Aileen (00:02):

Thank you, everyone for joining today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It Real Estate podcasts. We are your hosts, Seyla and Aileen, and today our guest is Rodney Thompson. Rodney has been working in it for 36 years and management for the last 20 years. He has a background in investing in single-family homes and quickly realized that commercial real estate is the place to go. And so he is also the founder of Solars capital management. And so we’re very excited to have you on today, Rodney, how are you doing?

Rodney (00:32):

Great. Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation to be on your show today.

Aileen (00:37):

Can you please start off by sharing a little bit more about your background and how did you get started in real estate?

Rodney (00:43):

Well, as you said, I’ve been in IT for the past 30 plus years. And I guess the involvement of real estate came somewhat by accident and somewhat planned by accident, meaning that we had purchased a new house and we had our old house that hadn’t sold yet and we ended up renting it out and I did the smart thing. I heard a property manager, so I let them handle all the day-to-day dealings. And all I did was, you know, answer the phone and about issues that may need to be addressed, that type of thing. And that was really our first dealings in you know, a real estate investment type of atmosphere. And we had always looked at and wanted to expand that and we, and we did get more single family, but my wife also wanted to be in self-storage and I’d always thought that was a great idea, but didn’t think that we could, because for what I saw, I needed a self-storage facility that was not humongous, but a pretty good size.

Rodney (02:13):

And I just didn’t know how I could purchase that. And I didn’t know anything about syndication or joint venture at the time, and I really didn’t want to be partners with anybody per [Inaudible], because I wanted to stay away from partnering. But my, my idea of partnering was different than, you know, it was based more on business. And there was a lot of you know, regular businesses is it can be cutthroat. And the people that I’ve found in real estate are not that way. The vast majority of them there might be a small slice of them out there, but the vast majority of them are very willing to help lend a hand lend advice bring you in on a deal. There there’s very much an attitude of abundance rather than scarcity, which is great. And I love that about real estate, but where I first started understanding real estate as a way of being financially independent and retiring early was from a colleague at work who listened to a lot of financial independence podcasts.

Rodney (03:33):

And he introduced me to several podcasts. And one of those was bigger pockets, and we were going to expand using the Burn method where you buy a house and you rehab it and you sell it and rent it or rent it, sell it repeat or refinance, I think is how it goes, refinance it, and then repeat the whole process. And that seemed like a very doable thing to me. And the more I listened to podcasts, I eventually started hearing about syndications and moved over to listening to primarily syndication type podcasts. And there were some things that really intrigued me about commercial real estate. One is the way that it’s valued compared to residential, single family structures and the economies of scale, where you can do forced appreciation and that type of thing, it made total sense to be in that arena. And so I switched over from being in single family assets to being in multifamily commercial assets. And then my education journey began about right there. So that’s how I, that’s how I got started.

Aileen (04:54):

And something you said earlier about the real estate industry and the people in here the more we’re learning about it too, the more refining that the people it’s more of a team sport and everybody is so willing to lend a hand and everything like that, just like you mentioned. So it’s the people, the people in this space are very, very helpful, very, very great people.

Rodney (05:15):

Yeah. That’s the biggest thing is it is, and being the team sport doesn’t necessarily mean that they work for your company because it takes a lot of different people to make a commercial real estate transaction. It’s a lot more complicated than single family. You know, one person can go to a real estate agent, find a house, go to the bank, put a deposit down, make your down payment and take possession of it and either manage it themselves or hire a management company. And then do that whole process again. Whereas commercial real estate, you have mortgage brokers and as sec attorneys and you have property brokers, and then you can split the duties of the acquisition, the underwriting capital raising and the ongoing asset management and the property management. Those are all can all be separate people. And so it can, you can have a lot of people involved, but there’s a lot of moving pieces too, at the same time. And having that team with you allow you, especially if you’re getting started and you don’t have a lot of experience, it allows you to come alongside and bring other people in on the game with you and allow you to operate in a space that you’re, if you’re starting out, you’re technically not qualified to be in, but those people are willing to mentor you through the process, which is, which really sets it apart from a lot of other things out there. A lot of other things in industry and especially in traditional business.

Seyla (06:57):

Yup. That makes sense. And Rodney, you mentioned that you know, to get into the multi-families base, somebody will be mentoring use or you’re joining another team to start it. So how did you start your first syndication multifamily investing and can you walk us through that process?

