Aileen (00:01):

Thank you, everyone for joining today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It? Real Estate podcast are your hosts Seyla and Aileen and today’s guest. We have Blake Janover. Blake is a founder of Janover ventures where he and his team have been overseas underwriting managing, investing in and originating billions of dollars a month, commercial and residential real estate or competent FSG or debt, BSA financing, CMBS loan bank, and debt is also an honorary member of the 2019 forms [Inaudible] So thankful to have you on the show, like, how are you doing?

Blake (00:35):

I’m good. I’m well, ahead of the introduction I was just saying, I’m very grateful that you guys want to have me on and I’ll do my best not to mess this up.

Aileen (00:47):

I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of great advice and knowledge from you today, Blake. So we’re really excited to have this.

Blake (00:54):

Thanks. I’ll try. So where do we start,

Aileen (00:59):

Let’s start with your background and just, how did you get started in?

Blake (01:03):

Sure. So I I’ll try to, I’ll try to keep it short, so I’m not too self-indulgent, but I suppose I have a decade and a half of experience in residential commercial and multifamily debt markets, right? People say capital markets, it sounds fancy. This is just the movement and the economy of money and debt. And I just haven’t to a lot of experience in real estate capital markets. It’s been about 15 years. My, let me think. My first company was a residential mortgage lending company in the last real estate cycle. And we were very tech forward back then. But tech forward back then was, you know, you do email marketing, you use a CRM and these days that’s very commonplace. Although in some places it’s still a pencil and paper and spreadsheets, but anyway, so I started in real estate finance in the last cycle, became a direct lender, got into commercial.

Blake (02:08):

And the world ended essentially in the 2008 tsunami that wiped out you know, global economic confidence and competence in real estate. So I made it through that with a lot of bruises that I still feel today. And right now I’m, my company is general ventures. We’re a financial technology company focused on reducing frictions and commercial property finance. So we’re building something that’s kind of like rocket mortgage, but for commercial real estate. And our focus is definitely, you talked about some of our core competencies. I would say we do a lot of it. Agency is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac multi-family financing. We do a lot of work with first-time borrowers or smaller borrowers. We do a good deal of FHA insured. Multi-Family that as well. And I don’t know I’ve done, I’ve done it. I’ve looked at a lot of deals in my life and I’m a I’m a GP in a large project in Miami. So I’ve been on the, I’ve raised LP. I’ve been a GP I I’ve done debt and I’ve built or worked on building technology infrastructure for debt transactions. So that’s my sort of background.

Seyla (03:31):

Thanks so much Blake for providing that background and your current focus. And you mentioned that your company is working with the commercial size of Doria state. And will you be able to provide a little bit of detail for the first time multifamily borrowers to fundamentals of the loan from the company?

Blake (03:52):

Sure. So when we talk about, when we talk about multi-family in a commercial property context, it’s generally as it relates to debt, it’s generally loans from a million dollars and up. So in this universe, a small balance loan is a million to 7 million, whereas anywhere else in the universe, a million to $7 million is a lot of money. But in the context of multi-family finance it’s, it’s small. And gosh, to explain some of the, well, I guess the best thing I could do is I could explain some of the components of a multifamily loan for first time multifamily borrower. So the first thing is the term, this is generally the fixed period of time or the period of time that alone is fixed. So a five-year term 10 year term, 30 year term these are all options and these are fixed periods of the loan.

Blake (04:50):

And then there’s the amortization period. The amortization period is when you’re making a fixed payment, it’s the amount of time it takes for when you’re making that fixed principal and interest payment for a loan to be paid off entirely. So if you have a 30 year loan, if you make the same payment every month for 30 years, and the last payment of the 30th year, your property is paid in full most multi-family loans are balloon notes. So that means they’re usually expressed as two numbers. So a five 25 would be a five-year fixed loan or a 25 year amortization. And after five years the loan it’s a balloon note, the balloon is due and you have to pay that balloon payment at the end. So it’s, whatever’s left of your twenty-five year amortizing loan at the end of the fifth year, you have to refinance or sell or take money out of your pocket and pay it off. So agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offer 30 year amortizations and up to 30 years fixed and fully amortizing, most banks will be five, 10 years max, and they’re going to have shorter amortizations which means dipping into your cash flow, right? The shorter, the amortization, and the higher your payment is. So even if your interest rates low, you’re still paying more money into that principal every month, which isn’t bad or good. It’s just a factor. Am I doing good? Should I keep talking about these things?

