Scaling from House Hacking to Apartments with Julie Lam and Annie Dickerson

Brittany Henderson: 00:00

I'm Neil and I'm Brittany.

Neil Henderson: 00:01

We are a family on a journey towards financial and location independence. Each week we interview successful real estate entrepreneurs about their chosen investment strategy, and rate it based on how much money it took to get started, how long it took to educate themselves, how passive it is, and whether or not they could do it from anywhere in the world.

Brittany Henderson: 00:19

Welcome to the road to family freedom. If you like our show, the easiest way for you to give back is to leave us a rating and review on iTunes, head on over to road family freedom comm slash review for links and instructions on how to do that we would be so grateful. All right, and now thought of us Let's hit the road to family freedom.

Neil Henderson: 00:45

Our guest this week are exactly our kind of people, investors with families who got started investing in small buy and hold real estate. Now they're helping other people build passive income over at good egg investments. They have a new course available on passive investing. And they really are a couple of good eggs. Julie lamb Annie Dickerson Welcome to the road to family freedom.

Julie Lam: 01:06

Thanks for having us.

Neil Henderson: 01:07

Yeah, it's great to have you guys. Let's get right into it. Tell us the story about how you guys got into real estate.

Julie Lam: 01:13

Sure. Any you want to go first? Sure.

Annie Dickerson: 01:15

It's a it's a very similar story, actually. So. So both Julie and I started about 10 years ago. And when I started I was in Washington DC, my husband and I were about to buy our first condo or loft. We were so excited. And then we had a very smart realtor who talked us out of it and said maybe it might be better if you bought one of these nifty ro homes, which are very popular in DC, because not only does it have a great upstairs unit, but it has an in law suite in the basement. And if you're smart about it, you could rent out that in law suite, and you could maybe get it to be cashflow positive. I never heard that term before. But I loved it instantly. And I was like Yeah, let's do that. I want to be cashflow positive. And so that's how we fell into it was through house hacking. And then we purchased a few more duplexes after that, that's awesome.

Julie Lam: 02:14

Yeah, one pair. Yep, very similar story. For me, I was doing the traditional narrative of getting married and buying a home and was looking to buy either a loft in downtown Oakland or buy a townhome, a three and a half bedroom, two and a half bath townhome. And at the time, it was just my husband and I and I told my real estate agent, I said, What do I need with these three and a half bedrooms, it's just my husband and I not even thinking, you know, down the road and kids and all that. I just thought, you know, I don't want to live in this huge house with all these rooms. And she said, you know, if you buy this place, as opposed to the loft, then you can rent out the other rooms and effectively house hack, right and offset your debt payments. And I was like, Oh, that's that's really interesting. Let's, let's do that. And so we did that. And that was our sort of introduction to real estate investing didn't really know what I was doing. You know, at that time, didn't know that I was actually real estate investing. But got into that, that way and house hacked for about three years until we got married and started having kids and moved out and then just continued to manage the property until we sold a couple of years ago, actually. So yeah, that's how I how we got in.

Neil Henderson: 03:24

So you both got started pretty much with house hacking. Mm hmm. And then I don't want to go too far into the future. But what was what were your next properties?

Annie Dickerson: 03:34

Well, for us, we were collecting the alphabet. So we started with alpha, then Bravo, Charlie and delta. We started in Washington, DC, and then we moved a couple times. Now we're in Oakland, California, we have some duplexes here. And then we started investing out of state for the first time and ran into a whole host of new issues. Because for the first time, we were no longer house hacking. We were buying properties that we had never seen before, that we had never lived in before whose neighborhoods we didn't know. And so that has been our journey from House hacking, to out of state investing.

Julie Lam: 04:17

And then my next property after that one was actually purchased the next year we you know, that was like, Oh my gosh, this is incredible. We're living not for free, but very close to it. And so we thought this is great. Real estate is great. It was a great time it was 2009. We bought our next property in 2010, also in Oakland and California, you know, properties in 2009 and 10. here in the Bay Area, in particular, some markets not exactly San Francisco, but we're pretty much like 50% off. And so we purchased them with the thought that, you know, when the markets recovers in five to seven years that we could recapture the value that was originally there, you know, a year or two prior from what you know, at the price that we were buying it for and so That was our next property. And then we started buying a few more. And then we started buying out of state in 2016, after we started selling the properties here in the Bay Area, and, you know, we're basically looking for cash flow. And we've, you know, in 2016 cash flow even now, obviously here in the Bay Area's is hard to come by right on the properties we buy. So you both have some some obviously homes that that you are renting out that kind of thing. But what is the main thing that you guys are doing now as far as real estate investing or the real estate sphere? Yeah, so for me, personally, the biggest thing that I'm doing now is real estate syndications and investing as a passive investor. And I started out doing that in 2016. After I started purchasing a couple properties out of state and realizing how much work it was, luckily, I didn't get too far down that path. But I did purchase a few properties and then found real estate syndications as a passive, and that changed my world. And I did one in the end of 2016, and never looked back. And I've done about seven, seven deals now as a passive, and I quit my job back in March of this year, because of, you know, being able to replace my income through passive investing. So and then also started my business with with Annie good egg investments. And, you know, through good egg, we helped to have other families to basically achieve the same thing that both Annie and I have done, which is quit our jobs and, you know, be able to have flexibility in our lives with our family and personal life as well. So

Annie Dickerson: 06:37

because, you know, what we realized is that, it turns out, everybody loves the cash flow aspect of real estate investing. But very few people love the landlording aspect of real estate investing, the phone calls in the middle of the night, their property management, all of that stuff. Not everyone should be a landlord. So that's what we help people do is we help people to invest in real estate without having to deal with the hassles of being a landlord. And we do that through helping them passively invest in real estate syndications.

