The Profitable Property Management Podcast

 Now I come in and buy that property that they've made, look beautiful. Now I get the chance to come in and start to update their operations and systemize the operation and just make better decisions.

Welcome closers. Today we have another episode of the Profitable Property Management Podcast coming at you. This is season two on sales. I'm your host Jordan ela, and every week I interview World. Class property management entrepreneurs and industry experts who share actual insights to help you grow your property management empire.

So whether you manage a hundred or a thousand units, this broadcast is designed to help you see the big picture and give you the tools and tactics that you need to get to the next level. I don't throw darts at a board, I bet on sure things. Wheat. Sun sue the art of war. Every battle is won. Before it's ever fought, think about it.

Today I'm talking with Bruce Peterson, a multifamily investor, and the CEO and founder of Blue Bonnet Asset Manager and Blue Bonnet commercial Construc. After a 20 year career in retail, Bruce made his first real estate investment, which yielded a 300% return, and he is been hooked ever since. Today, Bruce syndicates large multifamily deals in central Texas, properties ranging from 120 to 300 units per property, and he currently manages over 900 units in a portfolio producing average returns of eight to 9% annually for his investors.

Bruce is obviously a little different than our usual guest, but that's a good thing. Today we're gonna get a chance to hear the perspective of a successful real estate investor and why and how he has decided to successfully insource. Welcome to the show, Bruce. Hey man, glad to be here. Hey, so gimme a little bit of your background.

How did you end up winding your way into real estate investing and property management? Well, I kind of backdoored this thing, I guess. Uh, I retired myself at 43 working for other people for, you know, 25 years. It was eating me alive, so I decided to go out and. Try to figure out something else to do with my own.

I retired myself from retail, believe it or not. I was a big box store manager, uh, for a lot of different companies. Before that, I was a stockbroker in the early nineties, but when I quit working for somebody else, 'cause I just couldn't get up and go do it one more day, I just had to. You know, I started doing some research trying to figure out this real estate thing.

I kept hearing about, found somebody to kind of show me the ropes and, you know, it's been the best thing I've ever done. The most profitable, and by far, the most rewarding thing I've ever done. So let's just get into the specifics. First deal. Walk me through the, the mechanics of your first deal. All right, so the first one I bought was 2012.

The end of 2012. It was a 48 unit property in North Austin. And you know, it was something I found on LoopNet. Uh, I don't know if anybody knows what that is when I'm talking about it, but it's MLS for commercial. I had developed a pretty core group of people around me. That we all got to know, like, and trust each other, because I didn't have any experience at all doing this, right.

I'm a retail guy, but we found this property. We did some, we got it under contract, did the due diligence, and I developed a, a good circle around me that they trusted me on this investment with no experience. So we bought it, I think it was September 29th, 2012. Our plan was to hold it for five to seven years.

And make anywhere from 10 to 12% returns while we held it. So the Austin market, of course, happened to everybody. And so from 2012 to 2015, our rents skyrocketed. Uh, we dialed in operations and we increased the value dramatically. So I went back to my investor, said, look, I know we said we were gonna keep it for five to seven years, but wow.

You know, let's not get greedy. You know, if this market changes, I would hate to have left all this appreciation on the table. So we went ahead and sold and made a 300% total return in two years and four months on that deal. Wow. Talk to me about the initial kind of proforma, like operationally the cash flow aside from the sale.

What was the, the spread of the deviation between what you initially anticipated and what happened? It sounds like it was off in a, in a good way. Well, it was often a good way to some degree, right? Again, it was my first one. Didn't have any experience. I learned a whole lot of lessons on what to really look.

Foreign due diligence due that I didn't know on that first deal. So at the beginning it was a little rockier than we anticipated, but then we hit our stride near two and we were hitting 12, 13, 14% returns quarterly. Well, you know, annualized paid out quarterly. We started off. Not really hitting our mark.

But then after a year of, you know, bumps and bruises and going through a full rental cycle, we started to hit our stride and that's when we started to make up ground. And then we sold and just killed it. And how many doors was that? 48. What did the managing the day-to-day operations look like? Were you, were you full-time figuring that out?

Were you part-time? What was the labor like? I was no time in that respect. Right. Because I, again, I'm not a property manager. I have a management company, so back then, that was my first property I took over and the seller had a management company in. Place the bank since I had no experience, they insisted I had third party management, which made total sense.

Ah, so I inherited their third party management co. Well, I inherited, I brought them on as my third party. 'cause I didn't have an office on site either. It was managed from a property down the street and then they would just come down as needed. So it, it wasn't an ideal situation, but I told my management company at the time that, look, once I get my feet under me and I construct an onsite office.

I'm gonna directly hire my own property manager and I'm probably gonna let you guys go. And we went into it with that understanding and it worked out very, very well. So I built that office little 10 by 10, 12 by 12, something like that. Very, very small, but it's all the 48 unit needed. And I hired myself a part-time manager and a part-time maintenance guy, and it just kept getting better from there.

'cause now I'm 100% in control. So how did the margins change? Do you remember, I know this is quite a ways back, but do you remember the management fee you were being charged? Uh, originally by the third party company, it was 4%. I think now at, at the scale I'm at now, if I was to take my portfolio out, I could easily get it for three, but back then for 48 unit, and that's the only thing I had for him, it was 4%.

So now again, if I was to do it again, I'd definitely be able to get it for three. When you say things get better, was that based on the fact that you just net cost savings or is that more a byproduct of the fact that you had the control and were able to drive efficiencies that you couldn't when you were doing it via proxy?

There's really two things. So the first thing is, you know, now I have a property manager on site every day. Now she's part-time, but she works five hours a day. And so now there were eyes on property all the time where, you know. Not to scare anybody. I'm sure a lot of your audiences dealt with this stuff too, but when I bought, there were homeless people hanging around.

There were prostitutes running around the property. But now that I have somebody there sitting there all day every day, or most of the day, every day. They realized I can't just do what I want to at this property any longer. It's like a Scarecrow. E. E, exactly. So it kind of started to clean itself up that way.

But one thing I really, really noticed by hiring an experienced property manager for me with no experience, she finally stepped in. She said, Bruce, you like most new owners? I'm like, uh. That does not sound like could put in open to this conversation. She goes, if you will get out of my way and let me lease these things.

You want to over rehab them for this neighborhood, buy a lot and I can rent it for the same price as you want and not put nearly as much money in. I was like, okay, I trust you. I absolutely trust you, but I'm gonna be watching and she made me look stupid. Right, but that's why you hire. Smarter people, more experienced people, and listen to them and get out of the way.

Love it. Yeah. Totally makes sense. So you go full circle on this deal. You cash out, you've got a, a group of happy investors, and then talk me through. Your next prospecting process on your next deal. So actually that first deal spawned my next two deals. So one initial investment created three properties for me.

'cause I'd made enough money in that first deal that gave me my investing dollars into the next two deals. So really that one turned into three. But in between, you know, I can get a little squirrel brain sometimes, and I decided, Hey, this real estate thing works spectacularly well. Let's go do something else.

So, yeah, I'm, I'm real smart sometimes. So I went and started an oil services company, you know, chasing that hot industry back in. 13, no, 14, I guess it was lost my butt in that market decided, okay, I'm coming back home to where I know how to do it. I know it's more rational and it's much more profitable. So I took about a year, well actually about a two year hiatus, but then I got reengaged at the very end, December of.

2015, we bought it our second property, 120 units also in North Austin, down the street from the first property. And over the next 18 months, we bought four properties total for uh, 860 units. Okay. And were they all roughly the same size, or was there one. Kind of monster property there that that held the, the majority of those units, well, the first one, the 48 bought and sold, and the second one was one 20, the third one was 256.

The fourth one was 192. And uh, the last one we closed in September of this year, uh, of last year I guess was 292. What do you feel like are the ranges of where the type of multifamily property really becomes a different animal? Obviously there's a difference between a 40 and a 400. Unit property, but are there like meaningful ranges or bands of where you feel like you're really dealing with a different animal based on unit count?

Oh, of course. You know, everybody talks about the, the unwritten rule of thumb, I guess is a hundred units, right? A hundred units and above. You can afford full-time inside and full-time outside. So the rules of thumb say one full-time in and out for every a hundred units. So that gets pretty good because now you've got somebody dedicated their 40 hours a week, but you've only got one person if that person gets sick.

Goes on vacation, has maternity leave, ha, whatever. You know that that kind of throws a wrench in things. So what I've come to learn, and I think everybody knows this, after you get into this for a while and you always hear it, it gets easier with size. My 300 unit property is dramatically easier to run to my 48 because now I have three bodies inside.

