Amateurs Focus on Transactions — Pros Focus on Relationships
I was standing in the vintage lobby/hangout area of the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel at the Commercial Empire Real Estate Conference.
About a month prior, my business partner (and cousin) Jennings had asked me if I wanted to go to a conference with him to level up what we were learning about apartment syndication/buying/investing…all that.
I got excited when he described how the Commercial Empire model worked so operators like us could own more of the equity in deals.
Let’s GO!
And then he dropped the price tag…$5k for us both to go.
Nope. Probably that model doesn’t work anyway.
At least, that’s what the voice inside my head started shouting at me.
But we talked through it, realized that buying and syndicating apartment deals was something were 100% committed to figuring out. And the next step was getting in the room with people who were actually doing it.
Walking into that conference, I felt so small. I didn’t have a single real estate investment to my name. Meanwhile, the speakers on stage were casually talking about closing multi-hundred-unit deals with others in the room.
Talk about imposter syndrome. For real.
I wanted to be one of those guys closing deals so badly.
Little did I know…
During one of the evening networking sessions, Jennings and I struck up a conversation with a group of guys from Maine. When they heard we were from Charleston, South Carolina, they mentioned they had a property under contract in our market. Naturally, as newbie operators do, we immediately offered to help. “We know the area,” we said. “We can be your boots on the ground.”
Boots on the ground…that’s where it starts.
They were open to the idea. “Sure,” they said. “Here’s the address. Check it out, and let’s see if there’s an opportunity here.”
When we got back home, Jennings and I dove right in. We visited the property, crunched numbers, and explored improvement possibilities. It was a mobile home park with some extra land, and the plan was simple: buy it, fix it up, and sell for a profit. They had it under contract for $2 million.
We analyzed everything — roads that needed repair, landscaping, trailer movement — you name it. We even analyzed if we coul sell off 30 acres of land that wasn’t part of the mobile home park to make the numbers work. But no matter how we sliced it, we just couldn’t make the deal pencil out.
So, we had to have a hard conversation with the Maine guys: “Look, at $2 million, this deal doesn’t work. It’s too expensive. There’s no way to make money on this at that price.”
That was the first deal we ever worked on — and the first deal we walked away from. We did the work, got excited, but in the end, nothing happened.
Or so we thought.
That “non-deal” paved the way for everything that came next.
Because when we found 18 units that did make sense about a month later, we knew exactly who to call. We stayed in touch with Maine, and they became part of our core team. As a team, we had all the pieces we needed to close the deal.
Five years later, we still have that first deal, and more. Over a dozen deals in that timeframe. Some we’re holding for as long as we can, others we’ve sold according to plan, others maybe not according to plan (lol).
It all traces back to being in that room at that conference, stepping out of our comfort zone, and connecting with the right people.
Here’s the truth: buying apartments starts with building relationships.
It starts with putting yourself in the room with the people who have done it before and are willing to walk alongside you as you do it too.
