Podcast Episode 81 Transcript

Episode 81: How A Single Mom Achieved Financial Freedom With Mandy McAllister

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 Prereal Podcast. We're joined today by Mandy McAllister, also known as the Mindset Ninja. Mandy is the managing member of Good Fortune Capital. And folks, I want you to really pay close attention today. We're really fortunate to be able to have Mandy come on and share her story today. She's got some amazing advice, some great tools, some of which I've personally used, and I'm really excited to jump in. Mandy, thank you so much for the time today. So excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Our pleasure. So why don't we start just by giving the audience a little bit of your background. So many people talk about financial freedom today. You've come up with a pretty interesting way to define it. And she's got an amazing tool, folks, that we'll talk about in defining what financial freedom is. And then we can get into the whole investing good stuff, right? The deal stuff, all of the things we'll get into all of the things. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Mandy McAllister. I grew up a farm kid, had a conversation at 19 that made me think, oh, my gosh, I need to be a real estate investor because a friend explained she owned the property and rented it to our friends. And I realized, oh, my God, you get to keep that money. That's the best idea I've ever heard in my whole life. Right. But I didn't buy anything with the express purpose of being an investment until I was 35 years old. So that was a really long time of just thinking and wondering, oh, this is for other people. They pray, love their way through life. And I'm just the girl who gets the straight A's and gets the job she's supposed to and buys the big house and whatever. Right. And then I realized after I bought that first fourplex that I had intended to be basically my kids College fund. Because if you bought it on a 15 year loan, if I can then pay it off in that time, put a new loan on it, that chunk of cash becomes a tax free College fund. That was the original plan, but, oh, my God, I had an extra $1,000 cash flow coming in every month. Right. So I realized at some point that could just be a math problem, that I could just figure out what it cost me to live and if I had a steady flow of cash coming in that was beyond those needs, then I got to make a lot of different life decisions that I wasn't afforded without setting those things up. So that's kind of how I got bit by the buck.

Again. We hear all the time. Financial freedom, financial freedom. Can you walk the audience through just a couple of minutes on the calculator that you put together, folks? It's one of those things that when you look at you go, when I have time, I'll get it together. But so many of us talk in almost a glib way about I want financial freedom. But what does that actually mean? And Mandy has an amazing tool that if it's okay, Mandy, we'd like to share that in the links when we promote it. It's really helped to define for me exactly what financial freedom would look like. But if you would a few minutes on the calculator. Sure. I totally agree with you. We save financial freedom. It's this nebulous term like Nirvana. Right. So what does that exactly mean? And actually, I kind of went all the way down the financial independence rabbit hole. I did a ton of seminars, read a bunch of books, and Tony Robbins has this idea of that there's a bunch of different levels of financial freedom, and that resonated so much to me. So I use basically that concept to back into what would those different levels of financial freedom be in my life as a real estate investor? Because there is some level of freedom if you just have your mortgage and food and health insurance paid for for the month. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that a personal freedom and power comes from knowing those things are covered. Because I was faced with a boss basically telling me to do something that was morally not okay in order to grow my business. And I knew I could say no because I wasn't scared as a single mom to lose my job because I knew that I would be able to pay my mortgage. I knew that I'd feed my kid and be ramen, but we would eat and we would live. So I'm here to tell you, knowing, like, step one is covered and then knowing that you have those things covered plus some fun stuff, and then a huge extra leap of freedom comes when everything you spend on an average month is covered. And I use a tool that's free called Mint.com to estimate that. And then that plus a buffer means that's really what I wanted to see, to quit my job, all my bills covered with passive income, plus call it a 2020 5% buffer. And then that's when I chose to retire from my day job about five months ago. And then I'm not finished yet. I want a jet membership. I want a stupid, like, luxury car. So, you know, the building of my passive income to help reach those kind of ultimate financial freedom. I'm still working towards that. So, folks, the Calculator is basically a series of Excel sheets that has different levels. As Mandy had touched on, it will break out for you, just the core essentials. And then there's an allowance for how much you want to be able to spend on close a month and dining out and so on. And then, as she had said, Mint.com gives you a number, you plug in, and then it's got the aspirational stuff. If you want a van with a driver and you want a partial membership or you want to own a jet, it has the ability to plug those numbers in, and then it breaks out for you, which I thought was so neat, at $100 a door, at $150 a door, at $200 a door. And it will tell you the