Brittany Henderson: 07:13

What kind of syndications Are you guys typically involved in?

Julie Lam: 07:17

Like what kind of properties multifamily and primarily multifamily? We do do some self storage and mobile home parks as well, but I would say, you know, most of what's in our portfolio is multifamily apartment buildings.

Neil Henderson: 07:31

Gotcha. And are you guys the sponsor from on those properties? Or are you primarily on bringing the money side?

Julie Lam: 07:41

Primarily bringing money side? Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 07:44

But obviously, you're involved? You know, you're you're involved in the underwriting and the marketing and all that of the syndication correct.

Julie Lam: 07:51

Um, to a certain degree, I mean, we, you know, usually by the time we are brought into a deal, it's usually under contract already. So underwriting Yes, to the extent that when we are presented with a deal, we do our own underwriting to evaluate whether it's the deal we want to do, but we're not necessarily involved in the underwriting before the deal is actually under contract and evaluating whether that's, you know, a deal we're going to purchase or not that decisions usually made prior to us coming on board.

Neil Henderson: 08:20

And you mentioned, you know, you mentioned that not everyone should be a landlord and you guys have obviously been on that on the the active side of landlording. Can you give us a couple of examples of maybe what drove you out of being active?

Julie Lam: 08:37

Let's try to keep this short. But not just this not just one. I mean, everything goes smoothly.

Unknown Speaker: 08:44

What do you

Neil Henderson: 08:46

rainbows and unicorns? Yeah,

Julie Lam: 08:47

yeah, I mean, for me, probably the biggest one was buying a single family home really cute, adorable property to lots one home, I thought, oh, I'll build another property on the lot It was in Indianapolis, decent area or so I thought. And you know, nice home not too bad condition, purchased it from a wholesaler, rehabbed it threw it on the market, and it sat vacant for five months. In that time period. It got broken into it. It took Finally we got somebody in there and then they paid rent for like two months. And then the third month came along, never saw a check had to call the property manager find out what's going on. We had to evict. I mean, it was that property in particular was the last property that I purchased and will never single family home maybe or maybe not buy single family homes again. But that was primarily the the huge, you know, thing that was like, Okay, I'm done. Yeah.

Annie Dickerson: 09:45

So, and for us, you know, we thought we were terrific landlords, the first several years that we were doing house hacking, because it was so easy. We were living in these duplexes. We had tenants upstairs or next door and Yeah, they were our friends. They paid on time early even. And there were no issues when there were maintenance things. They told us right away, we went and fix them. It was easy peasy. And then when we started investing out of state and neighborhoods that we didn't know, and things just things happened that we had never experienced before. We had people who weren't paying for months on end, we had some guy who left in the middle of the night and left his dog behind and didn't tell anyone. So the dog chewed up all the drywall, we had somebody who we had to evict because she wasn't paying for months and months on end. And she ended up stopping up all the sinks and tubs in her unit left the water running and left and flooded the unit and the one next door and then one next door to that. And so it's just all of these issues that we hadn't seen before. Because we had no experience being a real landlord. I consider house hacking landlording to be sort of a stepping stone. But when you invest out of state or you invest in a real rental property, then you become a full fledged landlord.

Brittany Henderson: 11:11

Yeah, our experience with Airbnb is pretty light on the issues. It's like, occasionally, some mishap with cleaning or something.

Neil Henderson: 11:21

You know, like this was just Thanksgiving. And you know, we our cleaning lady who handles our turbo was out of town. And we had a last minute booking on Thanksgiving Day, wasn't it?

Annie Dickerson: 11:33

Oh, no.

Brittany Henderson: 11:33

It was like a one nighter. Oh, like, why didn't we blog it?

Neil Henderson: 11:38

though, you know, so I just go in. It's not hard. I mean, it's 400 square foot space if that it's right there on our property. But like you said, you know, it'd be it'd be a whole different story if it was even across town. Right? Or, you know, we know something. Airbnb investors or landlords who are out of state. That's a whole right?

Unknown Speaker: 11:57

Yeah.

Brittany Henderson: 11:58

Mostly, it's just sunshine rainbows. Right now. Awesome. So you guys moved into syndication? Obviously, because who wants to deal with all that? What is the destination from here? What? Where's this? Where's real estate taking you?

Annie Dickerson: 12:16

Well, I think a big part of what we realized and getting into the syndication space is that you know, both Julie and I had been investing in real estate for nearly 10 years before we had discovered this thing called syndications. And when each of us did, we had our own respective journeys of trying to figure out if this thing was legit, who do we invest with? How do we do this? What's the process, there wasn't a single resource, there was a forum thread here and a podcast there, and an article here, and it was really hard to figure this whole thing out. And so I think that's a big part of what's driving us forward. And driving our mission for good egg investments is really just spreading the word and letting people know that these opportunities are out there. Because I think a lot of people are intimidated by real estate investing, because for stocks, you know, you could go on to fidelity or Scottrade and click a button and suddenly you're an investor. But for real estate, the hurdle is so high that a lot of people just they get they get intimidated and they turn away. But there's such value. And there's such potential in building wealth in real estate, that we want to provide that to more people. And we think that a big part of that is through passive investing.

Neil Henderson: 13:43

And then gradually

Julie Lam: 13:45

know pretty much that's it? Yeah. So

Neil Henderson: 13:50

obviously, you know, going from being an active investor, to more on the syndication side of things, you know, you hinted that this it's not, it's not exactly the same. How did you go about getting yourself educated on syndicating?

