Episode 118: Quit the job you hate through Real Estate Investing with Jack Bosch - The Apartments Operators Podcast

Welcome to the Apartment Operators Podcast, where you can learn from experienced operators what it really means to be an apartment operator. No fluff, no sugarcoating, just the raw unfiltered truth of the ups and downs of operating multifamily communities. Welcome everybody to the Apartments Operators podcast.

My name is Joseph Gozlan. I’m your host, and today we have a very special guest, Mr. Jack Bosch. Welcome to the show, Jack. Thank you for having me, Joseph. I’m super excited to be. Awesome. You have a lot of experience in so many different aspects in real estate. Why won’t you take a couple of minutes and tell our audience a little bit about yourself, what you’ve done so far.

You have an accent just like me. So tell us a little bit about the background for there, and then what you’re doing today. First of all, I have a much stronger accent than you . I’ve actually almost never hear your accent but I, obviously, I sound like Arnold just, I don’t look like him. So I am, again, my name is Jack Bosh.

I’m actually from Germany, originally, came into the United States in 1997 three weeks into it. Met my beautiful wife and wonderful and super smart and strong wife Michelle. Few years into we finished our college degrees here. We got jobs. We hated our jobs. We went from there to learn real estate and started a company together flipping land.

So just like other people flip houses, we flip land, which is simpler than house flipping because there’s no tenant installers in termites. Which is something we gonna talk about a lot right now. And we made that our cash machine. We built it up flipped over 4,000 pieces of land and then turned the cash and the income.

We realized at some point of time that we, if we wanna ever retire really well and nicely and so on, then we can’t re you can’t retire in an active business. Because unless you sell the business, because otherwise if you stop the business, then the income stops. So we realized that we needed to take the money from there.

And then even though we sell a lot of our land, we sell a financing. So we had cash flow from land. Those, even those are 5, 7, 10, 15 year nodes that will also stop at some point of time. So we realized that what we need to do is we need to get, we need to specialize not just on generating. But on also allocating income and allocating assets and buying assets that last for our lifetime.

And they’re bringing cashflow for our lifetime. So we started adding to our land flipping and land flipping coaching, which we teach we teach other people how to do that. We added to that mo first single family investing cuz we basically dipped our toe in it and it’s okay, let’s figure out how these people, these renters are, and then what’s the deal with them.

and dipped their toes in that saw that we could actually manage a portfolio, not just where we live in Phoenix, but another portfolio in Cleveland and another portfolio in Omaha, Nebraska. And we’re like, okay, I never have to go out there. We have a property manager in place, let’s step it up. That’s when we started syndicating apartment complex deals.

And now we are invested either as general partners or the minority as also limited partners, but significant limited partners in about 700 units. Awesome. So you got a lot going on. And one of the first thing we ask everybody is self-managed or third party. Third party. Okay. Everything, even our single families are being managed by third party.

Okay. So what was the driver for the decision? . We learned it on a single family because on a single family, we literally, I went from around the weekends first we started in our neighborhood, like in, in Phoenix. We bought some houses in like a C class neighborhood, but a well located C class neighborhood that easy to get to the interstate, easy get to everywhere.

And these houses have been a hundred percent full ever since we owned them. They’re like, the moment they’re vacant, you fix ’em up again and you got five applications within the matter of a few days. And good quality. Good thing tenants are now staying in for eight years, 10 years already in those same properties.

But what I realized is that we actually, we needed to go, but with our old car, with a new Mercedes for it, we used to old for Toyota 4runner, right? Go house to house and pick up rent and it was nice, but. I’m soft at heart, and when people tell me when the lease comes up, and I was like, yeah, we gotta rent.

Increase the rent. They would tell me the story and know when the dog died and the an emergency room and this and that. It’s okay let’s wait a little bit. And we realized we wouldn’t, we weren’t as strict if they broke a window, we ended up fixing it and paying for it, but they broke the window.

The window doesn’t break itself, right? . So we’re like no. At some point of time he is you know what? We want to go travel. We like travel. . So we like spending the summer, two, three months going out of town and you can’t pick up rent. So we brought in somebody else to pick up rent, who then supposedly was attacked by somebody and the money was stolen.

