WIN Ep171. How to Vet Real Estate Deals and Sponsors Before You Invest with Wayne Courreges III

Intro speaker: Welcome to the Westside Investors Network. WIN, your community of investing knowledge for growth. This is the real estate professionals investing podcast for real estate professionals by real estate professionals. This show is focused on the next step in your career, investing. Thank you for listening.

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Trent Werner: Welcome back to another episode of the deal deep dive segment on the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Werner. In this segment, our future guests will share their unique stories on a specific deal they've invested in. We'll dive deep into finding the deal, financing the deal, writing an offer, and the due diligence. Do us a solid and smash that subscribe button, leave us a rating, and share this episode.

And now let's dive deep. Welcome back to the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Warner. On today's episode, we are joined by Wayne Courageous the third. Wayne of CREI Partners and I are gonna be talking about a couple of deals that they've worked on.

One that's been great, and one that's had a little hair on it that he purchased in 2022. But he's gotten greedy and been able to work his way through that deal and maintain control and ownership of it. CREI Partners has over $50,000,000 in assets under management across Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. And Wayne Courageous III is going to let passive investors know how they should be vetting sponsors and deals before investing in a real estate syndication. Now let's welcome Wayne Courageous the third.

Alright. Wayne Courageous the third, CREI Partners joining the Win podcast today. Wayne, welcome.

Wayne C: I'm excited to be here, Trent. You for having me.

Trent Werner: I'm excited to have you. Wayne Did you go

Wayne C: to the masters? I'll take over your did did go to masters? I see your shirt.

Trent Werner: I did. I did, yeah. Had to wear one of these episodes just to let everyone know

Wayne C: that I was in Wayne,

Trent Werner: thanks for joining. I'm excited to get into our topic, which I'll save for right now. Before we get into our topic or topics today, I want to know who Wayne Courageous III is.

Wayne C: Well, I am a father. I am an investor. I'm a Texan. I'm born and raised in Texas here. And really just aspiring to grow our investments with our investors and community and partners and do good things.

I mean, that's ultimately what I strive to do is just be good people. My background has been completely in commercial real estate. I started right out of

Speaker 4: the Marine Corps. So went

Wayne C: to the Marine Corps 2003 to 02/2007. And then I started my single family investing career in 29 Palms, California, when I was like 19. And it was a two bed, one bath. But anyway, in 02/2007, had an incredible opportunity to join CBRE, one of the large commercial real estate companies in property management. And I was with them for sixteen years working institutional client, office retail.

Why am I going blank? Big Amazon realm. So you have office retail and distribution centers, those large

Trent Werner: The warehouses. Yeah.

Wayne C: Anyway, it's a little late here, so going through that. But yeah, so really working through business plans and repositioning assets. And so speed up to 2019, I was like, at that time, just finished my MBA at North Carolina. I was still working for CBRE, had this entrepreneurial spirit of starting my own business for our friends and family and investors. And so I started that in 2019, CREI Partners.

And then we've grown through that to a point where in 2023 trend, I couldn't do both CBRE and CRA partners. Just wasn't. It was just all I could think about was CRA partners and it wasn't fair to my clients to see it CBRE. So I went out on my own. That was a big, launch.

But we had built a company at that point where it was okay to do it with three kids and a wife. Like I felt like it wasn't too risky. And here we are in 2025. We've got about 50,000,000 assets under management. People throw that number out a lot.

But I mean, those are that number is like what we are lead sponsors and we're, you know, we've sourced the deal, find the deal, write, asset manage. So yeah, we're just continuing to grow and do, you know, do good things for our investors, but really the communities that we buy into.

Trent Werner: And obviously working at CBRE, you got a lot of experience in the space. Were you investing in your own deals early on in that process? Or were you using it as a job and a learning, I guess, vehicle at the time?

Wayne C: Yeah. So when I worked for CPRE, I wasn't actively investing in, say, syndications. Honestly, crazy to say, Trent, but I didn't even realize that people could syndicate and pull money together to buy assets. I was in the industry working at a large real estate company, but in my mind, who I was working with were institutional clients, MetLife, Invesco, JPMorgan, TIA Craft. The idea of like retail, quote unquote investors could be buying large multifamily.

