you live in a neighborhood and you go to your neighbor, maybe get your cousin together and say, hey, you know, let's rent a houseboat and go to Lake Powell.

Let's share the expense and share the benefit, right? I mean, most people aren't of by themselves go rent a houseboat for 10 people and float around Lake Pearl. It's just generally not as much fun. So apartment syndication is kind of like the same thing. It's like, hey, we're going to buy a $1.3 million property. And in this case, we bought it all cash. Most people don't have $1.3 million sitting around to do that. They don't have the experience.

They don't have the time to find the deal. So what we do is say, all right, the syndication piece is I acquire the property, come up with the business plan, and then go to our investor pool. and say, all right, here's the property, here's the business plan, here's the projected returns, and we have this much equity, and you can invest anywhere from 50,000 up to whatever you want. So instead of one person buying an apartment complex, a syndication is a pool of people, pooling their funds so that they can take down a property they otherwise wouldn't be able to get and then share in the benefits.

So that's the syndication. And that's how we initially funded it was cash syndication. Okay. Okay. And why would somebody, I actually had this exact conversation this morning with a friend of mine, we're talking about kind of what my next moves are in real estate. And I said, I think I probably want to get in bigger syndication. He said, well, why not just instead, so I'll ask the same question to you,

why not just buy a smaller property and own 100 percent? So instead of buying 100 unit, why not buy a 20 unit that you can just do with your own cash, 20 percent down payment, go to a bank? Why go to the bigger deals and not just stay small and scale up? Well, I think for some people, it actually might make sense to do that. But for others, it doesn't because if you're going to buy your own 20 unit, you better know what you're doing, or at least partner with somebody who knows what they're doing, right? Also, you know, I live in Southern California. And you can buy a, you might be able to buy, I just know, a friend of mine just bought a fourplex for $1.3 million.

Right? I mean, an amazing forecap. Wow. And he bought it for other reasons. I'm not dogging his investment. So whereas we can go to Texas or Georgia or Florida and get returns that are more than double that without speculating on price appreciation. So that's one reason. Say, okay, you know what, maybe investing in my backyard in rentals isn't the best. I can get higher returns if I give my money to somebody else who has expertise and invest it over here.

Another reason is if you are looking to learn the apartment business, a great way to do it is to invest with somebody and then follow their every move, read their every report, request every financial and talk to them. Well, why are you rehab in this? Well, why did you hire that manager? It's a good way to learn it. A lot of investors, that's actually why they invest it, because they want to do their own big deals. They're like, you know what? I'm going to invest with you first and then learn the process and then go on from there. That's fantastic. It is. It is. However, not everybody can do that. I mean, not everybody could go and get in a syndication deal. You have to be an accredited investor, correct? You have to be accredited, which means you have a net worth of a million dollars

or married income of over $300,000 a year. So you have to be accredited if the deal was solicited or advertised. But if it's a private deal, meaning just, you know, I already know you, you know me. Then you can be what's called a sophisticated investor. which means you don't have to meet those income requirements. It's kind of a, it's a, it's a, it's a, you get, you make the decision yourself. And basically what you're saying is as an investor, I am sophisticated enough to evaluate whether or not this deal is a good fit for me.

And, and just as a heads up, I mean, all this stuff is, is exceptionally highly regulated, correct? Absolutely. So if you're listening and you're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go and create a syndication deal with my buddies and, you know, to go ask people for some cash, you better not do that until you talk to a securities lawyer. Absolutely. You don't want, the SEC takes it very seriously and, you know, Bernie Madoff is looking for a roommate and they will make you that guy real fast if you do it wrong. Wow. There you go. There you go. So yeah, this is, this is something that definitely requires a higher level of sophistication for sure. And as I had said, you know, you definitively need legal counsel when you're

getting involved in this kind of thing. Frankly, we recommend it on any kind of deal, but particularly on these kinds of things, you absolutely want to cover your backside. Yeah. Yeah. We have a very good attorney that I'd be happy to recommend to anyone. And, you know, again, I wouldn't definitely don't let that scary piece of it, you know, hold you back because it's not about figuring it all out yourself.