And now I have four bodies outside, so it's just t there's a lot more specialization. If one person gets sick, hey, there's two people in the, in the office to pick up the slack. So yeah, it's dramatically easier the bigger you get as you've networked with other investors. By that I mean other people that are doing what you do.

'cause the people that have actually. Gave you the capital, did they have a background in real estate or doing anything in multifamily or were these just contacts with capital that trusted you? Contacts with capital that trusted me for the most part. Uh, my first deal, I had a private investigator. I had a math teacher.

I had a bunch of tech guys that they were looking for a way to invest their money into real estate, but they didn't have the time or they just didn't want to deal with what they perceived as the headache of managing the day-to-day operations of this company. So for a lot of my clients, they're in the single family.

Management space, so they're not really doing a ton of multifamily. Occasionally they'll be dealing with small, multi duplex, triplex, quad, whatever, or occasionally they'll get a mid-size multifamily, really a smaller multifamily property, something that's gonna be a hundred doors or less, but. In terms of the persona of the people that they are interacting with, most of the investors, so I'm differentiating this from accidental landlords.

Most of these investors, they're gonna own. You know, five plus properties and they are intentional, but they're certainly an order of magnitude down from institutional. How do you think that the profile of single family investors differs from folks that are actively engaged with multifamily deals, like folks that are basically not, not syndicating, but actually owning one or more multifamily properties?

Well, you know, that's tough because a lot of times they're the same. But when you do start to get up there in larger and larger properties, much nicer properties, you're, you're dealing with a much bigger set of sophisticated people, the single family guys and the guys that are gonna go out and buy the 4, 6, 8, 12 unit property.

I don't mean this disparagingly, but they're very often mom and pops. Right? They just run it the way they run their personal budget at their house. That doesn't really work when you scale in multifamily, you actually have a business with a p and l, with staff, with benefits. You have all that stuff. So a lot of times when people are coming out of the single family or the very small multifamily realm.

They sometimes they can struggle because they have a hard time adapting to running a legitimate business. So it just gets much more sophisticated, especially when you go out and start buying from some of these guys. Now you're used to operating in a very small pond, and now you're getting into a much deeper.

Pool that has all, they're not sharks necessarily. Some of 'em are, but they are much more sophisticated. So what do you think about the pros and cons for an unsophisticated investor, somebody that's taken that first plunge, they own their first property, and they're really interested in exploring and kind of scaling this.

What do you think about the level of complexity and accessibility for that person to either buy multiple single family properties or to get in on. Syndicating and owning whatever, one 10th of a multifamily deal. If you were just advising another, you know, the math teacher, whoever, what would you say are the pros and cons of these two strategies?

Well, the second strategy where you're just gonna own one 10th of the deal that you spoke of. I mean, that's by far the easiest, but it's, it's a lower payoff because now. You're just a silent partner. You're a limited partner with really no say day to day, which is fine, which is what most people want. They don't wanna deal with the the dead guy at the property.

And you know, the bedbugs. And you know, I could say that on your podcast because everybody knows what I'm talking about. I'm not scaring anybody. They don't wanna deal with that stuff. So it's much, much easier for them if they just want to be invested and involved in real estate. It's so much easier. To find somebody that's experienced and just invest alongside them.

The other side of it, now you get somebody that's coming outta the one two unit properties and now they're gonna get into apartment complexes, you know, six to 12, 18 unit properties. The payoff is a lot higher because now things are valued on an NOI basis and not on a comp of your next door neighbor.

You can control your value a lot more in multifamily than you can in single family. But again, now you're the one making the decisions day to day and it can get a little white knuckled. It, it does. No matter how good you are, how much you prepare, there's gonna be something that's gonna, you know. Smack you in the face every once in a while.

You just gotta be able to pick yourself up and keep moving. So you're saying you can control the value through operations, is that what you meant there? Absolutely. So I can go in and I can clean things up. I buy a lot of properties from multi-billion dollar companies. Well these mul multi-billion dollar companies, very often, not always, they have gotten into this industry 'cause they see there's a lot of money to be made in their opinion.

So they come in. They buy and they flip an apartment complex, which usually is one to two years. So they're good at coming in and putting a cosmetic facelift on the thing. You know, they, they upgrade the major systems. They do some landscaping. They paint, so they do a really good exterior rehab. But what I'm learning is they're not truly operators.

