Episode 125: Shifting Strategies for the New Real Estate Market with Stewart Beal - 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 multi-family communities. Welcome everybody to the Apartments Operated podcast.

Today we have Stuart with Stuart. Bill, and Stuart owns and operates thousands of units. He’s with Bill Capital, he’s got a lot of experience. Welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. Absolutely. So we start usually the show with giving our guests just a few seconds to introduce themselves, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you’ve been doing, how’s your portfolio looking and then we’ll take it from there.

Okay, great. Yeah my name is Stuart and this is the 20th year of my real estate career. I started purchasing properties when I was 19, in 2002, and now we manage 3000 departments. In about 65 cities in the state of Michigan, many around metro Detroit. And then in addition to that, I’m invested in about 3000 other units through real estate syndications, where the properties are too far away for me to manage them.

North Carolina, South Carolina. So we were invested and manage about 6,000 units in total. We have a property management company, so we do three things for real estate investors that ways that you could get involved in what we do. The first thing is if you buy a property anywhere in the state of Michigan, we’ll manage it for you for a fee as a property manager that could be as small as a single family home.

Or the largest property we’ve ever managed was a 468 unit apartment building. We also have experience managing office space, retail, pretty much everything, but mobile homes will manage, and then that’s the first thing that we do for real estate investors. The second thing we do is we buy two to three small properties a month.

So a lot of times non-accredited investors approach us and say, how do we get started? How do we get involved? And we invite them. To JV with us, so to speak, into a single asset entity where we’re buying a small property. A triplex four unit, five unit. Tomorrow we’re buying a six unit in Port, or Huron, Michigan as an example.

That’s the second thing we do for investors. And then the third thing we do for real estate investors is we do real estate syndications. We’re currently raising two funds right now. Fund two is investing in apartment buildings, mid-sized apartment buildings, 20 to a hundred units. In the state of Michigan and then be Fund three is investing in office buildings, single story flexible use commercial slash office buildings in the state of Michigan.

And those two funds are active right now and you could invest in them right now. Awesome. First of all, wow, . That’s a lot of experience and that’s a lot of things going on at the same time. So I think this is gonna be a very interesting conversation. So we’re recording this in November, 2022. The Fed just increased another three quarters of our point last week, and they’re gonna do that again next week.

Inflation is going crazy. Interest rates are going up there’s no tomorrow, right? Everybody’s asking. What do you think about the market, right? So tell us, what do you think about the market? What do you see things going, what is your outlook on the short one, two years and then in the five, seven years range?

Kinda like someone with your experience. You’ve been around since 2002, so you’ve seen the big crash, right? Of oh 7, 0 8. So I’d love to hear what you. Yeah. Okay, great. So it’s very strange. Four months ago we borrowed 1 million at 3.45% interest rate to purchase an office building. And yesterday I agreed to pay 7.19% to do a cash out refinance with that very same bank on a different property.

And. . I didn’t readily agree to that. That was the best offer that I got on this property from the lending people that I was speaking to. It’s not a big property, it’s a small deal, so maybe I could have gotten a better interest rate if I had some more meat on the bone type of thing. But anyways, it was the best Buy a lot.

Yeah, it was the best offer that I got. What I tell people, And I’ve been doing this for 20 years in a couple of different environments, economic environments. What I tell people is everyone is gonna be playing the game on the same field. Okay. So you and your competitors on the buy side are gonna be.

Being offered approximately the same interest rates that you are on the sell side, your seller, the sellers are going to be selling to people that, again, are, have the same interest rates as you are, and when you can borrow at 3.45%, a building is worth a lot more. It’s both a buyer and seller.

Then when you are borrowing at seven or 8%, right? The debt is double. The sellers are gonna have to realize that, or they’re not gonna sell their buildings. And people, people sell buildings because they have to a lot of the time. And so the prices are going to have to stabilize or come down because buyers are not gonna be able to afford as much.