Did it really happen? Did it not? We don’t know. We don’t know. So it is okay, that doesn’t work, and then let’s just go third party. And what we realized is that we are actually making more money on these rentals with third party than we’d made our own. Because now it’s the property manager’s the owner wants to increase the rent.

We have to, it’s our hands are bound. You broke the window. The owner said based on the law, you have to pay it. So we got that middle man that can be like both good cop backup and do those things that are necessary to make the property perform and take people to court and evict and whatever.

It’s all necessary. And after that experience was like, we’re not going self-managing probably ever again. Plus when we went to multi-family, our multi-families are not close to us. The market in Phoenix where we live is extremely hot property, straight at the three and a half cap or four cap, which is like crazy and and so we are going into the secondary tertiary market.

So we have properties in Oklahoma City, we’re properly in Kentucky. We are property in North Carolina, and I am not going to go out there every. So I, we go out there a few times a year, but we go, but we don’t go out every week. So third party was the only way to go. I didn’t wanna have to manage higher pay roll, all those things.

I, I wanted somebody to be in place. So you wanted to turnkey operation. Turnkey operation now. Did it work like that? Always? No. I can tell you some couple of horror stories about that. We’ll get to that one in just a minute. So before we talk about the ordeals, you have to go with the third party management.

How did you go about selecting your third party partner? I can tell you how not to go about selecting just as valuable. Now the first property that we bought was a 90 unit. Classy town, 90 unit, all town homes. Beautiful property, classy older in 1980s but a nice property. We still own it actually.

We, we, we actually restructured the deal, bought our investors out, and we’re gonna own that for the next 20 years as just buying old property. Just happened last year, but this property, the way we did is we had a friend that. That also owns multi-family in a different state. And he knew this mo he was like, my property management company’s the best in the world.

They’re nationwide. They’re absolutely amazing. And and they’re, I couldn’t and I trust this guy. He’s a good, he’s a good guy. a, He’s a friend of mine. I trust him. So I was like, okay, I talked to these guys. They said all the right things, but I didn’t dig any deeper. . So we hired them and what it turns out to be that it was a company that bought local property management companies all over the country and was in the process of rolling them into their national brand.

But in the process of them being rolled into the national brand, they still operated in limbo and like their own way. And what happened is that property management company that they had bought in the location where my friend owned multifamily, that happened to be a great operated property management company, the property management company that, that we were talking to and then ultimately hired, ended up being a disgruntled owner.

Of a single family home, a single family property management company that ended up running our 90 million, 90 unit apartment complex like a single family, meaning his team was not HVAC certified. That means we spent $40,000 over the for next six over the next six months replacing air conditions that should have been repaired.

They were not in good, they were not good managers. They, instead of keeping everyone in, because there was a lot of people month to month rents , instead of keeping them in they basically canceled their, their their raised their rents and they’re all left. And then within literally four months, we went from a 90% unit occupied unit property to a 65% occupied unit.

And we were bleeding left and right financially on that property at that moment. We kicked them out and then we learned how to properly select the property management company. learn we had them. We first of all, we asked. We looked at the properties in the market that looked really wisely, ma maintained that were full, that had nice rents.

We asked who runs them. We selected them down. We interviewed them. We asked for referrals. We looked at, we we yeah we just did a whole bunch of checks. We asked them if their HVAC certified. We met up with their maintenance team. We met up with their leadership team. We dug deep to really.

What are their philosoph, what is their philosophy? What their, what are their actions that you’re taking? Typically and then we picked one and we couldn’t be happier. They brought this property back within four months to 90% again, and it has been all through Covid and everything. It has been 98 to a hundred percent occupied with 97 to 98% rent collection.

So mean they did an absolute fantastic job. Yeah. I just want to echo what you were saying in just a little bit different way, cuz we’ve heard that over and over from previous guests in the. Is that it doesn’t matter if it’s a national brand or a local company or anything else. The only thing that actually matters is who’s on site, who is the actual people with the boots on the ground, who is the manager of the property, who is the regional supervisor of that property management company and obviously processes and having the right accounting team and all that is super important.

They can have everything lined up in corporate, but if the people in the field are not good, it’s not gonna end up well for anybody. Unfortunately we have experience since everybody else that we’ve heard before, hundred percent understand that one that we ended up hiring was they had, they, every year they win various awards of the National Apartment Complex Management Association or whatever it’s called.

