Value Add Multifamily and Student Housing with Jeff Greenberg

Value Add Multifamily and Student Housing with Jeff Greenberg

Jeff Greenberg – CEO and Managing Member of Synergetic Investment Group based in the Greater Los Angeles area, talks to Neil Henderson and Brittany Henderson, the hosts of The Road to Family Freedom podcast. Jeff has invested in a $20 million multi-asset portfolio, consisting of over 800 units. The Synergetic Investment Group currently controls over 300 student housing beds and properties in Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio. SIG focuses on value-add student housing and market-rate multifamily, and senior living multifamily properties.

Three Key Take-Aways from this Episode

  1. Value adds for commercial properties include: increasing occupancy, fixing things to increase rents, charging for covered parking, garages, storage units, billing back utilities, or doing more efficiencies to reduce expenses.
  2. Five units or more qualifies a property as a commercial property when you are getting a loan. 
  3. The differences between multifamily and student housing include property management, different marketing to reach students, on-campus events, the timing window for student housing.

What you’ll learn about in this episode

  • Jeff Greenberg discusses his history in real estate.  
  • What does “value add” mean?
  • How did Jeff’s first multi-family property perform during the recession? 
  • How did Jeff finance his first deal?  
  • What amount of units qualifies a property as commercial? 
  • Where is real estate taking Jeff Greenberg? 
  • How did Jeff go about getting himself educated about real estate?
  • Does Jeff share a renovated college property that he had to change the reputation of? 
  • What are the differences between multi-family and student housing multi-family? 
  • What unit arrangements are usually most desirable for students? 
  • Does Jeff ever use short-term rentals to fill in times for student rental units? 
  • How much time does Jeff Greenberg spend on real estate?
  • Are there any systems that he uses to automate his business?
  • Is finding a place on a strong team a good place to start? 
  • What elements does Jeff assess to rate the value of a property?
  • The mental game for real estate is the most important thing because it is easy to give up.
  • What resources does Jeff Greenberg recommend? 

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Transcript
Jeff Greenberg:

You know, as they say, you know, you got two arms, you know, one, but one to pull yourself up and wonderful somebody else. And you have that attitude. And you can have great team members, you know, just bringing people along with you and learning with you. I’m Neil.

Neil Henderson:

And I’m Brittany, we’re a family on a journey towards financial and location independence. Each week, we interview successful real estate entrepreneurs about their chosen investment strategy, and rated 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:

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 to family freedom comm slash review for links and instructions on how to do that we would be so grateful. All right, and that’s out of us. Let’s hit the road to family freedom.

Neil Henderson:

Greetings, friends and families. I’m Neil and I’m Brittany, you’re listening to the road to family freedom. With us today is Jeff Greenberg. How you doing Jeff?

Jeff Greenberg:

I’m doing fantastic today. It’s great to have you

Neil Henderson:

a little bit about Jeff. Jeff is currently the CEO and managing member of synergistic Investment Group. Jeff has been an investor in a $20 million multi property portfolio consisting over of over 800 units. Si g currently controls over 300 student housing beds and properties in Georgia, Arizona and Ohio. Si GS focuses on value add student housing, market rate, multifamily and senior living multifamily properties. With all that said, Jeff, you want to give our friends and families a little bit more about your background and let us know how you got into real estate.

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, you’ve got you’ve got the beginnings there. So that that’s great. I’ve been doing this for let’s see about 11 years now. So we bought our first Well, I first got into real estate probably in about 2007 by the end of 2007 2008. bought our first multifamily in 2010. And just been going since then we’ve sold off a couple properties recently, within the last year. And so we’re we’re on the acquisition side of it now looking for some more properties. But we definitely need value add in this market, we want something with a value add, we don’t want just straight stabilized properties.

Neil Henderson:

And for our listeners who don’t really understand what value add might be, could you give a quick explanation for

Jeff Greenberg:

that? Sure, we need something besides just going and saying, okay, we’re going to raise rents, either we’re going to buy something that’s got a low occupancy, that we can fix something and increase the occupancy. Or if we can put, you know, five to $10,000 in the unit in order to get another hundred dollars a month in the rents. Those are value adds other value adds might be charging for covered parking, garages or storage areas. Other will billing back utilities. So other other things of that nature where you can increase the revenue, or doing more efficiencies, where we’re reducing the expenses, finding where the inefficiencies are, and reducing expenses with looking at more, more efficient lighting, water saving either toilets or fixtures to cut down in the expenses, all of those things add value to a property, a commercial property.

Neil Henderson:

And because of the way commercial property is valued, if you increase the net operating income, the net revenue, you increase the property value substantially correct.

Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely. And that’s the one thing I love about commercial properties, you’re you’re not tied to the comps in the neighborhood. single family homes, you can fix it up all you want, you’re not going to get much more value than what the neighborhood brings in. And commercial real estate. That part doesn’t matter if you can increase the noi, you’re going to increase the value of the property. And that’s what’s so much fun about the commercial properties.

Neil Henderson:

Your first multifamily property, you said you have that during the Great Recession? Could you talk to us a little bit about how that performed during the recession? Well,

Jeff Greenberg:

that was more at the tail end of it. The property was built in 2007. And we bought it in 2010. It actually ended up with two builders that got stuck with it, they didn’t plan on holding the properties. But they held them because they couldn’t sell them in 2007. Or at least they couldn’t get what they wanted to get out of them. Even when we bought them in 2010, the one the one seller, he he was going to have to come to the table with money. Welcome. First of all, I own three years worth of taxes that he had paid. But he was going to have to come to the table with money and he refused to so my broker had to he had to throw in part of his commission just to make a break even. So the seller made no money out of that one. But there was there was actually two sellers, the other guy, the other seller made very little, they just basically didn’t want to be property managers. They wanted to get out of it. And so we got some great a great deal on it. They made very little on those properties.

Neil Henderson:

And you want to give us a little bit of numbers on that like size of property, market location, class property and things like that.

Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. And and I’ll say up front, this was an education. We didn’t make a lot of money out of it. Our investors did did fine. But it was in a town called Harlingen, Texas. And if you don’t know where Harlingen is, look on a map where, where Texas meets the goals and meets Mexico go, and it’s about 35 miles north of that. It’s a very small town, slow growth, which was one of our problems, that the the rent growth didn’t happen the way we had hoped for. This was a three year old property 100% occupied, there was no value adds the only value add was raising rents. We were also hoping to build back on water because they were already paying their own electric. So we were trying to build back on water. And we were met with some great resistance. So we had trouble with that. And so we ended up just a slow growth property that we were slowly increasing rounds, we had an 8.8% preferred return. And the investors got their return. And we basically ran the ran the property for six years without any without any compensation. But it was a six year lesson. Yeah. And some of the investors are still with us.

