A true pioneer in the commercial real estate and Multifamily industry, Neal Bawa has an impressive track record to back up his experience. As the CEO and Founder at Grocapitus, a commercial real estate investment company, Neal sources, negotiates and acquires commercial properties across the U.S. for 230+ investors. His current portfolio includes over $110 million, more than 1500 units/beds, and multifamily and student housing properties in 7 U.S. states. Additionally, Neal is the CEO at MultifamilyU, an apartment investing education company, the co-founder of the largest Multifamiy Investing Meetup network in the U.S. (BAMF), speaks at events all over the country, and produces his own podcasts and radio shows.
Neal Bawa joins John Carney today in The Real Estate Locker Room to share how he made the transition from the tech industry into Multifamily, the secret to his Meetup group success, the importance of education and the action that follows it, and to shed some light on Multifamily investment industry as a whole.
Speakers: John Carney and Neal Bawa
Announcer: Welcome to The Real Estate Locker Room Show with John Carney. Did you know that investing in real estate is a team sport? Join John and his guests as they explore the intersection of the business of real estate and athletic competition. The goal for this show is to grant you direct access to the real estate pros that are closing profitable deals and grow with their businesses.
On The Real Estate Locker Room Show, we are getting in the ring with successful investors, developers, operators, and all of the industry professionals to learn what it takes to achieve ongoing success.
Now it’s time to kick off and level up with new ways to grow your real estate business.
John: Welcome back to The Real Estate Locker Room Show, everybody. I’m your host, John Carney, coming at you today with another great episode where we’re going to explore the intersection of competitive sports and competitive real estate right here in The Real Estate Locker Room Show.
If you are a repeat listener, a repeat offender, someone who continues to tune in week after week, I just want to say a quick thank you. Coming up in a couple of weeks, we’re going to have a guest who has a success story from the show, which I’m going to be proud to share with you. So, thank you for tuning in and as always, turn the volume up to 11. Especially today, if you’re interested in multifamily investment, because we’ve got a guest that’s the CEO and founder of MultifamilyU University, U for University.
If this is your first time tuning into The Real Estate Locker Room Show, welcome and thank you. We are going to help you raise the bar in your real estate game today and no doubt you will leave with some type of information that you will be able to apply immediately to be just a little bit better than you were the day before.
Joining me today, I’d like to welcome to the show, Neal Bawa. How you doing today, Neal?
Neal: Fantastic, John. Thanks for having me in The Locker Room.
John: Thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to shed some light on multifamily investment. Give me a moment here just to tell everybody a little bit about you, Neal.
You are the CEO at MultifamilyU, an apartment investing education company. Neal speaks at events and Meetups across the country. Nearly 4,000 students attend his multifamily seminar series each year and hundreds attend his Magic of Multifamily Bootcamps. Thousands of people tune into the podcasts, as he has now been featured in over a dozen podcasts and radio shows. His management techniques and revenue optimization techniques for multifamily are considered unique in the industry.
All right! One other thing to know about Neal he has a nationwide Meetup network (Multifamily University) has thousands of members.
We are going to be diving in to multifamily with an undisputed expert in that game.
Neal: Thank you, John. It’s been an interesting journey. It’s been rather a unique journey and maybe I can start off by telling you a little bit about how I got to multifamily from technology.
John: Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s warm up just really quick, maybe before we get into there. The Real Estate Locker Room Show, we’re really about that intersection of competition and I use the analogy all the time about athletic competition and real estate being competitive as well.
Did you play any sports growing up?
Neal: I’m different from most of the people that are on your show in that football is not my game. I watch a game called cricket, which used to be a boring game that lasted five days, and so each game would be five days long. Then they shortened it to a single day, but the TV networks still didn’t like it, so now it’s about three hours and it’s very similar to baseball at this point in time. That’s my game. Anyone that’s an expatriate or part of the British Commonwealth would know it well. It is the second largest sport on earth.
John: Absolutely. I spent a little bit of time in Australia. My wife and children are Australians, so I bat for the Aussies when I’m watching the sport. I love cricket. Was there an athlete growing up that you admired on the cricket pitch?
