The Best Ever CRE Show

Chris Long is the CEO and founder of Longyards, a hybrid business model that takes old-world storage and combines it with secure contractor storage yards, as well as community support. Longyards is an exterior storage rental business that caters to small business owners, large-scale operations, and even individuals who simply need more room for their hobbies.  In this episode, Chris shares how he came up with the idea for Longyards, how he used a 10-acre commercial property to launch an innovative new business, what his typical customers are like, and the unexpected barriers to entry that come with this unique asset class.   Chris Long | Real Estate Background CEO and founder of Longyards, a hybrid business model that takes old-world storage and combines it with secure contractor storage yards, as well as community support. Portfolio: GP of three properties in Ottawa, CA; Florida; and North Carolina Based in: Ottawa, CA Say hi to him at: longyardsfranchise.com All socials: Longyards Storage  Greatest Lesson: Communication is key. Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Passive Investor Tips is a weekly series hosted by full-time passive investor and Best Ever Show host, Travis Watts. In each bite-sized episode, Travis breaks down passive investor topics, simplifying the philosophy and mindset while providing tactical, valuable information on how to be a passive investor. In this episode, Travis talks about the various levels investors need to achieve on the path to building financial wealth. Using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Travis has created his own hierarchy of wealth building to illustrate what needs must be met before you can achieve financial independence. There are five tiers in this hierarchy:   1. Self-Sufficiency The first level in the hierarchy of wealth building is self-sufficiency. This is where you can support your living costs and expenses through active income. You may have a W-2 job or work as an independent contractor — in any case, you are working to pay your expenses.    2. Stability At the second level, you eliminate high-interest debt, bad debt, and credit card debt. You also have some cash in the bank as a reserve.    3. Flexibility At the third level, you could potentially take a year off of work, travel, or even pivot careers. You may have some investments or IRA accounts and adequate cash reserves in the bank. However, you are still working to pay your expenses. Your investments have not been able to generate enough income for you to quit your job.   4. Financial Independence At the fourth level, you are able to live off of the income that your investments generate. It is important to note that even if you are a high-income earner who makes millions of dollars per year, it isn’t possible to reach financial independence unless you become a passive income investor.   5. Financial Abundance At the fifth and final level, money is no longer a concern. You have more than you will ever need, and you may begin using that extra money to give back via sizeable charitable donations. Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Micy Liu is the founder and managing partner at Life Mission Capital, a commercial real estate firm that focuses on multifamily investing. She is a GP of 348 units, a fund manager of 929 units, and an LP of 187 units. She also works a full-time W-2 job in the data analytics space, which helped her cultivate the skill set necessary to excel in due diligence and data analysis in the commercial real estate world. In this episode, Micy shares how she uses her data analysis background to her advantage during the business plan execution process, the importance of prioritizing the collection of data, and how she is adapting her business models in response to the economic volatility investors are facing right now.    Micy Liu | Real Estate Background Founder and managing partner at Life Mission Capital, a commercial real estate firm that focuses on multifamily investing. Portfolio: GP of 348 units Fund manager of 929 units LP of 187 units Based in: Fayetteville, AR Say hi to her at: lifemissioncapital.com LinkedIn Best Ever Book: DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson Greatest lesson: Confusion causes indecision. Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Rosenberg is a passive investor who works full-time for his family business, Ralph Rosenberg Court Reporters. He first became "hooked" on investments after buying his first stock at age 13. Years later, Andrew and his father decided to begin investing their extra money in real estate. They started out with single-family homes but made the switch to syndications in order to scale more quickly.  Today, Andrew is an LP of 3,400 units, along with small investments in office, farmland, and ATM syndications. In this episode, he discusses what he looks for when evaluating syndications, the one thing he considers to be a deal breaker, and why there’s no such thing as a truly passive investment.   Andrew Rosenberg | Real Estate Background Passive investor who works full-time at Ralph Rosenberg Court Reporters. Portfolio: LP of 3,400 units, along with small investments in office, farmland, and ATM syndications Based in: Honolulu, HI Say hi to him at: LinkedIn Greatest lesson: Much like with most everything in life, you have to work and earn results; there is no silver bullet. Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Slocomb shares his secrets about how to find and keep great contractors. He breaks down the three aspects of a good contractor — speed, affordability, and quality — and how to decide which of these aspects is most important to you. He also shares what to do once you have found a good contractor in order to foster a relationship and build loyalty. Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bobby Larsen has spent virtually his entire career in real estate. He earned his broker’s license while studying as an undergraduate, working in the sales part of the residential industry through his graduation. He then moved on to the investment world, working for a large asset manager based out of Newport Beach. 12 years, later, he launched Vanamour Investments, which strategically invests in multifamily communities throughout the United States through syndications and joint ventures with high-net-worth, family office, and institutional investors.  Today, Bobby is the founder and principal of Vanamor Investments. He is a GP of 400 units across seven properties totaling $115M in AUM, as well as an LP of 10,000 units across 34 properties. In this episode, Bobby tells us how he qualifies operators as an LP and how he establishes trust with LPs from a GP perspective, plus his thoughts on why investors lose money in multifamily and why he believes now is a better time to invest than it was six months ago.  Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Ash takes on the topic of partnerships, covering partners in business, deals, and joint ventures. He also shares the six most important lessons he’s learned from mistakes he has made over the years.   Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Gilman started his career as an attorney in investment banks. This gave him a chance to explore asset classes and business lines, which influenced him to leave the volatility of the stock market for real estate. He began investing his own capital, creating cash flow to replace his salary so he could eventually begin a full-time career in real estate. Today, Michael is the founder of Cross Mountain Capital, a vertically integrated sponsor focused on value-add and opportunistic real estate in New England and the Mountain West. In this episode, Michael shares how his first deal became the best-performing property in his portfolio, how his Wall Street and law background help him with the due diligence process, and his secrets to successfully scaling.    Michael Gilman | Real Estate Background Founder of Cross Mountain Capital, a vertically integrated sponsor focused on value-add and opportunistic real estate in New England and the Mountain West. Portfolio: GP of 600+ units Based in: New York, NY Say hi to him at: crossmountaincapital.com LinkedIn Greatest lesson: The importance of finding the right partner to scale.   Join the newsletter for the expert tips & investing content.   Sign up to be a guest on the show. FREE eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Multifamily Deals & Investing Register for this year's Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City Stay in touch with us! www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | DLP Capital   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hemal Badiani spent two decades traveling between three continents as he provided management consulting services to several fortune 100 companies. Several years ago, he decided to hang up his traveling boots and join the financial world, which led him to real estate.  Today, Hemal is the CEO and founder of Exponential Equity, which builds and buys large commercial assets in the Carolinas. He is a GP of 744 units and $60M of ongoing construction projects that include self-storage and build-to-rent communities. In this episode, Hemal discusses the strategies that helped him rapidly scale his business over the last 16 months since leaving his W-2 job.  1. Be clear about what you do well — and what you don’t. When Hemal was new to the business and looking to educate himself, he insisted on being authentic about what he did and didn’t know. His specialty is in helping others improve their businesses, backed by two decades of corporate experience. However, he makes it clear that construction isn’t his forte. “People are attracted to that authenticity and the competency that I bring to the table,” he says. 2. Focus on what works in your market. One of the reasons Hemal says he has been able to scale successfully so quickly is that he stays disciplined when it comes to what works in his chosen market. He avoids attaching numbers to his goals — whether he does $100M or $10M, he is happy if he, his partners, and his employees can make a good living.  “We just continue the momentum and expansion of business, and the way we’re building each project is more important to us than having a fancy target,” he says. “That philosophy has allowed us for the most part … to stay in a very disciplined lane in terms of what we’re trying to do.” 3. Manage your emotions. Last year, Hemal and his team walked away from a $45M deal and lost $385K in due diligence money. The sellers said they did due diligence, and because Hemal trusted them, his team didn’t follow their typical process. They later found out that there was a misleading set of financial information once they got into the contract and the deposit had already been made. “The biggest lesson was … if you let your excitement let you diverge from that process, you can get knocked down pretty quickly,” he says.  4. Hire people who genuinely subscribe to your vision. A major fundamental that has helped Hemal to scale is finding the right people who have the right values, integrity, hunger, and drive that he carries. He determines who these people are through a genuine conversation about how they view success and what they truly want out of their careers.  “Once I find the right person, I trust them so much they get uncomfortable sleeping at night,” he says. “I look at them and I’m like, ‘I know you got this.’ And they just do magic and they go above and beyond.” 5. Stay nimble.  Because the market has been so dynamic over the last two years, Hemal and his team assess and alter their strategies each quarter. By refusing to stay married to any one idea for a long period of time, they are able to adapt to market changes as they continue to build out their business both horizontally and vertically.  6. Ask the experts.  When Hemal was just starting out, the most valuable education he received came from established operators. “We asked these owner-operators to basically open up the books on how they manage properties, how they do reporting, and how they do communication,” he says. After reviewing five other operators’ playbooks, he was able to distill down his own version and buy his first property in September 2020. 7. Take action.  “When you’re trying to climb a mountain, if you’re thinking about what shoes you want to wear and what pack you want to bring and what kind of filtered water you want to bring, I’m telling you — folks like myself are going to go barefoot and be halfway there before you decide to take action,” Hemal says. Even if you make mistakes, he believes those experiences only help to build credibility and good judgment. Hemal Badiani | Real Estate Background CEO and founder of Exponential Equity, which builds and buys large commercial assets (mainly multifamily) in the Carolinas. Previous episode: JF2418: Using Diverse Background and Personal Superpowers in Real Estate Portfolio: GP of: 744 units $60M of ongoing construction projects that include self-storage and build-to-rent communities LP of: 2,000 units Based in: Charlotte, NC Say hi to him at: exponential-equity.com Facebook Greatest lesson: Do your best every day, but remember that your best is different on different days. S​​tay in touch with us! Sign-Up for the Best Ever CRE Newsletter: www.bestevercre.com/access www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: | Cash Flow Portal | DLP Capital |  Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each week for the Best Ever Round Table, the three Best Ever Show hosts — Ash Patel, Slocomb Reed, and Travis Watts — come together for a deep dive into a commercial real estate investing topic. Have you recently dipped your toe into commercial real estate? Maybe you’ve done a deal or two, or maybe you’re considering putting some more CRE in your portfolio. If you’re just getting started, this episode is for you. Ash, Slocomb, and Travis discuss what originally attracted them to commercial real estate and how you can decide if it’s the right path for you.   1. Why Commercial Real Estate? Ash, Slocomb, and Travis each had different circumstances that led them to consider investing in real estate.  Ash was seeking a way to offset taxes. “I found real estate by accident,” he says. Every year, he would ask his CPA how to offset his taxes as a W-2 earner, but never received a useful answer. “I always heard that real estate was a great way to offset taxes,” he continues. “I didn’t understand what that meant, but I thought I should buy some real estate.” Slocomb was looking for a side hustle. Before becoming an apartment owner/operator, he worked as a youth minister. “I was just looking to bridge the gap with a part-time job, be contributing equally to our family as my wife was, and I finally picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad,” he says. Soon after, he embarked on his first house hack and fell in love with real estate. Travis was following his dream of entrepreneurship. “I just didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do for a business,” he says. “So it took many years to go full-time with real estate, and that was about a seven-year journey.” 2. Top Lessons Learned in Their CRE Careers If you want to go far, go together. “If you’re full-time in real estate and your goal is to scale, you have to start looking at partners, joint ventures, and other people to work with,” Ash says. He also advises carefully selecting your partners and clearly communicating your expectations beforehand. You always have the ability to adapt. When Slocomb realized he was pulling most of the weight in a partnership, he decided to do something about it. “I formed a property management company through that experience so that my partnership could pay me management fees for doing all of the work,” he explains. That management company has allowed him to take down additional deals, scale through hiring, and scale through new partnerships. “It was my ability to adapt to changing circumstances that those things happened.” You don’t have to start small. “I would say to anybody listening, whether you are or want to be a GP, an LP, do a JV, individual purchasing — you really can start with multifamily or commercial, or something above that,” Travis says. He didn’t realize this for a long time, and like many CRE investors, now believes he could have gone bigger faster when he started out. S​​tay in touch with us! Sign-Up for the Best Ever CRE Newsletter: www.bestevercre.com/access www.bestevercre.com YouTube Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Click here to know more about our sponsors: | Cash Flow Portal | DLP Capital |  Cornell Capital Holdings | PassiveInvesting.com | Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices