WIN186. How to Scale a Multifamily Portfolio with Robert Martinez

AJ: 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

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AJ: Alright. Today, have Robert Martinez with us, with Rockstar Capital. Looking forward to this conversation. Robert has amassed, quite a few units down in Texas. Robert, do you just wanna kinda give us a little bit background on on yourself and tell us how you got here today?

Robert: Yeah. So, you know, real estate is not part of my family. I I grew up in Deep South Texas. My dad was forty five years in the franchise fast food industry. So, you know, real estate, the only real estate my parents owned was my house, the house that I grew up in.

So I went to Texas A and M, got an engineering degree because that's what I thought I should do to make the most amount of money. I did that for about ten years, you know, when I was in sales. What you realize in corporate America that there's only X amount you can make, there's a ceiling. And once you get close to that ceiling, your bosses wanna like send you back down and start over. And so that's what happened.

That happened two or three times to me where they would play with my commission plan, play with my territory so I couldn't make a lot. So I started looking for different things to do. And I found, after about two, three year period of that, I found a real estate club in Houston, Texas that was teaching single family investing. And I went there and I paid $500 to go through their two day bootcamp. And at the end of Saturday, I was like, wow, I'm gonna be the single family king.

I think this is amazing. I'm gonna buy a few houses and I'm gonna supplement my income. Never imagined that I leave corporate America. Then I went to Sunday, and Sunday was all about multifamily. And that's where I learned forced appreciation, something that I call today the magic formula, right?

Where you can increase your NOI, and then NOI divided by a cap rate gets you valuation. I'm an engineer by trade, so that made a lot of sense to me. Like you can apply a formula and this is it. No, you couldn't do that in single family houses. And so I ponied up $10,000 to join this real estate club.

This is January 2007, and I immersed myself in this club. I went to all of the free events, I went to all of the special paid member events, we had bus road trips, we had a lot of different, we had a lot of videos we would watch from previous presenters or whatever subject matter there was, and I really immersed myself. I met a partner when I was there. He and I went on to buy 2,000 units in about a three year timeframe. In 2010, I'm sorry, excuse me, 2011, he and I had a falling out.

We ended our partnership. I had bought one deal that was mine. The other deals, he was the GP, I was more of the operating arm. But on that last bid, I bought my first deal, a property called Water Chase Apartments in March 2010. So when I started Rockstar Capital in April 2011, that was my first deal.

We bought another deal that month. And what we did was we just buy deep value add deals. We look for ways to improve the business. So similar to like a leveraged buyout or what you would see on a lot of movies out there, that's what we did. We raised equity and then we would go get a loan and we would buy this asset, we would make improvements on it, and in a two, three year timeframe at that time, we would refinance it, get it reappraised, pull cash out, put long term debt on it and hold it.

I got very good at that. Raised a lot of equity because I had a track record of being able to follow that business plan over and over. At one time I had 100% cash out refinance events. Wow. It was a big deal in my real estate club.

So when people see that they can give you a 100 K you and and that in a three to five year period, you're producing cash flow and you're giving them their money back and they have all the tax advantages and they still own the deal, you get a lot of attention. Yeah. And so that's what I did. I started doing buying one deal a year. And then in 2014, I started to buy a little bit more than that.

And and it just kept growing and growing and growing. I'm proud to say that today we have a $150,000,000 of lifetime distributions from my investors.

AJ: That's awesome.

Robert: And we've done really, really well. Yeah. So we have 22 assets, in Texas, primarily concentrated in Houston, 4,415 units.

AJ: Yeah. That's that's amazing. So kinda talking about, you know, like that that first one, it sounds like you were you'd you'd done some research and done some deals with another partner, but, you know, you start out with that first one, like, getting over those hurdles of the first one, you know, if you can remember that far back. What what what were some of those challenges that you went through, at that time?

Robert: So so as I said, I got in the business in in January '7. Yeah. And by December Perfect timing.

AJ: Right? Right as right as it's Yeah. Gone

Robert: And not not too dissimilar to what just happened. Right? I I bought my first deal with my partner. So he was technically the GP. I was the operating arm, but on the legal documents, I'm a passive partner, I'm an LP.

Yeah. So I put my couple $100,000 on that deal and then we bought some deals in 'eight and we bought a couple more deals in 'nine. And of course, what happened? You had the crash occurred. Yeah.

With what's now called the Great Recession. And I was the operator. I had to learn. I trained all the staff on how to sell, how to lease apartments, how to maintain retention. Like nobody ever tells you the number one way you make money in real estate is when everybody renews and not when they move out.

Because when they move out, you have vacancy loss. You have to pay marketing costs. You have commissions to your leasing agent. It doesn't work.

AJ: Gotta you gotta fix up the unit too. So you've got construction costs potentially on two.

Robert: So I my my upbringing in real estate, as you said, happened at the most critical time. I got to see deals fall and then rise again later on when they don't ever tell you that when these deals go under, they come back again like a zombie and they're at a fraction of the cost that the competitor you helped put into the ground came back with. So they're doing the same thing. So then it becomes a customer service game. It's all about retention, making sure that number one, when they move in, they get the right make ready that you expected that what they saw during the tour is exactly what they get, because that will influence your work order activity.

Oh, yeah. You don't want your work orders to be coming from the move in from last week. You want your work orders to be coming in just, you know, I gotta change out an AC filter. I gotta change this out. Like, everyday stuff,

AJ: Yeah, like a toilet starts running, right? Like that's the worst when

Robert: in Absolutely. You don't wanna make a bad first impression. Yeah. It's like going out on a date, right? You don't wanna have bad breath or you're not gonna get a second date.

And that's how I tell my team is that we need to always be trying to get that second date. We need that renewal that happens in twelve months. And so we would make improvements along the way. We would change out the air conditions. In Houston, Texas, it's very hot, just like it is in Arizona.

And their number one maintenance headache is air conditions. And it turns out that that's the number one reason why people move out. So as part of our rehab, we changed out all the air conditions. And then we started updating the appliances. Update, you know, don't do these Taj Mahal type renovations where people are spending $1,020,000.

I take care of the basics. If you get cold air, you get hot water on demand, is pest control in line. You know, nobody wants to come home and there's a creepy crawler, you know, that you see there, right? We focus a lot on that and spend a lot of money on pest control. So the key is that we're buying deals where we're gonna have a renter for life.

They're never gonna buy a house, at least not a majority of them.

AJ: Right.

