Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.

Josh: So hey guys, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. We’re actually sitting here in my office with Sachin Patel who I met about six months ago and instead of like doing a traditional podcast thought we just fire up the computers, the speakers, the mikes, the cameras, and catch a lot of the conversations we’re already having. Catch it on camera for everyone else to a tiller to hear more about, hear a little bit more about your journey. So we started talking just a few minutes ago before we fired the camera’s up about growth, about your growth over the last couple of years.

Josh: So, why don’t you just talk about what you’re working on right now for a minute. Give our audience a little bit of feel of who you are, what you’re doing, and then we’ll back up and talk about your growth pattern and process over the last four years. So this year you’ve accumulated well over a hundred, 150 units just in the last 18 months or so. And you’re working on a bunch of college stuff in college towns, multi-family. Let’s talk about as you sit here right now as a multifamily investor, as a lender, what are you most excited about in your entrepreneurial path into next year 2020?

Sachin: No, that’s a fantastic question. And it’s just a passion every day, right? I wake up and it’s just the same energy, right? Today is always better than yesterday. You find a new appreciation for life, you know, just meeting new people. Thank you for, you know, talking today and just kind of, I love, I love I being around people, you know, that are like-minded, right? They just have this enthusiasm. But, but yeah, no, like you, like you alluded to earlier, you know, I got into real estate investing four years ago. Today we’re starting to really ramp up things, you know, from where we were last year to this year, moving to the whole multi-family world and, and getting into apartment buildings. That’s been our main focus this year is getting into multi-family. So we’ll obviously touch base on how we got there because I was scared as heck to get into the multi-family world, but everybody’s got to make that jump, right?

Sachin: So we started doing that as you mentioned, and we started getting into some college housing as well, right? I still am involved in buying singles and doubles and so forth, but, but now it’s more so strategizing, you know, in different ways, right? So we’re doing college stuff next year as we were talking about earlier, right? Next year I want to get into my first big deal. You know, big deal when I say that is your a hundred units plus, right? So we’re working through some performance right now to get right into something like that. And it, it’s been great. It’s just finding the way and just using, you know, life is about a game of inches, right? You have to use the resources around you. So we’re just utilizing every relationship we’ve built throughout the years and just getting us to that point.

Josh: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing like now that you’re four years into your paths especially the last 18 months of growth, how much just the cultural relationships and a couple networking opportunities can change your path. I mean, you and I just met at Matts, you know, meet up and Matt asked me to speak and come talk about 20 to 25 people there. We meet. I meet Tyler, you know, here we are four or five, six months later we’re talking about doing more deals together. We’ve obviously funded a number of your deals. Tyler’s deals a lot of your friends deals, but talk about that for a second for again, we’re talking about more future stuff. We’ll go back in a minute, but talk for a second about how big, how much of your business now is dependent on or a result of relationships that you’ve built versus just being tactical and go finding deals on your own. Go finding deals on the MLS or LoopNet or off-market, you know, direct mail. Those are all tactics versus relationships.

Sachin: You’ll always, you know, if you have the hustle, the drive, the hunger, you’re always going to find deals. You’ll always find ways, right? This does not work without the relationships that you’ve built, right? I always, you know, tell you know, I always have these conversations with my partners and everyone else, right? If you’re not out doing meetings like this or if you’re not at an event or if you’re not at meet up groups and this and that, that’s where deals are really made of and that’s where they’re made from and that’s where they can come from. The tactical stuff you will have already figured out, you know what I mean? So it’s very vital and it’s very important. Most of everything that I do today is because of conversations I had yesterday with people.

Josh: Especially when you do the bigger and bigger deals because the bigger deals don’t happen where. A perfect example, like we got involved and invested in 160 40 unit apartment building in Shaker Heights that they’ll never hit the market. And the reason why we got it is because of relationships we had with the broker. The reason why the relationship with the broker happened was because of other deals we did with that same broker. And the reason why the broker had the relationship was because of other deals he did with other sellers that led him to that seller who wanted to sell but never wanted the property on the market.

Josh: You were just telling me about this college portfolio. Never hit the market, bought it through a friend, somebody that you knew through contacts. And the bigger and bigger the deals get, the more it’s dependent on relationships. So maybe help our audience, maybe the audience that’s doing single families or residential and think about it’s all about direct mail or it’s all about the MLS or it’s all about making offers. It’s all about the tactics in your journey now and focusing mostly on multi-family and building our portfolio, doing bigger deals. Talk about the evolution a little bit more about tactics versus relationships and how those relationships have helped you get access to more capital, more private money, more lending relationships, and more deal flow.