Mm-hmm. They're just deal makers. So they flip it off to the next guy. Now I come in and buy that property that they've made, look beautiful. Now I get the chance to come in and start to update their operations and systemize the operation and just make better decisions, you know, clean up the place. Not let everybody and their brother in if you can fog up a mirror, you know, that kind of stuff.

So we dial in our operations and we get dramatically more profitable. So walk me through that. What are some of the real differentiators that you feel like have allowed you to get dramatically more profitable? I empower my staff. I tell them that, look, I'm hiring you to perform this duty to have this job with me.

This is what I expect, and these are the tools to do the job. But then again, I get outta their way. I get outta their way, and I give them a lot of flexibility, a lot of autonomy that they can make decisions day-to-day without having to consult me all the time. I usually give them about, you know, it changes from property to property some, but.

If it's a major capital project and it's less than a thousand dollars, it's a repair, it's a capital project, whatever, just go do it. Don't ask my permission. Don't pass it by me. But I will see it hit my p and l my income statement. So just be able to speak to why you did what you did. And same thing like with a, uh, a renewal gift.

Give up to 200 bucks. Anything above that you need to get me involved. But anything below 200 bucks, don't bog yourself down. Make the decision, move on. Be able to support your decision when we talk about it. So I, I believe fully in giving them autonomy, you know, I learned that from my first manager. Just get out of their way the best I can.

$200 for a renewal gift. You're talking about paying the, the tenant for renewing a lease. If it's needed, it's only on an as needs basis. Most of the time you don't need to offer anything. Some people will be on the fence, go, you know, it's really pretty. On the other side of the fence over there, the grass is a little greener and Sure.

You know, I'm, I'm thinking about moving. Well, I'll tell you what, what if I give you a, a ceiling fan in your living room? 'cause maybe they don't have one right now. Oh, well that's only 50 bucks. It, you know, a lot of times that'll get us another lease. That'll get them to renew. Well, 50 bucks is a lot better than, uh, somebody moving out and have to turn that unit over.

Yeah. Got it. So yeah, so when it's needed, yeah, they have the authority to go up to 200 bucks. So empowering employees. I think for, for anybody that's got an even remotely progressive mindset, it makes sense. But that said, the flip side of that is accountability. What are the knobs, the dials, the KPIs, the metrics that you use, either daily, weekly, or monthly to make sure that your empowered, smart staff is doing what you've asked of them.

Well, the biggest thing is you can't just, you know, give them all these parameters and then just run away. You know, go to Spain for, you know, six years. Don't do that. You have to still keep eyes on property. If you're gonna act as a regional manager, let's call it. 'cause that's kind of, that's one of the hats that I wear.

We're about to bring on our first regional manager soon, but as the regional manager, I need to be visiting these properties as the owner until I have a regional, I need to be visiting these properties, you know, at least once a month in my opinion. You know, if it's a, if it's a new takeover or a property that's struggling, maybe two or three times a week sometimes.

So trust, but verify. And of course I'm, I'm able to manage everything also remotely from a p and l. There are tricks you can play. I get that. But we're really good at spotting most of those problems. And if, if you're doing something weird, we're gonna figure it out. My wife is a, her background is an auditor as a CPA auditor for multifamily.

And tax return. Now, that's an unfair advantage. I understand that most people don't have that, but we're able to, you know, watch, watch our budgetary numbers and watch our p and l watch the rent roll, the, the lease terminations, uh, our dashboard, all that stuff. I can do a lot of the management remotely.

What about third party software? What's in the mix for, for your management process? So we've always used third party management software. We've never spreadsheeted, we've never written it on the back of a napkin. For you guys that are gonna buy a five unit property, please do not do that. At least do Excel.

But if you plan on growing above that five to 10 unit property. Go ahead and get a low cost property software suite. That way you can start learning for your growth. We use resin right now. Uh, we've never used one side or yard already. Two of the bigger ones, resin is fairly reasonably priced and it's, it's as robust as we need it to be.

Now there might be something and you already, that we don't have that I'm not aware of, but it does everything and then some that we need it to do. I've heard great things about ResMan. They really seem like they're an up and coming player right now. What about, uh, any other vendors? Have you ever taken a look at Buildium, for example?

No. I, I know a lot of people that use Buildium AppFolio, but no, I've, I've never thought about leaving. I've not been dissatisfied in any way. They're very, very, very responsive. They're like any growing company. Things happen every once in a while. There's a hiccup, but they make it right. Right. And part of the autonomy for my managers, a lot of the major property management companies, the big, big, big guys out there, I know from my experience in corporate America and retail, and I think the property management space is the same way.