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local bank and said, hey, can we get debt on this? We bought it all cash. And so what they do is they look at the financials. They look at our personal balance sheets and say, okay, sure, we'll give you a loan for, I think we got, I think we got $1.6 million loan on that property. And so what they give us the loan on, they secure it against the property like any other, you know, real estate loan, and then give us the cash. And then what we did is we gave 80% of the original capital back to the investor. So someone who invested $100,000, they got a check for $80,000 of their original capital back. So now they can go, you know, go on a cruise or invest it somewhere else or whatever, but they still have the same ownership. So it's kind of, I mean, it's similar to

buying a, yeah, yeah, yeah, to the burr method, right? Yeah. So you buy a house, you fix it up, you refinance it, probably take some cash out and then hold it. That's exactly what we did. Yeah, I love that. Because, yeah, I talk about the Burr strategy all the time, for those people who don't know, It's the acronym for buy rehab, rent it out, refinance it, and repeat, where you buy a property, fix it up, just like you said. And so I love that you're doing this with an apartment complex, like a large apartment complex. It's burr on steroids, yeah. Yeah, I love that.

That's awesome. Scaled up big time. Very cool. So what about you personally? As the, I mean, you were the lead, is that what it's called like lead syndicator or whatever? Like you were in charge of this deal or you and your partner? How did that work? Yeah, I'm the manager.

So I actually, I do have a couple, two different sets of principles I work with. And in both cases, I am primarily operations, meaning I'm finding the deal. I am getting under contract. I'm coming up with the renovation plan. I manage the managers, everything that's involved in operations. So that is my primary role. Okay. And while we're on that subject, we mentioned you find the deals.

How are you finding these deals? I know apartments are tough to find these days. Yes. You know, most of the stuff we buy now, I think the last five or six, have all been off market or post market. And when I say post market, I mean, someone else got it for a higher price and they failed to close. So now it eventually comes down to us at our lower price, which can work out really, really well.

So it's all through, on these bigger deals, it's all through broker relationships. And I actually tried for a while, you know, unsolicited, getting into contact with the owners. But what I realized is that can be great for mom and pop stuff for 10, 20 units. but these commercial brokers spend their lives trying to build relationships with owners of the apartment complexes. And so I'm like, why am I trying to duplicate that? And the more effective way is to form a good relationship with that broker so that I can leverage all of his relationships. And so now what I'll do is, you know, they'll call me, say, hey, I talk to this owner, you know, he might sell, put in an offer, let's see what happens. Or I'm going to list this in three weeks, but you know what, it's a good fit for you.

let's see if maybe they'll accept an offer early. Or also what I've done is I will pick a neighborhood and say, I like these five properties. Then I will email my broker contacts and say, do you have a relationship with the owner of this property? And 80% of the time I say, yeah, I know that guy. I've been talking to him for five years. Then the follow-up question is, would he entertain an offer? No, they wouldn't. They just refinanced.

Or yeah, you know what? They probably would. And that's how we find the deals. I love it. Right on, right on. All right. So two things. You talked about being the lead guy. So you're the guy who kind of puts everything together. Is there a financial incentive to be the lead guy in a syndication deal? Yes, absolutely. So how I put food on my table is there's a there's an acquisition fee, meaning when the deal closes, I get paid a fee. And the size of the fee depends on the size of the deal. And in my case, I split that with partners as well. And then there's also what's called the syndicator or,

the sponsor carve out. So our deals have a preferred return, which means before the sponsors can take any profit, we have to meet a certain level of profit distributed to our investors. That's the preferred return. But once we meet that, we have a carve out. And it's generally, it's generally 25%. Again, it kind of varies by the deal, but the industry standard is 25%. So what that means is, you know, all other considerations aside, forget about the pref for a moment, if we send out, if we have $100 in profit to distribute, as sponsors, we get to have, we get $25. Got it. And so that, you know, that is my passive or horizontal income.

It's not truly passive because I am, you know, managing the business. But, I mean, I don't have to go out and find another deal to get that check. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. So that's how, that's how I earn an income? Well, I was going to ask, how much time do you actually spend? You say it's not passive because, again, not a lot of real estate is fully passive, you know?

So how much time do you actually spend once you have the deal acquired? and it's fixed up and maybe even refinanced it. How much time does it actually take you now to manage the individual deals and manage the manager? The ones that are fully stabilized and mature that I've been running for three, four, or five years, those ones are maybe an hour a week. I mean, once you get to that point, it's pretty steady state. And the ones that we recently acquired, the first three to six months can be very time intensive, especially if there's a significant rehab, because I'm flying out there more frequently,

where we've got budget reports more frequently. I mean, just everything is magnified in the beginning. But once it gets to the point where you've renovated all the units, you know, you've bumped the rents 25%, and you're just tweaking little things and you've got really good people in place, that's where the time equipment really drops off. And that's where I really experienced the reward for doing it.

