Real Estate Underground

Shams Merchant structures syndications and investment funds for clients across the country. He also runs his own fund-of-funds, allocating LP capital across about fifty sponsors, which means he sees both sides of the table: he writes the documents, and he reads other people's documents deciding whether to invest. That vantage point is what makes this episode useful. On AI: he gets the ChatGPT question weekly now. His answer is not that the technology is bad, he uses it heavily. It is that a model has no access to which structures have actually been tested and litigated with the SEC, and no discretion about what belongs in a document and what does not. You are not paying for a stack of paper. You are paying for someone whose malpractice insurance stands behind the decision. On what LPs check: they can spot AI-drafted documents immediately. They ask who your law firm and your CPA are, because they want to know who is backing you. They do not want a five-hurdle waterfall nobody can follow. They do not want seven stacked fees. They want clawbacks, so a disposition fee disappears if the deal misses its return metrics. And they want a GP contribution that is real cash out of your pocket, not an acquisition fee recycled back into the deal and called skin in the game. On 506(b) versus 506(c): Shams defaults to C for nearly everyone. B only makes sense on a small raise, or when you have spent a decade building an investor base deep enough to fill the round from existing relationships. His words: you only know so many human beings. The last stretch is the one that will stay with you. Shams thinks there will be meaningfully fewer lawyers within a few years, that one attorney with good tooling can run a two-hundred-million-dollar deal, and that AI already redlines a standard contract better than a first-year associate. Ed pushes on the obvious problem. If nobody hires juniors, where do the seniors come from? Books mentioned this week The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth https://www.amazon.com/Price-Tomorrow-Deflation-Abundant-Future/dp/1999257421?tag=clarkstholdin-20 The Eight Secrets to Powerful Manifesting by Mandy Morris https://www.amazon.com/8-Secrets-to-Powerful-Manifesting/dp/1401969550?tag=clarkstholdin-20 Connect with Shams Merchant Commercial Real Estate Law Group (CRE Lawyer) at MW Law, with offices in Dallas, Houston, and Fort Worth and a national practice. Website: cre.law LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shams-merchant As he says at the close: Google "Shams Merchant," it is all public. Connect with Ed Mathews Website: clarkst.com Real Estate Underground is where operators talk about what is actually working. No sales pitches allowed. Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Rob Bergeron writes a free newsletter at five in the morning, five days a week, and has for years. One Saturday he sent it out saying he saw something happening between data and energy and wanted in. A reader named Mark, who had never once replied in five years, wrote back. That email became a data center company that has since shrunk the standard footprint by 92 percent. That is the whole method. Rob publishes in public, constantly and for free, and lets the right people find him. Rob calls himself the tilapia of realtors. He owns Winner Realty in Louisville, runs OffMarket.deals nationally, writes The Morning Bergeron five days a week, and is building what he hopes becomes the institutional standard for data centers. On paper that is four unrelated businesses. In practice it is one move, repeated. The wholesalers in Louisville were all convinced they were competing for the same buyers. Rob ran comps for them for years and never once took a deal off them. When he finally asked for their buyer lists, they handed them over. He merged those lists with his own, charged two thousand dollars only when he brought the buyer, and made forty two thousand in year one. That business is now OffMarket.deals. He posted on the BiggerPockets subreddit because nobody else was posting there. That produced David Greene. He sent one newsletter into the void about data and energy. That produced a partner, a connection to HKS, and a design that shrinks data center footprints by 92 percent, runs closed loop on 40 gallons of water a year, uses submerged cooling so it makes no noise, and routes its waste heat to farms. And he sends unsolicited letters of intent to listed properties and for-sale-by-owners on behalf of his clients' buy boxes. Direct mail hits at 1.1 percent and costs money. Rob hits at 2.1 percent and spends nothing. His frame for all of it: we are in the NIL era of real estate, where everyone has to earn everyone's business. Nobody is owed a repeat client. Rob also gives one percent of Winner Realty's net profits to Hand in Hand, which builds houses in Belize