If I have a problem with the software, either I can't figure out how to make something work or this report doesn't exist that I would like to see. You have to escalate that through your organization. It has to go through 2, 3, 4, 5 different levels before that in person can finally contact ResMan. We don't do that.

We give you access right away at the property level management and above. Not assistant manager, not leasing agent, anything like that. But the property managers can directly call resin. They can text with them, they can chat with them, or they can call them directly. We give them that authority so it makes things run so much smoother.

So let's kind of go back to talking about contrasting what you're doing now versus working with a third party management company. And obviously at the scale that you're doing at, it's not. That different, right? I mean, presumably you could begin managing other multifamily properties that you don't own if you wanted to Fair that.

That's fair. And we're thinking about that, but in the state of Texas, you have to hold a broker's license, which we do not. So we would have to, you know, figure that out if we decide to go that way. But yeah, we're, you know, doing everything they're. For the most part. All right. So how do you think that the, your yields would be impacted if you did choose to work with a third party management company?

Let's just get past the obvious things that could go wrong. Let's say that they're, that they were competent to your satisfaction and for whatever reason you just decided that you didn't want to be managing that operations. How do you anticipate that the overall yield in your investment would change?

Really, it wouldn't change from the investment standpoint, but you know, the thing that would change, obviously, is I wouldn't get that earned income from having a management company. I, you know, have a management company. So I get the 3%. Management fee in my company that I pay all, you know, the infrastructure for that management company.

So it wouldn't affect the investment directly. It would probably run just as well. Provided, like you said, I find somebody that I like and trust we're on the same page. And they allow me to at least be a little involved. I, I, I know I won't get any say in the hiring and firing of staff for the most part.

You know, I know my place. We've considered doing that, but I love everything about owning a management company. So I, I, I don't ever want to give it up. Unlikely. So then let's talk about either what I might call buying criteria or, or in your case, what you think are just the criteria of what actually defines a high performance, fully functioning property management company.

And maybe you can kind of couch it in terms of if, if you were looking at a third party vendor, like what are the key issues for you that if you get an unsatisfactory answer would just be a total deal breaker. Well, you know, it's, it's the feel good stuff, right? Because it matters. It absolutely matters hugely that I wanna know.

How do you treat your employees? How do you deal with a difficult tenant? There are professional and tactful ways and respectful ways to deal with this stuff. You know, I believe firmly, I think it was the founder of Southwest Airlines, I think his name was Kelleher, that, you know, the most important people in my organization are not the tenants, believe it or not.

You know, it's the employees. If I take care of my employees, they will, you know, just kind of by default take care of the residents and the tenants and everybody will be happy because they're happy working there. That's the biggest thing. How do you interact with others? How do you deal with stress?

Because there're gonna be stressful things that happen if somebody gets in your face on site. 'cause you know, even on an A plus property, you're gonna have some people get very, very upset for whatever reason. How do you handle that? That's the stuff I wanna know. We can come to terms and agreements on what color I think that toilet should be, you know, and what kind of landscaping I wanna see out there that's all workable.

I wanna make sure that we align fundamentally. And ethically, I guess you'd say, I wanna make sure the, the character is there. And I know that's not a really, you know, hard and fast thing to point to. It's more in the ether, but that, that's it for me. Well, how do you suss it out? Because I feel like the flip side of what you just described.

Is a equally nebulous and vague description from the management company. We're number one, we care about our employees, we love our tenants. We do right by our investors, blah, blah, blah. I mean, how do you dig in to actually verify all of the things that you just articulated? That's a great question. 'cause what I actually, I'd start asking questions about, okay, so what does that look like for you?

Tell me some things that you've done. Tell me how you've really knocked yourself out for a resident and, you know, not the, the canned interview question. So tell me some, some way that you went above and beyond in the, in your scope of view. No, and no, that's not what I'm talking about. Tell me about some of the community outreach stuff you've done.

Tell me about some of the parties. You've done the fun little drawings or raffles with your employees. What have you done special for your employees? Okay. It's not to me, it's not enough that they have a job. They should be happy to get a damn paycheck. I don't buy that. They wanna feel needed and apart.

