Street Smart Success

If you’ve been looking to make passive investments in hard assets but are finding it difficult to get the returns you’d expect, there are other great vehicles that can generate 10 % or higher with conservative risk. Business loans made to well-run, established and profitable businesses that are not served by traditional banks or other sources can provide an attractive risk adjusted yield. Jamie Shulman founded Meriwether Capital wi...

The best ideas are simple. For example, creating a national coffee chain like Starbucks, or an alternative to taxis, like Uber, or Airbnb, etc. Joseph Woodbury, CEO of Neighbor.com, connects homeowners and businesses that have unused space to people who need to store cars or other storage items. Now people can find homeowners in their town where they can park their car, boat or RV. Neighbor.com has also created partnerships with of...

Starting a Multifamily brokerage from scratch can be a steep undertaking. It takes time to build awareness, and to get known in a market in order to hire the right agents and obtain property listings and clients. As the current environment is seeing agents leave the market, however, there’s opportunity to gain traction in starting a brokerage business. By adhering to basic sales and marketing disciplines, and providing superior cus...

Despite the desire for short-term gains, the predicable wealth in Real Estate is built over the long term with quality assets and strong operators. In multifamily markets where employment and population trends are favorable, rents will continue to grow and the value of properties will increase substantially, especially in supply-constrained markets. Keith Wasserman, co-founder of Gelt Inc., buys properties with mostly 7-10 year fix...

Single family homes in the U.S. are the largest asset class in the world at $37 trillion dollars. This is why the largest financial institutions on Wall Street have been increasing their investments in this lucrative asset class. There are many ways to make money in single families from flipping, to buying and holding, to lending against them. Jim Manning, CEO of Doorway Properties, started out fix and flipping in his hometown of S...

In an environment where it’s difficult to achieve significant cash flow with direct equity investments in Real Estate, investing in the debt can be an attractive option with much more liquidity.  Investing in debt can have less risk and generate yields as high as 9%-11%, and sometimes even higher, with the assets as collateral. Carrie Cook, President of Ignite Funding, makes investing in Real Estate available to people who always w...

Most of the problems in commercial Real Estate right now are related to debt. In addition to evaluating the General Partner, debt is the most important aspect of a deal. James Eng, “The Professor” of multifamily financing, is the National Director at Old Capital in Dallas. James has helped hundreds of multifamily investors strategize the right debt to obtain and acquire over $1 Billion dollars of properties. James has also been a L...

Making money in Real Estate requires timing and being able to see what others don’t. Just a few years ago, retail was written off for dead because of e-commerce and Amazon. More recently, office has become a hated asset class because of the work-from-home trend and the problems of urban cores and central business districts across the country. Neighborhood retail, however, has the highest occupancy rates of all time, and select Clas...

Both residential and commercial Real Estate occupancy rates and rents are contracting in many markets in combination with higher expenses. When investing in the right part of the cycle, however, Real Estate can generate attractive cash flow. Aside from Real Estate, there are other great cash-flowing businesses that can scale efficiently and generate consistent, high double-digit returns. Justin Sloan, a successful Real Estate entre...

Real Estate is a block-to-block business where an intimate lack of local knowledge can be costly. It’s critical to know the nuances of a submarket and the different neighborhoods to mitigate risk. Eddie Ring, Founder and CEO of New Standard Equities, only buys in markets he knows like the back of his hand. Eddie specializes in value-add multifamily on the West Coast and has generated 29% IRR’s and equity multiples of 2.6 over three...

In the world of multifamily, 80% of total units are in buildings with fewer than 50 units. This represents a big opportunity for buyers, because these buildings are mostly too large for most smaller operators to acquire, and too small for institutional buyers. Ray Heimann, Managing Director of Terra Capital, specializes in acquiring properties in this smaller range. These buildings are mostly older properties in gentrifying neighbo...

Although the multifamily market has seen huge headwinds, the competition for buying these assets remains fierce. Even in this market, there is still lots of competition, but Lee has managed to find great value-add properties that perform well and generate great returns for his investors. There are still markets experiencing rent growth, and the long-term prognosis for multifamily remains strong as a result of a persistent national ...

You don’t need to be a direct operator of Real Estate to get a great return on your money. You can invest in the secondary mortgage market and get a 12% return with conservative leverage against single family homes. Nic DeAngelo, President of Saint Investment Group, invests in pools of mostly non-performing single-family notes at a discount and a conservative loan-to-value. Nic works with borrowers to get the loans back into perfor...

Getting high returns is very difficult in Real Estate investing, largely because there are too many people chasing the same deals and sellers want a lot for their properties. If you’re willing to invest in projects that are off most people’s radar, however, there are great deals that can generate double digit cash flow. Mike Holdwick, Co-Founder of Pro Team Commercial, identifies non-residential value-add properties, mostly in the ...

Single family homes in U.S are the largest asset class in the world at $43 Trillion. Many investors have made a fortune investing in single family homes over the decades, and large institutions have been aggregating single family portfolios over the past dozen years. One sector of the market that has unique appeal is homes in the best school districts in the best zip codes. There are very few homes for rent in these neighborhoods a...

Investing passively is a great way to generate cash flow and appreciation, without having to deal with day-to-day operations. You just need to develop the skills at vetting operators and specific deals. David Shirkey, a fellow passive investor, has done a great job finding quality operators and profitable deals over the past eight years. David has made numerous successful multifamily investments plus several profitable investments ...

Most multifamily syndicators are facing major headwinds including interest rate increases, new supply, and escalating expenses. In order to thrive in this environment, you have to have an excellent organization that executes on business plans and maintains healthy working relationships with their lenders. Zack Haptonstall, Founder of Rise 48, has never made a capital call or missed a debt payment. For the properties he acquired in ...

Eventually, ma and pa Mobile Home Park operators will be swallowed up by professional operators, so the opportunity to invest is now. The demand to live in Mobile Home Parks is growing while the supply is shrinking. The average Mobile Home Park owner stays in their home 17.5 years, some stay even longer. Many ma and pa owners, especially second or third generation family members, don’t reinvest into their properties and the assets ...

Even before covid, the Southeast was rapidly growing, but the trend accelerated during covid, and still continues. The population of Atlanta, for example, is projected to multiply three times in the next thirty years to over 15 million. Currently, office leasing activity in Atlanta is 80% of the volume of 2019, which was robust. As recently as 2022, however, companies were still questioning whether they would return to the office, ...