Episode 62: Bottom To The Top: Learn How To Invest In MultiFamily Properties

Host/CEO James Prendamano sits down with Todd Pultz of Bottom To The Top Investments. In less than a decade, Todd went from being in debt to being a successful multifamily investor. He now has over 100 doors to his name. Learn more about his journey here.

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Participant #1:
The problem and the biggest frustration for us in this area is that while our property values have increased and while our market has been hot, our appraisers are still two to three years behind what the market is doing, right? I have no idea in the world what these appraisers look at right now now, because every single one of them is different. We've developed kind of a formula that puts us pretty close. That is right about eight, five, nine cap on these appraisers. When you're looking at an income approach, obviously, four units and below is going to continue to be the sales. Comp approach. But when we're talking five and more right around eight and a half to a nine. But we've had some properties that are coming in an eight cap with these appraisers.

Participant #1:
Welcome everyone to the podcast. We're joined today by Todd Pultz. He's the founder of Bottom to the Top Investments. He's got an amazing story. It's going to take us on a bit of a journey today. Todd, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you having me our pleasure. And we have my business partner, associate and everything in between. Becca, how are we doing? Rep Becks beats.

Participant #1:
How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you. We'll have a little fun today. So, Todd, you currently have over 100 doors, correct? I do. Yes. All right. So to get to 100 doors has been a hell of a journey for you. And I think it would be great if you're up for it, sharing kind of some of the story. I know you've got some humble beginnings, and you've got a remarkable story. You mind jumping in and giving us a little context before you got into the real estate world? Sure. I start off in law enforcement. That's what my degree is. So I started off as a police officer, and when I started as a police officer, I start getting those checks where I was making 50 $60,000 a year. I thought I was on top of the world because I came from very, very poor upbringing. I lived in a trailer park and the projects. Mom and dad never had any money. So when I started getting a debut where I'm like, Man, I can pay some bills. I can actually buy a car. That was like, the end all be all to me. But I realized at a certain point in my life that I never had the skills to manage money, right? I didn't know what to do with my checks. I was spending more money than what I was making. So no matter what I would have done at that point, no matter how much money I would have made from the debt job, I didn't have any of the resources from an educational standpoint to figure out how to manage my finances. So that led me to when I was in my relationship at the beginning, which is now my wife, my car was repossessed from her driveway. My house was foreclosed on all within the first couple of months of her and I being together, which led to some embarrassment. And it was kind of that moment where I said, you know what? I need to figure this out. Like, I need to figure out how to create financial freedom. And at that time, there was like videos around. Internet was kind of big, but we didn't have the big digital social media push like we do now with all the real estate gurus and things like that. But there was one thing that I knew, which was that real estate made sense to me. And when I listened to people, if you made $1,000 in rent, you paid out $500, you made $500. And that clicked for me. I didn't see myself as super educated or like a really smart guy, like I couldn't go be a neurosurgeon or something like that. But I understood real estate. It was simple enough for me. And I took my $10,000, which was the last $10,000 that I had for my police retirement fund. And I went to one of my mentors, my only mentor, but my mentor at the time. And I said, hey, I'm going to buy a four year apartment building for $20,000. Will you give me $10,000 and let's partner around together? Now? This was 2011. So the market was completely different than what we see now. So as you listen to this podcast, you're like, what do you mean, you're going to buy a $20,000 quad, right? Well, one, we're in the Midwest. Two is a completely different market, and a lot of properties were bought from the housing bubble crash, and people were failing on those properties because they bought a lot of cheap properties across the country, but they didn't have any mechanisms in place to manage those. So some of the people that try to capitalize originally, we're starting to loosen properties again. So I found one, and it was a really quirky deal. But I found a four unit building that was listed for 60,000. I ended up just trying to practice my negotiation skills and found out it was a little guy that had it on land contract and had never paid the original owner money. So we sidestepped him. When to the original owner, who was in Iowa and said, hey, if we give you $20,000 and get rid of this guy, that's only in contract to you, we let's buy your property. And he said, yeah, so we offered the land contract guy $1,000 if he walked away. And he said, okay, so we end up buying that first quad for $21,000. And that was like the start of the real estate journey. I wouldn't say it was luck, because I think you always have to be in the right place at the right time to get luck. I think the harder you work, the luckier you get. Right. But I would say, there was a little bit of luck by the position that I was in that my mentor at the time had 31 doors, and it was a horrible landlord, one of the smartest business guys I've ever met in my life. Still one of my best friends in the world right now. I look to him for all kinds of business advice. But the one thing that he wasn't good at was being a landlord. So he had this property that he had bought during the housing crisis super cheap. And it was 31 doors, all apartments, tries and quads. And I went to him and asked him owner financed me with zero money down. And he agreed. So I really quickly got into 35 doors within that first year. And in between there, I had found a second property that was a six unit apartment complex for, like, $22,000. We bought. And then three days after we bought it, it burned to the ground. We didn't have any insurance. So one really successful deal. Very next deal. I lost double the money that we paid for the quad. And then the third deal was known to finance deal. And that's what kicked it off. So that was the start of my journey. But being able to build doors, that didn't happen until a few years later. Once I started educating myself and learning how to use money and how to leverage and how to build partnerships and kind of network and find off market deals. So I had a little bit of a gap in there to where I went from being really comfortable to wear. Like, now I can break loose, and