Episode 80: Trading A Single Family Rental To Financial Freedom With Grant Warrington

Grant Warrington is full time Real Estate Investor, Property Manager & Realtor in Southeast Michigan. He started with very little money, limited knowledge and 1 single family rental. He quit his 24 year career job to take a pay cut to get into full time property management and oversaw around 800 units. Then came his second pay cut when he quit the property management job and gave up the W2 safety net to follow his dream of working full time in Real Estate and not having a boss. He accomplished this in 4 ½ years and he now personally owns and self manages with his wife Monika their 41 unit portfolio.
Get in touch with Grant:
Grant's Youtube Channel
www.grantgwarrington.com
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Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of PreReal. And over the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week, a meeting with outstanding investors, investors, highperforming individuals and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now. Getting It Done this podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the PreReal podcast. Welcome, everyone to the show. We're going to go through an interesting exercise today. We're joined by Grant Warrington. So Grant is the principal and co founder of Warrington Capital. He's out of Trenton, Michigan. And he's going through a process growing his business and his portfolio. And we thought it'd be a lot of fun if we can jump in and kind of walk through those steps as he's going through it in real time. And I know many of us are looking to raise the bar and raise our game, if you will, on the investment side. So first of all, Grant, thank you so much for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for having me, James. I appreciate it. I've been looking forward to this interview, so I appreciate it. Thanks.

US, too. It's always great to connect with folks that are doing what it seems everyone is trying to do now that operates in our space. Right. Find ways to scale to do this a little bit more efficiently and to get to the next level. So it's great to be able to connect with people and pick up the tips and tricks. And this has been like a crazy experience for us on the podcast. Do you do a lot of shows?

I do. This is the third one this week, actually, that I've done. It's nuts, right?

You get into this world and the connections start to come out of everywhere. And everyone's been wonderful in our experience, at least. Yeah, for sure. Same here. Same here. Good stuff. So why don't we talk a little bit about background? So first of all, you have to excuse our surroundings. We have further shutdowns in New York, so it's difficult getting in and out of the studio. So please bear with us over the next couple of shows as we do these remote. But if you could talk to the audience a little bit about your background, you weren't necessarily in real estate. You started in construction.

Yeah, correct. So, yeah, I can just jump right in. I was a Union crane operator, construction worker in Michigan. And I'm third generation. My grandfather was my dad myself. I worked my way into becoming a business agent. I worked for the Union. So I had a great job. I had a job that everybody really strived for. It was a great position. I was able to give back a lot of benefits to it. But during that time, my wife and I, we're 100% partner in all this. We're 50 50. And we said we want to buy our first single family rental. And that was kind of our goal. We met in 2014, my wife and I, and we bought our first rental in 2014, and that was it. We bought it before we were married together. And we kind of ran out of money, but we literally ran out of money. I shouldn't say we kind of ran out of money. We ran out of money, ran out of ideas through network. We met some people and found out how we can grow. And we did a lot of crazy things. So we bought a house. I sold my truck, my boat, and my pool table to put a down payment down on a home, on a duplex that we still own today. I took out personal loans. My wife took out personal loans, and we threw a little credit card debt in there. We bought a house. So we've done everything we could to buy houses, packaged them together into a blanket loan. And then after we rehab them and we refinance them and just move forward. And that's how we grew. I'd been in construction 23 years. Everything was great. But I knew I wanted more. I wanted to be out of it. That was the end goal. But it really didn't hit me until it was maybe 2017, I believe. I don't remember exactly when exactly it was, but my boss asked me to do some things, and I just didn't really agree with it, right? So just morally, I didn't agree with it. And I said, I really don't want to do that. And he said, well, hang on. Why don't you meet me at the Starbucks? We'll discuss it. So I'm sitting there, and I'm like, Shit, you know the feeling, right? You're like, yeah, I know what's coming next. I want to be a good employee. I wanted to do good, right? But I just said, this is just how I feel, man. I can't do that. So I'm waiting on him. And literally, my mentor, my friend of mine, sent me a text. As I'm sitting there, I don't talk to him all the time. Every couple of months, we would talk to each other. But it just happened at that moment to send me this text, and I look at it, and it was a picture of a check for $625,000. And it said, my biggest check to date. He had just refinanced a bunch of property. And I was like, Holy shit, man. I'm in the wrong business. I got to go, dude. I got to go. I got to get out of this. I mean, instantly, right? I was like, I'm freaking gone. I don't know how. It's one of those things that you know it, but you don't have to know how you're going to get out of that job, right? But I knew I was gone. And I'd say three months later, I was working for him full time. He needed a director of operations for his property management company. I ended up overseeing like 800 units total, including ours, and in Southeast Michigan, in Northern Ohio. And that's was it. I was gone. And that taught me, though, I could quit that good job. I could quit that, give up that pension. I could give up healthcare, I could give up all these things that I had that my whole life. I was programmed and told, you can't quit. And look at what you've got. You can't. There's nothing you can do. And I quit. And I went, wow, I can. That changed my mentality. And then that property management job, I told him I'd give him two months there. I'm sorry. I've given two years. And about 16 or 18 months into it, we bought a 20 unit. We're at 30 some units at that point. And I didn't have any time. And I was just working day and night, man. And my wife's like, listen, eleven months you're going to quit. And my wife just counted it down. I was already a realtor. And so my wife said, you're going to sell residential real estate? And I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. Everybody knows that I'm in real estate. We were buying and selling for ourselves, so it made sense to do that. But I was starting from zero, from nothing. So when I quit that property management job, I want to make it zero. So I consistently took pay cuts to get closer into full time real estate. And that's what we did. And I quit that job with $18,000, the second job with $18,000 in the bank. That was it. We owned rentals, but we were putting all our money back into the business. So we had to make some big sacrifices. That's what we've done through the years. But it was crazy. We probably didn't do it the right way, but that was three years ago or so, and we're still here. And this month, January, we're going to be financially free. We're going to start actually taking some bigger draws on our properties just because we're set up now to do that. So we're finally now realizing that financial freedom, which is fantastic. That's amazing. So a lot of ground to cover there.