Robert: And so they're not gonna leave you unless you give them a reason to leave you. There'll be a renter for life. And that's our motto that we need that renewal. You make your money on the renewal because when somebody renews, you don't have to spend any money to start their new contract. And if anything, they're gonna pay more in rent than they did the previous twelve months.

AJ: And if I remember correctly too from talking with you, you guys, self perform the property management. So you're vertically integrated?

Robert: Yeah. So my company Rockstar Capital. We manage all of our deals. We self manage. Along the way, we've earned 19 city state national apartment association awards, and I'm a five time owner of the year.

Three times sorry. Three times at the local level, one time at the state level, and one time at the national level.

AJ: One of the one of the big advantages of that is, like, you have direct communication with those either the on-site managers or the leasing agents and, like, sounds like your background in sales training has very much helped kind of like curate that that training for them.

Robert: Right. So the difference is that when you self manage, right, you control all the meetings, you control the strategy, you control the culture, and all those are very important. Every Monday here at 12:30 goes about two hours. I have a leadership call. I have all my executives that my regionals, my head of revenue management, my head of training, my head of operations, and where they're talking about the portfolio.

This past week, we were talking about our make ready process. How can we speed up our make ready process? How can we have more completion? At a third party, you don't know if they're gonna do that.

AJ: You

Robert: know that if you own it and you own the management company and that's your kid's equity on the line, you're gonna make sure you you, you work on those things. And then on Wednesday, we have our manager calls. I try to lead those. I wanna go through the stats. I wanna share a little bit of what we talked about on Monday with the leadership team, but more importantly, I want feedback.

How are things going at your sites? What is occurring? What's good? What's bad? We focus on resident retention.

We focus on resident reviews. We focus on work order activity, and it's just any general items that come up during that call. I feel that if I have those two meetings every single week, if I conduct and I lead those two meetings every single week, then I can have the right information I need to make decisions for the portfolio. Yeah. I think leadership starts at the top, It absolutely does.

The way I carry myself, the way I'm engaged, you know, I I can't expect anybody to do that if I'm not willing to do it. So you've gotta lead by example.

AJ: So, I mean, run me through this, you know, you you buy these heavy value add deals and presumably they've got some problems with them. But, I mean, if you've got a property that kinda starts to show some resident retention problems, I know you've kinda said focus on that. Like, if you start seeing, you know, a bunch of tenants leaving a place, like, how what's kind of, you know, your modus operandi for going in and identifying what the problem is and, like, how to fix it?

Robert: Yeah. I'm glad you asked. The way you fix that is that you start first in the manager chair. Yeah. That manager that you put there is representing a multimillion dollar asset.

The least expensive asset that I have right now is worth $10,000,000.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: And I'm putting somebody there that's maybe making $5,060,000 a year. And I need to make sure that they're making the right decisions.

AJ: Sure.

Robert: And so we train them, we watch them, we encourage them, we tell them what the metrics are. And if we start to see slowdown, we're gonna make a change. You know, as much of a people person I am, I like my money more than I like people. I wanna make sure that my money's here to take care of me and my family. So I've got a very itchy trigger finger.

Yeah. When I bring somebody in to replace somebody else, I have a thirty day policy. You have thirty days to spark it up, meaning that you have to do better than the person you were there before. And if you cannot do better in those first thirty days, you need to go. Yeah.

It doesn't take longer than that. If you've made the right hire, they're in that chair, and you're you brought them in because they you had a problematic manager before, you should see improvement. If you see things continue to go down, if you don't see a stop, you don't see an a a crescendo up, then you made the wrong hire. It's literally that like that. That that's how business that that's how the operations of apartments work.

If the manager is the right person sitting in that chair, she will make you or she will break you.

AJ: And when you say manager, that's like an on-site manager, I'm assuming there.

Robert: Property manager. Yep.

AJ: Yeah. Okay. And, I mean, when you when you first buy these properties too, you presumably have, like, there's you're putting someone new in place or you're keeping the same person and you're coming out like, hey, here's the plan of like what we plan to do.

Robert: Yeah. You know, I think it's a mixed bag. Obviously, I want depending on where you are in your business business cycle, I wanna put somebody there that I know knows my way. Yeah. I don't want a first time manager.

That's not gonna help me in my business plan. Need somebody who's successfully helped me implement a business plan at another property. Okay. Because they know exactly the rockstar way, what is expected there. And so you're gonna comp them accordingly.

Once in a while, we will retain staff depending on the person and you interview them. And also you want somebody to that knows where the dead bodies are buried. Yeah. And I always have my person running congruent with that. I wanna make sure that, you know, I'm either gonna stick with this person that I inherited and that I decided to keep, or I'm gonna move my per my other person there.

So they'll shadow them for a little bit. And if this person here can make it, then the other person doesn't need to come, and they'll go back to wherever they're at or they'll go somewhere else. But, you know, in reality, nine times out of 10, it's a new person. I'm putting my people there. It's not I'm not gonna take on somebody's stuff.

And the reason for that is that I'm buying deals that have issues. Yeah. I'm a value add operator. So there is something wrong with this deal. And chances are you're part of the problem.

AJ: That's that's probably going what I was getting at. It's a lot it's a lot easier to replace the, the person that's, you know, part of the problem. They may not be the entire problem, but they're certainly not fixing it. Right? Otherwise, you're not you're not buying the deal.

Robert: Just like I treat I give them thirty days just like I treat my my my team. And they need to show me that they that they deserve to belong here in thirty days. So during that thirty days, I'm gonna find out all that they know. I'm gonna find out the good of the property. I'm gonna find out the bad.

I always tell them, hey, if I come with you with a bucket of money, how would you spend it? Well, the number one thing that people talk about is playground. Oh, really? Okay. Cool.

What else? Well, we we don't have a dog park. Okay. Cool. What what else?

And then you you you pump them from information, and you find out if if it's credible or not.

AJ: Well, they're and they're getting a lot that

Robert: renovations right away.

AJ: They're get they're not just coming up with those ideas themselves. They're talking with tenants, presumably, right, of, like, you know, send maybe sending out some surveys of like, hey, what, you know, what does this place need or where do you guys think this is deficient or something like that. Like, they're supposed to be communicating that stuff up up the ladder and it's like, is it worth it or not? Right?

Robert: Absolutely. And if they don't have an answer, then they're the wrong person. That means you're not walking your property. That means you're not engaging with your with your residents. And so what value do you have for me?

You're gonna do the exact same thing with me.

AJ: Yeah. What I maybe talking about like capital improvements, what are some of the, like, your favorite things that you've done that have, like worked out well or the favorite things that your managers have done that have worked out well?