Sachin: Yeah, no, so once you have a deal going right, and I’m a firm believer in going into okay, who was involved in that particular deal, right? You had a title company involved, right? You had some brokers involved, you know, in my field, the portfolio that we purchased from that the college portfolio, right? I met that guy through my exterminator, right? So you’re always going to have people that you’ve done business with within the same deal that you’ve already done, right. Continue to have the relationship with those people as well and see who they know, right. Talk to them a little bit more, talk to them about this is what I do. This is my future, this is my plan. And it just starts to snowball, you know from that point on because my exterminator introduced me to the seller for the college portfolio that I bought. I met with him, he introduced me to 12 of his wealth guys because he owns a wealth management companies. I pitched in front of them about everything that I’m doing. Well guess what? They’re like, hey, when you have a deal, when you have something going, please let us know. We would love to get into the real estate world. See how it all happened? It all happened with that one deal. Found out…

Josh: The exterminator. The guy that you never thought would be a referral source.

Sachin: Yeah. You treat people with the utmost respect, right? You, once you help everybody come along with you, you’re going to grow a lot further, right. And I helped you know this gentleman, you know, help his business and I gave him all my contracts. You know, you can have all of my buildings because we had such a good relationship working relationship, you know, and he’s like, Sachin, my God, you’ve been fantastic. I loved working with you, with your team. You got to meet this guy. Yeah, let’s go meet this guy. Then he’s like, I loved you. You’re real. You’re 100%. You keep it the way it is. You got to meet my team. I met the team.

Josh: Yeah. I just had a conversation this morning, like right before we got started here. I was speaking at an event, Capitalism.com Cap Con, huge event. 700 to 800 people there. Stephanie McMahon, right. Okay.

Sachin: Oh yeah.

Josh: The brand manager of the WWE is there speaking, right. So I met a guy in the hallway who saw me speak on stage. He introduced me to a guy today. I was just talking to. So one of my big passions going forward for next year is to make sure I’m a very present and engaged father. So I got introduced to a group called Front Row Dads through this guy Justin and who I met through Ryan, who I knew 12 years ago. So as we get older in our entrepreneurial journey, I think it’s interesting that all of my significance, my significant relationships with my significant connectivity, my significant relationships with money, with capital, with deals, almost none of it’s coming through a tactic. It’s all of the growth is happening through providing value, relationships, engagement, staying in touch with people. I got a call today with an investor that was a very first investor in our fund four and a half years ago.

Josh: And the guy’s got a couple hundred thousand dollars with us. But I want to get on the phone with him just to say, hi, what’s going on? How are you doing? Like what’s your plans for next year? No purpose of raising more money. And I think it’s those conversations that go the furthest that allow you to raise more money or find more deals, right? So let’s back up for a second Sachin and talk about your start in real estate, right? So I know you’ve been a loan officer for a while, you’ve been in lending, residential, commercial, a lot of that kind of thing. And then you start and do your very first couple of real estate deals as an investor. Tell me about that. What was that like? And that went for two, two and a half, three years until you made this big pivot into multi-family and the growth, it’s like hockey stick growth. So talk about your starting point. Because a lot of people want to know like how did he get involved?

Sachin: And this is the best part, right? Because when we were starting and I just remember, you know, just getting into your first deal, you know, and then where you got today and how you got there and anything that you do or in real estate or whatever. Like you mentioned before, I’m a father first, right? That is my main focus in my life is being a father and a husband to my wife. That is number one priority. You know, family has always been very, very important in my, you know, in my forefront, you know, just watching, you know, being an immigrant, coming to this country when I was three, I’m watching my mom and dad, selfishly, right? Just nonstop work day and night, you know, while I lived with my aunt for the first four or five years of my life, you know, then spending time with me, your parents when you can, you know what I mean?

Sachin: You saw a lot in how relentless their work ethic was. How selfishly, you know, they put themselves, they left their friends, everybody else back in India, you know, and came here just to have a better life for me and my sisters, you know? That was my, that’s my why, right? You got to have a why. If you’re doing this, you have to have a why. It’s not something as simple as, well, I’m going to buy a house today. You know, it doesn’t work that way because now you don’t have anything attached behind it. You have to have that passion. You have to have the meaning, right. So that’s my why, you know, and then, and then coming here, you know, to, to the States, I still, you know, I went to college over at Cleveland State or in my finance degree there.