now I can break through the ceiling. And we just haven't looked back. Now we've used all that momentum to keep rolling. So you're out of Dayton, Ohio, correct. We are in Riverside, Ohio, which is a little suburb, the borders up to Dayton. Okay. And are these doors that you're taking down in that immediate area or are you all over? Yeah, I stay local, so I don't invest out of state. I stay pretty true to my neighborhood. We have so many properties out here, and I think when investors come out here, some of my clients that come out, they're always impressed by how many apartment doors we have, how many quads we have, how many triplexes we have? It's just one of those unique areas. And Dayton is kind of just now starting to catch on. So for a long time, when you look at bigger pockets and you read all the forms are out there, nobody talked about Dayton. Like, hey, we're running all of our stats. Well, if you run all your stats, like all the gurus tell you to do, Dayton will never pop on the top places to invest. And you guys have probably seen all those lists that are out there. People put out like, hey, here's the top places in the US. Dayton's never on there. It's not. But it is a phenomenal, phenomenal place. And if you're looking for cash flow and you're looking to replace W two money, this is the place Dayton, Ohio, is where it's at. And I have no reason to invest outside of Dayton. There's too much here for me to do. And when I think that the inventory is drying up for me from an off market standpoint, I get pounded by a bunch of more off market deals, so I've just never had any reason to. So I'm curious about the numbers, right? And emerging markets is all the rage, as you mentioned before. Right? Everyone's got a list, and everyone's got their own metrics in identifying a market. But if you could walk me through a typical four family or five or six, whatever strike prices now versus when you started, I'm really interested in what the Delta is and what is the typology? One bedrooms, two bedrooms, three bedrooms. What do the rents look like? Where do people work? Could we kind of run down one of your deals just to get a flavor of it? Yeah. So I think when you look at 2011, the first deal I had, we bought that for $21,000. It was fully rented out for, like, 350 a unit, all one bedrooms. We had to stick about 12,000 into it to turn because we quickly. As we started raising rents, we had vacancies. So all in on that one, we were like, 32 $33,000. And that was for a fully rented quad. And at the time, 375 was about the right rent. And that was 2011. So those same quads right now, if you're looking at rents, we're renting out from 625 to 650 for a one bedroom quad. And that is in a C class neighborhood or maybe even C minus, depending on how you look at it. For me and Dayton, they're all C properties. It depends on how you manage them, but those quads right now are hitting our market on the MLS at 175, 185, 195. So for all of us that bought a bunch of quads back in the day, we're like what in the world I can't bring myself to buy an MLS squad right now. I just couldn't do it. I would be nauseous and unable to sleep at night if I did it. But we still find off market deals. So our off market deals right now, when we're driving for dollars, we're still getting into quads that are fully rented, maybe low rents. Older owners. We're still getting into around 75 $80,000, and we can push the rents very quickly because most of them don't ever have leases in place. We can push the rents, like I said to 625, 656, 75 in some of our areas. If we have central air in them or things like that, most of the quads are going to be one bedroom. Our two bedroom quads don't really change in price. And in our area, a lot of investors come to me, and they're always against one bedroom quads. But what they don't realize is Dayton is a market with a very large single population that needs one bedroom quads. You have a lot of single mothers. You have a lot of people that are just trying to get into some units. And we have a lot of subsidies in the area, not just Section eight, but mental health subsidies and developmental disability subsidies that they're, like, 90% single bedrooms. So I have a waiting list upon waiting list for one bedroom apartments, the two bedrooms tend to be a little bit harder to rent out. And the thing that I don't like about them is there's not a huge gap, right? Like we're like, 725 to 750 in rent. So you don't have a huge gap between the margins on the rents. So those are pretty typical numbers right now. Now we're buying retail quad for a lot of our clients that we represent from a realtor standpoint, and we can get them for 100 and 4150 depending on the building. But that's pretty much where buys buying at right now. So I'm curious, Becca, in your home market, rent wise, are one bedrooms in that $600 range? Is it a similar market, or is it closer to what we do here? It depends on which part of the state you're talking about where I am. It's a little bit closer to what we do here in New York, but the Southern part of the state is right around those numbers. So for us and I hear this all the time, people say, Well, you can kind of launch a career in investing in multifamily, but you can't do it in New York anymore because it's been just become so expensive. We're in Staten Island, and that's the offborough, right? We're not Manhattan. We're not Brooklyn, not even Bronx or Queens. But we've got some buildings where one bedroom is 2100 a month. Sure. And that's cheap compared to some of the other markets surrounding us. But there is opportunity between the lines. So you guys are approaching this from a are you, like, buying a payment or are you buying for the appreciation as well? You have, like, a standard set of metrics that you're going through when you perform a deal. Yeah. So mine is pretty simple. I know everybody, especially my young investors that I mentor. They send me these Excel sheets that have, like, 75 categories. And look, I'm not reading it. Take it back to bigger pockets, like I'm done with it. Okay. So for me, I'm a simple dude, man. How much rent, what's my expenses? And am I making money? Right? So for me, my target. Okay. My target on a quad is I want to be able to true cash flow $1,000 a month. That's kind of what my number is. And if I can truly cash flow $1,000 a month on that quad, then I'll do the deal, and that's on the low end. Like, I like to be a lot higher, but that's kind of my bottom line when I'm doing deals, and that slowed me down a little bit over the last year, mainly because I'm not buying a lot of quads. I mean, we're buying larger multi family right now, and I'll give you an example of a good large multifamily. And when I say large, I just mean more than 816 units. But even February 28 of 2020, because I have another multifamily business that I have a partner in, I have close to 200 doors that I have personally my partner, though, in a multi family business, we have around 100 doors together, too. And he was originally from Reno, Nevada. We kind of hooked up to a fluke, but we started buying together last February of 2020, and