Show Summary
Far more people see investing in apartment buildings as a great opportunity than those that actually do it. So, what’s holding you back? Everyone that starts has to start right where you are…dazed and confused! Even Michael Blank did. However, he’s learned through experience, and joins today to tell us all about how to start investing in apartment buildings. Given that it goes hand in hand…he also shares some great advice on raising money for your deals. Don’t miss this FlipNerd Expert Interview show!
Highlights of this show
- Meet Michael Blank, multi-family real estate investor and mentor.
- Join the discussion on why Michael chose apartment buildings over single family homes.
- Learn as Michael shares some great advice on how to raise money for your.
- Learn how to get started investing in apartment buildings.
Resources and Links from this show:
- Learn more about Michael Blank
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
FlipNerd Show Transcript:
Mike: Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting expert interview, where I interview awesome guests who inspire you and help you learn a little bit.
Just one more quick reminder of our upcoming REI Power Summit, REIPowerSummit.com. We have a large virtual conference that’s coming up where you’ll have access to the presentations actually for a year, over 50 great speakers so far. It’s going to be a great event. So check out REIPowerSummit.com.
For today’s show, I’m excited to have Michael Blank with us today. He’s a serial entrepreneur. He can’t sit still, kind of like me. But he’s also an apartment investor is one of the things he does. He’s really focused on cash flow as all of us should be. But he not only invests in apartment buildings, he teaches others how to do it.
And a big part of investing in apartment buildings, especially larger buildings, obviously, is raising capital. For today’s show that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about with Michael Blank, how to get started investing in apartment buildings and raising capital for it.
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Please note the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions as real estate investing can be risky.
Hey, Michael. Welcome to the show.
Michael: Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike: Yeah. Glad to have you on. I’m excited to talk about this because I know that you have done a number of houses too, so I think to give some context to investing from the housing side, from apartments. A lot of people just tend to be in one camp or the other and they’re kind of fearful of going one way or the other or have no interest in going one way or the other. It will be exciting to compare and contrast a little bit between investing in houses and apartments.
Michael: Right.
Mike: But hey, before we get started, why don’t you kind of tell us your background and how you kind of found your way into where you are now?
Michael: Yeah. It took me a while in life to figure it out that I was actually an entrepreneur. A lot of guys are fortunate when they’re in their teens or early 20s, like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to have my startup.” I wasn’t like that. I kind of followed the traditional go to school, get a good job thing. That’s what I did. I went to college. I went to graduate school. I got a Master’s in computer science, so I’m highly educated, right?
Mike: You were prepped to work for somebody else.
Michael: Well, I guess. That’s how I was programmed. My dad was with IBM for 30 years, bless his heart, and that’s what everybody did. I did at one point want to experience a startup, a software startup specifically. This was in the late ’90s. I did join a startup as a programmer. But we grew so rapidly that I ended up most of my time was spent recruiting, interviewing and managing teams. It wasn’t the right place, the right time and the company was very successful and we went IPO in 2000 and put a bunch of money in my pocket, which was awesome.
I stayed on probably for too long. All the fun people had left at this point. We had kind of a larger company at this point. And my plan, though, was to have my own software company. So I specifically moved around inside the company. I went to marketing for two years. The last year I was there, I was actually in sales. I actually had a quota. I had to cold call people. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I learned a lot.
Anyway, then in 2004 or 2005, I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” I was 35 years old at the time. I was like, “Ah, I am such an idiot. It doesn’t really matter how much money you have in the bank. It matters how much passive income you have coming in.”
So I left the company, took some time off and I did network with other entrepreneurs and venture capitalists around the software idea. I just felt the passive income calling me. That’s basically what it is. I decided then to implement a two-prong approach, which was to have cash flow business, which was going to be pizza restaurants and then real estate, right?
So in the pizza restaurants, I bought a territory. Essentially my plan was to plunk down my vast majority of what I had and finance three or four units and that would then self-finance future growth. So I hired a guy to run all the restaurants and I would basically sit back and count the passive income. So it didn’t quite work out that way.
Mike: That’s a hard business, man. I actually have some family members that have owned pizza places. So yeah, I understand. Go ahead.
Michael: On the real estate side, I decided to start flipping houses. So I aligned myself with a local mentor and was immediately successful. In the first 6 to 12 months, I did my first two deals and made as much money as I did in my software job. I was like, “Wow, this is really amazing.” I already felt inside that really where I wanted to be is buy and hold property. Based on the financial goals that I wanted, it would have taken me too long to do it with houses. What I liked about the houses was that you generate chunks of income.
Mike: Right.
Michael: But it was very active. There was nothing passive about it. If you’re not buying and selling and fixing, you’re not making money.
Mike: Right.
Michael: But the market was so unique in…Well, I started in 2005 and 2006 and did like a handful and then put that on hold because of the restaurant business. I was getting very busy. At that point, I actually had under letter of intent in Texas, an 82-unit apartment building, which was a smoking hot deal. I had probably looked at 100 before then. I said, “All right, I’ve got to put this on hold because if I do this deal, I’m going to be spending time in Texas.” We were like building two restaurants, buying one. It was crazy.
So I put the whole real estate thing on hold until about 2009 and where there were so many foreclosures on the market and the Washington DC market, the retail market was coming back so strongly that I was like, “Man, I need to jump on this.”
Mike: Right. That was kind of fortuitous of a good two or three-year period to miss out on actually.
Michael: Well, my restaurants took a hit. So I actually sold two of them in the process at a massive loss. I don’t think anyone came out unscathed unless you had a 9:00 to 5:00 job maybe. So no, I have some battle scars from that perspective. But the real estate stuff I put on hold. Like I said, in 2009, I saw this opportunity.
But my own money was all deployed in these restaurants. I kind of bet it all. So I had none of my own money, so I was like, “I need to do something.” And I decided to raise money from other people. That’s when I got the taste for other people’s money. I was like, “This is unbelievable.” So we were buying about two houses a month. We did 30 houses in two and a half years.
Then that thing dried up a little bit and I rekindled my initial plan, which was commercial property. In 2011, I got into a small 12-unit deal in Washington DC. That was my first syndicated deal. It was the second time I’ve used other people’s money, but it was the first time I had a private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, the LLC, the whole nine yards.
That freaking thing was a nightmare. I almost regret getting into it. The first 18 months, there was one tenant who not only made life miserable by not paying the rent, suing me for same 12 housing violations in three different dockets, calling all kinds of authorities. He was costing me thousands of dollars. I thought I was going to run out of money at one point.
Mike: Yeah.
Michael: And the dear lord had mercy on me and eventually stopped that and he eventually moved out. But it was quite the wakeup call. But now it’s stable and it’s performing well.
Mike: Yeah. It’s funny. Thanks for sharing that background. I used to live in the DC area, as I told you. I remember reading an article. It was in whatever the local coffee shop-type rag is there. I can’t remember what it’s called. Literally the cover of it was, “How to Rent a Property and Not Pay Rent.”
And literally, it was a laundry list of…because I know DC and some states are very difficult, not as landlord-friendly as other areas, I should say. I don’t know if that was a big part of your problem. It sounds like it probably was.
Michael: Yes.
Mike: Literally it was talking about how you could just file things and not pay rent. It practically takes forever to evict somebody, right?
Michael: So true. Professional tenants.
Mike: I’ll never forget that article. But it was like, “Why wouldn’t anybody put this out?”
Michael: I think my tenant wrote that article.
Mike: Yeah, wow.
Michael: But anyway, it’s one of those things where you get into the game. It doesn’t go as planned, but you survive, you get stronger, and now you’re in the game.
Mike: You learn a lot from it. Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. About a year and a half, to years ago, people were asking me how I did this and how I raised money. I was invited to do a full-day seminar at my REIA one day on this very topic. It was very well received and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.”
But I had to sacrifice an entire Saturday for this thing. I said, “One day, I’ll put all this stuff online and people can look at it online.” So that’s when I started writing about apartment building investing and I put out a ton of content. I’m a weekly contributor on the BiggerPockets and I have a podcast and a YouTube channel and weekly articles on my own website. So I have a ton of free resources. In the meantime, I also have courses that teach others how to get into apartment building investing by raising money.
Mike: Sure. So let’s dive into that. I think there are a lot of folks that have an interest in…I think there are a lot of single family house investors that it’s kind of like monopoly. They think it’s monopoly. They see themselves, “Well, I’m going to graduate to apartments and then onto hotels,” or whatever it might be. But they never know how to bridge that gap. We’ve had lots of other folks on the show where we’ve talked about multi-family type investing.
There are always people that bought houses and then graduated up, if you will. There are always some people that bought one house, hated it, got into apartment investing and they’re like, “I didn’t need that experience. You don’t have to have single family house experience to get into this. It’s a totally different business.” What’s your take on the type of experience you need to have that would make you a good apartment investor?
Michael: Yeah. That’s a really good point. You actually raised several points in what you just said. One is even though despite my house flipping experience, I got woefully little credit for that when I entered the apartment building world. People kind of said, “That’s interesting.” In fact, my 30 or so investors I had, I think only two of them actually ended up investing with me.
So it’s almost like why did I bother? People say, “Let’s start small.” I’m like no. Don’t start small. It doesn’t really buy you might. If you think multi-family is the way to go, then go right at your goal. Don’t make a little sidestep and think you can graduate to that one. That’s the first point.
The second point, they are a lot of single family house people that want to get into multi-family and they do a variety of reasons. One is they’re burned out. That’s probably the number one reason is they’ve recognized that having 20, 30, whatever, 10 houses is just too much for them. There’s nothing really passive about it.
Number two is some other recognize that to meet their financial goals would require a huge amount of single family houses to get there. They’re like, “I’m not getting there in my lifetime. I’ve got to do something else.”
And then there’s the other camp who does not have the single family house experience. Maybe they have a rental or a single rental or they just have a real desire about real estate and they want things in life that they don’t have right now, which is they want to quit their job, they don’t like their job, or they’re working too hard. They’re traveling too much. They’re not spending enough time with their family or they’re about to retire and they want supplemental income when they retire. These are the kind of people that go, “How do I do that?” The best business in my opinion to address those is commercial real estate. It’s better than pizza.
It’s, in my opinion, better than single family houses as well, though I don’t want to knock that. I’ve done it and there are plenty of people that make good passive income with that. Multi-family, really, is a fantastic vehicle, right, because it has this passive component. It’s the easiest business in the world to get financing for. Banks won’t lend on any other business except for real estate. And it’s something that is teachable and, in my case, scalable and repeatable. The pizza business was not.
Mike: Right.
Michael: If I buy, let’s say, 10 units, I can buy 20 units and then I can buy 50 units and I can start building this business over time and I can stop or I can keep going.
Mike: Yeah. I know we’re going to talk about raising money in a little bit too. Without having any experience with large apartments, for sure. I know just in the raising money part, which I’ve had to go through myself, you kind of go through this process when you’re an investor of, if it’s in your intent to raise money, you go from it seems impossible to raise money to, “I can raise far more than I ever need.”
As a single family house investor that’s tough because if you find somebody that has money, and they’re like, “Okay. I could give you $1 million.” You’re like, “Awesome. Well, I need $80,000 right now though. Can you just put the rest in a bank for me earning nothing on it, right?” So you can apply a lot more money. When you find people that have money, they want to apply it, right? They want to put it to work, not just set it aside for you in case you need it. So I’m guessing that’s much easier on the apartment side as well.
Michael: Yeah. It is. People investing on the house side, after six months you return their money and they’re like, “Dude, I don’t want your money. I want it working for me.” I say, “Well, I can’t place it right now.” Three or four months maybe go by before I can do that. With commercial real estate, the downside with commercial real estate is that you’re locking their money up for longer.
Mike: Sure. Well, let’s kind of dive into how to get started. What’s your general guidance for people that are hearing this and they’re on the edge of their seat right now? They’re like, “Wow, this is going to take me over the top.” Let’s take them over the top, Michael, where do we go from here?
Michael: I always start with the big why first. Anything in life, when we try to change our life is, “Why do you want to change your life? What is it about your life that’s so bad? How do you envision yourself down the road?” You have to be clear about those because anytime you change your life in any meaningful way, whether it’s losing weight or starting in apartment buildings, that why has to be pretty strong.
What you’re about to do is if you want to retire in three to five years, you’re going to do sustained activity for a long period of time. I always say if I could teach you how to generate leads from Facebook and you do these 10 steps and in 3 days you have 10,000 leads, that’s like instant gratification. With apartment building investing or real estate investing in general, actually, there is no such thing as instant gratification.