The, what I tell people is you can do well on. Economic environment, as long as you have a robust deal flow pipeline and you’re underwriting and reviewing multiple properties a month and then just doing the one or two that are the best for you, that you have the highest chance of succeeding at. And if you’re reviewing, let’s say you review 20 properties in a month and you pick the best two and you don’t do those 18.

You’re gonna do pretty well, in any environ. Because you’re choosing the best deals that are available to you and that you have the highest success. Now, if interest rates get too much higher, you’re gonna see me paying some debt off and holding properties in cash for the first time. You’re gonna see me buying properties in cash and maybe not refinancing as quickly.

You’re also gonna see more land contracts, right? Because sellers would be glad to be to lend you money at 6% instead of 8%, which you’d be borrowing it from a bank. So there’s a couple of different. Shifts that you can go to in, in higher interest rates. Now, I’ve never done higher interest rates before I, in 2002, I borrowed money at 5.25% by on my first deal, and then maybe my second deal, I borrowed 5.5, but I’ve been under that for 20 years.

I’ve never borrowed money at more than 5.5 basically for 20 years. And so this will. This is a new environment for me and I’m gonna have to learn how to adapt as we all are. But I will tell you that in 1981, my father bought his first house and in 1981, interest rates were 18%. And so the way he got that deal done was a land contract.

He borrowed the money from the seller at 12%. He thought that was a great deal, 33% less. Interest payment than you would’ve you borrowed from the bank. And the seller thought it was a great deal too, because he sold a house that he had to sell. Cause he had to move and he got a 12% return on his loan.

So you’re gonna see different things happening, yeah, I know. That’s a good point. And for our listeners from other states that, dunno what a land contract is, usually cell financing is just how we address it. At least in Texas, we call it seller financ. Land contract, so Yeah, no, that’s a good point.

What we’ve seen, and we’ve got a commercial brokerage, right? So we’ve seen that there is this weird gap between buyers and sellers that lasts about 120 to 180 days, right? So the buyers are facing the highest interest rates today, but the sellers are still thinking in terms of 120 days backwards of what the interest rate was back then.

Yeah. A lot of the investors that we talk to have this notion or the idea of when maybe I need to sit down and wait, maybe I need to hold off. And what we tell them is, instead of waiting, what we suggest is that make an offer today at the price you would pay three, four months from now. Yeah, exactly.

Waiting to invest in real estate. The exact opposite of what you wanna do. You want, you wanna invest as much money as possible in as quickly as possible into real estate that you have now. Don’t be reckless and invest every last dollar, keep an appropriate cash reserve. Of course, I’ve been guilty of breaking that rule, multiple times in my career, obviously.

But yeah, you want to invest as much money as, as quickly as possible in real estate, because as long as you’re. Choosing from multiple deals and doing the best one that you can. Real estate’s cyclical, obviously, goes up and down, but it will go up, especially with construction costs skyrocketing because really the price of real estate should be close to the cost of construction and in mid the.

For the last 20 years, it’s been so outta whack that we’ve got a lot of room for real estate to increase in value until it equals the cost of construction in Texas. You’re from Texas, much closer. The cost of real estate is much closer to the cost of construction. But in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where I live, we can still buy properties for 50% of what they would cost to build, and it used to be 25%.

So I think there’s room for real estate values to increase overtime. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Here in Texas they are the brokers make it a point to point it out when they, it’s below replacement cost. And over there in your world is like a third to maybe 50% of replacement cost.

Yeah. So that makes a total sense then. So you mentioned a few strategies when the market shifts of paying cash and doing things like this. One of the other things that we’ve noticed is on the rise in popularity is loan as. Especially when it comes to the agency debt. The larger Fannie Mae loans, right loans that were taken for seven, 10 years, but 3, 2, 3, 4 years ago are suddenly now very attractive cuz in they’re in the four to 5% range.

So that’s another strategy we see very popular in, in our environment. Yeah, so I had some properties for sale late last year where my interest rate on them was 4.85%, or maybe 5.15. And I couldn’t get anyone to assume the loans. I couldn’t get anyone to assume the loans. They said, no, we’re not gonna assume.