Julie Lam: 14:06

Yeah, I mean, well, for me personally, it was just research research research for about a good six to eight months before I actually first pull the trigger on my first deal. It was researching, it was networking, it was listening to podcasts, it was reading, you know, any books I could get my hands on. But I would say the biggest piece of all of that was the networking was just reaching out to everyone that would talk to me about what they were doing and real estate syndication and how it worked. And you know what their involvement was in you know, in syndications and in understanding the different opportunities within real estate syndications, as an active as a passive, you know how many sponsors there are in a deal understanding what your sponsors even are understanding what my role is, there was so much work that went into it. On, which is part of the reason why we created good egg investments, as Andy has mentioned, is just that there was it was here it was there, it was everywhere. And it was really hard to sort of pull it all together and get to a point of feeling comfortable and saying, Okay, I'm ready, you know, I'm ready to, to make my first investment. But I would say primarily that it was the networking and the educating myself.

Neil Henderson: 15:22

And Danny,

Annie Dickerson: 15:23

well, my process was a little different, because I came to it from the standpoint that I wanted to lead a syndication because what was happening was, we were doing all these out of state investments. And we were able to scale much more quickly than we could with our house hacks. And so friends and family were taking notice, and they said, Oh, I want a piece of that I want to do exactly what you're doing. And of course, I'd explained to them all the steps of the process, and their eyes would glaze over. So that's when I stumbled across this concept of syndications. And I thought, well, maybe, you know, I could drive the bus, everybody else could get in the back. And we could all share in some of these deals. And so I actually joined a program, I joined Michael blanks apartment investing program. And I highly suggest if you're interested in learning the business of syndication, that you find a mentor, somebody who's done it before, because there's just so much to learn. And so I joined his program met a lot of people through it. And his course is fantastic. It was a great foundation for me to learn all the ins and outs of how to run the numbers, how to evaluate properties, how to talk to investors. And ultimately, that's what allowed me to see that the capital raising and the investor relations piece of the whole puzzle was the piece that I loved the most. And it's what led Julie and I to form our partnership.

Neil Henderson: 17:06

I want to backtrack just a little bit and talk about how you financed some of those early deals. I mean, and I don't really mean to say mean, the house hacking deals because those were more sort of personal residence. But early on when you were buying your first out of state investment properties. How did you go about financing those?

Julie Lam: 17:24

Yeah, I mean, for me, it was just using, you know, our own money that we had saved. On the first deal that I purchased, we actually purchased that from a wholesaler and bought it for all cash. And then we implemented the burst strategy. And we purchased it for all cash. And then, you know, went in and rehabbed it and renovated it, got it rented out, and then took it to a bank and refinanced out almost everything that we have in that deal. And I'm cash flowing after my expenses, about $1,000 a month. So that was like one of the ways I did it. But I mean, I think pretty much on all of those out of state deals, we financed it with our own with our own capital.

Annie Dickerson: 18:03

For us, it was a little bit different. So when we started out estate investing, it was because I had jumped into the bigger rabbits, bigger rabbits, bigger pockets, rabbit hole.

Neil Henderson: 18:19

Bigger rabbits bigger,

richer that domain.

Julie Lam: 18:23

Yeah.

Annie Dickerson: 18:26

So I jumped into the bigger pockets rabbit hole and learned about all these different financing strategies. And I thought, Oh, we don't need to use cash. Let's do something creative. So we got a HELOC on our current property. And suddenly, we had enough to buy a whole property in the southeast, right where things are cheaper than here in the Bay Area. And so that's what we did our first out of state property we bought with our HELOC. And then we did a couple of 1031 exchanges. And so our financing has been a little bit more creative. I would say,

Neil Henderson: 19:08

gotcha. No, it's good. It's good to have that contrast because we've talked to all kinds of people that have said, you know, well, I got started with no money down or HELOC or I've saved $100,000 for my entire working life and then put it all into real estate so it's good to hear the different so um, did you have a question? Yeah. Can I go ahead sorry.

Brittany Henderson: 19:33

No, I was just curious how you guys like the first time you guys did a syndication where you just involved in the investing side? Did you create it like you would kind of thought about doing you know, what did that those that you know, first or maybe first couple of syndications look like you guys?

Julie Lam: 19:51

Yeah, I mean, I that first syndication I invested as a passive was not involved on the general partnership side at all. Did that really I had gone into syndications, thinking that I wanted to do my own deal, but then was quickly overwhelmed with how much there is to do when it comes to purchasing an apartment building, right. And so I actually thought that it would be a great way for me to learn about the apartment syndication space. If I invested as a passive first, right? If I could do the deal, I would learn about how they're underwriting the deals, what their business strategy is, I would understand why they're picking particular markets, and sort of just leverage that, you know, education through investing as a passive. And so essentially, I'm, in my mind, I was decreasing my risk and increasing my potential return, as opposed to doing it as a passive as opposed to doing it as an active right. And that's exactly what it did. I learned so much through that first deal that I did. And just really, because I was researching and trying to figure out is this a good deal? Do I want to do it, and pulling myself through the process that we now help other investors go through? But but that was that that was like, the best thing for me that first deal that I did, and and after that, it was I was, I was so sold after that. I mean, any other time I had had significant amounts of income coming into my bank account, it was because I had gone to work for it. Right, I had gone to work. And two weeks later, I expected some money to show up in my bank account. And now money shows up in my bank account every month, and I don't do a thing other than the due diligence I do upfront when I'm betting a sponsor or betting the deal, right. So, um, so yeah, that was that was my story. But yeah.

Annie Dickerson: 21:37

And for me that those early days are kind of fuzzy in my head, but basically, so I'm doing the microblog program, I'm taking the course. And I'm doing it right. So I go out and find a deal that I'm going to take down. And I'm in conversation with a broker. And, you know, I'm pretty close to getting it under contract. So I'm starting to talk to investors, putting out a sample deal deck and really trying to trying to start raise the money to see if I could make this thing happen. And along the way, somebody approached me through one of these networking events, and they said, Hey, so I've got this deal. And, you know, would you be interested in, you know, co syndicating it and helping to raise some money for the deal? And I said, raise money. That's the worst part of the thing I want. That piece, you know,

Brittany Henderson: 22:35

let me run the numbers.