Neil Henderson:

Yeah, any things that you might do differently as far as market selection, property selection. Now, you know what, you know?

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, as I said before, we’re looking at value add. And I don’t think I mentioned this was a 20 unit property, it was actually it was actually five for plexus. And we treated it as a all in the same cul de sac. And we treated it as a 20 unit property. But the lessons learned were, you don’t buy a property with some without some value add. And it can’t just be saying, Okay, I’m going to raise rent and build back water. If it doesn’t happen, then you’ve got to sit there and try to figure out what else you’re going to do. We held the property for six years instead of the five that we had planned. Because when we started to sell it at year, four and a half, we couldn’t get the price that we were looking for. So we kind of drew this line in the sand, and said, we’re not selling it if we don’t get this price. And we just it ended up taking us to the sixth year, we had to extend the loan. Fortunately, the bank was real good about that. We extended the loan. And until we finally got the price at the end of six years. Now, the other thing that was real interesting, and we were talking about this earlier, with commercial real estate versus residential, we had to sell these for Plexus as a commercial real estate. Otherwise, we couldn’t get the value. If we went and had them priced as a four Plex as residential. There was no comps or the comps that that were in the area. This was a cul de sac that had, I believe, maybe about 16 to 24 plexus, the only thing that it’s sold and yours were three properties that had sold in foreclosure. So we would have our only comps was a foreclosure columns. And that would have killed us, we couldn’t get our price. So we had to sell it all together, we couldn’t break it up. Even though each of the properties had a separate title, separate deed, separate loan. These are five different loans. We couldn’t sell it separately, because we couldn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to get our value. So that was definitely a lesson that we learned on that we had, we had hoped that the community would be growing faster than it did. They were just breaking ground for a new Bass Pro Shop. If you know our Bass Pro Shop, it’s like Disneyland for the sports to the US. And they were so we thought wow, this is going to be a great boost for this community. And it did bring in some businesses but not nearly what we had hoped for. So so the small community just didn’t have the growth potential look that we expect. And so that’s something we learned in our It was a slow growth town and there was just no way to raise the rents the way we needed to

Unknown:

location, location location.

Brittany Henderson:

Just a quick question, what is the number of units that qualify something to be commercial versus residential?

Jeff Greenberg:

Over five, I mean, five, five and above. So a four Plex is still considered residential. But when you’re getting a loan, five units and above is considered commercial?

Brittany Henderson:

Well, we are big believers in beginning with the end of mine. So what’s your destination? Where’s real estate investing taking you?

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, I guess I mean, are you asking about more of my Why? Or what I’m looking at as far as number of properties,

Brittany Henderson:

more of your WHY? Yeah. I mean, like, obviously, we all have kind of a number for what we want my actually that kind of thing. But yeah, this is more of the sort of, why are you doing this?

Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely. And, and your show theme is a perfect one for me. Because my wife, my wife’s family, being able to do things with my family to help my kids buy houses, I’m out here in Southern California house prices are very high. I have I have grandkids that I want to spend time with, you can see some of the pictures behind me, of my grandkids, they’re extremely important to me. And I love spending time with them, I love doing things with them, I want to do traveling with them, I want to, you know, be able to leave them leave them a little bit of a legacy. On the last property that we just bought, I bought a I bought one share of the property for each one of my grandkids. So they now have an ownership share of that property. And with each property, I’m going to try to get them at least one share of each the properties. And they may not understand what I’m doing right now. I’ve explained it to the 10 and 11 year old, you know, I don’t know how much they grasp it. Obviously the the foreign the six year old don’t don’t understand what’s going on. But at some point, maybe they will. And if I can help my kids and my grandkids with their financial education, and to understand, you know, money and real estate, you know, that’s that’s my why I want to spend more time with them. I want to enjoy spending time with family.

Neil Henderson:

Yeah, I mean, it really time is time is the most precious resource we have. So I think that’s it’s a common common theme from all of our guests.

Brittany Henderson:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it’s it’s kind of why we’re doing this as well as we want to be able to have more time with Holden moving forward.

Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah, absolutely. And you have, and you guys are young, you have a young family. And it’s so important to spend that time with them, you know, they’re not going to be that age, you know, again, to enjoy that time. And to be able to have a business where you can work around your family is extremely important. I mean, I didn’t start doing this until late in life. And my kids were already grown up. But with my grandkids, I still want to spend time with my grandkids. I love spending time with them. And so I can work my schedule around, I could go and do things with them, I can take them to school, I can take, I could go to their soccer game, I can do all kinds of other things. And I come back, and maybe I’m going to be on the computer until 1030 at night, but I can schedule myself whatever time and work around my enjoyment of spending time without watching them grow.

Neil Henderson:

That’s awesome. So when you made the decision to plunge into real estate, how did you go about getting yourself educated?

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, I went I went the guru circuit. This was in 2007, when I was first learning about multifamily. And there really wasn’t any podcasts to listen to. I didn’t know about any books, the any of the real estate events I went to, they talked about single family and and I did, I did try doing Oreos for a while. But in 2007 was not a good time to be doing Oreos, because the bank’s didn’t know what the heck to do with them. They had so many foreclosed properties or properties that weren’t even for closing, because they didn’t want to have another one on their books. I know someone that was in foreclosure for six years, and she lived there without making payments, because the banks really didn’t want to kick her out of the house and have another have another property sitting around. So I ended up going to a guru and going to seminars and participate in seminars. And then later on, we started seeing more of these podcasts coming out and you know, that kind of stuff. But for the most part part, I didn’t have that resource that we have now. Now there’s so many so many different educational resources. It’s phenomenal.

Neil Henderson:

Did you find that time with the mentor to be valuable?

Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah, I did. I did. And there’s a lot of mistakes that I would have made otherwise, and you know, we everybody’s going to make mistakes. But you’re at least you can learn from other people’s mistakes. So at least you don’t make quite as many. So that’s, that’s always good. Yeah, you know, mentorship is good. You know, I do coaching now as well. And I try to help people out and to learn at least, hopefully, they’re not going to make the same mistakes I’ve made. And, you know, everybody’s going to make mistakes, and hopefully, they are devastating mistakes. Hopefully, they’re small ones. And, and you can recover from them.