So I’m trying to set expectations properly. I’m happy to take people’s money when they buy my course, but I said, “Okay. Just to be clear here, this is something you’re going to do for many months. Okay?” So the first thing is the why. Why do you want to do it? When that why is strong enough and the person is really motivated and they really know what they don’t want and they know what they do want and then we can talk about the how.
The biggest objection, there are really two hard things with commercial real estate investing. One is finding the deals and number two is finding the money. The biggest objection is people say, “Look, I don’t have the money to buy a $1 million building,” or they don’t have enough money. So to address that objection, I’ve really spent a lot of time teaching people who to raise money to overcome that objection.
Mike: Okay. So you think that’s where people, after they kind of understand why they’re doing it, get some context to it, kind of set the expectation that especially on the residential side, I think, because of all the flipping shows on TV and stuff like that, people have been conditioned to think that it’s easy, but it’s a hard business, as you know.
Michael: Very hard business.
Mike: In fact, there’s no business that’s easy.
Michael: No, no.
Mike: Everything is tough, especially as a small business. It’s not like you have a lot of resources. You can’t hire redundancy and backups to the people that leave or quit or get fired or sick. So you end up as the owner kind of getting inserted in a lot of areas and it’s still a lot of work, but just kind of setting that expectation of what you’re getting yourself into, why you want to do it. Then you kind of advise, “Hey, let’s work on raising money first so you can’t use that as an excuse as to why you can’t do this.” Does that sound right?
Michael: That’s about right. That’s usually the biggest reason people say, “I know I want multi-family. I get it. But I just don’t have the resources for it.” That’s it. The conversation ends. That’s where mine begins.
Mike: Yeah. You kind of made some reference before. I know you live in the DC area and had looked at an apartment building in Texas. I heard you say that early on. Are you of the belief that the properties need to be in any sort of geographic proximity to you or do you kind of teach people, “Hey, you can invest anywhere?”
Michael: I teach people two things. One, it’s ideal to invest in an area that you already know because it’s just easier. But the reality of the market is that it’s tough to find deals and you have to kind of go where the deals are. So I specifically teach people how to do it remotely. How do you get deals remotely? How to do you build your team remotely? How do you do this whole thing remotely? Without it, it would incomplete. Your experience would be complete and you’d be very frustrated if you’re living in New York City and you can’t find deals.
Mike: Right. Absolutely. And so with that, I assume you kind of go hand and hand. You probably do not manage your own properties, I assume.
Michael: Oh no. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
Mike: Okay.
Michael: I know there are a lot of people that do it. I would say do it in the beginning, but only so you know the business enough so you can delegate it and manage the manager. That’s the only reason. There are plenty of people who say, “Oh I’m going to do it because I want to make more money.” That’s fine. I’d rather use my time to find more deals and make in the long run more money than if I manage my own building.
Mike: Right. I don’t manage my rentals. I’d rather do anything in the world other than manage my rentals. Awesome. Okay. Where do we go from there? You raise money. You get comfortable doing this remotely, being able to not limit yourself to your own backyard, necessarily. So where do we go from there?
Michael: Well, there are three activities that people have to take when they get into this stuff. They do these activities every single week. One is you’re analyzing deals and making offers. That’s kind of one related activity. Two is that you are meeting with potential investors and three is you’re speaking or meeting with a potential team member. You’re building your team. So that means you’re speaking with property managers, lenders, for example, things of that nature.
Mike: Okay.
Michael: So those are the three activities that you’re doing every single week.
Mike: Sure. In terms of finding deals, you probably could talk on this for days, but what we some of the high level areas where people typically find multi-family deals. It’s not like they’re just listed on the MLS. When you get into the commercial world, you know there’s LoopNet, and a whole bunch of other obscure places that you might find stuff. Maybe just share a couple minutes and say some high level places that you teach people to find deals.
Michael: Yeah, the primary source of deals is brokers. Okay. Now, the way you find the brokers are with the sites you just mentioned, for example, LoopNet. LoopNet is not great for finding actual deals because, well, they kind of go there to die a little bit, you know? If they’re on LoopNet, that means the immediate buyers list of these brokers have not purchased a deal yet. But that’s okay. You use it to find brokers.
Another good source is CCIM.com for example. What you want to do is you want to build up a list of brokers and you want to contact them. You want to contact them. “Hey, what deals I have? Here’s what I’m looking for,” build rapport, get them to send you deals. And then you want to stay in touch with them.
And then when they do send you a deal, this is really important, you want to actually respond to them in 48 hours. Based on my brokers, I ask them, “Hey, when you fire out a deal, what percentage of your buyers list responds to you?” And they’re like, “25%. A quarter of my buyers actually respond.”
So if you’re one of those 25%, you’re already bubbling to the top in this broker’s mind. The issue as a newbie is that you’re not being taken seriously. Now, you respond to a broker, you’re going to start being taken seriously. What I teach is kind of the 10-minute offer.
So when a deal comes in, I made this mistake early on, I spent four hours analyzing a deal when it came in. It was asinine. What a waste of time. Now I have this 10-minute offer thing. I actually have a free e-book on my website that describes this process. It’s very simple but powerful because you start, you get back to the broker with feedback about the deal and what price would work for you and if there’s any flexibility.
You’re effectively starting a negotiating process. If you get a response saying, “Yeah, there might be some flexibility,” at that point, you can go to level two of the analysis and spend maybe an hour or two sharpening your pencil a little bit.
Mike: Sure. Back to the responding quickly, you see that on the single family side, really in everything. One of the things that I talk a lot about is building relationships with people. A lot of people go to REIA clubs and things like that. They shake hands. They put a business card in their pocket and they come home with something like this, a bunch of business cards and you put a rubber band around it and throw it in a drawer.
It’s funny. We’ve kind of been conditioned, like Facebook, I’m going to click a button and somebody’s my friend, but they don’t really know you. I think what you just said is very powerful. Even if you’re new and you’re like, “I’m almost afraid to create a lot of banter with this person because I don’t have the money yet or I’m afraid to get a deal.”
Sometimes in real estate investing, new people are like the proverbial dog that’s chasing the bus. They don’t know what to do if they catch it. So you start to subconsciously sabotage yourself really from doing stuff. But basically keeping those relationships alive.
You know, stuff like this happens, probably. You respond to somebody and you say, “Hey, I’ve got this. We’re going to look at it.” And they may write back, “Oh by the way, I’ve actually got another deal you might be interested in. There are things that happen that unless you start that banter, they may not fall in your lap.