Annie Dickerson: 22:37

Let me talk to the workers, like, let me do something fun here. But he said, you know, if, you know, just try it, what do you have to lose? You know, and I was like, okay, fine, but I'm not gonna raise a lot of money for your video, because I want to say, my good investors for my own deal. I'm just gonna raise a little bit for your deal. And so that's what I did, I committed to a little bit to raise for that deal. And because it was further along than the deal I was trying to put together, they had the investment investment summary, they had a webinar, and I could see the whole process unfolding. And my investors got really excited about it, I got really excited about it, I had a phenomenal time, educating my investors and talking to them about the merits of this deal answering their questions. And that's when I realized, and in hindsight, it makes perfect sense, because I've been in education for about 10 years, that the investor education piece was the piece I loved the most. And so that's when I transitioned from trying to take down a whole deal by myself to just trying to focus on the investor relations and investor education piece.

Neil Henderson: 23:54

I completely agree. And I'd sort of similar experience I've had, which is when you start talking, when you start talking to people about real estate, you know, you said a lot of times you get that kind of the the eyes glaze over. When they when you are amazed at the number of people who don't even think about it, the only way to think about it as an investment is Oh, I buy a rental property. And I'm a landlord, I don't want to I don't want to be a landlord, you know, and they don't think about all of the other ways they can get involved in it, you know, then, you know, commercial real estate, retail, self storage, mobile home parks, but even then they're still always thinking about it as an active investment. And most of them have no idea that the whole passive side is out there. And then they allow in now, isn't it risky? Well, you know, the SEC, you know, makes it a little harder for you to invest in it because they think it's risky, but actually in the long term. It's less risky than the stock market. So I'm with you in edge Investor Education is actually the most fun part. Yeah.

Brittany Henderson: 24:55

Probably why we're here.

Unknown Speaker: 24:56

Yeah, yeah,

Unknown Speaker: 24:57

yeah.

Neil Henderson: 25:00

How,

what types of deals are you doing now? How, how large are they? You know, what sort of equity Are you guys bringing to the table? Typically?

Julie Lam: 25:10

Yeah, so we're doing large apartment buildings primarily. And when when I say large, I mean anything, usually over 200 units. As of late for some reason, a lot of the deals that we've been co syndicating are pretty large, like 400 unit apartment buildings. And I would say about 90% of everything we do is in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. And, yeah, we're so on this last deal that we did, it was about a $20 million raise. But we were just a small fraction of that. Usually, on every deal we do, there's usually a number of folks just like good egg investments that are participating on the deal. So

Neil Henderson: 25:50

and are they? Um, we're digging into the weeds here a little bit, but are they typically? What sort of financing are they typically putting on it?

Julie Lam: 25:59

Just regular, Fannie, Freddie agency debt. Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 26:03

And do you have the terms? Usually five years, seven years, 10 years? Are they all the way out? Like 30 years?

Julie Lam: 26:10

And no, no, definitely not 30 years? Most of them, I would see our interest only for the first few years. I would say traditionally, now we're starting to see seven to 10 year terms, usually fixed rates, not always, but most of the time. And that's I think, mostly because of where we are in the market cycle, our operators are looking for those kinds of loans, because of where we are that we anticipate, you know, some kind of a correction or softening of the market sometime soon. So

Neil Henderson: 26:41

yeah, gotcha. Just and so people understand why I'm asking this, why it's important is that commercial loans are typically they may be amortized over 25 to 30 years with the UCC a term, which can be as low as you know, five years where the loan needs to be paid back. And if there's a market correction, and you haven't finished your business plan, and that loan needs to be paid back, you can get in trouble. So that's why I'm sort of an agreement with your sponsors. You know, you want something seven to 10 years, that gives you some runway to execute business plan. So

Julie Lam: 27:15

Right, exactly.

Brittany Henderson: 27:16

Awesome. How much time are you guys spending on real estate on good egg investments?

Julie Lam: 27:22

Yeah, I mean, I would say roughly about, I don't know, 15 hours, 20 hours a week.

Annie Dickerson: 27:33

full time job for me over here.

No, it's okay. It's okay. So okay, so

let's back up. Because the way that we've built this partnership is that one of the reasons we came together was because Julie and I have such complementary skill sets. And so whereas I wanted to focus on the investor education and the marketing piece, her focus is on talking strategy with investors, and she loves those conversations. And so a big piece of the work that I do is all the content marketing and the brand building. And so I'm doing a lot of the blogs and the videos, and we just launched an online course. And so that stuff does take a lot of time. And I would say the the output of that is hopefully the leads that we get that then go and talk to Julie. And so when we have a deal on the table, Julie is very busy. She's possibly busier than I am. She's answering tons of investor questions. And so right now we don't have a deal on the table. So Julie, you just enjoy your time over there, sister. But

all the work over to you.

Julie Lam: 28:55

Yeah, yeah. But I will say like, for example, over the summer, we had about, gosh, what was it any like four active deals going on? Maybe five? Yeah. And at that time, it was crazy for me, because we were at the beginning phases of some deals. And then in the middle phases of funding some deals, which means following up with investors getting ppm signs, a lot of work going on. And then at the end, where we're closing deals and having to send out the closing emails and making sure that our marketing stuff is set up for Facebook and announcing all of that kind of stuff. So that that time period was really busy. But for the last like three or four months, we've only had one deal on the table. So my time has been primarily spent talking with investors about that one particular deal and also getting them ready for the next deal. But I mean, if I was to look back over the last like seven or eight months that we've since we've started I would say if I come up with an average number, it varies over time, but it's roughly about 15 to 20 hours a week.

