[00:00:00] Kristen: Welcome to this week’s edition of Insider Secrets. The show that turns multifamily investing into reality. Each show we interview guests who are seasoned professionals, actively closing and managing real estate deals. Your host Mike Morawski has more than 30 years of multifamily, real estate investing and property management expense.

Mike is the founder of My Core Intentions. And he’s been involved in over $285 million of transactions. Focuses on helping you create short term cashflow and long-term wealth. Here’s your host, Mike.

Mike: Hey, good afternoon. This is Mike, your host of Insider Secrets. And Insider Secrets is brought to you by My Core Intentions. Welcome everybody. Good to see you today. Hey, have you been thinking about your real estate intentions and where you want to go? [00:01:00] What’s your why? Now, let me ask you this.

Why does that really matter, right? In life, in business, it does. And at MCI, we invest in our client’s future, really through an educational platform. We teach you how to create short-term cashflow and long-term wealth. Empowering you to execute sound real estate investing and property management principles while living a balanced lifestyle, develop that a strong foundation of practical principles.

I share many of those principles in my newly released book, “Exit Plan”. Your complete guide to multifamily investing and why you need an exit plan before you buy. You can pick up your copy today on my Website. If you are looking for some direction, My Core Intentions would like to help you get that direction and help you execute on it.

So what I’d like you to do is just reach out, send me a message, either text me, or email me, and we’ll set up a time to get together. Hey, listen, you guys I’m really excited about today. My [00:02:00] guest, good friend, multifamily syndicator, and capital raiser. Ruben Greth. Hey Ruben, say hi real quick to everybody. Would you?

Ruben: Hey, how’s it going everyone?

Mike: Glad you’re here today, buddy.

Ruben: Yeah, man. Thank you for the invite.

Mike: Yeah, you bet. Hey, Ruben is a real estate entrepreneur with partners who are qualified investors. He raises capital and syndicates real estate deals. Ruben has his own podcast about raising money for multifamily syndications called “The Capital Raisers Show” where he learns best practices from successful syndicators and multifamily investors.

He’s a capital manager for Baker Sin and does marketing brand awareness and capital raising for the company who has purchased 850 units in Arizona. And many of those through syndicating apartment communities. He originally got started in the real estate business by raising $650,000 of joint venture money from social media to buy small [00:03:00] multifamily deals.

On our show, we like to talk about the small multi-family deals. But he’s in Phoenix. And he did all of that during the real estate crash, which is even more exciting and compelling. So he’s got a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University and get this in chemistry and Spanish.

So here’s what I want to know Ruben, how do we go from chemistry to real estate? Although we can have an explosion from time to time, but how do we get there? So I’m impressed by it. If you want to just describe to our investors. And first, here’s one thing I always ask everybody, is describe in one word for us, your strategy professionally in the real estate business.

Ruben: Syndication, I guess that would be the easiest word to describe what we are doing and the difference. That can mean so many things and how you raise capital. It can be done a variety of ways. I’m sure we’ll go into that. But you asked the question, how do you go from chemistry to real estate?

I don’t know. Is there some [00:04:00] chance for me to tell a little bit about my background so people can understand how I took that road from chemistry to real estate?

Mike: Absolutely. I’d like you to get into that right now, if you would do please.

Ruben: Yeah. So number one, thank you for having me on the show Mike. I’m really looking forward. Actually, I’m going to be recording you on my show after this so that should be a lot of fun too. But we’ll take a step back here. So as I was going through college, it was taking me a long time to graduate from Arizona State with my degree in chemistry, because of the prerequisites, math and physics.

And I realized it was going to be a long road. So I’m like, let’s just add another major to it. Because I had some Spanish background, both my parents were born from Mexico. I decided to study literature. And in the time that I was getting my chemistry degree. I did a lot of literature classes, picked up quite a bit and then moved into after graduating from college, into mortgages, thinking that would be a good avenue [00:05:00] and stepping stone into real estate investing.