Aileen (06:18):

Yes, definitely. And can you actually elaborate a little bit on that with every single loan that we have

Blake (06:26):

Most, most multi-family loans have a balloon? So if you’re alone is fully amortizing, meaning the term is the same as the amortization then there’s no balloon it’s just, you just pay it down over time. If it’s a 520 or a 530 at the end of that five, almost always, it’s an it has to be paid off sometimes like with the bank, you might have a 55 25, so it’s fixed for five years. And then after five years, it resets to what the market rate is. And then it’s fixed for another five years. There’s some cases where there’s a floating rate loan. And I don’t really think that a lot of first-time multi-family borrowers should be, or will be messing with a variable rate, apartment, building loans definitely the most conservative thing you could do. And the most fiscally responsible thing that you can do if you’re buying something for a long-term hold is to depending on your business plan is to take a 10 year plus a fixed rate loan.

Aileen (07:37):

You mentioned that your company so lends the money to the commercial real estate and either we estate investing. So can you where, what are some of the ways that your company raises money to be able to that type of loan?

Blake (07:55):

We don’t make loans and that’s something that’s really important. Our primary function is educating borrowers on what all their multifamily commercial property options are, and then helping connect them to a lender who will make them alone. So we’re in the middle where the technology and the advisor, that’s connecting the commercial mortgage lender and the commercial mortgage board work. And so in this way, we have access to all the loan products. And what we try to do is we try to connect the person with the right deal instead of what like a lending tree might do, where they sell your information to 30 people. Or if you go to a lender and a lender just gives you what works best for them, for us, we can understand the situation and then we can make the connection to the right lender and the right deal or loan product.

Seyla (08:51):

That makes sense. And thank you for elaborating that would you be able to provide some insights about the vendors options and the requirements? You mentioned a little bit earlier about the agency loans for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would you be able to elaborate there’s any ideas out there and what do?

Blake (09:11):

Yeah, so there’s a lot of lenders out there. There’s a lot of requirements, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae. You could be a first time borrower. You could be a first time multi-family owner and operator, and then they’re just going to look to see, are you close to the property? Have you hired a professional property manager Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac FHA are going to look at your net worth and your liquidity. So a good rule of thumb is the cumulative net worth the combined net worth of all the individuals greater than the loan amount and is their liquidity for a purchase post-closing for a refinance before closing greater than 10% of the loan amount. So if you’re borrowing a million dollars, your net worth should be greater than a million, and you should have a hundred thousand dollars leftover after closing or a hundred thousand dollars cash on hand before closing a refinance.

Blake (10:01):

So there’s net worth and liquidity requirements. And those are non-recourse loans. This is really important. And if somebody takes anything away from this conversation today, I want it to be why the difference between recourse and non-recourse and why non-recourse is important. So I’m just going to, I’m just going to go a different direction. I’m sorry. So banks generally offer full recourse loans. That means that you’re giving what’s called a PG, a personal guarantee. And that personal guarantee says that if something goes wrong with the property, if somebody stops paying rent if there’s a COVID 19 pandemic and you can’t pay your bills, that the bank can take back the property, and then they can come to you personally, they can they could take your car, your shirt, they can garnish your wages.

Blake (10:51):

They could Sue you personally. They could put you in bankruptcy and people, people forgot about this, but this is what happened in the last real estate cycle. Everybody had personal guarantees on everything and the world changed and everybody got screwed. So Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac FHA, some CMBS lenders offer non-recourse loans with standard carve-outs it says we’re analysing you to make sure that you’re, that you’re a strong borrower, right? But if something, but we’re really going to study the property, and if something goes wrong with the property, our only, the only thing we could do is take the property back. We can’t touch you unless you’ve triggered a carve out, and these are called bad boy carve-outs or a standard carve-outs, which says, you know, you’re paying your real estate taxes. You’re not committing fraud. You’re not, you’re not behaving poorly, right?