Robert: Well, think number one is when you take over a property, you got to change the culture.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: You have to let them know that we're different than the guy before. That's why I bought the deal. I think I can do a better job than the guy before. And so number one is you're gonna start engaging with the residents. You're gonna start with resident events.

You're gonna get them to start promoting positive reviews. They're gonna see the renovations that you're doing. You know, if you can, you send out a renovation letter that, hey, over the next, you know, three to six months, we're gonna be making the following improvements so that they see what's coming. And then they give you feedback. What's happened a lot too, is that some residents like, oh, you only fixed the new stuff.

No, it's not true. I put a brand new air conditioning in your unit too.

AJ: Yeah. You

Robert: know, and so you have to remind them of the things, right? Because they always see when a new owner comes in, does renovation, it means rents going up. So you have to alleviate that fear. And the reason why they're afraid of the rent going up is not because they can't necessarily afford it, it's because they don't think the value's there. If the value's there, they will pay for it.

If you put a washer and dryers in their units that they didn't have before, they'll pay an extra $15.20 bucks. Why wouldn't you? So that's what it comes down to. You gotta change the attitude, excuse me, you have to change the attitude of the residents there. Then you need to make life a little bit better.

Yeah. You wanna put a dog park. You wanna add amenities. So we're gonna fix the gym. Some of the things that we've done recently is we started adding parcel lockers.

So, you know, kinda like that Amazon style parcel locker. So if I get a package, the package gets delivered in the parcel locker. The parcel locker will send the resident a text message to say, hey. You have a package

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: Notification. And then here's your code to get your package. And you go to the parcel locker setup, punch in the code, and then a locker will open up. And there's your package. People like that because it's safety.

Nobody wants to buy something and have it ripped off from your front door. And in the office, I'm not the post office.

AJ: I don't want my teams

Robert: handling your packages. They're not, that's not what they're paid to do. We're not one of those little post its that you see there in the retail centers or strip malls. We're a property management company and that's not what we wanna do. So parcel loggers are great, it's a great amenity.

And because of that, we get to charge $15 on top of our rent as an amenity fee for that. And a $25,000 investment can be a 4 or $500,000 lift or a 5 or $400,000 gain to your valuation. We started adding cameras. Know, years ago when I got involved in real estate in 'seven, 'eight, I was told, Don't put cameras on your property because the residents see that and it opens you up to liability. That was just small minded thinking.

Know, in 2026, crime has no zip code. If I see a property that has cameras and there's like blinking red and blue lights there and they're all over, I'm like, wow, they care about their residents.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: That's how I would feel if I was moving in. And there's always this perception that, oh, no, it's like, it's gonna show liability that you had and it's gonna no, that's not how it works. First of we have property insurance, and property insurance will cover any kind of issues that we have that are to our negligence. But having those cameras there is a winner. That adds a sense of security.

No place is safe, but it adds a sense of security there and comfort when the resident's walking around and they're looking at the grounds and they see a camera there with red and blue lights, they feel safe. And then they see another camera on the corner, then they see another camera on another side of the property. They feel good. So these are just a couple of things that we've added to increase the NOI. The last thirty six months have been crazy.

We had tax increases, we had properties, the property insurance almost triple, you had interest rate exposure where rates went up, skyrocketed. It was a lot of negative, right? You had to manufacture NOI to help you overcome that and get out of that floating rate debt. So if it we either came up with something where we helped add the income or we found a way to help reduce expenses.

AJ: Yeah. Well, and not only that, the other kicker too is, you know, a lot of rents were kind of flat over the last couple years, in a lot of different markets. So really coming up with, you know, extra value to bump that NOI sounds pretty imperative, especially when you're trying to refinance or get some additional loans. So kind of backing up, you know, you said you did kind of like one deal a year and then, you know, you were doing a refinance and getting a lot of, you know, investors' money back. So I guess kind of like, talk me through, like, the, like, how how you, like, cultivated those investors and then what it was like when, you know, you're giving them their money back and then ask them presumably for more money on the next deal.

Like yeah. Just kinda go through that a little bit with me.

Robert: Yeah. You remember, you gotta remember who we are. We are stock market alternatives.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: That's what corporate America has ingrained in us. Right? From the minute you come out of college or whatever, put money away in your four zero one k. Where does that four zero one k go? It goes to the stock market.

It grows those companies. But you have no voice. You have no influence. You don't know who's managing your money. And the difference in what I do is that when I raise the equity, I am personally asking you for equity to invest with me.

I'm gonna put 300 to 500 to $800,000, I think is my largest equity investment. They see that as a strength. I'm asking you to come invest with me. And then we're gonna have monthly calls. You're not gonna get monthly calls investing in the stock market.

We do monthly calls. We've been doing that ever since 2022 when everything started to go south. I needed my investors to know from me what's occurring, not reading the news, not letting somebody else control the narrative, letting them know, here's what's going on with your investment and here's our plan to correct it. And then once we corrected it, okay, here's our plan to get to an exit in two years from now. We're gonna implement the parcel lockers.

We're gonna put these cameras. We're gonna do this renovation update. We're gonna do these different things. When you can stay in contact with your investors month after month, nobody's gonna break that because I'm gonna be compared to you. I'm gonna be compared to somebody else.

And they're gonna be like, wow. Who gives me the most information about my deal? Is it BrandX or is it Robert at Rockstar? And that's that's how I look. I I figure that the more FaceTime I have with you, the less time anybody has to talk to you.

And that's an old sales rule, right? Like if you're not talking to me, you're talking to somebody else. Well, I'm gonna guarantee that you're gonna talk to me at least once a month, and we're gonna have an hour and a half to two hour call, and we're gonna go through our portfolio, and you're gonna get a chance to do Q and A. I've been told time and time again that almost nobody else does that. Nobody else is as transparent and communicative as I am.

So it's working for us, and that's how you cultivate a relationship.

AJ: Yeah. I, I being vertically integrated too, I think, allows for additional transparency just because of the fact that, like, you know, you're doing those level 10 meetings or the, your your leadership meetings and being involved with with the actual management company that much. I think I think that definitely gives a lot more credit to the information that you're providing too. We're we're vertically integrate we're vertically integrated and like, you know, we we send so much information with our quarterly reports. It's kind of ridiculous, but, you know, we have we have the ability to do that because of we're the ones running the management company.

Robert: And Absolutely. You're in the front lines.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: Your boots on the ground when you're when you're a a solo operator that's vertically integrated. You can control things. You can forecast, and then you have an update a month or two months later, did you hit your forecast? Yep, we hit our occupancy number. They see that.

