WS1215: Key Metrics to Evaluate Before Buying With Ruben Dominguez

EPISODE 1215

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:00.1 

Ruben Dominguez (RD):  All the metrics tell us that everything is going to go up so things are going to get more expensive. But then our underwriting, we’re saying, no, it’s going to actually lose value. And so what that means for investors is we’re going to lose a lot of deals but the ones we do get, we’re probably going to outperform pretty good on those because of that exit cap. The exit cap’s going to either stay the same or go down and that’s going to make the deal just be a rock star deal.

0:00:23.1 

Whitney Sewell (WS): This is your daily Real Estate Syndication Show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest and I go through some metrics that he considered the most important to know before moving forward with the project. His name is Ruben Dominguez. Ruben is the founder and principal of Totem Capital Group. He’s the founder of San Antonio Real Property LLC, a Texas single-family, multifamily home acquisitions company. He’s recently served as an executive for several SaaS companies, and he’s grown and exited SaaS companies as well. On the real estate side, he’s grown his business, and you’re going to hear about some challenges, the biggest challenge this past year and how he’s overcome that. I’m sure you have experienced some of the same challenges. I know I have. And then also, we’re gonna get into some of those metrics behind when a deal works for them and when it doesn’t. I think that’s going to be very helpful for you as a listener, especially if you are wondering about that for yourself and some things you need to consider. Also, some ways around how he has given back to the community and what that’s done for his business as well. I know you’re going to learn a lot from Ruben today.

0:01:30 

WS: Ruben, welcome to the show. I can’t believe we’ve not met yet. You were just telling me about somebody else in the industry that’s been on the show a few times that I would consider a friend. I mean he’s done some big stuff in our business. But you and I have not met before so I just want to know about you. I’m looking forward to this conversation. Give the listeners a little bit about your background, Ruben, in real estate, and give us a little bit about your business model, what you all focus on.

0:01:56.0 

Ruben Dominguez (RD): Definitely. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So, my name is Ruben Dominguez. I’m a principal and founder of a firm called Totem Capital Group. We are a multifamily acquisition company and so basically what we do is we help investors invest in multifamily. My background started when I was in the corporate world for a long time, in IT. I was middle management and then executive eventually and I had a very stressful, very high-paying, very demanding job. I was missing my kids growing up. But, I was looking for a way to get out and I started with real estate. We started trying to acquire single-family rentals and another one, another one, another one. We got to the point where we ran out of money to buy single-family rentals because each one you got to put some money into. So, we started doing flips to find more rentals. Then, we started doing wholesale deals to find more properties and cut out some of the fees that we were paying wholesaling companies.

We tried to scale that model, the single-family model. I think our biggest year was 2014. We probably did 20 deals that year and I think we acquired six rentals that year. My whole purpose for trying to get into single-family was to have more time and I actually looked back and said, ‘I missed the entire year, I didn’t see my kids at all.’ All weekends, all nights, every free moment I had from my corporate job, I was working on my single-family stuff. So I said, there’s got to be a better way. 

0:03:17.3 

RD: I’m not that close to retiring yet with my single family. So, we moved over to multifamily. I was trying something but my buddies kept telling me, do multifamilies, just scalable. But my returns were so good on the single-family side. I was really hesitant to move over. But it got to the point where I was so…time, I just didn’t have time and I was not spending any time with the family. There’s got to be a better way and so that’s when I reluctantly moved to multifamily. I started to passively invest in people’s projects. Eventually, I said, hey I’m going to come on and co-sponsor, co-GP a project. Actually, it was with our mutual friend that we know and that’s really when the magic clicked in my head – well, that was actually easier than single-family or about the same amount of effort. But, instead of doing one single-family house, we just did 268 units, it’s a 268-unit project. And it was like, okay, my returns are lower but it’s across a multi-million dollar building instead of a $200,000 single-family house. So, that’s when it really clicked for me. I was like, okay, we can do this over and over and over again just like I did in single-family. 