Sachin: Then I started working at Quicken Loans at the time. You know, we worked again, it rest is up to you. How much hustle you have, how much drive you have. We work 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM everyday for four years. What I did though, I learned mortgages, I learned hustle. I learned, you know, everything else can wait. You know, people will say, well, you’re 22, you should be out there doing this, that, and the other. No, I’m 22, this is my time that I build my life, right. So, you know, we went there and we really just hustled. We saved our money, you know, commission checks where when my partner and my partner today, Eric Scalic and I, you know, commission checks were earned, but we never spent them on cars and houses and boats or whatever. We’re like, let’s buy a house, see how it goes.

Sachin: He’s like, yeah, you know what man, I have to figure out another way, right. You know, I read the book Millionaire Next Door, you know, in order to, you know, be a millionaire, right? You have to have seven streams of income, right. So you start thinking about that stuff early. Okay, I get a, yeah, I’m working, I’m doing fantastic, but is my money growing? What am I doing with this? You know? So, you know, we bought our first house while we still worked, you know, no idea about a house by the way. I didn’t know how to plunge a toilet for God sakes, you know what I mean? But we bought this house, you know, we rented it out. We went in there and did our own renovation work. By the way, we can’t afford to pay guys, you know? But it was cool.

Sachin: You know, rolling your sleeves up. Let’s go, let’s get dirty. We bought one house, two house three house, four house that year. We ended up like six or seven. We’re like, whoa, we don’t know what we’re, you know, we don’t know what we’re doing, but we have seven houses, know we’re looking at it and now we’re able to create balance sheets, which we’ve never learned before. So you learn a lot of things to creating these sheets. Okay, we’re making X amount of dollars. How can we really scale? Because the income that we’re making, we’re only going to be able to buy a house or two at a time, you know? So then I took that into, you know, we put together some investors sheets. You know, some people that I just knew fired off a thousand emails and said, hey, here’s what we’ve been doing the last five years.

Sachin: Here’s how many houses we have. Here’s how much vacancy we have. Here’s how much rent roll we bring in. You know, we would love for you guys do invest with us and in our company, which is SS Properties, you know, we got our first million that year coming in, you know, through friends. A lot of my wife’s family, by the way. So God bless my wife and her family for really believing, it was my wife is literally the catapult of this whole thing, but she is the catapult. I kid you not, you know, I give her, you know, I told her my ideas, you know, some of them she’s be like, yeah, you’re out of your mind. But then she’ll say, run with it. I got everything else. I got you. Whatever you need. So I love you Omni. Have any thank you for everything.

Sachin: You know, that you’ve helped me grow. You know, when I’m stressed, she’s there for us, you know, but her family back this, you know, almost entirely, you know what I mean? My first and think about that, right. It’s not even my own, right. How, you know, her side of the family said, we believe in you. We trust you, you know. So this all came in. We ended up buying about 20 more houses that year. This is rewinding back about to 2015. Then we had 20 houses and now we’re up to, you know, the 30 and then you know, we hold the money for five years so we can buy houses and through a rent rule we give them back the initial principal, so you know, they gave us $100,000 we give them 10% annualized and dividends and then we give them back their $100,000 five years after and the way I’m getting the money is through rent rule. So you have to be on top of your game, right?

Josh: It’s good to have cashflow though.

Sachin: Have to have cashflow.

Josh: So many people have made that mistakes in this business is because they buy house house, house, house. Now they’ve got expense, expense, expense, mortgage payments to make and no cashflow. Love the fact that you want it and knowing I got to have cashflow to pay the bills. That’s what you build real wealth anyway. It’s how you get through recessions and anybody that I’ve seen in this business that’s gotten in trouble, I’ve seen many people get in trouble. Why? No cashflow. You learn that young. Whether you knew you were doing it right or not right. You did it right.

Sachin: We just learned it the right way. Well, my dad always told me that the less debt you have, the better, you know? So just try to have that mentality. But you know, leverage is a whole other thing, right? But, but yeah, so what we did was we didn’t, we didn’t take a salary. We didn’t take an income. You know, we made sure that our investors always eat first, you know, so, because once they’re are paid back in these five years, well guess where this money is coming? It’s coming right back.

Josh: And the friends are going to be involved. They’re going to tell everybody they know.

