Sign Maine Banking Lease Template Mobile

Industry sign banking maine lease template mobile

hey everybody welcome to this episode of tech guys who invest we're so excited to have ryan murdock on this episode ryan thanks for coming on the show hey guys thanks for having me man this is going to be a good time well ryan we're going to jump right in and we wanted to ask you why open door capital focuses specifically on mobile home parks we could probably take up the entire show just with that answer but i'll try to condense them as much as we can we like mobile home parks although there's many great asset classes we could have picked and gone with we felt the the real need to just pick one thing and be very good at it instead of getting distracted like i certainly tend to do i know brandon turner tends to do like we all tend to do right so right we picked mobile home parks really because we feel that they're as recession resistant and asset as as you can get and that was tested pretty quickly uh during this whole covet thing where um you know we've had nearly 100 rent collections through through all of kobit uh certainly remains to be seen you know what the next few months spring but so far we've done really well with it so with it being workforce housing and typically low-income housing there always seems to be a need for that during a good economy bad economy no matter what's going on like there's always a need for for workforce housing so we like that aspect of it the other thing that we really like about it is the opportunity for value add so unlike apartments or any other sort of you know whether it be commercial or retail to add value to a mobile home park our target park typically is 60 to 70 occupied so we buy them generally on uh current cash flow and current value but we know that if we buy a hundred lot park that is a you know has 70 lots that are occupied we have another 30 lots that we can fill through uh either we'll have tenants who will bring their own homes in and set them up or what's more likely and happens at a quicker scale is we'll buy homes bring them in set them up and then sell them off to to tenant buyers so during that process if we spend fifteen or twenty thousand dollars to bring in a home and set it up and we sell it even for a break even like we're not looking to make any money on the sale of the home or even if we take a small loss on the sale of the home we've activated a lot that is bringing in you know three to four hundred dollars a month in lot rent that was not otherwise activated so it's it's different from an apartment in a sense where if you if you're going to add value to an apartment you have to go in and renovate you have to spend money to renovate and it's typically not a break-even process when it's all said and done yes you'll be able to raise the rent it adds value overall and it's a good thing but with mobile home products we can add value really for a net zero cost that makes sense yeah yeah no that's that's really neat um what are what are some misconceptions about mobile home parks uh they just tend to be the laughingstock i think of the industry and myself included i mean i was as guilty as that like you know just growing up and and i didn't live in a mobile home park but i had friends that did or we'd drive through there's always cracking jokes about the trailer park or a huge fan of you know trailer park boys that series like that's i mean that's a riot right it's fun stuff but it's very stereotypical so uh what we found is that i mean there's always an element of that and i i've managed apartments for years i've managed everything and there's always there's always that kind of low end joking element anytime you've got tenants involved period but uh you know that what we found with mobile home parks is that's that's not the norm i mean there's sure have we have a fantastic tenant base in our mobile home parks overall we see a a tremendous pride of ownership in in the parks that we have where as you know the the tenants own their home so there's there's a real pride of ownership there that you don't see in apartments and you don't see in other asset classes where the you know the tenants are doing their own repairs and maintenance they've they own their home they've lived there for years they've got you know emotional attachment they're they're they're working to beautify it either through renovating or landscaping or you know they've really got that their pride of ownership that i've never seen in in any other asset class so uh it's it's you know the reality is certainly different from from from the reputation most times and there's still you know there's still a little bit of it you got to keep things interesting we got to keep the good stories rolling around the office so yeah there there are some stereotypical things that happen but we i've seen that in in every asset class sure yeah exactly you see that everywhere no that's interesting about the how the reality is a little different than the stigma how would you you know for people who don't know that some people are probably curious just how you might describe a lot of the residents or like what you know what what they're like uh in terms of just like you know how i don't know i guess but it's not what you'd think there right it sounds like they're just probably hard-working regular people right that's that's typically what it is and i mean just especially in the past two and a half weeks i had to do on-site due diligence at three parks that we have under contract and anytime i do due diligence i'm always touring area parks because once we're in one location we might as well try and buy other surrounding parks because we're already there so i've toured i mean hundreds of parks in my lifetime but 33 specifically in the past two weeks driving through doing videos you know doing some pretty pretty good research and across the board i mean it is exactly what you said it's typically the you know the sort of blue collar hard-working uh you know they they mean well usually it's a you know they've got a couple kids and then and both parents work i mean it's it's really that that segment of the population it's worth workforce housing uh there's also a pretty good segment of of retirees so um maybe older folks who have downsized you know their kids are gone they don't want to take care of the upkeep of a full-size house and they're happy just just living in a mobile home it's a lot easier to maintain in in florida where you've got to park under contract you have uh even some snowbirds maybe they they spend their summers up north somewhere and then they come down to florida just for the winter so uh you know there's a there's a pretty good cross-section of the population but they're all they're all good people that's good that's great to know thank you for sharing that and breaking that misconception uh you mentioned this a little bit earlier when you were talking about that mobile home parks you can kind of value add with a net zero expense what other ways does does it set itself apart from other asset classes in real estate well it will go back to the to the uh the the pride of ownership and the tenants owning the home so our our our target for all of our parks and it's rarely how we acquire them but our target is to have zero park owned homes so the the goal is to have all the tenants own their own homes which means they're taking care of all of their own repairs maintenance anything that happens on like in the outside of the inside of the home itself they're responsible for so it's it's different in a sense from with an apartment the owner is responsible for all the maintenance all the interior things like you know if the toilet's leaking or something breaks as a manager a property owner would get the call and have to go and fix it with it with a mobile home uh mobile home park you don't have any of those calls so it's a lot less management intensive and and typically your your operating costs are a lot lower because once once we get a part to where it's stabilized and all the homes are owned by the tenant they're just renting the lots all we're really responsible for you know the the infrastructure with the water lines the sewer lines the roads any common area maintenance you know mowing or snow removal but as far as any of the the nickel and dime stuff with the homes we don't we don't involve ourselves with any of that so it's completely different than apartments okay and that last piece you mentioned kind of segues into the next question i want to ask you around due diligence i mean what kind of things do you look for when you're doing due diligence on a mobile home park well there's there's there's two elements of it you've got the we call it the off-site due diligence so we're reviewing all the financials and we're doing a lease audit and the same thing that you would with an apartment or any other investment property you want to make sure that the numbers that you that we've underwritten the deal on and that we presume are correct are are actually correct so we're looking all the utility bills all the leases we want to get a handle on what the impact is going to be on the property taxes if they're going to increase you know based on the sale of property all of that stuff so we do all that before we dive in and do what is then the on-site due diligence so similar to anything else you buy you want to make sure what you're buying is physically sound or at least that there's there's no surprises so with the mobile home park there's usually very few things to actually look at in terms of structures you might have a park office or maybe there's a stick built home or garage that maybe the manager lives in but 99 of it is all infrastructure related to the park itself so we're doing uh sewer line inspections so we have a plumber come in and send a camera down the sewer lines we want to make sure that that's in good shape we'll have an electrician check out all of the generally the utility lines and utility poles contained within the park or the park's responsibility so the utility provider is not servicing those we want to get a handle on the condition and age of those things and then the electrical service meters that are the entrances that that service every single lot we want to make sure and confirm what kind of shape those are in if they're good to go as is or if they're all going to need to be upgraded uh so it's all it's all infrastructure related type of things for the most part okay makes sense so i just realized we kind of um can we take a step back and you were talking about zero percent or zero percent park owned homes can you break down just a little bit more about the structure of owning or the business of owning a mobile home park like how does that work i just realized we didn't kind of dive into that yet yeah i guess i i don't quite understand your question so it's like i i there's a there's a part of it where you're talking about it sounds like the mobile home park can own the mobile home but then there's also the part where the the the owner would own the park and i'm just trying to understand how the pieces work together yeah so it it varies by by market really there are some areas and it's mostly it's mostly smaller operators in areas where maybe the lot rent is just too low to really be sustainable so they they like to own the homes and and renting the homes themselves is a profit center for them and again you see it a lot with smaller operators maybe like you know mom and pop on site that he's doing all