0:04:19.6

RD: That’s when we started our single-family business and our model. To answer that question – we go out and look for class B and C assets here in South Texas, so, Houston, Austin, well, not really Austin because nothing over there is, really the numbers aren’t working, but Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi down south and in the south Texas Valley.  We’re looking for some type of value-add place. These are older, some of the units are dated. We like to go in there and upgrade them, make them nice, make it a nice place for tenants. We hold those for three to five years normally and then we sell them. It’s a win for our investors, it’s a win for our tenants, it’s a win for us. So, that’s been our business model for the last few years and we got some pretty lofty goals this year as well.

0:05:05

WS: That’s awesome. I appreciate you elaborating on the business model a little bit. The bio that I had of you since Texas is a single-family home acquisitions company. You were a single-family acquisitions company but now you’re multifamily acquisitions company. I want to get into that some more, but you also said something about being an executive in some SaaS companies as well. How is that connected to the real estate industry? Or what does that look like?

0:05:28

RD: I wouldn’t say this software piece…SaaS is a “software as a service” company for people that don’t know. Those are like your online subscription-based models of software. So, not really directly connected to that but I think as I was in operations, so the operational stuff and the metrics we looked at, how to run a team, that stuff really directly translates to multifamily. Because I can look at our financial statement which I did, and I can look up apartment financial statements. It’s kind of the same stuff, income, expenses. You’re always trying to reduce expenses and increase the income on property just like we were in SaaS model. It’s kind of like a subscription. Your tenants are paying you every single month and the same with the SaaS model. Your customers are paying you every single month and you got to make sure you’re providing a great value to them so they continue to want to do that. With tenants, it’s like, we’re going to give you a little bit of a rent bump every year to keep up with inflation and we want to make sure that they’re happy to pay that and not go look somewhere else. Because if you’re going to raise the rent 20 to 50 bucks a year, it’s like, do they want to go look somewhere else? You want to not have to question that, and that was the same thing in a SaaS company. You don’t want your customers to cancel on you any minute. You don’t want them to do that. You want to provide a great value for them so they’re happy to pay that every single month.

0:06:46.4 

WS: Yeah, that’s awesome. I just wondered if there was any connection there but obviously on the multifamily acquisitions piece. I wonder, what’s your biggest challenge this past year on multifamily acquisitions? Let’s talk about that a little bit.

0:06:57

RD: It’s finding a property, a project that works for us. We’re pretty conservative on how we analyze properties, and because we’re raising capital from investors, we got to be good stewards of their capital. It’s more important to me than if it was my own capital. So, we’re really careful. Because of that, it means we lose a lot of deals that we probably could have bought, we probably would have made a lot of money on, but we don’t want to buy it because if something happens with the economy or the market. It’s so tight that we’re like, I don’t feel good about that so it means that we have to analyze a lot of stuff. We analyze probably 50 deals a month. And we have to form a lot of relationships, do a lot of networking. But, that’s probably been the biggest challenge – to find something especially here, it’s a really hot market in Texas.

So, we got a lot of competition and a lot of people that are coming in with money that sometimes when I lose deals I’m like, how did they pay what they paid for? I have no idea but, you know, I guess it might be institutional money, 1031 exchange money.  I don’t know but that’s been the biggest challenge for us definitely.

0:08:00

WS: I would agree completely. There’s a project we were looking at then. It was sold, maybe three years ago, going for $200 a door and they’re looking at $400 a door. It’s 80s vintage. It’s hard to believe. But anyway, let’s talk about that a little bit. What’s been a successful way that you found the project to buy?

0:08:17

RD: The last two projects that we bought were based off our relationships with brokers. One of our big key pillars is when we submit a letter of intent, that price, we close at that price unless something major happens or we find something major. And it’s got to be pretty big. It’s got to be probably 100K for us to go back to that seller and say hey, we found this and we didn’t know about this before. We got some things that we do to make sure we don’t find those big surprises like, sometimes, walk. We will ask for early access agreement. So before we sign a contract, we’ll get in there and we’ll look at the property pretty closely. Get some contractors in there just to make sure we’re not missing anything. But that’s been the biggest key. You want brokers confident that you’re a ‘closer’, and you’re going to close at the price that you agreed upon. You want the sellers confident that you can do that because it’s a small, pretty small world. There are a lot of multifamilies but in every market, there’s a handful of buyers, a handful of brokers. 