But what I soon found out was that all I was really learning was how to be a salesman in for a corporate bank. And so I found this real estate group and it was an educational platform I learned about, I don’t know, 15 to 20 different single family strategies. And they also had one course on multifamily investing.

And I had started a meet-up to attract people to myself because I knew that building a network even way back then was going to be probably a good idea for me to grow in anything that I did as long as real estate was the premise behind it. And I had this individual come from San Diego with the bankruptcy. And he was purchasing all these fourplexes.

He’s lost all his money in spec homes out there during the crash. And I couldn’t figure out coming from a mortgage background, how he was purchasing all these fourplexes. It seemed like he had one every other week he was purchasing. It’s a great time to [00:06:00] buy during the crash. We’re talking about 2009, 2010. Units here in the Phoenix market were like around $20,000 and you could cherry pick them right off the MLS.

So it was very fun time and he invited me, or I should say, I asked him, Hey, can I go to your projects and particularly, how you found it? How you acquired it? What the business model was? How are you are going to reposition it? How you’re going into that had to deal with the multi-family deal itself.

And through that process with the intention to raise capital, but without ever asking for capital, people started seeing our business and saying, wow, I want to be a part of that. Phoenix seems like it’s cause we’re in the crash, but why are you telling me that we can cashflow astronomically purchasing these units at $20,000?

That really don’t have a lot of work and to do in order to get them back to stabilized product and sure enough, that was what was going on back then. And we took down about, I think he took down about 70 units consisting of small [00:07:00] multis and I participated in about 20 or so units a threeplex here, a fourplex, a 12 unit.

And that was my introduction. He was so excited about me marketing and raising capital that he’s Hey, we don’t need to underwriting machines. Why don’t you focus on the marketing? I’ll focus on the acquisition side of things. And that was going to be a great partnership, right? So I found a guy that was going to write us a book.

We were going to do an email drip campaign. We were going to go on tour. We even flew a producer in from San Diego to basically start recording a pilot that we were going to pitch the a and E and everything was great. But then, one thing happened, which was, he started getting over leveraged and not outsourcing.

So he was very focused on micro-managing, all of the contractors. And we got to a point where we could no longer scale and he would not show up for our business meetings, with the marketing people that I had already invested money into grow our business. We started fighting. And that was my first experience with a [00:08:00] real estate divorce.

So I left the real estate space for a couple of years. Went down to Mexico, took some time off, came back in 2014. And then somebody had challenged me because all I knew was fourplexes. And I came up with a business plan. I’m like, I want to buy 32 fourplexes. I’ve done it in the past. And I want 128 units total.

I figured that it’s going to produce enough cashflow and give me the opportunity to make an impact in the Phoenix market and multifamily market and create everything that I can that I need to make as much money as I want for the rest of my life. And someone. I showed that plan to them and they said why don’t you just take them all down right now?

What do you mean? It’s this is, you buy one and then you double your portfolio every couple of years. Yeah, no, just multi-family is a team sport go out and it. And then I heard the word syndication was like, ah, okay. I was still a little bitter about my relationship, but I started [00:09:00] opening up myself to the concept that, Hey, this is a business that requires multiple team members.

So I started interviewing people, gurus that taught multifamily syndication, and then even some local people. I had a license to sell real estate at the time. And I asked my broker, I’m like, Hey, you’ve sold some properties to some big people before you people that syndicates who have you sold a deal to.

And my broker was like I sold a $5 million property to baker sin last year. I’m like, can you set up a meeting with them? So I ended up coming and interviewing this local team of syndicators. And they I was like, Hey, who do I need on my team? And they’re explaining it. And then they turned it around on me and they’re like why do you want to know about syndication?

I’m like I’ve raised some capital for multi-family as a joint venture in the past, and want to translate my skills and find the right partners to work with. And they said you don’t need to look anymore. Why don’t you just come work with us? And I said, oh, that’s fantastic. So that was the introduction to baker sin and the beginning of the capital reserve.