the first deal we did was a 21 unit apartment complex, fully rented. All the rents were like $350, all one bedrooms, C minus neighborhood. But we bought that for $298,000. And to date, we've only had to stick in about $35,000, which is just turning units and updating updated things. And not only do we buy it for 298, the hard money lender at the time who was already on that property with the client trying to sell it. He had lost because the guy defaulted on it. So he was losing money on this little red deal he had set up for hard money. So he actually funded us so he could make some interest back. And he gave us a 90% loan on it. So we literally had to come up with, like, 32,000 to close, which we loan off of one of our private money persons. And we've stuck another 30,000 into it. And that building just now is appraised over $700,000. We have all the rents at 625, and it's a kick ass deal, man. And those are the type of properties that we find here in this area. And it's not just Dayton. I hear it all over the Midwest. This is a cash flow market. If you're looking for high appreciation, if you're looking for La appreciation, if you're looking for New York appreciation, this is not the market for you this last year where our markets went crazy, like all of us were like, wow, because we never bought these properties banking on appreciation. It was always just the cash flow. And that's kind of my strategy is cash flow. So your debt service, you're taking some of these down with hard money lenders. What's the strategy? Are you holding them for a year, two years and selling, or are you refiing out, refi, cashing out? What's in a perfect world? How are you stabilizing these things after that hard money Burns off? What's that pretty trending word that they made that word they made after many of us were doing it for years. Yeah. So that's just what we do. We cash out refinance, all these properties I bought, like, 15 doors a couple of weeks ago, and we have a really good local hard money lender here. They'll fund a deal within seven days. So typically just to get into a deal and get the deep discount, I will close it with a hard money loan pretty quickly. And then I'll just cash out refinance. We have some local credit unions that they'll do it without any seasoning whatsoever. So we have a really good lending situation. But I'll tell you one of the things that I started doing, and this is when I really started understanding money is all the profits I was making. And I sold one that initial apartment complex that I got on the owner finance deal with zero down. I originally bought that flight $400,000 from the guy never put a sent into it because the owner financed all of it. I rehabbed it, got the rents up. It got hit by a tornado in 2019. I did another million dollar rehab on that property with zero my own money. But what I did at that point, and I don't remember who I heard on the Internet, but they were talking about how to basically lend yourself money. And they talk about the health insurance, your life insurance policies and things like that. And I thought to myself, I can do something like that. So at that time, I took all of my insurance money that I got, which at the time was a cash payout because they allowed me to GC the project. And it was like, right at a million dollars, I stuck all that into a diversified portfolio. And during that economy, I was banging like, 15% returns, right? Because we were in just a crazy economy. So then my portfolio allowed me a loan myself, 60% of my principal back to myself at 4% without paying it back until I wanted to. And my principal never changed. Right? So I'm still banging 15%. I'm Loading myself money at 4%. I'm still making 11% of my money, and I had twelve months rent loss on that property. So I took the entire twelve months to rehab that property. Because why would you put renters back in there and get the headache when you can just take twelve months? And that's what I did. So I didn't spend any of my insurance money. I kept that all in a diversified portfolio and just loaned myself the money at 4%. And then I sold that property at the end of 2020, right after I got the complete rehab done, I sold that property about 1.5 million. And then I paid my loan back to myself, which was like about 600,000. I kept the profits. So that's kind of what I do, too. If I don't use the hard money lenders, I'll use one of those types of strategies to loan myself money from one of my other money pools. And then we just cash out, refinance a couple of weeks later. Okay. So covered a lot of ground there, folks. The life insurance piece that Todd's talking about. We actually just did this and took money out of some whole life policies. It's a great tool if those of you who are familiar with it understand. And those of you who are not, I really recommend you get familiar with it. It's a slow, long burn. I started my policies back when I was 1920 years old, and it allows you to almost instantly pull down cash from your policies, your death benefit and everything still stays in place at a very reasonable interest rate. And it allows you to without having to go through the process of traditional financing, you can pull this money down. I think the money hit the account in 48 hours, if that right. Yeah. You underwrite it. You attribute an interest rate on top of the rate you have to pay back, you use it to fund your deal, and then you pay it off, and you can continue to hit this thing as often as you like. It ended up being one of the better things I did when I was young. I didn't do many things good when I was young. That was one of the things that did work out for me. You also talked about no seasoning. And I just wanted to explain for the audience what that meant. So many times when you're buying a deal and you close, a bank wants you to season the property, they want to see you in the property and see the property performing. I've seen seasoning as low as six months. I've seen seasoning as high as twelve, maybe 18 months. So you're saying you found a credit Union that's not requiring any seasoning? Yeah. So what we found with lenders, and we've done a ton of research, right. And you've probably experienced it yourself. It's a very painful process to find lenders that you can create a relationship with that you can go to. Right. So I have 100 hard money lenders that I can go to, but it's like, yeah, kind of like a toss up game, whether they could actually close the deal pretty quickly, right? Yes. So for us, we're very fortunate. I finally found a local one that underwrites their own deals for the hard money. But from a commercial standpoint, what I always found was that the commercial lenders. Even today, I sent one off to a commercial lender, and I have, like, eight properties, and I'm like, hey, I want to refi these whatever. And I forgot that they require seasoning. So basically, their terms were that you have to have it for at least three months. And if you have it for less than six months, but greater for three, they'll allow you to take 120% of the purchase price or 75% loan to value whichever one is lower. Right. So you're