And and for best place to work in, for most efficient, for best processes and things. Not that I knew, if that really means something. But now that we’ve worked with them for a couple of years, I know it means a lot because every new person that they bring in is highly trained, knows what to do, is professional.

Is really good. . Yeah. Okay. So now is it time to tell us a little bit more of those horror stories? I already did. These guys, they weren’t they wouldn’t res the first one like that. We hired the wrong one. We hired it based on because it was the first multi-family that we bought.

Which goes to the point that if you think, real estate has so many different facets, right? And so many different angles that you can, If you know how to flip land doesn’t mean you know how to manage an apartment complex if you know how to flip land. , if you know how to own, own and manage single family successful, the dynamics of multi-family are very different, right?

So not good or bad, just different, right? Little bit more complex, little bit different engagement, little different things and so on. And there’s probably no such thing like a perfect property management company. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. You just need to make sure, as you said, Joseph, That the team on the ground is there highly trained, they know what to do, they follow up.

The team now follows up like on every lead that they have ever heard until that lead tells ’em no. Yeah. So there’s if there’s 200 leads that are still linted and inquired over the last six months. They’re getting a message like every week they’re getting a message from them.

It’s have you find a place to live already? You wanna come back? And until they tell ’em, leave me alone, I have a place to live. Then we take ’em off a list. But before we don’t. And those are fantastic things to do. Versus the other one, they were like, . First of all, they kept the alt leasing agent in there.

They were completely enabled, like we said okay, we need to bring this, these people left, as I mentioned , people left like crazy. Like we had 25 VA vacancies in a matter of four months. So for down from seven vacancies to 25. So now the problem gets so why are we not filling these vacancies?

We’re in a good season for renting. Why are we not? We’re filling up cuz they’re not rent ready. It’s okay, so why don’t you get them rent ready? We only have one maintenance guy, 90 units. You can’t really afford to have two. So it’s okay, can we bring support in? We only work with licensed companies.

Okay, that’s fine. Then let’s bring in a licensed company. They want $20,000 to make a uni rent ready. And I’m actually not even not even not even exaggerating a little too much. There, there were like 15 to $20,000. It’s are you guys crazy? Like getting a uni rent ready? If you don’t have to replace the kitchen or the bathroom, if you replace the carpet, you know what it costs.

The carpet is perhaps a thousand dollars and the rest is $300 in paint and cleaning up $1,500, $1,600, you should be ready. And they’re like, now we can’t do that because we don’t have the manpower. It’s then it’s never where we hire another maintenance guy. Let’s let us start with that.

But it might take six to eight weeks to find one. And they were just like, not reacting, not acting. He was trying to push a cart uphill and it’s just we couldn’t get anywhere. And to the degree that I had to on my own pocket, hire the husband of our leasing lady who was a handyman, and he brought in two other.

And I paid them outside of property management to get these units rent ready so we could actually listen. That’s how chaotic it ended up turning. And then while we are looking, while we’re searching and finding and looking for another property management company, and then the moment we set eyes on.

The moment we decided on that one, they were able to actually step in within two weeks, which is pretty fast, usually takes perhaps 30 days. They were able to step in within two weeks and then they brought in their team of experienced people and boom. Not only did those units I mean with, as I said, within three months we were back to 90%.

Within another two months we’re at 98% and we have literally stayed there ever since for the last pretty much two years. . Yeah. And these are great examples of what you just said earlier, that real estate, different real estate assets have different dynamics to them. In a single family word.

A person that manages single families. Even if it’s 30 or 300, they usually don’t have their own crew. So AC breaks down, you call an AC technician, something with plumbing gun on, you call in a plumber. And then if I need to get a unit house ready, I’m calling a contractor. That does all the subin for themselves versus in their partner world, right?

We usually have onsite maintenance guys that can do all these things, and if not, then we bring apartment contractors and not retail contractors. That helps you turn a unit for two, three grand instead of 2030 grand. We just went through the same process with a small property. We helped one of our clients manage and we brought in contractors for a 300 square foot studio apartment.

