Becoming a Best in Class Multifamily Investor
As a successful real estate investor in over 1900 units, Gary Lipsky helps friends invest in C-Class Value-Add Multifamily opportunities. Gary typically finds deals in Phoenix and Tucson. He runs several meetups and is a regular on real estate podcasts and at conferences. You can count on Gary for integrity, strong operations, and excellent communication, which have been keys to everything of which he’s been apart.
Gary has always been a self-starter, taking on entrepreneurial endeavors and succeeding in his efforts. At the end of 2016, he sold arc, an after-school program, leadership development, and outdoor education company he founded in 2001, which served over 9,000 students daily throughout Southern California. He is a founding board member of the non-profit CORE Educational Service, has been a member of Vistage since 2013, and is an alumnus of the Leadership Southern California program.
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Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. I would consider him what is known as a Hall of Famer when it comes to all things commercial real estate and multifamily investing. In fact, he has been in the real estate investors since 2002, has invested in over 1900 units with over $41 million in Hmm, he’s the co-founder of the Asset Management Summit, Asset Management Mastery Podcast, and co-author of the Best In Class Real Estate book his expertise in asset management and in his secret sauce, and he started developing those skills at a young age and so much more. Please welcome showed me, Gary Lipsky. Gary, how are you doing?
Gary:
Good. Thanks for having me on Brett.
Brett:
I’m excited to dive into your story. For our listeners to get to know you for the first time, would you give us a little bit more about your story in your current focus?
Gary:
I started investing in real estate in 2002. I didn’t dive into it full-time until the end of 2016. I just learned as much as possible in all facets of real estate because obviously, when you get started out there are so many ways to make money, and you get a little bit of that squirrel effect, but I found multifamily it was a really good fit because I’ve been running businesses my whole life. In multifamily is just like running a business. Just I started investing in other people’s deals and, and learning the right way to do things, and started just doing my own deals and closing on my fifth deal. In a very short period of time, we’ve had one exit, we’ve got another exit going on right now and just continuing to learn as well, and I love it. It’s it marries my creative skills and my business skills.
Brett:
Amazing. Gary, appreciate you sharing that, and I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life. These gifts are given to us to be a blessing help to others. I wanted to go back maybe to your high school college days or something like that. I want you to picture maybe the strength of the superpower or the gift that you’ve been given, and how to use that to help and bless people today.
Gary:
It’s a matter of taking action, and I learned that at a very young age, I never really worked for anyone else, and it’s that ability to move things forward. That I have and that I, recommend to anyone like you control your own destiny and you just got to take action, you got to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving as this quote, how do you eat an elephant and it’s like, bite by bite, and that’s how you approach things. I know a thing, taking action can be daunting, but if you can, if you can push through that then you can achieve pretty much you know, anything you set your mind to.
Brett:
Excellent. Taking action and perseverance. The kind of the staples and the foundation of entrepreneurial entrepreneurs and commercial real estate syndicators and operators, so excellent. We’re talking about becoming a best-in-class, multifamily investor Gary Lipsky. Gary if you want to hold up your book, Real Fast Racing took, wrote a book called Best In Class, and it is focused on multifamily real estate and building wealth through that. Gary, what is the best-kept secret you think in the book because most of our listeners are very experienced? They own multifamily. They’ve done syndications, they own big businesses, they’re selling a highly appreciated asset or they’re looking for more of a niche on how do I take it to the next level with tax flow versus just cash flow? What is the best-kept secret you think for the advanced reader if they’re jumping in to become best in class in their multifamily investing?
Gary:
It’s breaking down every single task to the simplest level. You’re not looking at you know, let’s say renovations as a whole on how long does it take, is it does it take 30 days, I want to know every step of the process, so I can find bottlenecks. This isn’t, brain surgery but I think a lot of people lack that you know that kind of breaking out every single task that’s getting done. I want to know, when do we need to let our turns whoever’s doing the turns know is that two weeks in advance to make sure they have everything that’s ordered, is that one week and when they start is how long for each process of the way? When can we factor that the Lisa up all these different things we can maybe shave a week off a time, and now if we take that same strategy to everything else that we do, we’re constantly shaving off times compressing time and saving money and making more money to because we’re able to lease it up to so when you factor in that cap rate, this could mean millions of dollars to your property and value depending upon the size of it?
Brett:
Make sure I kept encapsulate that and that makes a whole lot of sense of breaking every single task into really bite-sized pieces, knowing every step of the process. The key here, you’re looking for the whole time as bottlenecks. Like what is it that slowing us down from turning the unit from renovating the unit from leasing the unit from pre-leasing the unit? From negotiating with the tenants to getting the tenants to sign you know, to come here, having clear timelines, and perhaps even time tracking to figure out how we’re spending our time and energy on our team members. Is that a fair summary?
Gary:
We and this information are shared for our whole team so that we can all see it at all times, and everyone’s accountable, and when what is there for everyone to see, you don’t want to be the one that’s screwing up, so it really helps people to hold them accountable.
Brett:
I want to dig in on that sounds fishy. The process is shared with the entire team. everyone has visibility to any given time on any given particular, let’s say KPI, key performance indicator, and let’s just say it’s renovating these next, bought a 200 unit apartment complex. Tere’s five minutes ago and vacant in two months, and we have a timeline for those things. we’re sharing who has what task were and then having the entire team hold each other accountable. Is that a fair summary so far? Let’s break that down. What I guess software CRM or project management system are you using and talk about that real-time accountability?
Gary:
We’ve used Google Sheets before. On our weekly check-ins with our property manager, we’ll have a task list and whatnot on a Google Sheet. But for the construction, we’ll use a Trello board because of the different stages. It’s really easy to use, you can move from one stage to the next, and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve. We have that whole process, we’ve tremendously improved over time, and it could be completely different in six months or a year as we get better and better at what we do and come up with new ideas as to how to improve that.
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