the maintenance and that type of stuff but the the industry as a whole for the larger operators they really don't want to deal with with any of the parkour homes so we're just trying to get it to to lot rent only and the real driving force for that outside of just the maintenance issues and the overall management is the lending environment right now banks don't like to lend on on mobile homes because they are not considered real estate they're more like personal property like you know a car or a boat or you know personal property so when we're going after and valuing a mobile home park at least from a lending perspective all the the only income that they're really considering is the lot rent income so we'll see some disparity in a park that has a high number of park owned homes which is generating uh the lot rent plus the rent money for the actual home themselves and the seller will value the part based on on all of that income but when we look at it knowing that the bank is going to just come in and chop off all of the income generated from the rental portion of just the homes there can be there can be a huge gap there so the seller might think that hey i want to sell this for three million dollars based on my numbers and he's not wrong because it's actual money and you know it's it's real money but for us as buyers when we know the bank's going to look at they're going to remove all that that rental income now they're just going to value it based on on the lot rent uh the seller's 3 million dollar ask it may be where we're at you know 1.8 million because we're just looking at lot rent so there's there's a few reasons we want to get out of that park on home business and those are those are the two big ones that is interesting i am curious how that works out in negotiations yeah you know a lot of times so like i mean the seller the seller's in a bind and that's why you see in this industry there's a lot of seller financing it's to bridge that gap so you might have a lot of parking homes there's real money coming in and you can justify paying the price but the bank won't lend on it so the seller hopefully will will will either finance the the entire park or maybe they'll just they'll they'll take a second mortgage just to kind of cover that gap or us us as buyers we have to come to the table with a lot more cash because we're only borrowing say you know a 50 ltv which in most most cases we can't justify it doesn't doesn't check all our boxes so we have to pass on those deals and there's some great deals out there we've just you know quote unquote deals that work but they don't work for us so we've had to have to pass on okay makes makes sense so we've talked about the assets i i'd love to talk a little bit about odc fund and why a fund when and how did you get to that like what made you think hey let's do the fun then that would be a great way to do this can you just share a little bit of that yeah i think anybody that's done a syndication or a fund it's just a it's a mechanism to scale right i mean it's it's a way that any one person or any small group of people can can partner with other people and and scale and that's the key to this entire business right i mean anybody that really wants to scale you've got to bring in partners or at least that's that's my experience is all i think there's six of us now in the general partnership and and all of us together are very successful in our in our own fields in our own right in our own investing but together as a group we have achieved uh goals and and and been able to acquire property at a rate that none of us would have been able to achieve independently and our investors in our fund are a part of that and these are typically people that uh you know they want they're all walks of life but most of them uh the typical investor profile it's a it's it's somebody who has uh generally a very good day job or they're making very good money doing whatever it is that they do uh maybe they like it maybe they hate it but they're making good money and and it's it's a mechanism for them to do something with that money so a lot of these guys maybe uh want to be in the real estate game they're they're interested in investing but they either don't want to or they just simply don't have the time or the knowledge or the ambition to roll up their sleeves and dive into an investment so this is this is a more passive way for them to be involved and to invest in real estate and i would i would you know say that to anybody i know when i got i was i was in the tech industry for for 10 years and just was itching for a way to get out like i really wanted wanted to get out and pretty much just burn the ships quit and got into real estate investing but that's not that's not the route everybody should take f you have a job that you like and you're making great money like excel at that thing and make as much money as you can and if you want to turn around and take your earnings from that and invest it in something else what they're saying stocks or real estate or any other thing that you're into like focus on what you're good at make your money there and then turn around and invest with people that that that can handle what what you what you can't so it's it's just they're just an integral part of the team i mean any team you have to bring in people that offset the skills or the knowledge or whatever it is that you're lacking so for open door capital we have the network we have the know-how we have the deals and our our partners for that are the people that don't have any of that but they have money that they want the best so it's a great fit i love that you mentioned the good stuff in there that the idea that if you love your job or if you if you're good at it just continue to do that to invest