I’m not getting 300 square foot and we got bids over $30,000 and it’s kinda like I, what’s going on here? Look, I can buy another apartment for $30,000. Do you wanna renovate a 30 300 square foot for 30,000? Yeah you can’t work with retail anything retail technicians or retail contractors.

It just doesn’t make sense in the multi-family world. So tell us a little bit about how you interact with your third party property management. How often do you have a phone calls? Who do you talk to? How often you visit the site? So it depends on which property it is. So on on the one on one of the one in North Carolina takes a long time to get to from Phoenix, so it takes a full day to pretty much get there.

But so I don’t go to that one very often because it’s also run beautifully. I think so, so I might only go there now at the beginning I went there more often, but now I might only go there three times a. Right now that sounds very little, but we have weekly I get lots of pictures instead.

So I got lots of pictures. Last time I went there I saw that there was a little mul a little mosque growing on the weather side of them from the sprinklers cuz it’s 90 units on 15 acres. So there’s lots of grass and things. So there’s like little mosque growing. So the, I basically ask, okay, by this state I need all this to be power washed.

And then I. Building, but building, after building, I get the pictures and I don’t have to go spend an entire day flying out there, checking, renting a car, doing their, staying overnight and then coming back the next day and be completely wiped out. So I get those things Now, larger decisions right now are coming up.

And now that we refinance and thing and we, we bought our investors out on that one. So we’re keeping this for the long term, so we’re making some more major investments into it. So for any of these major investments, I’ll make my way out there. So we are adding some extra parking, but we’re converting.

The Shad into an actually leasing office, cuz right now they’re using one of the units as a leasing office and we need to open it up for revenue and instead there’s this beautiful shad that’s just a two car garage, basically a beautiful building. Actually, it’s the same kind of building as the rest of it just, it needs to be converted.

Which again, I had asked the fir first property management company right after we bought it to get us a quote, and it was like a hundred thousand dollars quote. I was like, really? I don’t wanna rebuild the thing. And I don’t wanna rebuild it with granite countertops and everything and marvel floors.

I want it to just it’s basically the equivalent of a burned unit that needs to be redone. It should be costing about 25,000. To finish this up. Put some insulation in there because all plumbing and everything is there already, right? So now we’re getting quotes to make it really pretty and it might cost 30, 40 or so, but that’s in the budget.

But when that happens, I wanna go out there. But then what we do is we receive, I receive an email from them every Monday. , which lays out exactly all the statistics, how many visitors we’ve had, how many applications we got, how many approvals, how many new clients, if we have, what, how many people we have on the waiting list.

If we have a waiting list. It shows us how many people that the leasing agent followed up with. It tells us what we are collection tracking for the month and for the week and for the month what we are in rent collections. And it tells us what maintenance items were done for the week.

And and then if there’s any activity was done on the property, like a celebration or party or it gives you a bunch of pictures of those. Usually with that, I look through and I might shoot up a clarification email. I don’t even have to get on the phone with a team at that time. If every if the property is at eight 98% occupied, basically we have one, a one vacant unit.

Yep. I don’t I don’t need to. I don’t need to. Then I have access to, they use resin as a property management financial tool. So I log into resin. I have all the day-to-day financials that I can see. I don’t need to waste anyone’s time and then jump on a call with them, however but we do get on a call at least let’s say every two, three weeks just to catch up on stuff.

But then also as we put in projects for every project, when we kick off a project, when we get for those, we get more regularly on, on the phone with each other because they might get three quotes. And I don’t wanna just look at the quotes, I want to talk to them and say So what’s the pros of this one and that one, and then we talk these things through.

But, so there’s a few phone calls a month perhaps, and and this one email a week, and then perhaps other emails that go through go back and forth. Now, if you go to a refinance, of course, then the interaction is tenfold higher, right? Because then you need all kinds of stuff from them for the lender, and it just goes back and forth.

Now, on the other property, we do a phone call a week. And I get a little bit, they’re a little bit less organized. The other property management company in our Oklahoma market. So they’re sending me more we, we go to the KPIs that I’m interested in more on the phone. . So they send me an email the night before we talk, which says like how many who applied, who was allowed, who was not.

Cuz for example, one of the things we did there. We just increased the rental requirements actually right in the middle of Covid, which is we want better tenants. So we actually increased the requirements and successfully that actually helped us successfully navigate to Covid because we got within about.