Blake (11:45):

You’re not doing something that’s materially, fraudulent or illegal. And if you don’t break any of those rules, the lender can’t touch you. And I think those are really important. So just wanted to put that out there. You, you asked me Linda requirements, so debt service coverage ratio is really important. Most lenders are going to look for something like a 1.25 debt service coverage ratio. That essentially means if the property makes $10,000 or the mortgage payments, $10,000 a month that the property makes $12,500,000 a month in income. In NOI let me just think real quick banks are sometimes going to want to get deposit business from you. If a bank is underwriting you, they’re going to be, they’re going to be looking at your personal tax returns and your global cash flow, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA CMBS. They’re going to be looking at the property the property performance. They’re going to look at your net worth and liquidity. And the property performance bank is going to look at the property performance and your own personal global cash flow and income situation. And everybody cares about your credit, right? Have good credit

Aileen (12:56):

Going back to the non-recourse recourse. If you’re going to the bank for a loan as a borrower, how do you negotiate the terms of whether or not it’s recourse on week and what are the requirements?

Blake (13:11):

You’re not going to get your first loan with a bank. Non-Recourse very, very unlikely unless you have massive deposit accounts. It’s just not a likely thing to happen. What you can do is when you, when you go to a bank and you get a loan option, they’re going to send you a term sheet. And I will tell you that most things on that term sheet are negotiable. The interest rate, the term, the prepayment penalty, the origination fee maybe the amortization, maybe the reserves there’s a term sheet is usually as a bank, like putting something out there and hoping that you sign it sorry to all the bankers that might be listening to this, but it’s the, you know, it’s the truth.

Seyla (13:57):

And I just want to ask a little bit about a recourse and non-recourse again, so put a non-recourse loan. Why would a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac like wanting to lend to you? And it’s a non-recourse

Blake (14:14):

Why would they, I need you to ask that question differently because I didn’t fully understand it.

Aileen (14:19):

You don’t have like a, you mentioned that if something’s going on with the property, they won’t be able to come back and go to you personally. However, why would they want to lend the money out as a [Inaudible?]

Blake (14:33):

Ah, okay, got it. So most big institutions in the world are non-recourse right. I think about like, I’m the CEO of Blackstone. Am I signing my personal house? To the lender? No of course not. They’re making loans to the company and to the property and as company get bigger, the separation between the executives and the company become really, really important. And it’s totally unfair and unreasonable that a small business, right? That the owners should be responsible for everything in the company. And then as you get bigger and richer, that it’s allowed to separate also triggering a personal guarantee and using a personal guarantee is complicated. And generally doesn’t yield a lot of money for a lender. If a lender is making a loan to a sophisticated borrower, their money is in trust. And instead it’s in here and it’s there and you can’t get it.

Blake (15:28):

And it’s complicated. So the best thing for a lender to do is to underwrite you as a person or at least an agency lender, right. To underwrite you as a person and say, okay, this guy, this girl has experience and has financial wherewithal. If something goes wrong, they can afford to take care of this. This property is good. The leverage is good. The debt service coverage is good. So we like the property. We like the borrower. Part of our value proposition is that if something goes wrong, we’re not coming after this person. It’s a macroeconomic event. So that’s some of the reasons behind it.

Aileen (16:03):

Thank you for clarifying that. So for someone who has a first time investor in a multifamily apartment, and you mentioned about yeah. How did you have any tip or trick of how to make the bank like you?

