WS920: Five Off-Market Deals Under Contract with Zach Haptonstall

EPISODE 920

[INTRODUCTION] 

0:00:00.0 ANNOUNCER Welcome to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

0:00:24.4 Whitney Sewell: This is your daily Real Estate Syndication Show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest, Zach Haptonstall. Thanks for being on the show Zach.

0:00:32.3 Zach Haptonstall: Hey Whitney, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. It’s an honor, I think we were just talking, it’s been over 18 months since I had the pleasure being on your show last time, so I’m sure a lot has happened for you and… Excited to be here.

0:00:43.3 WS: Yeah. Excited to have you back. That show, a show number WS 275, came out July 23, 2019. So yes, a lot has happened for us, and obviously the podcast and businesses and… I’m sure it has for you Zach. But a little Zach, case you have not heard of him before, he’s the CEO and co-founder of Rise 48 Equity. Zach’s main responsibilities and CEO include overseeing all acquisition, sourcing capital and building strategic partnerships.

Rise 48 Equity has 84 million in assets under management throughout Phoenix. They went full cycle in their first acquisition in 2020 and achieved a 1.91 x equity multiple and 21 months. That’s an incredible achiever right there, Zach. No doubt about it. But one thing we wanna jump into, and I want back to give us kind of an update since that, that one thing Zach has been really good at is overseeing people building teams, leading teams, and to get to the level they’re at now and so we wanna hear about that but Zach, give us an update since show 275 or what’s been happening in Rise 48.

0:01:46.7 ZH: Yeah, absolutely Whitney. I think the last time we spoke in the summer of 19, we had just bought our first deal… Okay, so it was a little 36 idea. We just got in our contract and we had two other deals under our contract to buy, which we had in closed yet. So since then, we’ve been very fortunate, we’ve bought about 90 million in the last 24 months, all here in Phoenix, which is about 700 units, and we currently have five deals under contract.

It’s 110 million under contract to close between now and June. So we’ve been very blessed and fortunate to build those broker relationships, build relationships with investors and be able to scale up, so we actually just signed a lease at an office space a couple of weeks ago Whitney, we just hired a director of asset management, so now it’s very exciting now that we have more volume and more units, we can actually start to scale it and build out the business, so very exciting things for us and we’re just gonna keep pushing forward on what he…

0:02:40.0 WS: Wait a minute. That’s incredible. I mean like, you just send all that, like no big deal, you know, but that’s some pretty incredible steps there, purchased 90 million in the last 24 months. Congratulations to you and your team. For sure. But a big thing there. You said you have 110 million under contract, then you said that’s across five deals, is that right?

0:03:01.3 ZH: Correct, yeah, yeah, there’s five separate assets, they’re all here in the Phoenix Metro, and they’ve all been sourced completely off market with no competitions, these were all from brokers that we’ve done previous deals with, and so… Yeah, it just kinda goes to show that, at least in Phoenix, and I think it’s relative to the rest of the country, that the brokers really control the market, and if you can leverage your relationships and you can get some of those better deals, so that’s been our strategy.

0:03:28.0 WS: Wow, well, congratulations as well on that, ’cause in deal flow right now is such a pin point for pretty much everyone I talk to, you know, I mean it is. There’s so much competition. Prices are so high… All those things that we all hear about all the time, but you mentioned you’ve been able to scale a lot, you know, since show 275, and now have even hired a Director of Asset Management, which I think is just a crucial hire in our kind of business when you can have somebody committed to those things. But I wanna back up a little bit and talk about this team you put together to be able to do this…

Yeah, I think it’s such an accomplishment, and so tell us about maybe the people you’ve put together, the team you put together to be able to lead this kind of growth from where you were at a year and a half ago to to where we’re at now.

0:04:12.2 ZH: Yeah, thanks Whitney… Yeah, I think a year and a half loan we spoke, I was quote and quote dating my business partners, I was still feeling it out and meeting different people, and I was not committed to one group of people, and so, I mean, in 2019, probably went through seven or eight different business partners just trying to see like, okay, what are your complimentary skill set? What is mine? How we work together? I was our communication work ethic, etcetera.