Three, four months. We had quite a bit of turnover and we got a lot better tenants in and they paid all throughout to Covid. So it was, it helped a lot. But there we are. I still, they also use resume as a platform. So I can also look at those things. But there, I have a phone call a week.

I might have a phone call with accounting once every two, two months or so because they book stuff in a way that doesn’t make sense to me. And so I’m. diving in is like, what are you booking? Like that? And we have a conversation about that and that’s about it. But then there’s also an additional with that property man, with that regional property manager, she operates very well on text.

So we just text back and forth on a bunch of things and email back and forth. Probably another five, six emails I would. Not five, six emails a week, but some weeks it can be five to 10 emails. Other weeks there’s nothing but so bottom line is we’re plugged in on a weekly basis. Look at our financials.

That might trigger a conference call to dig in some more detail and, but again, this property is right now 91% occupied. It was 95, but then we were actually lucky. I like, last summer they actually stopped the eviction moratorium for about four weeks or three, four weeks, right? Yeah. Between August and September.

Yeah. We were ready. We had everything ready for that to stop the day. It stopped. We submitted everything, we got it processed, and we were able to evict 13 people the day, the morning of the reinstatement of. Of the moratorium. So as a result, our occupancy though dropped from 95 to 86%.

. And so it took us a little bit to fill that back up, but we are at 91%, but collections are actually higher than they were when we’re at 95% because we got better tenants. Yeah. It’s better cut it. Thanks for sharing all of that. So in. Johnny moving forward. Do you see yourself buying more multi-family properties?

Yes. So last year we passively invested but with a significant share in, we were, we became 20% owners in a tech and a tenant forma for a tenants and common structure. Where’s only four owners? We own 20% of it, of 258 units in Kentucky. . So that we invested in that. Now that’s passive. But it’s for owners, it was a great opportunity, great value add and all for our owners wanna hold onto their property for a long time.

So we’re like glad to invest in a more significant amount in that to to just for cash flow. And we are actively, we’re actually hiring a transaction coordinator right now and an acquisition manager in the next few weeks to really get because it was always like something we did like part-time.

, like we, we have a land flipping business. We have an educational business, and we are investing in these assets. In order to sometimes the syndications providing other people an opportunity to invest with us and so on, but also for us to be able to to put our own money into something that has that has the depreciation in the cash flow for more longer term.

So with that said, we definitely wanna continue that. We have switched our outlook though a little bit. That instead of doing syndications, we might still do a few syndications with a lot of investors. Like 30, 40 investors or so. But we also have since connected with a few investors that are, have similar outlooks as us, that are potentially want to invest like.

More significant amounts and put three or four investors together and own a property for the foreseeable future, 10, 15 years. Yes. And so for that we can actually tackle a little bit of a different product. So instead of it having to be that product that everyone else’s chases, which is the value add.

We can go even into an almost a stabilized kind of property, but in a higher rent growth market and just basically because we don’t need to make an 8% return in year one. We, if we can make a three, four, 5% return in year 1, 2, 3. But then with the rent growth, be it an 8%, 10% return in three to five years, every one of the investor group would be happy.

And then we’ll just hold it for another 10 years afterwards continuing to get higher and higher cash flow on the property. So our strategy is shifting a little bit on that. But it’s and it’s and, yeah, this is yeah. Shifting a little bit. Yeah, no it’s a great point. To what you’re saying is it all depends on the strategy and it’s all dependent on the investor’s expectation, right?

So on the syndication world, our investors are always looking for high return and immediate kind of immediacy of that. And then the high net worth individuals that you’re talking about, and I’ve met a few of those myself, are more into let’s buy something that is a higher quality in a better location.

We might not see a lot of returns in the first few years, but multifamily and commercial real estate in general is I like to say it’s like wine. It gets better over. . Because the inflation is eating through your mortgage payments and rent keep going up and up. So I totally understand that strategy.

So that strategy still aligns with your decision to stay in the third party management space, right? It does, because on those kind of proper. There’s not that much heavy lifting to do from a from a value add kind of point of view. So yes. Do we, might we end up with a property that we still in the next five years need to replace all the kitchens and interiors and upgrade them?