Michael: So brokers, really, what you’re saying is so true about building relationships because brokers are number one, your source of deals, but also your gateway into your other team members. They will recommend you to the proper mangers and the lenders specifically. So this is why it’s so important to build relationships. I’ll track them in like the spreadsheet or something. If I haven’t heard from them in two weeks, I might call them up and say, “Hey, how’s it going? What do you got? Here’s what’s going on,” just so you’re staying in touch with them.
Mike: Right. Do you want to talk for a few minutes, Michael, about the raising money part? Because I think a lot of people, especially if they don’t have money or they’re never had to raise money, when you talk about millions of dollars it’s kind of overwhelming and scary, maybe talk about how folks can get more comfortable with that process.
Michael: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I think the first thing is understanding what the process might look like, because people go, “Well, I don’t have money. I don’t really know anybody with money. What do I do?” There are a few things.
Number one is one of the catch 22s with raising money is that if you don’t have a deal under contract to talk about, how am I going to go raise the money? And then on the other hand, if I have a deal on a contract, how in the world am I going to raise the money? You can’t. So people kind of go, “I can’t solve this problem. I’m stuck.”
The way I solve that problem is what I call a sample deal package. A sample deal package is a real deal, wherever you find it. It’s basically an investor package that has photos in it. It has financials. It has how you can structure the deal. The only thing that’s not real about it is the fact that you don’t have it under contract. Okay. You basically take that as a tool to start reaching out to potential investors. That’s the key tool to do that.
The first thing we do is create a mind map of everyone you know, different social groups–my neighbors, my friends, my family, my church, my sports club, boy scouts, whatever. You write down the names of everybody you know and then you start reaching out to them.
What you want to do is you want to get a series of yeses from them. All you really want is a five-minute conversation. “Hey, I’m really excited about this. I’m looking at apartment building deals. I want to run this by you and get some feedback. You’re friend’s going to say, “Sure.” Okay.
It’s a five-minute conversation and you tell them more. In that conversation you say, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. I’m raising money. Is there anyone you might think is interested in a five-minute conversation?” And then they will go, “Well, I might be interested.”
Mike: Right.
Michael: Or they might say, “Well, I’m probably not the right guy, but my brother is or my boss is.” Then you follow up to the referral. Again, you want a series of yeses. You say, “Hey, I just want a five-minute conversation to tell you what I’m doing and see if you’re interested in something like that.” And you just follow where the breadcrumbs lead you.
Mike: Sure. And the people know that it’s a hypothetical deal or they don’t?
Michael: Yeah.
Mike: Okay.
Michael: And you don’t actually spend a lot of time talking about when you actually meet. You have a one-hour meeting with somebody. You spend most of the time building rapport, talking about your background, talking about the team that you’ve built, what you want to do.
Mike: Sure.
Michael: You talk about how you would structure the deal, maybe the returns, some of the risk factors. And then in the very end you might either show them the sample deal package or leave it to them as a leave behind. The idea is you’re building a relationship with somebody. You’re answering some of the questions, and addressing some of their objections and eventually you will get a verbal commitment.
So one guy goes, “I’ll do $50,000. Just keep me posted.” So you keep them posted. Just like your brokers, you call them every two/three weeks. And then when you actually get a deal, you call all the people up and say, “Remember you were in for $50,000? Or whatever. Are you still good?” He goes, “Yeah, I’m good. What do I have to do?” And then you take it from there.
But you’ve already essentially raised the money by the time you have a deal because why would I put a $1 million property under contract if I don’t have my money raised. There are people who do it and they pull it off, but man that’s stressful.
Mike: Yeah. I know in terms of the stress of those whole thing. I know that a big part of it, especially on your first deal, it’s the same way in single family or anything, your confidence goes through the roof after you’ve done a deal or after you’ve done a few deals, right? And then it’s like, “I could do this in my sleep. I don’t know what I was ever worried about.”
The dynamic changes completely, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Mike: So I know that you said you found a mentor locally. I mentor folks. I’ve had mentors. I know you’ve had mentors. Talk about the role of having people that you can rely on to kind of give you guidance and really the importance of that.
Michael: Being an entrepreneur is kind of a lonely sport. People around you or friends don’t really understand what we’re doing or [inaudible 00:27:47] and why don’t we just get a job? It’s kind of lonely. There are [inaudible 00:27:55] pieces of it. One is, of course, when you [inaudible 00:27:59], of course you acquire knowledge. That’s one of the [inaudible 00:28:05] we need to be the best at is knowledge.
Then there are two other pieces. One is accountability. [Inaudible 00:28:09] and you’ve got to take action. [inaudible 00:28:15] because you need community. You need [inaudible 00:28:18]. So as you think about doing anything [inaudible 00:28:24] or anything, you have to address all three. So you can acquire knowledge by Googling on the Internet or buying a book or doing a seminar. Okay.
Number two, on the taking action, if you’re an action-taker, that needs someone to kick you in the shins every once in a while. Hey did you [inaudible 00:28:39]. My experience is most people are not natural action takers. They need to be reminded what they did last week and if they did it [inaudible 00:28:49].
And then third is [inaudible 00:28:49] is the ongoing support. You need a [inaudible 00:28:55], number one. Because when things take [inaudible 00:28:58] but then you also have specific situational questions that a course or book camp is not going to [inaudible 00:29:04]. There’s only one situation like this in the world and you need some kind of help on this particular situation. So those are the ones I’ve seen to be effective in anything that you want to do, [inaudible 00:29:17] some way or another.
Mike: Yeah. Michael, definitely appreciate all the information today. I know you were kind of a ferocious content creator here, have a lot of great articles on your site. But if folks want to learn more about what you’re doing and some of the stuff we talked about today, where do we go?
Michael: Yeah. They go to TheMichaelBlank.com. So it’s The Michael Blank, B-L-A-N-K dotcom. If you’re interested in multi-family, it’s a great place to start because I have a lot of articles. I have two free e-books, [inaudible 00:29:49] a podcast channel and a YouTube channel. So it will keep you busy for a while. I think it’s a good place to start for listeners.
Mike: Sure. Any kind of final words of wisdoms to those that have some level of fear. They’re interested in this, but they have some fear that they need to get behind them.