not truly cash out, refinancing that property. And then if you've had it for six months or more, and you've been able to season those rent roles. Then they'll allow you to take 75% of the new appraised value. So that's what we kept running into. And it was always a brick wall. And I just happened to call local credit Union. I'm like, hey, do you guys do any rental properties? And they're like, yeah, we got a whole division for it, like, where you been? And we started working with them, and I didn't know how it was going to go. So one of my clients that I had bought a ten unit for when they bought it, I was a realtor on it. I said, hey, why don't you try these guys out and let me know how it goes and they close the deal in less than, like, 30 days with zero. Hiccups. And I'm like, okay, you got a new fan. Like, I'm all in. Right. And we've been sending them all kinds of deals. As a matter of fact, that same credit Union is taking down 100 unit deal for us right now. That's going to be a 1.51 $.7 million rehab in one of our C class areas. So they've been phenomenal. And we have two or three credit unions. But when I talk to people around the country, I find that to be kind of a typical trend, right? Is that credit unions are tending to work with people a little bit more than the regular banks and everybody's having success with them. I don't want to go too far on the deep end, but, like, on this rehab deal, not only are they funding the deal, they're funding the construction loan piece of it, too, just like our money lender, but we're still getting three point 85% on the entire deal right off the bat. We're not paying, like, the high interest on the construction, and we only got to pay the interest with the money as we use it, which is typical, but they're giving us great rates right off the bat, even if the property is not stabilized. So these are, like, true, no seasoning, like, no conditions. It's really cool. And we're very fortunate to run into those. But I would imagine that everybody could find one of those lenders in their area if they just do a lot of research. Yeah, they may be able to find them, but it's surprising to me how often people don't go find that, right. Institutional partner, right? Yeah. It's the absolute difference between really making it and being secure. And not the last thing I wanted to touch on going backwards, and then we can start going forward again is you had said that the property now appraised for $725,000 that you had initially acquired. What is the standard kind of cap rates? Is that the methodology that they're using? Are they using standard cap rates to determine these values? Well, I would like to think so. And when I mentor and talk to clients out of state. I would love to be able to tell them that's what happens. The problem and the biggest frustration for us in this area is that while our property values have increased and while our market has went hot, our appraisers are still two to three years behind what the market is doing. Right. So I have no idea in the world what these appraisers look at right now because every single one of them is different. So we've developed kind of a formula that puts us pretty close. And that is right about an eight, five, nine cap on these appraisers. When you're looking at an income approach, obviously, four units and blow is going to continue to be the sales. Comp approach. But when we're talking five and more right around eight and a half to nine. But we've had some properties that are coming in an eight cap with these appraisers. So it really just depends. We still have a ton of appraisers that are not true commercial multifamily appraisers. We're waiting sometimes 40, 45 days for an appraisal. So that still becomes a huge frustration for us, even in this area. But if I'm giving you a number, that's pretty close to what we're seeing right now, got it. I just want to ask about the mentoring that you mentioned. So is it mentoring? Is it coaching? And how did you get started doing that? You know what I will tell you. The first, there was a couple that came to me that I've known for many years, and they are both one's a retired homicide Detective. The other one is still currently a Detective with fellow Assault division here locally. And they came to me like a year ago and just said, hey, we see what you're doing. And we would love for you to kind of help us a little bit, get us rolling. And I said, sure, we set up my kitchen table. And that was almost a year ago, and I enjoyed having that conversation with him. And at the end of that conversation, I remember his wife asked me a question. She said, all right, Todd, let's really get down to it. She goes, what do you get out of all this? What's your motive? And I thought to myself, I'm like, what do you mean, what's my motive? I like, you guys, right? I want to help you guys. But what that told me was is that there's so many people out there that they expect something in return. Right. And when I saw them have their first success and like, I could do a whole other podcast on success they're having because they are killing it, right? Like, way better than what I did when I started. But when I saw that first success that they had, that gave me some fulfillment. And I'm like, I need to do more of this. So I started kind of quietly offering that out. But time is money, right? So we have to charge a little bit. And sometimes the payment for coaching and mentoring comes in the form of me partnering with deals. Sometimes it just comes in the form of, like, hey, you pay me for my time, but that kind of started. It's been a little bit of a slow process. I'm not out there pushing it. You'll never see me advertising for it. But I have people that just organically come to me and want their help or want my help. I do that, and I like it, and I enjoy it. And I love seeing others be successful. So I won't keep on. I have about two or three people that I'll mentor at a time, and that's, like my cap. I don't go any further than that. Obviously, having the hard times is certainly incentive enough to try and take this step. But you've taken like, a quantum leap here. Was there anything in your past or a mentor or someone in the family? Why did you land in real estate? How did you go from being in financial trouble and going through what you went through to? Hey, I'm going to start taking down four unit quads on the side. Did it just happen literally like that, or was there some influence that brought you to real estate? It kind of just happened like that. But there was one thing. Okay. So and James, I think you and I are, like, pretty close to the same age. I won't ask you to share with everybody how old you are. But I think we're pretty close in age. Okay. And because of that, I think you'll remember what I'm getting ready to say. Do you remember Carlton? Sheiks sure. Okay. So that was, like, the first time I heard about real estate staying up late at night, and I saw the infomercial on TV, and I did what a lot of people did was like, I order the videos. I'm like, I'm all in, like, I want to be free. I want to be rich. And those videos said in my house, I never watched them. And when my house got foreclosed on, I was so unorganized. I was so not with it and just not taking care of my finances. I went over the night before they were going to come take that property over from the Sheriff's auction to get whatever I could out, like, it took 2 hours, and I gathered whatever I could. And I remember seeing right at the last minute that box of Carlton sheet videos. I didn't take them with me, but I remember seeing those, and it just stuck with me. I'm like, you know, I wasted that money. And then when my car got repossessed and I'm thinking about, what can I do? I kept going back to the fact that I didn't have anything else. My degree was in law enforcement. That's what I knew. And I was making six figures. Okay. So I was making good money. But there was nothing else. I knew. I didn't have a machine. I didn't know how to work on cars. There was nothing else that I knew at that point other than sports. I was always an athlete, and I just kept coming back to real estate. Like, okay, I got to be able to make this work, right? This is the only thing that I even know about outside of that. I was so kept in a bubble growing up, my mom and dad like, they didn't have any other resources, right? All I knew was my dad worked three jobs. He worked at a Speedway, he worked at a Myers, he was a truck driver. He got fired job after job after job, always bouncing around. So I never had anybody give me those skills. And I was never in those circles of people that were entrepreneurs or anything. So the only thing that I ever crossed my mind was real estate, and I didn't know if it would work or not. And I just kind of jumped in. That was it. I mean, it really just happened like that. There was nothing else that influenced me outside of maybe the Carlton sheet videos that I never watched. You weren't missing anything because I also ordered those many moons ago. I think that's pretty funny. And I'm 46, by the way, if he didn't, I was going to sneak it right in there. Yeah. On your social media. You talk about being intentional. What does that look like for you? Yeah. So I think that's, like, an everyday thing for me. And that was one of the things I had to force myself to do, because first of all, there's one thing that I know in this business, which is that females are much better than males and almost everything we do in life. Okay. I'm going to jump on the sword, and I'm going to do it. All right. Females are much more organized. Females are on point, like most of the time, right? I'm making a very broad statement, but that's usually what I experience. Okay. Even in law enforcement, the females were phenomenal investigators. And that first couple that I'm mentoring right now, his wife. She's much better than him. And I tell him all the time, she is like a Bulldog, right. And the name of their company is actually Pit Bull Properties. But she is like, crazy at it, like, so good. And I said to myself all the time, I'm like, what do I have to do to be like a female? Okay. And I meant that just by being organized and get things together. And I knew that I had to be intentional. So every week, I look at what I need to do for the week. And especially now that I work on my own, I have no W two. I'm either successful or I don't provide for my family. That's the options. So I know that every single week. I got to do the same things to set myself up and continue to build that pipeline. So that means I wake up in the morning and I'm not going to lie nearby and say, I wake up at 530 and 06:00 a.m. Because I hear too many people say that I wake up whenever the hell I want to, because I can. But when I wake up, I check my emails, I check the deals I run through off market things. I run through, whatever the wholesalers do, and then I plan out my day, and I make sure that I knock my priorities out. Anything that's going to be, like, harder for me. Those are the things I take care of first thing in the morning, and I make sure that every week I'm driving for dollars. I make sure that every week that I'm spending time with the people that I'm mentoring and I'm coaching. But I have a plan every single week, and I'm very intentional with those actions. And when it comes to deal finding, I'm very intentional with those, like, every day, I want to make sure that I'm finding at least ten properties, even if it's the busiest day of the week that I can put on my phone and I can research later on. But I also carry that into my family life. And I want to be very intentional with my family, too, because it's easy to neglect our family when we're in real estate and we're grinding and we're hustling. And I have a very addictive personality when it comes to success and closing deals, and I can get caught up in that. So I have to constantly force myself to be intentional with my family and make sure that I'm slowing down at night, which I'm not always successful at, but make sure that I'm slowing down at night, spend time with the family and spend time with the kids and make sure my family knows that I love them because there's times where I'm home and I'm just not really home. I'm still working. I'm still grinding away, and that's the conversation we have all the time, which is, you're always working. I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm home every single night. It's like, no, you're always working. I'm like, okay, I need to be intentional with that. So I just try to do that with business and that and there's other things that I do, too. I'm very intentional about trying to reach out to people on social media, like, make a comment on somebody's post or make sure I like something or just let them know that I'm watching what they're doing, because I think that's easy is to expect people to like your stuff and expect people to follow you, but not give any of that back. Right. So I'm very intentional about living givers game. There's so many common threads in the folks that we have on the show that we all seem to share the same good and bad habits. And we all have these similar journeys. So as you started making the transition, knocking it out of the park, and I thought it was over 100 doors. You're over 200 doors personally now. So what did that scale look like in infrastructure look like? Can you talk us through maintenance and sourcing tenants and doing background checks and sourcing the deals? Have you scaled the operation? Are you still trying to run it as an individual? How did this all come together? Yeah. So I am Gladden for punishment. And I didn't know where my limit was at managing properties because I still manage all of our properties. I also manage close to 400 doors for other investors with our property management group. And I'm very hands on, like, I treat investors properties like they're my properties. So I've been very fortunate. I have three crews that work for me. They've been with me for five, six years. They do my rehabs, they do maintenance. I got to have maintenance guy like, they all work directly for me. And I'm the only one they work for. They do side work and things like that. But I'm very fortunate that I've had