I said, no the, I got these prepayment penalties. I can sell the building at a higher, at a lower price to you if you assume the loan. Cause I’ll avoid the prepayment penalties. I couldn’t get anybody to assume them. But yeah, if I had, if I was selling a property today at a 4.85, I assume it would snap, it , snap it up.

Unless the loan, the value was so outta whack that, if it was like less than 50% loan to value or something, then maybe. But yeah, definitely we’re gonna be seeing a lot more loan assumptions for sure. . Awesome. So you mentioned that you have a property management company, which means you’re doing third party.

When did you set it up? Did you start man self-managing from the first property you bought, or did you get to a certain threshold where you said, okay, now it makes sense to do self-management? Yes. Since I bought my first property when I was. 19. I didn’t even know there were companies that managed properties for other people.

I didn’t. I didn’t even think of that and I wasn’t even aware of that. So the day I bought that first property was the day that our company, our property management company, was founded. So it was a property management company managing just five units for the first year. And I was the only employee, obviously.

But then the second property I bought was a 30. And it was pretty distressed, so I hired a maintenance technician to work for us when we did that. He still works here seven, 17 years later and then. The third and fourth property, got me to about 50, 55 units. And at that point I needed a bookkeeper and I had some other businesses.

So while managing 55 units isn’t a full-time job for a bookkeeper, I needed a bookkeeper for everything I had going on. So then that was like the third hire, and so it scaled up to there, where now we have about 60, 65 employees at the property management company, and I wish we had 80. It’s kinda hard right now, as to hire a maintenance technique,

Yeah, so let’s talk about that because that’s one of the biggest pinpoints that a lot of the owners that we see, that self-manage are facing. And we’ve had the same challenges as well, because we also self-manage is just hiring people. It seems like the world’s gone to a place where nobody wants to. and if they wanna work, I, after a month or two or three or six they just get bored and they wanna move to the next thing.

So you just mentioned you have an employee for 17 years. That’s amazing. What do you do to find good talent and more importantly retain it? Yeah, so the way I’ve retained that, that guy is, Do anything for him that he ever needs help with. Like I remember one time he was like in a fight with his wife, so I set him up in a hotel.

I remember one time he needed a, a bed that costs $6,000 for his wife. Cause she was in a situation. So I bought that for him. You just do anything you can for your like, main guys. You can’t do that for all 7 70, 65 guys. But those core guys you like really. Take care of, pay them a good salary, but then when it comes down to it, really take care of any pain points they have because then they’re just super loyal.

Because, when someone calls and says, hey, rich, come work for my property manager company a Rich, I bet says, no I gotta stick with Stuart because any problem I’ve ever. Ever had, he’s helped me out with, and if I come work for you, it’s not gonna be the same. So he’s very loyal.

We also have, 401K matching, which is very attractive. We have 30 company vehicles, which we give our maintenance staff. So they have their, they take pride in this $50,000 logo van that they drive. Whereas a lot of property management companies try to do property management where they have no vehicles at all.

The maintenance tech has to drive his own vehicle. . Another way to retain talent in terms of attracting talent. Who can hold a job right now? Has a job that’s a first. That’s a first for me in my career. Normally I would put ads out and I would get hundreds of resumes, but right now, anyone who can hold a job, Has a job.

So you’ll get a maintenance technician in the door and he’ll say, yeah, I worked for this other property management company for three months. Like alarm bells go off, but you need to hire a maintenance guy today. And so you do hire that person, but then one day later you’re like, oh, okay, I realize why this guy didn’t have a job, is because he literally can’t hold a job.

So what I do is I keep that core together. and then at the bottom, people come and go just daily, constantly. And it’s just a problem that we work on every day. And if you hire 20 guys that come and go quickly, maybe you’ll get one or two and you can retain them and keep it going.

But that’s the number one challenge in our business right now is attracting a maintenance technician who can do a robust amount of work. You. Yeah it’s, it, we talked to a lot of vendors and suppliers that, that are in the same spot as you and I. And it’s kinda it’s sad to see that we’re in a world where showing up every day on time became 70% of the requirement.