0:09:10.8 

RD: If you ruin that relationship, they’re not going to bring you deals. We want the ones that… the last two were – we really need to sell this pretty quickly. One was because they had a loan coming due so they had to pay the bank back within a few months, not a great position to be in. So, if you have somebody come back and say ‘I can’t close, can’t execute’, that might put them in a bad position. And the other one was  – they need to get that equity quickly because they were buying a big portfolio or a $700-million portfolio and so they needed to unlock that capital and that deal to put in the other one. So, they only brought in two or three buyers that they knew could close and so that’s how we got those last two deals. 

0:09:48.4 

WS: So, outside of just track record – time. I mean we’re experiencing that as well. We get deals from brokers that we’ve sold and bought projects with. They know we can close, all those things. But for somebody that’s just getting started, that’s frustrating. You got to start somewhere. Any tips for building that kind of relationship with a broker? Outside of just the time and track record that would be helpful?

0:10:10.5 

RD: Definitely. I think the easiest way to get in is – and I tell this to people all the time – Don’t go out there if you’ve not ever done a multifamily deal. Don’t go out there and try to contact brokers because they’re not going to know you. They’ll probably send you stuff but it’s going to be the stuff that they’re sending everyone, probably overpriced a little bit. Not going to work. And everyone else is like, I’m not quite there. And they’re going to hope you’re going to buy it at a higher price. What you really want to do to get a good track record is you want to partner with someone that has a track record in whatever market you’re looking at. Go find, go find a Whitney, right? You’ve got a track reference and you got to bring some value to that person. They’re not going to just partner with someone just because you want to be in multifamily. You gotta bring some value. That’s the best way. 

0:10:54 

RD: And then you do a few deals as a partner. You do some work. You’re going to have to do some more work, you have to provide value for that partner. But after you do two or three of those, you can confidently go to a broker. The first question they ask is, ‘what’s your experience?’, ‘what are you looking for?”. You can confidently say, ‘I’ve done three deals and here they are, they’re in the market’. Yes, you’re a partner but that still gives you some credibility because you know what you’re doing. And then also, you can confidently, when they ask you that question, you can say that. And you also know what you’re doing because you’ve been on the lender calls, you’ve been on the asset management calls. So, you’re not the newbie out there trying to buy a deal. I think that’s a huge mistake if you’re a newbie out there, talking to brokers and you don’t know your buying criteria and you don’t have a track record.

They’re not going to be too confident about your ability to close which is the number one in multifamily – ‘do you have the ability to close this deal?’

0:11:42.5 

WS: That’s right. No doubt about it. You mentioned that challenge, finding a deal that works. Could you give us a couple of those metrics around it? What makes that deal work? For you, what are you looking at there? Maybe that could be a passive investor that’s asking you. Make that scenario of passive investors asking you a query of what makes a deal work for you especially in this environment?

0:12:05

RD: Our number one metric we look for is the return that we can provide to our investors or passive investors. That’s the biggest key. If we can’t make that work, we won’t buy the deal.

Now the trick to that is, we have a couple of metrics. We want to be conservative on our rent growth. What can we actually get in the market? Let’s say we do a remodel. We’re going to spend $5,000 on the remodel, an interior. Can we get X amount of rent bump for that conservatively? I’ve seen some projects out there from some other operators where they’re projecting rents that are really pushing the market. We don’t like that. We like to do a rehab and then get market rents right. We don’t want to be the most expensive place out there. We want to be about where everyone else is.

So, that’s one of the metrics – we don’t want to over-project on rent. Second one is, we don’t want to be too crazy on expenses. It’s expensive to operate these properties. We don’t want to say we can save so much money on expenses and run really tight numbers, and then you get into trouble later on operationally. You can’t really operate correctly because your expenses are higher than you projected.

0:13:10

RD: And then, I think the biggest one for us is – and this is where we lose most of our deal – cap rate or exit cap rate. For those that don’t know that may be listening, a cap rate is basically what the market would pay for an asset. So, the lower the cap rate, the more expensive the property is. The higher the cap rate, the less value that property has. Right now, what we’re seeing, especially in Texas, is cap rates declining which mean things are getting more expensive. But in our underwriting, when we project out five years and an exit, we’re actually increasing the cap rate meaning that the property is actually going to be less valuable for the market when we sell it.