for about ten thousand dollars each. His stated legacy goal is one house every month, forever. Find Rob: The Morning Bergeron newsletter, and OffMarket.deals for assignable contracts and the buyers list. This week's book: The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501147765?tag=clarkstholdin-20 Chapters 00:00 The NIL era of real estate 00:33 Welcome to Real Estate Underground 01:45 Meet Rob Bergeron, the tilapia of realtors 03:00 Why investor clients are worth the reputation they have 03:30 Louisville: slow to rise, slow to fall 05:00 Where Rob is looking now: energy, water, land, agriculture 06:00 Bloom Energy, small modular nuclear, and a Q1 2027 timeline 07:00 Three Mile Island, and the cousin who built the cleanup robots 08:15 One Saturday email into the void 09:30 The Louisville Network becomes OffMarket.deals 10:45 Uniting the tribes: competing wholesalers, one buyers list 11:00 HKS, SoFi Stadium, and a data center division three months old 12:00 Shrinking the footprint by 92% 12:45 The good neighbor data center 13:45 Why retrofits beat new builds 14:15 Waste heat, farmers, and who is actually getting squeezed 15:45 Let the average person own the residuals, not BlackRock 16:30 Shooting your shot 16:45 How posting on a subreddit produced David Greene 18:00 Louisville as a real estate brain trust 19:00 What the next three years look like 20:30 3D printing, automation, and what is actually viable 21:15 The unsolicited LOI play: 2.1% hit rate, no money spent 22:45 The NIL era: everyone earns everyone's business 23:30 Winner Realty and giving agents more than one trick 23:45 Rob's Brain 24:15 Winner Services: lending, oil and gas, water treatment, data center land 25:15 Three or four things a day 25:45 Hand in Hand, and the house that changed the math 26:45 Two grand versus $1,900 a year 27:00 One house a month, forever 28:15 The Power of Moments 29:30 Water balloons, a record, and sending Panera anonymously 30:00 Why wholesaling is the lowest barrier in the business 31:30 The deal he would take back: a partner with no money in it 32:45 What he should have built on the front end 33:30 Less chips, more steak: how Rob reads 35:00 The highlights someone finds after he is gone 35:30 How Rob defines success 36:15 An ADD brain, AI, and making it linear 38:00 Obsidian, and Ed's own workaround 39:15 Music, sun, and saying weird things in public 40:00 Where to find Rob Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Will Harvey got into real estate the way a lot of people do. He dropped out of college after a double hip surgery ended football, landed on a mortgage desk in 2015, and figured out fast how leverage worked. He bought his first house on a $30,000 salary with his dad as a co-signer, rented out two of the three bedrooms, and house hacked a deal before he knew the word for it.Then came the part nobody puts in the brochure. Three rentals in an expensive market, no money left, and the discovery that owning property is not passive. As Will puts it, the only genuinely passive position in real estate is limited partner, and you pay for it by giving up control.So he kept moving. He left a high-paying W2 to flip houses, rolled the flip profits into syndications, took bonus depreciation against the gains, did a couple of deals as a GP. And somewhere in there he figured out what actually excites him is the finance side of the table, not the operating side.That led to a friends-and-family fund in 2023, an accidental first hard money loan, and eventually a dedicated 506(c) fund built on a specific idea: that hard money underwriting is due for a rebuild from first principles.Will walks through the seven risks he underwrites against, why he thinks most lenders collect the wrong paperwork while skipping the single most predictive input available, and how he uses AI to compress an underwriting file from hours to about ten minutes without giving up the verification step.He also talks about the $70,000 he lost on a deal he already knew he should not have taken, what he looks for in an investor conversation before he will accept a wire, and why the boring end of real estate is the point rather than the compromise.What you will learnWhy Will chose debt over equity, and what that decision has to do with temperament rather than returnsThe first-principles exercise he ran on lending, and the seven risks it producedWhich document lenders over-collect, and which input they skip entirelyHow AI actually sits in his underwriting stack, and where he still verifies by handWhat he screens for in a first conversation with a prospective investorWhy he charges points and has no prepayment penaltyConnect with Will HarveyWebsite: harvey-capital.comEmail: [email protected]: search Will Harvey, Harvey CapitalThis week's bookTitan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron ChernowWill also mentioned The Book