Brittany Henderson: 29:55

Yeah. For someone that maybe wants to just come in and be an investor. with you guys, what is the time commitment for kind of just getting into being an investor? First vacation?

Julie Lam: 30:06

Yeah, um, so from the point at which it really depends, because it depends on whether or not we have a deal on the table. Like, right now, if I talked with someone two months ago, we had that one deal that was on the table, but we were pretty much already full on that deal. So the and we don't have any active deals now. So it really depends. But if we had a deal on the table, and I was, you know, and I met someone, and we were chit chatting about a deal about that particular deal, usually, it's about a month to a month and a half from the time the deal is offered to the time we close. And then it takes about another 30 to 45 days for them to receive their first distribution. So I would say it's roughly about two to three months from the time we, you know, speak to the time they received their first distribution. And how much time are you spending with an investor just kind of like, educating and talking strategy with them? Yeah, so that varies from investor to investor. Some investors have five questions, and we talk for half an hour, and they've done a lot of their research on their own on our website, we have a ton of resources on our website that Annie's put out, that she had mentioned. And then I get other investors who send me emails, and it's literally like a, you know, bullet pointed list. And it's like, 20 questions, right? And, and so it really depends. But I would say on average, you know, it's probably about an hour or so per investor, talking them talking to them on the phone, and then going back and forth through email, hour, hour and a half.

Neil Henderson: 31:38

So two follow ups on there. Have you ever had investor that you spoke to where you're like, yeah, this is not going to work? I don't care if you have the money?

Julie Lam: 31:47

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, absolutely. In fact, I know who that person is, right now, in my mind. Um, you know, he just wanted to really nitpick the deals and and i would give him my responses. And it was, you know, about why I think this is the way it's set up. And I think that's, I believe that it's okay. And he really, I believe, now looking back that he just was looking for someone to engage in argumentative conversation, it wasn't really because he didn't like the deal. And then, you know, follow up emails, it just it was became very clear that, you know, it wasn't going to work. And I just kindly let him know that I think that, you know, if he is, if he's found someone else that he really enjoys investing with, he should probably stick with them and that our deals are probably not right for him. So

Annie Dickerson: 32:35

yeah, a big part of why we take the time to establish these relationships with our investors is because we don't want to help somebody invest in a deal that's not right for them. And so we, you know, we talked to a number of people who, you know, syndications are great, but it's not the right fit for them at this point in their lives. For example, we've had people who have asked us if they should take out a loan to invest in a syndication? And the answer is absolutely not. There's a number of things that can go wrong, and then you'd be on the hook for that loan. So you know, there's, there's a number of things that we talked to our investors about to make sure that these syndications are really the right thing for them. I had a great conversation with an investor that you guys maybe know the name, named Jay Henrik,

Neil Henderson: 33:31

really sharp guy, and I had, he said, you know, it's important to remember that every investor that you bring on, as a customer service job, you're going to have, you're going to be in a long term relationship with that investor. And so you need to be, you know, you may be can't be So choosing the beginning. But as you grow, you need to become choosier. Because, you know, you don't want to be, you know, at 6570 years old handling 300 500 investors, who are all needy and want you to pick up the phone when they call.

Julie Lam: 34:04

Yeah, yeah, I'm in agreement with that totally.

Neil Henderson: 34:08

Are there any systems that you've guys have developed to help you so to automate your business and keep it flowing?

Annie Dickerson: 34:13

Yeah, absolutely. So on the back end of things, we've got a number of automations built out. And so I would say that the automations are primarily built out so that we can help to educate our investors without us having to handhold them or pick up the phone every time to talk to them. And so for example, one of the things we encourage people to do if they're interested in investing with us is to sign up for the good egg investor club. And in on the back end, what happens when you sign up for the good egg investor club is we automatically put you into this drip campaign, where we send you a series of emails over the course of a month, just to help you get to know us and what we're about. And we also send you an invite to schedule a call with Julie. And then we also sign you up for our weekly newsletter. So all of this is in an effort to help you to get to know who good egg is, whether we might be the right fit for you, and to help familiarize you with the types of things that we're doing the deals that are available, and the upcoming deals to see if we might be a good fit for your investing goals.

Neil Henderson: 35:33

I'll try anything that you use, Julie,

Julie Lam: 35:38

trying to think I mean, so one thing that I do use for setting up those calls is meeting bird. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that, but I love it. So like

Neil Henderson: 35:45

schedule once or one of those like that, yeah,

Julie Lam: 35:48

it's kind of like calendly, or whatever that is, but I've fallen in love with with that. It offers a lot of different things that you can do to basically just get people very easily onto my calendar. So before I used to have to, I would meet someone on Facebook or in person and whatnot. And we'd go back and forth through email about picking a time setting up the call and all of that, getting them on the calendar. And now I just wake up. And on my calendar, there's all of these calls, because people find us they sign up on our website, and they go through the automation that Andy talked about, and meeting Bert as part of that process to set up the calls. And so yeah, we use Active Campaign as our CRM. So that's Annie loves ad, she's a huge fan of it, she's, I work in it as well. But I used to use MailChimp. But yeah, Active Campaign seems to be a lot more robust than MailChimp was what just got what is one of the costs associated

Neil Henderson: 36:45

with Active Campaign?

Julie Lam: 36:48

I don't remember any.

Annie Dickerson: 36:49

Yeah, so we're not using it as a full CRM. So we're using it primarily for the automations and for the mail servers. And so for up to 1000 subscribers, it's $29 a month. So it's pretty reasonable.