They know that you're the guy in control. And then, of course, you know, when you are dealing with stuff every day, you sound more confident on camera. You sound more confident in conversations because you're living this every single day. You know? So no no and nobody can bullshit you.

You know what what stuff costs. You know for example, I had a situation very recently where I had a he said, she said, where allegedly I had a a maintenance guy touching somebody inappropriately. And again, I've been doing this since o '7. I know how this works. It was consensual until somebody said they didn't wanna play anymore.

AJ: Right.

Robert: And once we did our investigation, what do you think happened? You find out that that the accuser is married and has children, so she has something to lose. Yeah. You find out that the other guy starts to develop hardcore feelings and he's trying to, you know, he he's not he's not being uninvited. He's being invited.

We find the chat messages, the text messages. You see the different things and what they're talking about. I'm like, that's inappropriate. See, it's always the same thing over and over again. That's why I I kinda like this because, you know, it it it it's not rocket science.

It's a formula over and over again. If I see a property go down, I'm gonna go to the manager, And something has happened in that manager's life. They've either they've lost focus for some reason.

AJ: Yeah. There's there's often something extra extracurricular with, with with work product if they've been, good in the past.

Robert: It's black and white numbers. Right? Numbers are great because you have a reference point. And, like, well, we used to be here, and now we're here. What's going on?

Yeah. And you need you know, when you've done this enough, there's only so many answers. There's only so many explanations. I've heard stuff like, oh, we have new competition down the road or this and this and that. But, you know, it's never not.

No. It's always the most easiest, simplest answer is what it is.

AJ: Yeah. Often often it very much is. We, definitely have had some employees or something extracurricular is going on in their life, and it's like, maybe maybe it's worth a little bit of grace, but, definitely need to refocus and get them back on back on track. Little bit. You know, you you said you started off with a couple deals and, you know, to from then till now, like, that's a significant amount of employees that you now have and a significant amount of money you're managing.

Like, the I mean, I I I kind of got to believe that there's there's usually some glass ceilings in there of, like, you know, that first level, you've got just the managers you're dealing with with property management, but then you gotta move up and then start hiring these regional managers. Like, what were some of the challenges you felt like you went through to add in that extra layer of management?

Robert: You know, if you promote from within, it goes a lot easier. It's when you hire from outside that you have problems because they don't know the rock star way.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: They know what Greatstar told them. They know what Candid told them. They know but those are all third party management companies. It's very different working at a owner managed property management company. Yeah.

Where the owner cannot be bullshit on stuff, where the owner's got a significant amount of his life savings and his kid's future in these deals, right? He's gonna work it. And so what happens is I need to grow, I need to develop a bench. And the better my bench has been, the better our expansion plans happen. If my bench gets light or weak or thin, then I don't have the same results later on.

And I'm forced to bring in outside people. And again, those outside people, it's hit and miss. Yeah. It's hit and miss. Most ideal candidate for me is somebody that I hire as a leasing agent who shows that they can lease, because that's the number one skill of any property manager later on, is your ability to lease yourself out of a situation.

So if you've got sales experience, that's number one. Then I go, can you collect rents? Can you be the assistant manager? Can you go knock on doors when somebody's late and not feel bad about it? Then can you be promoted to property manager and run a team?

Can you work? Because now that you know how you're a successful leasing agent that got promoted. You're a successful assistant manager that got promoted, so surely you know what those positions should look like. Then you got to work with your maintenance teams. You got to work with your lead maintenance and have that conversation every single morning.

What is our focus today? What is our task? Did we hit yesterday's assignments? And then the best of the best, they then become, for me and my group, multisite managers. If you're doing great at my property, WaterChase, man, I'm struggling at this other deal.

Why don't I make you the multisite manager to where you can oversee that? And that happened to us recently where we are having some issues, and now both of those properties are 99, believe it or not, ranked one and two in my portfolio because we hired the right manager who knew what she was doing or promoted the right manager, excuse me, who knew what she was doing. She just duplicated the process. Yeah. Then you get into a region.

And you're a regional, can they do not just two deals? Can they do five deals? Can they do seven deals? And that's where you start to test them, right? Where are they able to manage their time?

Are they able to inspire their team and do what they did at the manager level or the multi site level, but now overseeing others, right? You're learning best practices. You're learning the rockstar way. Are you able to put the rockstar way and guarantee that that's occurring every single day on those larger deals? So I think as long as we've had staff that we could promote and a bench to work with, we've had success.

It's when that didn't happen that we struggled.

AJ: Is there, you know, we do a lot more single family and smaller multifamily and we kind of have like maybe door counts for leasing agents and that sort of stuff. Do you guys have any metrics of like just knowing that like, okay, a leasing agent can handle 200 doors or, you know, a regional can handle 1,200 doors or something like that to kinda get an idea on whether you have capability of adding another property for a certain employee or a certain group of employees or anything else?

Robert: Can you Yeah. You know, you you you have your staff compliment. Yeah. On a 100 unit deal, I'm gonna put one person in the office, which is gonna be your property manager, and they're gonna have to be the leasing agent, and they're gonna have to be the assistant manager. Yeah.

There's no more room in the budget for that. No. It's only a 100 units. Yeah. And then I'm gonna put the rest of my budget in my maintenance team, and I'm gonna have hopefully at least two people on the outside.

So I use that as my basis. I need, I need, I need a lead maintenance and I need like a ticket or I'm sorry, like a, a make ready guy. Yeah. That can get units ready. Yeah.

So my lead maintenance is gonna manage all the work orders and tickets. And he's gonna assist the make ready guy when he has to.

AJ: When he has time.

Robert: And that's been a good combination for us. So if I'm gonna buy a 200 unit deal, then I'm just gonna double that up. I'm gonna put another I'm gonna add another person in the office, and I'm gonna have a a larger team on the outside. And so we kinda stick within that ratio.

AJ: Okay. And then your regionals, they're, like, doing three to 10 properties or something and, like, up to a thousand units or 1,200 or

Robert: Yeah. The multi sites are typically doing two or three properties at most. Yeah. And then your regionals, which are not the day to day managers. At a multi site, you're the day to day manager.

You're just managing this this property remotely from this property. And, you know, you're telling them over here on the property that's, know, ten minutes away what they need to do. And then you're gonna go over there tomorrow and you're gonna work out of that property. Then you're gonna tell the property over here you worked out yesterday, how to run those things. Then you have your regionals.