So I’ve been very fortunate to really to find my two co-founders and partners in our business, is 40 quiberon San Duan, Robert Chafin, a key for us when he is trying to find complementary skill sets, so my strength is really connecting with people, building relationships, interacting with the brokers, creating partnerships. So I met Bikran, who has an Economics degree as a CPA and is a lot more intelligent and financial analysis and I, and so we partnered up and he’s really just locked down the back office, so to speak of our company, whereas I’m primarily focused on the front office, and then we have a Robert who has a construction background, he’s got a master brand architecture, and so he’s focused primarily on asset management and anything post-acquisition as far as staying on schedule and on budget with our renovation.

And so we’ve really been able to focus on what the three of us do best in the company, and this was by design because we were all seeking other people, and we feel like we’re a good fit, so I’m focused on acquisition sourcing capital, we have Bikran underwriting analysis, and we have Robert doing a lot of that post-acquisition stuff, like I mentioned, and the Director of Asset Management we just hired, she was actually has been our regional manager for our property manager company for over a year.

So she knows our entire portfolio, she personally recruited all of our on-site managers and leasing and install these properties, and so we recruited her because we felt like that would be just the best transition, and right now, like I said, we have these five years under contract, Whitney, and the… Most of them are larger than deals we’ve done in the past, and so in the next four months when we close, we’re gonna literally double our portfolio, we’re gonna go from 700 to like about 13-1400 units.

So we wanted to get her in place ahead of time so that we have infrastructure, so when these deals start to close the next few months, it’ll be a smooth transition and we can hit the ground running with the renovations.

0:06:31.6 WS: Nice, no, I appreciate you just elaborating on that, ’cause I think it’s important for the listeners to hear as well, I’ve seen it so many times, we’ve talked to so many guests as well on the show who… It’s like you have these skill sets, you’re really good at these things, but men, you find somebody else with these complementary skills in your case, two more people that… I mean, wow, what a way to move forward so much faster and so much better it… You’re doing the things you are really good at and you’re excited about, and that makes all the difference.

It’s not these things that you just dread every day, like you’re talking about spreadsheets, so it’s like some of those spreadsheets are not my love in the business. We have to know, I have to know how to do that to a big degree, of course, but it’s not what I look forward to doing every day, day in and day out, it’s more high level. Okay, now here’s the deal we need to consider, we’re making offer on, now then I look at it it with our team, and so, let’s elaborate a little bit on what were some of the key things though, we’re this massive growth that you all experience and even hiring this person to be completely committed as your director of asset management of those things.

What were a couple of key things that led you all to that growth, was it the partnership and then there’s other things, or was it a couple of key things that maybe all of you all were doing before you partnered? What was some timelines there and some key things that it helped you all to have this explosive growth like this?

0:07:50.1 ZH: Great question Whitney… I think it was a combination of organic growth in us, trying to be ambitious with setting large goals and then just being fortunate for stuff to fall in a place, like I said in the beginning, with your quote and quote dating different business partners, and you may do two or three deals in the beginning of your real estate career, sort of speak with different people, and we started to feel each other out, and in the beginning, probably in a que Whitney, I was doing everything.

You know, and it’s stressful and overwhelming, but as you start to progress and you see that… Okay, this business partner is doing a really good job in this department, I can trust him now, I can trust them and I don’t need to worry about that. I need to just focus on what I do. And we start to continue to build that trust, and then through that process, we just started to build out processes and say, okay, you do this, I’ll do this, this is what we do, and it starts to become a rinse and repeat.