[00:10:00] At that point in time, I was like, I need to learn how to get, capital for these deals for baker sin. They were in a situation where they were outgrowing a lot of their investors that they had accumulated over the years. So I started the show and then discovered about limited partner capital and how that works in regards to raising money and the differences between raising for syndication versus the way that I used to.

For small multifamily deals, which was typically a joint venture structure. So it’s, it was a very interesting learning process. And I’ve learned a bunch and we can go into some of the details of either that model or some of the other models that I’ve learned. It’s been a lot of fun. Yeah. Great

boy.

That’s a lot of information. Thank you. I really like what you said though, that multifamily is a team sport. I don’t know that I’ve really heard that before I’ve been in the industry 30 years and I really think that’s a great concept and a great way to look. And the other thing you talked about was real estate.

The boards. I always talk to people about, [00:11:00] Hey, don’t fall in love. Don’t get involved in a deal that you’re going to have an ugly breakup with because the red flags that you ignored along the way. And I think that’s really important is that we pay attention to that stuff and not get married to the deal.

What I like is that your focus has been on small multi-family and, from there you, it sounds like you made a transition from small multi-family into larger properties and to the bigger stuff. Can you talk a little about that transition?

Yeah. So that’s a big mindset hurdle that people have to go through.

So it’s actually two hurdles. One, if you’ve ever had a real estate break, And you want to continue in the multi-family space. You’re probably going to need to find some different partners, even if you’re bitter. The other part is a lot of people struggle going from either single family or a small multi-family and making that breakthrough into large multi-family syndication.

Particularly if nobody in your family [00:12:00] has ever done. Or taken down a $5 million deal, right? So that’s such a mental hurdle now instead of taking down a hundred thousand dollar house or a single family or multifamily deal, or a 200,000 now you’re multiplying that by a hundred and taking down $20 million deals.

So in order to get across the finish line, one of the only ways to do it is to partner with somebody that has already. Built that road for you. And see if you can add value, which is what I did. I entered into agreement with a company here and provided brand awareness, marketing capital raising, and those types of aspects.

And they were very excited about that because that wasn’t their particular strength, even though they had raised $50 million for real estate in the past. So that’s how I got it. And it’s, I just joined forces with the team that already had a track record and did so by adding value.

Yup. Excellent.

That’s really great. So what do you [00:13:00] think that your biggest ma you mentioned mindset, it’s a mindset hurdle. What do you think along the way your biggest hurdle has been my, when it comes to mindset. Cause I talked to people about this all the time, right? Is that you have to have that shift in your own mind and understand that you can accomplish something and go ahead and go forward.

I like the way that they encourage you. Just go do a syndication, go do your own, right. Take them all down at one time. And so what do you think your own biggest hurdle was or mindset hurdle that you’ve had to get over? And are you dealing with something today?

Yeah, so I would say a lot of people, including myself, start with limiting beliefs of what they’re actually capable of what their actual ceiling is.

So for me, after my real estate breakup, I was thinking, this was the mindset that I had. The limiting belief that I had was multifamily partners. Don’t grow on trees. Like, where am I going to find [00:14:00] another partner? They’re not like growing everywhere. You can’t just go into a real estate meeting and say, Hey, I’d like to be your partner.

There’s so much synergy and things that have to align in a place to find that. And that was for me, a limiting belief. Now having had my show for over a year, I’ve interviewed him. Plus syndicators. And I’ve realized that these people are not hard to find. In fact, you can go on anybody’s podcast and at the very end, they almost always give this some form of contact information so that you can get ahold of them.

What I’ve discovered is that if you talk to enough of them, You can find somebody to align with. And that’s actually, one of the things that I’ve been focused on is finding some partners that can bring their capital and their database of investors from the code GPS key or co-sponsors that ships perspective.

So that’s starting to really take off right now. We’ve got a lot of people in our day, the base that wants to either have a fund or want to bring their investors along for the [00:15:00] ride in our here in the Phoenix market and the Tucson markets.

Mike: So Rubin, let me ask you, can you explain to our listeners, because some of our listeners are newer investors or just getting in the investing world.