It's funny how we get signs. And I'm a big believer in that, by the way, that tax coming in that moment, with that check, with those circumstances, I'm a big believer in the universe. All ties this together one way or another. And for you, comfort is like the biggest enemy of progress, right? When you have a decent job and you're comfortable, it's very difficult to trade that in and to trade in the surety of a check in order to go out to the complete unknown. And you see, I call them the TikTok investors. You see these people that are all flash and pizzazz and they look great on social media. But that's not what this business is about. This business. It is tough. This is a grind of a business, man. This is not easy. Yeah, that's for sure. We found that out.

I'll be honest with you, man. We sat like Monica, like I said, as my wife, and we're both 100% in this together, which is fantastic. And we'll always tell each other, you can't have a down day. Today's my day to have a down day. That was our rule. Like, you can't be down, man. I'm down today. So you need to pick me up. And I remember back in the early days, we look at each other, you got to imagine, we told our family here we're quitting our jobs, right? It's. And so we didn't get a lot of negativity, but, you know, everybody's looking at us like, what in the hell are you guys doing? And we would say to each other like, hey, is this going to work? And I'd look at my buddy, and I'd go, he did it. I mean, he had one single family home, and he did it. Look where he's at now. It's got to work. So it was a grind. It wasn't easy. I remember one quick story. I was in Lowe's parking lot early on. We may be at six single family rentals at that time. And I was in Lowells parking lot in Allen Park, Michigan. And it was December 17, and I was soaking wet. I worked all day, and now I'm picking up material for the rehab. We had a contractor, but I had to get the material back. Then I'm soaking wet. I'm sitting in the car and I just broke down, man. And I can still feel the emotion day talking about it. I broke down, dude. I was bawling. And I'm like, Is this worth it? Is it really worth it? I could just quit and be done with all this bullshit. I said to myself, right then I put a note in my phone in my calendar to go off every year at that time, at exact time with a question, Is this worth it? Because I knew if I didn't quit, that Grant Warrington is going to be in the future getting this calendar message. I knew that sitting there. I thought, in the future, you're going to get this message and you're going to remember back to what you felt and where you are at, and you're going to laugh or cry, which sometimes was the case. And I did that, right. And that was like four years ago. And I can honestly say this year, December 17, that went off. I put a post on it on Instagram. And this year, I can honestly say, yeah, it's worth it, because it's not a get rich quick. It's a get rich over time. And that's how you build wealth. Like I said, we're going to be able to pull some more capital out of our business and really be financially free. But yeah, you're right. There was a long story there. I know, but yeah,