Rodney (07:18):

Sure, sure. So I understood early on listening to podcasts and things that you really need to have a mentor because to get a multi-million dollar property financed there are things that you have to have such as net worth and liquidity and experience. And if you’re going with an agency loan, you have to have a, what they call a Fanny card where you’ve signed on a loan before. And it’s, so what it makes is it makes the barrier to entry very high as, as an individual. It’s very difficult just to walk in and do a multifamily deal because they’re looking. And when I say they I’m talking about the lender, the mortgage broker, all of these people that are involved are looking for track record, and your investors are looking for track record. They’re not willing are going to be willing to turn over hundreds of thousands of dollars to you. They equate out to, let’s say a $2.5 million raise if you don’t have any experience. So having experienced people on your team that speaks to the credibility to be able to make sure that the deal gets done right. And so I understood that I needed to have that because I didn’t have that. And that’s the other beautiful thing about syndication is, is that you don’t have to come into it with millions of dollars. You can come into it with a lot less money. And but back to the, you know, you were asking about the mentoring and the coaching, understanding that I needed, that I started seeking out people to be a coach. And of course that doesn’t come free. You can find those that will maybe bring you in to their fold. But if you’re looking to just start out right away and get going, you really need to seek out coaches.

Rodney (09:25):

And I would say anybody that is getting into the industry and that is doing that do so with a very discerning eye and stuff. And, you know, talk to a lot of people in the industry that have paid for coaching because not all coaches are created equal, not all deals are created equal. Not everybody treats, you know, you’re going to be a student of this person. Not everybody treats their students the same way. The participation levels in deals varies from coach to coach, to coach. So you got to find a coach that satisfies the goals that you have and satisfies the level of participation, both in the deal and financially that worked for you. And, and I did that. I looked around and I talked to a bunch of different people and I talked to different coaches and I found a group in Dallas that when I inquired about it, the guy that runs the group called me and his name is Mark Kenny.

Rodney (10:33):

And he you know, my phone rang and I recognized that it was a Dallas number because I used to live in Dallas. And when I answered the phone, it was Mark. Now I’ve, I looked at a lot of other coaching programs. Didn’t get a phone call from the main guy on those. So that right off the bat, and he answered all my questions. I never felt like I was rushed to get off the phone. And so I felt very comfortable with that. Now I didn’t join right there on the phone. I just was asking questions about the group. Then I went, they have a, they put on a regular by yearly what they call a fire summit. I went to that, I talked to a lot of other people that were there. They were in the group and their success talked about the deals that they did, their level of participation. I made a decision based off that. And I did, I ended up joining at the end of that. And that was in April of 2019. And I know one of your questions. So if you, if you want me to go right into the deal how I did the deal,

Aileen (11:44):

That’d be great. Let’s get right into it.

Rodney (11:49):

I made a goal. Let me back up. You hear a lot of people talk about, I made, I did hundreds of, I analysed hundreds of Deals to find the one. And I’m going to say that that’s true. And what I would hear more than often is that it would take about a year from the time that you started the process until the time you found a deal. Well, I wasn’t happy with that timeline. I there’s got to be a way to do it at a faster rate than that. So what I did was I started getting online, started looking up brokers. I started sending emails to brokers, asking them to be on their email list. And I had that set up as a draft template. And I just sent it, that’s a broker after broker, and I started getting deals in my mail mailbox and, and then I’d call them up and see, and then an email and I’d call them up and I’d visit with them.

Rodney (12:53):

And I let them know what my criteria was as for the type of asset that I was looking for. And then they would put me on their list based on that criteria. And I said, started getting deals in my mailbox. And the majority of them don’t pencil, at least to the returns that we’re looking for. Somebody bought them, somebody bought them along the way. And I’ve talked to a couple of different people in different groups in, and they sat yeah. For Feis, certain aspects of the deal too, to get, to be able to raise their price up. I don’t like to do that because a lot of those fees that they give up are fees that I, that I earned because I put in a lot of time, many hours analysing, going to properties, doing property tours, talking to brokers, talking to mortgage people, talking to lenders, just talking to other people on my team and adjusting my underwriting to make everything work.