I knew high net worth individuals, but even just not putting it all together. And it was really I must have listened to a podcast November, December when I was like, Okay, I want to start my own investment company. And then once I caught on to syndication, got a mentor in the multifamily space and really just learned as much as I could. We didn't buy anything until 2021. And then in 2022, we bought our first multifamily.

So it took when people were buying values that I just weren't comfortable with, I'm not shaming anything, just is what it is. I just couldn't make the numbers work. And, and so in '21, we got into a build to rent community that I really liked, for many reasons. We can talk about that. But then 2022 got into my first, multifamily, but it took a few years to get through the frothiness of what was going on.

And '22 was still frothy. There was a lot of high bids. Things were going on still. But yeah, so I was learning along the way, but honestly, I had three kids, wife. Like it was just my nine to five was paying for my five to nine.

I was surviving young kids, you know, and my wife wasn't working at the time, which was important to our family to have her focus on the kids. And I also, you know, helped the kids as well. But there's nothing like having mom around full time. And that was something that we as a family decided. So there wasn't a whole lot of money at that point going into syndications and such for for reasons I mentioned.

Trent Werner: Well, then at CBR, you said your background was mainly in commercial, industrial, warehouses, that sort of thing. And then you said you bought your first multifamily in '22. What was the first deal that you guys bought at CREI?

Wayne C: So the first one we got into were partners for our Build to Rent community.

Trent Werner: Oh, that's right.

Wayne C: And 98 single family and we got that into that in 2021.

Trent Werner: Okay.

Wayne C: The reason I like that, and that was raw land and building, you know, these single family homes. What I really liked about that was there were multiple exits, meaning like we were treating these 98 single family homes as rentals to, similar to a multifamily. So it's like horizontal multifamily. So I could see the demographics of young, older people who just don't want the hassle of homeownership, but want to live in a home and not an apartment. They have backyards and such nice community.

I like that from a standpoint of treating it like a multifamily investment, even though it's not your traditional three or four story garden style multifamily. But the other exit is like, hey, in a worst case scenario, if the economy or whatever is going in the wrong direction, we could put an HOA on it and then individually sell the homes as an investment too and do really well. So I had I felt comfortable. There were multiple exit options. Again, mind you, like I was saying no to a lot of investments prior.

This one I got comfortable with, even though it was a development, I was still comfortable with it because of the multiple exit options. And then we got into our first multifamily in 2022.

Trent Werner: It's interesting that you got comfortable with the ground up development where you're usually not gonna start seeing a return for a year minimum or maybe even longer. And that's what you guys got comfortable with. Tell more about that.

Wayne C: Well, when you're putting offers, and at the time I was in Austin, so I was putting a lot of offers in San Antonio. I tried to buy into Austin as well. But when you put in offers and there's just so much money just chasing units and not chasing yield or return. And so I'm just going throw a number. Put a $10,000,000 offer on.

I would easily get outbid every time by $11.12000000 dollars offer, dollars 1,000,000, 2,000,000 more. And I'm like, it just doesn't. I know it's good that we can talk through this, too, throughout the podcast of different levers that syndicators and sponsors can use to support the investment or not. And not everything has to be or needs to be super conservative because if that's the case, you probably never get the deal. But when everything is aggressive, then that's really concerning.

And so, yeah, there was a lot of notes. I had brokers tell me, Trent, the worst deal or no, your worst regret are going to be the deals you're passing on now. Like that every deal you pass on, it's going to be in. So I was in the penalty box a lot of times because I just I couldn't move our numbers much, maybe $300,000 here or there, but not going up to what some of these pricing and have forbid I was in a bidding war. Like we have a pretty strict policy.

Like once it goes on the market, we're not buyers. And so brokers now, because we have a track record, we're good people, we have a relationship. Now the deals come to us before we even, know, before they even go out, before there's even a broker opinion, a value or I shouldn't say a broker opinion value, but the offering memorandum, before there's a presentation put out to the market. So, and that's where you want to be. You want to be able to get in before, you know, you have a bunch of sharks going after the same meat.

Trent Werner: Yeah. Well, and in 2020, I mean, obviously, you were looking at deals before 2022. But going into 2022, you said you acquired your first multifamily. Tell me just brief overview of what that deal looked like and what made you end up pursuing that deal.