Julie Lam: 37:07

One other thing that we use is Slack, I just wanted to mention slack. It's like a messaging internal messaging system. But that's something that's been really helpful for us to keep our conversations organized. So for every discussion that we have, whether it's marketing or a particular deal, or social media, we have a channel for each one of those discussions. And so it's never like, Oh, my gosh, searching through emails, or trying to remember what somebody said, or, you know, we have one channel for events. So everything that we do for various events or speaking events that we're going to be doing, it's every, all those discussions and conversations are in those channels. So that's another good thing to to use. And as

Annie Dickerson: 37:49

we're starting to grow our team, we're able to invite, for example, we have an SEO expert, and we have a social media expert. So we're able to invite them to our Slack channel. And then we don't have to add them to all of the channels, all of the conversations, but we can add them to the specific conversations. So they can see the history of everything that we've talked about not Charlson.

Neil Henderson: 38:15

Now I'm familiar with slack. And I think I even have it on my phone. And I've just never, you know, it's one of those ones where it's hard to get people you got to get Have you have more than one people to be, you know, on board with it.

Unknown Speaker: 38:27

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well,

Brittany Henderson: 38:29

I mean, it would be we're talking about me sort of coming on more. You know, I'm here at the podcast, but I'm not really doing a lot else with the real estate stuff. So that will be something that you and I could use, particularly since Yeah, absolutely. That work. Awesome. All right. Well, that leads that you're so you've got your SEO expert, you've got your social media people. Do you have anybody else that you guys have invited onto your team?

Annie Dickerson: 38:54

Not at the moment? It's not for lack of trying, though, you know, we, okay, here's the thing, right. And some of your listeners may be in this boat is it took us a long time to get to the point where we were ready to hire VA. And it's not that we don't trust people. It's not that we didn't want to spend the money. It's just, you know, it takes time to find the right people. And when I was staring at my screen and say, I need to get this blog post out by 5pm today, am I going to train somebody to find somebody and train them to do it in that time? Or is it easier to just do it myself? Okay, I'll just do it myself this one time, but next time. When you have those breaks, you're like, I'm gonna enjoy my break. I'm gonna hire a VA. And then when those crunch times come, then you know, you're just busy doing go out and find somebody. And so it took us a long time to get to a point where we were finally like, okay, we just we need to do this and you know, Wait, it was much easier than I had anticipated. We used a service called free up it free has three E's in it free up calm. And what's great about free up is that they pre screen everybody on their platform. And so unlike other services, where anybody can join free up only takes the top 1% of applicants. And so by the time they come to me, I already know that they've been pre vetted that they're hard workers. And so I didn't have to spend very much time at all to find some really good people.

Neil Henderson: 40:39

That's fantastic. And that was you. And that was opposed to Upwork. Was that the other Upwork was the other one, right? Yeah, that's my experience as well. Upwork it's like gray, you can find the diamonds in the rough every once in a while. But you a lot of times it's digging through a lot of

Brittany Henderson: 40:52

Yeah. Free up. They do the digging for you. Yeah, that's right. We do the digging for you. Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 41:01

So you obviously I know the answer to this. You guys invest long distance neither one of you live you invest primarily in Dallas. Neither one of you live in Dallas.

Julie Lam: 41:10

Right? That's right. Yeah.

Annie Dickerson: 41:12

Not yet. Now. Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 41:15

It's a cool town. I will say that. Yeah. But you both. Are you both in Bay Area now?

Annie Dickerson: 41:20

Yes. Yeah. No.

Neil Henderson: 41:22

I lived in the barrier for a while as well. And if I had my choice, I'd probably live in the barrier over Dallas as well. But no, no offense to Dallas.

Unknown Speaker: 41:31

Yeah. To hot.

Brittany Henderson: 41:35

desert to human. Yeah. No.

Annie Dickerson: 41:39

Yeah. But it's got great job growth.

Neil Henderson: 41:41

It does. Yeah. Great. It's a great economy. And is that is Dallas, the only market you're in?

Julie Lam: 41:50

No, we're also in San Antonio. Huntsville, Florida is where we have one Self Storage, property. And then Roswell, Georgia, Atlanta suburb of Atlanta, Georgia is where we have another Self Storage too.

Neil Henderson: 42:05

And are you do you currently only have one sponsor you're working with or how many sponsors you currently working with?

Julie Lam: 42:11

I think we have about three multifamily sponsors. And then one self storage on one mobile home park. Gotcha.

Brittany Henderson: 42:22

So are you do you guys go visit the properties for these syndications ever?

Julie Lam: 42:28

In the beginning? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we do. Um, we're out there. We were just out there a couple of months ago in September, I was out there at the end of August, visiting some of our existing properties. We don't always necessarily go just because when there's a new deal, it really depends. If it's a new area, a new sub market, then we may consider it. But most of the properties that we invest in, in Dallas are all within sort of the same area. So I've been there a number of times over the last year or so.

Neil Henderson: 43:05

Could you? This is an important question for a lot of our listeners. Could you run your business from anywhere in the world?

Julie Lam: 43:11

Do you think? Yeah, good. I think so. No,

Annie Dickerson: 43:15

anywhere with a Wi Fi connection?

Julie Lam: 43:18

Yeah, I was in Hawaii over the summer for a month. And I was working while I was there. And he was just in China for two weeks. And she was working while she was there. A little bit harder when she was in China, because we're dealing with the time change. Or the time difference, I should say. And so but yeah, no, definitely I think we could.

Neil Henderson: 43:38

And Annie, what was that? What was the biggest challenge as far as the time difference doing it from all the way on the other side of the world?