And these are the guys that are looking at the financials. They're looking at your work order completion. They're looking at your make ready completion. They're making sure that the property is being run the way they would run it. And if it's not, you make training, you make corrections, and then you make recommendations for a termination if they can't do it.

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AJ: Yeah. And you I mean, I I guess, how, I mean, how much turnover are you kinda having on that lower it sounds like your your upper end people, you know, you've promoted from within, so they're sticking around probably fairly often. But, you know, that that leasing agent and you say you're kinda giving them thirty days on a performance plan and if they're not getting it up to snuff or doing the right stuff, they're they're gone and hiring someone else?

Robert: Yeah. You know, so very rarely do I lose somebody that I wanted to keep. Yeah. When I lose somebody it's because I ask them to leave. Yeah.

And if I'm asking them to leave, have a good reason. They're damaging the business. So I don't really look at the turnover rate per se. I'm like, are you the right fit for this business? Right, because I'm running 22 different businesses.

Yeah. And they consist of, you know, 4,400 units. Can you run the 200 units, right, that's about a 200 unit average. Can you run the 200 units that you're there? Can you lease apartments?

Can you manage the property? Can you get units ready? That's all we do. And can you do it in a quality kind of way? So I'm constantly turning staff because I'm looking for diamonds in the rough.

I'm literally there like I'm I'm panting for gold. I'm looking for that nugget because within every 10 people, there's that one nugget there that can be a superstar and be promotable. And so, you know, again, I've never lost anybody or in my current situation, I don't lose people that I was that I did not wanna lose. Yeah. It's always because I terminated them.

AJ: No. That's great. Yeah.

Robert: I mean, think about it, right, from from my position. I I I've signed on over $300,000,000 of loans right now in my in my portfolio. So everything is running on me, and then I've raised your money. I've raised a $180,000,000. Actually, no.

Sorry. $200,000,000. We just we just updated our totals. $200,000,000 of my investors cash. I don't have a lot of wiggle room.

No. I don't have a lot of sympathy for things that are not working. I'm running a business. You're paid to, you're compensated to run this business because you said you could do it. And if you can't, then I gotta be the adult in the room and say, hey.

I'm sorry. It's just not working out. Because that's what you as the investor expect me to do. Now that's a little hardcore, and I and I wasn't like that in my earlier days. Fifty two now.

I've been doing this nineteen years. I definitely hardened up over the years. And certainly, you know, after COVID, you know, 2022, 2023, 2024, I got super hard. Yeah. You know, I've gone through, I've seen what hell it looks like.

When you wake up one morning and the sky is no longer blue and water is no longer wet, You've lost half of your valuations because your insurance jumped from $700 a door to $1,700 a door. Or you saw a 70% increase in your property tax. Or you saw your interest rate, you saw the cap rates go in the wrong direction and now I've lost valuation. And now I'm not even worth loan value. I've lived that.

I've seen where that happens. I hate Jeremy Powell. That guy had no idea what he was doing with raising debt five and a quarter points in a fifteen month period. He absolutely crushed the real estate world and put a lot of people that I know out of business. And I'm glad that we have some stability now, but we had to be prepared for that.

Like nobody's gonna cry for me. No. So if I, I'm gonna make sure that I make the right business decisions and put the right people in the right places.

AJ: So, after going through kind of that period of hard times now, has that changed your way that you buy deals?

Robert: I'll tell you what. So I've gotten very defensive in my underwriting. I I've learned now, you know, with the things that occurred I want everybody listening to understand the things that occurred the last three years had never happened before. And if they had, they had never happened in the trifecta that they did. We never saw insurance go from 700 or door to 1,700 or that's almost 3 x, two and a half x.

You've never seen at the same time taxes jump, you know, 40 to 50 to 60%. And then you didn't see interest rates spike, which meant that cap rates went the wrong direction and your property is now undervalued. Nobody has ever had to see that before. So the number one way is liquidity. You gotta have cash to make sure that you can withstand a storm.

And I thought I had enough cash in my during COVID and slowdowns we've had here in Houston. This one really tested us. Yeah. Absolutely. You had you had significant issues that occurred between '22 and 2024.

We had interest rate exposure. I'm proud to say that during that time, I was able to refinance 12 deals that I had that had floating rate debt. I got them refinanced. I saved the equity on those deals. I manufactured the NOI to get the valuation necessary for those refinances to occur.

And so with that, I'm like, okay, what hurt me here? Well, a lack of cash on some deals. I think anybody underwriting should have nothing less than six months and ideally twelve months of expenses. Not including property tax, not including insurance, not including your mortgage. Twelve months of your everyday expenses.

You gotta have that for a rainy day. Two, you can't be overleveraged. The guys that bid at first were the guys that were overleveraged. Yeah. And I feel bad for those guys.

We bought we all bought in a cycle. If somebody didn't get hurt during that three year cycle, they really weren't a player. They really weren't active in the market. Because anybody who was active in the market had exposure. Everybody saw it.

Nobody saw what Jeremy Powell the devil was gonna do. And so we, even if you didn't get the rent growth, nobody expected valuation to fall off the way it did. So you've gotta come in lower leverage, 65% ideally, no more than 75%. So if you have the lowest debt service you can have, and you have a cushion of minimum six months to twelve months of operating expenses, then you can probably do well. You know, you don't have bad deals, you have bad loans is what happened.

And so Yeah. For sure. Like these deals that that the deals that went south, they were fine. And they were they were identified the right way. I think anybody went and bought a bad deal.

I think they just had bad loans.

AJ: I mean, my experience with the underwriting, you know, if you're underwriting and putting in, I mean, we've added some extra vacancy in the first year, some bad debt going in. You know, typically IRRs on expectations just come down. And so the attractiveness and the marketability of the deal goes down, but it's significantly safer, less risk. You know, we didn't do any of the adjustables. We did mostly five year debt.

I mean, we get beaten out on projects of guys that would were offering, you know, 20% IRR. So, you know, it's there's a fine line of, like, how conservative do you be on the underwriting versus, like, do you wanna be a player like you say. Right?

Robert: It is yeah. I mean, everybody's different. Right? It depends what what it what your buying philosophy is. I can tell you everybody's buying philosophy got turned upside down June, May 2022.

Yeah. It completely turned upside down. And, you know, today I put an offering on a deal yesterday for 80,000 a door. The deal traded for 110,000 a door in 2022. You know, it's it's it it happens, and no one has ever seen that happen.