Wayne C: So that property took me two years to purchase. And it sounds crazy, but it was during one of our off market. We did a full text blast and we would find off market sellers, people who weren't actively looking. And we had a strike list of properties we were interested in, typically nineteen seventy newer, 100 plus units, certain areas of Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. And we did all the grunt work of finding out who the recorded going to the tax website, seeing who the reported owner was or is, go into the Secretary of State's website, finding out who the owners behind that LLC, the recorded owners are.

So finding the true owners in essence. And then we did a bunch of pricing and it's a lot of work. But that type of work is where you can find really good deals. We've got that. We did our tax blasts and seller and I just started building the relationship.

It took two years before he was ready to buy. What I liked about that deal was it was direct to seller. It was a very, in my opinion, distressed property in a sense that there wasn't a whole lot of money is being put in the property to keep up. A lot of the roofs were leaking. HVACs weren't working.

Pools green. There was a lot of issues. This was not a professional real estate investor who had owned it. It was a cardiologist out of California. Even a good person, good doctor, all that good stuff, just got a little out of hand for him.

So yeah, we put an offer on it after many offers. And he let us I won't say let us because it was like his baby. He let us take it over. Now we still have that asset. And we have a lot of properties in 2022 that were bought, even when they were strictly underwritten, etcetera.

Those are all have had pains. There's no secret multifamily everywhere has had those pains. We recently modified that loan, to, you know, a lower rate fixed rate. And so that was it was, you know, not an easy project, even though the numbers look fantastic. It's just in '22, even though I was saying no to all these other properties, it's still, you know, was priced at a point where, you know, looking back now, I don't think I would have done anything different because I liked everything about the deal and what I knew about what was going on.

We weren't using debt to overpay. We were going in conservative. But it definitely tests grit whenever you have those markets. When have a sponsor who's gone through ups and downs, because we've had some really, really good times, we've had times of age, maybe twenty years. But when you talk to a sponsor and you're like, well, how did you get through a tough time?

Like people want to know and not like even this will be very transparent, like open through it. Like not every not everything is easy, but that's why passive investors want people like us doing it. Like last night we had a major flood event. I won't say flood event, but I'm going say water event. We had Bryan College Station, Central Texas.

We just haven't tons of rain. Well, last night in one of my storage facilities, I'm pushing out water because the storm system, the drainage system, it just overloaded in Bryan College Station. I was thinking while I'm pushing out water, I'm like, this is why passive investors want to not be active in real estate. They want the benefits of real estate, but they don't want to be doing. And so I pushed the water out happily thinking about my investors and they don't even know that I did that.

This is the first time I even mentioned it outside my team. But I'm like, this is just really important for sponsors and syndicators to be hands on and not controlling a real estate asset that they're not local to and focused and doing all the hard work that the passive investors don't have to do.

Trent Werner: Well, and this just talking about this deal, for example, or not not the not the flood or the water event deal, but the the one that took you bought in 2022, took you a couple years to buy it. And and 2022, like you said, it it was a year that was you can find good deals, but some of the deals got a little hairy. They were a little tough. Maybe, you know, maybe preferred returns had to take a pause or or whatnot just to get through some of these these tumultuous times. What are you telling your investors when you're dealing with a time like that, that a lot of multifamily general partners have been going through recently, especially on those deals that they bought maybe two, three years ago?

What are you telling your investors when you're like, Hey, you know, we need to keep the operating account filled up. We need to have some reserves. Market's a little hairy right now. What kind of conversations are you having?

Wayne C: Yeah, I mean, our conversations have been a lot better during the early stage of it. We were communicating, but those conversations are tough to have with any investor. The biggest thing, I had investors who were so grateful that we were just on the phone, just communicating, doing a webinar, doing everything we can just to overly communicate. I have investors that are I have people who haven't invested with us that are part of our newsletter that we send out every other week. And they're like, I know more about your deals that I'm not part of than the deals that I'm part of.

And so but that's I mean, good or bad. We just want to educate now. Part of that education process is like, Okay, well, what happened in 2022? Well, bridge debt, which was used to finance loans when Fannie Freddie on fixed rate debt wasn't being given, then we can get more technical on why would debt service coverage ratio, etcetera. But just in essence, bridge debt was being used because just being blunt here, a lot of properties were just being bought above value.