Neil Henderson:

Yeah, I’ve often heard people say, you know, you can either, you know, lose a bunch of money in your first couple of deals, and that’s your education, which is great. Or you can, you know, pay money, spend the money on on a mentor, and you still may lose your money and some money on the first deal, but you’re probably not going to lose as much. Right, right. And you might get you might get to your destination faster.

Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah, I mean, you know, we’ve we’ve, the only money that we’ve ever lost on a deal is deals that we didn’t do that we started, we maybe went under contract, we flew out there, we did our inspections, paid inspectors and then decided it wasn’t a deal for us. So you know, you lose those kind of as part of doing business, you know, your your cost of travel, your inspections, you lose that. But other than that, you know, so far we haven’t lost anybody. We’ve never lost investors money. So, so we’re very proud of that, that that hasn’t happened.

Neil Henderson:

Are there any books now that you would recommend?

Jeff Greenberg:

I mean, there’s a lot of different books, it depends on what people are focusing on. I mean, if we’re talking about beginning books, you know, for multifamily. You know, I still like you know, Dave Linda’s book, you know, multifamily millions, Matt Faircloth house book on raising money, Joe Farrah lewis’s book on syndication, you know, those are good. There’s other books, you know, out there as far as for motivation and stuff. I like Tony Robbins and his stuff. And there’s so many of these other self improvement guys, that I really like. And I think that’s underrated a lot, a lot of times that people don’t realize how much of it is in your head. And a lot of its motivation, and drive. I had a guy call me up one time, I was having a meeting. And he calls me up. And he’s 20 minutes away from where my meeting was, and said, Oh, don’t you have anything closer? And I said, Wait a minute, the meetings 20 minutes? If you can’t, if you can’t make it to the meeting, because you don’t want drive 20 minutes, then don’t do real estate. Don’t do real estate, forget it walk away. Yeah, definitely don’t bother. I mean, I there’s times I drive, you know, two hours to go to a meeting and that I’m just going there to network. So you know, and I travel all over, I’m I was, you know, in Tampa was in Colorado, I’m going to Florida, if if you’re not going to dedicate a lot of time to this, if you’re not going to put the time in the no bother, because that’s what it takes. So it’s a mental thing. Not just sure you want to gain knowledge, but the networking is important. And pushing yourself when you’d really rather be doing something else. Maybe I’d rather be sitting there watching the TV program or do whatever. And so it’s it’s mental stamina as well.

Brittany Henderson:

Alright, so on that first deal, you said you guys had investors? Did you? How did you go about finding that, that in those investors, okay,

Jeff Greenberg:

I was with a partner, she’s she lives up in Alaska. And most of her we raised we raised about half. I mean, this was, this was a big raise, you know, $350,000, we had never raised a penny before. So that was that was a big deal for us. And about half of what she raised, and most of the people that she brought in were, or ex employers or coworkers or friends. And when I look at what, where I brought it in from, it was all from networking. It was people I had met at Real Estate events, people that essentially the men met on on different real estate events, but really none of my friends or family. So it was just networking, that that got it. It was I guess it was also, let’s say I wasn’t I didn’t get on the first podcast until after we bought it. So a lot of it was going on bigger pockets, and responding to people was questions. And I was on there a lot, just answering people’s questions. And people would contact me and say, Hey, I like what you said on that, on that forum. And you know, how can I get involved with you? And so those are, those are the most people, a lot of my investors I’ve never met, I’ve never met in person. A lot of them I’ve met through phone calls. And since then, a lot of them have been, you know, from other podcasts, where they’ve heard me on other podcasts as well as all the different networking events, I go to gotcha,

Brittany Henderson:

cool. Did you use any of your own money on that first deal, the only money

Jeff Greenberg:

that we used was to get us into it. And then we got our money out of the clothes, most of our money has been spent for our education, you know, and travel for that kind of stuff. But as far as on the deal, we pulled our money back out at the end. And we didn’t have very much money. So we needed to have that available for the next deal or for the next time. Next seminar we’re going to. So yeah, we didn’t have enough to put into those deals.

Neil Henderson:

So I want to talk a little bit more about some of the other asset classes that you’re involved in. You’re into student housing, and you’re also into some assisted living facilities, can you walk us through some of some of those deals and how you got involved in that?

Jeff Greenberg:

Okay, the assisted living, we haven’t done yet. But I do like that class, it just so happens that my daughter in law used to run an assisted living facility, she used to run to homes. So she’s a great resource for me on that. But we haven’t purchased one yet. But I think it’s a great, I think it’s a great asset class, my generation are getting older, and there’s certainly going to be a need for it. And I think about, you know, hey, if if I needed that assistance, you know, I would rather be in a small family home, if I couldn’t live at home, I’d rather be in a small family home, then another institution, you know, with, with 50 people or something, I’d rather be in a house with six people. So I think it’s a great asset class, you don’t see as much in the way of value add on that one. Unless you, if you find a house and convert it, then obviously, you’ve got a value add there. The student housing I like a lot, because it’s easy for people to mess up. And because of that, we’re finding some value adds that we can resolve, we bought a property in Georgia, it was 48% occupied, but it was only 30% economic occupancy. Okay, so all those, the rest of those weren’t paying. And right now we’re selling that property, it’s at 95% occupancy. So we bought it for 1,000,001. And right now we’re selling it for, well, I just got an offer about three nine on it. So and that’s in two years. So we added the value by fixing it getting the occupancy up changing the reputation of it had a horrible reputation. One of the things we did was go to the athletic department and talk to the coaches and said, Hey, we want you to send your athletes over to us, because we were a block away. So here, they’re a block away, like a walk to school. And they looked at us and said, why would we want to send our, our students over there, it was just kind of. So it had it had a horrible reputation. And we so we told them, Hey, you know, we put 500 grand into that thing. And we said come over and take a look at it now. And they came over and looked at it. And now we’ve got got all kinds of athletes over there, we’ve made a couple changes that they wanted like a car to access doors, you know card reader doors for because that’s what their security asked us to do. So we did do that. Other than that we put Wi Fi throughout, we updated the old analog cameras to all digital, we still really need add a few more. We put furniture in, in all of the units, none of them were furnished. We also basically redid the entire units, I mean, the floors, we redid all the floors, paint, all the fixtures were replaced, resurface the countertops, resurface the Tubs and Showers, read it all that put quite a bit of money into it. But that’s that’s all coming back. Because it’s you know, super nice facility right now. And right now we are in the middle of redoing the leasing office and the laundry room. I’m sure

Unknown:

that’s awesome. How big is that unit, or how many,

Jeff Greenberg:

that’s it’s not that big, but it’s 36 units, it’s 36, four bedroom, two bath units. And oh, the other thing that we did we got we be donated to the athletic department. So for $3,000, we get to 62nd spots on their jumbotron at every home basketball home football game, and we get our commercial. And I went down there and I interviewed the students and my team actually did the Film Editing happen to have someone on my team that has a background in Film Editing. They ended it, put some music on it. And now we’ve got this real catchy clip that gets played at every basketball and football game. And so we essentially filled up, we had a waiting list for a while 100%. That’s great. That’s

Brittany Henderson:

awesome. So it says it’s creative. And that’s I think that can be really helpful when you’re doing some of these different properties where you have to have that value add and you have to sort of change the reputation, you had to get creative and really, and still network with the neighborhood and the coaches and stuff. So you’re kind of reusing all those skills that you use just to get the properties and the investors and things in the first place.

Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah, we actually interviewed with the we went and saw the mayor. That’s what it was. It’s a small town. So it’s easy to get to see a lot of the important people but we may or actually came to our open house wearing one of our T shirts. So she came she came with our T shirt. We had a DJ that was broadcasting live. And she came to it we’ve had the coaches come by we’ve had the security from the school come by to look at the property, see what they thought about it. And it’s become a real community thing. And I’ll tell you something that hasn’t really been announced as of this time. But the school is considering buying the property. Since it’s on that. We told him we were selling it. So the school alumni, they don’t have sufficient rooms. And so we’re telling them if they’re interested, they better hurry up because otherwise we’ll sell it to somebody else. So they may be buy the property and that will be good. Use it for dorms. Yeah.

Neil Henderson:

So talk to me a little bit about the differences between a multifactor Emily, in Harlingen, Texas, that’s about 40. You know, what 20 units and student housing in a small town in Georgia, of 36 units. So what’s that, you know, explain what some of the differences are between standard multifamily and student housing multifamily?

Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely, absolutely. And there’s some real important things, the most important thing is your property management. And property management is key you need because you advertise differently, you market differently with the the student housing, you can’t just go and throw it on Craigslist, and apartments calm. And I mean, that’s what we did with the Harbinger property. We don’t, we never paid for advertisement, we put it on Craigslist. That’s all we did. And we filled it up. But on other you have to you have to do social media, you have to get out there, you have to get where the young people are going to be looking, and you know, Facebook, and Twitter, and whatever, all these other different social media outlets. I do that also, you go to on campus events, we purchased, you know, a table cover and a canopy. And anytime there’s an open house or a back to school night, or parents night, or whatever it is, we have a table, our manager is out there with with a table and giving out trinkets, you know about him for the property with the property name on it, that’s, that’s critical in the student housing. Because the students, you know, they’re they need to see you, they need to see who’s who’s the management company, because they want to relate to you, the managers. And if you have a management company that isn’t equipped to do that, or isn’t prepared to do that, you know, they’re not, it’s not going to work for the student housing. The The other thing is, is timing, that every school seems to have a different lease up window, you missed that window. And and you’re toast, your you can be you can be vacant for the rest of the year, you know, until the next semester. And that’s critical. And and the different schools, and sometimes even different properties have a different window. An example is my property in Ohio, I’ve got one building, that’s 12 Studios, okay, so it’s just a studio apartments. And the other ones are all mostly four bedroom, two bath units, by actually have some four bedroom, four bath units as well. But the, the window for the other units, the four bedroom units, you know, if we’re not all leased up by by the end of March, maybe April, we’re probably going to have a real difficult time, because groups that want to come in with four people and rent all together, those, they’re going to do that early. Now my studios, we probably can rent all the way through to August, because those are sometimes you get the young professors, sometimes you’ll get grad students, you get sometimes the people that just want to be by themselves and don’t want to be in with a bunch of other people. So and that just depends on my Georgia property, we were renting all the way up through August, it’s a different demographic. The the Georgia property is a lower lower economic group of students were my Ohio property is you know, upper middle class, and seems the upper middle class plan a little bit better, you know, at least the parents do that they’re going to be looking for a place to stay a lot sooner. The others, they the lower class, students, maybe just don’t plan as well. And, and they may not have the help of their parents either. And other parents don’t know the parents may have never gone to college. And a lot of these kids are maybe the first the first generation that gets to go to college. And so they don’t really know that they need to plan ahead. So they’re so different properties are different in those two are totally, totally extreme of each other. As far as the timing on it. So the thing is, is the lease up window, the the marketing aspects of the property management. Also in some of our properties, we do roommate matching, where we try to bring in people that are hopefully compatible with each other, our current generation doesn’t like to share. And sometimes we find that being social together and living together with some strangers is difficult. The other thing that you find in student housing, is they like the one to one on bed and bath parody, they don’t like to share bathrooms either. So you see a lot of that with the young generation. So back.

Brittany Henderson:

Back in my day, I lived in a dorm and shared a bathroom with 20 people

Neil Henderson:

to walk down the hall and shower in a stall.

Jeff Greenberg:

Exactly Hey, well, actually, when I was over in Germany, I remember some of the places we stayed. Yeah, it was very communal. And the in the bathroom wasn’t in your room, you had to go down the hallway. Yes, but nowadays they want even if it’s a very tiny bathroom, they want their own bathroom, they want the privacy, they want to feel nobody messing with their stuff.

Brittany Henderson:

Is that a value add that you can make with some of the properties to do that kind of like renovation to add about. I know

Jeff Greenberg:

people that have done that. I know people that have done that where they’ve cut it back, where they can add a tiny bathroom or a unit of it afford to they might split it into a two, one and two, two ones. Because at least that way, they’re only sharing with one other person, instead of sharing a unit with you know, three other people. The two ones seem to be more popular than afford afford to. But if you can add a little postage stamp bathroom, that certainly is going to be more desirable. Yeah.

Neil Henderson:

Now you said sometimes you you know the some challenge is with timing and, and leasing up. Do you ever put some of these units on to short term rental to to sort of fill in on some of those times?

Jeff Greenberg:

Yes, yes. In fact, my Arizona property, we had that issue where we came in in December on that property, and the selling property manager didn’t do any lease up. And so we were late to the game. And so we we do have vacancies on that property. So yes, we do have some market rate rentals in there, that will be out, you know, next, or this coming July, the end of July. And so we can get students back in there. Because we can’t we’re not getting the rates that we can get for students. But yeah, we’re doing that just to fill the units and get some money coming in. So yeah, that that can be a problem. But that’s a solution. The other thing is is corporate rentals, doing it as a corporate rental or short term rentals just to get bodies in there and get some funds

Brittany Henderson:

to get like, visiting parents and students for like a short term, you know, kind of like,

Unknown:

the probably wouldn’t pay them.

