Building Your Team Out of State

The first thing is networking. Figure out the phone networking with local brokers, local professionals, real estate professionals, local property management companies, attorneys. I spent a lot of time in the first couple weeks and months interviewing people, letting them know who we are and finding out more about what they do and who they are and aligning with them to make sure there is synergy there to where we can partner up from a property management perspective or from a brokerage perspective to have them send us opportunities. Interviews were the biggest thing we did starting out.

People are going to say “well why don't you have any large multifamily?”, well everybody starts somewhere, you want to know exactly what you're looking for and you also want to be proficient with your terms. You want to know what you want to say in terms of what you need from these team members. You start the conversation, “I currently don't have any assets in this area we're looking to grow into this area we really want to acquire 75 to 20 units BC assets that have operational efficiencies whether it's in the manager site or the property side, we don't want to stay on the west side because we know it's a more dangerous area. We would prefer to be on the southeast where we know there's a big mix”, now you’re on that point, you have a conversation with someone, they understand that you've done your time to know what you're looking for and have the right questions and then from that you can see if they're going to be the right fit because you have told them that and they may say “well we only do single-family homes”, then you know it's probably not the right person for your team. They could also say that they “just want to do new construction again”, and again you know that that is probably not the right person for your team.

When you're building your team you want to be specific and make sure those people are in line with the properties you're searching for, that's also important when looking for brokers and property managers. Say I'm a broker and I'm like “oh awesome! two new investors, I can do it”, I put you on my buyer's list and I send you a four hundred unit on the west side that needs a ton of work, what do you say to me? is it “thank you for sending that”, we get a response back to you no matter if it was a fit or not. I guess for the first couple it's always important to respond with why not because there are going to be some scenarios that just don't work out but we do want to keep the partnership going. We make a point to reach back out on every opportunity that comes across our desk just to let the broker, the property management company or owner know why the scenario does not or does work for us. We make it a point to get a response back and that is why I think follow-up is key no matter what you're doing in this business or in life in general.

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