in real estate you don't have to be an active investor you can be a passive investor and still reap the benefits of investing in an asset class like mobile home parks that is a fantastic advice for our listeners out there so we want to touch on on your investing journey you mentioned in the past you you've managed properties and now you're doing mobile home parks we'd love to hear a bit more about how you got the how you started and kind of how you ended up managing a uh fund that's sure thing so i was in like i mentioned i was in electronics manufacturing for about 10 years and lived all over the world and and uh lived in singapore for a year went to hong kong for a year and if i was going to sign on for another year i was going to have to go to shanghai i visited shanghai i didn't want to live there for a year it was really just kind of getting burned out on that whole industry uh so i said hey why not start investing in real estate i didn't know anything about it uh but just read some books and said yeah i can do this and came back from maine originally moved moved back from asia moved to maine bought a duplex where i house hacked that really no idea what i was doing but lived in one side rented out the other uh inherited some bad tenants and had some troubles there but learned a lot and what i learned more than anything is hey this you know receiving rent's pretty cool there's a bunch of other headaches that go with it but like i think i can pull this off so i slowly but surely built out my portfolio uh around the same time i got my real estate broker's license real estate agent license and started a property management company which i built to i think i was managing roughly 200 or so units um grew that to the point where i was able to uh long story short it was it was i'd done that for about five years and was just really getting burned out neither he needed to make some changes he needed to hire some people to help me or do something different and i ended up going to work for a larger property management company in in my same town they had all the stuff i was lacking they had administrative help and they had payroll handyman so i brought my book of business went to work for them uh to which they were thrilled to have me because i had at that point plenty of experience and was becoming pretty much self-funded as i brought a bunch of business with me um so together we managed i think it was 1500 or so units and i did that for another five years and part of part of working with them was i was managing a lot of mobile home parks so i really cut my teeth on uh mobile home park management there and spent a lot of time down in the trenches of just you know whatever nasty disgusting on-site you know turnaround projects and and just dealing with you know all kinds of stuff so uh really got some experience there and it was it was in 2018 when uh brandon turner from from bigger pockets uh had kind of put out a shout out that he was looking for a mobile home park and he had cited his criteria and what he was looking for and i happened to find a park local to me that fit his criteria uh sent him the details on it and he liked it came out we did some due diligence and a month later we closed so that kind of started my relationship with brandon that park uh was was almost sort of like a test bed it was a smaller park 50 lots but uh same same sort of idea where we're you know it came with quite a few vacant lots we're able to do some infill increase the value uh everything went went really well and and it was uh later in 2018 that i actually moved out to maui to come and help him uh with some bigger pocket stuff and and and really to kind of get open door capital kicked off so uh that's a very condensed version of 10 or 12 years but uh yeah it's been it's been a crazy ride it's fantastic it's it's inspiring as well and uh to think you went from a duplex to pushing a thousand pads i don't know if that's where you are now but i know you guys are headed that way yeah yeah we've got i think 600 600 so opener capital in its current form is going on about a year and a half now like i said all the general partners have a decade plus experience we've got several thousand apartment doors uh individually if you combine us all but open door capital in its current form has been going for about a year and a half we've got 600 or 600 or so lots uh under ownership right now and a bunch of stuff under contract if we close on everything that we have uh under contract right now and there's always a chance some of that could fall out but if we close on everything within the next say 60 days we'll be up around 1500 lots and it'll be pushing 40 million in in acquisition since since the beginning so impressive yeah it's been it's been a real ride for sure i have to ask you how you push through fear i mean that has to you know probably the the duplex you did was scarier than the 600 units you're doing now right but how did you push through that i mean everything i think is always scary to some some degree if you've never done it before and it's just you know just putting putting one foot in front of the other and it's it i'm reminded of that every day like for example yesterday was a great example where i had to fill out an insurance application and i hate those there's nothing that makes me want to throw myself off a building than having to fill out an insurance application they come in the email i'm just like oh my god there's always a list of questions and i dread them and i get this just it feels like i get punched in the stomach i hate them all right i hate them but i print the thing out and you look at it and it's just one question at a time just all right what's the question go find the info put it down what's the next question put it down