How can real estate investors leverage technology to find great deals and joint venture partners?
Paul Wakim of TwnSqr joins us to talk tech and scoring killer deals as a real estate investor.
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Deni: Hi everyone, and welcome to Spark Rentals podcast YouTube Live,
Brian: Facebook Live.
Deni: We are very excited this week because we have Paul. How do you…
Paul: Wakim or Wa-kim, Wakim is good.
Deni: Okay. I’m so terrible with that stuff.
Paul: No worries.
Deni: And Paul’s a real estate investor developer. You’ve kind of done a little bit of. Of everything. And right before we came on, you were telling us an interesting story about how you’re living now. So it’s kind of very cool. So with that, let. Can you just start us off a little bit with how did you get involved in real estate?
Paul: Yeah. First things first. Thank you guys so much for having me. I, I have watched a couple of your shows, and I like this live format that you do, and I think it’s very raw and keep people honest.
Brian: That, it is!
Paul: I appreciate that. I think that in the world of social media, things can be too curated. So I think that your utilization of live is awesome, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be here talking to you guys.
Deni: Thank you.
Brian: We are grateful to have you with us!
Paul: Yeah, my name is Paul Wakim. Yeah. I got my start in real estate in my hometown home city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My entrance into the world of real estate and real estate investing is a little bit odd. I started with my girlfriend at the time, now my wife. What has become one of the largest real estate photography companies on the East Coast? And I had always had like a passion under the surface for real estate because of family and friends and people that I had interactions with throughout my middle school, high school years, college years. But whenever I started this real estate photography company, I had instant direct access with high end real estate agents, really high quality flippers, rehabbers, landlords, guys that owned three properties to 8,000 properties. And it kind of just ignited the little tinder bundle of interest in real estate investing for me. So I would drive around and listen to podcasts all day in between photography appointments, all about real estate investing, and then decided to take the leap and get into investing myself right around 2017 with some pretty interesting deals that led me to my first rental and then eventually to the technology company that I’ve started in the real estate space.
Deni: Wow. It’s amazing what can get you involved. So you start out taking pictures of homes and then you’re like, Hmm.
Paul: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it was it was honestly like the exposure to experts, you know, like being on social media and seeing the success that people have, being on YouTube and seeing the success that people have. It’s definitely great. But listening to podcasts, hearing somebody talk about their financial freedom through rental properties or through their flipping business or through wholesaling and whatever it was, and then going and talking to those people in person and taking photos of their house, it’s like, All right, it’s right in front of me. I got to do this.
Deni: It’s funny, I have a friend who invests in Pittsburgh and he’s an insurance agent and that’s how he meets so many different people and has struck some deals. So it’s it’s funny. It’s funny.
Brian: I think most investors get in that way? I kind of threw the side door. I mean, I got into it through working for a lender. Mortgage lender.
Deni: Oh, that’s right.
Brian: Yeah. You specialize in working with investors. So.
Paul: Yeah, it’s hard to avoid you like, you see the success and you’re like, All right, I got to do this. I can I can definitely do this. You know, I had a little bit of that, like fear of missing out where I would look at somebody and be like, All right, I have started a somewhat successful photography business and it just required a whole lot of hard work. And these guys are working really hard. If I can work really hard, then I can also do this. So it was kind of a it was a good place to find myself in a couple of years ago.
Deni: That’s awesome. How did you get involved in photography? Was it real estate photography that you wanted to do or…
Paul: So I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in economics. I thought I was going to be a doctor, met my wife in college, and she said, You don’t want to be a doctor. I can see it in your face. So graduate with a degree in economics. I got into real estate photography in a crazy, roundabout way. I started a marketing company. The guy who is our business partner in the marketing company, his wife was and still is one of the largest real estate agents in Pennsylvania. He said, Paul, can you go take drone photos? Because I had just got a drone as a graduation present from my wife. He said, Can you go take drone photos of this listing? And I said, Sure, why not? Went took the photos, drove down the street, found another real estate agent sign and called her. And speaking of being in access or having access to the largest real estate agents and investors, that first appointment, I called that agent off of her sign. She was the largest real estate investor friendly agent in Pennsylvania at the time, and I proceeded to take 430 house photos for her of that year for her rental properties. So yeah, it was very much serendipitous.