0:13:44

RD: Now, that makes us lose a lot of deals because a few basis points on a cap rate can make or break your deal and we’re writing it half a point on exit cap from where we go in normally. What’s probably going to happen though in Texas, if anyone knows Texas right now, is that cap rates are going to continue to go down which we’ve seen over the last couple of years. All the people moving here, all the jobs coming here, we’re right down the road from Austin, it’s about a 45-minute drive. 

0:14:08.1 

RD: All the metrics tell us that everything is going to go up so things are going to get more expensive. But then our underwriting, we’re saying, no, it’s going to actually lose value. And so what that means for investors is we’re going to lose a lot of deals but the ones we do get, we’re probably going to outperform pretty good on those because of that exit cap. The exit cap’s going to either stay the same or go down and that’s going to make the deal just be a rock star deal. But it might not. We’re predicting the future. It might be that values don’t go up.

And we projected that they’re going to go up, right? We may potentially lose money for investors and we never want to be in that position so.

0:14:41.0

WS: That is great. Also on the return metric, we’re very similar in what you just said. If we can’t hit a certain return metric then we’re going to probably move on to the next project. I love what you highlighted there. Obviously, conservative rent growth and our expectation of expenses, the exit cap rate, so important. Is there a specific, say, return metric or a couple that you’re going to focus on when let’s say, we’ve got the rent growth and the expenses and the cap rate where you wanted, but what does that return metric need to be before you say, ‘we’re passing this’ or ‘we are going to move forward’?

0:15:15.5 

RD: We’d like to look for, I like to talk in terms of average annualized return ’cause it’s simple for investors. AAR is a better metric. It gives you time-value based on your time value of money. Because as time goes on, the longer in the deal, the less value that deal is. But it’s really hard to figure out in your head. You gotta get a spreadsheet out to figure that out. So, we like to talk in terms of average annualized return ’cause if I tell you, “Hey, Whitney, if you invest 100K in my deal and I give you a 100K on that in five years”, in your head, that’s a 20% return ’cause it you gave me a 100K on my 100K in five years is 20% annualized return. Super quick, super easy. Your IRR on that’s probably going to be around 16%, 17%, somewhere in there. But it’s so hard to figure out, you gotta get a spreadsheet up. So, what we’re looking for in our deals is 17% or better average annualized return right now. Obviously, as the market changes, things get more expensive. 15% is still pretty good, right?

0:16:11.7 

RD: When you compare to some of the other assets out there, at some of the other investments out there. But right now, that’s kind of what we’re looking for, at least a 17% and we want to be able to beat that. But we want to at least be able to confidently say, I can hit that for sure, and then if we outperform, the better.

0:16:27.6 

WS: Now, that’s great. We’ve also started using average annualized return for that exact reason too. IRR is hard to calculate, hard to explain. However, oftentimes I’ll say, if you gave me $100 and I said I could turn it into a million, you’d say, hey, can I give you a lot more than $100, right? But if I said it’s going to take 300 years to do it, you’re going to say, that’s not okay, that’s not such a great deal.  AAR calculates time, it brings time into the equation. So, conservative rent growth, expenses, cap rate, exit cap rate, how are you all thinking about exit cap rate? Is that something that’s going to fluctuate much? So, okay, half a basis point, is that going to be a basis point another time or per project? Or I guess walk the listeners through that a little bit.

0:17:13.2 

RD: So on our underwriting, just be conservative. We are writing in about 10 basis points a year and the cap rate going up. Because what we’re actually seeing right now is about 10 basis points a year in the cap rate compressing. So, it’s going down but that’s just to keep us conservative ’cause when we look at over the last 60 years in multifamily, you normally don’t see cap rates going up more than about 10 basis points a year. Unless you’re in a crazy market like Las Vegas in 2008, your cap rate’s going way up over there more than 10 basis points a year. But if you look overall average in the United States over the last six years, you’ll see about a 10 basis points a year in cap rate going up when there’s some type of economic thing happening. So, we feel that’s pretty safe. I don’t see a scenario where it goes up higher than that, especially here in Texas. We got job diversity, we’ve got industry diversity, we’ve got a lot of people. If I was in a market where maybe it’s oil market like in east and west Texas, I might write in a much higher cap rate, like accelerating cap rate. But I think we’re pretty safe with 10 basis points a year.

