All Forum Posts by: Shane H.
Shane H. has started 48 posts and replied 745 times.
Post: Group Home or Assisted Living Home Experience

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Originally posted by @Glenn McCrorey:
@Shane H. Thanks for sharing your story. I've been kicking around ALF but haven't pulled the trigger. I rent to companies that provide HCBS for special needs individuals. Do you know of any companies like that in Wichita? Thanks.
Were you on a podcast? Was thinking the name and strategy sounds familiar.
My wife worked for a person that did this - however based on my wifes experience I wouldnt recommend anyone do business with the woman that owns the business. Sorry I couldnt be much help there.
Post: Group Home or Assisted Living Home Experience

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Originally posted by @Jared Viernes:
@Shane H. if you do end up trying to work with vets in the area I would be very interested in helping you out. I sit on the advisors board of the Veteran Providers’ Coalition of Sedgwick County and am getting pretty well connected with the various entities. Always good to know people trying to help vets out.
Thanks. It would be up in the capital city. Know anyone on various vet boards or if there is a need for housing for vets that are borderline homeless and need help with medication management?
Post: Group Home or Assisted Living Home Experience

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Long answer to your question. My novel below:
EXTREMELY unhappy with my job, had been for years, have thought RE and running my own business has been my calling for a # of years but didnt know how to break the chains and get out of misery - lets just say if you are stuck in a bad place you have more things working against you mentally to get out of it.
I've dabbled in residential investments and done a few things/deals since 2006, worked in insurance claims since 2004. Insurance claims sucks and I'd recommend no one ever go into that field. Not my worst enemy. However as horrible as the job can be I did learn a lot of things I can carry over into what I do now. Not apples for apples stuff but the basic concepts that translate well into this industry and others. One good thing was the company I worked for the last 10 years had a very generous retirement/profit sharing program which ended up facilitating my business purchase. So, in the end or up until now the pain was worth the gain, however if I could skip insurance claims I'd probably go back and do that.
So I'm having an attitude problem and other things going on in my life, I realize in order to get out after hearing the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk and others on the BP podcasts, (though have to credit Vaynerchuk the most) I need an attitude adjustment. Things continue to decline at work during 2016. Late summer of 2016 I decide to get away with the family on a vacation. It's a state I'd consider moving to so figure why not look up a fellow BP member in that town and see if they'll meet as I'd met and tried to meet a # of people in ICT. Said member agrees to meet me and little did I know when reaching out to him he had a long history of successes in his life and had reached heights I'd only dreamed of and then some. We have an hour or two meeting, he agrees to keep talking to me on occasion and he happens to be involved in assisted living and sung it's praises. That hour or two I spent with him and the energy I pulled from him played a pivotal role in helping shift my mindset change to where it needed to be. Without that meeting I wouldnt be here today. I'd read about assisted living before but until I met him never thought it was possible I could get into the field.
So fast forward some more and a little more background, I'm still working on correcting my attitude, and as luck would have it my wife has been working in the assisted living/skilled nursing/group home setting as a front line grunt level employee ever since I'd met her in 2012 (grunt is said with the utmost respect - she worked hard) so I started to bounce things off of her.
Keep in touch with fellow re investor - agreement is reached that I can travel out of state and shadow his assisted living ceo for a week...did so March 2017 and learned a ton.
More depressing things happen at my job April 2017 so upset with w2 job and all the negativity in the industry I was in.... one night I'm carousing re for sale listings, business listings etc and find this business newly listed for sale on an obscure bus website. Converse with broker, send him my balance sheet, he says I'd qualify to buy - I thought there was no chance in hell I could qualify for a loan but he says he knows a way. I have little cash and what little wealth I have is on paper in RE and in my 401k. Business is listed for 7 figures. However sending the email to him I figured why not and I'll never know unless I try. Showing is set up.
Throw it in my wifes lap we are going to look at it - she gets over it in 3 days :) and we look at it - she walks through the place and tells me she gets a great vibe and feels it looks like it's well run. We go back and forth for 3 weeks and get an agreed offer - I get paperworked to death and finally get a prelim approval for an SBA loan utilizing a ROBS (roll over business startup) to fund the down payment needed. Thank God for this IRS allowance and vehicle and thank God there was a bank willing to underwrite this loan. Local banks in Wichita basically laughed, same for Topeka, well not literally laughed but stated I needed to be at least $500k liquid and have as many assets as the businesses was worth - at the rate I was going I wouldnt get there in my lifetime. (Also have to credit another BP connection - used mysolo 401k guys for the ROBS setup and they were great)
So after a few hiccups and having to put the brakes on the deal for 2 mos during summer 2017. (Had to wait for a flip I dove into headfirst in Wellington to sell so I wouldnt have any underwriting issues or extra liens applied to me by the SBA lender)
Property sells and closes end of July so we can finally move forward. I had a lot of dumb luck as time went on and this was one of them - I nearly maxed out my HELOC on personal residence to fund the flip - which was a good thing - it raised my LTV on my personal residence high enough the SBA lender couldnt put a secondary lien on it. So I can give little tidbits of advice if anyone ever gets an SBA loan and uses a ROBS vehicle to fund a business, re startup etc.
We takeover Oct 1 - survive a major scare of almost losing our key employee and admittedly I had no clue what in the hell I was doing - Thank GOD for my wife helping me through the process and taking the role as counselor, motivator, and sounding board for ideas as we've went through this - she's focused on nursing school as she'll be attending Baker to get her BSN starting here in a week and finally get that out of the way after a few hiccups on the education side in the past. So things are tending to look up. This whole attitude adjustment paid dividends and I always thought what some of the guys said about positive thinking, law of attraction etc was hokey - I think theres a lot of truth in it now. I think I'm far from a success story and have a long ways to go, but the one thing I'm happiest about is I got out of a job that literally was killing my spirit and taking a toll on me physically and mentally. I personally haven't felt better in years.
This facility now that I've gotten used to it certainly provides more joy than I ever imagined. Being around positive people and the residents who are appreciative of you trying to take care of the place is payback enough. I went into this thinking if all I can do is get an avg place to live, have a couple cars and eat Id be happy. So far so good - hoping to expand the place in the future and walk away after handing most of the day to day elsewhere so I can focus on other things and just oversee. I'm not that great of a leader so need someone else to do it. Not really my strong suit. I'm more of an organizer and person who cares and can handle 15 things and delegate and think outside the box kind of guy.
Wrote kind of a novel but hopefully that gives you some insight - - definitely not something to take lightly to get into. To go back to where I'm finding outsourcing companies, compliance etc, a lot of things I knew nothing about.... a lot of it I've felt out the previous owner, the current executive director and due to another referral due to my wife from a Wichita memory care owner I hired a consultant that specializes in running facilities like these and has more experience that he'd forget in a day than I'd gain in 5-10 years in this business. He's been worth the investment, and so has our executive director. We plan on giving her 5-10% of the company - will probably be the equivalent of $60k to 100k in dollars that we paid for the place - hopefully in 5-10 years when we sell we can triple that # for her - I dont really care about the money - she's a key employee and without her we dont do well. Still need to structure the ownership giveaway to her and it will vest over time but something I look forward to having done this summer and in place.
Post: Group Home or Assisted Living Home Experience