Yeah. Just show up. Yeah. So I have a couple of employees that have worked for me for more than 10 years who have never called in. Never not missed a day. And so when I’m talking to these younger people that are trying to work for me, I tell them that’s what’s possible. That’s the standard. And it’s weird when you sit down with someone after they’ve worked for you for 90 days and you point out to them that they’ve called in sick or not showing up like 11 out of 90 days, and 11 outta the first three weeks.

Exactly. Exactly. So it, it can be done. You can come to work every day and be responsible, a staff member. I’m not saying you can’t call on sick, I’m just saying it shouldn’t be something that happens so often that your boss starts thinking about it, yeah. And so it should just be a rare thing.

Yeah. You’re rare, you’re rarely miss work, and in maintenance, property management and, calling. Calling in is devastating for the employer, very unlike a lot of businesses. So for instance, I also own the Ace hardware and if in IFPs, Michigan that my wife owns it and Ru and runs it, , she has eight people working in the store.

If one person doesn’t show up, seven people are in the store. It’s a little store, and so it’s not the end of the world, but if a leasing agent that has 16 appointments tomorrow doesn’t show up it’s problematic. Yeah. And it’s, the impact goes beyond the employer, right? If the maintenance guy out of two calls in on a property, right?

Then suddenly half the work orders are not getting. And if the one that actually shows up is your HVAC guy, then now none of the ACS or the heaters are getting dark. So the impact goes beyond the employer, it goes onto the residents as well, and that impacts their lives as well. Yeah, so we’re focusing on retention, hiring new staff, and when we get lucky enough to have someone that looks like they have a lot of potential training them really well.

Try to keep them, keep keeping ’em going. Do you send them to school for HVAC certifications and stuff like that? Yeah, so I find the schools are not as good as just doing the job, so we do partner. Partner up where you partner up with a guy who’s worked for a long time and just get right into it, yeah, no, obviously school doesn’t teach you actual skills, but it gives them the certification. So sometimes we would send our maintenance guys to get a certification so a, they can get, go buy the materials like the free on and so on. But it also, , it helps them advance their career, having those certifications, right?

So when we send them they have the tendency of, staying more loyal cuz they know we can help them advance their career going forward. And of course with certification, they get raises and so on. So we use that as a tool for retention. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. So the.

Event that happened to everybody in our world was Covid. So tell me a little bit about how co covid impacted your world, both from the investor side and the property management side. Just cuz it impacts differently. Yeah. Okay, great. So when Covid hit, my partners and I had just finished raising 130 million from investors.

Buying 140 apartment complexes in which there were 6,000 units, like we had just wrapped. We had just been on a five year streak where we did that, and we had just wrapped it up. We just wrapped up our fourth syndication a month or two before Covid hit. So when Covid hit, I thought, Everything was over.

Not only just the business over, but it’s gonna be horrible, and I just remember being I had some real low days there in the beginning. And then magical things started to happening where lenders would reach out to us and say don’t worry about paying your loan.

We’re gonna give you six months of no payments at all. And then we’re gonna add that on the end. And then here came the SBA coming, saying, we’re gonna do it even better. We’re gonna pay your loan for you. So actually your principal, and then there will be over the six, six months. And and then these programs started coming out with with the ceremony and all these things where the tenants were gonna get support.

So just so much support happened. That we quickly realized that if we’re really nimble and work quickly, that we can survive this. And now, two and a half years later almost people are still applying for Sarah and , not paying the rent, it’s getting a little old. But in the, in, in the beginning there, the programs were really beneficial and, in, in the most part, things worked out.

Okay. Here’s an interesting question cuz I’ve been talking to a lot of operators recently and they all give me your, about the same answer. So in, in your, this is an estimate, right? In your estimate in the last two and a half years since Covid has started, what percent of rent income that you brought in.

Came from assistant organizations. I would say that it’s just an absolute mind boggling, staggering figure. I dunno the figure rough, yes.