Brian: Oh, but it’s also that’s scrappy marketing, right? You know, going out there and just picking up the phone and calling somebody.
Paul: It sure was! It Sure was. It was the crappiest! <Laugh>
Deni: Yeah. But look where it lead.
Paul: Yep. Yep. Very fortunate. Very, very fortunate. So then yeah, my wife and I got into real estate investing. And bought a couple of properties, got in to do some wholesaling. We kind of saw wholesaling as like if there are leads, we’re going to find them. I’d prefer to find them myself, which then led us to buying properties and then creating a technology company.
Brian: All right. Well, yeah, again, I love the winding road that your career in real estate took, and I think that’s very typical, actually. I think most of us end up taking this very winding road to our real estate investing success. Now, I read before we hopped on today that you bought your first property from an investor in Qatar and you handled the whole thing over WhatsApp. So tell us that story.
Paul: Yeah, so I keep mentioning this technology company and I’m sure we’ll get there, but if we don’t know, big deal. I predict I was I wanted to predict who was going to sell their house next. And I was a real estate agent. I was getting into real estate investing and I said, I can build an algorithm. I know kind of what code means. So I taught myself how to code. I built an algorithm, very rudimentary algorithm, to predict who was going to sell their house next. And it predicted that this house that was on my dog walking path was going to sell next. So it was out walking my dog one day and said, Hey, I recognize that address. Is that the same house on the spreadsheet that my very rudimentary algorithm cranked out? And it just so happened that it was. So I walked my dog back home and put a sticky note on the door of that house and said, I would like to buy your house. If you’re interested in selling, please call me at this phone number. Left my phone number. It just so happened that that guy that owned that house was in town for three days in Pittsburgh. He was a professor, a remote professor at Carnegie Mellon. It just so happened he was in town for three days and saw that sticky note on the door and called me from a phone number that had like 18 digits. And I was like, I’m not answering this. It’s definitely spam. Left a voicemail for me, called him back, and that was the one and only phone call I had with him. Everything else throughout the entire purchase that eventually ended eight months later in us purchasing the property was done over WhatsApp, including going to the Qatar Notary or the US Embassy in Qatar to get the sales agreements finalized and signed.
Deni: Oh my goodness!
Paul: Yeah, that was crazy.
Brian: In terms of the scrappy marketing effort. I love it!
Paul: Try it. We definitely were trying. It was, you know, do everything we possibly could at the time, the photography business was doing well, but it wasn’t it wasn’t fully supporting us. So we were like in between these two worlds of what can we make work in real estate outside of photography? Thankfully, my wife is killing it with the photography business now. And yeah, it was, it was an interesting start to our real estate career, that’s for sure.
Deni: Now, I also read that you bought a property for a dollar.
Paul: Yeah. Yeah, I want to know about that. Yep. Yep. So in the state of Pennsylvania in 2016, I think maybe 2017, the probate laws were amended to include this clause that was called the conservatorship. And what it allowed you to do was essentially take a property that was in very, very, very bad condition with the consent of the family of the person who had passed away. Take that property and clean the title. Now, I was one of the first people in Pennsylvania to do this whole conservatorship process, and I had to pay $18,000 in attorney’s fees to weed my way through this process. But if you look at the court records, if you look at the tax assessment, my name is on this house with a $1 purchase…
Deni: That’s great!
Paul: Yeah, Thank you. I actually turned around and ended up selling it to my landlord, who I was renting from at the time for $86,000 without doing really any work at all. So it was a great pay day as well.
Deni: Wow, that’s amazing.
Paul: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, It was a very interesting start to my real estate career, those two properties.
Brian: I love it. So you mentioned that you created this rudimentary algorithm based on like five or six different data points that indicated who was interested in selling their home before they actually hired a realtor and listed it on the MLS’s for sale. I don’t we obviously don’t need to give away any trade secrets or anything, but given that it sounds like your algorithm today is much, much more complicated. Can you share with us what those five or six data points were that indicated in advance who was interested in selling their home?
