How to Focus and Get Into Multifamily

In the beginning, I looked at 150 properties until a certain point. I had a verbal agreement on an 82 unit in College Station and I had to make a decision, I told myself “I can't pursue this because of what's going on in the restaurant I’m investing in”, but in my head, I knew apartments was where I have got to go. When the recession hit I kind of stabilized in 2009, I looked at my situation and thought “okay I'm down to four restaurants now everything's looking pretty good” so I started getting into real estate and at the time I had severe shiny object syndrome with short term opportunities that an in effect did not get me closer to my goal which was permanent retirement.

There was a huge amount of foreclosures on the market in the DC area and the retail market was recovering rapidly. You get eighty thousand dollars put thirty thousand and sell it for two hundred thirty thousand, there's a huge gap, I was like my gosh I have to drive my truck through that burst while simultaneously asking myself what was the original goal?, the original goal was financial freedom not to fix and flip houses, it should be an end to a means and it was just a means to I don’t know what end. I wasn't exactly sure so that's what I did it, it distracted me for about three years and then I sort of accidentally got into my twelve unit in DC which was brought to me one of my wholesales and I remembered this thing I wanted to do one day when I grew up and I got into the saying and then it just occurred to me that if I keep doing this active house flipping stuff when it isn’t what I want to do why don't I just do more of this multifamily investing.

I was a part of building staff which is a lot less work, that was mentally when the shift happened for me. I eventually made that shift fully when the final decline in my restaurants happened which took up the next three years of my life to try to extricate myself out of that and it was during this time where I had a fundamental transformation in my mind about what I wanted to do with myself. I really associated myself with my success or the lack thereof it's like who I felt that I was in my head. I was really looking for financial freedom for myself and my family but it was really about me and so it was very frustrating for me to fail so miserably at this.

The shift came when I kind of let go of that. My war is not my net worth. It was very freeing, I said what I was going to do and then I thought to myself “you know what I'm going to try to do also is help people raise money and do apartment buildings”, because I've raised money for houses and for the apartment buildings and people kept asking me how I do this kind of stuff and I said you know what I'm going to start sharing my knowledge about this stuff even though it really wouldn't solve my financial issues at all, and then really focus on multifamily. All it took was really letting go of all that thinking less about me and how can I make it and more about how I can help people other people make it.

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