And our goal is to scale and be very, very large, but like you said, it’s tough with deal flow, just in 2020, we had a six-month wall of no deals, which I’m sure a lot people did ’cause of covid and it makes you grateful whenever you get a deal that you have it, and so we really wanted to focus on investor outreach, broker outreach, things like that, and so we’ve had this run these last few months where we’ve been fortunate to really get deal flow off market that actually pencils…

And I think you and I were talking about before we started recording, Whitney, that we haven’t even won a marketed deal since August of 2019, so it’s been like 18 months since we even wanna do… We just got a second place in the deal last week, so we keep getting second third place because it’s just so crazy, I got people making crazy offers, so… Yeah, I think to answer your question, it’s really just a matter of setting last fall, we lost a deal, another example, we got second place in a marketed deal, and I was so frustrated and it really hurt ’cause I thought we had that one…

We had every advantage. We didn’t get it. So we set a goal in the Fall of 2020 that in 2021, we’re gonna buy 250 million worth of real estate in the Phoenix Metro. Okay, so right now, we’re just about on pace to hit that. We close a 24 million deal in January and we have one ton of contracts, so we’re on pace to hit that in June, and that’s our goal is to continue to just push forward, and there’s all the books, you can read all the cliches, envisioning having faith, it’s all true, but you have to execute and keep pushing forward. And so, yeah, I think once you start getting these deals under contract, it’s okay.

We may be scaling sooner than we thought, Let’s hire the asset manager, let’s get the office space so that we can be legitimate, and we expect by the end of the year, to probably hire at least one more, possibly to other people, just to continue to build it out like a real company, which…

0:10:23.2 WS: What were those people to… What would be the roles of new people you’re looking forward to hiring?

0:10:27.5 ZH: Good question Whitney, so one would be a transaction manager is what we want… Or basically, if we have deals in escrow that we’re buying or selling, they’re gonna handle all those docs, you have to send to the lender for the legal checklist, lender checklist, and they’re also gonna be handling a lot of our draws and things like that. And so we have a couple of deals in our contract that are gonna do bridge loans, so they’re gonna handle all the draws for renovations, things like that.

And then we’ll probably have them work with some investor outreach and multi-media stuff as well, so it’s tough ’cause you wanna make sure it’s easy right now and you’re busy with five deals to say, let’s hire a transaction manager, we only close these… We could go six months with no deals, you know… You just never know, so we need to try to find things on the deals… So that would probably be one.

And then another person would probably just be kind of like a construction runner or floater, so to speak, who’s just consistently at the property, ’cause when we have 12 or 13 assets, it’ll be tough for our asset manager or constantly if we have a president, so they’ll work under that person, so that’s kind of what what we’re envisioning as we continue to build it out.

0:11:26.8 WS: No, I love that. Just thinking through what you know or the next hires, you are continually thinking about growth, and I think as you hire those experts, it is so much… I’m just learning so much more about how it’s so much more about who instead of how… I’ve just read book who not how, which I highly recommend my Dan Sullivan. I think a lot of listeners, including myself, one and say, Zach it a minute, five deals under contract right now, and all these off-market, give us some tips about how you’ve done that, right.

And I think that would be… Like everybody listening, right? I was like, Wait a minute, how have you done that? How have you gotten that in that many assets under contract right now?

0:12:04.9 ZH: Yeah, it’s a good question. A part of it, and I’ll talk to this as a second part of this answer is spacing it out, so if I forget when you’re mind me, it’s kind of space since we have long escrow and we’ve strategically been able to space these, but as far as the broker interaction… So I’m constantly trying to have some interaction with brokers every week.

Okay, so even if there’s a deal that I know we don’t wanna go pursue, I know It’s a crappy deal or it’s not a good area, whatever, I will… I haven’t seen that broker in a while, or I have never met them, I’ll reach out to him and say, hey, can I go to this deal with you and I’ll review the offering memorandum. I’ll have some high-level knowledge of it, and when we’re going through the tour, I’m gonna show that broker respect by acting interested.

Okay, so I’m gonna go in there and I’m gonna be asking questions, I’m gonna be taking notes, taking pictures, and I may even ask hypothetical questions that I would know the answer to in order to demonstrate that I’ve looked into it. And these are all things that you can do to build rapport with the broker, because brokers are busy, they don’t want people to waste their time in general, but you can’t think that way because they wanna generate tours for their selves.