Paul: Yeah, of course. Of course. And there’s no real secret sauce, honestly. There are some companies that are doing prediction right now in the real estate space better than I could ever hope to do. So much so that we’ve actually put the prediction side of our business back on the shelf and said, we’re not going to do this right now. So my technology now is not really related to prediction. There are some companies now, if anybody is interested in the world of predicting who’s going to sell, the best company out there is called Oddentic. Those guys are up in Seattle and they are amazing, like absolutely amazing at doing what they do to predict who’s going to sell their property. But at the end of the day, when it comes down to predicting who’s going to sell, there’s obvious things like death, divorce, tax liens, violations against the home, like if there is like trash left outside, really financial distress, those kind of things are like the big indicators of this person is probably going to sell. Job changes, promotions that you can see on LinkedIn. But I’m sure as you’re thinking about or you’re listening to me say this, it’s like, okay, but how do you tie all of that data together in one place and then make a prediction on it? And that’s the key. The algorithms that predict who’s going to sell their house today are off the shelf. They’re built by Google. They’re built by these giant companies, and they’re open source for anybody to use. The difficult part is tying all the data together and structuring the data, which, if I’m honest with you guys, I was I was very, very, very lucky in my first algorithm because I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where CMU is one of the top computer science schools, if not the best in the entire world. They did a project with Allegheny County to structure all of the tax assessment, all of those distress factors that say somebody’s going to sell all that data was really nicely structured and packaged for me to build an algorithm on top of. So yeah, it’s the things that you would expect death, divorce, tax liens, credit card debt. The home is in distress from the outside if there’s violations against it, job change, those kinds of things are really the big factors that point to somebody wanting to sell their house. And one last thing. I don’t mean to ramble so much, but I learned all of that, not really from the data, but I learned all of that from communications with the sellers that I was photographing their homes. And I’d ask, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you selling your house? And it really led me down. How do I find the data for somebody who just got a promotion at work? Oh, LinkedIn has that data, that kind of stuff.
Deni: Very cool.
Brian: Yeah. And by the way, for anyone listening who is interested in some of these more traditional ways of finding distressed properties like foreclosures, tax liens, divorces, we added a couple of links in the comments to tools that can help you with that, like foreclosure dot com and prop stream. So check those out. If you are interested in finding off market deals that way through just distressed sellers.
Paul: Yeah. propstream’s a great way. Prop stream is one of the best at taking all these different data sources and combining them in one place to really make it accessible to a consumer.
Brian: Yeah, we love propstream. Can’t speak highly enough about it.
Brian: Now, in your real estate investing career, what has changed since those early days? How have you scaled your investing strategy?
Paul: Yep. So in 2017, 2018, that time frame, like I said, I really got into the world of wholesaling and whole tailing properties. Like we would purchase them. My wife and I would purchase them and then sell them off like that $1 property. And then as I got into the world of predicting who was going to sell, I did that with my business partner who’s now the CTO of our technology company. And it was a lot of wholesaling and wholetailing and then keeping some as rental property. So that property that I mentioned that I bought from the guy in Qatar over WhatsApp, that was our first rental property. It was a duplex. Yeah, it was a duplex. We put about, I think $83,000 into it. And then whenever we started the technology company and got super in to TWNSQR. My wife and I decided, okay, we’re going to stop investing in properties. We’re going to put all of our effort into our companies like the photography company and like the technology company. So, full disclosure, I don’t own any properties right now. I’m not even renting from anybody right now. We can talk about that if we need to. But yeah, it evolved from wanting to find the deals and how can I make a little bit of cash flow by wholetailing those properties to holding a couple of them to then starting the technology company and saying we need some cash, let’s sell these off. And the property that we sold off, we actually sold to our tenants. That one that I mentioned that that duplex.
Deni: All right. Very cool.
Brian: So tell us about TWNSQR, this platform that you’ve built for real estate investors for buying and selling off market deals. Tell us not only how it came about, but you know exactly who it’s for, how it works, what the appeal is.