Can you explain to them what the difference between active investing and passive investing?

Ruben: Yeah. So I got that question just the other day where they weren’t too sure. What passes. They were almost like trying to relate it to a stock market investment. So like you put your money into. Stocks and I’m actively putting that money in there.

So that means I’m an active investor, and in the real estate world is a different concept. When you passively invest, you’re giving your money to somebody that’s going to basically run the project for you. And you take a back seat. You don’t have investment decision making capacities.

You’re basically entrusting some company to do everything for you. And that is. Call to security. So just like a stock [00:16:00] investment, if you give your money to somebody else to manage it for you, then there’s all of a sudden all these legalities that you have to I should say that the sponsor or real estate investor that controls a project has to go through in order to legally take money from you particular.

If they’re doing it for more than one person, the active investor is the person that actually is the person in charge of. Project. So he’s the person or they’re the people that go and find the property that lock it up that create the resume and investment summary and create what they designed for returns and have the vision for the construction management or rehabilitation of the project.

So that as they’re remodel, multifamily apartments, they can increase the rents or by lowering the expenses from. Helping of, getting utilities lowered or increasing the rubs, which is the rent utilities bills and those things, and, [00:17:00] lowering these expenses on the management that increases the net operating income of the property as you lower expenses and increased rents that affects the business because multifamily is ran more like a business.

It’s the way that you value it as more as a business than it is from an appraisal model, a cost approach or neighboring property approach. So that’s the difference is basically if you’re active, you’re the one that’s in charge. If you’re passive, you’re the one that’s giving your money to somebody and basically collecting a cash flow and tax benefit from partnering up with it, with that.

And that’s a mental breakthrough in itself because a lot of people think that, oh, I can’t invest in a multifamily property because that’s what millionaires do, but they don’t realize that they can actually just team up with people. That have experienced doing these million dollar projects and then partner with them and receive all the benefits that an investor would in some cases more than you would just doing a single family [00:18:00] dwelling or flip or fix and flip or something like that.

And yet, have it be completely hands-off where you’re not doing anything except collecting a check. So that’s a beautiful thing in this.

Mike: So do you think that it’s a mindset shift for that investor? Who says, man, I need to have my hands in it. I need to be doing this myself and being a mindset shift.

Do you think that there’s more money on the passive side for an investor? Or is there more money on the active side? And I think there’s a lot that goes into that because it’s not just money, right? There’s some time freedom that comes with being a passive investor and you don’t have to worry about, a lot of things where when you’re an active investor, you’re worried about, tenants and those phone calls and things like that.

Talk about that a little bit.

Ruben: Yeah. So in a typical syndication, the sponsor or promoter, there’s a couple of different words that people use to identify the actual person investing, [00:19:00] but let’s just call them a sponsor. And they typically do a split with their investors, where the investors, the paths have been investors get 70% of the deal.

And so why do they do that? Because they, in order to manage the property and find it and do all those things, they get some fees, to keep the lights on in their business. They get an acquisition fee and a disposition fee and a management fee. The investor gets the majority of the profits. If you’re talking about a 70% split.

They get the majority of it. So from that perspective, the investor actually makes more than the sponsor, but the sponsor, because they get some fees, they can keep the lights on too. In order to scale, you have to take down a bunch of these properties. And this is an avenue that helps the passive investor get associated with somebody that can do that.

And then from the active investor side, the person that’s managing the property, they get the [00:20:00] capacity through, years of doing this and building a track record, you go and purchase more and bigger properties in larger and larger, more diverse areas. That makes sense. Yeah, it makes a

Mike: lot of sense.

Thanks. So this show is called insiders. And we run this on Tuesday afternoon at noon. And the whole, my whole premise behind it was I wanted to share those intimate secrets that may be a syndicator or a capital raiser has that your average investor takes some years to figure out, or they maybe don’t even learn sometimes give me one insider secret that you would otherwise hesitantly.

Maybe not share with someone.