Rodney (13:59):

So there’s a lot of time involved there. But I set a goal. I wanted to have a deal in six months, which would have been September Amber. And, you know, you’re a lot of people say, well no matter what, I’m going to analyse four deals a day. And that that’s a great goal, but I would say that that doesn’t always work because you may not get four deals that day. You might get four deals in the week. And at the level of underwriting that’s required for multifamily. I think doing a, trying to do four deals a day is a little bit over ambitious because it takes quite a bit of time. You can do, you can do just a quick 10 minute analysis. A lot of people have these Michael Blanca has that? Mark Kenny has that, but over all, what I found was those quick analysis is, would not be accurate, not even within of, because you could do it.

Rodney (15:02):

And you’d say, oh, it looks like a, it looks like a great deal. And then you’d start doing a little more detailed underwriting and come to find out it’s not. And so I, what I did was I just took an, I took the, our full analyser and I just started doing summarized entries. And that gave me a quick indication I could, within about 15 to 20 minutes, I could tell you whether that deal was going to work or not. And then I could either continue to analyse it, or I could you know, if it didn’t work, you just move onto the next one. You can’t be married to it. You can’t let it be this emotional thing. Like I’m going to make this deal work. There, there is there are times even when you get into the deal where you’ve done an initial analysis and it looks great, and the more that you analyse it and you start finding little nuances and the deal slowly fades away to nothing.

Rodney (16:05):

And then your mental state is like, and I put all this time into this, I really want this to work. And there are things that you can do to move things around, but what you don’t want to do that too much, because then you get this artificially inflated deal that really doesn’t work, that you’ve just made work. And so you have to be, you have to devoid your emotional state from that and just move on there because there’s going to be other deals. There’s going to be a constant flow of deals. So just move on to the next one, and then just keep doing that until you find one that works. And, and I did, I found one that works in September, and that was my six months I made it. I got my first deal in six months. And then we closed in December. It was quite a deal because it was an REO. In other words, it was a bank own, it was bank owned. It was with the agency. It was a Fanny property that the owners got in over their head. And they decided to just turn the keys over to Fanny and Fanny assigned it to a national asset management company. And they got the property turned around and it was showing it was profitable. It was, it was great. The day we closed, it was, it was cash flowing, but because it was REO and they had to have it off their books. By the end of 2019, we had a hard close date in the middle of December that we didn’t, we had no extensions. And so it was a scramble to raise cash on it, especially at the end of the year, it’s a holiday season. And so those things all play together. Plus we had, we had like 10 other deals in our group that we were working on at the same time, which spreads investor money thin. And all of our core investors ended up with this smorgasbord where they could literally pick and choose which deal that they wanted based on returns and how great it looked. So it was a challenge, but we got it closed. We got it closed. And, and it’s been doing great.

Aileen (18:25):

That’s really great advice about just moving on from the next deal and everything that, because there’s always going to be another deal down the road, and then you don’t want to sacrifice any of your underwriting just to make the deal work, just to get a good gist, just to get a deal. You want to make sure that it’s the right deal. Right. And so it seems like that first deal was very stressful at the very end, but you guys did it so congratulations to you.

Rodney (18:50):

Yeah. When you have, when you, when the sec attorney and the mortgage broker is nervous you know, we were down to two weeks before close and we still had $1.2 million to raise. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it was a $3.4 million raise and, and we were still quite a ways from the finish line. So we had to really knuckle down and, and open up the phone lines and start talking to everybody, including your grandmother to see if she was ready to invest or not.

Aileen (19:26):

So it was a lot of nail biting at the last, the last minute.

Rodney (19:29):

Definitely, definitely. But it was very satisfying to get it close. Yep.

Seyla (19:35):

That’s awesome. So Rodney, you mentioned about there are different ways to increase the value for the commercial real estate. Can you talk a little bit more of what are those ways and why is it important for our investors?

Rodney (19:53):

So you’re asking about different ways to increase the value of the property. The greatest thing about commercial property is if you, well, what we look for is we look for a value added property. Now that’s a broad range because you talked to some people and they say, Oh, the only, the only way that a property is value add if it’s sitting somewhere between 30 and 50% occupancy, it’s a deep value add where you’re going to have the pudding in between 12 and $15,000, a unit that’s value. Add the rest of it’s just, you just, and you’re just buying an apartment building with varying degrees of repair that needed to be done. But the way that I look at it is that if you buy a piece of property and, and take that property and you don’t do anything to it, you just start renting out units.