Of something, or they're not gonna be happy and they're not gonna stay. And yes, it's your management company at this point, if I'm third partying, but that affects my property because you have a carousel of people running through my freaking property. Mm-hmm. So I wanna know, how do you engage with your employees?

How I wanna know what their autonomous approach is like. Again, I empower people. How do you empower people if you do it all? So that's the stuff I want to know. Well now what would your expectations be in terms of reporting specifically? I'm curious what, what the deal breakers would be for you there.

Well, see that's tough 'cause I've only self-managed, so I have access to every report in creation, right? So, but I think the things that I would need to see is I wanna see collections. I wanna see lease expirations and renewals. Uh, turnover rate is huge for me. And then, you know, the basic p and l, the rent roll, that kind of stuff.

But my big things are turnover, obviously, you know, y profitability, that kind of stuff. And collections, you know, you can bill out $200,000 a month, but if you're only collecting 13 bucks, you're not helping me, dude. So for, for a turnover rate, what's an acceptable range for you there? Well, I know industry average last report I saw in 2014 was 54, 50 5%.

Totally unacceptable for me. I expected to be below 40% one of my properties in San Antonio. Right now, they consistently run below 20%. Wow. Yeah. Now I know that's not sustainable for most properties. Most management companies, we just have a spectacular thing going at that property. What about tenant screening best applicant versus first applicant?

What are your, what are your thoughts on the process and and the kind of answers that you would want to be hearing from a management company that would make you think that they're actually doing that Well. Well, really to me it's, it's pretty simple. Now, again, I'm more of a regional slash CEO of my company, so I'm not the one, you know, in the weeds doing it day to day.

So I don't know all the just down and dirty specifics, but I wanna make sure they're actually doing it. I wanna see, you know, it gets tricky. How do I verify you're doing it right? Because I can't ask to go see an existing properties, lease files, right? That's against the law. That's private information. I can't see that.

The one thing I can say. Is, this is not my phrase, my maximum, everybody said it throughout the years, but. Hire slow fire fast. You know, take time to get to know them. But then once you decide on somebody, give them a little while. If things don't seem to be going well, you gotta make a move fast. You can't be scared.

To have the difficult conversation because it's your business that's on the line. So again, hire slow and fire fast. How do you think that your investment strategy is going to either the management company or the investment strategy is going to change? Over the next couple years, what, what meaningful changes do you see on the horizon?

I don't think it'll change much, 'cause right now what I'm doing is buying fully stabilized properties anyway. So it's not like I'm buying a lot of deep value add, just completely neglected properties that are. Yeah, I'm not buying, there's not many of 'em on the, on the market right now. Most of that's already been run through the system and cleaned back up and resold, so I don't know that anything's really gonna change.

The one thing I've gotta keep in mind, for those of you that understand underwriting a property, I've got to go back to a higher cap rate. Right now I'm buying at a six to a six and a quarter for the most part. But I've got to realize that as interest rates start to creep up quarterly now. I'm gonna see my cap rate start to rise.

So, you know, if I'm buying at six and a quarter in a couple years, that might be back to seven. It, you know, you know, a few years after that, it could get right back to kind of more of a historic norm of eight. So that's the biggest thing I have to be cognizant of. But again, I'm not really gonna change anything.

When you think about prospecting, et cetera, where have you sourced deals historically, in terms of deal flow? What's been most effective for you to find the right deal? You know, I was talking to a, a really good friend of mine the other day. He was trying to get into this space. He said, Hey, you know, I'm, I forgot what they're called, like yellow letters or whatever, you know?

The dialing for dollars, the mailing for dollars. I'm like, dude, quit doing that. Having said that, it, it probably can work at a five to 12 unit property, something like that. I, I would assume, 'cause those are mom and pop people, a lot of 'em are just tired of it. So it, it can work. But he is wanting to jump into a hundred unit property or bigger his first time out.

You know, he's a developer. He is, got a lot of background in real estate, so it's not like he's a complete newbie to this. But like, look dude, quit doing that. Don't, don't go down that road just. Develop relationships with the major broker players in your neighborhood and just get to know those guys really well.

See if they'll let you go to lunch. You know, buy 'em a coffee so they can get to know who you are, what you're looking for. And that's how I'm finding my deals. I have, I've only done like two to four fo uh. I, I guess you call 'em cold calls in my life. One of 'em actually beared fruit, but then they realized that they couldn't sell the property 'cause a loan they put on the property.