Annie Dickerson: 43:45

Oh, my gosh, you know what the time, the time difference wasn't as big as a factor as having my kids around all the time. And Julie had this in Hawaii, too. You know, when I'm at home, my kids are in school. Long swaths of time where I can be by myself at my computer doing my work. And when we were on this family vacation in China, there were I mean, we did the sightseeing, we went to see family and Mike It was great. I had my kids around all the time. And that's what this is all about, right? Being able to spend time with your family. So I loved that. But the it made doing the work a little bit more challenging. So I tried to front load as much as possible. So I did a lot of the work ahead of time before the trip, scheduled blog posts, scheduled emails, created newsletters, things like that. And then there were pieces that I knew I needed to do during the trip. So they were a little harder because after a long day of sightseeing, you know it's hard to refocus, and sometimes hard to get a good Wi Fi signal. And so I would say those are The bigger challenges.

Brittany Henderson: 45:01

How old are your kids?

Annie Dickerson: 45:03

They are two boys six and two.

Brittany Henderson: 45:06

Okay, so you got little ones? Yeah, we've got a four year old and I'm trying to figure out like, I I'm stuck on wanting to homeschool him schools here that the schools aren't great. And I'm like, can I make this work? Does he have the attention span that he can go on? Because he's gonna, you know, it's kindergarten next year. So it's sort of like a long, like, family vacation drawn out over time. How do I? How do I balance both? So yeah, with the little ones, it's definitely harder as they get older, I'm sure you can be like, this is my time you go be on your computer.

Annie Dickerson: 45:43

Yeah.

Neil Henderson: 45:44

So what do you as far as syndicating and capital raising? What do you think is the most important skill for someone who was going to do what you do to develop themselves? For me, I

Annie Dickerson: 45:55

would say the most important skill is being able to take a complex subject, like investing in a syndication, and terms like capital injection, and refinance and all this lingo and translate it into common language that people understand. I think a big part of this business is people and talking to people is so important. And so much of what we see in the business is, you know, people just adding lingo on top of lingo, and nobody knows where you're talking about an employer. And so I think a big skill, that's, that's so crucial, is just being able to, you know, be humble and be authentic and use common language and being able to break down those complex terms into easy to understand concepts.

Neil Henderson: 46:48

Yeah, I agree. I agree, Julie.

Julie Lam: 46:49

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. That's, that's something that I would have also said, but for me, I would say the biggest thing is probably determination is there's, this is such a complex thing, as Annie said, right. And it's, it's very easy to jump in and get very overwhelmed. I talk to people all the time who want to pick my brain, and they just get really overwhelmed. And I would say that determination, like you got to be determined to, you know, get to that goal, whatever it is, however, you think that multifamily syndication is going to help you get to where you're going, you have to be determined, keep your eye on the prize and don't lose sight. Because if you can keep your eye focused and and be determined, you're you're gonna get there one way or another. And I think that in this business, you have to be that level of determined in order to get to where you're trying to go. Because there are a lot of obstacles that are going to come up along the way that you're not going to want to deal with. And it's very easy to say, Oh, this is just this, maybe I'm not enough for this, this is too advanced for me, maybe I should just stick with single family homes, maybe I should just, you know, stick with my job for the next 30 years of my life. But I think if you stay determined, you'll be able to get where you're trying to go.

Brittany Henderson: 48:02

So if you guys could press a magic reset button that allows you to go back and start over again. Is there anything that you would do differently or start sooner? Yeah, for me, I

Julie Lam: 48:15

would say that I wish that I had understood the potential of real estate investing way back when I mean, I fell into it back in 2009, and 10, but was very casual about it, you know, didn't really realize the power and had I realize the power of real estate investing and leverage and all the great things that real estate investing has to offer, I probably would have quit my job like maybe eight, nine years ago, you know, but instead, it took me you know, all this time to get where I am. So for me, it would have just been to get in sooner and educate myself more and sooner. But the bigger pockets was around back then. I don't remember. I think it's been around for a while. But yeah, I wish I had stumbled across bigger pockets a lot sooner.

Annie Dickerson: 49:02

Bigger rabbits, you

Unknown Speaker: 49:03

mean bigger rabbits.

Annie Dickerson: 49:07

And for me similar, you know, I I wish that I had put more time into learning more about real estate investing earlier on, you know, for a long time. This whole house hacking thing was just something we did, it sort of made sense to me, but we didn't run them, you know, that first duplex that we bought, we didn't run the numbers. You know,

what a cap rate was, we

were just you know, we're just like, yeah, we think this could work. You know, I think we could rent it out for this much. And, you know, it looks pretty good. We'll put some of our own sweat sweat equity into it, it'll be fine. And, you know, we were pretty happy with it. And it took a few more years before we bought our second one, but we were building equity in that first one. And meanwhile, we could have been leveraging that equity or we could have been creatively financing another property. So I think we would Could have scaled faster had, we put more time and effort into it earlier on. So I want you to imagine you're standing in a room full of people, potential investors, people looking to do real estate, you know, their family a full time job.

Neil Henderson: 50:16

A lot like like, when you guys were starting out what are two or three strategies that you could recommend for them to get started and best ensure their success,

Julie Lam: 50:25

I would say, for me, it's invest in yourself first. And he had mentioned this earlier, get a mentor, you know, even if it's an informal situation, find someone who's willing to mentor you, because I think that that's going to catapult you from one place to the next much faster than if you were to try to do it on your own. That's one thing. And the other thing is to network. I mentioned this earlier in the podcast, networking was probably the biggest piece to how I got from where I was to where I am today. I just networked like crazy talk to everyone that I could, that would give me the time I made real I built relationships with these people. And you know, people remembered what I wanted to do. And they would reach out to me and vice versa. And so I started to build myself a community of folks who are doing what I wanted to do. And I feel like that's so huge. And then lastly, it's Don't be afraid to pull the trigger, you know, don't get stuck in analysis paralysis, like analysis paralysis, like get out there, do a deal. Don't don't just get stuck in and say, Oh, my gosh, you know, it's so risky, I'm afraid what if I lose the money? I mean, at the end of the day, if you lose a small investment, that's not really the best ideal situation. But the way I look at it is that as long as I have my kids and my family and I'm healthy, I've got food on the table and a roof over my head, then I'm good, right? So don't be afraid to pull that trigger. But those are those are my top three, you literally took

Annie Dickerson: 51:49

my top three which is add that you know on that last one, you know if any money that you lose by doing a deal is education, money, you know, it's the real world classroom, Rod Cleef calls it seminars, you know, and so don't be afraid to lose a little bit of money. And on those first few deals, we've all lost money here or there on deals, it's not all sunshine and rainbows is easy to believe. And so don't be afraid to to make some mistakes early on. And you'll learn so much more than if you just sat back and tried to research your way out of it.