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
@Keith Scott - if you're still active on the site - (realize you posted this reply 6 mos ago) would it be possible to connect with your contact that deals with the Vets? As I stated in the above post my wife and I have an opportunity to be a part of a vet focused group home but we just don't know enough about it. I'm really leery about the types of mental issues people living there would have and safety issues - Guess it's something I dont know much about so want to feel comfortable with it.
Post: Group Home or Assisted Living Home Experience

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Originally posted by @Jared Viernes:
@Shane H. went to Topeka to dive into this type of investing. I would expect he’s learning a lot about it trial by fire.
Yes 3 mos in and loving it. Difficult but the place we bought came with a great staff. Bad staff or bad residents would sink you real fast. I only hope we can make it better than it was. We are trying to implement some things to do so. I was offered to be a part of group housing for mentally ill vets but I'm not sold on the partnership yet - something we are still entertaining - the economics were there.
The struggle we are realizing is the ebbs and flows of the cash flow. Takes a while to get all the money flowing in. 3 mos in and we still have not been paid by HCBS/Medicaid. Still working on set up - we've hired someone to do the setup for us but really nothing we can do to speed it up. I think now we are owed appx $30-36k by them - definitely in assisted living or any group home setting unless you are doing skilled nursing I'd say it's best to focus on private pay folks and make sure to underwrite them to determine how long they can pay the private pay rate before they run out of money. We've had that happen to two folks since we've been there and it takes a serious hit to the bottom line - your option is to discharge them and find another resident however you really have to weigh the fact that if you kick a resident out you can disrupt the whole community of residents and throw the whole thing off balance. We really do have great staff and residents alike - we have some areas that can be improved, but we are hoping to build on the foundation that is here.
In a year or two we will be ready to buy in Wichita. However the scale I want to stay at is probably 25-61 beds depending on the specific type of resident you were trying to go after. Smaller than 20-25 I think it's hard to make it work with a team in place. Just don't have the scale - you can do it but you'd be doing most of the work yourself.
Post: New to Wichita and Investing