Nice. I have a question that might be a stupid one, but why would a broker offer you a deal before it goes on the market. Why not let it go on the market and let people compete against it? I mean, I think that's a question that a lot of people are probably thinking here. Like, oh, well, why would they do that? They can let people fight over it and push up the price. That's a very valid question. And a lot of brokers won't do off-market deals for that very reason. But I'll give you an example of one that we bought last year. This was outside of Atlanta.

The seller, again, it was his only multifamily asset, a smaller one, 76 units, built in the late 90s, a beautiful little property, but the purchase price was going to be under $4 million, right? And the broker typically deals with properties that are $10, $20, and $30 million. So it's going to take the same amount of marketing, the same amount of tours. He's got to go down there and tour the property 50 times. So if he can get this property transacted with a known closer off market

and not have to spend all of his time and save that time for his $20 and $30 million deals. As long as he can make the seller happy and then I'm getting a deal that works for us, everybody wins. Makes a lot of sense. Would I assume also that he would get both sides of the commission? I mean, he'd get the full commission instead of having to split that with another broker,

just like residential? Yeah, there's no, well, there's, I mean, there's typically, I mean, we're just getting into the selling process we've only sold two. But my understanding is, and then experience on those few deals, is the broker, unless it's a co-op situation where someone brings in another broker, typically they're not splitting it. Oh, okay. Yeah.

So it is different from residential on that. Yeah. Okay, cool. Very cool. Well, last question I have before we kind of maybe move on. I'm curious about something totally different than this whole thing, and that is goal setting. The reason I bring that up is because I know that you are a go-bundance guy. Just like last week, Hal Elra.

I mean, like a few weeks ago, we had Hal on. Before that, we had Matt on. We've had a lot of Go-Bundance guys. One of your partners on. Yeah, anyway, all these GoBundance guys. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, and I'm curious, like, goal setting. You know, that's a big thing in GoBundance I know is goal setting.

So how has that affected your life, you know, again, you, David Green, Hala, Rod, all you guys. How does that affect your life in goal setting? It's been huge. I mean, I'm actually one of the founding members of GoBundance, so I've been in it for, I guess, four-something years now. My net worth has more than doubled since I joined. And it's part of just surrounding yourself with people who have, similar mentalities and goals and that are going to help push you forward and hold you accountable. So before I joined, I had some vague goals and that was like, well, I want to be financially free by

2017, whatever that means. And, you know, I want to have a nice house or whatever. And but it wasn't really concrete. And one of the things I learned through being part of that mastermind is how to really define your goals. And so what you do is you kind of, you start where, you know, a good question asks, well, where do I want to be in five years? You know, do I want to have this much income? What are the sources? Where do I want to live? And then work backwards and break that down. Okay, what do I have to do this year to get there? What do I have to do this quarter to get there? What about this month? What about this week? What action am I going to take today that is most going to get me towards my goals? Yeah, I love it. So that's, yeah. And beat on the microphone for

Well, so I read that concept in the book of the one thing. You've probably read that. They talk about this goal setting to the now. Yeah, this idea of just breaking down your long-term goals. And anyway, goal-setting, like, I never really set goals before two years ago, probably. Never had really any hard and fast goal other than I wanted a million dollars or whatever. You know, like some vague goal kind of like, I want a million bucks someday. It's very religious of you, Brandon.

Thanks. So, like, how do I? I want to be a preacher for a million dollars. I want to be a billion. So I can take off. Exactly. Have you seen those videos? They're pretty funny.

Anyway, yeah, I mean, so like goal setting totally changed my life. I mean, yeah, my network's doubled or I don't know, whatever, probably more than that. It's just in the last few years because of goal setting entirely because of that. So anyway, I'm just glad that, I don't know, you could talk on that. So cool. All right. Anything else before we move on to the fire? Anything else you want to cover that we didn't cover yet today?

I know we don't always ask people that, but anything you would want to say. Yeah, you know, that's actually good. you know, getting to the, you know, I've met a lot of people, because I get a lot of requests for, well, you mentor me and when you coach me. And I don't do anything formal, but I just try to, you know, I've been giving a lot of, I've been given a lot of handups. So I like to try to do the same. And what I mean is, you know, it's not like, oh, here's a handout. Here's a hundred bucks. It's, okay, well, I'll teach you how to do this, right? So a lot of people I talk to is like, well, I don't really know how to write a plan for five years or, you know, how do I set these goals?

