Episode 136: From Educators to Multifamily Operators! with Ken and Rachel Wick - 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. Today we have Ken and Rachel Wick.

Guys, welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. Great to meet you here. Awesome. Just as usual, we let our guests introduce themselves at the beginning. Give us like 30 seconds or a minute about how you got into real estate. What are you doing today? How does your portfolio look like? And we’ll take it from there.

All right. We’ll try to match at 30 seconds as best we can. Yeah. We, Rachel and I are former teachers. We have had rental property since 2004, mostly smaller property. In 2019, we decided to go into large multi-family. We partnered up with some folks out in Las Vegas on three properties, and since I’ve gotten into two properties, closed or home in Iowa and presently, we’re working on the thirds now we’re.

I at over 200 units and we manage one of the apartment complexes where the operators asset managers. Oh, I assume that’s why you’re having us on today. Awesome operations. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that’s interesting. So you went from teachers that kind of invested on the side to full-time managing apartments.

That’s absolutely awesome. Which part of the country you guys are from? We’re from Minnesota and part of the reason we did that is we have six children between the two of us. And as educators, you don’t necessarily think you’re setting yourself up for the future. So we thought this would be like many of your listeners, I’m sure.

This would be something to supplement our income for the future. Yeah. And God knows we underpaid teachers, nurses, and in this country. Let’s talk about how you guys got started in multi-family and not necessarily from the purchasing, but the first decision you gotta make when you buy something that is more than a single or a duplex is, am I gonna hire a third party manager or am I gonna self-manage?

And if I heard you correctly, you guys are self-managing. We are for. One of ’em, we’re not actually property managing the property. We’re operations managers and asset managers. Yeah. That’s what I meant. So our podcast is about operators, not property management companies. But there’s a difference between, I’m gonna talk to you once a quarter kind of asset managing, and there is operators of, we’re on top of it, we’re handling things.

How did that decision. Come to be that you’re gonna be a lot more engaged, a lot more hands on. Sure in back in 2004 when we bought our first triplex and duplex and single family home kind of all at the same time, we were managing ourselves and God teaches us a lot the first time you start managing a property yourself.

And back then, you weren’t just jumping on the internet to learn how to manage a property well, and we probably weren’t even smart enough to go to the library and pick out a book that actually taught us how to do that either. So value add. Multi-family just started us off. And so after that we probably did that for 12 to 15 years to, and then we started realizing, no, there’s some really nice six units and eight units around us and 12 units, and how are people buying those anyways, and that kind of kicked off our journey to just listening to podcasts and starting to learn this is possible to do without us using all of our own capital to buy these.

And that’s where we got into the Finding a market about three hours away from us and hiring third party property managers and us overseeing that. Okay. So how do you interact? Let’s take a step back. How do you choose a third party management company? Three hours away. That’s a great question.

Initially we had encountered a single property management company that we talked, we had questions, we have a whole list of questions now. That we asked property management companies. At the time we were so green. We thought, okay, this guy seems pretty good, let’s just go with them. And unfortunately we had to dismiss him about seven months into the project.

And then at that point in time, we had been talking to some of our other fellow operators who. Said, call everyone. Call all the property managers in the market. Tell ’em about your project. I ask them a bunch of questions and at them. And so that’s what we did and we did a little bit better job of it the second time around.

And at that point we questions to ask. We had reference is that we checked on and ended up part really good property manager. One thing I’d like to share with listeners as you go and pick up a property, depending on the size of your property, will also depend on the type of property manager that you have operating in.

For example, if you’re buying a property over a hundred units, you’re probably going to have a property manager that owns potentially thousands of units, either in your market or not. But they’ve got those efficiencies of scale. They have things down ready to go. Some of those big property managers won’t take you if you’re picking up a mid-size property, say a 50 unit, because they know they’re a little more labor intensive and you can’t afford to have somebody on site.

So there’s different levels of property managers is what I think I. I would say, and if you’re going around the 20 unit purchase, you’re probably gonna end up managing it yourself. No, you’re absolutely right. And we’ve heard that from multiple of our guests before. It’s, you gotta pick the right manager for whatever you are buying.

