The Best Way to Track Your Real Estate Portfolio with Bobby Sharma
“About 10 years ago, I started to build a networking group to help other real estate investors connect with each other, and to this day, I'm a firm believer in networking and building connections and supporting each other.”
Bobby Sharma brings his deep understanding of real estate investing to provide a next-generation solution for fellow real estate investors (bettercapital.us and bayflip.com). Well known in the real estate community as a networker, speaker and a caring investor, and technologist. Bobby has built one of the most comprehensive software platforms for tracking, training, and transactions for real estate investors and professionals. Bobby is renowned as a thought leader in the PropTech and real estate space. Bobby brings social good into smart investing. Bobby is generous with his time and knowledge to help aspiring and experienced investors to succeed and grow.
Bobby Sharma has worked for some very successful Silicon Valley real estate companies and also created the largest real estate networking and educational group in the Bay Area and now looking to expand this to many major markets. Bobby has developed an innovative platform that allows investors to invest fractionally in debt.
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Brett:
I'm excited about our next guest. He brings a deep understanding of real estate investing to provide a next-generation solution for fellow real estate investors. Better capital.us and Bay flip calm are two websites of his as well. He is known in the real estate community as a networker, speaker and caring investor, and technologist. He has built one of the most comprehensive software platform platforms for tracking training and transactions for real estate investors and professionals, and so much more, please welcome to show, Bobby Sharma. Bobby, how are you doing?
Bobby:
Brett, thrilled to be here with you. You're one of my friends, you're my DST go-to guy. It's good to be on your show as well.
Brett:
Thank you for that, and likewise, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, and, and for our listeners getting to know you for the first time, would you give us a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Bobby:
Spent my last 34 years in California, mostly in Silicon Valley, worked for a bunch of real estate technology companies, but about 11 years ago, circumstances were such that I, got into real estate and more actively, I had a primary home, but then got, but in 2010 got involved more actively. But I kept my day job in technology. One foot in the W two and then one foot trying to build a passive income, fast forward, accumulated some real estate assets, and was trying to attract them in Excel, and it was just not working. For me, it was not giving me the full 360 views that I wanted, as a real estate investor to track the performance of my assets, how much what's my cash on cash ROI? What's my equity build-up? What's my loan, pay down, what kind of occupancy rates, vacancy rates, nonperforming rates that I have across the portfolio, and then storing all the documents, they were all over the map, they were in my Gmail, they were in my local hard drive, they weren't on a thumb drive. They were in somebody's Dropbox and all that. What and reminders, I used to travel a lot. I would come back home and realize that I’d forgotten to pay certain property taxes or the Franchise Tax Board fees, and so on. I decided two years ago that I was going to build something for myself and for other real estate investors that needed something to track.
Brett:
We're gonna dive into all of those intricacies here in a second, and this is really exciting because we believe it's it is the best way to track your real estate portfolio, and before we go there one thing one other step back probably wants you to take us back maybe to the high school days of the university days when you're a kid, I believe we've all been given certain gifts and strengths, and people call them superpowers, and I believe their God-given gifts that are given to us to be a blessing and help to others. I'm curious, what are those one or two gifts that you believe you were given? How does that help how you help and bless people today?
Bobby:
I grew up in India, and then of all places, Africa. My high school, my formative years were in Africa and my history teacher was an American, and we did the Bicentennial, and I was Thomas Jefferson in that place. I got introduced to American history, American geography very early on in my teen years, and but we came from a middle class, humble family, but I always felt like, I wanted to be in the stateside, I'm talking this is the mid 80s.still relatively early as far as immigrants, the new immigrants are concerned. I wanted to study computer science. I always felt that being able to come here was really a gift, and I shouldn't waste it, I shouldn't waste the opportunity to be in this land where there's so much, so much opportunity, so many wonderful people. I always felt like I had to maybe build something, but also help people along the way. About 10 years ago, I started to build a networking group to help other real estate investors connect with each other, and to this day, I'm a firm believer in networking and building connections and supporting each other. Luckily, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we built out the largest real estate networking group. We've got about 5000 members in there, and very active, we were we, we support each other like if they need a contract, or if they need a contract reviewed if they need a connection with an attorney if they need help with a DST if they need 1031 Exchange help, whatever it is, the group comes together, and we support and help each other out. To me, my, if there's one gift that I have a god-given gift, it's my ability, to network, and just quarterback, some, some deals, pull people together.
Brett:
That's a beautiful gift. It's an amazing gift. That's a really cool story of India to Africa, then the history teacher, American history teacher, and then to San Francisco Bay Area, and building out buying real estate and helping other people do it is such a cool thing. Now let's dive back to the topic at hand, the best way to track your real estate portfolio. With the service in the software, we already talked about a little bit of the pain, people losing track of certain things, Franchise Tax Board, property taxes, certain bills, tracking all of these things can be especially as you build the multiple assets. There's got to be a better way. Bobby says there's a better way, we're going to build it out. I'm gonna help people do this, and by the way, you can find out more about Bobby Sharma at BetterCapital.us. What's the number one secret to the software, and what it does? Can you kind of break it down step by step for our listeners.
Bobby:
Brett, you and many of your listeners and viewers, they're probably familiar if they own real estate assets, maybe in their backyard, maybe out of state, maybe different property management companies, maybe different syndicators, what was happening was, let's say you have, let's say, you live in Sacramento, but you own properties in the Bay Area, and then in, let's say, in Scottsdale, and then some in Dallas, the property manager in Dallas is on build him, the guy in Scottsdale is on AppFolio, your guy in the Bay Area is on the property where and when you've got, let's see, we're invested in syndication and they're tracking it in, let's say, Juniper square. Alright, now you have all these different logins, you're getting these owners, the property managers only provide partial information. They don't know your mortgage information, they often don't know your tax or insurance information, but they're just sending you what are called owner statements, or you have to log into their portal, which is not designed for real estate investors.
It's designed for property managers. What happens is you end up logging in to all these different systems, these different URLs, and software. Let's say on a monthly basis, it becomes tedious, and eventually. I'll just try to plug it into my itself and see if I can track it that way. Well, what we did it What we did was make it super easy. We don't care which Property Management application which syndication platform you're using, it really doesn't matter. We will integrate with all of them, some very automatically to what are called APIs, others through some automated machine learning tools that we have built with built some connectors. Regardless of what Property Management application you may be in. Plus, we securely integrate with your bank account. We can read the maybe the mortgage information, we could read the tax and insurance information, some of the transactions that are not taking place on the property management application side or the syndication management aside, but they're on the bank account. We integrate all that data very effortlessly, and we give it to the user in a very nice classical.
Brett:
Got it. if I had, if I'm thinking here, it's kind of like, perhaps a mint.com that it brings in your credit card over here brings your other credit card over there brings in your bank account can bring in some investments, and aggregates into one portal where you can all you can see, is that a fair summary so far?
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