Lauren Brychell

[00:00:00] Kristen: Welcome to this edition of insider secrets, the weekly podcast that turns real estate investing goals into reality. Each show we interview guests who are seasoned real estate professionals, actively closing and managing real estate deals. Mike is the founder of my core intentions and would like to help you make your real estate investing dreams a reality.

[00:00:22] Mike coaches you to buy investment real estate, creating short-term cashflow and long-term wealth, your host and real estate coach. Mike Morawski has more than 30 years of real estate investing and property management experience. Here’s your host, Mike.

[00:00:39] Mike Morawski:

[00:00:39] Hey everybody. It’s Mike, your host for Insider Secrets brought to you by My Core Intentions. I’m excited about today, my guest Lauren Brychell is an investor relations associate at Spartan Investment Group. Laura, you want to say hi really quick?

[00:00:54] Lauren Brychell: Hi, nice to see everyone today.

[00:00:55] Mike Morawski: Glad that you’re here, really looking forward to digging into our interview. Before we get started, I always talk to you guys about making sure that you’re intentional about what you’re doing. How’d you start your day? Did you start it with some good solid disciplines? Maybe you worked out, maybe you spent some meditation time or time in scripture. What did you do for yourself to start your day on that right foot? If we are intentional about what we’re trying to accomplish through the day, those little wins continue to build into the big wins. I want to be able to encourage you to continue to do that and live a balanced lifestyle.

[00:01:29] If you are hanging out on social media anywhere, please go follow us, like us, love us, subscribe, all that stuff, anywhere that you hang out you’re going to find us. You’ll find me personally and you’ll find My Core Intensions. You’ll get the most relevant content and you’ll always get the most recent version of Insider Secrets. So let me jump right in and talk about Lauren. Lauren is the investor relations associate for Spartan Investment Group.

[00:01:55] In this role, Lauren brings her skills in marketing and project management to assist the team with investor collateral communications. She’s the go-between the team and the investors, she helps raise capital for projects, investor education. Lauren graduated from Belmont Abbey College with a bachelor’s degree in business management, with a concentration in marketing and a minor in entrepreneurship. I think everybody should go to school for that stuff, it’s interesting. Lauren, welcome, how are you?

[00:02:29] Lauren Brychell: Thank you so much, I am great, thank you for having me on today.

[00:02:32] Mike Morawski: So one question I ask everybody, cause I’m always interested in this answer, but in one word what describes you personally and professionally?

[00:02:41] Lauren Brychell: You know, I’d have to stay passionate. I’m very passionate about my work, I’m very passionate about living the best life that I possibly can every single day. So that would be my word.

[00:02:50] Mike Morawski: Okay, passionate, excellent. So what are you passionate about right now?

[00:02:54] Lauren Brychell: Right now, I am passionate about traveling to as many spots as I can with my boyfriend. We have a couple of exciting trips planned for the month of December and I’m really passionate about the projects that Spartan has going on right now. We’re about to double our portfolio this month and just seeing the growth and the team work together. Everyone exudes a ton of passion and it’s not an easy job. We’re all passionate to get the deals closed and get our investors great returns.

[00:03:22] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Awesome. I can’t wait to dig in a little bit, and, knowing what you come to the table with in marketing, management, and the communications piece. I think those are really important parts when you’re dealing with investors and you’re building a syndication company. Especially you’re at a place right now where you guys are going to double in size, but let’s fill in some gaps for the listeners. How did you get to where you’re at today? How’d you wind up in the crazy real estate business? Cause sometimes I wonder, is there another life?

[00:03:52] Lauren Brychell: Absolutely. So my interest in real estate really started when I was young, we were always moving all over the country. We were always buying new houses, whether it be our primary residence or a fix and flip or a vacation house. They always included me on the process and we always would go see the houses, and I loved going to open houses on Saturday’s. So that’s where it really stemmed from. But from there, when I went into school, I didn’t have a real estate background. I went from marketing and entrepreneurship, as you mentioned and I actually started my career with a tech startup and a CBD oil company, actually. So totally opposite ends from real estate. So I did that for a little bit and I launched a couple of brands with them. So that was really my focus, bringing those brands to market. Then one day I found Spartan Investment Group on LinkedIn and I was looking to move cities.