range that you need to be in, how many doors you need to have under ownership in order to achieve those different levels of financial freedom. And for me, that was super motivating. We're at a point where we've invested and we've been blessed over the last decade and a half or so on a number of different units from shopping centers, not as much multifamily. We're starting to get into more multifamily now as inflation becomes more of a reality and less of a talking point. But it was really great to see I'm a Gold person, and for me to be able to see those different defined targets is something I'm going to print out and I'm going to put it right up on my board. There you go. There you go. So I guess that kind of feeds into the next piece I wanted to touch on with you, Mandy, is mindset. What does mindset mean to you? I feel like that's another kind of nebulous thing that gets thrown around a lot and mindset for goals just to kind of tie a little bow on what we were just talking about. For me, the more truth that you can put to any problem, the easier it is to attack that problem. So if I know that, oh my gosh, I thought I needed $15,000 to leave my job. All I needed was eight. I put truth to it so I could solve the problem easier. So knowing exactly what North Star I'm running at is the easiest mindset solution on anything. I also feel like, especially women, analysis paralysis and overcoming fear is a really big thing. Hp did the study that for people going for promotions, if a man was going to go for a promotion, he needed to feel that he met about 50 or 60% of all the bullet points for that new job. Women needed to feel like they meant 100% of them. So really figuring out how to overcome that fear, to take that calculated risk, that is multifamily investing, that is, investing in anything is so incredibly important. Like look at my story went from 19 to 35, absolutely no motion. So I'll share with you kind of my primary, like my favorite kind of Mindset hack, if you don't mind. I was reading a lot of stoic philosophy at the time. I was trying to take a leap from like six ish ten ish units, like the small multi in that area up to the 50, up to the agency debt type stuff, which is really where I wanted to be. But that was a huge leap to me. And I was scared to death because I was taking on other people's money. And I realized, oh, my gosh, this stoic philosophy principle of I just need to get incredibly okay with the downside. Not that the pipes are going to break or that somebody's going to drive through a fence because that really happened. But what is the absolute worst case scenario? And I realized that this break even point was we can have an economic breakeven point of 46%. We could have almost half of it not paying for the first eight years, and we'd be able to pay our bills and keep that deal. Right. So that got me so comfortable with that deal. It seemed like a no brainer at that point. So if you can quantify the absolute worst case scenario and mitigate that risk, you are likely going to feel better about moving forward. So where do you start? Right. Where do folks begin in trying to get their head in the right place to take these leaps? I mean, I see so many folks that are trading their nine to fives in now, and some of which I think are going to have absolutely amazing success. But I think that there's also a fair share of folks that are not quite measuring what the other side of the tracks really looks like and the sacrifice and all of the things that comes along with being in a position where you're striving for financial independence. I know for me, Mindset has changed my game completely over the last two years. I was in a position, and while we had a lot of growth in the company, there wasn't much growth beyond that. And it took actually, it was the podcast that helped me break free and start moving to the next level. Are there any books or any references you can point to that are good places for people to start as they explore their way and they start to explore what the mindset really means for the individual. Yeah. So I did a whole list on this, and I'll give you that list for the notes, too, but one that's right off the top of my head, and it's a little bit more advanced. It's not a very first one, but if you're kind of you've been doing all the right things and you figure out what is the next step for you, look up the art of the impossible. This is the whole idea of Malcolm Gladwell's idea. We need 10,000 hours to be an expert. The idea behind this is if you're in flow, if you're doing the absolute right things in this really deeper work state you don't maybe need all of that time. You can get there far more quickly. And this Art of the impossible has a ton of actionable ideas on how to get into flow. And I want to say one thing about this financial freedom and leaving your day job, saying, I'm a single mom of a five year old. It's all me. So I'm also super empathetic of guys who have a stay at home wife and three kids and like that idea too. Like my palm sweat thinking about it. So I kind of came up in this multifamily world with people that were looking for syndications. And for instance, the last syndication I was a part of on the general partnership side, I raised a million dollars. I did a ton of due diligence. I'm on the calls I'm sending out new. I'm doing all of the things as the general partner. My ownership percentage is one point 96%. That is the thing that no one really talks about if you're targeting syndication. So I call myself an equity hog and buy stuff. It's just my own. Think about that. That 104 units. One point 96% of that. That's a duplex bro. Right. Like, how much benefit am I getting out of it? So the way those guys were