Ruben: I would always be willing to share anything. I’m an open book. I think most people in the multifamily space have that abundance mentality. One thing though, if you’re coming from the same area that I was, which was a single family dwelling or multi, small multifamily, residential multi-family kind of mindset that I didn’t know about syndication [00:21:00] before I started.

The difference between how you raise for small deals and big deals. So my thought process before which you’ve heard, I’m sure a lot of times is if you find a good enough deal, the money will come. I think that will work in small deals, but that mindset does not work in a more complex, larger syndication type deal because.

People need to receive communication. They need to understand the, when am I going to get my returns? Am I going to get cash flow? What are the tax benefits? What is cost segregation? How does that apply to me? And, what does it look like and feel like to invest with you? What’s the experience I’m going to get, in the small, single, in the, smaller deal kind of capacity.

Oh yeah. Houses worth X, the rehab is going to cost this. We can sell it for Z. That makes sense to me, pretty easy for me to understand how I’m going to get my money back in the world of syndication. There’s this process that you have to go through. It’s [00:22:00] not like just raising money and taking a property down there’s financing.

There’s all kinds of other things that it makes it more complex. So that’s why you really want to get involved with somebody that has a strong track record and that, and trust. And this is the way that most syndicators raise capital. They go, they take their investors through a four step process.

They get them to know and trust the sponsors. Which is basically a process of educating them, having, investor communication. And then the second part would be. To explain why you like multi-family what are the inherent benefits? Why do people invest? Or why do we invest in this specific asset class versus movies or stocks or, self storage units or RV parks or any other kind of property?

That’s not multifamily. So once the person goes through the education background and gets to find out why this is an Alliance with, [00:23:00] oh yeah. Maybe this makes sense for me. And maybe it doesn’t then you take them through the process of explaining this is step three, explain what it looks like to invest with you.

So get people to know and trust you, explain why multifamily, explain what it feels like. And when you’re going to get your money back, what communication’s going to be like, and then you take people through. Three steps before you do step four, which is present the deal. So a lot of people will say, Hey, present the deal.

If the deal is good enough, the money will come. But in the world of the syndication you have a hard time getting people to invest with you in this. They know what that investor experience is going to be like. And especially if they don’t know and trust you already. So it’s a different type of capital raise in that type of world, right?

In the multifamily syndication world than it would be for. Hey, here’s $80,000. Just go, let’s go take down a small house or a multi-family unit. Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. It’s a big difference. So I like that though. I like those four steps, no, like it find them, get them to know and trust you [00:24:00] and that’s with anything really.

You want to get your client, your associate to know and trust you. And then what are the inherent benefits? I really like that. I think that it’s important. People need to understand because there are a lot of great benefits by being a passive investor. And then what it looks like to invest with you and then the deal.

And, I think there’s some secret sauce in that, right?

Ruben: Yeah. This is what I’ve learned along the way, that. 40 50 episodes of my show was all about understanding how to raise limited partner capital. In other words, there’s these people they’re called limited investor equity partners or limited equity partners.

That is the passive investor. They are considered partners. They get a lot of the same benefits as the sponsor. They get the tax benefits, the ownership rights to some of the property, maybe not the decisions, but in terms of real estate tax [00:25:00] benefits, you can cashflow a lot of times without having to pay attack on them.

If you get the right write-offs and obviously you’d want to talk to your CPA about that, but there’s all kinds of benefits in multifamily that people need to be aware.

Mike: Let me ask you this. Are there any specific ways that baker center builds a strong brand awareness or personal brand awareness

Ruben: in the marketplace?

Yeah. When I found them, they had a lot of values, core intentions and focus on the resident and focus on the investor experience, but they did not have a strong social media presence. So that’s where the, where I helped with my podcasts. We have over 26,000 downloads as a November of 2020, and growing about three to 5,000 podcast episodes.

Downloads per month. So that really helps people find out about us. The social media, honestly, it’s a relationship business. So I’d say going and networking and obviously in the [00:26:00] COVID world, you have to do that virtually, but there’s plenty of places to do that. And the more people that you meet, the more time that you spend on, they’re getting to know you, the more that the, in our case, a national presence is established where, a lot of the brokers around town and in Tucson, Phoenix, and Tucson.