it's great. And I think people need to hear more of the other side of what really goes on with this business and the intense amount of sacrifice and delayed gratification and straight up risk. A lot of folks in the business now have seen one market, right? This market has been rock solid for as long as I can remember. I've got in the business 25 years ago, 26 years ago. So I've seen a couple of markets come and go. And I understand what it's like. I just had a discussion with a young associate the other day explaining as they were looking at a potential syndication. And the numbers to me were a little bit tight. They were a little scary. And the rationale was, well, we won't lose our money. Maybe we can't get it out at that point, but we won't lose it. And I said, look, man, I've seen markets where it doesn't matter how good the deal is, it doesn't matter how well it cash flows. It doesn't matter how strong your sponsor is. There's no debt available, period. You cannot get out of debt and restructure if you need to refinance. A lot of the loans now are these three and five year notes. And you've got to recast the debt at the end. And everyone is assuming, well, in three to five years, rents will be up another 30% and rates will still be low. So of course, we can say no, that's not how this thing works. And a lot of people have been calling for rate hikes for a long time. We haven't. We think it's now where we've gone out and said it and we will continue to say it. We feel that the next two years is going to see a significant, steady series of rate hikes. We're watching the ten year year over year. Last year, it was the biggest increase since 2013. This year it's cracked 1.6. It cracked 1.7. The signs are all there, right? So it's not always this wonderful market that we're in. So we caution people to be aware of these things. And there is risk out there. And again, we saw deals where there was a portfolio in particular. That was two condo projects that were one of them was completely built and ready to be sold. And the other one needed maybe three or $4 million to finish. The debt service between the two projects was 83, $84 million. It was such a no brainer what the note was being offered at. We knew the note could be bought for about 24, $25 million. The sellout between both buildings, conservatively, was $150,000,000. This was just a win, win, win, win. And of course, we underwrote it as a rental just in case. And man, for almost 1617 months we couldn't find any lender that was willing to come in and backstop that note. Now, this was after the eight crash, so there was a bit of an anomaly there, but we're in another anomaly right now, and we don't know what that's going to look like in a couple of years. So as you're making these investments and you're out there making these moves, people don't quite always appreciate the immense amount of risk that we take in this profession that we have chosen. I think your story is really unique in a few different ways. You mentioned this mentor at that point. Was there anyone else in real estate that had been influencing you? And how did this mentor come to be a mentor if you were a business agent at that point?

Sure. So just to let you know, I got into real estate. I've always been interested in real estate since my early twenties. Read books. I bought Carlton Sheets, if you remember Carlton Sheets. I bought his program, read books on it. And in 2002, I bought. I ended up buying 2002, 2003, I ended up buying three single family rentals. I paid way too much for them. I didn't know anything about it. I wasn't mentally right to do that in my personal life. I didn't have any knowledge to do it. Everyone ended up owing me $5,000 each tenant. I didn't know how to manage, how to evict. I didn't know any of that. And it was a nightmare. So I had to declare bankruptcy. I gave that money. I gave the homes back to the bank. They were in great condition, gave them the keys. I was the only investor in it, and I was out so fast forward, I always knew I was going to get back into it. Fast forward. My wife and I, she was my girlfriend at the time we made the decision. We both had this passion about it. We knew we wanted to do it. So we got back into it. We buy one single family, and then basically we're out of money. So I go to a networking event. My wife didn't go to this one, but I go to a local one and I'm like, I might as well go. I don't know what else to do. We're new in this business. Bigger pockets is the only thing I had to help me in the beginning. Sure. And so I went to a local RIA, and I see this kid sitting there, and he had a hoodie, just wearing a hoodie. And he was young man, and there was like ten or 15 older people in their 50s all standing around, and he's sitting down. They're all standing around talking to him. You can see they all wanted to talk to him. And I'm like, man, who's this kid? You could tell these people want to talk to him. So I went up to him. Long story short, we had a coffee. I think at that point, he owns 60 units. Maybe he was maybe 32. And we hit it off. And he gave me five things to do. And people ask me, what are the five things he told me to do? And I don't remember. I've asked him, he doesn't remember either. But he said, hey, do these five things and come back to me or whatever. And I came back to him and he's like, you're the only person that's ever done that. You're the only person that's ever done what I said. And I'm like, well, I just don't know any better. I'll do whatever you say. And I did that. He would tell me, hey, here's what I did. I took on some big risks. Sometimes it's hard to sleep at night, but I took on personal debt, credit card debt. I did anything I could to get my hands on money to grow. And we said, you know what? We're going to do that too. And that's what we did. We just followed in this footsteps. And the funny thing is, if you want to fast forward to today, three months ago, I rode in his helicopter to an apartment investing event. Apartment association of Michigan held an event at an airport, and we landed his helicopter. And some of these guys there, some had 3000 units, and my Buddy's got, I think, 800 personally owned. And some have 3000, some have 20,001 had 60,000. And they were showing us their jets. And it was amazing, though, because you say that, but people are like, those same guys are like, well, how many do you own? I'm like, well, 41. My wife and I. And they're like, that's fantastic. Keep going. This is the best thing we found to be able to build wealth. So it's just cool getting in that kind of a room and getting around those kind of people. It really shows you what's possible. And that's where I'm at now in my life. I needed to get into bigger rooms. I just joined abundance because I needed to be around people that are doing bigger things. And it's just huge to get in those bigger rooms for me personally right now, where I'm at just real quick. When I got to those 41 units, I had this underdog mentality. Like I said, we did it with nothing, blah, blah, blah. And we get the 41 units of scrappy like Rocky, right? And that only takes you so far. And I hit a ceiling and I realized that like three months ago. And I'm like, I can't go any farther with that mentality. I'm not going to own 1000 units telling everybody, yeah, we did it this way. And that needed to change. My story needs to change. And it all starts here, right? So I knew that. And again, that leads me back to go abundance. But that's why I got involved, because I need to change my story. And that brings me to where I'm at today. So you're 41 units that you own with your wife. Do you have any other partners there? Is there any GPLP structures? No, just us. We're the only one, just us to own it. All right.