and like six and a half minutes later this is done right it's not a big deal it's not a big deal but when i look at it as silly as it is i look at that one application i'm like oh my goodness i quit but six and a half minutes later i'm out of the woods so it's the same thing on any scale where just break it down one step at a time get through it and once you're done i mean i don't know about anybody else but anytime i've battled through anything like that that i was afraid of that i was overwhelmed with that i just didn't think that you know oh my god this is the end of the world i'm done i've gotten through it every single time and then the next time it has happened it's way easier to deal with right so we just keep just keep keep going that's fantastic on that since we're talking about you know that the personal growth aspect you talk about focus earlier and uh what's what's crazy is and and awesome at the same time with real estate is how many different ways that you can make money but the problem with that is it's so easy to succumb to the shiny object syndrome yeah and you hear mobile home parks you hear multi-family hearing no investing how do you recommend somebody kind of hone in on what they want to to focus on yeah it can be really tough to start out and like i had mentioned i pretty much just quit my day job and said i'm going to do this i'm going to make real estate work and to make that happen i really had to hustle and diversify and i think anybody else would have to do the same thing so i had excuse me i had uh you know a small number of rental doors i had my real estate license i had my management company so i was doing a bunch of different things but they all kind of centered around the one goal which was to build a build a rental portfolio okay so um i i had it was somewhat of shiny object syndrome but it was more out of necessity that i had to start all these different streams of income so i think that's that's that's different for for everybody and you have to you have to figure out you know especially if you have a day job like when is the right time to quit can you can you ease into it and build up but the real thing is you've got to find something that you like and that you're good at so shiny object syndrome is is not necessarily bad as long as you can manage all of the things that you're doing as soon as you get to the point where you've just spread out two things too thin and you're starting to fail at everything because you just you just you just spread too thin that that's a problem and that's what we've certainly tried to avoid at open door capital and that's why we're focused now solely on mobile home parks we get deals all the time presented to us that are great for parking lots or strip malls or apartments or like great stuff but we know that okay we we don't even want to veer off track and start to get spread too thin it's we're solely focused on mobile home parks and and and that's it so it you know i guess in short it depends on your situation makes sense so ryan kevin and i talk a lot about the importance of a strong network and and how important your network is and you mentioned earlier uh how you're part of bigger pockets and and friends with a lot of those guys as well and you and brandon even got together and and did this odc fund can you talk to us about the importance of a strong network and kind of how you look at that yeah it's everything man it's it's it's absolutely everything and that is the only thing that has gotten me to where i am today not because i'm smart or because i'm really good at any one thing because i'm neither of those things it's staying engaged and i hammer this all the time when i'm talking to people especially newbies especially people are just trying to break into the industry stay engaged so you want to listen to podcasts you want to engage on forums so it's big apartments forum or wherever else real estate facebook groups go to meetups meetups are huge if you have you know a local meetup in your area go to it if you don't have a meetup start one and you want to you want to get in front of as many people that are doing what it is that you want to do as possible you want people to know who you are it's a great way to find partners it's a great way to find deals it's a great way to find mentors you're not going to accomplish anything if you don't just get out of the house and go do stuff and i'm as anti-social as it gets like i just hate crowds i don't like talking i don't like any of that stuff so to like get past that and go out and and actively engage in the community for me was a real hurdle but it's it's it's it's everything because that's that's the only way that people know who you are and i continue to do that to this day that's why i like to do these podcasts is it's staying engaged people know who i am so when when they come across a deal that doesn't work for them they say oh yeah we know that ryan or opener capitol this is a deal for them and they pass it off and likewise i've made a ton of connections that when we come across a deal i might be able to hand it off to somebody else and that goes that goes for deals that goes for uh attracting help you know as far as partners or uh money lenders or employees i mean you you live and die by by your network i know we certainly have i love it couldn't agree more and you mentioned a couple of things there where you said yeah you are you are one of those anti-social people but you're finding ways to network and right now we're filming this interview end of july 2020 cove is still happening you can network virtually right connecting on forums where you don't necessarily have to to to put on a happy face when you're messaging somebody or interact on a forum so that is a fantastic point engage