Paul: Yeah. Thank you so much for asking. So TWNSQR is just that. We think of it like a virtual town square. I have never personally had really any success in business unless I was working with somebody who was more experienced than I was and was willing to take me under their wing completely or in small parts. So our focus with Town Square is not only to help real estate investors sell their off market properties, but also connect with other real estate investors on a deal by deal basis. So there are companies like, you guys know, Bigger Pockets where you could go on and you could connect with somebody. But the surface level connection where you’re talking about information is good, but it’s not great. If I had a deal and I came to you guys and said, Hey, I have a great deal in Florida, can we work together on this? Do you want to joint venture with me on this property that I want to sell? Our connection would be much deeper because it’s like we’re all financially interested in this property. So that’s really the essence of Town Square. It’s a marketplace for real estate investors to post their properties and sell them to buyers that are on the platform, but also to connect with other real estate investors that are on the platform through joint ventures and through partnerships to leverage each other’s strengths so that you can grow your business faster. Like I said, I’ve never had success without working with somebody else who’s been more experienced than me. So that’s what we’re trying to build into our platform, is really that connection on a deal by deal basis.
Brian: And how does it differ from Roofstock, which seems to have a similar business model, or it’s a marketplace platform for off market real estate investment properties?
Paul: Yeah. So the biggest way that it different that we differentiate ourselves from the likes of Roofstock or there’s another company from Texas that does a really good job. Their name is Trelly the way that we differentiate ourselves from those guys is that connection piece. If I have a property that I want to sell in, let’s say Jacksonville, Florida, I can go on town square and I can send my property to the marketplace. I can also send my property to my network if I have a buyers list or if I have contacts in my phone that I think would want to buy my property. I can upload those contacts and I can send my property to those contacts from TWNSQR. We’ve built that email technology.
Deni: Oh, wow!
Paul: Thank you. Yeah, built it into the platform. Then the third thing you can do is I can look and see who are the other investors in Jacksonville, Florida, on TWNSQR that I can share my property with and who have also uploaded their contacts to Town square so that I can leverage a relationship, a possible relationship with those people and their contacts. So yeah, we’re different in that way that it’s all you can market your property, you can post it on the platform, you can post it on the marketplace, but then you can take it many steps further to form those connections with other users and direct buyers.
Brian: I love it. So not just the marketplace, but also almost like a real estate investing social network.
Deni: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. It’s like social media. Yeah.
Brian: It help you find shady partners.
Paul: Yeah, that’s right. We’re not trying to take the social network for real estate investors away from bigger pockets by any means. But I would say the social network, based on deals, I can’t connect with somebody unless I have a deal. And that’s very important to me, is that people have to bring value to the table in the form of a property instead of just saying, Hey, can we talk about real estate investing?
Deni: That is really, really [awesome]. I like that.
Paul: Thank you. It tie everybody together more. You know what I mean?
Brian: Absolutely. So, you know, since we’re talking about assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars here and there is plenty of fraud in the real estate industry. Have you guys seen fraud on the platform? You know, people trying to fraudulently form partnerships or anything like that? And how do you guys prevent that from from becoming a problem on there?
Paul: Yeah, I’m so excited that you asked. I have to be honest. It’s part of the big initiative that we’re making right now. There’s a couple competitive platforms in the space that we’re hearing from the users of those other platforms, like, Hey, I’m only getting properties sent to me that like, first of all, the person doesn’t have the right to market this property, so I can’t even talk to them about it. And I’m getting properties sent to me that are of such low quality. The numbers don’t work out that I feel like I’m just being bombarded. So to prevent fraud, to prevent illegal marketing actions, and to make sure that a high quality of properties on our platform, we’re coming out with a couple of new features. I actually have a bunch of Slack messages right now from my team who are testing these new features. The main feature that we’re adding is what we call post completeness. So in the next couple of weeks, when you look at properties on TWNSQR, you’ll be able to see how complete that property is. And what that means is has the seller added all of the information that makes it possible for me to know it’s a good deal and that they actually own the property or have the right to market the property so that, you know, the second you look at a property, this is worth my time. So yeah, it’s, it’s a very, very important thing to my team and I to make sure that there is legitimacy and professionalism on the platform.