So in doing so, they had to use bridge debt to be a little bit more aggressive floating rate debt to get that property. I saw that time and time again, as I mentioned before, like when I was doing offers on bids, I was getting fixed rate quotes, and I couldn't compete with the bridge debt because they can come in higher value loan to value, etc. Where we what we did is we took a property. We did bridge debt on that deal, but we didn't do it in a way because we were overpaying. We were using in the sense of like the roofs were leaking.

HVACs needed to be replaced. There were second, third, fourth chance type people. There is a purpose for bridge debt, and it's to take a property that's struggling, reposition it, and bridge the gap to long term fixed rate financing. And that's what our plan intent was. And so I'm already hearing people talk about bridge debt at conferences, like how they're being aggressive on not say aggressive on deals, but they're getting deals through bridge debt.

That worries me. And I think for those like passive investors that are listening in, bridge debt is not bad in the sense if it's used properly, bridging a gap to get to reposition an asset. But if there's not a real value add, a business plan to get to a higher value of net operating income, And when I tell investors, Trent, think of this every property as its own business and it's not a rocket science. It's income minus expenses. Is your net operating income and then minus your debt service is your, you know, your NOI after debt service.

So that's the profit of the the deal. If it's not cash flowing in this environment where, you know, it's a harder, you know, there's higher vacancy and multifamily, you know, it's a little harder time right now with rent bumps, etcetera. It might be something to, you know, just at least ask questions of that business plan or say like, hey, why is there 5%, 6% rent bumps when, you know, rents are softening a little bit, you know, so asking the right questions for sure. But going back to your question, it's just being open communicating. We put GPs, we put heavy money into the deal as well.

And we worked really tirelessly with our lender going through meeting them on-site, explaining everything. Mean, the property looks and still is running really great. And then once once we were able to get them comfortable that we were good stewards of the property, because you see a lot of deals Trent, they're like the bank still has them, but they've moved the property to another deal sponsor syndicator. Fortunately, they felt comfortable with us, so we were able to hold on to it. And now we just do monthly updates on what we're doing and you know, we have a few I always mentioned exit strategies here.

There's a couple of exit strategies we're looking at. We've got some extensions that we have on our loan that we can utilize. But I'm also looking at a HUD rate, a HUD loan, which gets us into like a forty year amortization, a lower DSCR so we can get a fixed rate debt, lower interest rate. But that's the stuff like you and I have to deal with day to day and strategy and long term preservation of cash and capital for our investors and working this with our lenders and such. So now I would say the other deals that we have, they're all cash flowing day one, quarterly distributions doing extremely well.

And so, but, but the mindset shifted from that 2022 asset to it has to cash flow day one. If it doesn't cash flow day one, I'm not interested. And, and so that's a lot of lessons learned that, but to reiterate, I don't know if I would have said no to that property in 2022. Like looking back, like I felt like it was a good asset and I still think it is a great asset, you know, as we just get through this period of time.

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Trent Werner: Uptown Syndication is now offering a syndication coaching program for you to take your real estate portfolio to the next level. This is your opportunity to have experienced syndicators, AJ and Chris Shepherd, coach you on your way to controlling your real estate investing future. Our coaching program will provide you with the tools and framework needed to begin syndicating real estate in your target market. Go to uptownsyndication.com today to learn more. So if you're looking at deals and part of your criteria is that it has to cash flow day one, are you staying away from value add or are you still able to find value add deals that are cash flowing day one?

Wayne C: Yeah, it's a great question. So it's being creative. A lot of multifamily guys have left the space. They've gone to car washes or ATMs or these Bitcoin stuff, like just storage, all that. Yeah, I'm like, Good people.

Thank y'all for being at this station. I'll stay here. And so I've doubled down on multifamily and I've been very, very fortunate to find great deals when everybody else was saying there was no deals. Couple of examples. We bought a property end of twenty three.

It was a REIT who was looking to get out of the Houston market. They were open to seller financing. We got a 6% fixed rate, five years interest only. I bought that property about 75 a door, which a couple of years ago, easily we won $10.01 15 a door, but they were just looking to exit and that property has done extremely well. Every quarter since we bought it has cash flowed, minimal maintenance.