[00:04:40] I was out in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time, and it just was a perfect match. It was meant to be, I reached out to Spartan and we had a couple of quick interviews and I moved across country within a month. I’ve been with them ever since. They originally did hire me to do their marketing and some branding for our self storage assets and for the corporate side as well. Then from day one, our CIO Ryan was like, you’d be great for investor relations. He’s been training me up for that since I didn’t have the background in finance or capital or anything like that. So for about a year now, I’ve been doing this full time, the IRR side of the business.

[00:05:16] Mike Morawski: So let’s talk about investor relations. What goes into that job today?

[00:05:20] Lauren Brychell: Sure. So anything that is investor facing. The actual raising the capital itself for new projects that we open up, talking to the investors about the offering, explaining it to them, educating them on what internal rate of return is, or bonus depreciation, tax losses, anything like that. Hosting investor events, we do a ton of events all over the country. Just so that we can meet investors face to face, that really helps us get to know them and vice versa. And then of course, conferences, other educational materials, communications. Literally anything that goes with any investor is what we do

[00:05:53] Mike Morawski: Wow, so did you know all this before you came in the business?

[00:05:57] Lauren Brychell: I didn’t know any of it. Ryan was really my teacher for two years now, he’s been telling me everything. Every part of it, I’ve been going in doing some external classes and masterminds and did a financial management course through Cornell. So I’ve been educating internally and externally.

[00:06:14] Mike Morawski: Wow, interesting, good for you. When you are dealing with investors, what are some of the big things that you’re seeing in an investor’s mind today? When they’re looking at investing money in a syndication?

[00:06:26] Lauren Brychell: Sure. There’s a couple of different types of investors that we see often. One would be the person that is nervous about what the stock market’s going to do. They’re looking for cashflow and they’re looking for a safer investment to place their money in so they can retire someday. So they’re pulling money out of stock market looking for passive real estate, something hard, something tangible. Then another type of investor that we see a lot is our single family investor, multifamily investor who manages their own assets and they’re tired of the calls in the middle of the night. The toilet’s breaking the craziness that comes along with that and they’re just looking to park their money somewhere where they can expect to see good returns and not have to do anything for them.

[00:07:07] Mike Morawski: It’s interesting. I’ve been in the real estate business for about 30 years and I syndicated several thousand units, 10 years ago. We had a woman who worked for us in our office that, pretty much the same job you have, investor relations. I’m of the opinion and correct me if I’m wrong, but back then she really had to do a lot of hand holding and communication with those investors, is it still that intense today? Or do you see a difference because of technology platforms like SyndicationPro or InvestNext out there, are you seeing a difference? Is it bringing ease around the business today?

[00:07:43] Lauren Brychell: Absolutely. I think there is a little bit of hand-holding and education piece to investors who are just getting started in syndication, which is absolutely okay. I think it’s a lot easier in today’s world because there’s YouTube, there’s all kinds of conferences focused around syndication, it’s a lot more known in the world today. I would say.

[00:08:00] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Interesting. Do you find a higher level of reception from an investor today? Or is it about the same that it’s been for the last few years? I see some shades of 2007, 2008, and I have to wonder, are we going to stay strong or is there going to be a fallout?

[00:08:19] Lauren Brychell: I definitely think that there’s a lot more reception, especially in self storage. So self storage is a pretty recession resistant asset class. Absolutely people are projecting it going to be a 2007, 2008 where at least the single family market crashes. So people are a lot more receptive to storage as, people need it in economic booms and busts so it seems like a no-brainer.

[00:08:40] Mike Morawski: Give some idea or context around cap rates in the self storage space. I underwrote a deal this morning in Florida, very high rent growth property, downtown St. Petersburg, close to the beach, a two and a half cap. I was dying when things were at a five, thinking it can’t get any worse than this and we’re at a two and a half, so where are you seeing cap rates at today?

[00:09:04] Lauren Brychell: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, an exit strategy for us would be to sell a portfolio of about 250 million of classic class B assets for a high fours, low fives cap rate. Buying wise, I’d have to go back and look at what we’re buying these days. I’ve seen, maybe some six numbers, some five numbers. There definitely some cap rate compression going on.