0:18:20.7 

WS: Yeah. I appreciate some detail there. That can be a complicated subject for a lot of listeners as well as we think about exit cap rates and what that means. But what about just being an operator in your level of experience? Do you have any predictions for the real estate market over the next, say, six to 12 months?

0:18:38.5 

RD: Everyone’s talking about inflation right now, and so I feel that multifamily has a lot of room because of inflation. When you have inflation, you want to be in an asset that is not…you don’t want cash and you potentially don’t want to be in the stock market. If rates are raised by the feds to kind of cool off the economy – that’s why you raise rates so people start buying and cool the economy off – a good place to be is multifamily. Because we’ve just got a loan at 3.5%, and so the bank’s stuck with that for five years. As long as you buy a rate cap, you’re conservative with your debt, if you’re getting on a property, you’re in a good spot because the bank is taking the inflation. We’re not really taking inflation, we’re winning because our rents keep going up and up and up and up, but our debts are staying the same. So, what does that do? It makes a deal great. I think we can write out any kind of inflationary stuff that happens in the economy. So I feel multifamilies got a lot of room because of that. And people are flocking to multifamily right now because that’s where they want to put their money. They don’t want it in stocks and they definitely don’t want it in a bank account where it’s just going to be eaten away. 

0:19:47.1 

WS: That’s for sure. Tell us a little bit of advice around, say, preparing for a downturn. A lot of people say, is there going to be a crash? Is there something coming? Obviously, there’re cycles in real estate. We all know that nobody has a crystal ball, what’s going to happen tomorrow, next month, the next year. However, we still want to be prepared for when that happens. What are some things you’re looking at when you are looking at that project moving forward that we want to make sure we have in place? Just so we are prepared.

0:20:13.6 

RD: I always like to say two big things on your project is your debt. You gotta be careful if you’re going to get a floating rate and rates go up, you want to make sure you buy a conservative cap rate on that. You don’t want your rates go up so you gotta have a cap on that. It’s going to cost you some money upfront but it’s going to keep you safe in case something happens. Make sure that you are well-capitalized on your deals. You can float it for a few months if you have to if something crazy happens. You want to be well-capitalized. You don’t want to brand a deal so tight where something crazy happens and you can’t afford to pay your debt or you can’t afford to pay your bills. You gotta be well-capitalized, so if you’re looking again to this business, that’s super important. You either need to be well-capitalized or the deal does, or you bring a partner on that is well-capitalized that can help that project if something happens. 

0:21:05 

WS: Yeah, no doubt about it. Such great advice. Do you have a way of measuring that? Do you measure so many months of expenses or a percentage of something or anything like that to say, this is our emergency budget? Or this is how we’re capitalized to handle some kind of downturn. Oftentimes, you talked about something happening and you can weather for a while but sometimes not just one thing happens but two or three things, and then you’re in trouble if you’re not well-capitalized. Do you have a way to calculate, any metric that you all use for that?

0:21:34.7 

RD: Yeah. So, we have a percentage of just operating capital. Depends on the project but there’s a percentage we put in there. Also, we stress test the deal to say, what if we went to 60% occupancy? What does that look like? How much money do we need to keep ourselves alive for six months? That way we can weather a storm and if we’re in an environment that we can’t keep occupancy at least 60% for six months, then we got bigger problems. That’s kind of the stress test. It means also that metric ’cause they’re going to probably raise some of that money from investors. Every dollar we raise from investors, we tell them we’re going to give you 17% back on that means that it’s going to make the deal less attractive which means we lose more deals but it keeps us safe and it’s all about keeping our investors’ money safe. That’s the number one. We gotta keep it safe. You gotta be conservative ’cause we never want to lose or even not underdeliver. Even underdeliver, ’cause if I tell someone 17%, I deliver 16.9%, we didn’t deliver on our promise, and we never want to do that. So, we have a lot of those metrics to make sure that we keep our investments safe. 