Neal: Well, oddly enough, it wasn’t a cricketer. The athlete that I’ve loved all of my life has been a guy, a tennis player named Roger Federer. To me, he’s one of the best-known athletes in the world and might even be ranked as the number one athlete of all time. But to me, it was his passion for the game and his focus on perfection. Roger Federer is one of those people that’s always looking to hit the perfect shot and he would go out and practice sometimes for five or six hours, playing the exact same shot, using a machine, 6-700, 800 balls. Just trying to play that shot perfectly and remember it, so when he played a tournament, he would execute that shot correctly and that was always an inspiration for me.
John: He’s amazing for all the tennis fans out there, one of the best. Have you got to see him play? Have you had the opportunity to see him play, I should say?
Neal: Very recently, yes, so he came to the SAP Open in San Jose and I watched him play and it was just magnificent. I cannot ever forget it.
John: Okay. The common thread that we here a lot about the successful athletes that our guests share is the top of their game, whatever that game is, it starts with dedication and practice and repetitions, which you just brought up with Federer. I’m sure that when we get into your expertise in multifamily, you and your success story, we’re going to pick up a little bit about that.
Yeah, please share your success story, Neal, and how the pivot happened from one sector to the next.
Neal: Sure! I’m a technologist. I’ve had a long and successful tech career. I’ve had my own company and had a successful tech exit. I got into real estate before I got out of technology because I was building campuses, office campuses, from scratch for my company. We built one that was 27,000 square feet in 2004 and then we built one that was larger than that in 2006, and ’07. That’s how I got into real estate.
I tell people that I got into real estate in reverse. Most people do, you know, one single family and then another single family and then they buy maybe a triplex and then they go on to do something bigger than that. But in my case, I started with a 27,000-square-foot shell building that had to be converted into an office in less than 9 months, and that was a $5 million project. Then I moved onto a 33,000-square-foot building that was behind that building, where we needed actually more money.
My CEO and founder of my company was very heavily involved. It was always his hand on my shoulder that helped me in that process. But then for that second building, we needed more money. We actually went out and got a bunch of doctors that were local to invest into that building and buy suites from us. We didn’t realize that what we were doing was a real estate syndication. I’m sure we broke every syndication law there, but we didn’t even know that that word existed, and this was in 2007, where we chopped up pieces of a building and sold off those pieces to different people, everyone owning their own piece. Then we rented that back from them as our company grew.
That was a true win/win/win. I mean, our students—we were a technology education business—they benefited from more space. Our company benefited because we got this beautiful space and we were able to do it without, you know, using all of our own money.
Those doctors got beautiful suites that are still rented out 13 years later to my company and the company itself benefited because now it had room to grow. That was a win/win/win and it really made me realize that real estate was amazing and it’s something that I had to get into.
Then I did the same thing that everybody else does. I bought one single family, then two. I bought ten in California, ran out of loans and refinanced. Got my wife off. Went to Chicago, brought ten triplexes in her name and then really started looking at the lack of scale and the fact that I was feeling more like a property manager than an owner, because a lot of the times, if you want cash-flowing properties, you really couldn’t be very passive about them. I’m not a passive kind of person, and so I was always in the weeds and I hated the fact that there wasn’t a professional level of management, even at a triplex level.
Then my company was throwing off so much cash and I had so much to invest that I went and invested into multifamily. I invested with 13 different syndicators. I became friends with them, started learning from them, started sitting in their property management meetings and picking up amazing nuggets that are really not in any book or any podcast or any training program, simply because they’re too granular. But they were amazing. They were incredibly useful.
So, I, with some friends, opened a Meetup Group in the San Francisco Bay Area and started teaching there. This is way before I have anything to sell, I’m not a real estate guy, I’m still a technologist, I’m still running my company. I have 400 employees. But in the evenings, I’m basically going to this Meetup Group that I co-own and I’m teaching everything that I’m learning from all these amazing syndicators, including one, his name was John Mark, who mentored me in particularly.
People really liked that. They liked my teaching style, they liked the fact that I had nothing to sell. There was nothing to sell. People were coming for pure education. Before I knew it, that Meetup Group, which the goal was to have 100 people, was 1,000. Then it was 2,000. Now it’s 5,000. People just kept coming. The referral rate for the Meetup Group was great because no one was pitching anything to anybody else.