[00:09:22] Mike Morawski: That’s interesting. Does it worry your principals?

[00:09:25] Lauren Brychell: Not too much. From self storage perspective, it’s decently stable. There is a little bit of compression going on, but we’re still able to find great deals and underwrite them really conservatively and still provide our investors great returns.

[00:09:37] Mike Morawski: I really want my listeners to pay attention here because you’re somebody who came into this business and just really like adapted. A lot of times I find people that are hesitant or fearful about taking that leap forward and you were just willing to say, “hey you know what, let’s go try it.” What kind of encouragement might you give other investors around that?

[00:09:58] Lauren Brychell: I would definitely say that if it’s something that you want to do and you want to set your mind to it, then you can go for it. Of course it is scary to learn something completely new and totally different than what you’re doing. This is definitely more finance heavy than what I was doing in marketing and that was very scary for me. But just educating yourself as much as possible, using your teammates, leveraging their knowledge, reading as many books as you can, listening to podcasts, and eventually you’ll start being okay with it and feeling comfortable and confident in what you’re doing. That’d be my advice, truly believe you can do it and set your mind to it.

[00:10:32] Mike Morawski: I think that’s great advice too. I think it starts with that belief system and then taking action. A lot of times it helps to have a mentor or coach in your pocket, giving you that encouragement, helping you along, giving direction, and then holding you accountable. I know over the years it’s worked for me really well. Before the show, we talked a little bit about marketing and how important that is. I’ve always been of the opinion that whatever business you’re in, marketing is such a key point because I believe, as a real estate agent, as an investor, as an investment firm, as a syndication firm, that we have to do marketing and a lot of it. So talk about that at Spartan?

[00:11:08] Lauren Brychell: Yeah. I absolutely think that marketing these days and social media will make or break you. So it’s very important to have consistent marketing, consistent branding and have a post go out every day. You need to stay relevant in people’s minds. Having posts that add value to people, not just something silly, but something that people will actually take and say, wow, I learned something today. That being said, one of the big projects I worked on at Spartan was creating our national brand free up storage. So we had each facility branded as a mom and pop, or just a different name.

[00:11:40] We would decide to consolidate our whole portfolio into one brand. I think that’s really set us apart for sellers, brokers, et cetera. Just to have 28 properties in Texas, that’s a huge brand for 28 free up facilities to be in that area. Then you really become recognizable. For our corporate marketing, we post people pics a lot, our investors and brokers love to see that there are faces behind the business. So that’s something that set us apart a lot in winning deals is having our team out there doing fun things. People recognize that and they’re like, Hey, this looks like a great team and they’re not just a bunch of people that don’t care about their employees, et cetera. That reputation has really set us apart as well.

[00:12:19] Mike Morawski: When you talk about social media, you say post once a day. Is that what you guys do? Is it specifically about the business or is it personal? How do how do you use those platforms?

[00:12:29] Lauren Brychell: So we post once a day for our corporate accounts just to update our investors or potential investors on closings, new offerings, team happenings, et cetera.

[00:12:40] Mike Morawski: Do you get much draw from the social media or do you think it’s just branding?

[00:12:44] Lauren Brychell: I think a little bit of both we’ve gotten some great feedback on people that have decided to invest with us after watching us on LinkedIn for a year, just because of the posts that we’ve been putting out. They feel like they know us and they can like us and trust us a little bit better with the social media that we are pushing out.

[00:13:00] Mike Morawski: Do you or the principals do any more personal type of social media marketing also? Is that stepped up at all?

[00:13:07] Lauren Brychell: Absolutely. Our principals do a lot of marketing. Anytime that an article is written or when you’re on a podcast or anything like that, they’re pushing out on their social media personally as well.

[00:13:16] Mike Morawski: I’m a big Gary V subscriber, I listen to a lot of what he says, and I just believe that there’s a lot of merit to what he teaches and using the platforms. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity out there. When I first started raising capital, there was no social media, I put a little ad for $45 in the classified sections of a newspaper. My phone rang off the hook, I wound up raising a little over $500,000 from that $45 ad over the course of about eight months.

[00:13:46] Lauren Brychell: That’s awesome.