The value add there is if you're able to even just increase it by $30 or $20 if you take that times the units times twelve months and divided by the cap rate, you're still adding, depending on the size, it could be 500 upwards of $1,000,000 in value a year just by those small bumps. So there is value add. The other thing about value add is it doesn't mean you have to spend a bunch of money to make massive capital improvements. If I can save a nickel and still take care of the asset in a way that takes care of my residents, etcetera, I'm going to save the nickel. Like it's important to save everything because at the end of the day, cash at the end of the matter, cash is king and it drives returns.

So that could also be a value add. Now, deal we did last late August was a fixed rate 3.82%, a loan assumption. So that's I mean, rates right now, you know, I'm getting quotes for low five or, you know, if that's Fannie, if I could, if I do like non Fannie, Freddie, it's upwards six and a half percent. I got it at 3.82% fixed rate. 127 Unit, great location in Houston.

Cash flow has done extremely well. Great tax depreciation for investors. It's been fantastic. Right now, I've got a deal in San Antonio under contract. That seller was a distressed seller, unfortunately.

Their whole portfolio, the loans were called due by their lender. A property they bought last year, they paid it for about 13,000,000. We were buying it for $10,000,007.50. It's pretty much just close to the debt that they have on the property. How we found that property is it came to us through a strong broker relationship before it went out to the market.

And so we're buying a year later, buying it for over 2 and a half million less than what the seller paid for a year ago. And that property is not distressed. It's just he's caught up in a broader portfolio of loans that are being due. So there's great opportunities for people who are willing to put in the work and find good deals. And you also have to raise capital.

And a lot of unfortunately, a lot people are not able to raise capital. We even the people who have invested on the property I told you in 2022, we have gotten they've reinvested and they have brought their friends and their family, etcetera. And so we've been very successful raising capital because they've seen us in the best of times and they've seen us when it like we're fighting through and gritting and that Marine comes out of me where it's like, got to fight through it and don't give up because so many people put their head under a pillow and it just it drives me crazy. So anyway, there's just incredible deals right now that we're finding. And that's to me, the ultimate value add.

If you're able to find these creative opportunities where either you buy at a great basis or buy at a lower rate than what the market's providing at this point.

Trent Werner: Yeah, and that kind of leads me into another question is, as a as a limited part or a limited partner or a passive investor that's wanting to get into the real estate space, the news the new if you look at the news right now, it's gonna tell you that all syndicators are bad. People are losing their their shorts on everything right now, which is not true. Obviously, if you're able to to weather those storms, it's gonna make you a better general partner. But as a passive investor looking to get into the space and invest with a general partner, what are things that they should be doing both from a deal vetting process as well as a sponsor vetting process?

Wayne C: Yeah, great question. I think the starting point is then listening to your podcast, listening to other going to meetups, conferences, reading books. I have a passive investor coaching program, passiveinvestorcoaching.com. It's free. There's over five hours of just content of just what passive investors can do to learn about evaluating deals and all that.

You do it. Number one is education and those listening in, they're starting that path. Two, it's networking. It's finding sponsors that are showing up and going to these meetups or going to conferences or, you know, going to their website, doing some searches, you know, and having a conversation with them. I think at the end of the day, like this is a people business, business, people, business, business, and being able to, just have the conversation and just see if anything in your radar system that we're all naturally tuned to for the most part of like, Hey, is this is this person a good person or not?

I live here in College Station, but I love going to Houston, Austin. I've gone to San Antonio where I'll drive a few hours or a couple of hours to go meet people that I've never met ever, other than I value that in person relationship. I have people who invest capital. I'm like, hey, I'd love to take you out to lunch. We haven't met in person.

It's those type of relationships that I just think matter. So looking at that, I also think for first time investors, looking at states or cities that you're comfortable and you know, The USA is large land, and there are states that are more landlord friendly. There are some that are more tenant friendly. So real estate is already a risk. Why invest in a state that is not landlord friendly?

You are an owner as an investor. You are an owner in a real property. And having laws and judges and officials that are landlord friendly, I think is a way to reduce that risk for you. Always look at the FEMA. I can keep going on trends.

Just tell me when to stop.

Trent Werner: No, keep going. I mean, this is

Wayne C: probably think flooding, go to the FEMA website. There's a flood map, put in the address. That should be part of the sponsor's presentation about what the flood zone is. If it's touching or in a flood zone, immediately pass. Real estate is already a risk.