It was a kind of a unique Meetup Group until, of course, 2013, when I sold my business, turned into a full-time syndicator and then I did have something to sell, but I’d learned my lesson. I learned that people want education. At my Meetup Group, I continued to teach these 60 to 90-minute deep-dive training sessions about multifamily with a 1-minute pitch at the end where I mention, “Hey, this is what I’m doing and hopefully you can join me.”
The story has just kept on snowballing. Our portfolio has kept growing. We’re at $150 million in our portfolio now. We have over 350 investors that are investing with us. We have over 1,000 investors that have signed up to invest with us. We’ve bought about $50 million worth of property in 5 months, John.
John: Great numbers. I don’t want to interrupt. I want you to keep going. You’re on a role, Neal. Well, I’ll ask the question: If you’re a new or struggling or wanting-to-scale multifamily investor, you’ve got a lot of experience in the industry, talk about MultifamilyU and how that can be an immediate benefit and how that can be an immediate benefit to help someone who is either thinking of getting into multifamily apartment buildings or might be stuck at the moment.
What product and services do you offer to bring people into the success?
Neal: MultifamilyU is a portal. It’s an educational portal and it’s at MultifamilyU.com. That’s Multifamily, followed by the letter U, dot com. We teach roughly 100 webinars through MultifamilyU. Those webinars are free. They’re completely free. There are 200-500 people attending each webinar and there’s different webinars each week.
We teach Multifamily Fundamentals, which is actually a deep dive, so it’s misnamed, it should be Multifamily Detailed. We teach how to get loans. We have John Brickson, who is one of the top lenders in the U.S., he works for a company in Texas that does over a billion dollars of multifamily loans, he’s coming in next week and he’s going to be talking about what are all the different ways in which you can max out your loans and reduce the amount of equity requirements.
We teach multifamily underwriting, so every month, Anna Myers, who is brilliant, she’s my partner, she’s an underwriter, also comes from a tech background, she basically takes a property apart. Maybe it’s a 200-unit that we looked at and didn’t like. Maybe it’s a 200-unit that we looked at and did buy. We basically dissect a property going through all of the different numbers. Going through why we did certain things and why we didn’t and going through rules of thumbs.
That’s just next week. Next week we’ve got John Brickson on, we’ve got Anna teaching. I’m teaching an event that’s not on our website, that is for an IRA company’s investors. Oh, yes, next week we’re teaching Real Estate Trends 2019.
If you’re interested in multifamily, there are two events that we’d like you to watch. Both of them are free, there’s no sales pitch. Multifamily Fundamentals, and I think that’s coming up either next week or the week after. The week after, I think.
Then there’s one called Real Estate Trends 2019. Both of these are extremely entertaining events. They’re about an hour long and they will open your eyes to what is possible with multifamily, but they’ll do more than that. Because what they’ll do, John, is that they’ll tell you what to tell to your investors.
Today, if you’re struggling and you don’t have equity from investors, you just don’t know what to say. It is easier than ever in history to raise money, but it’s very hard to find good properties. Finding properties and finding projects is a much bigger challenge than finding equity.
For those people that are starting out, I know that’s hard to understand. It’s like, “No, no, Neal’s got a thousand investors, that’s why he talks like that.” No, I still remember that it was much, much harder to find investors in the past compared to now, even though I had a portfolio back then. Why? Because there’s so much money in the marketplace. We have an economy at under 4% unemployment. You’ve got great job growth in this country. We’ve got $40 billion coming in from outside the country into our country every month. $40 billion a month.
We’ve got a very, very strong economy and there’s a lot of people looking to invest into real estate because the stock market is not doing well. It was flat for 2018, so people are looking for alternatives.
If you are having trouble raising equity, what you need to do is to attend those two events and simply write down my pitch and repeat it word for word back to people. You should instantly be able to get people interested into your multifamily.
But of course, now that you’ve got them interested, what do you do next? Well, there are events that we are teaching on MultifamilyU, one of them is a paid event that tells you all the other things. Where do we find properties? What cities to invest in? What neighborhoods to invest in? What are all the underwriting problems that you need to be aware of and then how do you syndicate? How do you split up the money between you and your investors? How do you do it legally, so you don’t get into trouble later if your property doesn’t do well. All of that knowledge is provided at MultifamilyU.com.
