108: 270M in multifamily apartment portfolio with ZERO Experience in 4 Years
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$270,000,000 Assets Under Management.
Everytime we tell someone about our fashion days, we can guarantee they will ask “but HOW did you make that transition, and have $270M AUM in such a short period of time?”
We get asked about this SO much and it’s a part of our story that we sometimes breeze over because to us it feels natural to us. But now as we’re ending 2022 strong, and it’s an important part of our journey, so we thought hey it’s time to really dive into it and share with you guys. 🤓🤓
Today, we thought we’d spill the beans once and for all! Hang tight and stick with us until the end to get access to our Ultimate Passive Income Guide – you won’t want to miss it!
Okay, let’s get into it. 👇👇
Here are some of the strategies we used and we hope they’re helpful to all of you starting out this apartment investing journey…
We started out as fierce passive investors
You should know that if we are being brutally honest, prior to 2017, neither one of us really knew what it meant to be a passive investor. Although we have some real estate experiences through our single family home rental – we were banking in on “appreciation.” Because living in Cali, we thought that’s our only option. Boy, were we wrong.
Sadly, it took us losing our only source of income overnight to realize, hey this is not a life that we wanted. Pretty sure we can speak for all of you listening that this is definitely not something you would want either. We were trading time for money and without any demand, our business became obsolete overnight. We know we aren’t alone in this; this has happened to so many others across many different industries. 😔😔
So we had to act fast. And really we didn’t have that soft landing like many people do. We were making great income in fashion and poof – overnight it was all gone. Honestly, in hindsight, that was probably the best thing that happened to us. It forced us to grow up quickly and shifted our mindset from focusing on only one income source, trading time for dollars, to having our money multiply – passively!
And that was how we became fierce passive investors in apartment syndication. Through being passive investors, we realized, wow, it’s so nice to have your vending machine money if you will, that will spit out $2 when you put in $1, all without sacrificing more of our time. 💰🤩
We created a virtual vision board
Now that we were hooked creating passive income, we were like ok, this is great, but we need more! Honestly if we didn’t lose our only source of income in fashion, none of this would have ever happened, and we wouldn’t have found our path that we’re on today.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve likely heard us say “time is our only true currency”. We are big believers here that you should NOT trade your time for money. We define success by working in such a way we have optimal free time to enjoy what really matters to us. Things like family, travel, hobbies, the things that really matter to YOU. ⏳✨
So, in order to create more passive investments, we went from being passive investors only to being general partners. And that’s where our little thing we like to call our virtual vision board came in. Yes, a virtual vision board. Think of it like your financial Pinterest board.
This is a little embarrassing, but we would literally kind of map out in our heads, and share with one another what we envisioned our lives in 3-5 years going to be. You’ve probably heard people talk about their 5-year plans and 10-year plans. Well this is totally what we did. Even now, when we take strolls in the neighborhood, or even out on a jog, we visualize our next biz move. 🤓🤓
One thing to acknowledge and just own is that this takes courage. This isn’t meant for us to give ourselves accolades, instead, we want to own how scary the process was and honestly how humbling it can be to map out hey, this is where we are at, this is where we want to be, and how do we get from point A to point B?
This also helped us recognize what we needed to work on, and where we wanted to take our business. You should also know that our virtual vision board doesn’t have fancy cars, mansions, designer handbags, etc. Nope, our virtual vision board is taking road trips with our fur babies, spending holidays with our grandparents, and taking them to places to create memories together. Someone recently teased us that the Kitti’s Sister’s jet is happening soon, but honestly guys, we just laughed it off. That’s not what motivates us.
We leaned on experts, mentors, and fellow passive investors.
You know how they say it takes a village? We believe your net worth is your network. Let’s say that again, just for emphasis – your net worth is your network. Who you are friends with really helps in some ways shape your life. Somewhere we heard that you should be careful who you surround yourself with, because who you spend time with affects who you are as a person, and that applies to the professional world as well. 🙏
Prior to joining the apartment investing world, we were the highest income earners, and that kind of made us feel like we’d made it, which definitely created a false sense of security.
All of that came crashing down in 2017, when our biggest client announced they were CLOSING all their stores. And… just like that our income dried up. We had absolutely no backup plan. And in that moment, we realized our sense of security was an ILLUSION.
Honestly, after college we stopped ALL education because we thought hey we made it. That really hurt us. It’s important to be a lifelong learner and always stretch yourself to keep growing and learn more, even in areas where you might have little to no expertise. In fact, that’s even more reason to bust out the books! 🙌
More than ever now that we’re here, we double down on leaning on experts, keeping mentors who help collapse our timeframe, and our fellow passive investors, who are on a similar mission to us. And that, friends, is to stop trading time for more money!
We empowered ourselves with knowledge
Knowledge is power! 💡
One of our favorite actors Keanu Reeves said “You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.” With knowledge we can let a roaring water flood our village, or we can create a way to capture it and turn it into electricity using dams or divert it for use in agriculture and sustenance. Either way, knowledge is power. In the case of dams quite literally! We know you didn’t come here for the puns, but we can’t help ourselves sometimes.
Anyway, now that we’re here, we don’t think we will ever stop learning because there’s always going to be roadblocks and we must learn to pivot at all times. It’s obviously impossible to ever fully prepare for the future, but if you give yourself the right tools, you will be prepared to navigate life’s storms.
We defined our Freedom Metric
Maya Angelou said “you don’t know where you’re going, until you know where you’ve been”. We aren’t willing to trade more time for more money, because we’ve learned to work smarter, but we understand not everyone can immediately get here. Here’s the thing when you are just starting out you need to define what we like to call the freedom metric. 😉😉
The freedom metric is basically the number you want to hit so that your cash flow exceeds your expenses. AKA, the financial number you need to reach in order to finally start breathing easy at night. Plus, thinking long and hard about asset classes that will yield you the results you’re looking to achieve.
We defined our freedom Metric and worked backwards. If we wanted to have X dollars in monthly passive income we must invest X dollars to achieve that output. Please note we didn’t get to our dream Freedom Metric overnight. It has been a long process and hey, we haven’t quite hit our Freedom Metric goals and truthfully this is a moving number. Once you hit X dollars, you elect to maybe move that to a higher number!
We built a team
Honestly, we wouldn’t have been here without our team. We have people working behind our successes. Our passive investors, our fellow co•GPs, our legal team, accounting team, our property management team, etc. By all means we can’t take all the credit. 🤝
From traveling to tour the property, to meeting the brokers to building lifelong relationships with our fellow investors, everyday we strive to win big for our team!
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