It’s gotta, they have to have experience in the same asset class because multifamily and student housing might sound the same to building with a lot of doors in it. But it’s not the same animal. And then also the size matters a lot. I always give the example of a company that manages even 300 single family unit are not gonna be a good job managing your 20 unit apartment complex.

All right? And that’s just because they’re not built, they don’t have the same processes, they don’t have the same manpower and so on. So it’s absolutely you’re spot on that one. Figuring out what’s right for your property and your market is probably the right way to go at it. I’d like to add one more thing, one thing as your listeners go out shopping for a property manager, not all property managers will take your property either in the sense that some of them, I wanna call them class A property managers, they’re they love to have the place looking fantastic, and they want an owner to put about 20 grand into each. Unit to make everything just sparkle and shine. And then there’s some that are definitely willing to actually listen to your bus business plan and follow your underwriting as to what you could afford, what you raised to afford to renovate.

Yeah. I tell, I’m a broker too so not just an owner and operator. I tell my clients, you, your property management company is gonna be a quarterback. You gotta find them ahead of time and let them line up the rest of the team. And you can be the coach, but they’re your quarterback. They’re in the field.

They’re the one that lead the charge. So find them before you buy a property. They’ll help you with the due diligence. They’ll help you with the vendors. They’ll help you with the bids. They’ll help you knowing. Don’t buy. This ones got a lot of trouble cuz you know, they’ve been around 30 years. They know all the properties, whether they managed it or didn’t.

I tell my my clients says, find your quarterback first, and then they’ll help you build a team around them. That’s a great point. I love that idea. In fact, we’re working on another property right now and we plan to have our current property manager move into this new one, and so he’s been instrumental in helping us decide what is the neighborhood like.

He came on the entire inspection and walked all the units with us. He met quite a few of the residents and also the owner and some good conversations that way. So he becomes a real valuable resource. At before you get your first property and as you move into subsequent properties. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And what you said about getting him involved earlier than later. We don’t go on a tour of a property unless we bring our property manager with us, and even if you’re out shopping for different property managers, Take one with you because they’re gonna see things you don’t see. And like you said, they really know the neighborhoods and they already know the apartment complexes and probably owners.

And through those tours, you’re gonna find out if the property manager is decent, they’ll reveal not they know what they’re doing. Yeah. And I keep telling people it’s the smallest big industry you can find. It’s like everybody knows everyone. The people that have survived more. There’s two type of people.

There’s the people that do a quick tour in multifamily and then they say, hell no, never again. And there’s the people that are there for a lifetime and the ones that are there for a long time, they know everybody. They’ve done everything. They touched every property. They’ve been everywhere. So leaning on that experience is important.

Especially if you don’t want to be the one actually doing the work I, in the field. So right now you guys are about 200 units, right? Correct. Has there been a conversation with your partners, with yourselves about, do we ever wanna. Create our own property management company, if it is, what kind of a scale are we thinking about would justify it?

What’s your thoughts about that? We have talked amongst ourselves with our partners and with other operators about that very question, how big you have to be able to afford your own property management company. How do you make sure that you get the right person to be your quarterback, like you say.

Come in and take over or, and follow your business plan. So we think that eventually when we get big enough, we’ll diversify vertically and have our own property management company underneath, or our companies weigh. We probably will start thinking about it when we get to the 800 or thousand dollars a thousand unit level in the Des Moines area, just cuz.

We, we just absolutely love that market and we definitely can see we’re, you can see we’re starting to think about it already as we’re joining other operators in the area and we’re partnering up. Things are moving a little bit faster, I think we’ll be picking up units quicker, so might be time to just start planning.

Yeah so I can tell you, we’ve interviewed guests that said until I hit a thousand units, I don’t touch it. I, we’ve had guests that have thousands of units and said, I will never have my own property management. And we’ve had guests that started at 40 units they, the, that was their first property and they’ve never had a third party.

It’s more of a control thing than it is a profit center. Because honestly, it’s not a profit center. It’s a brain damage center systems, right? And I agree with you. We agree with you. It is about overseeing equity. Quarterback, like you said, we’re the coach needs the quarterback. We’re the ones who are calling the plays and making sure that the right players are getting called.