Deni: Awesome. It is a big problem right now, especially in real estate and a lot of your real estate. You know… (we lost Brian)
Paul: No worries.
Deni: We’ve had it. We’ve dealt with it on our software. So I have to ask. And because right before we got on, you were talking about and telling us about how you well, you told us you don’t own a property right now, but. So how do you live?
Paul: Yeah. Yeah, of course. Thanks for asking, Deni. It’s definitely unique. So right before the pandemic hit is whenever my co-founder and I launched that algorithm to predict who was going to sell. And a month before everything shut down, we achieved 95% accuracy in our predictions. And we were so excited. But then we were watching the news and we saw what China was doing and how the pandemic was coming towards America and everybody locked down. And even though my co founder and I were five miles away from each other, we didn’t see each other for most of 2020. I think we may have saw each other for, I don’t know, three or four times throughout all of 2020. So because of that, our team and our companies have been completely remote, really since the inception in late 2019 or early 2020. So in late or early 2021, my wife and I and my business partner and his wife decided, all right, we don’t need to be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We don’t really even see each other in person. Let’s go move to the West Coast. So originally we moved from Pittsburgh to Boulder, Colorado, spent a lot of time in Boulder, Colorado, and then we both took it upon ourselves again to say, we don’t have to be in Boulder, Colorado. Let’s pick up and move around. So I’m currently living a month to three months at a time in Airbnbs, testing out different cities and states to decide on where I do want to finally settle down with my wife.
Deni: I, I love I love that Brian does something similar, but he’s a little bit more longer term. But he’s living right now in Brazil. I think the relocating shortly in Peru.
Paul: Nice!
Deni: He was in Abu Dhabi. So I have 13 grandchildren and five kids. So…
Paul: You’re locked.
Deni: Yeah, I kind of… Whoops, I almost popped you out Brian Sorry. <Brian is back online>
Brian: I did drop out. I had a connectivity problem. So sorry about that.
Paul: No worries. No worries. Yeah, you’re locked in Deni. Deni, where are you at? I apologize that I’m forgetting.
Deni: Oh, I’m in Pennsylvania. I’m in a suburb of Philadelphia.
Paul: Gotcha. Okay. I thought one of you guys were from Philly, and I was like, Maybe when I say Pittsburgh, it will pique their interest a little bit.
Deni: Well, yeah, I thought. I thought that’s where you are now, But it’s. It’s pretty much cooler where you are.
Paul: Yeah, we’re currently in South Lake Tahoe. It’s a pretty beautiful place. I had never been to Tahoe before this month and a half, and, man, it’s beautiful. It’s nice to stand up for my desk writing a tech start up and go walk around in the woods. Or I can go next to this beautiful. I was very fortunate, to say the very least.
Deni: I know that Brian and I both have been virtual and working that way. For what? Like, I don’t even know how long it’s been a long time.
Brian: It still feel new to me.
Deni: Yeah. I just think it’s funny when the pandemic hit and so many people were like, wow, either they were like really thinking it was cool or they were missing people. And I was like, Oh, I’ve been doing this forever.
Paul: Been there. Done that.
Deni: Right? But the cool thing is, is the travel like you can really like my husband and I got a camper and we spent some time in that and I was still able to work. So it’s yeah, it was very cool.
Paul: How do you, if you don’t mind me asking, how do you manage your rental properties and everything with Spark Rental? Like what is your day look like or your week look like to work on all of this stuff remotely? Both of you guys?
Deni: Well, I have one left, one house that I ran out. So it’s very easy. Long term tenants. I really don’t have to do a whole lot there.
Paul: Nice.
Deni: Yeah. And I am a realtor, which I think you said you were, too.
Paul: Yeah!
Deni: Right. I remember reading that. And so I do a little bit of managing. I actually just kind of turn down a couple people that came my way and asked me to manage because I’m trying to scale back a little older than you guys. So.
Paul: And do you have grandchildren? You got to spend some time with them.