It it didn't happen like that during the great recession. That was a completely different ballgame. This was something that was very, dramatic, and and, it created a lot of damage. Now I will say the silver lining to it all is that what goes down fast has to come up fast too.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: It's the rubber band approach. So if you can withstand and outlast that storm, there's gonna be significant opportunities.

AJ: Yeah. And, you know, there's we've had a couple deals that, you know, it's like extend. So we're gonna be end up holding them a little bit longer than, we anticipated. But, you know, if you can, like you said, withstand that and, you know, the it's got it's gotta come back up and probably even go up further too.

Robert: I mean, anything today, if you own it in January 2022, whatever you own today is worth 20% less. Yeah. And that's because of all those things that I talked about, but primarily the cap rates. The cap rates changed the wrong and they went in the wrong direction. Expenses have gone up, payroll's gone up.

You know, insurance is starting to rebound now and it's starting to come down and we're very excited about that. Hopefully we're looking at our third year of double digit decreases on our insurance. But you you just have to outlast that storm. I don't care who you are, if you owned it in January 2022, and you still own it today, you have a 20% loss evaluation, if nothing else changed. And that's where we got really good at manufactured NOI.

You had to grow NOI to overcome and to recapture that lost equity.

AJ: Yeah. I'm gonna switch switch kind of subjects here a little bit, but, do do you guys do mostly single asset syndications or are you putting together a fund?

Robert: Yeah. You know, I I I've been in the Grant Cardone world. And in fact, his real estate club, he designed it around me. I was member number one. I and he teaches the fund model.

I I'm not a big fund guy. No. That's not how I learn. No. In the real estate club that I was brought up in, you buy one deal at a time.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: You don't buy multiple deals. You don't cross collateralize. You don't you know, that's not what you do. I buy one deal at a time. So I'm gonna go buy this $10,000,000 deal.

I'm gonna raise, you know, $3,500,000. I'm gonna put in, let's say, anywhere from on a size like that, I'm gonna be 10%. So anywhere about 300, $350,000. You'd like to partner with me, we'll work on that together. But, you know, I know, I don't think people want to invest in multiple deals that they can't see.

And that's what it is, these are blind funds sometimes. Don't know they're gonna invest in. When I do a PPM in the LLC, you know exactly where we're gonna invest in.

AJ: Yeah. And that the fund model, you know, the advantages of it are you can act quickly. You don't need to necessarily get approval as long as the money's there. But on conversely, as from a GP, like, you're responsible for getting those returns. And if that money is not put to work, you it's almost like you're emotionally invested to move quickly, which kind of, like, leads to potentially, you know, jumping on a bad deal or something like that.

Robert: You make a bad decision. That's But when you identify a deal, you know, as the operator, right, the GP, when you identify a deal and then you put it into contracts and you probably put hard money on the deal, now you have to go out and raise the equity. If you have to go slow about that and put that kind of risk, you're probably gonna choose a good deal. Yeah. And then you're gonna have high conviction on the deal, so it's gonna be easy to raise the equity, right?

Because if the right deal will raise any dollar of equity you want, if it's the right deal. And if it's the right deal, then you can get the right kind of financing too. And it all starts with the deal. If the deal looks good, the equity will follow it. Money follows money.

AJ: Yeah. Is there any other reasons you don't like the fund model?

Robert: I think you hit on the head. I think it's blind. I think you don't know what the GP that you gave the money is gonna invest in. And then I think it creates a series of motivators that may put your money at risk in the wrong deal so he can get paid. I don't need to do that.

When I find a deal, I identify it, I put in a contract, I put all the hard money, that's my money first, you know, so if I lose it, then I lose my hard money. It's typically 1% of the deal. Yeah. And then I gotta go out and raise the equity one at a time. You know, I think it shows it shows that I'm committed to that deal, that I'm not trying to grow at any cost.

AJ: Are there are there any provisions you put in the sales contract that I mean, we we typically put in, a couple extensions and then some more money goes hard or something like that. But I'm curious if there's any other, you know, kind of options you put in there to,

Robert: like In my early days that's a great question. In my early days, I was so conservative. Right? I don't wanna put hard money down. Yeah.

I I wanna have the maximum. I want thirty days due diligence. I want another thirty days of finance the closed financing contingency. And then I wanna do another thirty days of extensions. Right?

Well, it depends on where you are in that market cycle. Back in 02/2010, you could do that because deals weren't trading.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: People didn't wanna buy a deal. They were afraid because of what happened in the stock market. So you could get away with very conservative terms, but as the market tightens, you've also got to be better. Like, I don't need a GP. Like a lot of my time, a lot of my LOIs that I get from people that want to buy my deals, it's contingent of somebody having a GP.

I'm not going to give that the deal to you then. Because I I I don't know if the GP is gonna back out. And if you give your if you get backed out, then now you're leaving me holding the bag.

AJ: Right? Are are

Robert: you talking about are

AJ: you talking about selling one of your deals?

Robert: Yeah. I actually have two deals right now Yeah. That we're looking at selling. And so what what I'm trying to say is that the difference between a strong buyer and a weak buyer.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: In in the early days, I was very conservative on my terms. But as you get more experience, you know, do I really need thirty days due diligence? No. Can I shave it to twenty five to separate myself? Yeah.

I know where I'm gonna go. The guy that's given me all my all my financing is the same guy that I'm gonna use for this deal. So do I really need a financing contingency? Do I really need to worry about not being able to raise the equity? Again, I've raised a lot of equity because I return money to people.

I know it's there. Now, in this market, it's a little scarier, right? Because people have had cash calls, me included. And and, you know, I wish they were there only in my deal, but they're probably in your deal. They're in and they're in his deal.

They're in other people's deals. And I don't know. You may have had a bad a bad you may have had a cash call also, or you may have lost a deal. So equity is a little scared right now. I think it comes down to the story.

If there's a good story, then you're gonna be okay. So I haven't bought a deal. Well, that's not true. I bought a deal last year because one of my I was a deal that I was trying to sell because the guy fell out of contracts. So I had to come in here and recap it and buy the deal again so so I can meet my maturity debt.

I'm happy I did. It's a deal that I wouldn't have done that if it wasn't the most stable deal that I have in my portfolio. It's produced a 9x return for the investors. So why wouldn't I want to continue to recap it, right? The devil you know is better than the devil you

AJ: don't. The devil you don't.

Robert: I know exactly where the bodies are buried on this deal. I know what makes I it know what it needs. So we'll raise a little bit of renovation money and I'll add, change out the appliances and I'll do this and I'll do whatever, you know, minor lift that I need to do, we'll hold it, we'll sell it in another three years when the market gets a little bit better. But that's how I I I think I think you have I think, the terms are dependent on the guy buying the deal. And I need to separate myself from you or from anybody else.