Yeah. But a lot of the syndicators, a lot of the potential passive investors around the country had never heard of baker soon. So I was very fortunate for me that I found a company whose values I aligned with, and now I get to share those values and the story of baker sin, which has a, an interesting background too, because it was partly, the CEO was paying homage to it.

Father and grandfather who were bakers. And also it’s been a lot of fun talking about the different values and focus on our residents. So that really helps us stand out in comparison to other syndicates. Nice.

Mike: Yeah. Sounds like a great story. It really has been. How about a couple of tips on the best ways today to go raise capital?

[00:27:00] So there’s a lot of people raising capital out there today, and there’s a lot, with the changes in the rules in the sec and guidelines over the last several years and crowdfunding and things like that. There’s people out there, a lot of people out there raising kids. How do you make yourself stand apart from everybody else out there today?

And what techniques are you using to raise capital?

Ruben: Yeah, so some of it in the world of syndication, as we talked about is it’s a more complex. A structure. So when you try it, when you move from single family into multifamily, you have to adapt and bring in technology and underwriting, softwares, and have a visual presentation that people can follow along.

But I would say some of the big things are mindset related. Just like in any sales business, most people will buy your product or invest in your deal for emotional reasons, rather than logical reasons. They will buy emotionally and [00:28:00] justify it with logic. But you see a lot of syndicators. They have.

Pictures of buildings on their websites. And then they do these presentations, these webinars to raise money and it’s all numbers and waterfalls and structures and market analysis, and why this and why that, and it really doesn’t tap into the whole reason why people invest in multi-family to begin with, which is all the emotional reason, that time freedom that spending, spending time on the beach and being with your family and.

Being able to have some passive income without working for it and getting that cashflow. So all of those things are very attractive, but when you’re just drowning people with numbers and hypotheticals, I think you’re just a syndicator in the sea of syndicators, right? An investor in the world, large world of other investors and it’s hard to stand out.

So one of the things to do is have enough. Focus explain, find out why people want to invest, tap into their emotional needs, their wants, and really [00:29:00] find out what it is that they’re looking to accomplish through multifamily. And when you can find that out, that stuff, you can see if aligning with you, make sense for them.

And if the cashflow that comes with multifamily and the passive investing or active investing as a partner makes sense. Tap into the emotional needs and really, educate yourself if you want to become active or raise capital. There’s a lot of ways to do it. So on my show, we talk about limited partner capital.

We talk about institutional capital, talk about fund creation. We talk about joint ventures. There’s all these different ways than the first thing I would say is potentially educate yourself. And then once you get educated, the way that you’ll have more successes, if you tap into the emotional needs of the event,

Mike: Yeah.

Interesting. Thank you. So what will you, what are the next steps for baker sin? So if baker sins looking out three years, five years, 10 years, and I always work with people, I say, Hey, you know what? We have to have plans and goals. We have to set those [00:30:00] short-term one-year goals. But where do you see yourself in three years?

Five years, 10 years.

Ruben: Yeah, so we, and interestingly enough, your goals can change along the way. So we started out with a heavy reposition or a heavy lift kind of value add property style, where we were taken down. 75 units in that range and fixing them up, super low vacancy as we restored it and then, fix it and sell it and make a good investor profit, which is one style of investing.

Now we’re moving into larger properties that aren’t quite as heavy lift and then just stabilizing them and keeping them forever. So we’ve gone full cycle on 16 deals. We currently have our 17th deal, 90 units down in Tucson, and that’s their first property that we want to keep forever. So we’re not looking to sell it in three years.

We want to just keep on building that portfolio over the next year. We’d like to acquire a thousand units. It’s a lofty goal. [00:31:00] However, we’re looking to do it. And part of that. Is done through building relationships with other people that can help you scale. And that can be institutions family offices, or in our case, the co-sponsor, which is the partner that, that comes in, brings in some equity and then has some management duties.