Sachin: And what we talked about relationships earlier, right now I’ve just built a pool of 15 people that have their own sphere of influence by doing it the right way, you’re always going to eat. Your daughters are always going to be open if you do this thing the right way, you know, just strategize it accordingly. But so then we had those, you know, those houses and we kept doing that over the last three, four, three years, okay. We’ve accumulated over 70 houses doing that, okay. 70 doors, single families, singles, doubles, you know, singles or doubles more. So, you know, you got to always make sure you’re on top of your game on your business though. How much rent flows coming in. You need to always be at an X percent of vacancy, so you have to work this thing, you know? But that’s what I learned, right?

Josh: KBI, Yeah. Right. Vacancies, collections. How much are we bring in?

Sachin: How much we bring in? Because you need to make sure you’re setting aside X amount of dollars to be able to pay your investors back in five years, this can all come crumbling down if you don’t do it right. And if you’re not ready to go to war for the next five years, right. Because our mindset was we’re going to war for the next five years. So we’re not buying million dollar house. No, we’re barely. So people are always like, since you’ve got 70 houses, you should have a nicer car, you should have this or that. Only if you understood, it’ll come eventually, right? Money of numbers follow, they never ever lead, right? So, you know, we built it that way. You know, now we’re going into our fifth year, next year where everybody will be able to, you know, pay everybody back, right? Those same investors that I build the relationship with, now they bring their money right back to me and now I fund multi-family deals with the same investors, same money.

Josh: Plus you can use leverage now with real banks, commercial banks, big banks that can fund 70%, 80% of your deal. And you only got to have that smaller piece from a private investor. So it allows you to buy bigger asset, right? Instead of just using all private money to buy everything. That’s fantastic.

Sachin: Exactly right. So just use a private money right now before we couldn’t get a bank to look at us, right? But it’s all about experience. It’s all about what you’ve done and your credibility is everything. Reputation is everything in this business, right? So it’s what you bring in. So now we have, you know, banks and Freeland, you know, Ventures for, for being an absolutely amazing partner for us, you know, as they’ve helped us fund some of our, our stuff as well. And you guys have been fantastic, you know, just from start to finish. So, so you guys have been great doing that. But yeah.

Josh: So the pivot, talk about the pivot, right? We talked about this before we started recording. That’s why I wanted to throw the camera’s up and start recording. So, you know, singles and doubles, singles and doubles gets comfortable. You kind of know the business, you’re like, that fits in the portfolio, fits the model. I’ve got this box fits in the box, buy it, we know what we’re doing. But then all of a sudden you’re like, well I want to scale up. You know, I want to do more deals. I want to do bigger deals. So what next? Meaning like what happens next is got to level up to multi-family. And this is something if I had a regret of my investing path was that I didn’t keep every house that I ever flipped and that I didn’t get into multi-family much, much, much earlier.

Josh: But you decided to jump in but you’re scared as shit, right? Because everyone’s scared as shit. I was and I still am. The bigger and bigger deals that we do, like this is not comfortable, right. So you’re not comfortable looking at, let’s say like your first 10 unit, your first 18 unit, but you do the first one. Tell me about it. How did you get into it? What was it like? How scared were you? How much anxiety did you have and then what actually, because that’s what we build up. None of that stuff is real. It’s all our own fear that we concocted in her own mind. There’s this wall that we say like, I don’t know if we can do multi-family. I don’t know if I’m ready for it. It’s too much risk. I don’t know if I know how to manage it. It’s all just concocted because there’s a thousand people before us that have done it. But then tell me about doing it and then how did you feel afterwards when you did your first couple successful multi-family? Like, oh, it wasn’t that freaking bad, so what was it? What’s going on in your mind when you’re thinking like, okay, we’ve got these now, but I got it. It feels good to stay where I’m at doing the singles and doubles, but commercials where it’s at, I know I got to go there.

Sachin: It’s, you’re never comfortable really. You know what I mean? You’re never, you’re always going to be, you know, uneasy a little bit all the time, but you just have to, like you said, get into there and do it right. Go back to what you did do, you know what you’ve done and what’s worked for you? Same with those relationships that you’ve had. That’s what we did, right? My whole point was we did the single family. Well, what do we gain from that single family? We gained the knowledge of how to get the tenant. Have a couple of contractor groups lined up already. So we have that, you know if we need some work done we can send it to them, have some banks lined up, some money guys lined up, et cetera. So that part’s already done, right. So my whole process and motto was, let me do it through the single-family away first, cashflow first and then go to the multi-family world.