Only one of our products, the Multifamily Bootcamp, is a paid product. Even with that product, we will not sell you mentoring. We will not sell you coaching. The number one promise of that event is, we will not spend one second pitching anything. We will simply teach an education and training-based bootcamp that gets you ready to go out there and buy multifamilies on your own.
That’s the promise that we make, and I believe we’ve delivered on that promise to the hundreds and hundreds of students that have taken that bootcamp and gone on to own properties.
John: Sounds very comprehensive and of course, we’ll have links to the webinars that you just indicated were going on that we don’t our audience to miss out on.
Where was the aha moment in your journey? I mean, you did start out in reverse. You started out as a commercial developer and then you stayed on the commercial side, I suppose. What was the aha moment where it sounds like with your background, you’ve got a real passion for helping people, first with technology and now with real estate combined with technology? Maybe you’re at the intersection of real estate and technology, Neal, as an entrepreneur.
But when did you realize you had to help other people to be successful? To share the knowledge and share the opportunity?
Neal: When I realized how large the opportunity was, John. This happened in 2010, 2011 when I started. I’m a data scientist, a demographer, by profession. That’s what I focus on the most. The science, the data, the demographics are endlessly interesting to me. I realize that they’re not as interesting to most people and so that’s why it became my mission to take those complicated demographics and put them together in a simple story that I could tell my investors. That story is told in the Real Estate Trends 2019 presentation.
Let me give you a couple nuggets out of that presentation. The first number—and it’s a number everyone should be aware of—is 10 million. We created 10 million new renter households in the last 10 years in this country. We’ve never even done 5 million in 10 years, in that timeframe. That happened because of a variety of reasons. That happened because the Millennials have massive student loan debt and that’s my second number that I want everyone to know about.
Student loan debt in this country is now at 1,500 billion, or $1.5 trillion. It was only 250 billion 15 years ago. It’s 600% increase in just 15 years, that’s 5 or 6 times what inflation is, right? That is a megatrend. That trend by itself—and student housing is not a bubble because you can basically declare bankruptcy and get rid of your student debt, so it’s not a bubble—but it has an incredible impact on multifamily. It has an incredible impact on housing in this country. Now the average student has $40,000 in debt. Some of these students, some of these Millennials, are never going to be able to afford a home.
Another number that most people don’t understand but is so key to your pocket, if you understand the opportunity, is 15 million. Do you know that the single population in this country rose by 15 million compared to married couples over just the past 10 years? Either people don’t want to get married or they don’t stay married. That’s not good news for our country, right, John?
But I’m not a politician and I’m not a religious leader. There’s nothing I can do about these problems. All I can do is be on the right side of history. When you’ve got 15 million people becoming singles above married couples over just the last 10 years, you know that that’s going to drive up multifamily development. Why? Because it was always the married couples that wanted to buy. Now you have this class, this new group of people in the United States, that do not want to buy single family homes. They don’t want to get married. They like the freedom of renting and they like to be mobile. The Millennials are a very mobile group. They move around the country whenever they want, and they live in nice apartments. Often they are not living in C apartments, they’re living in B apartments, and they’re happy with that. Maybe their psyche was permanently damaged in 2008. That’s another reason why we see such a huge increase in the new renter households. 10 million new renter households.
You might say, “Well, we’re doing new construction.” Yes, but are we building 10 million in 10 years? That’s a million a year. Are we building half a million? No. How much have we built? At a peak in the cycle, we built 300,000 a year. Can you imagine the gap between a million new renter households and 300,000 apartments being built? That’s at peak. This year, we’re going to build less than 300,000.
When that happens, the supply-and-demand gap is so stunning that it leads to above-trend rent increases not for years, but for decades. We’ve now had above-trend rent increases since 2012 and we think that we’re going to get above-trend rent increases until 2029. You’re at the halfway point in the multifamily super cycle.
Once you know this, once you understand this, and once your investors understand this, there is no reason why you would not be crazily successful. Stuff like this doesn’t happen very often.
John: You think this is a once-in-a-generation timing? And there’s plenty of time left to capitalize? That’s what I’m hearing. Correct?