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Welcome @TJ Crews
Post: Tenant says there’s bedbugs

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Here's what I've learned about them. They like to hide in wood, can sit dormant for a while I believe. So places you'll find them or they'll hide out - wood furniture, bed headboards, under the mattress, they'll crawl to the ceiling/corner of the wall and lay eggs (look for black specks) - if you see things like that you'll need to scrape and paint - there are treatments you can do to spray the baseboards, furniture etc - local pest control companies should be able to treat - I've also heard the only way to fully get rid of them is with a heat treatment as well as everything else I mentioned.
Your tenants would need to wash all beddings, strip all furniture down, spray/treat the furniture, spray baseboards, etc etc - pretty labor intensive to do it right.
Post: Self Employed looking for private lender to purchase prim residen

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Hello -
You can check me out on LinkedIn, Facebook, my BP profile etc.
The quick and dirty - wife and I just purchased a 41 licensed bed Assisted Living (residential living) facility in Topeka KS - and moved from our hometown of Wichita to run the business.
We've found a house to buy that is off market. Being newly self employed we are having a difficult time securing financing for a primary residence so figured I'd check for possibilities here.
We secured a 7 figure loan to purchase the business so a bank was willing to believe in us to lend that money, I'd like to think once you underwrite us you'd find it a no brainer to lend on a primary residence - and I'm open to structuring the deal any number of ways. We do not look for this to be long term, simply for a year or two or such time we've had enough self employment history to satisfy most larger bank underwriters. At that time we could refi and pay you off.
We do plan on putting 10% or so for a down payment. If you'd like to tour our business we'd be happy to show you around - can see a # of photos by checking out the business on Facebook.
Look forward to possibly working with someone wanting to put their money to work for a year or two.
Post: Roll call 4 BP members who are legit Assisted Living owner/ops???

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Originally posted by @Dan Brewer:
Hi Shane, First of all, congrats on your purchase - welcome to the senior housing community! Senior housing is hot, the economy is hot, each contributing to a very challenging human resources problem for senior housing operators. So you have lots of company. Based on your inexperience in the senior housing sector, I recommend you hire an operations consultant. I can refer one to you if you wish (we do not provide that service). Dan Brewer
I've got that covered but would certainly be open to any other consultants out there.
Post: Roll call 4 BP members who are legit Assisted Living owner/ops???

- Investor
- Wichita, KS
- Posts 769
- Votes 279
Originally posted by @Ronald Rohde:
Congrats on the endeavor. Are you self-managing? I have been in the senior care industry for 7 years and its quite a handful at times.
Your website doesn't load some content, Java errors? Do you have photos of the residence? If posted, they aren't easy to find. What type of existing policies did you inherit? That should help your recruitment efforts. Clear job descriptions and employee policies.
Not self managing - acting as business manager/ceo - We have an executive director and would be lost without her. I want to offer her a vested ownership interest and plan on doing so.
Website was partially updated by someone and I think they messed up the mapping showing the location when I asked them to delete the photo and bio of the prior owner - I plan a site overhaul and have a guy picked out in Wichita to come up and do Drone video of the surrounding area and promotional video of the site and executive director to put on our site and Facebook
Existing policies havent been enforced like they should - I'm ramping that up now with the implementation of T Sheets time tracking - right now there are paper time sheets and I'm about to pull my hair out as I'm a non paper and digital person. My wife and I will go out in the community and I'll work the phones to start a recruiting pipeline. Electronic timesheets should cure some of our problems - security cameras are coming 1st quarter next year or at least that's in my plans.
So far I'm enjoying it - doesnt seem like work - I'll be able to get more in the flow of things after we get a house bought here and more settled - so far in 2 mos we've moved twice - I have my former primary residence under partial construction to get it ready for the tenant moving in Dec 1 and another rental full gut rehab 70% completed and am selling another existing duplex in Wichita - so to say I have my hands full with outside things is an overstatement - I look forward to having a couple outside projects done in Wichita so I can 100% focus here.