Sachin: It’s so funny. So like the first multi-family one that came about, it was a 18 unit building that I bought, bought over in Gordon square area here in Cleveland and I saw it on Facebook. No, no, no, I’m sorry. That deal was brought to me by the same exterminator that brought me the college deals, okay. But I’m scared shitless at this. I don’t know what I’m doing with this. I’m like, let me broker this off to somebody. I’ll get a referral fee because I was scared.

Josh: Wholesale it, assign it, something.

Sachin: So I wholesale to Bratz. Not even wholesale, I just said, here’s a referral. You know, they pay you your, you know, your little broker fee. Cool. I’m like, I should’ve bought that damn building. So what did I do? I bought it back off of Bratz.

Josh: Did you really? Okay.

Sachin: For a $100,000 more. then what I would have got it for.

Josh: Okay. Got it. Did he do something to it before you bought it back. I hope he put some improvements into it or something.

Sachin: He put some tenants in there and did some renovations. But the value here is, I had no idea of jumping into that building. So the one, you know what I should’ve done was just bought it and jumped right into it. But it’s okay. And my message here is, it’s okay if you make that error there, just go out and buy it anyway and you will figure it out. You know, because I did figure it out. You know, we bought it. Did we take a little bit of a loss up front? Sure, I did. You know, it is what it is, but I learned a valuable lesson there. You know, just think things through and just kind of just jump into it. If you need to, they don’t lie, right. Bought it, you know, and bought that, renovated it, right. We still didn’t know what we were doing, you know, how much money we were putting into each and all that stuff.

Sachin: But we learned as we went, didn’t structure the deal properly upfront. So I learned that based on this transaction as well, we had to come up out of our own money out of our own pocket to do these renovations. You know, my partner and I, but we certainly did it. We saw it to the finish line. We increased rent year over year by 40%. The cashflow in the valuation on our refi to get the, our investor out of this, you know, we gained $390,000 in equity in that two year timeframe on that same very same building.

Josh: Even though you screwed it all up.

Sachin: Even though I screwed it all up so it’s still there. It just do your homework or you know, do your math right and just figure it out. Cause we knew this could still work. Even though I’m paying you a hundred more like to me, you owe me a free building by the way, but you can still do it and you could still make it work. So you’re never really going to be comfortable. I think you just have to go in and just do it and trust your process. Make sure you laugh.

Josh: Hustle your face off. Like, because I tell people all the time, pro formas don’t equal profits.

Sachin: No, not at all.

Josh: You got to have an operator that turns a pro forma into profits. Something actually has to happen. The work has to get done. The, you know the LVP. Flooring has got to go in the paint and carpet has got to get done. You got to advertise for tenants. That’s actually got to happen. You can’t just buy a building and then wait. You know, like, but I see people do it all the time. Like I bought it. People buy buildings and they’re like, Oh well I’m still got to find a contractors. Like, dude, you open this for six months, you’re bleeding. Like the world is going to kill you. It’s going to crucify you if you don’t do something with it. 

Josh: Because cashflow is going to be going out the door. So you’ve got to jump in. Like when you said, I got contractors lined up from day one and jump in and get going because the interest on a million dollar building will pile up fast more so than the cost of contractors even if the contractors do it wrong, unless your making progress. So now your focus is, is now that you did that one now you went out and bought eight nine other buildings?

Sachin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and then our focus after that, we knew what we were doing with the multi-family world, right? So we knew, you know how you know how the transaction works, what we need to do for renovations. We know, okay, is there any value add here? Now we know how the refinances work on multi-family buildings and on the cap rates and what the banks look for, how much of a spreads there. We knew none of that stuff. Two months prior to me buying this building. Two months later, I feel like I’m a, you know, I’m a savant to this stuff, you know, just because you learn so much as you go, but you got to jump in and do it, you know, just do it.

Josh: Price per door, price for door, rent per unit and cash on cash return. Once you know it it’s fun.

Sachin: It’s fun. You got to make sure it’s fun. You know, if you have to wake up as like, Oh God, I got to run these cashflow numbers today, your in the wrong business. Yeah, you can make it fun. You have to make sure you’re having fun doing it, right. So now we figured that now, you know, now we went on to the next building that we bought, you know, same way, you know, we went in, we knew what the value add to us. We did the renovations and this is the, you know, the one that you guys helped us on over on Bosworth, right? So now we know what the back end numbers look like, investors, all good. You know, this year we bought a bunch of them in Lakewood, you know.

Josh: But the first one was key.

Sachin: The first one is vital, you know, very, very vital of just learning.