Deni: I do! Yes, that’s that’s my goal.
Paul: Nice. Nice.
Brian: Yeah. So it Spark Rental we actually offer online property management software for mom and pop landlords, which I’ve actually I’ve sold off most of my rental portfolio as well. Deni & I today are mostly investing passively in real estate syndications. So apartment complexes were trying to get into some more alternative syndications as well, like self storage facilities, mobile home parks, that sort of thing. But yeah, I live overseas. I don’t have the energy or the time to buy properties directly in the US at the moment. So we’re trying to invest more passively right now.
Paul: Makes sense. Yeah.
Brian: So we actually have a co investing club with, so our core students, we all get together once a month and invest in real estate syndication deals and we all pool our money so we can each invest with five grand, ten grand apiece instead of 50 or 100 grand that you typically need as a minimum investment for real estate syndications. And it’s fun we all get together and vet the deals as a club. And yeah, it’s great. It’s a lot of fun.
Paul: Yeah. Have you guys ever heard of or thought about investing in a syndication for short term rentals? I was just listening to a podcast two days ago about syndications for short term rentals. This guy, I’m forgetting his name right now, but it was so interesting to me. The world of short term rentals obviously is very interesting to me, and he has the goal of syndicating enough money to build, “build”, not just buy and then rent out, but build 650 short term rentals. And I’m thinking, man, I hope that one day I can invest in a syndication like that because it just seems like, obviously it seems like the future because there’s so much momentum driving towards short term rentals.
Brian: Yeah, there’s a fund that we like. We haven’t actually invested in it yet. We did sit down and have a long chat with the sponsor. The fund is by a company called Tech Investor. Now that fund is only available to accredited investors, but there actually there’s a guy who created a feeder fund for that and you can invest in the feeder fund as a non accredited investor. I can’t remember the name of that company, but the guy who who created that feeder fund, his name is Tim Kinsman. So non-accredited investors can access this this fund by a tech investor that owns hundreds of Airbnb short term rental properties around the country.
Paul: Nice.
Brian: I think the investor is actually, I think they’re looking to expand into overseas vacation rentals as well.
Paul: Yeah it just seems like the future like I said, you know… We’ve been through a couple of pivots at Town Square and one of our pivots was from the retail space helping retail sellers connect with retail agents. And whenever we pivoted out of that, we went just like so many people, right to the hedge funds, right to the institutional buyers. And a couple of the people that we brushed up against, interestingly enough, were giant hedge funds with a couple hundred million, a couple of billion dollars to spend solely on short term rentals. And I think there’s some really interesting marketing dynamics or market dynamics coming whenever interest rates start to go down. But the media is still pushing the general everyday public to not buy. And there’s going to be an opportunity for people to come in and buy lots and lots of long term rentals, but also lots and lots of short term rentals, at least from my perspective in talking to these hedge funds, and the acquisitions managers there, they have this tranche of money set aside. A couple of them have this tranche of money set aside to buy thousands of long term single family rentals, the whole SFR world. But they’re starting to get into this world of, oh wow, I can get 4000 a month on this short term rental instead of. 1800 dollars a month on this long term rental. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens whenever institutional money comes into this space in a big way.
Brian: It will be. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I thought that was an interesting observation that you just said about when interest rates come down. But the media is still screaming fear and terror and everyone’s here. I think that we will see that happen in 2023 if a recession does end up coming about, if rising interest rates do push the economy into a recession, which most people tend to, or it’s the sounding the alarm bell seems pretty universal. Then what will the Fed do? They’ll lower interest rates again. But to your point, the media is still going to be howling about how awful things are. And that will be a great moment to to invest in real estate.