Brittany Henderson:

I mean, kind of like Airbnb, but it’s more specific, like you get to stay in student housing with your kid. Wow.

Jeff Greenberg:

But but the Airbnb, the other thing is, is traveling nurses, you know, those kind of things where they may be there for six months, you know, something, something like that. So yeah, the thing is, is you’re going to try to get them in. But the thing is, is the one thing that I do like about student housing, as I said before, is somebody else’s mistake can be my, my gold mine. And I mean, the Georgia property we got that was in foreclosure. That was in foreclosure, we bought it from the note holder. And the asset manager actually wanted to turn it around when they took it over. But the he had a it was a fun and they said the investors in the fund wanted the money out. They wanted to get out of it. So we got to turn it around instead of him doing so that that worked out very well.

Brittany Henderson:

Well, so how much time do you spend on real estate this, I gotten it, this is probably your primary job that you do?

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, it’s my only job now. I’ve retired from my, my w two job a few years back. And I’ve I haven’t really documented how long I know, I’ll get up at 630 in the morning, and then I’ll check my email and I’ll start doing some stuff. And I’ll take the dog out to the walk and come back and work some more and, you know, go see the kids or something. And it also it’s kind of scattered throughout, but from 630 in the morning till 1030 at night, I may be working with stretches in between I you know, here we are on a Sunday. And I’m working. But you know, I’ve already taken the dog for the walk and I’ll go do something in a little bit later. So it’s the nice part about it is my commute is 25 feet. You know, the only traffic I hit is when the dog gets in the way. So the you know, I love that part of it. I used to do a 40 mile commute one way. And so I’m able to, you know, do it on my time. And when when I want to. So that’s always a good thing.

Brittany Henderson:

Well, and you get to hang out with us on a nice Sunday, you know?

Jeff Greenberg:

Sounds good to me. So are

Neil Henderson:

there any systems or anything that you’ve developed to help you sort of automate your business at all?

Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah, well, the thing is, see, I have a team, that there was a group that one time kind of cornered me and said, hey, you’re gonna mentor us, we’re not gonna let you out of here. And so I said, Okay, look, I didn’t want to organize anything. I said, Look, let’s show up every other week. And I’ll just start teaching. And because you’re not paying me, I don’t have to be organized, I can just start talking about whatever. And so so I started working with them. Anyway, long story short, we ended up getting two properties because of them that they went out found the two properties are Georgia property in our Arizona property were because they found that so we became, we said, okay, let’s become a company. Because about three or four years ago, I broke up, we broke up with my my business partner, lady from Alaska. So they’ve become my company. So the communication that we really use, we love a lot of slack. Now, most of my people are in California, but I do have team members in Connecticut, Philadelphia, Oklahoma, anywhere else, I think that’s where the rest of them are. And over Virginia. So we communicate all the time on Slack, which is fantastic. I don’t know if you’re familiar with slack. But it’s, you know, instant messenger. But the nice thing is, is you could break it into channels, where typically with your instant messaging or typical forums, somebody can ask something and then 20 things later, somebody is answering, and you never know what the answer was to what the question was, because there’s so much other stuff in between? Well, the nice part about slack is we can separate it out by properties or by states, or by cities, or by topics. And so there’s much less clutter in between somebody asking a question somebody answering. And also you can you can tag somebody, you can tag somebody, so they know that there is a question for them. And it will show up on their screen with a number next to it. And you know, okay, there’s something out there, somebody tagged, and you’ll go look for the tag. So slack is fabulous, I don’t know that we can do our business without some thing like that. The other thing that we do is we use podium podium is a database. And basically, every property that we underwrite every property that we look at, we put in podium. So when we’re working on a property and and somebody has a bunch of information either about the market, or about the particular property, we can go back into po do and look for it, rather than going into slack. And then scrolling up trying to find the information you go into po do and po do will have all the information that we have on a specific property. And then we also have info, do we we have sections for property managers, we have section for brokers. So if we need to know what pro brokers we’re working with in a certain market, or what property managers we’re working with a certain market, that’s, that’s all in the database, my team will, will assign themselves different positions on each deal. So I might, one of my people will go and grab a team lead, they’ll become the excuse me, they’ll become a deal lead. And they’ll be the one that’s in charge of talking to the broker. And they’ll be the one that’s in charge of working with one of our underwriters and they’ll say hey, I need an underwriter. So one of my underwriters will sign up for that property and help to underwrite the property. And, and if the underwriter says, Hey, I need more information, the the deal, lead will go back and back to the broker and say, Hey, I need some more information. And then when they decide that, hey, this is the deal we were interested in, they’ll take it to my team lead, and they’ll look it over if he likes it, then what we’ll do is they’ll prepare a presentation for me, which will be all the bullet points of why we want to be in this market, why we like this property, what’s going on in this market or what the plan is, the value adds in this. And so when I look at it, I get I get the cliff notes, I get the cliff notes ongoing, I’ll look it. And if it looks interesting to me, then I can go, I can always go back and dig into the details that they’ve used. Because that’s all in our filing system. I can go look at us. Okay, yeah, I agree with you 90, and 99% of the time I agree with them. And I’ll say okay, yeah, this is a good idea, let’s put an offer in some of the time, I’ll say, Hey, you know, I want to get more information about this market. Or good, I don’t like this market or whatever, you know, and I’ll send it back or whatever. And we’ll do that. But most of the time, they know what they’re doing. That they know what I’m looking for. Yeah, we go from there. But the pOH do and slack are probably our two biggest, then we also use of course, Google Drive. That’s where all the files are kept for each property, we have a file on each property, any information in there. Just those are probably the three that

Brittany Henderson:

we use most. That’s great. That’s that’s a really cool system to really make it so that you’re not having to you’re not doing the finding anymore. Really, which is where a lot of the time that time comes from when when you’re in this business.

Neil Henderson:

Well in multifamily la real estate in general is a team sport. There are there are people out there who do it all by themselves. But they’re usually going to be a smaller smaller operators, single family home, somebody who’s doing multifamily and syndications and things like that. I just don’t i don’t know anybody who does it all by themselves. It does it all. How big is your team?

Jeff Greenberg:

I believe what do we go nine, nine of us. And most of them are, like I said, I think we’ve got 344 that aren’t in California. The rest, the rest are all out here actually local, local to me. Yeah. And, and the thing is, is my the Ohio property that I bought, that was just after my breakup with my business partner. And that was I did basically all by myself, I did have a 19 year old intern that did some stuff for me. But for the most part, I did it all myself. And that was that was pretty stressful. That was pretty stressful. Nowadays, my team does most of the work, I still do the fundraising, I still do the equity raised for the most part, I’d love to get that, you know, pan that piece off as well. You know, I can kind of just move on to other things. But I mean, it’s, it’s great. I work with the team as the as the lead in the whole group. Plus, I spent a lot of time networking.