We’re the ones that have a weekly meeting with our property manager on Zoom or once a month for sure. We head down to our properties that are about three hours away from us and visit the properties, check on the progress in person be able to actually press at the contractor with the property manager.

With vendors if need be. We’re the ones who look over the weekly financials and pay the bills. We don’t let our property manager pay bills. We have everything run through our accountant, our accountants send as a listener, bills payable every week, and then we okay them or if we have questions, we go back to the property manager or who initiate invoice and say, Hey, what’s.

What’s going on with this? They also have a limit of how much they can spend. They can’t over $500 without talking to us, unless it’s some extreme urgency like pipe burst in the middle of the night on Saturday. Something like that. No, and I think one of the things we’ve come to realize after going through our first property management issues we’ve learned that we like like you said, controlling the.

Property management transparency. We’ve, we’re running with a software called Resin. I don’t know if any of you have heard of that. We’re really enjoying that. We are in checking invoices, making sure we’re not getting double billed, et cetera. We’re very involved with the T 12 and the p and l and we’re constantly on it.

And then we hired a multi-family accounting firm again to pay all the bills, do all of our books. Fi financials, foreign investors. That’s why I think we might end up actually having our own property management company because we like it so much and there’s so much more. We’re not overspending as much as, let’s say we were before.

It sounds like you are in some sort of a hybrid mode because what you’re describing is not used in third party. So third property manager’s. Great. Yeah. So third, so that sounds like a hybrid when you have someone in the field handles the field work. Exactly. But you guys hold all the back office side of things.

So you’re in a hybrid mode and the step towards just calling it your own property management is just moving the people down in, on the field into payroll. It yes. If you look at it that way, that is accurate. They handle the leasing, they handle tenant relations. They take care of requests. We have, for example, if we a.

Hey, can you look for a vendor to take care of a plumbing issue or a laundry machine that’s gone bad? They coordinate all of those types of things. So you’re ac you’re accurate when you say it’s a hybrid mode and they’re actually in the field and we’re handling back into office piece. Yeah, and part of that came our first part.

Partner in our first three complexes were accountants and one of the two partners owned a multi-family accounting business, a national business. And so they were the ones who taught us that maybe this is a better way to go because we have more control over. Or what happens with the finances and, being a property manager is.

Hard. We honestly pray for our property managers over and over every day. They’re constantly getting a barrage of, maintenance calls as well as complaints. So we know how hard that is and we are just so thankful. Our property manager is very personable and takes that on very well. So we like overseeing the backend office stuff and just letting ’em take care of that.

And yes, we can scale quickly and easily with them because this system is already in place. So that’s where our next one’s we’re just. Check it on, take over and keep going. And to one more point, one more point on this too, Joseph, we did negotiate a lower percentage to pay him. Cause we were not gonna use his property management software and we were not gonna use his accounting or his bank accounts.

So that gave us leverage and negotiate a slightly discounted rate from his normal percentage. So I’m just gonna flat out ask it. What’s stopping you from putting him on payroll? He’s got. Several hundred other units that he manages for other owners too. So we would have to go out and find somebody and hi, hire them ourselves and train them ourselves in a, like we were saying earlier, at some point we’ll probably get to the stage where we can do that, but we’d like to.

He is a great guy. Yeah. But. He’s got too many other irons in the fire and they’re willing to help hire those people. Mean that we’re not in the market. We have, like we said, acquired some partners so they will be boots on the ground and we will be able to do that in the not too distant future.

But we are liking that they’re planted there and they’ve been there for years and they know those properties. So as we’re picking up more, there’s still a really integral part of, us knowing if a place is gonna, work out for us since we’re three hours away. I don’t know. I think they’ve got, they’ve turned properties.

They’ve turned other syndicators properties and turned great profits by executing the syndicators business plans in a different state. And a syndicator actually moved them up to Iowa in order to help them get off their feet as a property management company because he had them as employees.

He’s still along for the ride and he’s still growing, but he’s sold off some of his assets. So they really know the system, how it works. And how disposition comes. So right now we’re utilizing that and they’re willing to take on contract employees and do some 10 90 nines with them and oversee hiring.