virtually book a time and call somebody reach out to somebody on instagram those are all things that you can do so just to harp on that point that's a fantastic way to get engaged in network as well absolutely so when it came to bigger pockets and you touched on this with with brandon um earlier when you sent him a mobile home park how else did you become involved with uh bigger pockets and how has that journey been for you yeah i found bigger pockets back in it was 2016 and i hadn't been i had been investing for what seven or eight years at that point uh nine years and i was doing pretty well i had i don't know 25 or 30 doors of my own and was you know a successful real estate agent and my property management was going well but uh when i when i stumbled across bigger pockets it just opened up this like whole new world and i i don't know if other people are you know are guilty of the same thing but i was just going through my day but i had these blinders on but i knew like my segment of the business and i knew my world and what i was doing i knew it very well inside and out uh you know i could i could converse with with any real estate investor in the area and i was you know pretty well known in in my small town as being like the you know one of the investors to talk with but as soon as i tapped in this podcast and i heard all these other people with all these other stories of you know syndication and funds and doing subject-to and you know all these off-market strategies to find stuff i'm like well what have i stumbled into and was just supercharged with new information so i it really just made me look at investing differently and just just just the download of knowledge from from all of these podcasts i went through like i started right from the beginning and listened to every single one of them all the way through and just based on the information i found there i was able to increase my own portfolio from uh the 20 i think it was 28 units up to over 50 units in uh less than less than two years so it took me like you know nine years to get 28 units and i almost doubled that in two years afterwards just from just from the the knowledge i got from from from bigger pockets so that that really kind of supercharged me i was the you know the bigger pockets you know success story poster boy for a while and it's great uh you know i would i would the amount of knowledge that's out there for free now uh bigger pockets especially but i mean there's a million podcasts there's all kinds of free information there's no excuse that anybody can't get started i know when i started in 2007 you know there was some information online but not not nearly like the content that's out there now so there's just there's so much information for free right now that there's no excuse for anybody just not enough to absorb that and go with it yeah that i can't stress enough how influential bigger pockets was on me getting started when i first learned about real estate investing and hadn't bought my first property yet i was a fiend for their shows and their website and man i listened to the first 200 episodes like just binge listen a fantastic resource yeah i think my record i think i went through i think i listened to 15 in one day that was fun my single day record yeah yeah yeah was that on 1x did you do 2x no man i listened to him on regular speed because i didn't want to miss anything so yeah yeah nope nope 1x man that's from like when you wake up to when you go to bed it was it was yeah it really was that's awesome yeah and then you've been on there a few times so that's cool too yeah i think that's what that's what prompted me i was going to be on for the first time and i'm like oh my goodness i got to get them all under my belt and get up to get up to speed so i was on this like week-long binge i think i plowed through like 50 of them in a week or something nice so ryan what what kind of advice would you have for someone who is interested in possibly investing in real estate but they they just haven't gotten started yet find what it is that that fits your life i mean everybody's goals are a little different so i know my goals were i had i was going to make time i wanted to do the hands-on stuff so i i took that path and and did that route if you're one of those people like we talked about that has the day job like start looking at passive passive investment so it really really depends on what your situation is and what your goals are but figure out what your goals are and then work work backwards from there and if it's you know if you go on the passive investment route then uh you know whether it's with us or anybody there's a million syndications there's a million deals out there you just want to make sure you vet whoever it is that's putting the deal together i mean you can and there are guys that pour over the numbers and they pour over the offering docks and that's great do that make sure there's there's no surprises in there but ultimately it comes down to you've got to trust the people that that you're investing with you've got to trust the sponsor of the deal i don't care how good it looks on paper the deal is only as good as the person or the team that's putting it together so so make sure that you have a lot of trust if you don't have a personal relationship with the sponsor already get referrals and as many as you can and try to get them from not directly from the sponsor because they might give you some i mean they're only going to give you good references but you know go online again uh biggerpockets is a great place i've seen sponsors uh get praised on there and we've we've seen guys get the crap kick out of them uh sometimes justified sometimes not but really really bet your bet your sponsor if that's the route you're gonna