Michael: Yeah. I just go back to my initial why. If your current life is not so bad, why change it? Honestly, everybody wants $1 million and want to quit their job, but still a fraction of them are actually taking action. So really become clear about your why. If you aren’t clear about the why, you have to commit to whatever course of action you…you just have to decide that that’s what you want to do.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome, Michael. Thanks for your time today. I forgot to mention a while ago, you were talking about different sources for apartments. This isn’t going to help people out the gate, but we actually are about to add a couple of different property types on FlipNerd.com for those that are interested in finding multi-family and apartment deals and actually rental-ready turnkey properties as well. In the next couple weeks, you’ll start to see those pop up on FlipNerd.
So Michael, thanks again for being with us today. I definitely appreciate your time and great to see you.
Michael: My pleasure. It was a real honor. Thanks, Mike.
Mike: Awesome. Have a great day.
Michael: You too.
Mike: Bye, bye.
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For today’s show, I’m excited to have Michael Blank with us today. He’s a serial entrepreneur. He can’t sit still, kind of like me. But he’s also an apartment investor is one of the things he does. He’s really focused on cash flow as all of us should be. But he not only invests in apartment buildings, he teaches others how to do it.
And a big part of investing in apartment buildings, especially larger buildings, obviously, is raising capital. For today’s show that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about with Michael Blank, how to get started investing in apartment buildings and raising capital for it.
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Hey, Michael. Welcome to the show.
Michael: Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike: Yeah. Glad to have you on. I’m excited to talk about this because I know that you have done a number of houses too, so I think to give some context to investing from the housing side, from apartments. A lot of people just tend to be in one camp or the other and they’re kind of fearful of going one way or the other or have no interest in going one way or the other. It will be exciting to compare and contrast a little bit between investing in houses and apartments.
Michael: Right.
Mike: But hey, before we get started, why don’t you kind of tell us your background and how you kind of found your way into where you are now?
Michael: Yeah. It took me a while in life to figure it out that I was actually an entrepreneur. A lot of guys are fortunate when they’re in their teens or early 20s, like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to have my startup.” I wasn’t like that. I kind of followed the traditional go to school, get a good job thing. That’s what I did. I went to college. I went to graduate school. I got a Master’s in computer science, so I’m highly educated, right?
Mike: You were prepped to work for somebody else.
Michael: Well, I guess. That’s how I was programmed. My dad was with IBM for 30 years, bless his heart, and that’s what everybody did. I did at one point want to experience a startup, a software startup specifically. This was in the late ’90s. I did join a startup as a programmer. But we grew so rapidly that I ended up most of my time was spent recruiting, interviewing and managing teams. It wasn’t the right place, the right time and the company was very successful and we went IPO in 2000 and put a bunch of money in my pocket, which was awesome.
I stayed on probably for too long. All the fun people had left at this point. We had kind of a larger company at this point. And my plan, though, was to have my own software company. So I specifically moved around inside the company. I went to marketing for two years. The last year I was there, I was actually in sales. I actually had a quota. I had to cold call people. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I learned a lot.
Anyway, then in 2004 or 2005, I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” I was 35 years old at the time. I was like, “Ah, I am such an idiot. It doesn’t really matter how much money you have in the bank. It matters how much passive income you have coming in.”
So I left the company, took some time off and I did network with other entrepreneurs and venture capitalists around the software idea. I just felt the passive income calling me. That’s basically what it is. I decided then to implement a two-prong approach, which was to have cash flow business, which was going to be pizza restaurants and then real estate, right?
So in the pizza restaurants, I bought a territory. Essentially my plan was to plunk down my vast majority of what I had and finance three or four units and that would then self-finance future growth. So I hired a guy to run all the restaurants and I would basically sit back and count the passive income. So it didn’t quite work out that way.
Mike: That’s a hard business, man. I actually have some family members that have owned pizza places. So yeah, I understand. Go ahead.
Michael: On the real estate side, I decided to start flipping houses. So I aligned myself with a local mentor and was immediately successful. In the first 6 to 12 months, I did my first two deals and made as much money as I did in my software job. I was like, “Wow, this is really amazing.” I already felt inside that really where I wanted to be is buy and hold property. Based on the financial goals that I wanted, it would have taken me too long to do it with houses. What I liked about the houses was that you generate chunks of income.
Mike: Right.
Michael: But it was very active. There was nothing passive about it. If you’re not buying and selling and fixing, you’re not making money.
Mike: Right.
Michael: But the market was so unique in…Well, I started in 2005 and 2006 and did like a handful and then put that on hold because of the restaurant business. I was getting very busy. At that point, I actually had under letter of intent in Texas, an 82-unit apartment building, which was a smoking hot deal. I had probably looked at 100 before then. I said, “All right, I’ve got to put this on hold because if I do this deal, I’m going to be spending time in Texas.” We were like building two restaurants, buying one. It was crazy.
So I put the whole real estate thing on hold until about 2009 and where there were so many foreclosures on the market and the Washington DC market, the retail market was coming back so strongly that I was like, “Man, I need to jump on this.”
Mike: Right. That was kind of fortuitous of a good two or three-year period to miss out on actually.
Michael: Well, my restaurants took a hit. So I actually sold two of them in the process at a massive loss. I don’t think anyone came out unscathed unless you had a 9:00 to 5:00 job maybe. So no, I have some battle scars from that perspective. But the real estate stuff I put on hold. Like I said, in 2009, I saw this opportunity.
But my own money was all deployed in these restaurants. I kind of bet it all. So I had none of my own money, so I was like, “I need to do something.” And I decided to raise money from other people. That’s when I got the taste for other people’s money. I was like, “This is unbelievable.” So we were buying about two houses a month. We did 30 houses in two and a half years.
Then that thing dried up a little bit and I rekindled my initial plan, which was commercial property. In 2011, I got into a small 12-unit deal in Washington DC. That was my first syndicated deal. It was the second time I’ve used other people’s money, but it was the first time I had a private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, the LLC, the whole nine yards.
That freaking thing was a nightmare. I almost regret getting into it. The first 18 months, there was one tenant who not only made life miserable by not paying the rent, suing me for same 12 housing violations in three different dockets, calling all kinds of authorities. He was costing me thousands of dollars. I thought I was going to run out of money at one point.
Mike: Yeah.
Michael: And the dear lord had mercy on me and eventually stopped that and he eventually moved out. But it was quite the wakeup call. But now it’s stable and it’s performing well.
Mike: Yeah. It’s funny. Thanks for sharing that background. I used to live in the DC area, as I told you. I remember reading an article. It was in whatever the local coffee shop-type rag is there. I can’t remember what it’s called. Literally the cover of it was, “How to Rent a Property and Not Pay Rent.”