So we’re in that middle stage, yeah. You’re not that far off. Yeah. It sounds like you’re not that far off. Okay, awesome. I’m assuming that you guys are doing value add. Execution plans. So we ask all of our guests to help our listeners get some new ideas, right? So buying the property that is under marketing rents, that’s easy, right?

You raise the rents. A lot of them don’t use utility chargebacks, so you add utility chargebacks. Those are the, let’s call obvious ones. Give us a few of the not so obvious ways to increase income. And because noi, every dollar we increase income, and every dollar we reduce expense is equally valuable.

Then we will turn the conversation to reducing expenses in a couple of seconds. But let’s see if we, if you guys have anything you would love to share with us that maybe give some new ideas to our listeners. And this is probably nothing. No, not rocket science here. When we walked a prop two properties ago they were just, they were, they had an outrageous trash contract.

It was outrageous. Like even without us being in the market, we knew that was crazy. We were able to walk in the door and reduce that $10,000. Number two insurance costs. Insurance is huge. So as you know right now with all the different catastrophes, insurances all over the board. So honestly, we’re on a year by year.

We’re hunting year by year, free every year. New companies always stay on top of that cuz that can be a $10,000 difference even in a mid-size property. We literally just got. Insurance on 1 48 for 14,400 earlier this year, and now we’re buying a 48 and it’s 22,000 and it’s six months later.

So those would be things I would just put on people’s radar right away. Time. Yeah, absolutely. Those are great ways to reduce costs. The trash thing is just one of the. Least or the most overlooked item I’ve ever seen talking to owners and I’m just like you. That’s one of the first thing I’m looking at is kinda like, what’s going on there?

Because a lot of the time it’s, there’s too many dumpsters or they get picked up too often and what’s the point in having an always empty dumpster? So we help look at the plan, and we sometimes there’ll be two like single dumpsters right next to each other. And it’s like, why do I have two, put two, put a double one and then I only have one pickup a week instead of two pickups a week.

So that that’s a really good item for saving costs. And of course insurance. Everybody get hammered. In the last 10 months, all the renewals. The least I’ve heard about was 30%. And that’s us. We got 30% increase. That was the least I’ve heard about everybody else is more all the way up to double that’s just.

Detrimental to the noi. Absolutely. Couple other thoughts. The things that we’ve done at our first 48 unit, we contracted with a water conservation company to come in and change out all the aerators on the sinks and faucets and the shower heads, and they changed out all the toilets. And that is an upfront cost to be sure about a cut or water bill almost in half.

Another thing that we did, and we plan to do this at our new property as well. Another thing that we did is we keep an eye on the property taxes. We were just talking to one of our broker friends yesterday about our property taxes and how they’ve gone up. And there’s a method in Iowa where you can challenge that and you can bring that to up in front of the company board and potentially pitch your case and your property taxes.

Potentially reduce, but that’s something you should keep an eye on too. And couple unique ideas I’ve thought of. If you and your company can handle pets in your apartment complex, you can charge for pets. I would put some limitations on that. I wouldn’t allow any pets. Bulls, for example, or constrictors, that kind of thing.

Depends on what your tolerance is. And then a unique idea we heard during our training was you can set up what’s called a trash concierge surface, where you hire somebody to come door to door and pick up the trash on a certain day of the week and take it to the dumpster. And oddly enough, people will pay for that.

Some people. Valet Trash. Yeah. Valet trash. We’ll enjoy that. Some people may not have physical strength to carry a trash bag. The dumpster. So you’re offering a service that they might appreciate, and we haven’t done this yet, but we’re looking at it. The next property we’re about to take over, nobody has renter’s insurance.

Okay. We’re looking at maybe hiring. I don’t even know how, like going in under a contract. Yeah. We had a guest on the show Calvin Roberts from Falcon Insurance, and they, he mentioned that they have a program for multifamily owners or property management where you offer the insurance.