Neal: Yes, to both. Yes, to both. There’s plenty of time left. Why? Because if you go to my website and click on the Trends Toolkit, inside the Toolkit, you’re going to find a document. This is a report and it’s not a report that I’ve written, or anybody else in real estate has written, this is a report written by very well-known academics. It talks about the fact that one of the biggest problems with America is that our homeownership rate is falling. The two academics that wrote it, their names are Meyers and Lee, and they are at University of Southern California.
What they’ve pointed out is there is no scenario at all in which the homeownership rate will flatten at this point. It will decrease for 31 straight years, from 2019 to 2050. The only question in everybody’s mind is how much does it decrease? There are scenarios which are bad, worse, and catastrophic. The bad scenarios, the most-likely scenario, and in that scenario, we end up with another 15 million renters, which is really great for multifamily, so we’re talking about 31 years. Recessions come, recessions go, but if you have a long-term megatrend, you only need such one megatrend to make your life and I believe I’ve identified one, this multifamily, long-term trend of the homeownership rate falling.
Read Myers and Lee, Future Homeownership, on my website and it’s going to open your eyes to just how long this trend is and how early we are in that cycle. Remember, it started in 2012 and apparently goes on until 2050. Out of 38 years, we are in the 7th year of this super cycle.
John: Sounds like there’s lots of time, everybody, to skill up, get the skills and jump in the multifamily game, if you’re not there already.
First of all, thank you so much for being prepared with such great data and it wasn’t just a couple of nuggets. I mean, you gave us a lot and your website, no doubt, with the Trend link, which I’ll make sure makes it to the show notes, is a valuable tool.
Since you studied this, let me ask you a couple more questions and I might get into a rabbit hole here because we haven’t had this conversation on the show yet, Neal, and it’s incredible fascinating to me.
I’m in the age group where I have young children and we live on a street with families. There is definitely a trend I see in the market with my parents, with the Baby Boomer generation, selling the big houses and either buying condominiums, if they choose to buy something that’s maintenance-free, or moving downtown. We’re in Cleveland, moving downtown into apartments. We see that. We own and operate apartments and we see that demographic now increasing.
With the Millennials, you’re saying with the combination of student debt and possibly the scarring that some of them might have from the recession, you’re saying that they’re not really even going to be in a position to purchase a house because they’re weighed down with so much student debt. Which is like a mortgage payment, right? They’ve got a mortgage payment on top of their rent payment. Let’s talk about those folks that have the mortgage payment and the student debt payment and how do they get out of that debt through your program? We want to help them realize, hey, it’s time to jump in the multifamily arena because there’s an opportunity for you to earn more, retain your job that you love doing, if this isn’t going to be your full-time gig, and work your way into that dream home or that vision you may have some day.
Neal: Yep. Let’s address both parts of that. The first part of that is these Millennials, right? I’m not saying they’re not buying homes. I’m saying they’re buying them very anemically. At this point, in the year 2000, 37% of the people that were Millennials then, were in that age group back then, 41% of them owned homes. Today it’s 37. It doesn’t seem like it’s a massive difference, but it is. Because that 4% difference is the equivalent of 4 million families. 4 million families that previously were buying single-family homes are now renting. It’s a big difference. It’s an enormous difference and it’s driving the fundamentals for rentals up.
Again, we’ve seen this happen before. It’s happened in Japan. It’s happened in Europe. There are no other countries of our size or anywhere comparable to our size that have a homeownership rate of 62%. Practically the entire developed world is under 50%. How did it happen? It happened the same way as it’s happening to us now for the last ten years. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and as that divide grows, homeownership rates fall.
Anybody who understands what’s happening to America, should immediately resonate with, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to need a lot more rental housing in the future.”
How do you make use of that? Well, come to my Bootcamp. I’m going to show you a very discrete, straightforward for buying multifamily properties. I think that it’s an honorable thing to do. I find I’m very happy with my life, John. When I was in technology education, we were providing education and helping people, but most of those people were corporate paid. Like corporations were writing a check for the education. It was honorable.
But I feel like what I’m doing now is adding more value to society because on the one side, I have hundreds and hundreds of investors that are being cut checks of hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income each year. They’re benefiting. The way that the contracts are written, I can’t make any money unless they make money first. I like that. I like the performance, the pay-for-performance nature of multifamily syndication, that they’ve got to make money first before we make money.
I’m really all about that performance. That puts the pressure on me to only buy good properties that my investors can benefit from.