And so one thing, there's, and it's somewhat of a plug, but I believe in it. One of my mentors, Tim Rhodes, started a nonprofit called One Life Fully Lived. And their mission is to help people dream, plan, and then live out their lives. So if you're having trouble, you know, kind of figuring out, well, what is my why? What is my plan? That is one source to go to. And you can, they have a program where, and again, it's a nonprofit. They're not out to, it doesn't sell you stuff.

It's not expensive programs. And it walks you through and teaches you how to make that, you know, what are your dreams, make that plan for your life, and then back that down into, okay, now here's my goals. And that, and like, you know, Brandon, like you said, that's been transformative for me instead of just having a couple of vague goals, I've got goals broken down to all these different categories and I check on them daily. And it makes a huge difference. Yeah, yes, likewise.

I love it. Well, very cool. Well, wait. Yeah, why don't we shift gears here and head over to the fire round. It's time for the fire round. All right, the world famous fire round. These questions come direct out of the bigger pockets forums, and we're going to fire them at you right now.

Number one, what do you suggest is the first move to make when you want to become a full-time house flipper? First move to make when you want to become a full-time house flipper. start your education. And what I mean by doing that is get on bigger pockets, get in the forums, go to local meetings, read as many books as you can, and save up a living reserve. What I mean is, if you're going to quit your job and flip, make sure you've got six months or more of money set aside so that you're not going to be spending all your energy stressed out, oh my gosh, how am I going to pay the bills?

You can just focus on your flipping business. Perfect. Cool. I think that's solid, man. It was good. I would have let you continue. Brandon, I know why to cut you off. It's okay. I'm a whole intuitive to the fire round, you know? It's all it does. That's all it does. Yeah, great. Okay. So, yeah, Andrew, I got you and I'll let you talk all you want, man. So, yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah, no problem, man. No problem. We've got a bond here.

Would you recommend somebody invest in apartments as their first deal? So should somebody do a large, multifamily or mid-sized multifamily as their first deal in real estate. I would say it depends on what your goal is. If you're looking for a quick chunk of cash, then no. Go do a flip or something like that. If you're looking for a solid, you know, a stable asset-backed investment that will send you checks or passive income that you don't have to do the, well, you have the choice of either doing the working for if you buy your own or if not doing the work.

if you invest with someone else, then I would say yes. So again, it gets back to kind of knowing your why and your goals. That was great. And thank you for telling the full answer to us. Well, I didn't get cut off that time. An opportunity to in this next question. All right. I will make sure you have plenty of time to talk on this one.

This is a softball one that I do. Do you think having a mentor is a good idea for new investors? Oh, forget that. All right. Next question. You know, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for mentors. You know, you hear in the corporate world that companies have R&D departments, right? Well, I am not really a creative guy.

I'm an engineer. I'm not the guy who's going to come up with an invention, start this multimillion dollar business. What I am good at is R&D, and that stands for rip off and duplicate. Right? So, yeah, and I don't mean that in the malicious sense. What I mean is, is find somebody who's already successful at what you're doing. learn it and go duplicate it in your life or in your market. And actually, that's a kind of a finer point.

Most of my mentors were out of my immediate market. So we didn't have that kind of awkward, well, I'm going to take your idea and now I'm competing with you. So, yeah. Very cool. Fantastic. I didn't catch you out there, did I? I just got Josh off. No, no, I feel good.

I'm okay. I'll forgive you. All right, everybody's now. Go do it again. Can I have my steepler. I was just watching that like at lunchtime today. And I was sitting there watching Office Space. I was one of my favorite movies of all time.

I can watch that over and over again. I'm not seen it in a few years, but I'm sitting there at lunch watching this. And I'm like, this is like the best movie ever made. Oh, yeah. I just like dying laughing. And I do every single line, even though it's been forever. But anyway, Office Space, check it out. All right.

All right. Last question of the fire round. When hiring staff, what do you look at most to make sure they are reputable? That, you know, talking more on just like the individual level. I'd say like when you're hiring your team or if you have like employees. Sure. How do you vet them? Okay.

On the individual level, I'm really looking for people who have motivation and drive because you can't really train that. You can teach people all these skills. But I want to make sure they have motivation, drive, and ethics. And so if I sense that, when I'm talking about, talking to them. As far as vetting them, you know, of course, you talk to previous employers, friends, you get on Facebook, that kind of thing. As far as handling or hiring like a contractor or property management company, which, I mean, those are key, key roles in my world, I start

with referrals. That's how we build the list. And then my wife is really good at research. So she gets online and hunts for every bit of dirt we can find on them. I mean, it's getting really tough to hide anything these days, which is good, right? Oh, yeah. And so usually that cuts the list in half or by two thirds. I mean, because you just find stuff that like, this isn't someone I want to work with. And then I interview them, usually a couple different times. And, you know, that gets to a certain point at which, you know, you've done your research, you've done your analysis.