Brittany Henderson:

Do you think get, you know, trying to find an opportunity to be on a team like this is a good place to start for someone who hasn’t been in the business for very long or is looking to start out?

Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely, I I think that people should look at the different pieces that are needed, and decide how they can benefit a syndicators, or somebody that is doing it. So maybe somebody has a great network. And they know a lot of high net worth people. And they can raise money for a syndicate, or maybe they really are good at finding deals and off market deals. And maybe they can bring the deals. Maybe they’re great with Excel, and they they love underwriting, they love numbers. So they can help out with that, you know, whatever piece that they can bring to us indicator is what they should do and then learn. And like with with a couple of my team members, I have a couple ladies that they were working with me on a property of one lady in particular, she was working on our Arizona property. And we’re you know, she was on all the calls with the property manager or talking to them or whatever. And her questions were better than mine. And I said, Wait a minute, why am I doing this? You go and I want you to be my asset manager. And so I brought her into an asset management position, because she am she knew what she was talking about. You have a great question. She had the probing questions. And I did that with another one on my Georgia property. She was basically doing the same thing. That, that she had these great questions. She just just remodeled her house. And so she had just got through dealing with contractors. And so now we’re doing all this remodel stuff on the Georgia property. And she’s asking all these questions. And I said, you don’t need me. And so I’ve put most of those ladies in asset management positions where I’m not needed. And I love it because I will I will jump on the meetings with them. And I kind of sit in the background and pop in when when I have a question. But for the most part, they’re setting up the meetings, they’re having the conversations, they’re asking, why isn’t this done? Or when is this going to be done, or they’ve been going out to the properties to check some of the work that’s been done. So these are two ladies that came in with me the the one lady was afraid to get on the phone call with the and now training my other team members. And same with the other lady. And she she she was a fixin flipper on her own, and had done that, but really has dealt with brokers really have dealt with property managers. And now I’ve they’re basically training anybody knew that we bring in? So yeah, I mean, I love it. It’s it’s phenomenal. You get you get good people that that get along with each other that, you know, as they say, you know, you got two arms, you know, one, but one to pull yourself up and wonderful somebody else. And you have that attitude. And you can have great team members. You know, just bringing people along with you and learning with you. very rewarding.

Neil Henderson:

So obviously, you do invest long distance, you’ve got properties in Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas, or maybe you don’t have the Texas property anymore.

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, obviously we’re buying. We’re buying one in Texas right now. Okay. I’m closing next week.

Neil Henderson:

Yeah. So how do you because you’re obviously in Southern California, and you don’t invest in Southern California? Do you

Jeff Greenberg:

know, haven’t found anything that works?

Neil Henderson:

Yeah, the numbers just don’t work. So how do you go about, let’s say, let’s start with qualifying the market and saying, All right, this is the market we want to be in, and then to perhaps building a team on the ground to help you execute on buying properties there?

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, first of all on the market, there are there are several markets that we are looking at that are good markets. And I’ve and this is a shift that we’re taking, because we’ve been chasing a lot of rabbits. And it’s, it’s it’s too difficult when you look at everything that comes in from a broker and evaluate it. And typically, there’s 50 other people that are also going to be offering on it, it’s been too difficult. So I’ve instructed my team to pick out a couple markets, and they’re going to become experts on those markets. So we can focus. Now, the other side of it, is if somebody brings me a deal from a market that maybe I’m not familiar with, and they bring this deal to me all wrapped up in a ribbon with with all the information about that property and about that market and convince me that this is something that I that I want to do, that they’ve done all the work and all the research for me will look at other markets. So we’re open to that. But what I’m not open to as someone goes and throws a property to those areas of property, I found, you know that we’ve got to put all the time and effort into research. That’s, that’s wasting my time. And I actually brought one, the people that are up in Virginia, that they brought me a property said they did such a fabulous job of packaging, and evaluating and telling me what the plan was and how much you could raise the rents and, and why they liked that market. And they did such job of packaging the deal, and telling me all this information. And I go, Wait a minute, do you want to join our team? I want you working with us? Because that’s exactly what I want is someone that can do that. And so now they’re working with us working on finding properties. And I can’t remember what the question was.

Unknown:

Was going

Neil Henderson:

evaluate in the market, and then building building the teams on the ground.

Jeff Greenberg:

Okay. Yeah. So once we once we decide on a market, okay, obviously, we don’t rely too heavily on brokers, brokers opinion. But we we do, we’ll go out and talk to several different brokers and find out what areas they would rate as a, b and c, d, you know, what areas of the path of progress, what areas to stay away from, if you’re going to ask three different brokers that question or those questions, you can get a decent idea of what areas you want to stay away from. The other thing is, is we we talked to property managers, if we can get a property manager to go out look at a property, we will do that. If there’s a property that we’re interested in, we’ll we’ll go in, we’ll go into the city. And we’ll talk to the city will talk to the police department, the fire department zoning, building safety, all these different government departments to get a good idea about where the path of progress is, we also go to economic development will sit with them, and talk to them to find out where the city’s going, the city’s growing what they’re bringing into the city, what the city has to offer. And of course, we look at, you know, we look at a lot of stats, and then you go to city national data. And you can see a lot of the demographics, you know, you can see crime, you can see median home prices, you can see the change in all prices, you can see and see incomes, the change. There’s so much data nowadays that you can get online, for the different markets and crime rates and all that stuff. And so we do a lot of research on that when we decided that we’re going to go into a market. And as I said, we’re trying to narrow down the market so we can narrow down some of the time that has to be spent on that research. Or if somebody brings us property where they’ve done all that, when they’ve done all that and they say okay, here’s all this information. This is you know, the population growth, unemployment, employment, diversification, all those typical stats. Now, though, a lot of that stuff is different when you talk about student housing. So this totally different criteria that we’re looking at on student housing, student housing, the big thing is University, how, how large the university is, how much housing they have on campus, compared to the percentage to the number of students, we want to have under 30% dorms available for their population. You want because we do off campus housing, we want them to have an off campus housing need. So we want to do that. How far is it from the campus? How, how healthy is the campus? Are they the university? Are they growing, how much money they’re putting into improvements into the community? Those kind of things, we want to know what’s what’s going on in the university, more so than the city. I mean, my property that we have in Ohio, is an Oxford, Ohio, which was like 20,000 population with 18,000 students. So most of the population is student, the only lawyer, the main employer is the university, well, typically, you’re not going to want to go into a market with multi family with one, one employer, I don’t like going into military towns where military is the only employer, student housings a little different. If you got a nice healthy school, they’re not going to be deploying the kids overseas. So you know, if you’ve got a healthy school, that’s the main thing is you want to know what’s going on with that. And you know, the Miami University of Miami, Ohio, I think is 100 180 years old or something like that. So it’s a healthy school. And that’s what you’re looking for. Gotcha.