And literally, it was a laundry list of…because I know DC and some states are very difficult, not as landlord-friendly as other areas, I should say. I don’t know if that was a big part of your problem. It sounds like it probably was.
Michael: Yes.
Mike: Literally it was talking about how you could just file things and not pay rent. It practically takes forever to evict somebody, right?
Michael: So true. Professional tenants.
Mike: I’ll never forget that article. But it was like, “Why wouldn’t anybody put this out?”
Michael: I think my tenant wrote that article.
Mike: Yeah, wow.
Michael: But anyway, it’s one of those things where you get into the game. It doesn’t go as planned, but you survive, you get stronger, and now you’re in the game.
Mike: You learn a lot from it. Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. About a year and a half, to years ago, people were asking me how I did this and how I raised money. I was invited to do a full-day seminar at my REIA one day on this very topic. It was very well received and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.”
But I had to sacrifice an entire Saturday for this thing. I said, “One day, I’ll put all this stuff online and people can look at it online.” So that’s when I started writing about apartment building investing and I put out a ton of content. I’m a weekly contributor on the BiggerPockets and I have a podcast and a YouTube channel and weekly articles on my own website. So I have a ton of free resources. In the meantime, I also have courses that teach others how to get into apartment building investing by raising money.
Mike: Sure. So let’s dive into that. I think there are a lot of folks that have an interest in…I think there are a lot of single family house investors that it’s kind of like monopoly. They think it’s monopoly. They see themselves, “Well, I’m going to graduate to apartments and then onto hotels,” or whatever it might be. But they never know how to bridge that gap. We’ve had lots of other folks on the show where we’ve talked about multi-family type investing.
There are always people that bought houses and then graduated up, if you will. There are always some people that bought one house, hated it, got into apartment investing and they’re like, “I didn’t need that experience. You don’t have to have single family house experience to get into this. It’s a totally different business.” What’s your take on the type of experience you need to have that would make you a good apartment investor?
Michael: Yeah. That’s a really good point. You actually raised several points in what you just said. One is even though despite my house flipping experience, I got woefully little credit for that when I entered the apartment building world. People kind of said, “That’s interesting.” In fact, my 30 or so investors I had, I think only two of them actually ended up investing with me.
So it’s almost like why did I bother? People say, “Let’s start small.” I’m like no. Don’t start small. It doesn’t really buy you might. If you think multi-family is the way to go, then go right at your goal. Don’t make a little sidestep and think you can graduate to that one. That’s the first point.
The second point, they are a lot of single family house people that want to get into multi-family and they do a variety of reasons. One is they’re burned out. That’s probably the number one reason is they’ve recognized that having 20, 30, whatever, 10 houses is just too much for them. There’s nothing really passive about it.
Number two is some other recognize that to meet their financial goals would require a huge amount of single family houses to get there. They’re like, “I’m not getting there in my lifetime. I’ve got to do something else.”
And then there’s the other camp who does not have the single family house experience. Maybe they have a rental or a single rental or they just have a real desire about real estate and they want things in life that they don’t have right now, which is they want to quit their job, they don’t like their job, or they’re working too hard. They’re traveling too much. They’re not spending enough time with their family or they’re about to retire and they want supplemental income when they retire. These are the kind of people that go, “How do I do that?” The best business in my opinion to address those is commercial real estate. It’s better than pizza.
It’s, in my opinion, better than single family houses as well, though I don’t want to knock that. I’ve done it and there are plenty of people that make good passive income with that. Multi-family, really, is a fantastic vehicle, right, because it has this passive component. It’s the easiest business in the world to get financing for. Banks won’t lend on any other business except for real estate. And it’s something that is teachable and, in my case, scalable and repeatable. The pizza business was not.
Mike: Right.
Michael: If I buy, let’s say, 10 units, I can buy 20 units and then I can buy 50 units and I can start building this business over time and I can stop or I can keep going.
Mike: Yeah. I know we’re going to talk about raising money in a little bit too. Without having any experience with large apartments, for sure. I know just in the raising money part, which I’ve had to go through myself, you kind of go through this process when you’re an investor of, if it’s in your intent to raise money, you go from it seems impossible to raise money to, “I can raise far more than I ever need.”
As a single family house investor that’s tough because if you find somebody that has money, and they’re like, “Okay. I could give you $1 million.” You’re like, “Awesome. Well, I need $80,000 right now though. Can you just put the rest in a bank for me earning nothing on it, right?” So you can apply a lot more money. When you find people that have money, they want to apply it, right? They want to put it to work, not just set it aside for you in case you need it. So I’m guessing that’s much easier on the apartment side as well.
Michael: Yeah. It is. People investing on the house side, after six months you return their money and they’re like, “Dude, I don’t want your money. I want it working for me.” I say, “Well, I can’t place it right now.” Three or four months maybe go by before I can do that. With commercial real estate, the downside with commercial real estate is that you’re locking their money up for longer.
Mike: Sure. Well, let’s kind of dive into how to get started. What’s your general guidance for people that are hearing this and they’re on the edge of their seat right now? They’re like, “Wow, this is going to take me over the top.” Let’s take them over the top, Michael, where do we go from here?
Michael: I always start with the big why first. Anything in life, when we try to change our life is, “Why do you want to change your life? What is it about your life that’s so bad? How do you envision yourself down the road?” You have to be clear about those because anytime you change your life in any meaningful way, whether it’s losing weight or starting in apartment buildings, that why has to be pretty strong.
What you’re about to do is if you want to retire in three to five years, you’re going to do sustained activity for a long period of time. I always say if I could teach you how to generate leads from Facebook and you do these 10 steps and in 3 days you have 10,000 leads, that’s like instant gratification. With apartment building investing or real estate investing in general, actually, there is no such thing as instant gratification.
So I’m trying to set expectations properly. I’m happy to take people’s money when they buy my course, but I said, “Okay. Just to be clear here, this is something you’re going to do for many months. Okay?” So the first thing is the why. Why do you want to do it? When that why is strong enough and the person is really motivated and they really know what they don’t want and they know what they do want and then we can talk about the how.
The biggest objection, there are really two hard things with commercial real estate investing. One is finding the deals and number two is finding the money. The biggest objection is people say, “Look, I don’t have the money to buy a $1 million building,” or they don’t have enough money. So to address that objection, I’ve really spent a lot of time teaching people who to raise money to overcome that objection.