So you realize that owning 41 units where you don't have because that's another little thing that you learn in this business. Right? I've met a lot of folks that own 10. 00, 20. 00, 40. 00 units. And when you dig in a little bit, I guess owning 1% of those 4000 units means you own 4000 units. And I'm not knocking that strategy. There is a massive amount of equity and wealth you can build through that type of investing. Where I grub up against it a little bit is when there are the operators that have a bit of a chip in their approach and they are not necessarily the most helpful folks. And that's where I have a little bit of a problem with it. So do not in any way feel owning 41 units with just you and your wife is anything short of friggin. Outstanding, man. That is absolutely tremendous. Congratulations on it. And good for you. That's a huge accomplishment. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. No need to thank me. That's just a fact, man. That's a big deal. So those 41 units, what was the structure like? Were you focused on cash, on cash return? Were you focused on the Delta between your debt service and expenses and your gross? What was the motivating factor for you in these 41 units? What's the secret sauce that makes Grant go? That's a deal. Let's do it.

Yeah. So with us, basically, we would just run numbers on it like anyone would for the single families. And then I think we got to eleven those single families. And my wife's like, if we want to make 10,000 a month, let's say $100 a door, easy, right? We have to buy 100 single family homes. Right? And I'm like, I can't do that. That is so much work. We're just putting everything into it. So we're like, let's start buying apartment buildings. And we're like, all right, well, let's buy books. We'll transfer to apartment building podcasts, things like that, apartment podcast. And that's what we did in 2017. And I had an investor call me and say, hey, pick a house out, I'll buy it for you. And I'm like, man, my whole investing career, I waited for something like that to happen, and I had to tell him I go, I'm sorry, we transitioned. We're not doing those anymore. We're going to be in apartments. So basically, what did we look for? How do we tell this is good. If it was a good deal, we run some preliminary numbers. And if we could afford it and they were willing to sell it to us, that's how we bought it. That's basically it. And how I found the first one, I started telling everybody. We're buying apartments now. I told everybody I felt like an idiot in the beginning because we didn't own any apartments. But I told him that's what we're doing. And I told the city Inspector at one of our single families, and he said, Why don't you call this woman? She owns a bunch of properties. I called her and she said, Why don't you call this guy? He owns a 20 unit apartment building. And I actually knew who he was. So I went into his store and I said, hey, I'd like to buy your building. He said, all right, how much? And excuse me, we couldn't really come to terms. We walked away from the deal and a year later came back to it, and it was 20 units, $625,000. And in my hometown, which is a great blue collar hometown, I think his average rents were 480. So we knew they were incredibly low. We closed on January 2019. So 480 incredibly low. It's a long story there. I won't get into all that, but lost it in taxes. We ended up getting it back for helping him get it back so he could sell it to us. It was a mess. So we thought we knew we could get rent up to 650 or whatever it was. I forget at that point. So we knew this was going to make money. It just needed so much work. So, long story short, 16 months later, we actually bought a land contract seller financing. That saved us a ton of money because we didn't need all of the money for the bank appraisals and things like that. So it saved us money there. We had the down payment. We had some other rehab cost, but we borrowed 50,000 from a private lender, and we were in business. And then what we had to do, though, is all the cash flow that came in. We had to put that back towards rehabbing. And that's why we couldn't take money out for ourselves. So, yeah, we own property, but we were poor. It's just the way it was. So the great thing is we bought it for 625. So we put $125,000 down. 16 months later, we refinanced it and we took a loan out for $800,000. So we got a check for $300,000. So that was awesome. So we put a little more back into the building. We paid off, plus the interest to our investor. And then we took all of that money. All the money we had in the deal now was in this check. And I found another building off market, and we bought that eleven unit, and that was the second building. So that's how we did it. So when you say, what did you go through? We really put some numbers down. We used Michael Blocks deal Analyzer, and it made sense on paper. Now, today, the rents, they're a touch low. Right now. It's winter, and we're going to go a little more in the spring. We're at 815. Our rents are at 815. So we're proving the 815, we're going to go for 845. I mean, rents are just going crazy, but that's with the rehab unit. Every single one of these units needed to be rehab. They were in rough shape. Water leaks were everywhere. It was really a nightmare. But now it's a really nice place to live. So we're really excited about it.