Josh: You overcame the fear because you knew I gave this deal to Tim, sweetheart deal shit I should have done that. Took it back, right. But like just doing it, overcoming that fear is what gave you the confidence? Was it the numbers? What’d you think of like, Oh my God, I shouldn’t have let this go. The numbers make sense. I’ve just got to get and take it back. Because for most people it’s like the risk, the fear, what could go wrong? All the negative self talk, all the negative things of this whole cashflow. I don’t know the numbers. The bank’s going to kill me. I’m going to default on a loan. I’m not going to know how to renovate it, I’m going to need tenants. Like all that negative self talk. We talk ourselves out of what our true goals are. If our goal is through real estate, in this case.

Josh: We’ve got to have enough positive self-talk to overcome the things that we’re scared of, right? So you, your why your wife, your kids, your parents, you know, growing up as an immigrant and grinding it out, that has to be more powerful, more meaningful than the negative self talk, right? So what now going forward, so you’re going to have that negative self-talk again. Now you’re at 200 units going forward into next year. What does that growth look like? Are you looking at 400 units, 500, a thousand is there a number? What is the number and what are some of the things you still mentally think you have to overcome to get there?

Sachin: Yeah, so first and foremost, like we talked about earlier, always have that why, right? That’s going to help you, you know, cancel out some of those negatives. You’re going to have a negative in anything you do in life. If you really want to look for them, you’re going to find them. But, you know what I was saying earlier, instead, focus on what your why was to begin with and then focus on those pros of what you could do to eliminate some of that. And then you’ll start to talk to yourself in your head. You know, like, okay, no, we’re good. I know I got this, I’ve been doing it my whole life. You know, and nothing has changed today. All we’re doing is adding a couple more zeros or adding a couple of more buildings or adding a couple of more units. That’s all you’re doing. Take away that stress from you, that negative, just having a negative mindset.

Sachin: One thought, right? Can either send you to a euphoric state or just sending you to a depressive state by one thought, right? And that one thought, you know, you could say, well, I’m not experienced enough to buy this building. I’m going to walk away. Well then when will you, you never will, right? So it’s just understand your why and, and just kind of gravitate towards those positives, you know? And then keep doing that and then I promise you, of course you have to make sure all your logistics are there, your numbers are there and that all works. But once you have that figured out, gravitate to your pros and just go right into it and do it, you know.

Sachin: Because had it not been for that kind of mindset that I, you know, prepared for myself mentally. We would have probably still been doing single families two or three houses a year, right. And then, which is totally fine if that’s where you want your growth to be, right. My growth to be is I want to be eventually at a thousand units. You know, I want to get to that point and once we get to that point, we’ll see where we’re going. I like the slow growth. I really do because I know that I can back it all up with what I have, you know, and like you said, performa and going to deliver your results.

Josh: Well you also said getting ready for this, you guys have an over 90% occupancy for like the life of your portfolio. That’s where a slow growth makes a lot of sense in that if I went and bought a 500 unit building to know what to do with it or was buying a lot of small buildings too fast, you might have a 70% occupancy, then you’re barely breaking even on your cashflow. So growing and making sure that building is stabilized, then buying the next one make sure that building stabilize the next one, because you’re going to be married to these assets the rest of your life. That’s what longterm real estate wealth is all about, is owning the asset longterm. So it’s like, you know, you want to have a child and then ignore the child and think like, why isn’t this child those most amazing, beautiful, happy child ever? It’s not going to work. You have to babysit the child. Nurture, love all the time everyday. Cultivate apartment buildings is no different.

Sachin: You’re building a relationship with your apartment building as you are your kids, right. You know, so you need that, right? So you go into that, you know, you just have that mindset. I got this, I have everything figured out of what I want. Of course you’re going to make mistakes throughout the, you know, throughout your time you’re always going to make mistakes, but the best thing is the overcoming them, right. And just taking a step back and understanding it can be really easy. Like for instance, the other day we had four people leave in one of my buildings like boom, boom, boom, boom. I had no idea. And they were just like, hey, maybe they had a meeting together or something. That’s what they were doing. But I went there and I’m like, Oh my God, now I’m at four vacancies. I never have this kind of vacancies, you know? I could have easily been like kicking, screaming or what have you, but no take a second. You’ve got to this point because you’ve rationalized and you, and you thought things through, think it through on how to get past it. You know what I mean? And you’ll be better off for it.