Yes. But then it’s a five year project, right? You buy 200 units and you upgrade 30, 40. Upon move out little by little and you just basically bring in on payroll, potentially almost like two extra maintenance guys in, or two extra contract, two extra people in that can do that. Property moves out, they go boom and put it in place.

And a good property management company can manage that. I think it becomes, A little bit more of an issue if you have to do really a lot of heavy lifting at that point. I I wanna be involved because I wanna be involved on a daily on a daily, weekly basis. On the other ones, it’s just more like checking off the box.

Is the next unit ready? Okay, are we doing it within the right parameters? We’re in the right cost, using the same material. Is it uniform? And you just, as long as you put those things in place and you have a good team it can be managed. Third. Understood. Okay let’s talk a little bit about value add, right?

I know your properties are value add especially the syndication. Give us a few examples of things that you guys like to do in order to bring the property value up from the income perspective. We’ll talk about expenses in a little bit but let’s take off the table the usual ones. Increase rent, applied robs, right?

So other than these two, what other kind of things you like to do that increases your income in the property you. . So we like to put amenities on the property. Mo, most of the properties with own don’t have a whole lot of amenities. Like the one in Kentucky right now is actually getting an indoor pool.

Oh, wow. It’s 50. It does it’s 5,258 units. They have this big sh metal thing and it was already started, but when we bought it we decided to finish it up. So it’s gonna have an indoor pool that the community can use and that community, I don’t think there’s another property that has that, but again, it was already it only took another $50,000 to finish, or $75,000 to finish that pool.

And it was already prepared cuz that’s $120,000 pool or so. So now on the other one, if I’m thinking about again, our once in North Carolina, it has zero amenities, it has zero amenities and it had zero amenities. So now we added we’re still adding some of them because like we were just through.

Fixing the issues that the first property management company caused. When we brought back the other one, we were just ready to put in the things, whereas okay, the winter hits, let’s wait out the winter, let’s wait for spring 2020. Come along. But of course, COVID hit, right? Yeah. So we still haven’t added anything there other than we able to rent a, we bought it because we know rents were $150 below.

But that’s one of the obvious, right? . , we, what we have done is, what we’re doing now is in the next two months, we’re adding a playground, we’re adding barbecues, we’re adding a, we are adding extra parking on the side. We are adding overflow parking over there on, on, on both sides of the property.

We are adding, cuz every park, every unit only has one parking spot right in front of its . So anyone comes to visit. It’s not an easy kind of situation. Or some people have husband and wife obviously, there, where do we put the second car? So that’s been a little bit of an issue of contention.

So we are adding this out there on the sides. Then what else are we doing there? We we are adding we’re not adding a pool because it’s just too much effort and liability insurance rates go up and so on. But one of, a lot of the things we do in our properties are actually. intangible. . So we are really firm believers that a, even a C-class property, even the tenants in a c-class property, which is typically like workforce housing, they don’t just want the place to put their head at night.

They want the place to feel and they, first of all, they need to feel safe. So one of the things we do is we put up a li, the first thing we do is we put, we increase the night lighting on the property by a factor of 10. , like we, we go out and. Big, bright l e d lights all at every door.

Everything and may and turn and disable the ability of the tenants to actually turn it off. So basically they’re photoable cake things at night they turn on and when and down in the morning they turn off and that means the property is lit up like a Christmas. Because that single mom that works at Walmart and comes out from the night shift at 10, at 11, or from the late shift at 11:00 PM that single mom wants to feel safe on that property.

right? So those are little things, more psychological things that make a difference. What do we do? We upgrade the interiors to actually now that unit’s all, they’re both two, they’re all town homes. They’re two story units. We’re actually replacing the carpet to the entire units, even upstairs.

Okay? That helps. Pardon? You’re going to hard floors even on the second. Even on the second floor. The vinyl looking heart floors. Yeah. Even on the second one, because most of them we realized is like a husband and wife, a single person, or perhaps a single mom with a couple of kids and so on.

It’s your own kids traveling. It does less bottom if it’s somebody else and another apartment trams on there. So we just tested one unit. Tenants love it. So we’re gonna roll this out over the next over the other units over the next year. Because is. Not only is it it, the units look nicer.