Mike: Okay. So you think that’s where people, after they kind of understand why they’re doing it, get some context to it, kind of set the expectation that especially on the residential side, I think, because of all the flipping shows on TV and stuff like that, people have been conditioned to think that it’s easy, but it’s a hard business, as you know.
Michael: Very hard business.
Mike: In fact, there’s no business that’s easy.
Michael: No, no.
Mike: Everything is tough, especially as a small business. It’s not like you have a lot of resources. You can’t hire redundancy and backups to the people that leave or quit or get fired or sick. So you end up as the owner kind of getting inserted in a lot of areas and it’s still a lot of work, but just kind of setting that expectation of what you’re getting yourself into, why you want to do it. Then you kind of advise, “Hey, let’s work on raising money first so you can’t use that as an excuse as to why you can’t do this.” Does that sound right?
Michael: That’s about right. That’s usually the biggest reason people say, “I know I want multi-family. I get it. But I just don’t have the resources for it.” That’s it. The conversation ends. That’s where mine begins.
Mike: Yeah. You kind of made some reference before. I know you live in the DC area and had looked at an apartment building in Texas. I heard you say that early on. Are you of the belief that the properties need to be in any sort of geographic proximity to you or do you kind of teach people, “Hey, you can invest anywhere?”
Michael: I teach people two things. One, it’s ideal to invest in an area that you already know because it’s just easier. But the reality of the market is that it’s tough to find deals and you have to kind of go where the deals are. So I specifically teach people how to do it remotely. How do you get deals remotely? How to do you build your team remotely? How do you do this whole thing remotely? Without it, it would incomplete. Your experience would be complete and you’d be very frustrated if you’re living in New York City and you can’t find deals.
Mike: Right. Absolutely. And so with that, I assume you kind of go hand and hand. You probably do not manage your own properties, I assume.
Michael: Oh no. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
Mike: Okay.
Michael: I know there are a lot of people that do it. I would say do it in the beginning, but only so you know the business enough so you can delegate it and manage the manager. That’s the only reason. There are plenty of people who say, “Oh I’m going to do it because I want to make more money.” That’s fine. I’d rather use my time to find more deals and make in the long run more money than if I manage my own building.
Mike: Right. I don’t manage my rentals. I’d rather do anything in the world other than manage my rentals. Awesome. Okay. Where do we go from there? You raise money. You get comfortable doing this remotely, being able to not limit yourself to your own backyard, necessarily. So where do we go from there?
Michael: Well, there are three activities that people have to take when they get into this stuff. They do these activities every single week. One is you’re analyzing deals and making offers. That’s kind of one related activity. Two is that you are meeting with potential investors and three is you’re speaking or meeting with a potential team member. You’re building your team. So that means you’re speaking with property managers, lenders, for example, things of that nature.
Mike: Okay.
Michael: So those are the three activities that you’re doing every single week.
Mike: Sure. In terms of finding deals, you probably could talk on this for days, but what we some of the high level areas where people typically find multi-family deals. It’s not like they’re just listed on the MLS. When you get into the commercial world, you know there’s LoopNet, and a whole bunch of other obscure places that you might find stuff. Maybe just share a couple minutes and say some high level places that you teach people to find deals.
Michael: Yeah, the primary source of deals is brokers. Okay. Now, the way you find the brokers are with the sites you just mentioned, for example, LoopNet. LoopNet is not great for finding actual deals because, well, they kind of go there to die a little bit, you know? If they’re on LoopNet, that means the immediate buyers list of these brokers have not purchased a deal yet. But that’s okay. You use it to find brokers.
Another good source is CCIM.com for example. What you want to do is you want to build up a list of brokers and you want to contact them. You want to contact them. “Hey, what deals I have? Here’s what I’m looking for,” build rapport, get them to send you deals. And then you want to stay in touch with them.
And then when they do send you a deal, this is really important, you want to actually respond to them in 48 hours. Based on my brokers, I ask them, “Hey, when you fire out a deal, what percentage of your buyers list responds to you?” And they’re like, “25%. A quarter of my buyers actually respond.”
So if you’re one of those 25%, you’re already bubbling to the top in this broker’s mind. The issue as a newbie is that you’re not being taken seriously. Now, you respond to a broker, you’re going to start being taken seriously. What I teach is kind of the 10-minute offer.
So when a deal comes in, I made this mistake early on, I spent four hours analyzing a deal when it came in. It was asinine. What a waste of time. Now I have this 10-minute offer thing. I actually have a free e-book on my website that describes this process. It’s very simple but powerful because you start, you get back to the broker with feedback about the deal and what price would work for you and if there’s any flexibility.
You’re effectively starting a negotiating process. If you get a response saying, “Yeah, there might be some flexibility,” at that point, you can go to level two of the analysis and spend maybe an hour or two sharpening your pencil a little bit.
Mike: Sure. Back to the responding quickly, you see that on the single family side, really in everything. One of the things that I talk a lot about is building relationships with people. A lot of people go to REIA clubs and things like that. They shake hands. They put a business card in their pocket and they come home with something like this, a bunch of business cards and you put a rubber band around it and throw it in a drawer.
It’s funny. We’ve kind of been conditioned, like Facebook, I’m going to click a button and somebody’s my friend, but they don’t really know you. I think what you just said is very powerful. Even if you’re new and you’re like, “I’m almost afraid to create a lot of banter with this person because I don’t have the money yet or I’m afraid to get a deal.”
Sometimes in real estate investing, new people are like the proverbial dog that’s chasing the bus. They don’t know what to do if they catch it. So you start to subconsciously sabotage yourself really from doing stuff. But basically keeping those relationships alive.
You know, stuff like this happens, probably. You respond to somebody and you say, “Hey, I’ve got this. We’re going to look at it.” And they may write back, “Oh by the way, I’ve actually got another deal you might be interested in. There are things that happen that unless you start that banter, they may not fall in your lap.
Michael: So brokers, really, what you’re saying is so true about building relationships because brokers are number one, your source of deals, but also your gateway into your other team members. They will recommend you to the proper mangers and the lenders specifically. So this is why it’s so important to build relationships. I’ll track them in like the spreadsheet or something. If I haven’t heard from them in two weeks, I might call them up and say, “Hey, how’s it going? What do you got? Here’s what’s going on,” just so you’re staying in touch with them.
Mike: Right. Do you want to talk for a few minutes, Michael, about the raising money part? Because I think a lot of people, especially if they don’t have money or they’re never had to raise money, when you talk about millions of dollars it’s kind of overwhelming and scary, maybe talk about how folks can get more comfortable with that process.
