You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.
(0:40) Guys, welcome back. You're listening to the second part of last week's episode. Let's jump back in pop quiz, because I never get to trot this out. And I'm quizzing you right now. You're right, right. Right, Connecticut and state knowledge quiz. All right. Can you name our state song, our official Connecticut state song as he Google's very quickly, I have absolutely no idea. It is Yankee Doodle. Anyway, there you go. All right. I thought that there was gonna be a test in it. I know that. But now I know that forever. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. That's like all your bar. Every party. I go there in Connecticut. I trot that out at least once that everyone's like, now that's a fact that I know.
(1:25) Yeah, forever. Thank you. Now share that with my kids. And anyone else that will listen to me. Exactly. I'd like you to and I always say like, you know, you could sing at least part of it. And that always drives people crazy. Alright, so let's talk about RIAs. Me, you mentioned that you were you were sort of an integral part of CT Rio was one of the partners. That's right. We're country, which is amazing. So you know, I am an online marketing guy. Google ads, SEO Facebook ads, that's what I do Microsoft ads, right. I like that. I'm on the computer, on my own schedule, whatever. And when I first started my business, before I was really focused on real estate investing, I would go to the Chamber of Commerce, and I would go to the networking thing, and I would be and I would eat hors d'oeuvres, and I would have nice conversations from people. But I, I always struggled, I always felt like it was inefficient, right? So if you're talking to an investor that says, like, I know, Ri is like people do it, and it's great, and or whatever, but I don't know, I don't think it's for me sell that person, or maybe not sell is the wrong word. But tell that person what they have to gain by thinking about their local reo, or joining an organization. Yeah, and it
(2:37) doesn't necessarily have to be a real right, there's, you know, there's dozens of meetups on an on a monthly basis here in Connecticut. And, you know, here's the thing. So I've been very fortunate to meet hundreds and may even be 1000s of investors here in, in Connecticut. And, you know, a lot of them are, I like to affectionately call the dreamers, right, the folks that would love to get in have read all the books I've read, and just haven't been able to pull the trigger yet. And, you know, invariably, I asked him, How come? What's keeping you from doing it? And I get almost to a person one of three answers. I don't have enough time. They don't have enough money.
They don't know where the deals are. Right? And the fact is, is that, you know, as far as time goes, there are 168 hours in the in the week, work week, right? You got to sleep 56 of them, you're going to work 60 of them, you're going to go out and spend time with your family, 14 of them, you're going to go out on the weekends and do something with your family or go out with your friends, or are you going to spend 16 of them lives 26 hours? So from a time perspective, are you going to spend it binge watching? You know, the watcher on Netflix, which was awesome, by the way? Or are you going to go to a meet up? Or are you going to read a book? Or are you going to listen to a podcast like this one? Or mine? And you know, how do you spend that extra extra time, right? The other two are answered by going to your ear or going to a meet up and that is I don't have enough, I don't have enough deal flow.
At any given meeting once a month. There are people in those rooms that have deals in their back pocket, whether they're a realtor, or a wholesaler, or an investor who's looking to trade up, right, um, or change asset classes like I was where, you know, we have deals that we haven't necessarily hired a realtor yet. And if you know, in most of the most of the areas that I've been to most of the meetups I've been to. There's about a 15 minute agenda item where they talk about deals in your back pocket, right? I have this deal. I'm looking to sell it, here's the number here's how fast I need to close it. If anyone's interested. Here's my email. Here's my number happens at every meeting I've ever been to. Right. And so that alone creates deal flow. There's other things right you can hire your firm Dan to help with that. And there are any number of other things you can do. As far as money goes. I I was at a one of the CTE RIA meetings a few months ago. And I had done a talk on, you know, how to create relationships and network and all that. And this person came up to me and he said, You know, I just, it makes sense. But man, I just don't know where to find the money. And I put my arm around him, and I turned him around to the room. And I said, there was about, I don't know, 150 200 people in the room, and I said, standing here, we are consuming oxygen with 123. And I counted about seven or eight people that I know, are accredited investors, which means they have a net worth over a million bucks, and they make more than 200,000 a year.
I know, for a fact that they're standing in the room, and he, you know, the money you need is less than 100 feet from you right now. Go meet him. And you know, obviously, they're, you know, their next question is great, which ones? Yeah. And I said, No, no, it's not the way it works, right? I'm not going to invade someone's privacy, you have to go actually meet these people. And let them get to know you and become friends, create awareness, become friends, over time, they'll learn to trust you and you trust them, and then you do business together. Right. That's it. So that is a huge piece, finding deals, finding money there in those rooms every month.