looking to leave their jobs. Oh, I get this acquisition fee and that disposition fee. Awesome. All I got to do is four deals a year. Oh, my God, you have to do four deals a year. What if there's not four doable deals? How are you going to feed your kids? So that is how that calculator was born. I wanted the floor of income before I went on to do anything else. So premeditated planning with that buffer is really going to help ease a lot of that pain. So let's talk about that for a minute because it's something that a lot of people are not talking about. Right. So you see these Instagram investors and a lot of them are wildly successful, don't get me wrong, but there is another side of the business where I own 3000 units, I own 5000 units, I own 8000 units. But if you dig into it, as you're very astutely pointing out and a lot of people shy away from this, if you own 1% or 2% of those units, it's not quite the same. So as you're getting involved in these ventures, folks, you need to really decide first and foremost, are you a deal junkie? Are you someone that really profoundly understands and has experience in the markets where you're going to be analyzing the deal because you're going to be taking other people's money? Right. You're going to be taking in money if you're on the GP side and you're going to be running these deals. What does that GP side look like and what percentage of the deal are you owning? And another thing, Mandy, that people don't talk about all the time is everybody looks great on the wedding day. But as time wears on and different partners have different roles and those partners are not quite carrying their weight in those roles, I've seen some tough situations right, where the GPS look great day one. And as you get further and further into the deal, things don't look so great. So I'm guessing what you've done is you've moved away from those types of deals and you're taking significant chunks of equity in the deals that you're doing now. So I'm lucky enough that I have some equity to play around with as a medical device sales rep. I made a good living and I set a ton of that money aside. So basically the formula of this investing game is do you have dollars or do you have time? And if you're lucky enough to have both and want to get your hands dirty, you can command a larger percentage ownership of these deals. So the very best deals I've done over the last couple of years have been me and just a couple of guys, and we own them together with a longer term horizon. I feel like you talked about inflation being a thing early on. If you haven't Googled M one, if you haven't Googled the money supply that is in our economy now, it is now eight X what it was. Think of what that means. If we are sitting at a table, me and you, James, and there's two Diet Cokes and $2 each. Diet Coke is worth a dollar inherently. If poof now it's $200 is at the table. We're willing to pay way more than $2 for that exact same thing. So what does that mean? If I lock in my rate, my loan as long as possible and I just write it out, I'm going to get the yield that I need to get. Right. So the longer term horizon that I can get with agreement of three or four people in a joint venture is not something I can necessarily get in a syndication either, because as a syndicator, I'm incentivized to buy and sell in a three or a five year time horizon. So I want to lock in as long as possible. Right now is kind of a hedge for that inflation risk. So that's another thing that so few are talking about, right. We see pro formas all day long, and they're accounting for this incredible upside in rent. They're accounting for not quite the commensurate level of increase in expenses, which is usually flag number one. Right. 30, 40, 50% increases in rent reposition. We're going to add washer dryer. We're going to have all of these wonderful things. And folks, there is merit to that. There are absolutely a lot of ways to drive dollars out of your units. But that also comes with the other side of it. And we're seeing a lot of performers that have wonderful I mean, the rents are taking off over the next seven to ten years, but they're reliant on two or three different liquidity events, and they're not taking advantage of long term fixed rate debt today. A lot of these deals are three and five year. And I've seen markets where I don't care how good the deal is, you cannot secure new financing for it, period. That world does exist, and there's almost a whole generation of people that never saw that. Now all they know is low rates and money is available. And if you're not locking in, as Mandy had said, to get to what I say is the other side of the rainbow, there's going to be lean times, folks. And if you have to pay a few Bucks more today to lock in for a longer period of time and get through the lean times, believe me, they're coming. I'm afraid that there's going to be a bit of pain in the next couple of years in this industry. When the tide goes out, you're going to see who's been swimming naked. Right. And I worry that we are going to see a lot of naked syndicators. And I had a friend sent me a pro forma today that it's going to be a ground up build with year one of $300,000. So you're going to build and have an Oi of 3000 in the same year, and then the next year is 320. It's so much pie in the sky, so much like fancy magic in the numbers is happening that the whole generation of sendicare, the whole generation of investors don't know what it looks like to not have things go in our favor. Yeah. And there's a lot to be said for being very conservative in these models. And I know there's a lot of excitement and folks are looking to jump into the game, but believe me, these deals don't often