But for the most part, I, I don't believe that works and the space I operate in. Got it. So your point here is just to, to not waste time with TV infomercial style tactics. You're not actually discounting the fact that the, the notion that the money is made on the buy. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, and if you, if you just have that deep ingrained in your soul, 'cause you watch somebody's late night TV show, like you said, or bought their books and tapes and, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do.

Well, at least hire somebody else to do that. You know, that's not a very good use of your time. You know, get somebody, you could pay 'em, you know, get a high school kid eight to 10 bucks an hour or something. Have them do it. Show them how to do it, but then let them do it. Now if it comes to phone calls, well, you probably need to make your own phone calls, but yeah, I, that's just not a good approach for me at all.

Makes sense. Well, I want to transition now to the rapid fire section of the interview. I ask similar questions to almost every guest. And the first question is this, Bruce, who do you learn from? There's a very, very, very large contingent of individual owners in every major metropolitan area, so they're not all the amlie and gray stars of the world.

So I've become friends with many, many of them, and that's where I learned the most from now. I got started, I found a, a group that kind of taught me the ropes, showed me how to do it, but then I had to go out there and do it myself. But then ongoing, it's, you know, lots of podcasts like this. I read a lot and, but most of it I just, I'm friends with a ton of other owners in Austin.

We get together usually quarterly, about 10 to 20 of us, and we just share information. So that's where I learned most of my stuff. How did you embed yourself in that group early on? I mean, did you Google Austin real estate investors? How did you meet these people? Well, yeah, you go to enough meetups, enough, uh, different groups.

You start to meet other people that are trying to do or are actually doing what you're doing. And in fact, I'm going to a, a meetup tomorrow, uh, that somebody that I met on one of the online services we'll say. You know, they decided, Hey, I'm in Austin. Anybody else in Austin want to get together and start a meetup?

Like, sure, why not? All networking is good networking, but all that networking, you start to run into people or at the apartment association is another huge resource. You got a lot of other members that are going there to try to get educated themselves. Are you a BiggerPockets guy? Yep. That's the, that's the group I was talking about.

What podcasts do you listen to other than the BiggerPockets podcast? Jake and Gino, Gary V. Anything Gary Vaynerchuk does, I'll listen to. I I love that guy. I, we, we share a personality. I, I just love everything he does, but I like Grant Cardone. You don't have to be honest. I don't know that he does a podcast.

I think he does YouTube videos. Uh, Tim Ferriss, you know, all that kind of, it's not always directly multifamily or directly even business, but those are my big ones. Gary in particular is actually hard to keep up with. My appetite is probably to consume about a quarter of what he puts. Oh, it's insane his overall level of content production.

All right, so Bruce, if you could go back to day one, when you just quit your retail job and you were looking at getting into real estate investing, if you could grab yourself by the shoulders and deeply impress upon yourself one piece of advice, what would it be? Well, you know, I, I jumped right into multifamily, so I can't say, you know, go to multifamily instead of single family, but it, it's something I heard Grant Cardone say the other day on BiggerPockets, that I went pretty big my first time out, 48 units.

But I would tell myself, just go as. Hard as big and as fast as I can safely go. You know, don't make any stupid mistakes. Don't get crazy, don't get reckless. You know, as a syndicator, which I am, I got a lot of people relying upon me for their return. So if they get reckless and lose their money, well my whole thing falls apart, right?

So, but yeah, I would definitely go as big on that first property as you can possibly go. It just gets easier, faster. Mm, I like it. Yeah. Go bigger. Go home. And, and as a general business rule of thumb, the, the overall kind of philosophy that I adhere to is that small businesses are hard and big businesses are hard.

So all things being equal, if you're up for it, might as well choose to go after a bigger opportunity. Absolutely. It gives you a better lifestyle, my friend. Bruce, if folks want to listen more, if you're a property manager and you just wanna see about how Bruce is syndicating his deals, if you're an investor and maybe you're interested in working with them, what's the best way for folks to see what you're up to and get in touch with you?

Uh, my website, uh, I'm gonna spell it out 'cause it's a little hard to understand audio. It's apartment guide.com, but it's a PT. Dash guy, GU y.com. You know, I've got a form. If you're interested in investing, you can submit a form, you can contact me there. We can start a dialogue. Uh, but yeah, that's how to get ahold of me best.

All right, we'll link it up in the show notes. Bruce, I appreciate you coming on the show today, my man. It's been a pleasure. All right, my friend. Thank you so much.