The Great Art Of The Comeback

My previous podcast guest Ivan Barratt started like the most real estate investors, with Rich Dad Poor Dad book. He was just graduating high school and so he had always had this taste for real estate, he asked himself, why would you want to get a real job, why wouldn't you just owned a bunch of income property, sit back and watch the rent checks roll in.

So that was the initial attraction and he always wanted to own big assets, but it started with one duplex house, hacking it, living in one side and renting out the other and as a young early twenty-something kid fresh out of college with a fancy business degree in real estate finance development law and he thought he was pretty hot stuff and actually got sidetracked in development for almost eight years and thought he was going to be a big-time developer, as he says, and had a great mentor, some great teachers and then 2007 happened and everything changed. And that ended up being the biggest single gift of his early adulthood career, so he is thankful that happened to him at such a young age because he would be in big trouble at that time as a real estate developer.

That forced him to start over, he was a few hundred grand in debt, he owed a lot of money and had to pile up expenses every month because it had all been based on these projects that were going to hit right, so it's financing his lifestyle and at the time his wife was his girlfriend and he was trying to convince her to marry him and she said, "you're a $200,000 in debt", but he kept pursuing and asked, would you marry me if the tables were turned, that was a really tough question to answer, but he thankfully he dig himself out of it by doing whatever he could and started a property management company out of his spare bedroom and really grew that by managing assets for other people, all small investors and in single-family homes, townhomes, landlords by necessity, anything he could get his hands on.

At that time he was and he did everything, he was the leasing agent, he was the maintenance coordinator, he was the collector, he was marketing advertising, he was everything and then he started hiring people and figuring out how to scale that to where he is today and a long way he started off with the BRRRR method, where he was buying small multi-family with hard money, putting a lot of improvements into distressed properties in up-and-coming areas and then he would refinance and do it again and keep them, so over time he actually became his own biggest client and now he continues to grow into the larger apartment communities. In 2014 he bought his first site managed deal, where we had on-site staff on 112 units and shortly thereafter found a really great business partner that had a complementary set of skills to his and they bent the growth curve quite a bit now, all that small stuff is gone and he is focusing on mainly two and three hundred unit apartment communities in the Midwest, where they both own about 2,500 units together and then he still manages about another thousand units as a fee manager for his clients, that owned anywhere from 30 unit apartment buildings.