Your gut instinct is good. And you have to hire them. And if you make a mistake, which I have, then you have to fire them quickly. You know, hire you don't, if you make a mistake, just deal with it. But if you follow that, again, nothing's guaranteed, but that process has served us really well. Our current success really is a result of having awesome team members around the country that when, you know, a deal comes up, I can calm and they can help us move on it instantly and give me better information that I probably would be able to get on my own. That's great. That's great.

Yeah, I get, you know, on the hiring front, it's interesting. You know, when you start vetting people and creating like a stand. It's amazing how hard it is to find people at a high standard. I mean, like, you know, we do some really, really basic stuff for vetting folks on our hiring process. And I'd say 85% of people who apply for any of the open positions we have at BiggerPockets, which, by the way, if you're looking for a job, we are always hiring, biggerpockets.com slash jobs. But, yeah, I mean, simple things like little line of instruction in the job description. which just shows that you've actually read it appropriately

and are paying attention to detail. You know, hey, when you apply, make sure the title says this or send your resume in PDF format. And you can't ignore it when they get that wrong because that's a little detail that if they screw that up on the most important thing in their life, which is trying to find a job, what are they going to do when they actually have the job?

So, yeah, it's wild. You know, if you're looking for jobs, folks, pay attention to detail. Not a big deal. We just hired a, you know, like a couple months ago, hired a full-time maintenance, well, part-time maintenance guy for our company, like actual W-2 employee and everything. And when I put out the thing on Craigslist and on our local, like,

job board for our area, I wrote on there, do not email, or do not email, do not call, fax me your resume. And we out of, like, normally I would put out a job application, your job offering, I'd get hundreds, if not thousands of, you know, people looking for jobs. I got two from both, people and one of them worked out great. That's probably because only two people still have a fax machine.

Well, it's funny if he didn't. He didn't have one. He's like, he's like, it was so weird that you told me a fax. So I printed it out at home, I went up the staples, I paid 25 cents and they fax it to you. And I'm like, that is what I want. There you go. He found a way to get it done. Yeah, and he's been the best hire.

I mean, he's been awesome. Awesome. Anyway, cool. All right. Well, hey, Andrew, knock, knock. Who's there? Famous for. Famous for.

Sorry, I can resist. All right. Yeah, surprise. All right, these questions come every single weeks. I know people have heard them over and over, but we don't know your answer yet. So, number one, what is your favorite real estate book? That was pretty bad. Number one, what is your favorite real estate-related book?

You know, I always feel like this question should be set up like they do Wheel of Fortune now, right? You know, everyone used to always pick R, S, T, and L. So you know, maybe you should do that like... Besides rich, dad, poor dad. Yeah, besides rich dad, poor dad, and the one thing and, you know, all those e-myth and all those. You know, I'm going to go to the apartment world, and I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm going to pick a pair of books because they go together. Okay.

It's emerging markets and multifamily millions by Dave Lindahl. They're not hardcore techie books, but the information is legitimate, and it's a really good read, especially if you're looking at getting into apartments and learning some of the bigger concepts, I think they're actually well-written books and there's good information in there. Right on. What about business books? One of my favorite business books is a book by a guy named Jim Camp. It's called Start With No.

And it's a negotiation book. And it's kind of, it's very contrarian as opposed to start with yes and win-win or get-to-yes. It's Start with No. I found it to be absolutely instrumental in getting deals closed, especially in challenging tough negotiations, like trying to buy a house for 60 cents on the dollar, especially from someone who's in pre-forclosure and is stressed out. And it's very much about, you know, for example, if you remember the old TV show Colombo, which I saw a few times at my grandfather's house, but, you know, he was just very kind of laid back.

And people just underestimated him. And he wasn't always trying to close. He'd be, oh, wait, wait. And he'd answer that last important question. It kind of, it's along those lines. It's very counterintuitive. And when you first read it, you kind of react like, what? That's crazy.

But man, does it work? Cool. I'll check it out. Awesome. All right, what do you do for fun outside of real estate and, you know, pouring chemicals together? Well, I've got a wife and two kids, and I've got two little boys, and I'm teaching them how to pour chemicals together. And then one of the reasons I live in Southern California is I love to surf.