Why add flooding right in a flood zone? There was a property in Houston that I was so excited about. I was put an LOI or letter of intent. And then after the letter of intent, was like, let me go check the flood zone. And it's right in the bayou.

It's like right where it's like dark blue. Oh my gosh, darn it. No wonder it was a good deal. And so now I tell my team, before we even do anything, check the flood map. Can go a lot of people invest outside of the city that they're in.

Use technology, Google Earth, put in the address, go in as being able to pinpoint street view, look at the properties. Is there a pawn shop nearby? Is there bars, window bars outside the gas station? What's the nearest school? Where's the nearest school median income?

What's the crime rate? These are things that are easily accessible through online research.

Trent Werner: Let me let me let me ask you real quick. So flood, I mean, we're in Oregon, we don't really deal with floods, right? We get a ton of rain as is our, our weather, our drainage systems are are top notch because of how much water we're used to. And so, you know, our our assets were not I mean, maybe some wind here or there or like a tree coming down or ice or whatever, but it's not something that we're we're worried about all the time. Now if you're looking at at deals in the Sunbelt South where you're getting tropical storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, whatever, Aside from just looking at the flood map, are there other things that you are analyzing or doing to maybe understand what could happen a little bit better?

Wayne C: Yeah, I think, I mean, for most part, especially coastal areas, FEMA's got it pretty dialed in. I mean, there's always areas that could get flooded. I mean, there's always that risk. But there was a property that I was looking at through a partner relationship in Louisville, Kentucky. And I just did a quick Google search of Louisville, Kentucky weather or something like that.

And it was like the highest it had like the highest chance of tornadoes. It had something like tornadoes were extremely likely. And I was like, yeah, that does quite a bit of damage. So no, though we wouldn't have tornadoes every day. But I'm like, for it to be one of the first things that Google popped up when I Googled that, I was like, nah, not good.

I mean, Houston deals with hurricanes. So why do I deal with hurricanes? Well, Houston is so massive. Was it at least the fourth largest city and growing to Chicago? But it's so big landmass that we're not buying right near the coast.

I mean, we're buying North and Northwest of Houston, which is several 100 miles away from the coastline. So by the time it comes, you know, we're not being impacted as much through the storm. You know, if I buy in San Antonio, you're not going to have issues. You'll have issues with hail. Dallas, I mean, they have, their own set of things with the tornado, at least with a hurricane.

I can plan for it. I've got five days in advance. I'll tell my friends in Dallas last week. I went to the Byron Nelson PGA tournament. And I was like, I at least can plan for storms.

Night, you'd just be like tornadoes is popping up and hail damage. So I mean, there's risk wherever you are. But I just think if you're able to reduce the risk by at least not buying or investing in a floodplain, and plus your insurance is going to be a lot higher, which dilutes cash flow.

Trent Werner: Yeah. And then I guess, I guess just going back to betting a sponsor, I mean, from, you know, record or their resume, what else can you be asking these these sponsors when you're looking to invest with them?

Wayne C: For sure. And so, going back to the likability, understanding who they are as a person, what's their values, what do they have to lose? Like for me, this is what I do full time. I've got three kids, a wife. I'm a scoutmaster.

I'm a Rotarian. I've got a lot of lose if I'm, you know, my reputation such, go south. So, but asking, you know, you mentioned about the track record, but that's important. And I think if anybody's been in this business for the last five years, they have one property that struggled. I mean, unless they just hit perfect basis every single time.

But there's not one sponsor syndicator that I know that hasn't had some type of rough time if they were investing over the last five years. And you can say that about people back in 02/2007, 02/2008, 02/2009. A lot of real estate investors, they got hosed. But those people that were coming in and investing when others were not, which is sort of like what this period of time is, did extremely well. So I educate our investors, when the crowd is going in one direction, start going in the opposite direction, because that's usually where you can find some great deals.

So to ask about track record, they should be very transparent and talk about the lessons learned. And especially if they haven't lost any capital, but you have gone through major grit events that speaks highly of themselves. Understand the team. One of the things, Trent, I see a lot of is they'll present a team or you may invest in person A, and you think that person A is a decision maker on that team. Well, person A could be raising capital and participating in asset management, but doesn't have any decision rights in the actual deal.

And that's fine. It's very normal in syndications. I think in a lot of cases, multiple heads is a beast. You don't want you want that one leader. But as a passive investor, you want to know who that leader is.