So they can stay compliant with the sec regulations. So yeah, 1000 units. And then over the next 10 years, We’d like to get to 10,000 units whether we do that all in Arizona and that’s very unlikely. So we’re know that we’re going to have to scale into some new markets like Texas and maybe the Southeast, but yeah, 10,000 units is the goal and to bring some investors along the way and get them rich and receiving lots of passive income, so it’s going to be a fun journey.

Mike: Great goals. That’s for sure. Lofty. How about personally? How about for you personally? Where do you see your.

Ruben: Personally, over the next year, I’d like to start acquiring assets to the point of accumulating a [00:32:00] $5,000 passive income. So that would be very exciting to me.

And over the next 10 years, I’d like to raise that number to 25,000 and then help a lot of people get rich along the way.

Mike: Okay. All right. Interesting. Good for you. That’s great. What advice today would you give a new investor? And hi, here’s the context I want to look at that in right, is we’re, the world in the last eight months has gone through some changes here and with coal bed and the pandemic, I think eight months ago, six months ago, you would have given a new investor different advice than what you had would give them today coming into the market as a new investor.

Specific advice. You’d give somebody today.

Ruben: Yeah. If you’re transitioning or opening your eyes and moving away from the rollercoaster ride, that is, the stock market and wall street and looking for some ways. Get into real estate, you may start off with a single family kind of mindset. But [00:33:00] my advice, to the beginning investor that wants to scale to get bigger, faster, stronger, is to look into the world of syndication and being either a passive investor or maybe even, start as a passive investor.

If you’re trying to figure out how to actually do the deals yourself. Learn what it’s like have the curtains, pulled back, look into the operations of a company as a passive investor, bigger it out that way. And then basically as you’re learning, you can start moving and getting comfortable with bigger projects that you could actually probably do yourself.

If you align with the right people and, or get a coach or mentor. Which is not always necessary, but it is typically something that the most successful people do and a fast track to hitting your goal. So I’d recommend you to that become a passive investor or. Hire a mentor or get associated with the community of investors or get educated on how to be there, be a passive investor or an active [00:34:00] investor in the multifamily space, which a lot of people see it as the most recession resistant asset class of any real estate class.

So check that out

Mike: And I’m glad you brought that up, that culture, the mentor, because I think it’s really important. Personally, I’ve had a coach for 25 years. And even today, I still have two coaches, a business coach and a development coach. And I think it’s really important in their lives.

Do you have a coaching in your world that coaches you or works with baker Senator?

Ruben: Yeah. So our CEO has hired Darren Hardy and then on the marketing side and development side, I spend time with a group called real estate, a writer that’s run by the people that good egg investments. And they coached me on marketing, avatar creation.

They hold me accountable to certain things. They helped me with the website and marketing, and then they have a personal development coach, Trevor McGregor that comes and speaks to. The other thing, the other types of coaching that I do [00:35:00] is I’m a part of some accountability groups and a capital raising book club where we exchange ideas.

What’s working. What’s not, and that’s very helpful too, is to have a community of people to plug in to that networking, just meeting people.

Mike: Yeah. When you talk about those communities, there’s a group out there called meetup, and I meet up, I run two mastermind groups. One’s on property management and one is that.

Multifamily investing and those groups need on Monday one, one week and one the other week. So twice a month, each group meets, mastermind groups are the, are a great way to get information. And in many cases they’re not, they don’t cost you any money to be involved with. So it’s a great way to start to get that mentoring or that execution or education that, that somebody.

We lack and I’m such an advocate for education because I think we all need to get better by getting smarter, the more we learn, the more we can do. Hey, let’s shift this up a little bit and go to a little lighter [00:36:00] note. You’re out there in the Phoenix market. Let’s talk a little bit about your favorite

tourist

Ruben: attraction.