Brittany Henderson:

Awesome. All right. So I’m probably touched on this a little bit here in there. But what do you believe is the most critical skill that a new investor looking to thrive in either the multifamily or the student housing niche with need to master

Jeff Greenberg:

their Why? I think I think mental the mental game is more important than anything else. It’s too easy to give up a reason why they want to do this. Because sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s not, and why they want to set up late at night, in or getting up early in the morning, what’s motivate, I really feel that mentally you have to have a reason to want to do this up your kids or your retirement or whatever it is. Because there’s going to be a lot of aspects that you don’t like doing. There’s plenty of things I don’t like doing in this business. And I do it and it’s, it’s painful to do it. So I’ve got to do something to motivate myself to do those things. Because I know that in the end, it’s it’s going to be worse at all. Because I’m going to get to my goals, I’m going to get what I need. And so that’s the big skill. The other thing is depends on what role you’re playing, and I always liking people is always always a good thing in join network. And and I’ve, and I’ve had people communicate with me, I remember on bigger pockets. There was one guy was mentioning, since you’re not really an introvert and i and i and i have trouble talking to people. And I told him, I said, first of all, get over it. You know, I’ve been an introvert, I am an introvert. I wasn’t get over it. I said go to go to Toastmasters. Push yourself, push your limits, push yourself out of your comfort zone. People look at me and say you’re not an introvert. I’ve always been an introvert all my life. But I’ve had to push myself. Now I’ve gone up and I’ve been on on the stage in front of 1000 people. And I’ve been up there talking, okay, because that’s what I had to do to do this business. And you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. And the only way you grow is when you push yourself from your your comfort zone, anybody that’s ever worked out, you know that you get to a level pain. And you get stronger when you’ve pushed past that pain. Right? Yeah, anybody who’s done any kind of athletics workouts or whatever, you know, if you stop when you get to that pain, you’re never gonna, you’re never going to grow. So you get past being uncomfortable. And next time, you’re going to be uncomfortable in a different level. You keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing, I was a swimmer. When I was young, it was always at a certain point, you hit a wall. And then if you pushed yourself past that wall next time, the wall was farther out, you know, next time the wall was farther away, and you kept doing that doing that. And and people that haven’t done athletics, maybe don’t know that. And, and in business or in life, it’s more of a mental wall, then than what it is in athletes or athletics where you’re it’s more physical, that you feel it, but you push yourself and all the sudden next time it’s Wow, that was he’s, you know, like, the person that buys a first proper once you get past that hurdle by on the first property. And then the next one’s easy, because now you understand the moment. So I think those are very important things is realizing that you can push yourself out of your comfort zone, being willing to get into your comfort zone be uncomfortable, but uncomfortable. Every time I’ve pushed myself beyond you learn, you grow.

Neil Henderson:

Great points. If you had to start your real estate investing career all over today, knowing what you know, now, what would you do?

Jeff Greenberg:

Oh, network meet a lot of great people. Yeah, the network is is is important. I’m in I’m in a great mastermind right now, where there’s massive owners that some of you know owning billion or control, control over a billion dollars with a private and just being next to them and talking to them. And, and, and having them give you ideas is just awesome. So I would say you know, the networking, meeting people that are where you want to be where you want to get to. And, and I would do that sooner, I would have I mean, I did a lot of that with a lot of the seminars I went to, but I didn’t realize how important it was to even push farther, and be with people that are way ahead of me, there’s always going to be people behind you. And there’s going to be people that have it. So associating with the people that are going to be supportive and ahead of you is is is extremely important. Yeah, if I was going to, I mean, I could lose everything right now. And I really wouldn’t, you know, the my network, my people that I can call up and talk to is more important than anything else. Just

Neil Henderson:

resources, people, your network is your net worth.

Jeff Greenberg:

Exactly. It is it’s extremely important. And in this business, it is so important, so important than this business resource. And the nice thing that I that I really like about real estate, that, you know, like you can’t do in the stock market. You know, internet insider trading is legal. So, you know, knowing people and finding people I mean, there’s been times that I’ve heard, you know, people talk about, oh, yeah, I got this deal. You know, I mean, just networking, you know, one person might sell a deal to another dealer, or another person or I went to a mastermind and two people met there, that they found out that one had just sold their property to another guy that was in the same meeting, they hadn’t met, they hadn’t met before until they came to this meeting. And all of a sudden they met. It’s essentially a small industry. And small industry and networking and reputation is extremely important.

Brittany Henderson:

So for someone who is looking to get into this and has a full time job and a family besides networking, is there any other advice that you feel like you would want to give that person?

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, I would start out with the education. Okay, education, I mentioned some books that can get you the basics. And there is a ton of podcasts out there, there’s a ton of podcasts, I would throw away your music library. Just listen to podcasts as often as you can. When you drive when you walk when you’re ever there’s so much education out there, there’s so much value out there. There’s so many books out there as well. And, and 99% of the stuff is free. You know there’s there’s so much value out there, get yourself educated figure a way to be a value to somebody that is doing it and help them out. That’s that’s what I would say is either either find money, find out how to do it properly, how to raise money, but if you happen to know high net worth people, you know, syndicators are always looking for money, they always need the equity, they always look for deals. So the two things find out how to legally bring in investors. And the other thing is, is find out how to properly underwrite properties, and how to value the properties, and then bring them to investors. You don’t have to start small, you can start big, but you need to know how to value a property and bring that to us indicator you bring you find out what they want, what they’re looking for. And now you’ve added value to them. You’ve saved them time. And as you mentioned before, you know, time is a great value. There’s there’s nothing more valuable to any of us in this business than time. You can’t get any more of that.

Neil Henderson:

Nope. Well, listen, Jeff, we really enjoyed this conversation. And we could we could talk probably for another hour. But we won’t subject to you that to that. But we want to thank you so much for sharing today. If any of our guests want to reach out to you what’s the best way they can find you?