So I've got to show strength. I don't need sixty days to close a deal. I, in fact, the fastest I closed the deal was during, was in 2010. My very first, I closed it in twenty seven days.

AJ: That's awesome.

Robert: We were done. We were done, but I stole it. I paid 1,900,000.0 on a 118 unit. Yeah, no, no, I'm still not sure. Excuse me.

I paid, I paid 2,900,000.0 on a 118 unit deal. Yeah. And if you're doing the math, it's 24,500 a unit. And we we sold it for 113,000 not

AJ: too

Robert: long ago. So it's like, if you get really good at this, then you you you can show strength and you can show separation. So again, I'm going through all the offers. We had a call for offers this week, and today is the best and final on these two deals. And I'm looking at it, and I said, I need you to distinguish the guys that need KPs and put them over here.

Focus me on the guys that if you transacted with, that can raise their equity, that don't need a cosigner. Yeah. Now, me see what these deals look like, that's my plan for tonight. Let me see what these deals look like, what their offer price is, Let me compare it to the guys that need a KP. Okay, now the guys that have a KP, who do you feel good about?

Has the KP done deals before? Is he active in the market? Has the guy that needs a KP, has he done a deal before? Or is this his first one? Because typically, guess what?

The guys that need the KPs are typically the guys that have the higher offers.

AJ: For sure.

Robert: They're willing to off they're willing to offer more.

AJ: So you kinda have They're willing take more risk on it. Right?

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yep.

That makes know, there was another time. I remember with Cardone, it was this deal I really wanted, and he's like, you know, how gangster do you wanna be? And, you know, I was like, yeah, I I I I think I could do it. What are what are you suggesting? He goes, well, you're not gonna get this deal because the other guy that you're competing with, I know who they are, they're they they they buy from this guy all the time.

So you wanna separate yourself? I go, yeah. He goes, you need to go hard money. Sorry, you need to wire all the earnest money before you take your buyer, final buyer call. Like really?

He's like, absolutely. So here I am wiring a million dollars plus to a title company of my choice and that shows strength. Yeah. When I'm on that call, I'm like, I I I'm the right buyer. Let me tell you how much I believe in this deal.

Here's my my wire receipt at f y, you know, z title company. Go check it out. The money's there ready to

AJ: go. Yeah.

Robert: There's certainty to close for me. Oh, and by the way and this is a different a different market, but, yeah, it was hard right away. Yeah. I need to show them that I was willing to do the deal.

AJ: Do you I mean, the market right now is not indicative like that. Is it? You're No. Like no. I mean, now it's No.

Robert: In fact, if if anything, I got people who don't wanna put hard money down. Yeah. They don't wanna put hard money. They're afraid. They're like, okay.

Well, then you're probably not gonna get considered.

AJ: Yeah. I I don't

Robert: I don't want a tire kicker. I ain't gotta get this deal sold in the next hundred and twenty days. And so I don't have time to monkey with you.

AJ: Have you had have you done any ten thirty ones doing like the swap and drop or the drop and swap?

Robert: No. I've not done any 10:30 ones.

AJ: No. No 10:30 ones. Okay. I was just curious. We we just did our first one, and I did it on a very, very small one, and it's it was it was challenging.

So I was looking to get if you had any info

Robert: on that. I wish I could get insight. I I don't you know, it's complicated for me. I I wanna keep it simple as as simple as I can. Do a deal together.

Ten years from now, we're gonna exit out of this deal. You go your way, I go my way. We pay whatever taxes we have. Hopefully, you have depreciation along the way stockpiled or or coming in that you can offset your taxes. But I I don't wanna be I don't wanna be married to any of these, to any of my partners forever.

Right? Because partnerships, they have a beginning and they have an end. Yeah. People need to realize that.

AJ: Well and sometimes people wanna be able to use their money too, right, that they made. Sure. Some They

Robert: don't wanna be locked up.

AJ: Yeah. My brother and I, you know, we're fair fair amount younger or whatnot, so we've got some maybe more time on the the horizon. So we're screwing around with some of those ten thirty ones. It it can be there's always the, the saying swap till you drop. But

Robert: I mean, if you control it and you're and it's your equity, sure. But do you have, like, you know, 20 other 25 other partners? It's hard to control that.

AJ: Yeah. For sure. Well, Robert, I think we're probably getting on time. I should probably hop to these last four questions. First one is gonna be, what's one piece of advice you would give to your 25 year old self?

Robert: 25 year old self, okay. Work hard, it's gonna separate you from the guy next door. Get really good at Excel so you can plug in your numbers and you can analyze stuff and just believe it's gonna work itself out. Don't worry.

AJ: Yeah. Just kinda like that small steps every day. You can you can climb climb climb pretty high.

Robert: Yep. Put the time in. You put the work in. Look. You you won today based on the things that you want that you did the last three years.

Yeah. The little things that you did that nobody else is willing to do, staying late, putting that extra time in, walking your sites, whatever, all of that added up so that you're winning tomorrow. It didn't it didn't happen tomorrow. It happened three years ago.

AJ: Yeah. Next question. What was your first entrepreneurial endeavor?

Robert: My apartment complex that I bought.

AJ: Oh, it was?

Robert: Yeah, was. That was my first I never bought anything else. I was a corporate America w two guy. I never known or thought that I could own a business. I did look at other businesses like childcare facilities.

I looked at a water vending machine. I looked at laundromats. But again, I stumbled on a on this crazy guy on business radio, and I ended up joining that real estate club, and it was the best decision of my life. Certainly, the best $10,000 I ever spent.

AJ: Awesome. That's cool. Next question is, how has your formal and informal training shaped your journey?

Robert: Really interesting. You know, when you go to college, you're surrounded by career students and their job is is to prepare you for the work world, to work for somebody else. When when you're saying when they have worked

AJ: for someone else, they're career students.

Robert: That well, that too. Right? Yeah. That too. But they're preparing you to be a great employee.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: And that's okay. But you're never gonna get to a life that you could have. There was an expression somebody once taught me was what gets in the way of a great life? A good life. I think everybody that goes to college or even in high school should be taught entrepreneurship.

They should be taught what it's like to go out on your own, run a fictitious business and see what it's like. Because I think until you're ready to get out of those, the wall that they put you in, then you're never gonna see anything different. My friends, I remember when I joined real estate, I have a completely different friend group today. Those guys were the friends that when I was joining that real estate club in 'seven, these were guys that I met at church. These were guys that lived in my neighborhood at the end of the cul de sac, you know.