Then on the education side, MultifamilyU.com, I’m really thrilled at what’s happening. Two weeks ago, four of my students, who had taken an e-Bootcamp, bought a 45-unit property and all four of them met each other at the Bootcamp. They’d never met each other before the Bootcamp.
Another three of them, who were in three different states, have put a 63-unit property in Columbus, Ohio, under contract in the last week.
When I see students doing this, achieving their goals and doing it while they’re still not full-time in real estate, it really thrills me because they’ve understood the opportunity, realized that there’s a super cycle in place, and they’re jumping on it.
That’s what I like to do. I like to drive people towards action. Education, I feel, is not beneficial by itself. Action is the point of education.
John: One quick question about your students, what have you seen is the lowest dollar amount someone has had to invest through syndication who’s been focused on being successful? Do you have a case sample? Like where you can feasibly get into this and what’s the buy-in cost and then how long would it take for someone who’s going to be focused, a full-time worker? You’ve got to kind of paint a broad picture, I suppose. Let the audience know that this is doable. We want everyone out there tuning into this show to know, hey, this is not pie in the sky here. This is real and with a little bit of attention and not a lot of money, you, too, can be on your own road to earning more income.
Neal: Absolutely. Actually, you’re going to like the precise nature of the answer I’m going to give you. If you’re working by yourself, let’s say you’re looking to buy properties by yourself, then you need that down payment or that deposit. The deposit is usually 1% of the purchase price. If you’re buying an $800,000 property, you’re going to need—well, for a property under a million, it’s usually 2%. The $16,000 is going to be the deposit that you’re going to need.
Then if you’re syndicating, which means that you’re going to have more than two or three investors, then you’re going to need to pay $12,000 to a lawyer. Those are your expenses for buying an $800,000 property.
As that property gets more expensive, let’s say 2 million, now you’re looking at maybe 1% or 1-1/2% of that deposit.
But remember, it’s the investors that are investing into your project. You’re not investing into it.
There’s another way of getting around the “I don’t have money to invest” problem. When you come to the Bootcamp, I pair you up with three other students. There’s always one out of three or one out of four that’s pretty rich or affluent or they or their family have money and he wants to raise money. He doesn’t want to be in the weeds. He doesn’t want to do tenants and toilets. He basically wants to leverage his network.
Now, that person is investing from the GP or general partner side. You’re not. That person is probably the one that will put down the deposit and put down the lawyer fees for the syndication.
In that instance, you can actually get in doing zero dollars, but keep in mind, that he will then expect you to take more of a workload. What you can’t do is put in no money and no work because there you provide no value. If he’s going to be raising money, you’ve got to be the one underwriting. You’ve got to be the one doing due diligence by flying to Cleveland, Ohio or Columbus, Ohio where the properties are, and you’ve got to be the one that is helping run those properties for the next five years after you’ve purchased them.
Remember, multifamily is a get-rich-slowly business. It’s not a get-rich-quick business. You’re typically holding properties for three to five years, in some cases, some of our properties, we even hold for ten years, though that’s not common. This is one of those wealth-building businesses. It’s not a huge-amount-of-money-in-my-pocket business. It does not work for that. If that’s what you’re looking for, then fix-and-flip is a much better option. But fix-and-flip is never going to scale anywhere close to multifamilies.
Multifamily is a scalable business. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 people in the United States hold very large amounts of multifamily.
John: Yeah. I suppose the only thing that becomes important for the real estate investors out there is there becomes a point where you shift focus, I suppose, to your balance sheet. The more you focus on growing your balance sheet, when you have a comfortable income, whether it’s from your job or strictly through investing, that’s when another scale of opportunity arrives.
Look, Neal, this has been a ton of nuggets, a ton of gold nuggets here, and it’s really exciting. Your enthusiasm is infectious and you’re right on point. I appreciate you sharing all that.
I like to wind this podcast up with a few parting questions. We’re building a great reading list here. Are you a reader?
Neal: Yes, I am. A voracious reader, actually.
John: I like that. I love it. Well, have you picked up anything in the past or recently that you just want to tell everybody about?