Jeff Greenberg:

Oh, they can find me at my website at synergistic IG. com that’s synergticig.com or they can email me at that same Jeff, at synergistic. ig.com those are the best ways I do get on to bigger pockets. Not quite as often as I should. But my email is probably the best way to get ahold of me. Okay. And all that will be in the show notes. So All right, thank you.

Neil Henderson:

Well, listen, we hope you have a great day. It was great having you.

Jeff Greenberg:

Well, thank you very much. It was it was fun. And thank you very much.

Neil Henderson:

Well, it was a great interview with Mr. Jeff Greenberg.

Brittany Henderson:

Yes, I really enjoyed talking to him. It was really awesome. We actually had a also a very nice chat after we stopped recording. So

Neil Henderson:

which we all we always we always do. And they’re always great. But

Brittany Henderson:

yeah, it was really, I feel lucky that we actually we got to meet him at the best ever. Yes. a happy accident. So was there a key lesson that you learned from this interview?

Neil Henderson:

Yes, I would say one of the main ones was leverage the market experts in whatever market you’re going into the brokers, property managers, the people in city government, like police and fire and zoning people leverage those experts Don’t you know, you don’t have to become an expert. And in the market, leverage those experts was one was a big one. Yeah,

Brittany Henderson:

I think for me, a lot of it was surrounding that networking and education. And he sort of melded that together that you know, you want to network and then use that network to help educate yourself or, you know, kind of bring everybody up and and utilize what skills you have and what skills they have. So that you get kind of an everybody wins situation that he really has done well with because he, he we talked about this after the interview when we stopped recording that really the reason he has this amazing team that he works with is because he decided to give to them, you know, he he worked with them for free to teach them what he knew, and then in turn brought him this, you know, amazing team that is benefiting him as well. So just relationships, and educating yourself can take you a long way and can be free. And it’s just really your time that you have to pay for.

Neil Henderson:

Yes. And that was the other key lesson was that build a team that where everyone has a job, real estate is a team sport. And so many of us are out there trying to do it all ourselves, trying to find deals, trying to underwrite deals, trying to find the money for deals, trying to talk to owners and brokers and property managers things that it’s a team sport. So build a team, give every person in that team a job and find a flow that works for you. Where a deal enters your team’s sphere, and then work through that deal. Hopefully, push it through and put an offer on and close it next year business plan. So

Brittany Henderson:

awesome. So while we’re on the subject of knowledge, how how did Jeff really acquire his knowledge? Where did that come from?

Neil Henderson:

I would say a couple of ways. It was not just one way he won. He did. He did hire he did pay for mentorship gurus what you know, whatever you want to call it. He also talked about I’m not sure if there were podcasts at the time,

Brittany Henderson:

he said there weren’t any podcasts the time he talked mostly It sounded like he did a lot of his educating through conferences, meetups, you know that networking piece that’s really served him very well, obviously. Now he’s, you know, gone to like, you can do this through podcasts go on bigger pockets. And he did say he went on bigger pockets a lot, and probably learned there and then also showed his expertise. And that, again, brought him some people but the initial knowledge really came from paying for mentorship and going to real estate events, which is really easy to do now, because there are a lot of them. There’s a lot of meetups, there’s usually plenty of people in your town that are probably willing to share their knowledge with you let alone You know, these conferences around the country.

Neil Henderson:

So how much money did it take for him to get started?

Brittany Henderson:

He had to raise about $350,000 or and I think that was split between him and the partner that he had at the time? I believe. So he had to do some capital raising and suddenly he really didn’t put tonight he didn’t give us a number. So maybe whatever he put down.

Neil Henderson:

Yeah. Sounds like most of what he said they didn’t have a lot of money starting out. But most of the money that they have went towards executing on the deal on the closing the deal, which is traveling out to see the Property Inspections, and and legal fees and things like that, in my experience that typically can run about $15,000. Okay. All right. So that’s just my guess.

Brittany Henderson:

All right. So how much time does Jeff spend on real estate endeavors?

Neil Henderson:

It was not we didn’t nail him down on that. He said, he sounded like he didn’t have to work on it a huge amount. It was sort of like whenever, you know, he woke up at 630 and did some work and then walked the dog and did some work and then hung out with his grandkids and some more work. Yeah. And yeah, maybe and maybe you sort of wrap things up later in the evening.

Unknown:

But

Brittany Henderson:

I would guess that he’s probably working the amount of a foolish time job just in a very split up way. Yes. And probably some of that he may be doesn’t even have to do is he has that team in place. And you know, some of that is more on the probably thought leadership platform or the interview platform, you know, things like podcasts and things like that. So he definitely spends his time on it, though, which is no. I before we go on to our next evaluation, I’m just curious, like, do we feel like this is a something, you know, he works on this for 40 to 60 hours a week? Maybe? But I think we should mention that the way you know, because that number sounds like well, if I have a full time job, how am I supposed to do that, you know, Neil and Brittany, you’re on here and trying to show me that I can do this as a working you know, parents and that and that doesn’t sound like something you could do unless you want to kill yourself. So I think it’s good to mention and kind of refer back to the episode that if you want to do this, get in as a team member and spend your time doing a part of what he’s doing, or you know, the piece that you’re good at and spend whatever extra time that you can on that. So it may be that you only have 10 extra hours a week, but you spend those 10 extra hours looking for a deal. And you’re really good at that. Or you spend those 10 extra hours underwriting a deal. But friend brought you whatever that is, you can do that before you get to the point where you can quit a job and do this full time.

Neil Henderson:

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Unknown:

I’m learning.

Brittany Henderson:

So just for our audience, like six months ago, I probably would like a high Sure. Yep, whatever.

Neil Henderson:

So so could could he do this strategy from anywhere in the world?

Brittany Henderson:

I think so. I mean, we we didn’t really, obviously, we talked about the he has properties and other places. And we didn’t really get into like the international travel question. But we’ve we’ve talked to people who do similar things to him. And I think it really comes down to having that team on the ground that can really evaluate a property for you in person, if that’s what you need, and then being able to travel occasionally to whatever place you’re going to. And and that’s this is definitely a strategy that you can do that once you’re up and running.

Neil Henderson:

Yes. All right. Well, that was the evaluation of Jeff Greenberg. And and if you liked 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.com slash review for links and instructions. Thanks for listening. We’re doing this all again next week. Until then, safe travels.

About the author, Neil

Neil Henderson is the co-host of The Road to Family Freedom, a self-storage investor, and avowed proponent of short-term rental house hacking. He founded The Road to Family Freedom to guide busy parents to financial freedom through passive real estate investing.