Paul: Yeah, I think for everybody, it’s funny that we’re having this conversation. It wasn’t I didn’t mean to bring this up, but maybe it’s just in my brain. This morning I was looking at the St Louis Fed data just for interest rates, and I decided to drag the timeline out a little bit to see, you know, the big thing in my brain with this institutional buying was Blackstone bought invitation homes in 2012 and at the time Invitation Homes was owning and renting and managing 80,000 single family homes and they bought them in 2012 right as interest rates started to go down and the market started to come back. But everybody kind of still felt like they were in a recession. I think that we won’t have to wait four years. 2008 to 2012 was four years. I think that we’ll have to wait 18 months maximum, but I think that it’s going to come back and there’s going to be that sweet spot of time for real estate investors, big, small, giant, institutional, all of the like, to have the perfect opportunity to buy maybe even properties on market or for syndications to get some really good deals that will see appreciation over the next ten years because of the turbulent environment that unfortunately and fortunately the media creates, right?
Brian: Yeah, I agree. And in the meantime, we we never want to tell people to try to time the market because it never ends well. Yeah. So yeah, I mean we actually we try to just dollar cost average even with our real estate investments. Nice. Which you can do when you’re only investing five grand apiece in different real estate investments when you’re pooling with an investment club like we do, as opposed to having to put 50 grand 100 grand into either a down payment for a single property or as an investment in a real estate syndication.
Paul: That’s smart. That’s nice.
Brian: Yeah. I mean, you know, you can’t time the market, but you can just keep plowing money into it steadily over time. And I think long term, that’s the only way to come out ahead. Yeah, in the long run.
Paul: Exactly. Yeah, That’s honestly what we’re seeing. I was just at a conference two weeks ago and I spoke with some hard money lenders there and they said we’re seeing more short term rental and long term rental DSCR loans in our pipeline right now than we have seen in the last two and a half or three years. So I think that people are understanding what we’re talking about here, and hopefully it’s a good time for people to increase their rental portfolio. And the money that they’re plowing into the market actually does provide some fruits for that labor.
Brian: Well, Paul, I want to be respectful of your time. But before we wrap up, is there any final advice that you would want to share with real estate investors just getting started or people looking to scale their real estate investments? Any last words of wisdom for them?
Paul: Yeah, sure. So I’ve always had success, like I said, partnering with and working with people that are drastically more experienced than me. I know it’s kind of what we’re kind of beating a dead horse by saying, go work with people that have the experience that you hope to have one day. But it is so true. The best example is some ground up construction that I did where I built four high end townhomes with a business partner of mine, and he was an older gentleman that had experience raising money and doing new construction before. And I’m better for the majority of the profit that I gave him so that I could learn. So anybody who’s getting started or anybody who wants to scale, just go find somebody on bigger pockets or in your community to talk to that you can provide value to that you can then get some value back from them to just make yourself better, a better business person.
Deni: And even by going to your real estate investing clubs, which are everywhere and they’re just, you know, starting to meet in person again, which is nice. You’ll be surprised.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. So that’s my parting wisdom.
Brian: I love it. And, you know, that is something that I hear across the board in. In every business. Is that the shortcut to success, to the extent that there is such a thing, is find a mentor who has done exactly what you want to do and you find ways to either partner with them or learn under them because it’s worth every penny or every hour that you put in.
Paul: Sure is!
Brian: Yeah. Skipping the pitfalls and and learning from someone who’s been there and done that.
Paul: That’s right. That’s right. Yep. And seeing how they handle mistakes. One of the biggest things I’ve learned was seeing how the people that are more experienced than me, how they handled mistakes like the world wasn’t on fire. Whenever we were two months late on the delivery date of these townhomes we built, it’s all good. It’s fine. Everything is still going to work out.
Deni: Right.
Brian: Well, Paul, thank you so much for joining us today and spending some time with us. We really appreciate it.
Paul: Thank you.
Brian: We linked in the comments to TWNSQR where you can connect with with Paul and his platform there for connecting buyers and sellers and partners on real estate investment deals. Paul, thanks again and we look forward to speaking with you soon.
Deni: Yeah, this was awesome. Thank you.
Paul: Yeah. Thank you so much, Deni. Thank you so much, Brian. It was great to be on the show and yeah, I hope we can stay in touch.
Deni: Awesome.
Brian: Absolutely! Well, we will see you guys next week. Stay in touch. Let us know what you want to hear about in future episodes. [email protected]. All right. Have a good one, everyone.
Deni: Bye bye.
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