I dunno. 10, 15, 20%. don’t know, but it, I actually hear more like 30, 40%. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Could, it could be. I hope it’s not that. Oh man, that’s bad. But yeah it’s mind boggling. And I’ve got a guy in Detroit who hasn’t paid rent in three years, meaning he, he owed money before Covid.

He’s gotten three rounds of payments, assistance from the government. And I asked him, Hey William, COVID is over for the most part. You gonna, are you gonna return to work and pay your rent? And he said, no, because by the time you figure out how to evict me, I’ll get bailed out a fourth time.

I’m sure, they’ll roll out, they’ll roll out a fourth program. So he is, he was just an able-bodied adult with a job and for the last three years he’s just sat in his apartment not working and. that, that’s amazing that you say that because one of my biggest concern right now with the way the economy is looking is that every benchmark in the economy looks really rough except for unemployment.

And that’s what everybody that has the mentality of, oh, it’s not too bad. It is pointed out. Look at the unemployment. It’s so low. It’s so low. . Like I said, I talk to operators across the board and they all say same stories as you just told us. And they say 30 40% of the income comes from assistance organizations.

It tells me that the unemployment rates is fake. Yeah, no, it is because that William Guy doesn’t sit on that unemployment rate numbers that we see coming out of the government choices. No, he. Yeah, they’re not counting people that Yeah. The unemployment is fake. The unemployment rate is fake because it doesn’t count people that are not looking for work.

e Exactly. So my point is, When the party ends, when the, those assistance organizations stop printing money. Cuz you can’t keep printing money forever. Inflation is going all over the place right now And that is one of the major reasons. But the federal government literally doubled the money supply in the last three years.

Yeah. When that party ends, when they stop giving away that money, I think we’ll see unemployment more than double. It’ll go from three, four to seven, eight. And then that’s where it’s really gonna be interesting to the economy. Yeah. I have a robust organization, but I’m not trying, I’m not trying to.

With this organization resolve economic problems, big economic problems, right? What I’m trying to do is be nimble enough, smart enough, move fast enough so that we benefit positively from economic shifts and not negatively. And it’s very challenging and, but it’s something that we work on every day is.

People like people this morning were distraught about the governor getting elected or not elected and they’re like having all these worries about, you can’t really run in a small business change that type of stuff. You just have to roll with what is coming your way, and that’s what I try to do.

Here’s the reality of things though. When we talk about the economy, it’s gonna be rough. Yes, it’s gonna be rough, but when there’s blood in the water, that’s exactly when sharks are having the most. . And this is where in our brokerage we work almost mainly with investors because when the market is good, investors invest, and when the market is bad investors invest because you make more money on downturns as a real estate investors than you do on upturns, right?

Anybody that bought in 2008, 9, 10, 11, even 12 right? Made a lot more money than anybody that bought in 20 16, 17, 18, right? Yeah. It’s that. So when I talk about the economy’s gonna be bad, it doesn’t mean that people should stop investing or not invest at all. It’s about what you said at the beginning of the conversation is the strategy has to shift, right?

We have to look at maybe we do sell financing, maybe we pay cash. Maybe we use this, or we use that. Maybe we don’t refi, we buy and hold for a little bit longer. . It’s just a shift in the strategy, but it doesn’t mean, okay, stay away for the market. It makes no sense, right? Because even if you look back on 2008, a lot of people lost their homes for foreclosure, but you don’t go from a 4, 4, 4, $500,000 house to the street, right?

You lost that house, but you go to an apartment, right? So being in the apartment industry, being in apartment complexes is a great thing. Even in down. Yeah I agree. And we stress tested our portfolio a number of different ways, and we think that, we could function at, 75% occupancy or collections, I should say, 80% collections, on a lot of our portfolio.

And we just, you just gotta make sure that as an investor going into a downturn as you’re not too overly levered, and I’ve always been. Way under levered. I don’t, I do cash out refinances, but I don’t do ’em as quickly as I could and as aggressively as I could. That’s one of my main blueprints is cash out refinances.