Today, all my friends that I have real regular contact and relationship with, they're all multimillionaires. They all they all do real estate with me. And the reason why that happens is that the conversations change. They're different. I I remember somebody coming up to me and asking me, hey, hey, so you just started this this new real estate career, how's it going?

And I started sharing all the things that are going on and I'm excited about it. They almost immediately tuned to tune it out because they didn't wanna be reminded of what they're not willing to do. And it took me a long time to understand why I was losing friends, and it's because I was separating myself. And you had to get around a new group of friends. So the best part of that real estate club was there was a lot of people just like me that owned real estate, they were wanting to buy more real estate, they were all sharing ideas.

It was a giant rich dad, poor dad book that came to life. And I was living every page on it every day or every time that I was in that club or where I would show up on a bus road trip where I'd be interviewed on the radio for something, I was living it with them every single day. I was hearing the stories, was learning from them. And then when it was my time, was passing back the knowledge just like I'm doing now, You know, I'm trying to pass back the map on how I got to be financially free.

AJ: Yeah. That's that's insightful. I know that, you know, it's very hard to, relate sometimes with, like, non business owners. Like, just the

Robert: 100%. And and the worst critics could be your mom and your dad.

AJ: Oh, yeah.

Robert: Because they didn't knew it. Tell me about it. I remember when I went when I went to Texas a and m and I got an engineering degree and I entered into the Salesforce, my dad's like, wait. You went to college to be a sales guy? I'm like, dad, I'm selling engineered products.

I'm I'm making x y z amount. I'm doing pretty well at this. Mean, I think I'm making more than you are. Right? And and that that that that was an interesting conversation.

You they were the critics. And then and then, oh my god, you joined this real estate club. Right? I walked away from my day job.

AJ: Yeah.

Robert: And I started buying apartments. And I started like, oh my god. You got such a great life. You're making so much money over here, selling engineered products. Why are you doing real estate?

That's risky. No. It's not risky. If you know what you're doing, it's not risky.

AJ: That's very

Robert: true. You you it's it's a it's a controlled risk. It's a calculated risk.

AJ: Well, and, you know, the the point that we're at now is, like, I I see our deals, and I'm sure you see your deals as, like, not risky at all just because we can predict what's gonna happen. We have control over the management companies. We have control over pretty much everything. Like, we're we're not we're not making bets out here on the freaking blackjack table. Like, we we know what's gonna go on and how to do it.

Robert: That's the stock market to me. You have no idea what's going on in that company. You you you don't have any idea. I mean, if you watch shows like Billions and these other shows, man, you are outclassed. You have no idea what these guys are doing to pump and dump a stock.

And you can put your life saving in it and or you could you could put a you hear a tip from somebody, you know, if you're not in that game, then, yeah, that's more risky. But I'm in this game. I do this every single day. I I I control the management company. I see where rents are going.

I I see what expenses are doing. I I can I can fix that? I can literally shut something off and stop paying it.

AJ: Yep.

Robert: And and and, you know, you can't do that with a stock. You're relying on somebody else.

AJ: Very true. Alright. Last question. What was your biggest mistake and what did you learn?

Robert: You know, the biggest mistake that I think I made was, I probably have a couple of mistakes. It's hard to pick the ones that Which one? Which one? I will say this. I will say this.

The biggest lessons you learn are from the losses.

AJ: Oh, yeah.

Robert: Not from the wins. Like, it's great to have those 100% cash out refinance events, but it's the losses that really bother you. It's the ones where you didn't hit pro form a or you maybe even have lost equity or really where I was gonna go is that, you you let the wrong staff go, you know, you trusted one person and you let that someone that had been with you for a long time. There was a period in time where I kind of started to read my own press clippings. My ego got in the way.

I spent a lot of time with Grant Cardone and he gave me the stupid shit advice to get rid of my management company and focus on buying deals. And that was the worst decision I've ever made, was walk away from my management company, hire a third party management company to run my $700,000,000 portfolio at the time, and they ran it into the ground. Yeah. I had to take it back from them ten months later when the world was turned upside down on me and resuscitate every one of those deals because they had absolutely destroyed them. So you mentioned control in the previous question.

That's everything. You need to be able to have your hands on it. And the moment you take your hands off the wheel, especially to give it to somebody else, you know, expect to crash. And that's what happened to me. I will never, almost probably never forgive myself for giving the keys to my castle, to another third party management company who didn't share the same philosophy, who said one thing and did something different.

It was not the rockstar way. And the best thing I ever did was take it back and rescue those deals, do the 12 deals that I refinanced the last thirty six months and just breathed life back into my management company. And what it did was, it brought me back to life. Know, when you're doing this long enough, you recognize a lot of your identity, a lot of how you feel about yourself is on the health and success of your business. And when the health and success of your business is not good, you're not good.

You're not good. And so being able to control my future, and it's not going to happen overnight, right? You got to fix things, you need things, you need time to elapse. But man, it feels good when you take in that control and then you fix something and you get across the finish line.

AJ: Yeah. And so Yeah. There's there's definitely a sense of, just, like, I wanna say proudness. I don't know if that's actually a word, but, like, you know, being being there, being involved, and you're proud to see the success and everything along with it. I know that I I moved back into one of my properties that we did a huge renovation on and, like, I'm much happier here and just proud of, like, seeing all the work that we've done, which is cool.

Well, Robert, it's been a it's been a blast chatting with you, your wealth of information, and appreciate you taking the time to share that with us and and our listeners. If, anybody wants to learn more about Rockstar Capital or get in touch with you, what's what's a good way to get in contact?

Robert: Yeah. The number one way is to find me on Instagram. I put on a bunch of videos. I talk a lot about stuff every single day. This content is gonna be recorded and repurposed and posted on there.

So that's where you learn, you learn the lesson. So follow me ApartmentRockstar or find me on LinkedIn and listen to some of the articles that we post there on things that we're going through or just wanna be my friend, look me up Robert Martinez on Facebook.

AJ: Awesome. Well, again, thank you very much. Appreciate having you on.

Robert: Hey, thanks so much. It was great to meet you.

AJ: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real Estate Professionals Investing Podcast on WIN, your community of investing knowledge for growth. We hope that this episode has increased your knowledge and added value to your path to freedom. If you would, please take a second to rate us so that we can get more great investors to interview. If you or someone that you know wants to be on, please visit westsideinvestors.com and fill out our form to be on the show. Thank you again, and enjoy your day.