those crews. So for me, a lot of times, it was just organization. It wasn't until several months ago where I said, okay, I need a personal assistant. And I hired a personal assistant. And then right after I hired that personal assistant, what I found was that as I started giving off just what I thought was small tasks that could come off my plate. I found out that I overwhelmed him very quickly, and when I overwhelmed him, I could see the stress that I was putting on him. Right. And that was never my goal. I don't want anybody to feel the stress that I have. Nobody has to carry my weight. I'll carry my own weight. But I can't do that to my employees. So I figured out, OK, I need to hire some more people. Right. So from a realtor standpoint, I started bringing in some Realtors on my team that I could dish off my clients to that weren't ones I was going directly handle. I've hired a property manager. Now I'm looking for another property manager now. So we're scaling the operational piece of it because I'm finally at the point where I'm like, okay, I'm not Superman. I can't do this anymore, and I can't keep running and grinding as hard as I am. But because I was fortunate with having my own teams that do all the work for me, that stopped me from hiring other people to do a lot of other things because I didn't have to manage those as closely as what maybe some people do. So we're continuing to scale right now. I'm building a brand new office, and I'm trying to hire people, but I probably don't need to tell you guys that hiring people at this moment at this time. And this year is the hardest thing that I'm doing in my business. It feels impossible sometimes to hire the right person. So can I offer you a little tip? You can offer me a bunch of tips. It's going to help me hire some people then. So we struggled with that as well. And I'll push this off to Becca because she's done such an amazing job that she brought in these VAS, and I didn't even know they were operating in key roles in my company, and they were. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what you've kind of uncovered here. Yeah, sure. Especially for those, like, admin tasks that can be done that you don't need to worry about and deal with. I just handed, like James said, I started handing these little tasks off and things were coming into his emails, and he was getting reminders and just little things. And he's like, Wait, who is this? It was the most seamless transition and introduction into the company, and they have been phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. And they're doing, like, the whole gamut, right? They're doing editing. Yeah. We've got them doing editing, doing blog posts, answering the phone. Yeah. Phone work. Yeah. It's amazing. They can handle anything and everything. And they've got such a great work ethic. So it's really been a great experience. I was so dead set against it. He was just because I'm stupid. But there's a whole world, literally of people out there that are not looking to be paid to stay home. These folks are working at an extraordinarily reasonable rate. They're dying to do their job every day they send full. I started getting these emails, all of the things that they did and challenges they encountered. And if you have an opportunity and certainly you could speak to Becca about it, the virtual assistants are the real deal. If you get the right ones, they've helped us immensely. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at them. I've been on so many VA sites, and I've felt overwhelmed by the information that was out there. I'm like, okay, so I can't figure out which is the right one. So I'm just not going to do any of it. I'll point you in the right direction. Don't worry. Yes, absolutely. And that becomes important. We're getting ready to acquire a new company here coming up, and I'm like, okay, I got to figure this out, right. Because it's a completely different world than real estate. Kind of still falls within real estate. But yes, I'm gaining. We'll chat after. Absolutely. So where is this ship headed, Todd? Out in your neck of the Woods. Give me a forecast of what do you see over the next few years in the market? Well, I'd say I wish I had the Crystal ball, but what I see right now is that I see our market is cooling off a little bit but in our area with the Midwest, when I say cooling off, that is still hotter than we've ever seen it, I don't see the multifamily business stopping at. All. Right. And I think what's driving that I don't believe there's going to be a crash. I don't believe that we're going to have some crazy housing bubble. I just don't think that people are over leveraged the same way they were back in the first crash. Right. But what I think is coping that as I have so many clients come to me with 1031 money and other profits that they made from sales. If they gaffed a dump somewhere, right. And they're just begging for properties and they're overpaying for properties. And when I say overpaying, they're still returning good. But they're paying way more than we would have before. So I don't see the multifamily business slowing down, that's continuing to bang out. And we haven't seen that cool off at all, especially in our area. I do really have a strong gut that this single family market is going to come slowing down pretty quickly here. And we're starting to see that right now. I don't think it would be what we saw before, but there's going to be some huge opportunities out there for people. And I keep telling the young investors that come to me for help, be patient, be patient. There's some opportunities that are coming. So I don't know, we'll see, are you working with these 1031 investors that are not located centrally or are there folks from out of city, State County that are looking to invest there? Yeah. So one of our largest investor areas is California. We have so many California investors that come to Ohio and specifically Dayton. And I think what happens in different businesses that I've been in over the years is once you get into a certain population, okay. Like my mentor, for example, when he was at the police Department, he created the whole Hispanic Coalition and neighborhood reach out between the police Department and the Hispanic community in the city of Dayton. So the rest of his life, we got all the security business, anything we had going on. If it was a quinciana, I had a limo business. At one point, I got all the quincianas and all of their events. Once you get into a certain population, a certain culture and they trust you, then you get flooded with those people because they talk about it. Right. And I think we had some California investors come in a couple of years ago, and they started having some success. And there's a very small group of Realtors and property managers that are really just banging it out here. And we're very close knit family. So we've been flooded with California investors, and I get two or three calls from people out of state, mainly from California. One of my largest clients is right up with you in New York. They're some really great guys, but they're right up