[00:13:47] Mike Morawski: I think we have more opportunity today to reach more people. Do use LinkedIn a lot? Do you use LinkedIn for outreach and for meeting people?

[00:13:55] Lauren Brychell: Yes and no. We definitely post on LinkedIn a lot and we do get a lot of DM’s on LinkedIn, but honestly we’re lucky at this point that most of our potential investors come right to us. We don’t spend a ton of our time doing cold outreach, which is great. That might change down the road but right now we run a Facebook ad for lead sources and we get a ton of leads off of Facebook that we reach out to, a ton of leads off of our website. So LinkedIn is something that we’re looking at starting a lead generation ad on that platform as well. They’re all great platforms in their own way for their own special purposes.

[00:14:28] Mike Morawski: Interesting, do you raise capital yourself?

[00:14:32] Lauren Brychell: Yes. I would say the majority of my job is to raise capital for offerings that go out. So all of the communications and the social media and marketing are really secondary to my main job role.

[00:14:43] Mike Morawski: So what are some ways that you work on raising capital today?

[00:14:47] Lauren Brychell: The biggest chunk of my time is spent with new investor intake calls that schedule directly on my calendar. That kind of lays out my day, and then from there finding local meetups in the area that I attend for passive investors, going to conferences, going to events, things like that. Really, I like the face-to-face stuff. I think that investors can know and trust you, which is the model that we really like to talk about better when you meet them in person. It’s not just someone calling over the phone who lives across country and they’re like, sure, here’s a hundred thousand dollars. So I focus on trying to meet people in person and go from there.

[00:15:20] Mike Morawski: Do you do you spend a lot of time on the road traveling around?

[00:15:22] Lauren Brychell: Yes, I feel like I pretty much travel every week. I was just in Atlanta last week and then headed up to Seattle next week.

[00:15:29] Mike Morawski: Cool. One of the things you said is you do events around the country and I wanted to circle back to that. Do you drop into a city and put on a small event and what does that event look like?

[00:15:40] Lauren Brychell: Yes. Couple different types of events that we do, we do happy hours. So we’ll go and rent a space and invite whoever would like to come. We go to specific cities where we do have a lot of investors, so we can invite them and meet them in person. Then as well, we invite potential investors or people just looking to learn more about real estate. So we’ll go and have a happy hour in a centralized location or we’ll invite people to one of our properties and give them a property tour of, “Hey, here’s this self storage facility, we just bought it. Here’s what kind of updates we’re doing, we’re going to expand over there.” Or we’ll invite them when it’s done so they can see what we do and where the money goes if they were to invest. Those are really popular events.

[00:16:17] Mike Morawski: Pretty interesting because it really correlates with something I used to do, which was I had a conference room in the office that I was in, it would sit about 20 people. I marketed my database and continually built my database off a new potential investors and marketed that database. I was teaching people how to invest in real estate and I’d invite them to a seminar, I’d give them Gary Keller’s book, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor and then I would say, oh, by the way, we have this offering at the end of that seminar. I did that for two years on like Tuesday and Thursday night for 18 months. Interesting how your investor base can really build, and it becomes a pretty solid foundation. I like the way that you do that. So if you were to drop into Chicago and you were coming to town, do you specifically know people here or in that town you’re going to, or are you outreaching on social media to attract attention?

[00:17:15] Lauren Brychell: Both. So we pull from our investor database, people who have either talked to us once or have filled out an intake to express their interest to those types of people and our current investors. So we pull a database, we invite them personally, and then we also reach out to maybe other meetup groups in the area that could be interested in coming. We also post an event on Facebook and meetup.com so that people in the area can search us and feel us out from that way.

[00:17:41] Mike Morawski: Yeah. That’s interesting. I think a lot of people forget about meetup. I think meetups a huge platform. I have two meet up groups that sit out there that I haven’t run one in over a year, people still go and register. It’s a great way to meet people, I always wind up having conversations with people from there. We don’t want to glamorize it and say it’s always easy and stress-free. There are situations and times, like when we get down to the end and go, “oh my God, I’m 100,000 short or 200,000 short for this race. What am I going to do?” How do you handle high-stress situations in your life?