Blake (16:24):

My opinion is number one, use, if you haven’t experienced intermediary or advisor, I would be using somebody like that. I’m not saying us. I’m saying somebody that has experience with multi-family no single family, not one to four units. Somebody that you know has experienced multi-family I would use them, right? Because really it’s not about what the bank likes or doesn’t like, or how you could present it to the bank. Bank loans are really commodities. Every banker in the world is going to hate me for saying these things. But it’s the truth. You could show the same deal to four different banks and maybe get three different term sheets and make a decision. And it happens all the time. And if a bank says no to you, maybe try to figure out why they said no. But the best thing you could do is to have an intermediary in the middle, especially if you’re a first time borrower, because they’re going to help prepare your financial statements, prepare the package, submitted to the lender and presented in the best light.

Blake (17:26):

And also let the limp put the lender on, notice that, Hey this is a competitive situation. So if you don’t if you don’t present a great deal, then you will, then someone else will also an intermediary. You might say, Hey, like get me a bank loan. And the intermediary might say, you don’t need a bank loan. You can get a Fannie Mae loan at higher leverage, lower rate, no recourse, longer, fixed longer amortization. Like you can do that or you might say, hey, get me a Fannie Mae loan. I want to sign this purchase contract. And the intermediary might say, this isn’t a Fannie Mae deal. Don’t sign that purchase contract that Fanny’s not giving you that long. So I think it’s good to use somebody in the middle and it also, I wouldn’t be putting bankers on a pedestal. They’re great guys. I know amazing bankers. Some banks are a fantastic, I have favourites. But I’ve been asked this question before and if it’s a good deal and you’re a good borrower, they should be fighting for you. You shouldn’t be fighting for them.

Aileen (18:29):

Is there anything else that borrowers look over or the hilt pay attention to when they’re going into?

Blake (18:42):

Well, I would say there’s some things that they, that they, that, that I see newer borrowers and investors miss, that doesn’t have to do with the banks, generally speaking. A thing that I’ve seen missed a lot is repricing taxes. So I’m looking at a property. The owner bought it in 1992 for $50,000. She’s paying taxes on the property based on an assessed value of 500,000 Marcus and Millichap put together an offering memorandum. And it’s a seven cap deal looks great. And nobody says, well, what are the taxes in that County? And what are they going to be after I buy this property for $3 million? And it turns out the taxes are going to triple in the cap rates, actually 1.5%. And, and it doesn’t debt service. So that’s something I see happen a lot or I’ve seen happen a lot.

Blake (19:37):

Another thing that I’ve seen a lot in the past is new borrowers chasing yield. So I’m a borrower. I live in Los Angeles. I want to buy a building out here. It’s a two cap. And I say, well, I’m going to go to St. Louis because it’s a 17 cap out there. I can get a 17 cap in St. Louis, but at the same price is five units in LA. I can get 75 units in St. Louis. I’m going to St. Louis. And the problem is that there’s a reason it’s a 17 cap. So either it’s not a 17 cap, right? Or you’re a genius and you’ve outsmarted everybody in America or there’s something wrong. You have to wear a bulletproof vest. When you go to the property, nobody’s paying rent. You can’t get a loan on the property. There’s bodies outside.

Blake (20:32):

I’m not speaking bad about St. Louis. It’s a great town, great food. All I’m saying is there’s a lot of risk involved. And another thing I’ve seen is people using property managers that don’t have experience with the same property. So a property manager that has that manages class an institutional property, does not know how to manage your class C property, your 16 unit property, a property manager, that manager that manages a hundred single family homes in that area does not know how to manage a 20 unit class B plus property in the same neighbourhood. And certainly a property manager that has a bunch of commercial and retail does not know what to do with your apartment building. And these things I see these mistakes happen. And they’re important to be cognizant of

Aileen (21:19):

That’s really great advice. So Blake I want to talk a little bit about loan types. You’ll be able to be able to tell us a little bit about what type of loans are available out there.