play out, and that's okay. Right. That's why you work with a professional. That's why you work with people that have experience or are really true problem solvers at their core, and they understand how to navigate those waters when things aren't as smooth sailing as we've seen in the past. Right. I want to take a step back, if we can, for a moment. You mentioned the farm, so could you talk a little bit about the farm? And I'm going somewhere with that. Well, if you need a Bale hay or like you want to buy a half a cow, I got you. Don't worry. My dad still gives me the meat from half a cow for Christmas. The town is like about 800 people, and our closest neighbor was my grandma. And my graduating high school class of 26 kids was the same 26 kids I went to kindergarten with. So it was a really cool way to grow up. But my God, did I crave anonymity when I was 17? Did you get out onto the farm at all anymore? Do you still enjoy that? Yeah. So my almost six year old loves the tractors and especially during covet, it was like basically our vacation. We could go be in the pool and not have to wear a mask because we had hundreds and hundreds of acres around us. So my family is still there. So, yeah, I do go pretty frequently. So that became for me, that was my escape. I ended up buying what wasn't a farm at the time. And it still isn't a farm. It's a hobby farm. Right. We have our goats and our chickens and our pigs and cows and we just added horses. But for me, there's something really therapeutic about escaping and kind of putting your hands in the dirt and running the tractor to the extent that I know how to run a tractor. Right. But there's something pretty cool about growing the corn and then harvesting it and feeding the animals. And I thought that that was interesting when you mentioned a farm in the beginning. Let's talk deals.

For most folks, they can't get past the two, three V eight unit deals. Right. So what was it for you that allowed you to take that leap from those smaller units into, as you had mentioned earlier, institutional financing and government financing and those big HUD deals. What was it for you that allowed you to take that step? Number one. So my master's in economics. So the idea of this hard asset, my first job after grad school was on the floor of the border trade and I saw guys lose millions in the snap of a finger. Right. So paper assets kind of gave me the Willies for a long time. So this idea of locking in non recourse agency debt for the long term with a ton of interest, only that's what I was chasing, the kind of the byproduct the way, to get there with the cash flowing, multifamily assets. So understanding the only way I could get into that better debt was by going bigger. One, I took on partners, and then two, I did kind of that mindset hack. I talked about that. I just kind of had to get over myself because if I risk mitigated every way I knew how and I could really get comfortable if that worst case scenario happened, there was no reason not to do that deal. And now I'm still doing today, I feel like I talked super hairy doom and gloom there for a minute. But you know what? I'm still doing deals all the time. I'm just mitigating for that downside risk and knowing that I can live out of business cycle if I need to. So that long term debt is really the key to everything in terms of my ethos right now. Yes. Without a doubt there's deals to be had today and there, as you had said, when the tide washes out, there'll be even more deals to be had. At that point. I think that we're going to be headed to a climate where not only are investors going to be seeking parachutes, I think that some lending institutions are going to find themselves in a position where even performing notes are going to be a challenge. As those deposits start to drop, all of a sudden banks fall out of charter and they need to get rid of that debt. So I think there's some unique opportunities on the horizon if we keep our powder dry. So when you're looking for deals now, where are you sourcing your deals? You know what I have recently left my W two like I mentioned and my investing ethos overall is that the very best like safety deposit box for long term wealth growth that also has tax benefits, the best loan associated with it. That is multifamily real estate. Right. For the long term. But you also kind of need an engine of cash flow. So I was in search of that basically. So what can I do that's going to bring on faster cash flow than the multifamily stuff? Because it's good. But if you think about it, if I'm buying, it a forecast that's basically 25 X, I'm paying for that dollar, right. If you're buying a small business, you can buy a Laundromat at like two X for that dollar. So I kind of went down that rabbit hole and ended up kind of staying in my Lane. And I'm under contract for a motel that is underperforming thank you. It's underperforming on a Lake that was just listed on MLS in a town in Wisconsin. So it's 18 units. And I partnered with an Airbnb specialist. And we're going to run it from afar, like Airbnb in this town that we know needs tourism because that is a way faster cash flow generator. And still in the multifamily vein in terms of sourcing long term deals, you got to kiss a lot of frogs, man. Like, I'm sticking to it, that if I can get cash on cash to 10% to double digits by year two in an agency loan in a Midwestern market, I'm doing that deal. And I say that to everybody I can get my hands on because you find that deal, I'll figure out a way for us to be joint venture partners on it. So currently kissing a lot of frogs in the multi family space. So just to slow it down for a moment, what Mandy is referencing and this is something we had talked about