Who is that person who's really making the ultimate decision? Typically, it's the manager of the entity. It's the one who's going be signing your PPMs, the private placement marines, the documents. And so, but you want to understand what their track record is and understand, you you don't want to be in a situation where you start going to the person you invested with to then find out when the deal isn't performing that they don't really have any decision rates. And I know it sounds a lot negative, Trent, where it's like we're talking about deals not performing.

There's a lot of deals that are performing. And the publicity, it's really getting a bad rap. But what I'm saying is real estate has been around since the beginning of time. It's the oldest investment, right? They're not building more dirt, getting in when nobody else or not as many people are getting in where it's less frothy.

It makes sense. And then we get like supply and demand, you know, even though there could be some more supply right now because of the new builds. If you look at no, any permits coming up, there's no new permits. There's very few. So as that supply gets absorbed, those that are investing now, I think, are going to do really well.

Other syndication to ask for referrals, we're always happy to give referrals, look at deals, ask for financials. I I mean, there's all sorts of stuff. I'd say most people though, unfortunately, Trent, they join a webinar and then they like the presentation and then they invest. And even on our deals, we're grateful for those people, but I'm always trying to reach out to them be like, Hey, let's have a conversation and, you know, let's build the relationship.

Trent Werner: Well, I know I've mentioned it on this show before, but a very important aspect to investing as a limited partner and and as a general partner is the general partner should be, I guess, coaching you or or making sure that the limited partner is a good fit for the investment based on their goals and what they're trying to achieve. Because, yeah, I mean, obviously a general partner wants to raise money and raise capital. But if the investor doesn't necessarily fit the avatar or the criteria for this investment, that general partner, if they are good and know what they're doing, should be able to recommend that investor to either a different type of investment or just at least coach that limited partner up on, hey, this might not be the best fit for what your goals are right now.

Wayne C: Sure. That was like a mic drop. It was really good because if you don't understand as a passive investor, if you're a cash flow investor or an equity upside investor or both, you know, I always tell investors that it's like, you know, you have your growth stock, you know, that's more risky, but has better chances of giving you better returns or you're more your value stock, your safe stock. And it's less sexy, you know, but it's less returns, but it's stable. And so when you look at that, depending on where you are in your life investment, if you're going into, say, growth stock, I compare that to development.

We've got a multifamily development in Bryan College Station. People that are massively concerned about cash preservation and cash flow, that is not a good deal for them because it is risky. It's a development and it won't cash flow for at least twenty four, thirty six months as we build and utilize it. Where to your point, Trent, on our other deals that are cash flowing, you know, they, they want that 8%, 7%, whatever that number is, you know, because that's, they like the security of it, or they may want to use it for their, their life. I have a doctor in Los Angeles and I'm happy to anybody that reaches out, connect y'all with him to verify my story here.

But he makes at least $310,000 on passive income through us. And he just told me the last week, and this is the second year in a row he's paid zero in taxes because of the depreciation that we provide. So he's a retired cardiologist, but he's like, I now don't have to pay. Like I'm enjoying, he's got other rental properties and things, but he's like, because of investing with you and the depreciation I'm getting through passive income, There's always taxes. Talk to your tax person, I'll say all that.

But it's been pretty cool to see that he's just living off of the income that he's getting from CREI Partners. And then the K-1s help reduce or eliminate, in this case, his tax liability.

Trent Werner: And that is yet another benefit of investing as a limited partner. Wayne, I know you mentioned passiveinvestorcoaching.com for passive investors to educate themselves, learn more. Is there anywhere else that you want people to connect with you or hear more from you?

Wayne C: Yeah. So passiveinvestorcoaching.com, thanks for mentioning that again. And then cripartners.com, a lot of information about our team, about our deals, about our strategy. There's podcast information, blogs. It just goes back to the number one thing that past investors can do, and that's just get educated.

And so hopefully I added some value. And industrial was the word I was looking for industrial company. You know, when I was all the place you mentioned, I was like, Oh, it's industrial. So anyway, but, know, hopefully it was a good podcast episode for you and your investors.

Trent Werner: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining and answering my questions honestly and transparently. I know you're a great general partner and I know people that invest with you would agree with me. So thank you so much for joining the show today.

Wayne C: Thanks, Trent. Appreciate you, man.

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