there in New York, and they came to me about a year and a half ago. We met on BiggerPockets, just kind of shooting the breeze. And they become one of my largest clients. But I hear the same stories about what's happening in the New York area and how much they're paying. Or they'll send me a quad that comes on the market or six units. I'm like, what do you mean, you're paying a million dollars for four unit building? Like what in the world? They're like, no, that's cheap man that needs full rehab. I'm like, get out of here. Yeah. So the regulatory threats and the legislative threats. We've been banging this drum for a long time now, telling everyone that we can we do a lot of work with family offices and some big investors that there's no sign of it stopping. It's very difficult to apply logic to what's happening here. I understand the intention of some of the legislation, and I agree in the intention, but in the implementation, it is just an absolute utter mass exodus out of New York. We have folks now, one in particular who is a business partner and a friend and a client. There's six or $7 million in exchange and opportunities on money sitting in an account. And we just can't rationalize pulling another trigger here. The challenge for us becomes when we go to another market, how big do we have to go? Right? At what point does the scale make sense? We don't want to buy 24 families, right? It seems at least not being their boots on the ground. Logistically, it feels hard to make sense of. How would that work? Right. So do you have any advice for folks like us that are involved with people that are looking to pull that trigger? Where do you start and how much density do you need to really make these things pencil out? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it depends on how much money they got to get rid of. Right. For me. We have a huge Israeli population that has come to us in Dayton, Ohio, and I don't know how it started. I know that I got a couple of clients, and then a couple of my friends got a couple of clients, and now we have this entire group and they all have different strategies. But we're buying properties for them, and they just kind of land on Dayton, Ohio, but it really depends on how much money where we struggle at right now is if you came and you said, hey, I need a value add multifamily for two $3 million. Probably not happening. And if we find it, I'm probably going to buy it, right. Because that's one of the areas that we struggle in. We have a lot of hedge funds that come here. We work with one right now myself and another realtor that works side by side with me. And we have their criteria. We have their buy box and we just go out and we find it. We pound it off market. We find in the deals. But when you look at density wise for a single family portfolio, it really depends on what their exit strategy is going to be. But in this area, you can make some killer cash. And the good thing about this area is we can find some older owners that still have 30, 40, 50 single family homes that are at that point where they're ready to exit. And we can take down some pretty good deals. So it really depends on the strategy. If you're looking at multifamily units from an entity, standpoint for me. I don't think it makes sense to go into a new market unless you're ready to pick up 40 50 doors at one time. Sometimes it has to be multiple properties, but it just takes a little bit more work. But I see a lot of what you're talking about coming to this area. And there's lots of areas like this across the Midwest. The problem is it's hard to find the right team. It's hard to find, like in Dayton, Ohio, there's, like, 4670 Realtors. Right. And everybody is an expert. Everybody's the best realtor. Of course, everybody is the best realtor in this market, right? Anybody can sell a house in this market. Okay. Let's wait a couple of years. So the market cools down and let's see where the real players fall out at. But it's hard to find the right realtor that is truly in the game. That is an investor themselves that knows the off market game that can find you deals that nobody else will bring to you. And I think that's the number one piece that you got to figure out is what market has. That what market has, somebody that can really help us close those deals and work as a partnership and isn't a greedy asshole. Sorry for my language, but that's the unfortunate part about real estate is who doesn't have that greed that's willing to work together and help solve a common solution for a client. Are you seeing the big funds like Blackstone and are they coming in and buying up the single family homes up by you? No, not necessarily. Not that big. We do have some hedge funds that are in this area that are buying up some stuff. We don't have anybody quite that big, but they'll come they came last time and we'll see them. But we do have some larger headphones that are here and they're buying some things up, and we kind of see them pop in. And I'll tell you, my phone has been going crazy. I'm getting at least a dozen messages, text messages a day like, hey, this is so. And so for whatever properties. And I'm sure you guys get them all the time, too. Right. But are you interested in off market deals? And I'm like okay. So if they're paying per text message, let me see how many text messages I can get them to reply to. Because I'm bored tonight. I'm just having fun with them. But we're seeing a lot of that. So there is a lot more attention, a lot more attention on this area. And I think the reason is because a lot of people were drawn to Columbus and Cincinnati. Columbus is like, you can still find deals up there. My partner actually moved from Reno to Columbus. He's up there now. But Columbus is pretty much tapped out. Okay. You're not finding the deals up there, Cincinnati. You can still find some deals, but it's starting to get to that point where it's tapping out a little bit. So everybody's moved into more of the somebody say the word. I can never say it back. You probably can say what's tertiary tertiary market. There you go. I didn't even know what you're going for. There you go. So that's, like, everybody's kind of started moving into those markets and even us in the Dayton area. What we've done is we've started looking at some of our suburbs, right? So, like, where do we go 20, 30 miles outside of our city and start looking at the suburbs. And that's where we've taken some of our clients. It's like, hey, let's go over and let's go to a town that has a population of, like, 30,000 people. And let's just take over the town like, we can do it. So that's what we've been doing. We've been going to some of the smaller cities with one client and buying up 50, 60, 70 doors from a lot of the old owners that are in those towns. So we've kind of pushed ourselves out of our city as well, too. And we're kind of picking right. Like we're cherry picking different communities. And it's been a really cool process for us, because I said two years ago to one of my buddies, I said, Man, I would love to go to that city and just take it over, right? Like, it's so small. Let's just