So you need to constantly be cranking tours and asking intelligent questions, and then tell a little bit about yourself, and then at the end of the tour, I’ll always try to break into them and try to say, okay, what are the terms? What does it take to win this deal, etcetera, so that they get an idea of who you are, where’s your equity coming from, what’s your criteria. And you can constantly stay in front of them, and then within a couple of days, just give that broker feedback, they’re used to hearing no, and I think so many people are afraid of…

‘Cause I always terrifying when I started reaching out to brokers and then calling them and saying, I don’t wanna pursue this deal because you feel done or you feel like you don’t belong, but you can’t think that way, the broker just wanna have feedback, so they know that you’re not wasting their time. So, I mean, that’s a big thing, is just constantly reaching out to the brokers and staying in front of them.

And I think a big part of it just being humble, being respectful and being responsive, ’cause you’ve been surprised how many of our competitors that I know… I know a lot of these buyers and sellers, and they’re just rude or they have egos with the broker, and it’s crazy because to me, the brokers are the goal that represents your deal flow, and so… Yeah, I think it’s really standing in front of the brokers, and when you get to do in our contract is performing be an over-communicator.

They understand that there’s issues that come up, you say, hey, this happened, I’m gonna have to exercise my 30-day extension, I’m telling you earlier rather than when we get close to closing, just all those little things really build up and they build trust and credibility because these brokers are not… They’re not big bad people, like they can be perceived to be, they’re just…

A lot of them are defensive because they’re constantly getting burned, and it’s a tough business to be in, so if you can be transparent and honest with them and you perform and close deals, that’s the key, Whitney, is that then it’s closing deal with them. Get in credibility, and then it’s staying in front of them, staying relevant because then they trust you and then be given you deal flow, which is what we’ve been able to do.

0:14:51.2 WS: Nice. Is there an example where it was a new broker, you met them for the first time and you were able to close a deal off market? I mean, you reach any of these with the first time relationship?

0:15:01.2 ZH: Yeah, we closed the deal in September. And this kind of speaks to what you’re doing with you with the thought leadership and just getting exposure… I don’t have a podcast, but what we were doing is we were doing a meet-up in 2019, we did it, and we were actually renting a conference room from one of the brokers, one of the larger brokers buildings. Okay, so we would have our meet-up there, and I was small to none deal, they didn’t take me seriously.

But I would see the brokers, I’ve got this particular brokerage when we’re doing our meet-up, and they would hear about me, I interact with them every now and then… And so they knew what we were doing and they start to see you buy their deals, well then in September, I try… This was in last summer, we close in September, sure enough, this broker brings me an off-market deal, and we had never worked on a deal together, but he kind of heard of us, he had seen me be interacted, and so any way you can get exposure, whether it’s through podcasts, or videos, or going to networking events.

It just gets your name out there. And you never know what happens. So that’s an example, we’re never gonna deal with them and they brought us on off market too.

0:16:00.7 WS: Nice. Well, I just think that’s an often misconception as well, right? Well, we’ve never done a deal together, they’re never gonna bring me an off-market deal, if that’s why I just wondered, and a lot of us has heard many of those things before, but we still don’t do them, right? We don’t think about, are you reaching out every week and even though I like tip about going on that property tour, even though you think it’s not a deal that you’re interested in, and maybe you already know enough about the market or the deal that you say, You know what?

It’s just not for me. I would say if you do it enough, there may even be a time where you think, Oh, you know what, I was wrong about this deal, we are interested, you know as well.

0:16:30.9 ZH: That’s true… You changed your mind. Yeah, when you look deeper into it…

0:16:33.3 WS: Yeah, so you want me to remind you about spacing it out…

0:16:35.5 ZH: Yeah, yeah, thanks Whitney, thanks… So, one thing is, is like we’ve been able to space these out just kind of by chance, so we are not a money raising machine by any means, okay? And so we need to be spacing these things out to doing one raise a month at the most, and so we were fortunate that we’ve been able to get 60 day escrows with a 30-day extension on most of these, and a couple of them, the seller wants to do at 10-31…

Okay, so they build in at least two 30-day extensions, one of them has two 45-day extensions that either buyer or seller can exercise, we negotiate that in the contract, and they’re probably thinking, we wanna close sooner rather than later, and they’re saying, Well, we wanna have these extensions available in case you wanna do a 1031 exchange. Well, what we do is we kind of flip it on them and we say, okay, we know that these guys could extend this thing out to a 120 day escrow.