Rodney (20:55):

Then that’s not a value add proposition. But as a syndicator, you’re wanting to increase the value of that asset as much as possible to get a return for your investors. So you, by adding value to the building, which is with this is where it goes back to single family. We’re tied to the cops, right? Whatever the neighbourhood says that that piece of property is worth is what it’s worth. Now we can spend a little bit of money depending on the condition of the house in, you know, modernizing the interior, bringing the kitchen up to modern standards, put new appliances, and we can recoup some of that dollar value that we put into the property, but it’s usually not at a hundred percent. And I’m not saying that commercial real estate is a hundred percent either, but there’s only so much we can do to that single family house before we’re adding money to it.

Rodney (22:05):

And it doesn’t increase the value because all of our neighbour’s houses are at a certain dollar per square foot commercial property. On the other hand, there is a ceiling to commercial property. So I’ll give you that little proviso in there, but the commercial property value is tied to the NOI, the net operating income of the property. So if you purchase a piece of property and let’s say that, you know, just for easy terms, the NOI on it as a hundred thousand dollars a month you know, $1.2 million a year. And, and all we do is we take and add $50. And let’s, if we say it, let’s say it’s a 200 unit piece of property, and we add $50 because of a couple of different ways. It’s under market rent. Okay. And those are based on comps in the area. So we know what the market rent will bear.

Rodney (23:09):

So if we look at the property and we’re doing the analysing and we’re underwriting the property, and we see that they’re charging consistently across the board, $50, less than what they could charge. And we raised the rent $50. We could, we could do that. We could add things like on-site laundry and increase the value because that’s going to produce income. We can bring internet in and increase the value that way, because all of these things that we add to the property increase the money that it produces. And then you have this magic thing called a cap rate, and you take that in Hawaii, divided by the cap rate. And that gives you the value and on like a 200 unit piece of property, if we just increase the rent $50, it adds $1.8 million to the bottom line of that to, well, not to the bottom line, but to the value of that property. And that is that to me is one of the greatest things about commercial property is, is using the cap rate to determine the value. So I can do a lot of different things to a piece of property to increase the value by increasing the income. And then the cap rate turns around and adds that right to the bottom line of the value of the property. And that’s what, that’s what I love about. Multi-Family

Seyla (24:40):

Got it. Thank you for explaining that to listeners so single family homes. So the value of a single family home is based on the neighbourhood of the area itself. How was the multi-families apartment it’s based on the net operating incomes and the cap rate, and the operator can actually do many different ways to increase that net operating incomes or lower the expense, and that would increase the value of the apartment itself.

Rodney (25:10):

Right. That was one thing. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s one thing that I didn’t touch on is we know we’re doing the underwriting. If they’re overpaying or expenses, and we’re able to reduce the expenses, then we’re increasing our NOI as well. So if we either increase the income or reduce the expenses or both, then we can increase the value of the property.

Seyla (25:33):

Got it. Thank you. So why do you learning about a multifamily syndications at a time to get your first apartment and trying to complete your first deal? Were you still working full-time at a W2?

Rodney (25:47):

I was, in fact, I should say I am, I work as a, I work in it still at a, in a university just North of here, but I am on the, I am on the path to retire at least from that next June. Although it’s, it’s a little worrisome because COVID really put a damper in my plants. And it’s, it’s interesting because the way that COVID affected the market, I think it was drastically different than what everybody thought. Everybody thought this was going to be another recession. Maybe not as bad as we had an Oh eight, but it, but it was going to be in a recession that would because you know, prices to get depressed. And so a lot of people started waiting for value. Yeah. Just start appearing. And it didn’t happen. Values didn’t go down because they had all of these relief checks that were coming out and unemployment was coming out. So everybody was still able to make their rent payment. And so it didn’t change the value of the, of the properties at all. And interest rates remained low. They were already very low. And so they remained low. The only thing that happened was that investors got a little scared. So they pulled back and sellers got scared. And so they pull back because they thought that the pie, the bottom was going to drop out and that their prices were going to go down. So they pulled their properties off. Well, if the market, so deal flow dried up a little bit, but then it was, I guess, mid-summer or so deal flow started coming back now, deal flows. Great. It’s back to where it was.