But I just still don’t do ’em as aggressively as I could. And so that keeps me under levered. And hopefully we can be agile in a downturn. And I hope it isn’t a downturn, but we will definitely take advantage if it. . Yeah, that makes sense. So as operators, right? As, as that, especially syndicators that work with investors.

Our job is to make money for our investors. In the multifamily world, in the commercial real estate world, a formalized simple n o i divided by cap equals value. Raising our NOI is the main thing we’re focused on, and that goes both ways. We either increase income or we decrease expenses.

So give us a few samples of what you guys do in your organization to increase income or decrease rent. We would like to see examples for both of you have that are not the obvious run, right? That don’t, increase rent. Okay, that’s obvious. And apply rub. , or I don’t know if you guys do rubs up there, the ratio utility billing.

These are pretty common. Everybody’s doing that. Give us a few creative ones that you guys have been using in the last few years to increase the value of your properties. Yeah. Okay, great. So we. Often by secondary in tertiary market class C and class B apartment complexes from mom and pop sellers.

And these folks have managed these things for 30 years and they’re have not. Invested into the property in order to attract folks who are looking for a nice apartment. So what we do is we go in and we modestly increase rents on the existing residence, which naturally flushes a few people out and, a few people don’t renew.

And what we do is we go in and we upgrade the unit to a significantly higher. Then the owner was renting the apartment before. It’s basically, a basic value add strategy. Then we try to eliminate cost on the expense side. So for example, I bought a five unit apartment complex, a five unit apartment house in Ypsilanti recently, where the former owner had been paying waste management 3000 a year for a dumpster for 10 to 15 years.

And I asked him why don’t you just get rid of the dumpster and use the city trash can? And he said five units is a lot to have the trash cans and the residents don’t really take great care of the trash cans. I’m like, yeah, but you’re eliminating a $3,000 expense on a property that has income of, 40, 50,000 a year is just huge.

And yeah. Yeah. The value of the property significantly. So we u we look to eliminate things that we can. I also recently bought a seven unit apartment building in Ohio, and I went into the basement and realized that the water piping, the, it had a fire and the guy who rebuilt the property ran the piping in such a way where you could just attach seven water meters.

So you go from one water meter to seven water meters and. After I bought it, have the meat water in their name and they’re paying the water directly. Again, not increasing the rent, but reducing expenses. And that’s a strategy. And then what we’ve also done is since we’re managing so, so many units, you can go to vendors and get discounts, so like we’ve got a discount at Lowe’s, discounted Home Depot, discounted ACE Hardware, but we’ve got certain vendors.

That offer us discounts because of the amount of volume that we give them. For instance, our main electrician, they charge, people who just called our office handy electrician, they charge ’em almost twice as much as they charge us because we use them almost every day. And, it keeps their guys busy and then they can charge more people, other people more money.

So that’s another strategy. But on the income side it’s really the basics. Value add strategy rubs, . Okay. Yeah, makes sense. One of the things that we did when we started scaling up on our management side of things is we started buying equipment, right? So better plum, more professional plummet equipment or landscaping and stuff like that, and had our in-house guys take care of.

almost everything we could in-house. And that caused a of cost saving because if I had a slab leak in the parking lot, instead of paying $4,000 for a plumber to come do that, two of my guys could finish it out in a day, which end up basically costing us a couple of hundreds or $300 instead of 3000.

4,000. Do you guys do the same in your. Yeah, so I, I talk to other property management companies, especially property management companies that are run by realtors, and they tell me they don’t employ anyone at all. Every single issue is taken care of by a subcontractor. And I was like, oh my God, you’re paying like twice.

For a lot of what you’re getting done than if you had people that work for you in house. And that’s why we have a robust maintenance staff. We have over 30 maintenance technicians at our maintenance company, and we’re saving ourselves money every single day. A plumber costs $125 per hour, . and your maintenance guy could take care of four plumbing issues in a building for the one hour that the plumber would charge you, yeah. So that’s a main strategy unfortunately, with. Are not having enough staff. We have to rely on subcontractors too much right now.