So I do a fair amount of that. And then I'm into backcountry skiing. Oh, nice. Yeah, which means we don't ride lifts. You know, when you ride the lift to the top of Mammoth Mountain or Copper Mountain or Vale and you look out and you see all those gorgeous mountains out in the distance, like, man, what would we like to ski those? I got tired of answering that question. So I said, I'm going to do it.

And so now that's what I do when I go skiing as we find a way. Yeah, we find a way to get out, climb those mountains. and ski them. Andrew, when you come out to Colorado to backcountry ski, I've never done it before, but I'd like to offer myself up to go backcountry skiing. I've been dying to go. Scared, but dying to go. Absolutely.

And I've actually done that at our Go Abundance Winter Retreat. That's become a tradition now, is myself and Tim take out a group of people who've never done it and teach them how to do it. That's awesome. Awesome. All right, cool. Well, my final question of the day, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail, or never get started?

Getting a small million dollar loan from your father. Perfect. I guess that helps Trump. But no, it's that the relentless persistence, you know, having your why, having a belief in yourself, having a belief in the system that you are working. And that's key. I mean, you know, one of the, you hear all the time, and I don't know if it's true or not, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, right?

So if you're doing something that's not working, you do need to ask the question, why is it not working? Is the system flawed or whatever? But if you're working on a system that you vetted, that you have a mentor that is successful at it, so you know that system works. It's the relentless persistence. It's making phone call number 4,576, right? Or maybe 77, or whatever it takes. That's crazy, by the way. Let me just say that again. But it was worth it, right? I haven't had a boss in nine years now. That's awesome.

Crazy like a fox. Nicely done, man. Nicely done. And great answer. All right. Where can people find out more about you? Of course, I'm on bigger pockets, and I'm trying to get more active on it. So if I've got people hitting me up on bigger pockets, that will help achieve that goal.

My website is vantage point acquisitions, which is, V-P-A-C-Q.com. It's not a fancy website. It's just kind of a placeholder for people who look us up and want to see what we're doing, but I can be reached through there. Of course, I'm on LinkedIn, and I would say I do get a fair amount of contact. So if someone wants to contact me, I'm happy to do that, but please put in the subject line that, you know, how you got in touch or heard me, you know, oh, I heard you on

bigger pockets or something like that. That way I can make sure I respond. Cool. Because some, yeah. That's great. Great, great, great. Well, listen, man, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll look forward to seeing you around the site. And of course, for everybody listening, you could ask, Andrew, any questions you have at biggerpockets.com slash show 170, the show notes for this episode. Thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate it, and I look forward to taking you skiing.

Yeah, ha. I'll see around. All right. Big thanks to Andrew Cushman for coming on the show. Wow, that was pretty awesome. He's my hero. You're my hero, Brandon. You're my hero, Josh. Oh. Oh, hug it out. Yeah.

We just said, we don't. Yeah, that was kind of creepy. Usually we're like, you know, at each other's throat for us to hug. Well, speak. Kind of unnatural. Speaking of creepy. So, you know, we use Slack here in the Bigger Pockets office to communicate. It's a program we can communicate.

I also have hooked up with my real estate investment company. So my wife is on there along with my assistant. Anyway, my wife sends me a message. and here's what it says. Just like 10 minutes ago. FYI, there's a creepy white van with tinted windows and someone sitting inside the driver's seat outside of our house.

They're either casing the neighborhood or just staring at us. They've been there about a half hour. So anyway, I'm going to go check that out. Good luck. Hey, it's been nice talking to you, Brandon. Thanks. We'll see you next week.

Get out there and bust out the shotgun. At least it doesn't say like free candy on the side or something. That'd be a little bit creepy. There's something creepy going on. I'm going to go find out what it is. All right. Hey, great show.

until next week, guys. Thanks for listening. I'm Josh Dorkin. Check out the site. Check out the forums. Jump in, connect with Andrew on the show notes of biggerpockets.com slash show 170. Set up a profile, start networking with folks like him. We've got investors who are just getting started up to guys who've done 1,400 units and 24 flips like Andrew has on the site networking, trying to do business together. So if you're not there, you're missing out on the biggest business opportunity, the biggest networking opportunity out there for real estate investors and oh yeah it's free so join up and be a part of our community got anything you want to add no but if i die out there with the man in the van i'm blaming you why don't you go out there

with a periscope and you can record the whole interaction that's a great idea all right i'll be watching guys thank you for listening till next time i'm josh dorkin sign it off you're listening to bigger pockets radio simplifying real estate for investors large and and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

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