[00:18:13] Lauren Brychell: Sure. With our CEO being technically in the military reserves and army reserves, so we’re very process-based, we are very checklist driven. When we have a high stress situation, we all come together, we sit down and we say, okay, what do we need to do? What are the facts? Let’s not make any emotional decisions. Let’s go one by one and figure out what we need to do to get this done. So our team is really great at war gaming. If we are $100,000 short for closing, whatever it may be, we’re just great at coming together as a team, figuring it out, coming up with a solution that is not emotion-based and executing.

[00:18:47] Mike Morawski: I make posts like this on social media, it’s about the strength in the team. If you can let people understand what’s important about the team and putting it together. There was a time that you didn’t put teams together to do these deals, you did them all yourself as a company or your own organization. Now you bring teams of people together, and I find there’s almost a synergy behind it, but it really helps things go a lot smoother when you’ve got a strong team.

[00:19:14] Lauren Brychell: A lot of our investors, I will say they trust us as a team and it’s not about the deal for our repeat investors, it’s just about us. They’re investing in us, Spartan as a team because they know we can get it done. They know that not every real estate transaction is going to go a hundred percent smoothly, but it’s about how we can bounce back from the things that don’t go as planned.

[00:19:34] Mike Morawski: Yeah, there’s that big trust factor and you build it over time. It doesn’t happen overnight. People say, how do I go do this business? I say, you have to start today building relationships where people know and trust you. That’s how it comes together. How about technology? I always love to find out what type of technology you use, what are your two or three best systems or platforms?

[00:19:55] Lauren Brychell: I would say our investor database system, which we use IMS, has really set us apart from when we didn’t use it. We can do automatic reporting, it’s really easy for people to invest right through our dashboard. See all of the offering documents in one spot. That has really taken us to the next level and made life a lot easier for tax season, et cetera. So I would definitely recommend getting a great investor database. Another system that we use that makes social media and marketing easier is we use HubSpot for all the social media campaigns, scheduling them out in advance, making sure they’re going out at the proper times for best engagement. So I would say a tool like that is really important. For our deals specifically, we use all sorts of systems that honestly, I can’t even remember the name of, but just a lot of databases that we use to make sure that the markets that we’re going into have demand for storage, they’re not too saturated. We look at job growth, population growth, all of those stats. Before we even put a deal under official contract because we have a hundred percent contract to close ratio. So we’d go in and make sure the deal is feasible before we can put under contract just so we don’t waste anybody’s time.

[00:21:03] Mike Morawski: Yeah. Nice. That’s a whole due diligence piece, that just makes things work a lot easier. Where do you see the market headed right now?

[00:21:12] Lauren Brychell: Self storage specifically, it’s a really hot market. It’s growing in demand and also in saturation in specific areas. So I would say going forward is definitely gonna become more saturated, but there are still good deals to be had and great places to buy. Of course, secondary and tertiary markets, which is where we focus, still have that demand for storage. In the areas that we’re looking, we look at population growth and job growth and new developments and master plans going in. So it’s pretty easy to tell which market needs storage, where people are moving. I would say self storage is going to continue to be really popular and people always need storage. As I mentioned earlier, the stock market, we’re probably going to see a correction, at least that’s what people are saying. People are definitely pulling money out of there and putting into tangible assets.

[00:21:56] Mike Morawski: With your background in finance, I’m sure that you had some econ in there and any personal opinion, do you think we’re going to see a crash?

[00:22:05] Lauren Brychell: I think we’re definitely going to see something. I don’t know if it’s going to be a full crash. Things are going to have to change, I just don’t think it can keep going at this pace, housing market, stock market, et cetera.

[00:22:14] Mike Morawski: I’ve been at this a while, seen a few recessions, a few ups and downs, kinda lost the boat in 2008, 09, 10 when the world crashed. I’m a bit gun shy, but yet not enough to not move forward. I think people should still move forward, still invest because as interest rates go up and inflation sets in, as they continue to try and figure out supply chain constraints and things like that. How are you going to hedge yourself against inflation? I think self storage, multifamily, those buckets are good places to be. This show’s called Insider Secrets, so any good secrets tips, strategies that you’d give a new investor or somebody maybe thinking about going into the self storage space?