go make sure there's a level of trust with them great advice yeah i love that because you're giving them your hard earned money if you want to be passive so there's an active component in the like the front end work because you want to protect yourself as best as possible so that's a very good point yeah and when i'll add one more thing if you're gonna go the hands-on route or whatever you're gonna go like you're not gonna encounter any problems that somebody hasn't already had and and overcome so if there's any way for you to partner with somebody uh even if it's for little or no money but just to kind of learn the ropes or you know if you're gonna you wanna buy a fixer-upper four unit and you know you've never done it before then maybe partner with it with a contractor or carpenter or somebody again there's gonna be a level of trust there but to kind of show you the ropes or you know partner with an experienced investor even if you're working for free on your first deal just just to learn uh because if you just go it alone and it's trial and error you got to make a ton of mistakes it's going to cost you a ton of money so uh you know try try to try to align yourself with somebody that has already done what you're doing and and learn from them i mean you wouldn't go and just open a restaurant if you had never worked in a restaurant or had no idea right but if you you worked in a restaurant for six months or a year you'd come out a lot more knowledgeable about restaurant operations so i think the same is it can be true for real estate investing don't just don't just dive into it blind find find get some experience partner with somebody and and try to save yourself from making a lot of mistakes absolutely getting a mentor building that network is crucial and that is also action you can take towards achieving financial freedom and helping you towards your financial success you've had a lot of experience in real estate investing what would you say is your favorite thing about it right now it it it tends to change but i really like just and this sounds cliche but the freedom that it gives me i mean at this point i've got enough passive income from my own portfolio that i mean that's what allowed me to move to maui is i could be really anywhere and if i didn't if i decide i don't like maui and i certainly love it i could do my job now from anywhere whether it's uh still overseeing my own uh personal portfolio of properties those are all third-party managed so i'm really hands-off there or even the work i do from open door capital it's all done just like we're talking now pretty much with zoom and remotely so i can be anywhere so it's really the time that it has allowed me to spend on on things that i enjoy and it used to be that you know i was always want to you know everybody wants to make a million dollars you want to make a billion dollars you want to be rich and sure i would i still love to make money but really the the the real value for me is is the time and the flexibility to do what i want when i want um i mean certainly i have responsibilities and obligations that i that i have to meet but uh i have a lot of time freedom to go and and you know and travel and living here you know i'm an avid scuba diver so i can just go scuba diving like that that for me is is really the value that i get out of real estate i can't imagine having to report to an office anymore which i did for for many many years i just you know that was one of the reasons i got away from that is because i knew at i think it was age 30 that i had started investing that i just couldn't see myself in that role of punching a clock for another 30 35 40 years it just wasn't going to happen now right yeah i think a lot of people feel that way ryan and some of them listen to the show what are your thoughts on the fastest way to get out of the rat race if you're stuck there now fastest way to get out of the rat race um it you know it it just really depends on again what your goals are and how much capital you have if you you know if you if you have a ton of cash just sitting there doing nothing probably your quickest way is to invest in some sort of fonder syndication where you're getting a decent return to do that if you don't have a lot of money but you have a lot of time and start out small buy buy a project that you know something that you can fix up a foreclosure or you know some sort of banged up multi-unit property fix it buy it fix it up refinance it pull some cash out that's what i did over and over again just every time just to the the burst strategy you know you're buying it uh renovate it rent it refinance repeat and just just keep snowballing your your all the cash you pull into your next property that's a great way to scale but it just depends not everybody's cut out to do hands-on renovation it's it's it's not easy so you've got to find something that that matches your skill set so uh it just depends on if you if you're active or if you're if you want to take a passive route yeah makes sense and what you said there resonates with me and i've noticed that just getting started with whatever it is no matter how small gets that snowball rolling and it grows you know fairly quickly over time i mean it's not it's certainly not a get rich quick game at all by any stretch but you do notice it growing you notice your efforts compounding on each other and you'll you'll get there one day so yeah that's why you kind of threw me on that question is that how you do it quickly i don't know if anyone would do it quickly yeah really like i don't either yeah it's it's all slow it's all slow but it's it's steady and if you're wise and make make decent decisions uh you're you're you're gonna gain it'll happen yeah nice i love that i mean you said it took you 10 