(6:06) I think it's, you know, again, it ties back to the theme, right, that we didn't really plan it this way. But it's this theme of the sort of long term relationship building the core of the business, right? Like it's, it's the core of most businesses that last right. But that idea of forming the relationship before you need it. I talked about this a lot. I'm going to hit this point, again, because it is one of my sort of pet points. But I think real estate investing as an industry has shifted away from an industry where all you have to do is tell a seller, hey, I'm a real estate investor.
And here's what that means I'll pay you cash, you know, you blogroll blah, blah, blah. That's an industry where all the only decision that seller is making is should they sell to an investor. But today, everybody knows when an investor is or investors on TV every day, they've got a million postcards, they've seen the signs, right? They know what it is. So the question is, why you versus any other? Right. And again, it's that long term relationship idea that is so incredibly powerful. So let's talk about you today, because you have shifted your business, like you said, your search shifted down the sort of straight investment piece, you're moving to a syndication model, right. So you're still investing in multifamily. So you're bringing in investors and sort of doing it that way? What was behind your decision to do that? Because I think a lot of investors have they're either they've considered it maybe they've considered working with someone who's got a syndication sort of program going on. So like, what was going on in your head to let you know, okay, this is the right decision for us right now.
(7:37) So it was my long term plan from the beginning, right. And quite frankly, if I had to do it over, I wouldn't have flipped, I would have gone right into multifamily and just stayed there. So this comes down to scale for me, you know, getting back to the deal flow and capital flow and time, right? The motion it takes to buy a four family is identical step for step identical with the acquisition of a 50 unit building, it's identical.
There's no difference. zeros. That's it, right. And the fact is, is that if you want to scale a business, you know, the one of the one of if not the only, but one of the fastest ways to do that is to increase the scale is to is to buy larger buildings. And, you know, unfortunately, I have a finite amount of money. I would love for it to be infinite. But it didn't work out that way. I would love that for you. But I would be really cool, right? Yeah. You know, I'm not Elon Musk, too bad. That's alright. I think people like me more than they like. So, you know, are definitely students like people. I'm a Tesla. I'm a Tesla stockholder. So
(8:41) I'm really not a fan of his right now. But I was a year and a half ago. Yeah. So but the fact is, is that, you know, in order for my business to scale, you know, I needed to partner with other people. And so, my business plan when I left corporate America was, you know, I had friends, you know, that in the in Silicon Valley with newly minted IPOs in their back pocket, and they said, Yeah, we want to invest. And, you know, I tend to be a really conservative guy. And so I, you know, I basically told all of them, I said, Look, let me go screw this up, let me go out, let me make bad decisions, let me screw them up, let me fix them.
Let me never, you know, learn from those mistakes and build systems around them. So I don't have to stress out about those things anymore. And when I figure that stuff out, then I'll come back to and so it took me a better part of three years to kind of do dumb stuff and learn not to do it again and fix it and, and, you know, grow the business. And, you know, we got to the point where and frankly, it probably you know, COVID obviously slowed us down quite a bit. I feel like you know, we lost about we were a better part of 18 months, just kind of holding serve and making sure that our tenants were taken care of and that, you know, that our investors were taken care of and we were, you know, managing the assets. That's as opposed to growth over the last little more than a year, you know, we really started to crank up the syndication part of the business where, you know, we're we're looking for much larger properties.
And, you know, that said, I'm, I've got a seven unit to seven units at a 16. under contract today that I'm going to close hopefully in the next couple of weeks or so we haven't gotten away from that business, but I am looking for much larger properties. And you know, you were talking about the Connecticut market, you know, those properties really don't exist in mass here in the state of Connecticut. So, you know, we've got to go look elsewhere. So that's what drew me to the Midwest and the Southeast start looking at much larger properties.
(10:39) Yeah, it's a very rational plotline to follow. Right? Like Like you said, you're sort of getting that economy of scale, right. Let's find motivated seller leads online, but don't know where to start. Download our FREE motivated seller keyword report today, AdWords nerds have spent over $5 million this year researching the most profitable keywords for finding motivated seller leads. And you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www dot AdWords nerds.com/keywords. I'm curious about your decision to start the podcast. So we mentioned at the beginning of the show, if you meant if you missed it, it's called The Real Estate underground podcast. You can go check it out real estate underground podcast.com Is it on? Like particular channels?