[00:22:57] Lauren Brychell: Yeah, absolutely. My biggest insider secret, which a lot of people surprisingly don’t know about, are the tax advantages of investing real estate. So understanding the loopholes, understanding what you can use to your advantage. For example, bonus depreciation, getting those losses off of just investing in a self storage facility or multi-family facility. Being able to offer offset your either income if you’re a real estate professional or just the gains on those distributions, if you’re not. So just using those tax breaks to your advantage and having a great CPA who understands how to use them as well. It’s a huge secret that a lot of people don’t know about.

[00:23:32] Mike Morawski: Boy, that’s really good advice. I always say that depreciation is a gift from the government. You might as well take a gift from the government because they don’t give many. It’s always amazing how property values go up, but they depreciate or they say it went down and there’s that factor in between that works. Let’s shift gears a little bit, take a little time and have a little fun. You seem like you travel a lot, so this’ll be good. What’s the best tourist attraction you you’ve ever seen?

[00:23:57] Lauren Brychell: Ever seen, goodness that’s a tough one. I do love Rocky Mountain National Park, right out in my backyard here in Colorado. It is absolutely gorgeous. Arches National Park in Moab, Utah is also quite incredible. I love hiking and going out into nature so all the national parks are just fabulous in my opinion.

[00:24:17] Mike Morawski: Wow. Cool. Best hike you’ve ever taken? I love this.

[00:24:20] Lauren Brychell: So there is one in Rocky Mountain National Park that goes to a place called Dream Lake and it truly is dreamy. It’s not a hard hike, but you go out to this clear blue lake, and there are just gorgeous, straight up mountains that are snow covered right in the back. It’s quite cool. Also, Lake Tahoe is a fabulous place to go hiking and the views are just incredible.

[00:24:41] Mike Morawski: Got to make some great Instagram posts.

[00:24:44] Lauren Brychell: Absolutely.

[00:24:46] Mike Morawski: How about the best book you’ve ever read?

[00:24:48] Lauren Brychell: Best book. Oh gosh. I just finished reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, and I thought that had some great insights into sales. Since I didn’t really come from a sales background, I thought that was a great book. Of course, Rich Dad Poor Dad, the book that everyone reads to get into real estate. I think that’s a great one as well.

[00:25:07] Mike Morawski: How about best restaurant?

[00:25:09] Lauren Brychell: That’s a tough one. I couldn’t choose, I thought about this all morning and that’s my thing, I’m a foodie. I will travel to cities just to eat at specific restaurants, so I can’t just choose one.

[00:25:21] Mike Morawski: Wow, that’s pretty cool. I think if I had to pick a best restaurant, it’s still Javier’s in Orange County in Newport beach. Have to check it out, pretty interesting. You like to hike, I like to golf. If I was going to golf, I always say there’s nothing better than a bad day on Half Moon Bay.

[00:25:40] Lauren Brychell: That’s true. I actually, I played golf in college. So also a big golfer. I played there and I grew up in Ponte beach, Florida at TPC Sawgrass. That’s my home course, so spoiled.

[00:25:50] Mike Morawski: Both my two youngest kids are avid golfers. My son will probably get some kind of a scholarship here in the next year or so but they are really avid golfers and love it. Listen, thanks for being here, I appreciate it. Any last thoughts or comments for people?

[00:26:03] Lauren Brychell: Yeah, I would just say, learn as much as you can. Passive income is a great tool to retire early and not have to work as hard, so might as well learn about it, right?

[00:26:14] Mike Morawski: Absolutely. How do people get ahold of you, Lauren, if they want to talk to you about self storage, about investing with Spartan?

[00:26:22] Lauren Brychell: Best way to reach me is my email, which is lauren@spartan-investors.com.

[00:26:29] Mike Morawski: We’ll have all that in the show notes for everybody. Thanks for being here, Lauren. I really appreciate it, I appreciate your insight and your knowledge. Thank you.

[00:26:36] Lauren Brychell: Absolutely. Thank you Mike, for having me.

[00:26:38] Mike Morawski: Listeners, have a great week. We’ll be back here every week. Always remember, you can tell Alexa to play the most current version of Insider Secrets.