Michael: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I think the first thing is understanding what the process might look like, because people go, “Well, I don’t have money. I don’t really know anybody with money. What do I do?” There are a few things.
Number one is one of the catch 22s with raising money is that if you don’t have a deal under contract to talk about, how am I going to go raise the money? And then on the other hand, if I have a deal on a contract, how in the world am I going to raise the money? You can’t. So people kind of go, “I can’t solve this problem. I’m stuck.”
The way I solve that problem is what I call a sample deal package. A sample deal package is a real deal, wherever you find it. It’s basically an investor package that has photos in it. It has financials. It has how you can structure the deal. The only thing that’s not real about it is the fact that you don’t have it under contract. Okay. You basically take that as a tool to start reaching out to potential investors. That’s the key tool to do that.
The first thing we do is create a mind map of everyone you know, different social groups–my neighbors, my friends, my family, my church, my sports club, boy scouts, whatever. You write down the names of everybody you know and then you start reaching out to them.
What you want to do is you want to get a series of yeses from them. All you really want is a five-minute conversation. “Hey, I’m really excited about this. I’m looking at apartment building deals. I want to run this by you and get some feedback. You’re friend’s going to say, “Sure.” Okay.
It’s a five-minute conversation and you tell them more. In that conversation you say, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. I’m raising money. Is there anyone you might think is interested in a five-minute conversation?” And then they will go, “Well, I might be interested.”
Mike: Right.
Michael: Or they might say, “Well, I’m probably not the right guy, but my brother is or my boss is.” Then you follow up to the referral. Again, you want a series of yeses. You say, “Hey, I just want a five-minute conversation to tell you what I’m doing and see if you’re interested in something like that.” And you just follow where the breadcrumbs lead you.
Mike: Sure. And the people know that it’s a hypothetical deal or they don’t?
Michael: Yeah.
Mike: Okay.
Michael: And you don’t actually spend a lot of time talking about when you actually meet. You have a one-hour meeting with somebody. You spend most of the time building rapport, talking about your background, talking about the team that you’ve built, what you want to do.
Mike: Sure.
Michael: You talk about how you would structure the deal, maybe the returns, some of the risk factors. And then in the very end you might either show them the sample deal package or leave it to them as a leave behind. The idea is you’re building a relationship with somebody. You’re answering some of the questions, and addressing some of their objections and eventually you will get a verbal commitment.
So one guy goes, “I’ll do $50,000. Just keep me posted.” So you keep them posted. Just like your brokers, you call them every two/three weeks. And then when you actually get a deal, you call all the people up and say, “Remember you were in for $50,000? Or whatever. Are you still good?” He goes, “Yeah, I’m good. What do I have to do?” And then you take it from there.
But you’ve already essentially raised the money by the time you have a deal because why would I put a $1 million property under contract if I don’t have my money raised. There are people who do it and they pull it off, but man that’s stressful.
Mike: Yeah. I know in terms of the stress of those whole thing. I know that a big part of it, especially on your first deal, it’s the same way in single family or anything, your confidence goes through the roof after you’ve done a deal or after you’ve done a few deals, right? And then it’s like, “I could do this in my sleep. I don’t know what I was ever worried about.”
The dynamic changes completely, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Mike: So I know that you said you found a mentor locally. I mentor folks. I’ve had mentors. I know you’ve had mentors. Talk about the role of having people that you can rely on to kind of give you guidance and really the importance of that.
Michael: Being an entrepreneur is kind of a lonely sport. People around you or friends don’t really understand what we’re doing or [inaudible 00:27:47] and why don’t we just get a job? It’s kind of lonely. There are [inaudible 00:27:55] pieces of it. One is, of course, when you [inaudible 00:27:59], of course you acquire knowledge. That’s one of the [inaudible 00:28:05] we need to be the best at is knowledge.
Then there are two other pieces. One is accountability. [Inaudible 00:28:09] and you’ve got to take action. [inaudible 00:28:15] because you need community. You need [inaudible 00:28:18]. So as you think about doing anything [inaudible 00:28:24] or anything, you have to address all three. So you can acquire knowledge by Googling on the Internet or buying a book or doing a seminar. Okay.
Number two, on the taking action, if you’re an action-taker, that needs someone to kick you in the shins every once in a while. Hey did you [inaudible 00:28:39]. My experience is most people are not natural action takers. They need to be reminded what they did last week and if they did it [inaudible 00:28:49].
And then third is [inaudible 00:28:49] is the ongoing support. You need a [inaudible 00:28:55], number one. Because when things take [inaudible 00:28:58] but then you also have specific situational questions that a course or book camp is not going to [inaudible 00:29:04]. There’s only one situation like this in the world and you need some kind of help on this particular situation. So those are the ones I’ve seen to be effective in anything that you want to do, [inaudible 00:29:17] some way or another.
Mike: Yeah. Michael, definitely appreciate all the information today. I know you were kind of a ferocious content creator here, have a lot of great articles on your site. But if folks want to learn more about what you’re doing and some of the stuff we talked about today, where do we go?
Michael: Yeah. They go to TheMichaelBlank.com. So it’s The Michael Blank, B-L-A-N-K dotcom. If you’re interested in multi-family, it’s a great place to start because I have a lot of articles. I have two free e-books, [inaudible 00:29:49] a podcast channel and a YouTube channel. So it will keep you busy for a while. I think it’s a good place to start for listeners.
Mike: Sure. Any kind of final words of wisdoms to those that have some level of fear. They’re interested in this, but they have some fear that they need to get behind them.
Michael: Yeah. I just go back to my initial why. If your current life is not so bad, why change it? Honestly, everybody wants $1 million and want to quit their job, but still a fraction of them are actually taking action. So really become clear about your why. If you aren’t clear about the why, you have to commit to whatever course of action you…you just have to decide that that’s what you want to do.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome, Michael. Thanks for your time today. I forgot to mention a while ago, you were talking about different sources for apartments. This isn’t going to help people out the gate, but we actually are about to add a couple of different property types on FlipNerd.com for those that are interested in finding multi-family and apartment deals and actually rental-ready turnkey properties as well. In the next couple weeks, you’ll start to see those pop up on FlipNerd.
So Michael, thanks again for being with us today. I definitely appreciate your time and great to see you.
Michael: My pleasure. It was a real honor. Thanks, Mike.
Mike: Awesome. Have a great day.
Michael: You too.
Mike: Bye, bye.
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