Blake (21:31):

Sure. So there’s perm which is short for permanent. So think 10 year fixed 30 year amortization. I went on this property for a long time. There’s mini perm think like three years fixed, maybe five years fixed maybe a shorter amortization, maybe some interest only this is like, I’m going to sell it, or I’m going to refinance it really soon because there’s some, we have some value add plan there’s bridge which can be banks can provide floating rate bridge, but there’s also hard money type, 12% type bridge out there. I’d be really careful with some of the very expensive lenders. Some of them are okay. Some of them are not. So there’s bridge, which is could be 12 to 24 months floating rate interest only. It’s, you know, I’ve got an empty retail property and I’m going to put a bunch of tenants in here, or I’ve got an empty apartment building, and I’m going to rehab it and put people in here.

Blake (22:28):

The next step down would be a or the next, the next kind of the next type would be construction. I’m buying land, I’m going to build something. Those usually happen in draws. And those are, those are set up based on LTC loan to cost versus LTV loan to value, but they also underwrite things like loan to cost loan, to stabilized value, stabilized debt, service, coverage ratio, and things like that. There’s mezzanine loans, which is a fancy way of saying a second mortgage. There’s also preferred equity. So you can have a mezzanine loan that’s structured as preferred equity, where instead of the property being collateral shares in the LLC or collateral, and sometimes this is a creative way to circumvent some of the rules in the first mortgage. And then there’s LP, which I think everybody knows where, you know, I’m a GP, I’m buying the property. I go to LP and I get my equity from them. And I give them you know, some kind of preferred return and, and other stuff. So I that’s some of the things that come to mind.

Seyla (23:40):

Thank you. [Inaudible] And your companies, you mentioned earlier that your company actually are connecting the borrower with the with the bank or the lenders. And if someone comes to your company and can you walk us through, what are the requirements documentations that you need from us? And how does the process work?

Blake (24:07):

Well, right now, we’re in the middle of improving the process. We’re making it fully digital. So right now it’s like half digital and half not digital, but let me talk about the requirements. So different lenders have different requirements. Here’s some of the things to think of when you’re putting together a loan package for us, or for anybody, if it’s a purchase, had the purchase and sale agreement, have the LOI, have the offering memorandum, okay. If it’s a refinance, no, when you bought the property, how much you bought it for how much you spent on it since you’ve owned it and what the mortgage balance is, right. And you need the loan request, how much money I want, what the money is for from a documentation perspective, you want a T 12, that is a trailing 12 month, month by month P and L.

Blake (24:59):

Everybody wants that. It’s really, really important. It should be detailed. It shouldn’t be on a napkin. Don’t send us anything on a napkin. Don’t send us pictures on your phone of something that you wrote on like a, on a yellow pad. Give us a spreadsheet. So trailing 12 month, month by month, P and L a current rent roll. Now, our rent roll isn’t names and monthly rent. It’s the name? The unit number, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the square footage. When the lease started, when the lease is over the security deposit, what the monthly rent is, if anybody’s past due, so detailed rent roll, if you want to talk about ways to look good to a bank come with complete information. So a trailing 12, 12 month, month by month P and L a current rent roll, this is good, right?

Blake (25:50):

This is perfect for you as a person, a really good start is a personal financial statement. This is a basic document, shows all your assets, all your liabilities, what’s your net worth. It shows how much cash you have in the bank what your liquid assets are and so on and so forth. I think these things are really good, right? If you come to us for the PFS, a personal financial statement T 12 trailing 12 month by month, P and L a current rent roll, and some information on the property you are ahead of a lot of people that are just like, Hey, can I get can I get a million dollar loan? My name is George. That’s not enough. You know, and I’ve got a six 80 credit score. That’s great, George, we need a lot more info than that. So these are these are a few things I think she need,

Seyla (26:39):

We are in the really interesting time, right? So when you receive a financial statement or the property information do you look for any of any type of reserves or a boy’s number like COVID-19 reserve or anything that you’ll be able to?