I think it’s like $15 for the tenant and you get to keep almost half of it. So that’s a partnership that he he’s done with multi-family owners in that, again, every dollar we add to the NOI is a multiplier for us in the value. Tell him about, so we did have one back. We had a thing that our property manager put in place, but it made money for him, but it owners could do this.

Why don’t you tell him what the last document. Previous property manager had what he called a resident benefits package, and for $30 a month, a resident benefit package included a monthly or as needed change out of the furnace filter. And you wanna stay on top of that because if one of those gets clogged and your furnace or your air conditioner is up and leak over, you’re gonna have a pretty big cleanup bill from that.

In addition for every month that they paid on time that was reported to a credit reporting service that helped resident build credit. He also offered gift cards. If resident paid six months in a row without being a, they would get a $30 gift card. And what else was on that? So he would set up their utilities.

So he would help them through that process. He would also help them home That’s right with home shopping. Because he was a broker. All most property managers are. And basically he, so he would charge $30 to the tenant. And at the time we were not very happy about this cuz we were in the middle of our value add.

We’re trying to bump them $175 and then he’s taxing 30 on top. And we knew he was clearing at least $15. Straight property. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s things too. Yeah, definitely. No every property management company has their own thing. I’ve seen property management companies that keep late fees for themselves, all penalty fees.

And that’s just weird if you ask me cause that’s property income. But again, knowing exactly what your property management is offering and. What their fee structure looks like is very important upfront cuz that’s another way to save cost. Just change your management to somebody that does that on its own.

But it’s interesting that he bundles these things and call it a benefit package. You mentioned earlier that you use resin. Resin has credit builder as a service, so you can offer that, and that comes down to training your leasing agent. If you’re losing an agent knows how to promote those.

Here’s the insurance we recommend. Here is the the credit builder that can help you build credit. It only reports when you pay on time. Does not report when you don’t pay on time, so they don’t get scared of it. Stuff like that when you can do up sale. We also had a A guest that is a company that helps building owners negotiate access agreement with the cable company.

Okay. So your at and t, Comcast, Verizon, all these guys they need permission to get on your property and sometimes there are old contracts in place. Sometimes there are no contracts in place. And when there is no contract or the old contract is about to expire, that company steps in and then negotiate on your behalf.

And they get owners thousands of dollars for those access agreement. So that’s another interesting way that we’ve seen talking to people in the industry that people can add value and add income to the properties. As you mentioned, resin, one of the thing that came to mind. So because of their thousands of units that they’re operating with, we actually can, another income maker for people could be the background and credit check, which normally about $25 is charged to the resident.

But because of these efficiencies, were only charged like $12. So that’s another income maker there. And the other thing is and Ken, we’ll probably talk more about this. We had people breaking in and tearing off our washer and dryer coin tops. Breaking those open and then getting free laundry for a while.

And we looked into a program with a Bluetooth. Yeah, it’s a, you probably, but it’s a Bluetooth credit card activated module that you retrofit onto your washer and dryer machines and your laundries residence, and you put up. Signs teaching people how to use it and email them the directions, QR codes.

And so they come and they hit the QR code, they can pay with an app and get their laundry done that way, and then it gets deposited directly into your bank account as opposed to having a whole bunch of cash sitting in a coin box for a month until the property manager comes around and picks it up next time.

Yeah. So that’s more retaining the actual income that you’re earning instead of it may be disappearing on the way or being stolen. One of the things that we’ve also implemented in the laundry room specifically because the laundry rooms, one of our apartments is all exterior access. There’s no interior hallways, so residents have a key, the laundry room.

They can come in the laundry room and do their laundry, put the laundry and e come back an hour later and pick it up. The light switches in there, or we’re just on light switches. So we in motion sensors that 10, five minutes after they leave. Lights go off. We’re not burning electricity, but nobody’s in the on room.

Yep. That’s great. That’s great. How about resident retention? So we all know that every time we turn a unit it costs us money and time and you have vacancy and you gotta pay leasing commissions and all that. Do you guys do anything on your communities that will encourage retention? Yes.

A big insent. A big initiative for us is to provide a sense of community in all of the apartment complexes we’re involved in. In one complex. One complex, for example. Has a master release us bats and only rents veterans coming out of, in, out of the streets and moving back into society. Another one has units set aside for women coming out of incarceration.