And then our other property in Oklahoma, all the units are like that now. They’re all single floor units. They’re all piece of carpet in that property anymore. So that helps on both ends. It’s a one time, little bit more investment, but then it’s a cost saver, but it also, it’s a higher perceived value than a shampoo property that still has a bunch of cigarette stains.

It’s still, it’s, it looks nicer. It looks like, oh wow, this looks. And then people go to somewhere and get themselves a $50 rock to Ikea, get themselves an $80 rock if they really wanna feel something soft under their feet. And now they have a nice looking unit. So that’s something we do on everyone.

But we are really big on, on trying to create a community. So we’re big on, on doing barbecues. We’re big on doing 4th of July. We’re big on doing Easter egg hunts. We’re doing back to school back to school backpacks. We’re doing popcorn in the office for the kids to come in. We’re doing things like.

To provide decorating contests for Halloween and things that people can embrace and feel like they’re part of it. And even in one property, we did something, we found a local community college. Where some of the kids needed needed extra hours. Like for some reason they needed hours in community service or something like that.

And it was part of their curriculum. So we brought ’em in and we brought ’em in as math tutors for the kids in the, oh, that’s the school. So basically twice a week this college student comes in and the kids of the neighborhood because that property happens to be right next to a not very good elementary.

So the kids that, that stay there, they’re going to that school and they’re struggling. Guess what? Now there’s somebody that, for free, gives ’em some tutoring so that they can advance a little bit more, and that’s just super well received in the community by the tenants. Some of them treated as babysitting, which is okay too, but.

But others are seed of valleys. Yeah, I want my kid to be successful. And so that it’s so we are doing, we’re trying to do well by doing good too. Yeah. No, it’s fantastic. It’s a very creative way to add value. And bring value to the community and doesn’t cost you anything but a phone call to the local community college.

I, I love that idea. It’s a, we haven’t heard that one before on the show. That’s definitely a great one. Good. I’m glad. We also added a gym. We saw this little storage room of the, after the policing office, and it’s big enough to put, to drip to a treadmill, some weights. And and a bicycle thing on there and a rack or for weights and so on.

So it’s why don’t we just turn the door from inside to the outside and put a key card thing in there and people can get a key card for 10 bucks that if they bring the key card back, they get their 10 bucks back and, but they can go. Now we have a 24 7 gym. , which we didn’t have before. So little things like that add amenities with the barbecues, with the perus, with the thing.

And now we are replacing on one of the properties on that same property we’re, we were on a leasing program with a laundry units. And it has its own separate standing building with like 10 wass and dryers and 10 10 washes and 10 dryers. And the leasing is over cuz the leasing made us no money.

and there was these old top loader machines. So we basically told them to kick ’em out, and within the next six to eight weeks, we’re bringing in new our own equipment. our own equipment there. So our maintenance staff is now being trained up to fix those. And and we are gonna have a little bit variety of things, not just the small ones, but we’re gonna have at least one big one.

So we might only have nine washers eight small ones a medium, one and a big like seven small ones a medium, one and a big one. , and now we get to keep all that revenue and we calculated that should add about $1,500 to $2,000 a month in an actual profit to the bottom line. That’s 20 grand a year at a, at that’s a three, $400,000 value add to the property.

Yep. Fantastic. Great. So let’s flip the coin and talk about expenses, right? What do you guys do to shave off expenses or be more efficient on your expi? One thing is, for example the laundry thing itself, because as I discovered shortly into owning the property is that we, not only did we get only like this tiny revenue share, which usually can, the results literally was like $80 in the year we made on that you thing.

But we also had to pay for all the water and the gas. it was connected to our main units. So now shaving that and turning it over, it’s not only gonna increase revenue, but also but also at least we are now spending the money on our own stuff. Yeah. So on. Other than I think the really, one of the biggest ones is we have on the hundred 46 unit property, we have one maintenance guy and one guy who is mainly in charge of turns.

. So these two are good, but because of that, we don’t have to do almost anything. , like we we, it’s extremely rare that we have to bring in an outside company. So we have the salary expenses, but not much more. It’s extremely rare that we have to replace an ac. Because we got all this different cuz they can fix the acs.

Some of these acs are pretty old and they’re still fix ’em and fix ’em. So that saves tens of thousands of dollars a year over the course of that property. Cuz you got 146 acs that you don’t, of which you don’t have to replace, even if it’s just 10 a year, it’s for 40, 50 grand that you would have to, that you’re saving.

Yeah. So here’s a little trick on that one that we’ve. Is eye contact. I found a contact that works for a company that installs new acs and I told ’em, look, on my properties, we have two, two to two and a half tons condensers. So if you go out and you replace a working one, save it for me. So we end up, I think we bought 30 or 40 condensers last year at a cost of two, $300 a.

So we were able to replace, broken parts and get all new condensers that are in good working shape. We usually like to take when they do like a bank so banks and big commercial companies, they replace ACS on a schedule, not when they need to, right? Because if you’re a bank, you can’t wait till the AC breaks.

And then the entire branch is a hot sauna in Texas. You replace those on schedule even though they could have 2, 3, 4 years more left in them. So they take off really good units and they put brand new ones. So we’re happy to take those off their hands. Oh and saved us tens of thousands of dollars in the last few years.

I love that idea. That’s great. What else do we do? There isn’t that much that we we, on one of the units one of the properties. on the carpets that exist. We bought a carpet cleaning machine ourselves, and they’re, and then the maintenance guys, carpet cleaning the machines that saves shaves off, that shaves off 150 bucks of that or whatever.

Saves us a little bit money there. We’ve seen there, there’s that, but one of the things is the, one of the property managements that’s also again, in favor of Of third party management in this case, they are so big that they’re well known in Texas. They’re so big that they bring in their own they bring in their container full of stuff from, of fixtures.

From China and yes, makes their product a little bit, like predictable in a sense that, if you walk into a property that they manage, it’s the same kind of stuff, but what it does it pretty, we don’t ever have to go to Home Depot and pay $150 for whatever it is because they pass it on pretty much as a service to their properties.

At cost or if it’s just a very slight markup. So we get what costs at Home Depot, 150 bucks. We get it for 75 or 80. So that, that’s that saves a lot of of money. And then mainly having well-trained people that can fix all kinds of stuff. Cuz again, unless it’s something major we don’t have to bring outside contractors out for almost anything.

And then again, it comes down to having a good regional manager. Our regional manager on that property is a hustler. She is she is she doesn’t take no for an answer and she’s gonna. The best contractor that does it like a really good contractor that does it for a really low dollar amount.

And and so we so that all together keeps costs fairly down. Yep. Fantastic. I wanna be conscious of your time. I know you have another appointment coming up soon. If you. Met young Jack 10, 20 years ago. And you can’t tell yourself that, 2009 is the bottom by everything you can what advice would you give yourself?

I probably would’ve accelerated two multifamily quicker. Because again, I love our land business. We’re gonna do land flipping for the rest of our lives. I love teaching it, but long term, Wealth generation, long term and big, massive wildlife wealth generation happens more with a multi-family, but it’s also 3.2 million times more complicated, right?

Yeah. So get me wrong. So I’m I wouldn’t change a thing in what I’ve done. I would just would’ve probably transitioned from not transition. I would’ve probably added multi-family five years earlier. So that’s what I would’ve done five or 10 years earlier than I have about five years earlier than I have.

And and would’ve done more quicker. But it’s okay. We have done well. We’re we’ve, we won’t complain. We’re, we are a really beautiful spot in life and uh, and life is good. Awesome. Okay tell our audience where they can find you. If they wanna reach out, invest with you, or learn more about your land flipping business, how can they find you?

And we’ll obviously put links in the show notes. So if you wanna know more about our apartment complex investing activities, you can go to Orbit Investments or bt investments.com. If you wanna know more about the land, which we really didn’t talk about, but if you drink by that, you can go to Land Profit.

Fun, like having fun, land profit fun.com and check out more details there. Awesome. And also jack bosch.com, my website I’m on Facebook. I’m on our different platforms everywhere, YouTube. Awesome. Jack, you’ve been fantastic. You brought a lot of that. Our audience, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. Awesome. And for you, the audience, if you want to hear more, please subscribe. Doesn’t matter if it’s on iTunes, feature SoundCloud, wherever you consume your podcast and feel free to leave us a review. We’ll see you later in our next episode. Thank you. Thank you for listening to our show.

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