Four months or whatever, and so for timing purposes, we’re gonna just exercise both those extensions and we go under contract and bring it out there so that we know we’re closing in June, and now we have two months where we can fill other deals. Okay, so if I get a deal, it’s a 60-day Escrow. We’re gonna syndicate that one now go out to our investors this month and close that 60 days from now, and then we’ll worry about the next one next month.

So we’ve been able to space these things out through extensions and just through chance, where we’re just going on to our investors once a month, raise the money close and then rinse and repeat and go through it. And so that’s helped a lot. And I think part of that too is just communication with the broker and being honest with them and saying, Listen, I got these other deals in our contract, is it okay if… Are they okay with a June closing or You know what, May closing, you know… And that’s helped a lot. And so that’s been part of it too.

0:18:19.0 WS: Yeah, I think it’s interesting, talking about just the open over communicator you mentioned earlier, just open line of communication, even that aspect say, hey, we love this deal, we can move forward, but are we okay with closing at this time… Yeah, and just putting that out there asking… And so, you know Zach… There’s so many things we could talk about. There is so much value, just what you’ve already talked about, just through the deal flow, and you’re always growth and through your team.

After what’s happened over the last year, like how are you all preparing for a downturn? What’s different now or is it different about how you all are looking at deals moving forward?

0:18:50.2 ZH: Yeah, good question was, I’m sure as you do too, we stress test all these deals, so we have very conservative assumptions, and that’s why it’s so hard for us to win the marketed deals because we can’t compromise our underwriting model. We cannot push it over that, and that’s why we can’t win those, ’cause the prices are going too high, so we have very conservative assumptions pre-covid, and one thing that we added once covid hit and we’re still doing it going forward, is we’re assuming 0% rent growth in year one.

Okay, so previously, we’re receiving 3% or 0%, and I can tell you across our portfolio last year at the time, in Phoenix over 500 units across four different cities in the Phoenix Metro from March to December of 2020, Whitney, which is the heart of covid started in March, really. We saw 7% all year rent growth across our portfolio for doing nothing, we’re assuming 0%. And so that gives you an idea. We’re very conservative there, we’re assuming 3% annual stabilized rent book, which is barely above the rate of inflation, and we have very conservative economic vacancy assumptions.

And so, I mean, it’s hard in Phoenix, we not only need to deal that has value add, but we also need loss to lease in place, and for those listeners to understand, we basically a combination of where the deal has rents, they’re already below market, so if those leases expire we can immediately increase those rents without doing anything ’cause it’s simply the market, and then on top of that, we can do value add to push the rents even more.

So in order for a deal to work in an environment like Phoenix work. The prices are surging , the caprates are compressing. We have to find a combination of those two things, then you may see a four cap, which obviously sounds very low, but a four cap, Whitney is you know, it could be artificially deflated because there’s so much value-add and there’s operational issues that you can immediately fix and within a year, that might be a six cap, so those are the kind of deals we’re looking at what we have to really dive in deep and we have to stress testing to…

0:20:43.3 WS: No, that is a great point right there, I should do like a whole show just on that thought, but unfortunately, we can’t at the moment, but you know, what… Any predictions, Zach for the next six to 12 months in the real estate market?

0:20:54.2 ZH: Yeah, good question. We’re only focused on Phoenix, so I’m not incredible source for a national perspective, but I think that you’re gonna see hyper-inflation kick in as my… Is my prediction probably 2022 in the next few years with the Fed pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in the last couple of years, I think if you own assets, you’re gonna benefit… You know. And you have to be conservative.

Obviously, there’s a huge surge. People say, there might be a bubble. Who knows? I know in Phoenix, the fundamentals are very strong as far as population growth, job growth, that’s what’s leading the strong rent growth. So we’re very bullish on Phoenix for the long run, and by that, I mean at least the next five to 10 years, but we think the velocity of the growth will slow starting next year, and we’re also concerned about affordability.