Josh: I heard a great quote when I was at Tony Robins last week and he really resonated with me he said, what if every experience was a gift? What if every experience was a gift, right? So when you have four people move out, or you have a building that’s vandalized, or you have a contractor that steals some money, not that those are good things. Everyone associates those with oh man, more vacancy contractor steals money. You know, it’s all negative. But if you think, okay, if I look at that as a gift and say, well, what I learned it, what can I improve next time? And the fact that this contractor stole money, maybe he needed the money a lot more than I did. And certainly you’re going to cover your ass and cover your assets, as much as you can, but you can have business is a risk, right?

Josh: All business has some risk. And so you can’t eliminate all the risk all the time. But if every experience, you look at it as a gift and you appreciate that in saying like, what can I do with this? What did I learn from it? How can I make a better portfolio or do something better for my wife and kids and have something better next time? Every experience is a gift. And by taking that approach, it’s like, well, I don’t want negative experiences, but when I have one, it’s not really a negative experience it’s a gift. So I want to kind of wrap up with this. So help me understand. A couple things, a couple of questions I’d like to ask guests on a regular basis. So who do you think has been the most impactful relationship person, entrepreneur, mentor, that you’ve ever had in your life and why?

Sachin: Hmm, that’s cool? So a good friend of mine, his name is Gustaf Molnar, so he has his own development company here, Gustaf Development. He and I went to high school together. He and I went to Cleveland state together. We’re on the finance team, but he would constantly push me every single day, you know, even since we were in school together. All right. This isn’t enough, right? Get to this point. At that time I was working at a local bank while I was doing my internship at school and I could have easily went out and got a $50,000 $60,000 desk job and co-sale with my life, right? He’s like, dude, you’re way better than that. You are, you’re a type a personality. He was working at Quicken at the time. He’s like, come here, let’s just see what you can do, you know.

Sachin: And ever since there we’ve been in each other’s ears right. All the time. hey, do it better. Hey, what are you doing? So every deal that I go through, I talk to them about, you know, this is the deal that I’m doing. Because he’ll give me the candidate information or he’ll give me the candid, you know, responses and vice versa. Me to him, you know, if he’s in any, and he does some pretty big development out in Cleveland, very high end condominiums and so forth, you know, and he doesn’t understand this world as well, right. As he does the other world. But yet he’ll still take the time out and just help me, you know, go through the numbers and see if it’s a good buy, things like that. And I help him do the same thing, you know, for each other’s lives.

Sachin: You know, whether it’s in real estate, our families, our children, our friends, whatever it is. So he’s, I can say one of the guys, you know, has been the most influential of me getting to where I am to this point. And then throughout the years, of course we build relationships as we go. And now you just kind of have a whole team behind you, you know, hand in hand with my wife and my kids and my family and kind of like, I think it was like a big unity thing with the holding hands. And when you’ve got an army behind you, it’s so much better.

Josh: In battle together.. That’s Great.

Sachin: It’s awesome. I love it.

Josh: How about in your entrepreneurial journey? Is there a moment, a thing and experience that you had in your entrepreneurial journey really the last four years that you think was the most impactful?

Sachin: Yeah. So with our portfolio, you know, as I was telling you, we’ve always been at 90% occupancy since my partner and I were at the helm, okay. The biggest thing to kind of this year, but I pay say between February and August, okay. You know, we kind of give some agents the responsibility to fill units. When me and Eric, Eric and I were doing that in the beginning, we gave this person the task to do this, that person the task to do this, right? We kind of got hands off a little bit on our business and we saw our numbers just start trickling. We didn’t take a look at our books as we normally would, right. And we’re like, Oh my God. In August we’re like Eric, year over year, this is horrible. We’re at 90, we’re going to be like 65 if we don’t get this thing turned around.

Sachin: What are we doing? I lost four months right there. A rent roll because you know, agents will be like, Oh yeah, we have showings setup don’t worry. It sits there. It’s coming. It’s coming. And they’re sitting there for six months. We took over our business back again, full force and say, all right, now we’ve got to be more hands on with our process, what got us here. Don’t ever forget what got you there. Just because you think you have enough. You don’t, you need to always be hands on. You need to always fill in your own tenants if you can. You need to always be able to, you know, evaluate your own deals, not just send. We’ve sent some contractors out to look at houses before we bought them, giving them full trust. Dilapidated roofs, plumbing’s all messed up. You know what I mean? We wouldn’t have bought the house, but now we bought it and I think we did a disservice to our investors. I think we did a disservice to everybody around us, our partners by not being involved. So that’s the biggest thing, I think in business that we’ve learned and we learned it early. Thank God, right that we didn’t let this go on too long. But that’s the biggest thing, I think.