That's great, man. So who's handling the day to day management and the leasing of the units? Are you self performing network?

Yeah, that would be Monica Warrington. That would be my wife. Like I say, when I say we're in this, we are. She handles takes the phone calls. She's the leasing agent, handles scheduling, maintenance, rehab work. I'm in charge of acquisitions, dispositions, anything to do with the loans, finding the mortgage broker, things like that, major construction, finding contractors. But she handles the day to day, takes all those shitty phone calls and does all that part of it. We're at a tough time because around 40 units. And this is another thing that's great having I always say, try to find somebody ten times ahead of where you're at. So if you got one unit, find somebody with ten units and see what they're doing, what they did.

And the great point is my buddy has told me, like, hey, when you get to 40 or 50 units, you're going to have a problem. That's where most people stop self managing. They don't grow anymore because it's right around that point, you're going to need to start adding some people because it gets too difficult. Yeah. And that's where at we're right at that point. Now, our goal is to put 16 units on another 16. I want to buy 16 unit building this year, and we want to put a full time maintenance person on and say that walking through that with my buddy talking about it, too, he says, well, that's cool. But you want me to tell you your next problem? And I'm like, yeah, let me know. You said your next problem is you're going to need to scale again. You're going to need to grow again because you're going to need to put a second maintenance guy on because the first guy isn't going to show up. You're going to have problems, he's going to need time off. And you're going to have so many units now that you really can't do that. So it's just cool talking to somebody and seeing that I already know my steps that I need to lay out. And it's just real cool being around people that are a little farther along than you. Well, it's critical. What it is is it gives you if you're paying attention, it gives you a real glimpse into the future. It gives you a sharp look at what's around the corner before you get there. And failing to plan is planning to fail.

So without a doubt when you have the ability to tap those types of resources in today just the world has made it so easy to connect and to find folks that are going through, which is why I wanted to share and I wanted to get into this podcast because I know a lot of folks in the audience are making that move now also, and they're taking those steps and it's so important to really reach out and listen to folks who are there and who have been there. One of the big challenges we have here, Grant, in our home market is the legislative threats. It's something that continues to pop up kind of at the top of our SWOT analysis is we're looking at the overall strategy, where we want to go as a company and what we want to do as far as investments are concerned. What is the legislative climate like out by you from a perspective of landlord tenant? Is it favorable climate? Is it a changing climate? What are you seeing on the ground there?

It's pretty favorable. There's no rent control or anything like that. I know there's a bill that they're trying to pass to get cities to be able to vote individually on rent control, but right now there isn't any. 30 day notice starts the eviction process if you have to get to that. We've been luckily six years knock on wood. We haven't even gone through a full addiction.

Wow.

Yeah, we've been pretty fortunate. We had a really bad tenant on this last third building we just bought. We learned a ton on that. Man, it was pretty crazy. But she ended up moving out and we were that close. But she moved out before the whole process. But it's pretty landlord friendly in Michigan.