years to get to where you are like that's something that people think about aren't thinking about rather it's how long of of it takes and i think that that's a very good point uh we wanted to ask you as far as resources go and i love that you're saying it really depends on on the individual investors goals what resources would you recommend for them to help you know figure out how to establish these goals or how to figure out or look inward as to what their financial journey looks like again i think it just goes back to just listening to all the content that's out there just fine find podcasts that you like and listen to them and i know that when i started listening to these podcasts i would pick out certain things or certain avenues that seem interesting you know like i tried uh like i had to try a few things before i found something that i liked you know i tried the direct mail and cold calling and just was awful at it just hated it wasn't good uh but i found that managing contractors and fixing up old crappy buildings were i was good at that once i found the deal i was good at that so it's like i don't know you just have to find what fits what fits your personality i know that kind of dodges your question a little bit but um you know it just it's different for every person sure yeah no i think i think that makes sense everybody has their their strengths and if you can get a team to play to the wherever individuals kind of play into their strengths and bring that together it's super powerful yeah and we've seen it now with open door capital i mean a year and a half ago was pretty much just brandon and myself doing all the the the lead generation the the acquisition stuff all the underwriting and now we've got a team uh a total of nine people on our team and each one of those team members is they they do things way better than i ever did so we've got you know mike on the best relations and walk around underwriting and like those guys just are rock stars in their individual fields yes everybody there's always some crossover and everybody's willing to help out where needed but to to plug in the the right people uh in in the right positions i mean that's just it's it's been invaluable to us that's great ryan this has been such a pleasure uh having you on now we wouldn't be the tech guys who invest if we didn't ask you a tech question and i know you're into scuba big time right so i'd love to know what your favorite piece of tech for scuba is i'm a pretty low-tech guy when it comes to that stuff and the reason being is like just it seems like the the more tech the the more potential for something to break or some obscure battery is dead or uh you know i've got my my dive computer which you know it tells me uh my ascent rate and my depths and my whole dive computer and that's is probably as techie as it gets but even the guys that have the you know you get the transmitter the broadcast how much air you have into your dive computer like those are super cool when they work but i don't know how many times i've shown up to a dive site and somebody's freaking around with that thing it's not transmitting you know the battery's dead you had to go to seven different dive shops to find the right battery so i don't know man i i i was in the tech world for a long time i like tech stuff but as far as like operations i'm i'm just the old-fashioned guy man i want i want i want analog and mechanical whenever possible tried and true bulletproof stuff so yeah i know that's not the answer you want but that's where i'm at that that makes sense especially on something that's life and death you know what about in just in everyday life like what what kind of tech or gadget do you uh just love or feel like you couldn't live without something yeah i'm i don't know again i'm old-fashioned i'm one of the oldest guys on the team here so they're they're light years ahead of me like i'm just fumbling around trying to figure out how to use google sheets and asana and and get up to speed on this stuff uh you know and i i i definitely i definitely they make me these these kids these days definitely make me feel old so i i'm learning a lot but i'm i'm i'm like i feel like my you know my parents when i used to try to show them how to use computer like double click a mouse like i'm that guy now so well i wanted to ask as far as scuba diving what would you say is the coolest thing you've come across in your adventures as a scuba diver uh all kinds of cool stuff i mean maui even on a day that like we don't see anything out of the ordinary out of the ordinary even the ordinary's cool so i mean we see manta rays we see dolphins uh there's octopus out there i was in komodo national park in indonesia earlier this year i just saw some some huge manta rays uh i mean there's there's some really cool stuff and you know even a couple weeks ago i was out and there's a sunken uh world war ii fighter plane that had crashed and you know that's cool we kayaked out to that thing and dropped down and saw it so there's no shortage of cool stuff to see out there that's awesome that is awesome yeah well if people wanted to uh find out more about open door capital or reach out to you and your team how would they go about doing that sure uh you can check out our website it's odc fund fund so odcfund.com and you can see uh my bio and the all the team bio and the uh all the information on the funds so we're just closing our second fund right now we're gonna be kicking off our third fund i don't know exactly when but but it's coming but you can get all the information right there uh on the website or you can you can email me directly ryan ryan odcfun.com all right thanks so much for being on the show ryan this was this was great yeah this was awesome guys thanks for having me