(11:35) I can't remember. Do you click on Spotify? Spotify, Google everywhere? Oh, yeah. So you get anywhere that find podcasts are sold, right? Real Estate underground podcast. Thank you. And it is really good. You've got a really natural sort of vibe. I will say it's like you're having a podcast when you listen to other people's podcasts like I was, well listen, like, well, how does go? How's the flow? And I think there's a lot of real estate podcasts that are way too polished. And they almost sound like too weird. Ly artificial. And then there's podcasts that are like, it sounds like a guy in his bathtub. You know, whatever. Hopefully, we're somewhere in between. Yeah, you guys have such a nice sort of vibe to it. The flow is great. The guests you've had on are really great. Like, obviously, the informational content is awesome. So what was behind the thought process of starting the podcast? Like what made you want to get into that sort of particular? I guess you could call it a marketing chip?
(12:31) Yeah. So so it really didn't start off as a marketing tool. It actually so I love coaching, right? I love helping people accomplish. You know, I was, I was when I was managing people in corporate America, I you know, one of the things that really fired me up and got me going every week was seeing people grow right, and seeing people succeed. And I was genuinely happy for him. And I genuinely wanted them to grow. And, you know, and in my experience at CG Ria, same thing, right, I really got fired up when I saw someone when I saw the light bulb go off, that that kind of warmed my soul, right? Yeah. And so I wasn't necessarily coaching at CT Ray, I was more of an operational guy there. And so I wanted to use the podcast as a way to serve that community and ultimately, you know, investors everywhere, to kind of make it a very, kind of break down the the fear part of this and make it simple so that people can believe that it's possible believe that they deserve it, and that they, they deserve financial freedom, but do it in a casual way.
So it's just a conversation, it's two guys having a beer or you know, to people shooting the breeze about real estate in a way that you know, is we try to make it as conversational as possible, have a little bit of fun and, you know, hopefully serve our audience so that they can get that you know, I'm always looking for that one gold nugget with each guest that we meet. Right and then selfishly, I get to meet some really cool interesting very accomplished people. And it's a nice kind of it's a it's a nice sneaky way to get in their lives. Right you get to meet you know, Ron Legrand and you know, oz priest who I've known for years in fact, I'm going to a conference with them this weekend by him and by the you know, but you know, these people are I try as a professional to always put myself in rooms where there there are people that are smarter than me so I can learn from them, right? Yeah, I always joke this you know, the, the team here at Clark Street, if I'm the smartest person in the room, when I walk in, we're all and while I say differently, but I'll keep it clean here. We're all in trouble. Right? And so the only way you learn is by surrounding yourself with smarter people in the podcast for me personally, that's one of the things that that I that's one of the reasons I do it I'm trying to get smarter.
(14:42) Yeah, I mean, again, right comes back to the theme building the relationships or you need to read providing value for you have to ask for something I have found I've found a very similar thing where and I started doing the podcast primarily just for fun, just a way of getting some stuff on YouTube or whatever getting stuff out there. It's probably the single best networking tool I've ever found. Because when you call people up and you say, Hey, would you like to chat? You don't know me, but let's just chat for 45 minutes. We were like, what if you're like, Hey, do you want to come on my podcast and showered 45 minutes before? Like, yeah, it's funny to be on podcasts, right? So maybe everybody enjoys or most people enjoy
(15:20) while everybody likes talking about their successes, right. And so, you know, the most, the most fun thing to talk about as a human being is yourself. And so you know, when you invite someone on and say, Hey, I'd like to talk about all the really cool things you're doing. And maybe some of the feet folks that are listening might actually learn something from you. Would you be interested? That's a lot of times it's easy, pretty easy to get into say, yes,
(15:43) yeah, I literally was just reading, I started reading a bunch of books about psychoanalysis, which I know nothing about. But I was like, this is interesting. I started reading about it. One of the things I noticed was, initially, the like, most of the benefit of psychoanalysis comes from the fact that nobody ever gets deeply listened to true. And so you like lay on a couch and you have someone that's going to pay attention to like your every word, right? Like that's most of the benefit you get from right. I was like, and I'm paraphrasing, please, psychoanalysts out there, Don't come at me. You know, don't ask me, your DMS are about to explode.