And do you attribute that success to your background in management and just kind of knowing the ins and outs and understanding the ebb and flow of this type of work?

You mean with the tenant moving out or with your overall success having this many units this period of time, it's an anomaly to hear you haven't had to evict anybody yet. Were you relying on some of your management experience to have that success?

For sure. Yeah. No, that and here's the reason why. Because we're still small. So my wife and I will do certain things, but we tell each other when we hire an employee, we are not going to do that anymore. So we are able to be very hands on. We are at the buildings. We can control a lot more. If we had 500 units, it just can't be that hands on and I wouldn't want to be. So once we grow and we get to a bigger unit count, we're going to have evictions and things are going to happen because it's just the way it is. But we're not going to be in the business every second of our lives. Right. So that's kind of going to be the trade off. But that's why I think it's because we're so hands on and we're able to my wife does all the showings every single aspect of the business we handle. So we don't personally do the credit checks. We use building them, that does the background checks and all that. But my wife's digging into the paycheck stubs, believe me, she's great at it. Things don't make sense all the time. And where sometimes you might have stuff like that slipping through the cracks, it does not with my wife. And she'll continue to ask questions, hey, we need to see this. Can you verify this? And she does a great job at it. So that's what I attributed to. But when we do scale, we'll have some more things, some more evictions and things like that.

So at this stage, what are your thoughts on the market as we forge ahead? Is there anything in particular that you're drawn to, or you think you want to hedge away from any drastic changes on the frontier here as we move into the next year or two?

No, not to me. I always want to be buying no matter what. That's kind of what I've trained myself for, to always be buying no matter what. Now I know that 2008, nine and ten what happened, and I'm leery of that, and I'm a little fearful of that. But I remember in 2000, so in my market, these are really nice houses. We're selling for $25,000 in 2009 and ten, right. These foreclosures, now they're selling for like $180,000. Right? So my friends in these real estate groups, in 2016, I'm going to these real estate groups, and they're like, how much are you spending on a house? I said, $65,000. They go, you're crazy. I would never buy a house for $65,000. I was paying $25,000. I'm going to wait until the market crashes in 2016. They're telling me this. And guess what? You know what I mean. It hasn't crashed. Will it? Eventually something's going to happen, right? But I don't want to be that guy in 2016 sitting there going, well, I'm going to hang back, man. I got to be buying, but I got to be buying in a safe way that if something does happen, then I'm not out on a limb. And that's something I talked to with my friend, too. And he's like, I know how you guys buy. I see what you do. And I know you guys are doing things safely. And I tell him, yeah, one of the reasons we're being safe and we've been safe through our career is because we had no money. When you have a lot of money, you can go out and make dumb decisions. Right? And he laughed at it and he said the same thing. That's how he started to he didn't have a lot of money. He couldn't make dumb decisions. But, yeah, we want to continue to be buying, no matter what happens, I guess, is the goal.

So in order to time the market, I don't believe that there's any such thing as actual timing the market, as you're saying, you have to be in it. You've got to be buying and building a portfolio through a number of different phases of the market. It's the only way to be balanced. And what people are going to find is if you sit back and you try and wait to time the market, you haven't established the connections, you haven't built a track record, you don't have a resume, you don't have those banking connections. And the people that do are the ones that are going to be able to strike and strike with precision in those opportunities. So I agree, especially now we're at a moment in time where inflation is starting to drive numbers up, rates are still low. Like this is kidding. The candy store time. As far as I'm concerned, for real estate, this is a great time to be buying. I noticed that on your site, Warrington Capital, you're looking towards syndications in the future. Before I let you go, could you just spend a minute or two talking about what the idea is, what type of assets you're looking for there?