Let’s see. In Arizona, we’re not too far away where I’m located from. From Sedona, Arizona, which is red rock country. I love going up there. There’s a Creek that runs through town. It’s great place to take your dogs or your family and see some really beautiful scenery. There’s a couple other places that maybe nobody knows about along the grand canyon.

One that particularly stands out and I recommend checking this one. Doing a little Google search on it is called, have a super high falls. It’s like this part of the grand canyon, the entrance to one of the, parts of the grand canyon that has these, this, like almost. It’s like a phosphorous blue kind of shiny water that almost looks like a glows.

Cause it’s still clear and beautiful and there’s all these waterfalls all over the place. So definitely, I would say Sedona have a suit by falls and the grand canyon are a great tourist places that I like here in Arizona. That’s

Mike: awesome. [00:37:00] That blue water, like that sounds really attractive.

Yeah. How about a restaurant, your favorite restaurant, your favorite.

Ruben: So there’s this place that I’ve been going to for the last few years, it’s called via Luna and it’s a Mexican food restaurant and they have this shrimp stuffed chili with all these kinds of Monterey cheeses. And it’s just absolutely delicious.

And my favorite plate that they have there. And then they have a lot of, happy hour specials that are great too. So I liked that place a lot. I think that one’s tops on the list for me right now. Yeah. I love

Mike: Mexican food myself. So think back now in the last six months, most memorable moment that you’ve had in the last six months,

Ruben: you’re talking about professionally or personally, either way you decide.

So let’s see. And the last six months, I think what’s been interesting is the evolution of our company as we were, we just sold the 74 unit and a 75 unit [00:38:00] property, and we’ve transitioned completely to the philosophy. Long-term or what we call legacy investing, or even compound investing where our investors come and do the deal, get their money back in year three, or whenever we refinance, but yet maintain ownership and cashflow into perpetuity with us forever.

So that shift of mindset has been really huge. I think that’s been the most fun part of being around with our group in the last week.

Mike: Nice. I like that word legacy investing. I think that there’s a lot of. A lot of history in that, and we’ll create a lot of history moving forward for you guys. Hey, I’m moving.

I really appreciate you being here today. I really appreciate your candidness and how much information you’ve shared with my listener. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, how do they get ahold of.

Ruben: Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram. My handle is at capital raiser and my favorite communication is via LinkedIn.

So you can find me Ruben Griffith at [00:39:00] LinkedIn, or on LinkedIn better said, or just reach out to me at rubin@bakersin.com or become a, if you want to find out about our deals or our company, it gets ’em updates and join our investor club at bakers.

Mike: Awesome. Any last closing thoughts or comments for the list?

Ruben: Yeah, you can do it. Number one, you can do it to go out there and hustle, do whatever you can to figure out what it is, become aware of what it is I want to accomplish. Get that stuff written down and then go after it. You can do that and multifamily or whatever resonates with you.

Mike: Awesome. Thank you. And again, thanks for being here today. It really has been a pleasure. It’s funny how fast the time went today. It feels like it just buzzed right by.

Ruben: Oh yeah.

Mike: Yeah. But listen, I had a couple of big things that I really picked up from you today, and that was the mindset piece. And we really, investors really need to think about that mindset shift and getting a coach.

Coaching is important. And if you’re looking for a coach, I’d love [00:40:00] to interview for that. But if it’s not me, find somebody to walk you through it and somebody to help you and leave a legacy. But remember, we leave a legacy here every Tuesday on Insider Secrets. We’re here at noon every Tuesday.

I look forward to seeing you all next week. Ruben, it’s been a pleasure. You have a great day and you want to say goodbye to everybody?

Yeah. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that we added some value here. Make sure to tune into Mike’s podcast. This is great stuff, man. Thanks for having me.

Thanks Ruben.

Ruben: You bet.

Kristen: Thank you, Mike, and thank you for joining us for another great episode of Insider Secrets. As always, Insider Secrets is brought to you by My Core Intentions. Join us on social media and visit mycoreintentions.com where you can get expert coaching on all things, multifamily investing in property management.

We’re looking forward to having you back again next week for more Insider Secrets.