Blake (27:00):

It depends on the lender and the leverage. So some agency loans right now can be up to 18 months of principal and interest reserves right up front, which you get back later you know, if the property continues to perform, but we’re doing an agency loan right now that I think is at 50% LTV with Fannie, or maybe it’s, I it’s actually 48%, no reserves, low leverage, it’s all risk adjusted. So if you’re doing a higher leverage deal or a higher risk deal, or a lower debt service coverage ratio deal, you’re going to be, or in a riskier market, you’re going to have more reserves. And that’s just how it is right now. And if it’s a lower risk deal, lower leverage, strong market, you’re going to have less, you’re going to have less reserves. You asked if, I think you said, if there’s something we look out for and I’ll tell you, one of the COVID related risks right now is economic occupancy. So you can have a property that’s at a hundred percent occupancy, but nobody’s paying their rent. And that’s a disaster. And that’s a deal killer. If you have a hundred percent physical occupancy and 70% economic occupancy all the lenders going to see a 70% and when you’re presenting, especially to Fannie or Freddie there, they really like to see 90 days of 90% occupancy.

Aileen (28:17):

So are there any other items for first-time borrowers that we should know about that we haven’t?

Blake (28:25):

Yeah, I think something that’s worth mentioning Is If you’re a first-time borrower, you want to surround yourself with really experienced people. That means an attorney that’s done deals like this before a property manager. That’s done deals like this before in that market an advisor or a, an intermediary, a guru, whatever, to be physically, if possible, close to home, make a little less money, but be close to the property. There’s so much to learn and so much that happens. And that first deal doesn’t have to be a money factory for you. It, it should be an education factory a learning factory. And you could take you can take the dividends from that education and go out and do other amazing things. But you could listen to all the podcasts and all the conversations in the world that you want and talk to all the smart people, and nothing’s going to replace getting out there and doing it and surrounding yourself by smart people. So yeah that’s my last piece of advice.

Aileen (29:44):

That’s wonderful advice.

Blake (29:50):

Yeah.

Seyla (29:50):

So, Blake are you okay to want to ask about the opportunity zone? So if someone who actually pushing purchasing multi-families apartment in an opportunity zone doesn’t make any difference in the eyes of the lenders?

Blake (30:12):

No, It’s the opportunity zone is more about having a cool mechanism to or, sales pitch for LPs, for investors, right. That they can defer or ultimately eliminate long-term capital gains you know, maybe they’ve owned Tesla for several years and now they want to sell but their capital gains are insane. And now you’ve got this way too, to invest it. I think one of the challenges with opportunity zones is that the real estate, the dirt has been priced up to reflect to kind of like already pricing the money that you would save from deferring those, those long-term capital gains. So, I mean, I’m sure there’s good deals out there. I haven’t seen a ton of really good opportunities on deals. Maybe there were in the beginning and also banks are agnostic to this. I think that, I think what you will find is that in opportunity zones, it’s generally we’ll call it an up and coming neighbourhood. And there could be crime risks and things like that. And those things matter to lenders, right. Was there crime on the property? What kind of crime if people are getting shot in your building it’s no longer it’s not an opportunity zone. I mean, it’s an opportunity zone, but it’s not a good opportunity for you.

Aileen (31:36):

What is this for you and you’re [Inaudible]

Blake (31:46):

Well, it is our aim to materially change the fabric of commercial real estate finance. We want to, we want to, we want to build something. That’s kind of like we’re not Quicken. Right. And Quickens got the trademark, but if we want to build something, that’s like rocket mortgage for commercial real estate, except we’re not making loans, we’re connecting people to the right lender. We’re so we’re everybody should put me on mute right now, but we’re right, right now we’re raising, raising money. We’re raising kind of like a seed round to help us grow and build out the software. We’re doing it on, on Republic. I’m going to give the URL. I’m sorry. Its republic.co/Janover hyphen ventures, Jennifer dash ventures. So republic.co forward slash Jennifer dash ventures. And we’re raising to build what we think is going to be the future of multifamily and commercial property finance, and the next a million years of my life are going to be focused on this, on that

Aileen (32:54):

Agree. I can totally tell like the listeners can’t see, but we can see the passion that you have on your face right now.

Blake (33:00):

Enthusiastic I’m red, I’ve changed colours.

Seyla (33:05):

That’s awesome. That’s what’s on my mind. How has real estate investing impacted your life so far?