Same thing. They come the apartment, they get social services, they get back in, they get back into society. Our complex is we give them bi-annual appreciation gifts. For example, at Thanksgiving, Rachel and I walked around and delivered pumpkin Apple. Apple choice. Yeah, they could go pumpkin or an apple, pumpkin apple.

We give them a gift card at Christmas and a holiday card saying, we appreciate you. We appreciate you being here. We try to provide community space in the complexes that don’t have it. Picnic tables. Permanent barbecue grills playground. We’re considering putting it in one of our apartment complexes.

The one that we’re currently purchasing actually has an a preschool, an afterschool education program run every day of the week from one o’clock to five o’clock. The preschool kids in the afterschool kids when they get off the bus in one of one of the one bedroom units. So we want, we really, we are highly focused on giving back to the community, is that we have apartments on.

We don’t like the idea that if you’re an apartment owner, that you’re just there to bump rents and take the cash and don’t care about their residents. This the people business as much as it is a business. And we wanna provide safe, clean housing for people to live in. When you talk to your owners, you know that many of them have residents who’ve been there 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 years.

That’s their home. It’s not just a pit stop, it’s where they live. And why shouldn’t it be a great place for them to live? Also, one of the goals that we do have when we started doing all this about four years ago, is to buy properties big enough that we can implement what’s called apartment life.

Have you ever heard of that, Joseph? Yeah, I think so. The community portal? Yeah. Okay. They actually place two people on site in one of the units to live there and build community from within creating different every month there’d be some sort of social activity. They try and draw people together, of course, have little celebrations and such, and then they start trying to introduce other tenants to each other so that they can feel like they belong and then, To incre, it happens to increase the n no I of a property and the overall sale price because they start reaching out about four months before the resident is term is up.

And they start, asking them, if they like to stay what’s helping them, what’s hurting them what they might need, to, to want to stay in, be a part of that community. So that typically saves a 200 unit complex, about a hundred thousand dollars just from turnover costs.

Yeah. It’s worth building community. Yeah, I can definitely see that. One of the things, once we complete this I of this current purchase, one of the things we’re gonna do immediately is residents, basically give them a list of amenities that we could do for them and say, which of these are important to you?

Would you like a playground? Would you like a common space with a Perla and some picnic tables? And any number of other things, and see what their response is. That does two things. Number one, it shows that we’re interested in their welfare, which we are, we’re taking we’re taking that and putting in their hands and saying, what would you like in your community?

And number two, it gives us a chance to give back. Yeah. I’d just like to share this cuz we think it’s just such a great idea and we’re totally taking the model that the current owners in this property we’re about to take over are already doing. So this is something they’re doing and we’re gonna try and follow in their footsteps.

They have 28 3 bedrooms in this complex. When you have three bedrooms, that’s gonna lend to a lot of families moving into the property. So there’s gonna be children. Yeah. They have been reaching out to, I think Catholic Charities is one of the organizations. Yep. And there’s also a few others, but basically when they have a unit come up open, they reach out and they place.

Refugee families and immigrant families, and they’re families and they are paid, their rent is paid for three months from the organization. So right away they’re coming in, rent’s paid, and they both parents usually get jobs. No problem. Nobody feels a sense of entitlement. Everybody’s happy to have a place to live in this new country that they’ve come to.

We’ve been on site a couple times and been with them. It’s family oriented. People are kind, generous. They’re, we have a huge diversity of different cultures, which we would recommend if you do this to have lots of cultures, not just one culture within a complex. And so we’re gonna continue to do it.

Place is a hundred percent full all the time. Because nobody wants to move. They typically, and the entire parking lot’s filled with pickups SUVs and minivans. So you know how sometimes we all kinda look at the type of vehicles that are in a park parking lot? Yeah. They all are, they’re two parent working families and then they’re saving for a house.

So typically when they move out, which is years, Four or five years, they buy a house. Yeah. On a place like this, when they actually plan on moving out, what we used to offer, and that’s an opportunity for you guys, is we call it the home buyer program, which is basically we do leases for 12 months and when people are getting ready to buy a house, when they’re getting closer, they are, they don’t want to.