a few years ago with the Opportunity Zone. We thought that there would be a neat opportunity to allocate some of those funds into businesses that were located in the zones. There's a lot of neat benefits deferred gains and tax free gains downstream. If you hold it for ten years with a bunch of other considerations. But we also felt that human capital was a place we were interested in investing. And by that I mean in businesses. So to turn a quicker buck and not have such a long life cycle to get that initial outlay back, you're acquiring businesses. Hotel is a great example. Any concerns as you vet these deals with just kind of the overall feel and shift that we've seen? There's been well documented issues getting folks back to work. Any concerns with that as you're vetting these deals? So one of the big pieces of why I love this motel so much is I feel like there's risk mitigation and just paying less. Right. So we got an 18 unit motel for $350,000. Right. So my break even point on Occupancy is like 9%. So, yes, I have concerns, however, if I'm a mom that can't if I have to start handing bar instead of selling stuff right, then I'm going to still want to take my six year old on a vacation. And we're not going to go to Disneyland, we're going to go to the Lake. So I feel like there's an inherent risk mitigation there, too, because understanding kind of the Lake vibe that that's where you go as a cheaper vacation. I feel like this has a lot of downside mitigation for a lot of reasons. And the Airbnb model is that Mitigating employee count for you on the other side? Exactly. Yeah. So this woman that she manages nationwide, she's building companies around that she is an absolute rock star when it comes to making revenues like amplified with Airbnb. So you send me a message, I'll send you her name, actually. Why not? Julie Gates. She's wonderful. Sid was here. She's my business partner in this. I don't know if she's going to like that. I plugged her, but it did. But I'm bringing on the biggest expert of all experts as my business partner in it. So we're going to figure this out together. And were you able to source was it an exchange deal or did you seek financing? We did, yes. So a local bank actually happened to be the one who had the loan from before is going to be lending on it, plus some additional dollars for us to do some rehab. Great. And you had said it's underperforming now. So you think that there's a good bit of spread in the ADR and you're able to drive. Great. That's awesome. Current owners are running it. They're not supposed to run it as an apartment building, but they're letting longterm tenants live in it because they got scooped over COVID. They're basically charging $18 a night. We know based off of all the data and a study that was done by the municipality that we'll be able to have above 50%, occupancy, at least $70 a night. So we're super excited to get this going. It will be a couple of months till we finally take it down because rural areas are having trouble getting appraisal. But you take what you can take at 350,000 for 18 units? Yeah, I would say so. Right.

Interesting. We found a place in Pennsylvania that was a similar story. We're finding there's a lot of opportunity with some of the mom and pop run places that have not really fully embraced technology and haven't opened up that toolbox. There's still a good bit of opportunity out there. And I find it really interesting that you said you found the deal right there in MLS. Yes, I did. Well, I mean, someone brought it to me. We tried to make a different partnership work. We walked away, and then that deal came back to us. So there's something big to be said about kind of staying close to the rim when something kind of goes away. If it's meant to be, James, it'll come back to you and that's it. There's a lot of value in MLS. People think that you have to and look, you do. You said you kiss a lot of frogs and you do what you need to do. But we're even writing a software for it now because we have found that there's a lot of real estate that is overlooked right there in the MLS. And through the tips and tricks in technology, we're able to find a few hacks that will help identify deals for us without having to take out the old pen and pencil and underwrite them kind of one at a time. So your portfolio, is it outside of the hotel on the horizon? Is it exclusively multifamily? Do you have any commercial assets in there as well? All places people live. I still have two single family homes in a portfolio. I actually just sold almost everything I owned in the state of Illinois because I don't trust the state of Illinois. The taxes are bananas. I mean, if I look at teacher and police pension funds, they are underfunded like crazy. And who are they going to come after, the man in terms of property taxes? I actually a single family investor. His whole play is to just not pay taxes. That is his whole place to just not pay taxes. And it's going to take three years for them to take back the property, but he gets the cash flow in the interim. The fact that the nature of Chicago has yielded a beneficial play to just not pay taxes is mind blowing to me. So it's multifamily predominantly in the state of Indiana, some in Wisconsin. So for us, and we've touched on this in the past. I was going to ask, how much of a factor does legislative risk play when you're identifying a market that you want to be in? So legislative risk is up on that analysis pretty high for you. Yeah. I mean, one of the single family homes the lady owes me the equivalent of a car and it's one unit. Do you know what I mean? The fact that I'm trying to do right by her, but I got to pay my bills and she, in my opinion, is just kind of