0:22:41 

WS: Speaking of investors, what’s your best source for meeting new investors right now?

0:22:45 

RD: Those are going to be local meet-ups. We have one in San Antonio every month. That is where we meet the majority of our investors, and then we go and we try to get speaking engagements in other cities. People want to meet you, talk to you, be in person with you, shake your hand, kinda get to know you. That’s where the best source. There’re other ways to meet investors but that’s been our best place to meet new investors, in-person, face-to-face local meet-ups. There’s probably some in almost every city in the US, you just gotta find it, and then you start showing up to this. Because they want to meet you. Investors want to meet good sponsors that are doing good deals out there.

0:23:23

WS: What are some daily habits that you have that you’re disciplined about that have helped you achieve success? 

0:23:28

RD: I always try to do some type of workout or physical activity every single day. Then, I also try to spend at least a couple of hours without any electronics just with my family. Just say, ‘hey, let’s sit down and have dinner’. Lately it’s been homework time. My kids are at the age where they’re bringing home a ton of homework so it’s like, ‘okay, let’s get rid of that’ and they help you with that homework and we kind of bond right that time too. So, those are really the two things, some type of physical activity in the morning and then some family time at night without any distractions. I’m sure you know this – people call you all day, they text you or Slack, there’s email, all kinds of distractions, but I just try to put that away. I’m trying to enjoy it too ’cause my kids will be out of the house before I even know it, and I’m trying to enjoy as much time with them as I can while I still got them, right?

0:24:15.9 

WS: It doesn’t matter what age they are, before you know it, they’re going to be gone. I appreciate you highlighting, even putting electronics away. That’s difficult for me. We’ve done that, we’ve worked on that.  My wife and I do, even in the morning, it’s like, leave it on airplane mode till 8:00 am. You can conserve that mental time. Even the time with my wife and I in the mornings before kids get up, I just say you’re not distracted in every way by that email that came in, or the text, or Slack, like you mentioned. So, great advice. How do you like to give back?

0:24:47.4 

RD: Obviously, financially. Every project we do, we give a portion of that project from our own, not from our investors but from our own profits, we give that back. We pick a non-profit organization in our city. We like to give back to our city ’cause they’ve done so much for us by providing opportunities for us to go out and do real estate transactions. So, that’s how we give back. We pick one, we give a percentage back to every single one of those organizations, every single project. And then also, not just financially. That’s a financial give-back but we also, we like to give our time which is more valuable. So, one of the ways is we volunteer in an organization called CASA. Basically, that’s a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), so we are the judge’s eyes and ears for whatever Child Protective Service (CPS) case. So basically, it’s not a custody case, but the state is trying to remove the child from the parents for whatever reason – lots of reasons, lots of bad stuff. These cases go for one to two years, and so a lot of times when a child’s put in the system, the attorneys, the CPS case worker, sometimes the judge, people change on the case. and so really, the CASA is the constant person in that child’s life. Sometimes, they’re put in shelters or homes and they’re moved at the drop of a hat, and it’s really disruptive for that child. It’s really good to be that child’s person like, “Oh, this guy has been around for two years” and two years in a young child’s life is a lot of time.

0:26:17.4 

RD: So, you really form a bond with them and you kinda help them. You watch them, you can kind of check up on their grades at school, see how they’re doing. Sometimes, they need simple things like glasses, and maybe the teacher and their foster parent didn’t realize that ’cause they’ve only been with them for a couple of months and then they change schools. So, it’s a really good way to give back your time. It’s a lot of work. To anyone’s looking to do that, you’re going to spend a lot of time. But man, it’s so rewarding and it’s so needed. There is probably, I think in the county we’re in, there are about 6,000 Child Protective Service cases every year. Now, a case could be multiple children, not just one. That’s a super valuable way to give back. We love to do that, and it’s totally worth the time if anyone’s interested in doing it.