Josh: That’s great. Last question. Is there a entrepreneurial book, seminar experience, something that you rely on regularly? Something, a book that’s had a lot of impact, a podcast that’s had a lot of impact seminar that you’ve been to that’s had a lot of impact that you’d like to pass along to people who might listen to us today.

Sachin: Yeah, no, the good reading material. And I think I snapped this when I was on the plane. Your book that you are, that I got from the first meeting that we were at, The Flip System book, right. We were reading, I was, you know, reading that that helps a lot. I do a lot of reading, you know from that aspect, from books, self helps. Some, some guys that have, you know, done it before me, they do it way bigger. You know, Tim Bratz to seminars, you know, I went down to his seminars and his masterminds down in Orlando. For those of you that are getting into this thing, he’s very helpful, very knowledgeable and he’s built a really nice portfolio for himself. So always just, you know, get out there and everyday you have to learn something new. If you’re coming into the next day with the same thing you learned yesterday, you’re not growing, you’re dying, so figure something else off for that day that you didn’t learn yesterday.

Josh: I think it’s interesting that people will go and grind at work for 40, 50, 60, 80 hours a week and not carve out a single hour to learn something new. Like that is part of the work day. Like the, I just make it part of the day or part of the week. You need to carve out an hour or two hours. I listen to podcasts, I listen to my favorite like radio program is, which is not music at all. It’s, you know, so those kinds of things that, and I can’t possibly, for me, I can’t possibly digest it all incorporate it at all. So I think part of the reason for my success has been finding one thing and doing a deep dive in it. Totally immersing myself into, if it’s a multi-family podcast, listen to every podcast by that author all the way through everything I can out of it, right.

Josh: If it’s a self-development book or a self development seminar, stick with that for four months, six months, a year. Stick with that for the longterm and get everything I can out of it. Because I’d rather do a deep dive on one thing than do a shallow dive on a hundred right. Instead of reading or listening to 10 podcasts and listen to one all the time. Till I just totally beat that thing to a dead horse, sucked everything I can out of it. Finish it up and then move on to something else, right. I think that’s a huge part of what people need to do instead of if they’re going to listen to this podcast and 14 others like stop listening to my podcast. Go do a deep dive on one of the 14 and then listen to everything you can and then something else the next day.

Sachin: And the time thing too, right? Josh, they, you know, I always get, when do you listen? When do you listen to a podcast like you have to kids and stuff like that. Well we do. When you’re driving aw man how about them Brown’s yesterday, they scored this. Okay that 45 minutes or you learn to guys just babble about how horrible Freddy Kitchens is, right? What did you learn from that? The Browns stink. Is that what you learned and who’s getting fired next? Put the podcast on. Listen to do it in your car on the 45 minutes you have. You have a half hour there a half hour back from your drive work if you’re in the gym. I mean, I understand if you need music to pump you up, great. This pumps me up, you know, listening in to some like tax incentives. Like, hey, how can I save some money on my taxes by doing this. Whatever time that I get that you would be, you know, that you’re sitting idle do this.

Josh: Think about it. You know what resonated with me Sachin is if you listen to a podcast in your car or seminar in your car or something like that, one hour a day for the whole year, 365 hours, you just gained back 10 weeks of work. If your average work week is 35 hours a week, 40 10 weeks of work time that you’ve done with self development, learning something new, that’s all it takes.

Sachin: That’s all it takes. So got to have self-development, self-development is absolute key. You know, in, in your growth. Education is absolute key in your growth, you know? So that’s what I say. Keep the education, keep the passion, keep the energy, keep the hustle, you know, and everything else will follow. It’s going to work. It always works just man to have that right mindset and then just go kill it.

Josh: So hey Sachin. If any of our listeners want to reach out, connect with you, do a deal with you, joint venture with you, wholesale, you a deal, become a private investor, what’s the best place to reach out? Um, phone number, email, website. What’s the best place to reach out?

Sachin: Yeah, no thanks Josh I appreciate that. And we’re working on a, you know, on our website here this year. Next year we’ll have some more information on that, but for right now, yeah, whatever it is, whether you need help in home lending, I’m also a mortgage loan officer, right? That can help you in the home lending world. I buy apartment buildings, I buy houses, you know, so wholesale deals, whatever, anything or even if you just want to talk through, you know, what you guys saw on the podcast today of anything that I could help you with at all. My email is S Patel, so it’s S P A T E L @Libertyhm.com So SPatel@Libertyhm.com. And my phone number is (440) 915-8758.

You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.