Rodney (27:44):

The challenges that we run into though, is that lenders are still a little scared. So what they’ve done is they’ve brought in reserves and it usually it’s a lender reserve requirement. And it depends on whether you’re going with a Fannie or Freddie, if you’re going to go agency debt now private lenders and bridge lenders, the prop, the interest rate went up for bridge lenders. But like the agency debt, they have these reserves now they started off asking for between 12 to 18 months. Freddie was principal and interest and Fannie was principle’s interest and reserves cap ex reserves. And you were expected to put that into a separate account. And the challenge with that is it just crude up your returns? So a great deal.

Rodney (28:51):

All of a sudden didn’t look like a great day. Now, as the summer went along they started relaxing those a bit and Fannie hasn’t come that far off. They’re still wanting 12 months in, in an account. And, but they you’re saying now that they’ll release it earlier I think it’s nine months either nine or 12 months, they’ll release it well, that to me, that’s still cost prohibitive. Freddie, on the other hand, Freddie will requires 12 months of just principle and interest, not cap ex not cataract reserves. And they will as long as you mean teen a minimum DSCR with them, then, which is your debt service coverage ratio, as long as you maintain you know, like typically it’s 1.2, five, and as long as you don’t go under 1.25, they’ll cut those funds loose in 90 days. Now, what that does is you can, you can use that as a bargaining tool to say, Mr. Seller you know, I, my underwriting shows that I can offer you the price that you’re asking, but only if you help me out by taking money from the sale, proceeds equal to the reserve requirement and putting it in the account. And then in 90 days you know, we maintain our business plan. So there’s some, there’s some level of trust that has to go on here, but we maintain our business plan. And in that money is cut loose in 90 days, and you’ll get all that money in 90 days and you’ll get your asking price, and we’ve been pretty successful with that approach. Wow.

Seyla (30:46):

I really love that. Thank you so much for sharing that’s really awesome strategy to, to approach the salad. So Rodney, you’re also working right now four times and also doing syndication as well. So can we ask what kind of habits did you start to incorporate into your daily routine to ensure that you are being as efficient as you can be to run both of them?

Rodney (31:16):

My, my regular job is basically 07:30 to 04:30 type of job and that, so that leaves after 04:30 and before 07:30. And those are unique times because commercial brokers are an eight to five kind of crowd. They don’t typically work all crazy hours, like real estate agents do that forces you to be creative. So I’m talking to them on my lunch hour and that type of thing, or communicating with them through email and text messages, as far as analysing deals. My, the best time for me to analyse deals is in the morning, because in the evening when I get home, we have family things going on and we have family meal and that type of thing. And if I tried to dedicate that time, that I wouldn’t be able to do all the family stuff and I wasn’t, that’s not a sacrifice that I wanted to make that leaves morning, and I was getting up at five and, and by the time you get up and take a shower and get upstairs to my office, I would end up with maybe an hour and a half of time that I could use to do underwriting before I had to go to work.

Rodney (32:57):

And along the way, some there, somewhere along the way there, I ran into how L rod who gets up early and does all this morning routine stuff. And some of the people that did that got up earlier than I got up. And, and I, it’s not so much that I do all those morning routines because I just, I was like, well, my whole morning would be tied up doing L rod stuff, and I’d never do any underwriting, but I do get up. And I spend, you know, some quiet time. I make some coffee and, and sit down and have coffee. And I may look at net at LinkedIn because I’m very active on LinkedIn. And then I, then I would dedicate an hour and a half to do in underwriting deals. And I was getting up at five, but I wasn’t getting enough time.

Rodney (33:56):

So I rolled that back to four 30 and then I ended up rolling it back to four o’clock. And so I would come home in the evening. I would do the family thing. I would be in bed by eight 30, so I could have lights out by nine. And then I would be up at four o’clock and at my desk by four 30. And that would give me somewhere in the neighbourhood of close to three hours of, of time to do work on my business before I went to my W2 and rented my time to somebody else. And, and that’s, that was the, so then you may have you say, well, what, what does you know, what is the superpower there? The one thing that, that really made the difference, and I would say its perseverance because not all, like I said earlier, not all these deals work.