Neil Henderson: 52:34

Julian Annie has been so great talking to you. Before we go, you guys had mentioned something that you guys have a course on passive investing. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Annie Dickerson: 52:45

Yeah, absolutely. We just launched it. And we're very excited about it. It's called passive real estate investor Academy. And the whole goal of this online course is to give you everything you need to invest confidently in your first real estate syndication. So we go through everything from defining your investing goals, to walking through multiple real world deals, talking about all the different real estate terms that you would need to know, talking about how to find and evaluate deals, the risks, the tax benefits, we go through all of that, and it's a six week course. And, and it's, it will give you everything you need to know. So if you wanted to learn more about that you can go to passive investor. academy.com.

Neil Henderson: 53:40

Great. And then are you still planning do a podcast?

Julie Lam: 53:44

Yes, hopefully. hopefully sometime next year. We're working on it. Yeah. Well,

Neil Henderson: 53:48

we're big fans. So you we beat listeners. So well, thank you so much for sharing with us today is if any of our guests wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Julie Lam: 54:00

Yep. So they can reach Julie. Julie a good egg investments calm and Annie at Annie good egg investments calm. Okay.

Neil Henderson: 54:07

Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us.

Julie Lam: 54:09

Thanks so much for having us.

Annie Dickerson: 54:11

This is so much fun.

Neil Henderson: 54:13

All right. Okay, so that was Annie Dickerson and Julie Lamb of good egg investments. It was really great talking to them. So what were the some of the key lessons,

Brittany Henderson: 54:23

I think right there at the end, really, with the strategies they were talking about the two or three strategies for beginners is really good to know get a mentor, and that doesn't have to mean you know, find a mentor necessarily want to one at first, also finding just like a really good source of consistent information. And that's where something like a podcast like this, they're sort of, you know, their email drip system or bigger pockets and sort of like tackling, you know, that kind of source of information and start there and then find someone that you would within those that you feel like would be a good mentor. Whether that You know, as a program or just somebody, you know, like, the good egg investments where you can be an investor and sort of get some mentoring along the way, which is kind of what Julie did.

Neil Henderson: 55:11

I agree. So what? How much knowledge Do you think it took them to get started? was time to take as much time to take together?

Brittany Henderson: 55:22

I think, I don't know. It sounded like both of them did a lot of research. So you know, probably some of it. I mean, several months to a year of, of really putting time. I mean, so some of the time like Julie kind of jumped right into being a passive investor. And, and, you know, doing some research along the way. So I think it depends on really where you want to get started to get to where they're at, obviously, a lot of time.

Neil Henderson: 55:46

Yeah. Julie. What I gathered from Julie said to get educated on syndication, it took her I'd say about seven to 12 months. Yeah, yeah. And money. What kind of money did they get started with,

Brittany Henderson: 56:00

with syndications or with their?

Neil Henderson: 56:02

Well, I guess we can do both?

Brittany Henderson: 56:04

Yeah, well, I mean, with their, their house hacking or the even the like birth, single family home methods, it sounds like, some of it was just cash, and probably I would guess, in the 50 to $99,000 sort of range, just based on where they were buying. And, and then, you know, we've talked about this before for syndication, that's typically you're putting in what have we said, when the 45 to 50? is usually the minimum investment. So as a passive

Neil Henderson: 56:39

investor, what were they doing as far as time? How much time do you think today, we're doing?

Brittany Henderson: 56:44

Well, right now they have anywhere from like a part time to a full time job worth of time. You know, for if you really are just mostly doing passive investments, you're not bringing in investors, then you're really looking at very minimal time. It just depends on kind of what you want. Or if you're doing a little bit of each, you know, that obviously, they're, they're putting together a whole company. So you could probably do this with 20 hours,

Neil Henderson: 57:09

you know, that's a minimum for what they're doing as far as putting their company together. I would say minimum 20 hours sounds more like it's a full time job, most of the time, they have to have some, they do have some freedom. And what about location,

Brittany Henderson: 57:24

location? Well, as we start talking about, it's fairly location independent. You know, obviously, the, the terms of the location can change how easy that is. But, you know, with all other things sort of accounted for, you got Wi Fi, and you can figure out the time change. You can do this job anywhere.

Neil Henderson: 57:46

Well, they both, you know, they both don't live where they invest. So that's already and also, Julie said, she spent a month in Hawaii and Annie spent a couple of weeks in China. So yeah, so it's definitely something you can do. I would say I'm gonna say that it's this is completely location independent

Brittany Henderson: 58:05

exam, I think so they would still be traveling to some of the locations they still traveled to the locations and things so it's, it's not like you never have to like are in that area.

Neil Henderson: 58:16

Alright. And if you like this podcast, we would really appreciate it if you take just a few minutes and leave a review for us on iTunes. It's really simple to do. Just go to road to family freedom comm slash review for links and instructions. Thanks for listening. We're doing this all again next week. Until then, safe travels.