0:26:58.5 

WS: I appreciate you sharing that. And the listeners and I have talked about how we love to give back and how that’s changed our lives and businesses. And now even changing, it’s changing many people’s lives and families because of that desire the Lord’s given us. But how has that changed your business? This desire to give back in this way? Also, I wanted to highlight, you mentioned not just financial give-back but your time. You mentioned that takes a lot of time. That, oftentimes, it’s much more valuable than any amount of money at that moment or in that situation.  So, how has this changed your business?

0:27:33.0 

RD: It’s been everything really for the business. One of the pillars of our business is how do we give back to everyone that we come in contact with? Tenants, our property management partners, our partners on our projects, our investors, the neighborhoods that we come into contact with where we’re buying these properties. We try to focus on that and that’s been a real key to our success. We wanna give back. We bought a property in September. It was in a really bad condition, disarray. We walked into some of these, the tenants were like, ‘I haven’t had electricity in six months on that side of my apartment’. That’s not cool. You’re paying good money to be here. So, it feels really good to go in there and fix that kind of stuff and then make it a nice place for the people to live in. Little things like you talk about giving back your time. Little things where it makes a big difference. Like this Christmas, we went and we bought gifts for all of our property management teams that are on-site. Those guys are working hard. These guys and girls work really hard every single day, and we went and delivered, personally delivered gifts to them. I could have sent it in the mail. It wasn’t anything huge but a little gift. And I think it meant a whole lot for us to walk in there and say, “Hey, thank you for everything you’ve done for us this year. Here’s a small token of our appreciation.” I think it’s more about us being there with them on the property, and so that kind of says important, I think, in giving back.

0:28:52.3 

WS: Now, that’s incredible. I appreciate you encouraging us in that way, and the listeners as well. Even talking about how that’s changed everything for your business. Oftentimes, we don’t think about that side of it, giving back. I appreciate you bringing that up. But grateful just to meet you, have you on the show, talking about your biggest challenge to finding deals, those relationships with brokers. Even some of the return metrics around what makes that deal work for you all, and some of the things that you better be focused on when you’re moving forward with the project. I appreciate that, and just your transparency in that. Then, obviously going through the how you all give back and encouraging us to do the same.

Tell the listeners how they can get in touch with you to learn more about you. And I want to give a shoutout to Devin Elder as well, as a friend. I know you also have a multifamily course that you all help people out there to learn this industry. So, you’re welcome to shout that out as well as many of the listeners are looking, always looking for more educational tools to get into this business and to do it well.

0:29:55.0 

RD: Yeah, definitely. I guess the easiest way to get in touch with me is you can email me at ruben, R-U-B-E-N, at totem (like a totem pole) totemcapitalgroup dot com. Also, our website is www.totemcapitalgroup.com. Education, it’s called Apartment Educators. You can go to apartmenteducators.com. Basically, we teach people to do this business. And that was really not, I think we talked about this, not really a tool for us to go out and make a bunch of money. Our main business is to buy apartments. That was really a way for us to work with people that are serious and committed. And this business is about partners. We use partners for everything. And that’s another way we kinda give back. It’s a win-win when I help somebody. I might be a key principal form, sign on the loan form ’cause they can’t ’cause they are just building up their net worth and their liquidity. So, if I can help them sign on the loan, I got a little piece of the deal and they get to go out and do a few deals. Because of that, that’s a win-win, and I’d love to do that. That’s really why we started that coaching group as to help those people and really, you know this and this business, I get a lot of people ask me, “teach me, teach me, teach me” and you can’t really give that time. And most people aren’t serious about actually learning, especially when they find out how much work’s involved. So, that was an easy way for us to point them in that direction and only work with serious people. So, we’ve helped a lot of people get into the business.

0:31:17.5 

WS: That’s awesome, that’s awesome. Ruben, thank you again, and for sharing that. I hope the listeners will check that out and I look forward to staying in touch with you. I hope you and the listeners have a blessed day.

0:31:27.4 

RD: Yeah, you too. Thank you, Whitney. I appreciate you having me on.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

0:31:29.9  

WS: Thank you for being a loyal listener to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Please subscribe and like the show. Share it with your friends so we can help them as well. Don’t forget, go to the www.LifeBridgeCapital.com where you can sign up and start investing in real estate today, Have a blessed day! 

[END]