Rodney (34:54):

You’re going to do deal after deal, after deal, after deal, that doesn’t work. And, and let me tell you what, it’s easy to get discouraged. So somebody starting off in the, in the business, they’re going to go, like, I’m never going to find a deal. And it’s easy to get discouraged that you need to stay on. You’re reading books, podcasts, talking to people, talking to your mentor. Those people are those things, and people can give you encouragement to continue on, but you just need to knuckle down and just keep going. Just keep going, just keep going, because it’s going to, you’re going to find one that works. You have just do enough to find that one and not give up, and your Gusto needs to stay the same throughout the whole process. And it’s easy to say I get that. But if I think if you go into it with the right mental attitude and the right mental state, that this is what I have to do is just, I have to keep analysing these deals until I find one that works.

Rodney (36:03):

And that you know, like I said earlier, well, you know, like people say, well, I’m going to do four, analyse four deals this week, or this in this two week period or whatever your number. I didn’t find that to be very successful to assign an arbitrary number. It is like, you talked a lot of people and they say break goals down into bite sized portions. Right. And I think that is a good thing to do, because if you look at my goal is to retire by the time I’m X age old, what does that involve that involves? And you break down all the steps, right? And then you have to set goals to achieve those steps along the way. And those steps along the way may be broken down, even farther. So that it’s, you get to that easy and attainable, which I say that, and I cringe all at the same time, because I also don’t think that you should set, you know, what does that acronym start? You know, where your, you talk about setting goals that are realistic and attainable and measurable immeasurable fine, but the attainable and realistic to me, if you do that, you’re limiting yourself. If you say, I’m going to close X number of deals in this amount of time, and you look at that, yeah, that’s a realistic goal. I can do that. Then chances are, you’re going to, you’re going to do that. You’re going to re you’re if you, if you do the steps and you persevere and you stay true to your track, you’re going to attain that goal. I don’t have any doubt about that. But what I do ask is that if your goal was 10, could you have done 15? Because if you set a realistic and attainable goal of 10 and you just do it, and you’re like, Oh, Hey, I met my goal.

Rodney (38:14):

Could I have done 15? Should I have set my goal at 15 and, and did 12, or set my goal at 15 and did 13, because if I have set my goal at 10 and I did 10, when I could have done 13, that I didn’t set my goal high enough. So find your goal and raise it up to the next level of where you think that it’s going to be a stretch for me to get that goal and go for it, because it goes back to the old adage. You know, you’ve, you’ve probably heard this for shoot for the moon, and if you miss you end up in the stars. Right. Right. And I think that’s what, that’s what you got to do, because otherwise, if you just set a goal, you’re going to attain it, but you could have done more.

Aileen (38:59):

Absolutely. And I really liked that you mentioned the perseverance because you can just be that one deal away from analysing to get that right. One. And if you stop and quit that, I mean, that’s your life, right? Just three feet away from the goal.

Rodney (39:14):

Yup. Yup. Yeah. How many times have you seen that cartoon? Where that guy’s way. Right. And there, and then all of a sudden he goes like I’m going to go home. And he’s like gold deposit.

Seyla (39:26):

[Inaudible] So Rodney, how has real estate investing impacted your life so far?

Rodney (39:36):

Well, I could, I could say something like it’s allowed me to sleep less. I think, I think, you know, we talked earlier about the abundance mind-set and, and the way it’s impacted my life is I really haven’t. I haven’t realized my financial goal yet.

Rodney (40:00):

But I really look at financial goal as a by-product you know, there’s a, I don’t know if you guys ever heard of Zig Ziegler. I asked that because some people haven’t, some people haven’t, but, but he was, he was a very well-known motivational speaker and he came up through the sales ranks and, and his whole thing was, if you help enough other people get what they want, then you’ll get what you want. Right. So I think that the defining difference between this industry and other industries is the relational, the relationship and the relational type of, of capital that you come out of this with. Because if you are true to yourself and true to your investors and have your investors in mind, have your partners in mind, then the money’s just going to be there as an it’s a by-product. And the more that you keep doing what you do, then the more the money is going to be there. And if you do it for the money, then you’re not going to have good relationships in the monies. I don’t think the money is going to come. Can you, can you get the money? I think so, but I think it there’s a danger of it being at the expense of something else. That’s more important. Yep.