buy every street, right? Like that's what we said. So now we're in that place where we have some of these clients coming to us, especially some of our Israeli buyers. And they don't know the difference between Dayton or Riverside or place called Pickle or whatever, just like you guys don't Dayton. But outside of that, probably not. So we go to these towns and we're buying stuff for super cheap, and we'll buy, like, 30, 40 homes for them or multi family properties, or we'll buy a whole street of Duplexes, and we're having some huge success. And now that I said that all your buddies are going to start calling me and our deal numbers are going to go up. Well, what you're doing is precisely what and why I asked about Blackstone. Dave, go west, these huge funds, they're creating their own markets they're going in and they're buying hundreds and hundreds of single family homes in these smaller towns, and they literally are establishing the comp controlling the comp. It's an interesting model. But that's what's happening now. Do you play it all on the commercial side, meaning actual commercial office retail. I'm curious what's happening on that side of the business. Yeah. So I transitioned towards the end of last year, I transitioned. I started buying some true commercial spaces myself, mainly because our market took a huge dip during covet. Everybody lost renters. So we saw that a lot of commercial owners were struggling. I started buying up a couple of commercial buildings. Matter of fact, the one I'm sitting in right now, we're building our real estate office out in. It's an 18,000 square foot building, and it's beautiful. I wish I could spin the camera around. It needs a little bit of work. But we're doing a $200,000 renovation to build our real estate office in. But even this one we bought for $225,000. It was owner financed all except for 25,000 with 3% interest over three years. Right. So it was like a no brainer. I have 4000 sqft that's rented out for $4,000 a month already. And I have another 4000 sqft that I'm just like, I don't care if I rent it out or not because it's paying the bills right now. Then we're going to take some upstairs area that we're not building into real estate office, turn those into Airbnb because we're super close to the Air Force Museum. So we're just trying some really cool things and the commercial office space. That's what I'm looking at right now is like, how do I convert those to multi family? How do I convert them to luxury Airbnb? I'm big about playing the waves. And the commercial space right now is struggling. And I don't know what you guys are seeing up in your way. But when the multi family market tightens up, what else can I buy? And that's kind of the mindset that I'm in right now. Yeah. So we were a brokerage that started as boutique homes, and we now do everything consulting very strong residential and really, really strong commercial because it's counter cyclical. Oftentimes. What we teach our team here is if you're going to take the time to earn the trust of a client, work both sides of the book, because many times they're going to have both sides of the book. And it doesn't make any sense to us to put that time and energy in and not to work both sides of it. But if you're putting elbow grease in here, you're doing well with your commercial. And if you're not busting your hump with the commercial side, you're in trouble because the regulations stacking taxes are going through the roof. It's becoming very difficult, and you've got to work it. If you're working it, you're doing great. And if you're not, it's tough right now. Yeah. I watch a lot of posts that you guys have out there with your different Realtors that are listing properties or buying properties. So I see a ton of the commercial stuff you guys are doing. Have you seen the prices with your commercial space drop or those still stand stable up where you guys are at literally, it's center specific. If the owners are listening and they're allowing us to put in great marketing campaigns and they're allowing us to break the spaces up, and they're allowing us to get creative where we're doing really well. And those who are not are sitting with big, empty, dark shells of these 25, 30,000 square foot tenants that are never, ever coming back, not in this market or any other market. And you've got to get creative. You really have to hit it. So I would say, overall, most of the rents have come down a good bit, but in a few centers where they're hitting it hard, they're holding steady. Yeah. What's the employment base currently where I sit right now with this building that I'm in and where I live at, we have a huge military population because we have the Air Force Base here by Patterson Air Force Base. We have the National Air Force Museum. But in Dayton, it really is a melting pot. And we have so many things going on. And we have FUYA, which is a big glass manufacturer up by the Dayton International Airport. We have tons of large manufacturing companies that have come in a couple of battery places, some pet food, places that are making. I mean, we just have so many different businesses are out there. So there's not one base. If there was one specific job that I would say brings a lot of people into the military outside of that, it's just a working city, right? I mean, we have a hospital. We have one of the largest trauma centers, Miami Valley Hospital. My wife is an ICU nurse there. So that is right in the center of Dayton has its own Zip code, and we have a huge medical population that's right there. But there's so many things going on in Dayton, like whatever you want to do, you can do if you come to Dayton for work other than anything that has to do with being on a boat in the ocean or sand or anything like that. Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have a partner and a client that we do a lot of work with. And there's 4 million, maybe 5 million in opportunity zone and exchange accounts just sitting there about the time out. If you come across anything a size, please keep us in mind. We're down to, like the last 30 days or so, maybe a little bit more with the Oz stuff. But we are looking to make a move here. So please keep this in mind. I think your story is amazing. I love what you did and keep it up, man. Best of luck. How do people get a hold of you? What's the best way? Probably Instagram. I'm on there the most. Yeah. Todd pulls official or TikTok. I mean, I'm a big TikToker. I like TikTok, so that's the easiest way. I'm on Instagram quite a bit. I'm on BiggerPockets TikTok. Facebook from time to time, but in the social media sites, and I reply to everybody, I have people reach out from all over the country, and I guess that's one of my flaws is like, I never want to be that guy that doesn't respond. So I respond to everybody, even if it's the craziest messages. I reply to every comment that takes up a big part of my week. So, yeah, they reach out to me there. That's the easiest way. All right, man. Todd, really appreciate. Appreciate the time today. Thank you very much. No, thanks for having me on. I appreciate being with you guys. Stay safe.