I was just telling my partners the other day, I said, we need to really pound it this year and hammer this window because by next year, we might not be able to afford anything, and they might not pencil just because the prices are just going crazy and you have people with lower cost of capital coming in here and buying it up, so we’re really focused on trying to get as much done this here, ’cause we think it’s a strong window and then we’ll focus on asset management.

But there’s a lot of things you gotta be aware of with the new administration too, and I know that Biden had discussed possibly increasing capital gains taxes to 39%, so what we’ve done now, all deals going forward, we’re making sure we have a very flexible pre-pay penalties in our debt strategy, so that we can refinance if we have to, so that we start to refinance all these deals rather than sell them.

So we’re not subjecting our investors to like a large capital gains tax, so I think inflation will pick up, I think the velocity of the growth will slow on a national perspective, I couldn’t tell you, it’s hard to say, but we’re just being aware of tax changes and things like that…

0:22:34.8 WS: Yeah, no, that is very smart as some… Definitely some good tips there that you left that as an operator, you better be looking into or just be familiar… Right, for the benefit of yourself. But even more so all your investor base who are investing with you. You know, Zach, any daily habits that you have that you are disciplined about that have helped you achieve success…

0:22:54.0 ZH: Yeah. So it may sound like a cliche, ’cause probably a lot of people have read it and talked about it, but The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod is a big one. So I’m a Christian, I’m a believer. I think it’s very important on the days where I wake up early and I pray, and I journal and I reflect, I just feel better, and I’ll try to stretch, they do some deep stretching to help me out, I meal prep my breakfast every week, and I meal prep my breakfast for the entire week, and I’ve been doing that for at least four or five years now.

And if I don’t have my breakfast and my coffee, then I don’t feel right. So I think those are the keys is waking up early, I work out pretty regularly, just try to stay mentally and physically healthy so that you can endure stress and pressure and everything that comes with having to raise 30 to 40 million in three or four months and everything like that way.

0:23:40.5 WS: No. That is awesome, that is awesome. Tell me you need details about the meal prep system that you could share… That’s interesting, I’ve not heard that before.

0:23:47.6 ZH: Yeah. I’m happy to share. So what I do is basically I go to Costco and buy one of those egg whites, it’s like an egg white cordon, and I pour that into the pan and I do four regular eggs and I scramble that up and that creates two servings, so I think it’s about equivalent to like six or seven eggs, and then I cook turkey bacon… almond milk, a bunch of turkey bacon, so every morning I had like 10 bags, like big gallons of black bags of eggs…

Okay, scramble eggs. It sounds gross, but it’s actually pretty good, I know you put on a plate, you put the turkey bacon with it and then you throw to the microwave and it’s really good. Okay, and then I have toast with almond butter, and then I have a little cheap Walmart Latte machine, make coffee every morning, so simple as that… Eggs, turkey bacon, toast with almond butter and then espresso with almond milk, MCT oil winning. And that’s it.

0:24:38.4 WS: Wow, we’re good for you. No, I love streamlining things like that, I’m always like atomizing my morning and thinking, okay, if I move this up over here, if I did this thing over here, like I can put all these things in order a lot better and be more efficient right. At that time…

0:24:51.0 ZH: Yeah, it helps me a lot.

0:24:52.0 WS: I love that. So that’s awesome. Anything as far as habits for your team that you all are disciplined about?

0:24:58.8 ZH: So Bikran was living in California, and I had a Hospice Organization that I was running, I recently resigned from that to focus on real estate full-time, but what we were doing is we were having a nightly asset management call. So every night… And it was at least one to three hours, sometimes four hours, and we had other deals where we’re talking about asset management, how all of our deals are performing and how… I’m talking about our future upcoming acquisitions.

Well, now I’m full-time real estate. Bikran quit his job. He’s moving here in a few weeks to be full-time real estate. So well now… We’ll have that daily meeting at our office… Like a stand-up meeting in the morning. And so I think that’s the key. Obviously, it’s important to always be communicating so that your properties are running well and that your acquisitions are on point, but it also creates chemistry and camaraderie, and it creates a culture where you wanna…

You have to talk to these people every day, and it’s stressful stuff, and you know it, there’s always something that comes up during the transaction or acquisition, and so you need to be able to trust these people, so I think just consistently communicating builds the trust, camaraderie and it make sure that your business is operating well.