But you’ve gotta get the work done. So you gotta do what you gotta do, yeah, no, I totally get that now. But I was talking about taking it to the next level, right? So you, your maintenance guys will do the basic plumbing, right? But a slab leak that requires you guys might not have slab leak, but in our world, the slab leak means digging through concrete underneath the building to find the pipes. and then have a $3,000 pro machine or have a $3,000 auger that to run the big cleanouts. So we elected to spend the money to buy the expensive equipment the more commercial grid, if you wanna call it, in order to have our guys have the capabilities.

Cuz like you said, when you have a good maintenance guy, a good technician, They can do a lot of things right, but if you don’t have the equipment for them to do that, then you have to call a third party contractor to do that for you. Yeah. So that’s what I was talking about. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, for sure.

Yep. And we own a robust amount of equipment and we also rent some things. So as an example, we got a quote from a plumber for a $15,000 new sewer line. And I said how much is the excavation? How much is the plumbing? Turns out the excavation was about 80% of the work. So I rented a mini excavator and had our maintenance technician do the excavation.

He did the entire excavation in a day. The plumber came in with his permit and did the plumbing, and that saved about 50% on the whole job, yeah, that makes total sense. Cuz you can rent those things at Home Depot for three, $400 a day, it was like, we rented one of those in one of our properties and I was happy to play with it.

It was like a little toy . I was on site that day, so I was like, okay, then give me a turn. Yeah. No, that’s great. A question we ask all of our guests on the show is if you could go back to younger, you right. A 20 year old Stewart and say, Hey, listen. He’s you can tell ’em that 2008 is the bottom right.

So buy everything you can. And you can’t give them the 2 billion lottery ticket numbers. So what would be a good advice for young? Yeah, so I, in 2006 to 2016, ran a construction company where I had as many as 180 employees and we were doing work in seven states. I wanted to build a regional, construction company powerhouse, but our payroll was $200,000 a week or every other week, and.

At the end of the day, I was just doing construction for other people who were doing real estate and making money on the real estate side, and I feel like I wasted 10,000 of my hours on this construction. If I could go back and just focus on. Instead of that construction company I would’ve done even more in real estate.

And that’s why I, people call me and say, Hey Stuart, I see you’ve got 30 maintenance guys. Can you come over and do a project at my property? And I tell them, if you hire me to manage it, I will, but I don’t do construction. Separately, I want that recurring management revenue, and then I’ll do the maintenance, but I’m not gonna do it as a one-off construction project.

And so that’s what I would go back and do. But I’m gonna I’m happy overall with what I’ve accomplished. But that’s, no, that’s, it’s not a small feat. Owning thousands of units, investing in thousands more, having a big property management company. That’s very impressive, right?

There’s nothing you know, not to be happy about. So if any of our listeners wants to hear more from you, get in touch with you, maybe invest with your a syndications, or have you manage one of their properties in the area, how can they find you? Okay, great. So I’m very active on Facebook. I’m Stuart Beal.

I’m very active on LinkedIn. Send me a Facebook message, send me a LinkedIn message, and then emails always best beal go beal.com. And then our property management website is ww dot go beal.com. And our real estate syndication website is ww.deal capital.com. So you can find us on those websites and to invest a minimum of $25,000.

You do not need to be an accredited investor to invest in our smaller deals. Triplex Ford Unit five, unit six unit. We’re buying a six unit tomorrow that you could invest in, for instance, and then to invest in our syndication, you need to be an accredited investor. We’ll help you get accredited if you’ve never gone through that process before.

And then you can invest in our pools of real estate. You’ll own a smaller slice of a larger pool. But I can tell you oftentimes that works out really well for the investor. Yeah, that sounds great, and we’ll definitely put all the links in the show. Thank you so much for coming in. That was a very interesting conversation.

I knew as soon as I see your bio, I saw your bio. I knew it’s gonna be a very interesting conversation, so I appreciate you coming up on the show. All right, great. I had a great time. Thank you very much for having me. Awesome. And for you, the listeners, if you do us a favor, please give us a rating. Doesn’t matter if it’s a one star, five star, whatever you feel is right.

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