Blake (33:18):

Well, I’ve been on both sides, so real estate investing as, as an exercise that everybody else in the world is doing has impacted my life tremendously because I’ve been able to impact the lives of those investors and the people living in those buildings by providing debt and which it goes, it’s underappreciated because it represents most of the capital and the transaction. You go, and you buy a building for $10 million or, or a million dollars, right? $700,000 of the money is the banks is the lenders is the debt. And 300,000 is the equity. So I’ve had this opportunity to do all kinds of cool things with debt and equity finance. And it’s been a part of my life for the last 15 years as an investor. It’s actually, it’s done something really interesting. It’s most investing, not most investments, many investments available to individual investors.

Blake (34:20):

This is I’m going to get weird here. Many investments available to retail investors, individual investors, small investors, or just regular people like us are very liquid. It’s like the stock market. Right. And I think there’s a lot of data out there around retail investors, not really being good at making money in the stock market, right. They kind of like buy at the highest point and sell it the lowest point because it’s very emotional and the money’s very liquid and very readily available and not everybody’s like this. Right. But I think one really interesting component to real estate is that it’s totally a liquid, right? You’re putting your money in, you’re making a long-term commitment economically, emotionally, intellectually, like you’re in that deal. And you got to make that deal work, and you’re not pulling the money out of it. You’re not buying a stock today and selling it in three days. You’re in it. And I think there’s a very Gosh, I think there’s something very nice about having this, like long-term investment mind-set and this long-term commitment to working for an asset and having an asset work for you. And I think the compounding of a cash flowing piece of real property is invaluable. So that’s fine.

Seyla (35:46):

Blake, what is one thing that, you know now about real estate that you wish you knew when you first started?

Blake (35:55):

When I first started? Well, that’s pretty easy. I started in the early two thousands, so I wish I knew that real estate goes up and down. It doesn’t just move up in a straight line and it’s, it’s highly correlated with interest rates and, and, and, and, and supply and demand drive it. So I think there’s a lot of people out there right now that have seen multifamily values move up in a straight line for the last decade. And what I know now that I didn’t know, 15 years ago is that it can also go down and that getting max leverage and max debt is sometimes it might be the best thing for your IRR for your cash flow, but it might not be the best thing for, for managing risk in your life. And, and, and that also plays into things like recourse and non-recourse. So yeah, it would have been nice 15 years ago if I knew that real estate goes down also, it seems like when we forget every 20 years that you know, prices of all assets go up and down,

Seyla (37:10):

What is one thing that sets the successful people apart in a real estate?

Blake (37:24):

I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s just about real estate. I w what I, what I’ve found is that the thing that successful people apart from everybody else is I guess there’s a few things it’s resilience its action oriented responsibility taking there’s no, there’s no, self-pity, it’s you know, things don’t work out sometime and sometimes, and they just got to, you know, keep going. And I think there’s I think it requires a good deal of humility. As soon as you can recognize, as soon as someone can recognize that, like 99.9% of the information in the world is not inside us, it’s outside of us, it’s everywhere else. And you start looking for and listening and asking you know, that’s where I think that’s a major catalyst to success. I think some of the smartest people I know ask a lot of questions. So that’s, that’s my answer for that.

Aileen (38:32):

Thank you so much, really it, and had a lot of knowledge with us today and really, really took a lot out. And so for our listeners, find out more about you, where can they go?

Blake (38:46):

Well, you could you go to our website, Janover.ventures. There’s no.com or.net, just janover.ventures. If you want and financing, you can click on the get financing button among LinkedIn. I think if you just look up Blake Janover on LinkedIn, that’s Blakejanover all appear there and you can interact with me on LinkedIn. You’d send me an email that is really hit or miss. There’s a few hundred of those coming in a day, but it’s Blake@janover.ventures, and I’ll do my best to be responsive. That’s it.

Aileen (39:22):

Thank you so much, Blake. Really appreciate it,

Blake (39:26):

Guys. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me. I hope you’ll do with me again sometime.