0:26:03.2 WS: For sure, great advice. You’re raising a lot of capital right now, and I don’t know too many of the business that are raising that kind of capital, and so what about your best source for meeting new investors right now?

0:26:15.3 ZH: Yeah, good question. So what we’ve seen, Whitney, is that basically we generate content, meaning we’ll go to a proper… where one of our properties and we’ll do an update, we’ll do a video, okay. We’ll do a video update, like these are the renovations, we projected to hit this and we’re hitting these rents and we achieved it under budget, and we’ll do property updates, and then we’ll put those videos on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram with the entire goal of driving people to our common link…

Okay, so we’re trying to generate as much traffic and drive them towards our phone call link, and obviously we’re very well-versed with SEC rules, we have SEC attorneys who advise us on even these social media posts, so you cannot solicit a deal or selective investors but you can say, If you like to learn more about investment, set up a call, so then you get on the call, you establish a pre-existing relationship with an investor here.

Their background, and now you continue to communicate with them, and that’s how we’ve seen we’re capturing the most investors, and maybe it’s even content where it’s statistics or it’s an article, something like that, where you’re providing value to anybody who’s interested in this, and then maybe they wanna get on a call with you, so we’ve seen with covid, we’ve seen that as our most successful 2018 2019, I was going to a lot of conferences, flying around to Dallas and stuff, but now we’re primarily focused on social media content, generate calls.

0:27:32.9 WS: Which the number one thing is contributed to your success.

0:27:35.2 ZH: Honestly, I would just say faith, I would say faith and just sticking to it, because if you have the faith and in your mind you’re not giving up, nobody can take that from you. You may have nothing to show for it, but you’re not a failure until you actually quit it, right? So you can just keep grinding and if you believe in see it, it will happen eventually.

0:27:52.4 WS: Great advice. I could not have said that better myself. Yeah, I gotta have faith for it and you’re not a quitter, you’re not a failure. Until you quit. Yeah, and how do you like to give back?

0:28:01.8 ZH: So my wife and I, we like to do a lot of volunteering at our church, we volunteered at feed my starving children, we were gonna do a mission last year in our church, but covid cancelled it. So we wanna do that for sure. And then as far as a real estate context, I basically quit my job in 2018 and lived out savings for well over a year, I just burned to savings and went into a lot of adversity to get into real estate.

And so… In real estate context, that’s part of we started to meet up is just to help anybody who’s trying to get into it, I don’t have a mentorship program or anything like that, I just help people for free and try to give them advice, so people set up called with me all the time if they’re just trying to get into it. I’ll help them, I’ll send them all my broker contacts, my attorney, everything, whatever they need. I’ve seen… And this kind of relates to our first topic Whitney on the conversation is, I think the biggest thing you can do is have an abundance mindset, which maybe sounds cliche or cheesy.

But it’s true, you can be an elite competitor, but still have an abundance mindset. Meaning, give your resources or whatever you need to people who are trying to get into it, and then we’ll come back to you and they’ll try to help you rather than having a scarcity mindset and trying to keep things from people and cut people off because you wanna be the best. I’ve seen that as a very successful thing for us, I think it’s been beneficial for us, so you just never know when things come back.

0:29:17.4 WS: In, so it’s been a pleasure to have you back on the show and it’s really talk through the growth that you all have had. The teams… Just how you all complement one another, what that’s done, how that’s allowed… You all to scale even hiring now an asset manager and sourcing so many off-market deals, which so many of us are trying to do right now, right? And building and how you’ve built those relationships with brokers, so many great points there, telling listeners how they can get in touch with you and learn more about you.

0:29:43.8 ZH: Yeah, thanks so much, Whitney. I really appreciate, you can go to our website, rise48equity.com, or you can email me at Zach , Z-A-C-H at Rise, R-I-S-E, 48 equity dot com, and you can set up a call with us on the website or shoot me an email and I’d love to chat with you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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0:29:59.4 ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

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