playing the game. So the chance to you're totally right. The legislative risk, the landlord friendliness of these other States is why I voted with my dollars and moved my entire portfolio there. Yes. So a lot of times the legislation that we see rolling out, it's well intended, but it is awful in the implementation. And what happens, unfortunately, is the good guys like us, folks like Mandy and her team, and what we've unfortunately had to do is we've picked up and just located elsewhere because we can't sustain it. I have some holdings in a small town in Pennsylvania. I have some holdings right here in New York City. I was talking to some friends and colleagues and investors in Pennsylvania. The gentleman was a nuisance tenant. He had threatened a neighbor. They were out in 30 days. Sheriff showed up. No if, ands or buts about it. And not that I was in any way trying to be a bully or harm anybody. But this is someone who was disrupting the quality of life. And there were families and kids in this building, and within 30 days, they were out here in New York. That's several year process. And the allure for New York has always been it's the epicenter for jobs. And the pain was well worth it because at the end of the day, the investment paid dividends. But we're unfortunately seeing quite a shift in our state and in our city. And we have a new leader here, Mayor Adams, and we're hearing great things out of City Hall. And we hope that the Mayor is able to live up to those things because, gosh, it's become really tough to stay that gritty New Yorker and kind of hang in there. If you look at people voting with their feet, we're just talking about voting with our dollars, people voting with their feet. After covet the state that lost the greatest amount of population was in New York. Second state was Illinois. Third was California. Right. So if what you want is a long term investment, you need jobs, you need people. And if we're losing jobs, if we're losing people, there's a whole other set of reasons to not be investing in these States we're talking about. Yeah. So I feel like there's two ways to that. And this is all relevant folks in the investment world, because we're trying to identify those next emerging markets. Right. Where do we want to be if we can a little bit ahead of the curve. So as Mandy pointed out earlier, you can sustain and you can operate at a 40 or 50 or 60% occupancy rate, because those things sometimes are reality. And without getting too far into it, we're finding that the initial wave were folks that could move. They had the financial wherewithal to say, you know what, I'm trading my digs in and I'm going to go choose a different life, a different lifestyle in a different place. The second wave that we're starting to see now are the employer based moves where the employers are saying, I'm not sure we're going to have people back five days a week or three days a week or in some cases at all. We're seeing some big companies decentralized locate in the outer boroughs and locate out of state. And that next wave will be the companies pulling the first were people leaving. And this next wave, I believe, will see companies pulling that employment base out to these other markets where they're going to put down roots. Well. And how many employees can work from afar. Right. So what are we? I have a friend of a friend was working in New York City downtown as a designer or something computer based, and was able to have that exact same job and move to Kansas City and live like a King because she didn't need to live in her $3,000 a month apartment anymore. Yeah. So you're keeping a close eye on emerging markets, if you will, or markets that are presenting threats. What about geographically from Homebase? Are you investing where it's outside of arms reach, where you don't have the ability to triage or deal with day to day boots on the ground? Have you gotten to a point where you're comfortable in that type of environment? I operate better when I can completely hand off to someone and then just inspect what I expect. However, from my small I teach a course on small multi specifically, and I feel like they're so small that they don't have eyes on them in the property management the way the larger 50 plus units, let's say, have property management eyes on it and it can get away from you really quickly. And a six unit recently had a drug dealer in it, so I did have to engage. I like my assets to be close enough that I can be down and back by dinner, but far enough away that I'm not driving by or triaging any toilet fixes. So with that comes infrastructure. It comes having professionals that you rely upon. Could you spend a few minutes talking about how do you do that? What comes first is it the investment that comes first, and then you build a reliable team around it? Because we're struggling with this now, Candidly. Right. We're investing more and more further away from home, unfortunately, and we're struggling to find that place where you have enough critical mass to support the right management company, the right brokers, the right supers. Right. All of those different elements that you need. But it's hard to do that without having the asset. So how does someone manage that? So I feel like that conversation is very different depending on the size of the asset that you're looking to take on. Right. But I've done it both ways. I've done asset first and then property management, and I've done property management first and then asset management. And I can almost emphatically say that when I did property management first, when I vetted them in a deeper way, in both the larger and the smaller stuff, I've had greater success. So I'll give you an example on the smaller