Pay for the they, they don’t wanna commit for 12 months. So we tell them, you pay $300 home buyer program fee, and if you do end up buying a house during the lease, we will release you without paying the relenting fee. That’s very smart. So it’s a upfront fee for you guys. It gives you a heads up this.

Tenants are thinking about buying a house. If you have a relationship with a realtor, then you can do the referral. Because we’re brokers too, but we tell the tenants if you work with our assist company, the brokerage to buy the house, we will waive your relenting fee. Obviously we would love to get the commission from the real estate over the relating fee.

So that’s kinda it’s a synergy kind of thing. But the home buyer program basically, They feel more comfortable signing the 12 months lease so you don’t have to worry about the ends. And if they buy a house, congratulations. They would move out anyways, so why, not take the six months, eight months that it will take them to get to the closing.

Yeah. Huh. I like that idea. Yeah. Makes sense. We just need to get somebody on our team that’s a broker. Yeah. You just gotta go back and watch all the episodes cause We had a lot of great operators on the show, and I can tell you like half of our operations manual was built on this podcast.

Just by hearing great ideas coming from operators like you, what they’re doing, how they’re doing there’s a lot of things that you don’t know that you don’t know. So for example I didn’t. I live in Texas. We buy in Texas. We brokers in Texas, so I’ve never have seen a p and l for a property up north where there is like snow removal line item.

It’s like the first time I saw that it was like, wait, what’s that? And it, and again, you don’t know what you don’t know. So that’s what it is. It’s it’s talking to other operators and getting those ideas, cuz I’m a big believer in r and d. Reap off and duplicate. Okay. Love it.

Awesome. Awesome. If you could just go back in time and give your younger self an advice what would that be? And let’s say you can’t tell your younger self 2009 is the bottom by everything. Okay. Let’s take that one out. Good. So when we first started, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and probably thank goodness because I probably would’ve scared myself.

But jumping in jumping into that first triplex, it needed so much work. So much work and two of the three tenants weren’t paying rent. And like all that stuff. I love it. I enjoy the people aspect of it. We still enjoy here and there doing renovations probably would’ve done even more of ’em.

We, we, everything we bought, we’ve used creative financing so it works. Probably just would’ve pushed it even harder and would’ve picked up more and gotten into large multi-family faster. We spent about 15 years doing the small multi-family and now we’re at four here. And we’ve exited our education jobs.

So I guess I would definitely go sooner, at least start learning. Sooner. Yeah, that was I agree. We did have kind of a full plate. We have six children, so we had a full plate for a long time. Six kids, two fulltime jobs, five properties locally to take care of. But yeah, scaling up sooner, you gonna put it in these, almost the same amount of work.

It’s more with multi-family, of course, but why not do it with a scaled up multi-family as opposed to this. Single family, duplex, plex, that kind of thing is you’re gonna spill up, you’re going to increase your, or increase the equity that you have in property as you’re gonna potentially increase the reach that you have and the influence that you have over other people’s lives.

The more that you do it. I’m gonna add one more thing. Go ahead. I definitely would say take on investors and partners sooner than later. Release a little bit of control thinking that. People are going to try and take from you, but partner up, you can go a lot faster and grow with people.

Plus it is just fun. It is fun to be linked with other people at, in this industry. There’s a lot of kind, fun people to hang out with. That’s awesome. Great. Just to be conscious of your time if our listeners wanna reach out, maybe invest with you, maybe partner with you, maybe just, talk operators, shop how can they find you and we’ll make sure to put all those in the show notes.

Sure. Website, www hire point investing.com. And same with our email, contact hire point investing.com. Our phone number is three three eight eight five four three and that’s our business line. So connects to both of us. Awesome. Ken, Rachel, thank you so much for coming the show. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Joseph. Thank you. We appreciate too. Good luck. Awesome. And for you, the listeners, if you want to hear from more great operators like Ken and Rachel feel free to subscribe on YouTube, on iTunes, Onte, wherever you consumer podcast. We’re everywhere. And until next time. Thank you.

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