Neal: Well, I think to me, one of the books that everyone should read is called The One Thing. It’s a bestseller, it has been a bestseller for a very long time. The book simply talks about focus and how important that focus is. It goes beyond just telling you about that, because I think most people understand that, it tells you how. Companies are helping their employees be more productive by reading this book. Churches are conducting classes and recommending it for their members.
Because by focusing energy on one thing at a time, people can live very rewarding lives. They can build their careers, they can strengthen finances, they can lose weight, they can get in shape, they can deepen their faith, they can even nurture stronger marriages or personal relationships. The book applies to everything, not just real estate.
John: Got it. That’s perfect. We’ll get that up on the list, for sure. Do you have one pro tip for somebody out there? Something that you do, maybe it’s a daily practice, maybe it’s an experience or something that will help people raise the bar slightly, give them that little bit of an advantage in their real estate game?
Neal: Yeah. I’m going to give a tip to those of you that are managing multifamily. This is very much a pro tip, not for beginners. If you’re managing multifamily and you’re asset managing a property manager, every week, ask yourself this question: What are the things that this property manager always says he does and never does? Is it possible for me to outsource that to another group? I know that’s a radical question because 99% of multifamilies do not do that, but the 1% that do, where they basically take some tasks from the property manager because he never does them, and outsources that task, they are seeing huge benefits. I believe that that will become the norm of the future. At this time, I would say only 1 in 1,000 properties is doing that. All of my properties are included in that 1 in 1,000, where we’re actually outsourcing things that we know a property manager will do well and we’re creating amazing wealth for our investors by doing so. Instead of just beating him relentlessly for five years, to force him to do something that he’s never actually going to do.
John: I got to twist your arm, Neal. What’s the top—one more layer to that question—what is the top item you feel a multifamily owner/operator or syndicator should be asking their property manager to outsource?
Neal: Tenant lead generation. I mean, it’s not number one, it’s number one through number ten.
John: Number one through number ten. There you have it, folks. If SEO and lead generation isn’t your gig and not what you’re going to be good at, definitely find someone who does that professionally and invest in that. I would subscribe to that. I think it’s really important. A really important item.
Well, there you have it, everybody. A ton of information from Neal Bawa. Neal, where can the audience find you online, if they want to contact you directly? Obviously, I imagine people are going to light up your website. We’re going to have a lot of links there for the audience to check out. But if someone wants to dig a little deeper, are you available?
Neal: Absolutely. I’m actually very readily available. I like interaction with people a great deal. My first name is not Neal with N-E-I-L, it’s Neal, N-E-A-L. It’s the Irish spelling. Neal@MultifamilyU.com. You can email me directly. Also, as far as I know, I’m the only Neal Bawa on the internet. That name is kind of unique. You can just connect with me on LinkedIn, just search for me. I pretty much answer my email on LinkedIn all day long and I’ll be happy to chat with you regarding whatever it is that you want to learn, as far as multifamily is concerned.
John: Perfect. If you’ve got questions about the multifamily game or you want to connect with Neal and meet up with him at either one of his Bootcamps or one of his Meetup Groups, now you know how to reach out and start that conversation, everybody.
Well, I truly hope that the audience picked up some actionable advice from you, Neal. For everybody out there tuning in, make sure to check out The Real Estate Locker Room show notes on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play, and hit the subscribe button to ensure that you never miss out on the pro tips from our guests. The mission here is to help you elevate your real estate game.
Now, if you like what this show is all about, I’d be grateful if you would leave us a review on iTunes or your preferred podcast platform so that other likeminded real estate investors are able to easily find us on The Real Estate Locker Room Show when they’re searching for real estate content online.
The post-game report show notes that I’ve talked about a few times here, links and additional content related to today’s episode, will be available on my website, JohnCarney.com/podcast. While you’re there, feel free to drop your name into the email newsletter sign-up form and occasionally we send some stuff out, but we really like to direct you to Podcast Catalog because we’ve got hard chargers playing the real estate game in a lot of different ways and there’s nothing but pro tips and great advice.
Remember to stay focused on your goals, have fun, stay in the game. I’m your host, John Carney, and until next week, work hard, play hard, and raise the bar.
Neal, the Irish spelling, thank you so much for taking extra time out of your day to share such valuable information with the listeners of The Real Estate Locker Room Show.
Neal: Thanks so much, John. I’m happy to be on The Locker Room. Thanks.
John: You got it!
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