stuff. I didn't realize it at the time. That one of my happiest mistakes of my first acquisition, that tiny little four unit, that thing, I was scared to death up. I didn't realize that the property managers in most States, you have to have a real estate license in order to manage property. Right. So if I picked them first, then they're doubly incentive when they get the buyers Commission two, they get the business of managing the asset once I do find it. So especially one of the things I train the people that I do the small multi course with is look for the property manager first. And what I was doing was student rentals. So I just looked for the group that had branded themselves to students. They had already done all the heavy lifting. I found a small multi that made sense and plugged it into their machine and went from 450 Adore to 820 Adore within like two years. Wow. Okay, so do the homework. First is vetting to make sure that the market is right for you. Right. That there's enough of those metrics that make you feel okay. This is an emerging market that I want to be a part of next is fine, and I hadn't thought of it that way. But gosh, does that make sense? You find someone that is a property manager, which likely is going to require real estate licensure, and they help to source the actual asset for you. Okay. So once you've done that, are you finding that there's an economy of scale? If you found a place that you're comfortable and you acquire a 30 or 40, 5100, 150 unit building, are you trying to build around that create kind of a critical mass? That's exactly what we're trying to do. So in the Indianapolis market, we've partnered with a property management firm who they also manage their own assets. We're kind of going B class based. They're kind of very strong C class. So there's not a ton of competition in terms of triaging tenants. But what that means is that they can move their person. One of their people, we don't have to employ her full time. We own her. We own her help on Tuesday and on Thursday and not for the entire year. So as we continue to require more assets in that area, we'll have more and more specialized property management. Just that one person will be our full time employee moving forward. Got it. So you're doing a lot of self ownership at this point. Have you discussed or explored syndication versus a fund? I closed on a syndication in November, and it was born of I talked all this be a class asset long term. Well, this is what I do. And so many friends and family wanted my help but couldn't stroke a $500,000 check in order to my partner in that deal. So I signed on to work with the syndication that met all of my criteria, the B class asset, the emerging market of it's so funny to think emerging market and think like Louisville, you think like Libya is an emerging market anyway. So I really kind of only did that to help out my friends and family that had been asking. But in terms of that ethos of I want super long term debt. I want to own for the long term. I don't want to be a flipper of multifamily, which in my opinion, that's what a three year old is. I'm the flipper of single family rather than the buy and hold. And if I can't take advantage of that long term locked in low rate, which is the thing we have going for us right now. But I hear so many people say we're so overheated. Yes, you're right. We're super hot right now. But what do we have going for us, these super low rent. And if you're talking value add right now, one more thing that I think that you might find interesting thought pattern is it's NOI divided by cap equals my value. Right. So if I'm buying in a four and I'm talking about this being a value add property and I have to sell it at a five, if I lost small numbers, if I go from a four to a five and increase that denominator by 25% small numbers right now, I have to increase that numerator my ROI by 25% just to keep up with the value. So I have the Willie for short term holds right now. So the ethos of being able to communicate a long term hold with just a couple of partners is significantly easier than with the syndication. This has been just an amazing wealth of information for me and for the audience. You do a lot of work on the women's leadership side. Could you talk a little bit about that? Sure. This is a boys club. Commercial real estate is a boys club, right. So I was a traitor. I was on the floor of the Board of Trade. I was a College athlete. I do all of these things that I guess only boys want to do. So I feel like as I've gotten older, I want more and more women to know that they've got a shot at doing these things if they want to. So I kind of banded arms with some friends who were doing multifamily investing. About a couple of years ago, we started a group called Aspiring Women Achieving More, which is just kind of a place to troubleshoot problems to get accountability. It's basically all free stuff. It's all free resources of women trying to help other women out on this journey. Because I firmly believe you're given these two arms for a reason, one to pull yourself up and one to pull other people up and we want to provide a platform to help pull other people up who are getting started on commercial real estate journeys. That's amazing, Mandy, what's the best way for folks to find you? Sure, Mandymcallister.com, I've got a blog with a bunch of book recommendations and stuff that will give you the link to it also has all the social handles for me and for aspiring women and good fortune capital which is my investing arm. Amazing. She's the mindset Ninja folks. Mandy McAllister Mandy, thank you so much for the time today. Thank you. This was a real treat as always. Everybody out there. Please stay safe.