(16:21) Yeah, you'd like if you want to trade free therapy I'll take but I just I found that very insightful. i You're right. It's like we don't we don't get a chance to talk about ourselves in that way enough? Well, there's so many things I want to touch on. And there's like a million things, right? We didn't get to half of them. But I don't want to keep you too long. I do want to ask, so like, what is next for you? Like we're, as we're recording this commonly end of 2022. And who knows what the rest of the, you know, 2023 is going to be like, I think a lot of people viewed this year as a particularly tumultuous one. There were really high highs and really low lows. I'm even thinking about just outside of real estate. And you think about what happened with crypto and what's happening in tech now. And it just seems like there's a lot of stuff FOMO happening, right? So when you think about the next year, the next couple of years, did you have like a plan and you really plan in and out? Did you have like specific goals? Is it just I'm gonna play it as a comps, like, how do you think so?
(17:21) So we think about that in terms of kind of three ish year objectives, right. And so, you know, our focus right now is to get to 1000 units by the end of 2025. And so I know, you know, what we have to do to bring that home this year, next year, and so on. It is challenging, though. I mean, the fact is, is that if you listen to, you know, the Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and the pundits on CNBC and elsewhere, you know, we're about to dip into anywhere from an eight to 20% Drop in terms of, you know, a recession, and that's real estate, not necessarily stock market, I'm not a stock market guy. So I don't really know, that's why God made better gains. So the, but the fact is, is that, you know, in my experience, I'm 53, right? So I've lived through a few of the cycles, presidential years, and the run up to presidential years are always crazy, economically, socially, politically, and everybody gets charged up. And I think if you pay attention to the news, it's already happening, right. And, you know, I fully expect that, from a economic and real estate perspective, it's going to be a bumpy ride over the next 18 to 24 months.
The good news is, that presents an opportunity for investors if you can stay cool, and focus on numbers, right. And so, you know, here at my company, you know, we focus on cash flow, that's it, you know, in terms of appreciation, it's a nice to have, it almost always happens, but sometimes it doesn't, you know, see 2008 910 1112, right, but the fact is, is that, you know, our focus is on acquiring units, buying them slowly buying them correctly. And then, you know, getting to our goal over the course of the next three ish years. And, you know, so whether the interest rates are 2.5 or 8%, it doesn't much matter, because, you know, our focus is on buying them, right. So, you know, interest rates go up, price, software's go down, and vice versa, when you know, when things change it, we're in the, you know, we if this is about math, and it had built a building either pencils out or doesn't, and that's okay, you know, we kissed lots and lots of frogs to find our princes and princesses, and you know that so that's part of, you know, the value that we bring to our our partners is to be able to go do all that heavy lifting for him. Okay, so for people who are interested in checking out the podcast, we've mentioned it's real estate underground. podcast.com Or just go wherever you get your podcasts and look up real estate underground. You mentioned Clark Street capital. Yes. Where's the URL that they could find you at for that?
(19:59) Oh, now suck Clark st.com cl AR K s t.com. Beautiful. And do you do like social media? Do you have places that you want people to follow? You find you online? Are those places the best places? No, we are everywhere. So we're on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. Now I'm actually my kids are laughing hysterically at me on a very daily pretty much a daily basis that dad has a YouTube channel. And I which is hilarious. And so we're you know, we're on Instagram as well. And we're Kortrijk capital everywhere. Clerk so why you got to do is at some point you got to be like, yeah, just wanted to just check real quick. How many followers do you kids have? Your it's so funny. I did that.
(20:39) I did that to my 15 year old the other day was like, How many followers do you have on Tik Tok? She does. I don't know. Like, you know, a couple 1000 I'm like, Oh, okay. Well, how many followers see about a little more? Few more? A little heart. But But yeah, it's funny. Well, dude, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate having you on first of all to represent Connecticut. So thank you no mixtape forever. But obviously, you're you're such a giver, right? You You really do give so much thought and care that how you put information out into the world. So I just want to say thank you so much for for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it. truly my pleasure, dad. It's really good to see it. And thanks for the time. That is
(21:15) it. That's it for our interview this week. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you could leave us a review, wherever you get this podcast, I would really appreciate it. I read every single one. It helps other people find the show. And look, I just appreciate it. You'd be doing me a solid. So if you could go ahead, leave us a review. Give us a like or subscribe or whatever you can do. We really appreciate that. As always, thank you so much for listening to the show. I really appreciate you and I will see you next week. Cheers.
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