Yeah, in 2017, right? We said we're getting into apartment buildings and then at some point there too, we said we're going to syndicate and that's what we're doing. We're going forward, we're going to syndicate. I believe it was after we bought our 20 unit, full steam ahead, right. And it just wasn't working. We weren't getting deal flow. We weren't committed to analyzing 20 properties, 20 deals a week, things like that. We had a great team of people that are capable of doing it, but just not something I love doing either. Underwriting and so it just didn't work. So what my wife and I said was, why don't we go back to what got us here? And that was like playing small ball, right? If you will, like single families is how we got started. So we said, well, let's just take what the market will give us. We bought an eleven unit, we bought an eight unit, then after that, and that's kind of what we got back to. But now the point being, I think we need to play on a bigger plane because I know that will elevate us as investors, syndicating and it's something I want to do. We have a lot of people that are interested in investing with us and we've always just bought our own stuff, maybe 50,000 here or there on a property we would take. But it's something we want to do. It's something we want to elevate. Just raise our playing field. So what we're looking for, we don't want to self manage for sure. We're looking 100 units or more. We want a third party management. The great thing is, with my construction background, I took a twelve unit from burn down. I was there when the fire was actually the building caught fire. I put it back together. I've rehabbed over 100 houses and apartments. So we have that construction background. So as asset managers, that's going to be our big piece of the puzzle is what we want to do is the asset managers. But again, we don't want to manage it ourselves. We want our first building to be in Michigan, the lower half of Michigan, and 100 units or more we're looking for. But yeah, that's about it. And again, I want to bring some people on that have some stronger skill sets in me.

Listen, if I could find somebody that's like, hey, I love underwriting, throw me as many deals as you can find and bring me. I love numbers and I love that. That'd be great. So I'm just looking for some things like that. I'm looking for a key principle. I have some people I could reach out to that, but I'm still kind of putting this together. That's my goal. It's early January because I have the net worth. I have a net worth. Let's put it that way. But if we're looking at 100 units in my market, we're going to be around $8 million, right? So I need someone with an $8 million network or six with mine and someone with the liquidity. So that's kind of what we're looking for.

I'm is to just kind of put some pieces together. Some people are going to have fun with doing this together and then just really putting something together that we can be proud of. And we can take to people and really help them grow, too. Because I get so many people that say because I got a YouTube channel, I got an Instagram. And what I do is I take videos and I show people, hey, here's some of the crap we're going through, and we've gone through. Here's how we got through it because there's so many podcasts and different things out there about how to grow, how to buy a single family, how to buy an apartment. Well, that's great. But what happens when you buy one, right? What kind of LVP are you going to use? What kind of master key systems are you going to use? That's kind of my space, right? I like to do that. Like, okay, you bought it here's what now? But I get people that watch that stuff and come to me and go, hey, man, I want to invest in real estate, but I don't want to do all that bullshit you're doing.

And I'm like, yeah, I know, I 100% agree. So that's kind of what we want to do. Hey, come with us. You can invest passively and let us handle all that Bull crap because we're pretty good at it now. Yeah, that's where you win the deal, by the way. Of course, the strike price and all of the big ticket things are of course, critical. And if you don't hit it right from the get, the deal is going to be difficult. So let's assume that we all have enough experience and sophistication to understand where deals should trade, it's the little things, those micro efficiencies that you make in the running of the deal that make all the difference in the world, especially when you start getting into two 35000 units.

You can make an adjustment here or you could tweak something there that leads to even a couple of Bucks a month in additional revenue. When you carry that out over a big portfolio, man, you're talking real money, big time stuff. Yeah, for sure. And then just so that we'd be able to do with lowering expenses too. I heard somebody say, like for every dollar you raise an income right, there are still costs associated with that. But when you can cut a dollar off your expenses, I mean, that's a dollar save. So it is important. It's fun now to look at these three buildings, how we've operated and where we've been able to save some money and go from there. That's great. What's the best place for folks to find you? Grant Instagram.

I'm on Instagram. It's at Grant Warrington. There are some other accounts out there. Those are not me. So it's at Grant Warrington. You can find me on YouTube. I hope you love some of the videos I put up there. That's Grant Warrington on YouTube and I'm on TikTok too. If you want to see some videos, there Grant Warrington on TikTok and then my website is GrantWarrington.com grantgwarrington.com.

And if you are looking to buy or sell a home in Southeast Michigan, if you're looking to invest with me or you want to have a 30 minutes phone call, I got that opportunity on there too. Same on Instagram. The links in my bio. You can schedule a phone call free 30 minutes. We can be asked. My whole goal is maybe I can help you. Your listeners get unstuck in real estate. If there's something they need to talk through, work through. And the best part is it's free. So even if I get bad, if you don't find it helpful, it's free. So this has been a great chat.

Really appreciate it. As always, folks, you can find all the links, everything Grant is talking about below. Folks, we're having a hell of a time with this podcast. We're really having some fun. We hope the audience is enjoying it as much as we are putting it together.

So as always, everyone out there, please stay safe.