Seyla (41:40):

I agree. I mean, the money is it’s not the main goal. So the goal is basically you have to make sure that you enjoy you, what you doing Sunday and also giving back to communities and sharing the resources with, with everyone. So of course the money will come on to silence if as, as part of the process. I agree. And so Rodney what is one thing that, you know now about real estate that you wish you knew when you first started?

Rodney (42:13):

I would probably say that and this is really, I think, an ongoing thing, right? Everybody puts their pants on the same way. When you first get started in this business, there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of things to know, and there is a propensity to not talk because you don’t want to sound like an idiot, right? Everybody can probably raise their hand on that one. And there is good in that, right? I mean, there’s the old saying about God gave you one mouth and two ears, which means you should be listening more than you should be talking. And there’s a lot of truth to that. You do need to listen, but you also need to talk because where a lot of learning occurs is regurgitation of things that you hear in the learn.

Rodney (43:11):

And so when you start talking about real estate and all the aspects of real estate with other people that are in your space, you’ll be surprised how much you really do know. And, and not that you need to do it to get, to gain some sort of arrogant foothold. It’s that it gives you the confidence to talk real estate to investors, because you’re you, and maybe it isn’t investors. Maybe that’s not your thing. Maybe you are an underwriter or you, you want to do asset management, or you’re wanting to get into a completely different phase, like property management or something like that. You still need to know the core business. And this is what I was telling somebody the other day is that underwriting is not the most fun thing for me. I mean, I can run a spreadsheet and I can look at a deal and tell you if it’s good or not, but it’s not my thing.

Rodney (44:13):

It’s not my superpower. I could, but, but for me to talk to investors and, and to be able to talk to investors intelligently about why this is good, why this is a good deal, I need to understand the underwriting. So I think that it’s important to know that, but the that, so, so that would be my back to your original question, I’m kind of straying a little bit is have confidence to talk because here’s the other thing I found is that if you say something wrong, I haven’t run across too many people that go like, well, you idiot. That’s not the way, you know, they, they’re very kind to explain to you, Oh, well, I thought it was this way. Oh yeah, yeah. You’re right, man. My mistake. And, and it’s something, it’s a learning process because we’re all learning.

Rodney (45:13):

Even the guy that said, Oh, Hey, that’s not really the right way that you calculate the value, you know, you don’t divide the, the what’s the CNI drill blank. You don’t draw, you don’t divide the potential rent by the cap rate, you divided the NOI, which is you know, your, all of your income minus all your expenses, not including debt service, right. And, or let’s say you include the debt service. No, that’s not the right way to do it. Well, now you’ve learned something the next time you’re going to remember that it’s this way or that way. And so it’s a good thing for everybody. It, it allows them to reinforce what they know. It allows you to correct what you know, so that later on, you can, you can say the right thing.

Rodney (46:07):

So that’s and the confidence to be able to speak the language I guess, would be because there was a time where I wasn’t very confident in what I knew, because I didn’t really didn’t know that much. I had a surface knowledge, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody has to start somewhere, but I think the faster that you gain confidence and start talking to other people about it the faster you learn. And so that’s, yeah, I guess if I was going to go back and learn something different, or if there’s one thing that I would change would be able, would be to speak to more people you know, have the competence to speak to more people.

Aileen (46:56):

Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing Rodney. And if our listeners wanted to find out more about you, where can they go?

Rodney (47:02):

Well, you can find me a couple of different places. I am very active on LinkedIn. So that’s really, I was on Facebook too. I would say that I’m more, a lot more active on LinkedIn than I am on Facebook, but what I do is I just cross post stuff. So if you find me on, on Facebook I’m there too. And but LinkedIn, I’m very active on, I also have a website out there that is solarise cm.com. We also have a podcast that we do called the weekly multifamily round table. You can find that on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts we’re on about eight different platforms right now, Spotify. We also have a YouTube channel called the weekly multifamily round table where we post a video of the show. And then we also put that on the podcast, so you can consume it however you want to consume it. And there’s links to links to me on all of that stuff. If you’re, if you’re interested in talking with me feel free to reach out.

Aileen (48:12):

Thank you so much. And we’ll definitely put that in the show notes. Everybody can subscribe and learn more about you and your podcast and your company. So thank you so much and really enjoyed having you on the show today, Rodney. And thank you for sharing your journey.

Rodney (48:25):

You bet. Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it.