of Elon, a compilation of Elon Musk's own thinking pulled from interviews. He reads both the same way: printed out, at night, when his mind has slowed down enough to actually absorb it.Chapters00:00 Cold open: the first call with a borrower00:35 Welcome01:40 Who Will Harvey is and what Harvey Capital does02:27 Dropping out, double hip surgery, and the mortgage desk03:43 House hacking the first deal before he knew the term04:44 Nothing about owning rentals is passive05:29 Leaving a high-paid W2 to flip houses06:31 The realization: he is not an operator, he is a finance guy06:58 The 2023 friends-and-family fund07:50 The accidental first hard money loan08:06 Graduating from a 506(b) to a 506(c)10:02 Why debt instead of equity13:13 How he protects capital13:32 Applying SpaceX first principles to lending15:53 The seven risks he underwrites against16:25 Over-documenting what does not matter17:00 The borrower's story as the real underwriting input18:49 A word from Elevista Connect19:52 Screening investors on temperament, not just accreditation20:04 Why the one-year term filters people out21:00 Boring is the whole point23:20 Where the borrowers actually come from23:30 Google ads, and turning them off24:15 The REIA coin flip28:39 How Will uses AI to run the business28:44 Claude Code on the terminal30:40 Recording borrower calls as a data point31:52 Compressing hours of underwriting into ten minutes32:36 Incumbent lenders move like turtles33:01 Why flippers actually buy speed35:09 No prepayment penalties, and the reason why36:23 Lightning round36:52 What drives him37:50 The best advice he ever got38:25 Buffett: price and value are two different things39:40 The decision he would take back40:44 Losing $70,000 on a deal outside the buy box41:32 The return on brain damage41:52 What is on his nightstand41:58 Titan, and The Book of Elon43:33 Ed's NotebookLM workflow for books he never gets to45:55 How Will defines success46:12 Outcomes are a distraction, focus on the process47:50 You only get 18 summers48:56 How to reach Will49:03 harvey-capital.comThis has been the Real Estate Underground. Don't forget to subscribe, it helps us grow.Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Vessi Kapoulian spent fifteen years as a commercial lender. She underwrote more than a thousand deals and managed a credit portfolio north of a billion dollars before she ever bought a building for her own account. That order matters, and it is the whole reason this conversation is different from most multifamily interviews. Her framework has four parts, and she looks at them in a deliberate order: the operator, the market, the numbers, and last, the structure of the deal. Last. As she puts it, people pay back loans, not properties. The building is collateral and a secondary source of repayment. The person is the deal. The lender's opening question is the one most passive investors never ask: how do I lose money on this? Not what is the projected return. What is the downside, and where does it come from. She is direct about where LPs get hurt. The preferred return is not guaranteed, and a lot of investors believe it is. She walks through both waterfalls, the capital event and the cash flow, and what she wants to see about priority when a deal is stressed rather than when it performs. She has walked away from deals where the sponsor checked out and the numbers checked out but the structure did not align. She also talks about fraud, from both sides. She caught it as a lender. She was a victim of it as a passive investor. That is in the new book, and she does not soften it. Her latest, The Busy Professional's Guide to Passive Apartment Investing, is written for the doctor, lawyer, accountant, or executive working an eighty-hour week who wants real estate exposure without becoming an operator. Each chapter stands on its own so it works as a reference rather than a front-to-back read. Her first book, Mastering Multifamily Underwriting, is an Amazon bestseller and goes deep on the deal analysis itself. Both are on Amazon in all four formats. We also get into what changed in her 2026 underwriting on rates and insurance, why she wants insurance modeled well above the standard three percent, why she will not invest where the operator has no local infrastructure, and what a decade of watching LPs lose money taught her about protecting capital. Connect with Vessi Kapoulian: dbacapitalgroup.com masteringmultifamilyunderwriting.com LinkedIn Chapters 00:00 A lot of fraud, a lot of scams emerge in this part of the cycle 00:45 Welcome to Real Estate Underground 01:00 A returning guest: Vessi Kapoulian 01:30 Bulgaria, the Iron Curtain, and what it shaped 02:30 Fifteen years underwriting, then buying for her own account 04:00 Parallel paths: Clark St moves to the lending side 04:30 Why she wrote Mastering Multifamily Underwriting 07:00 The four areas, in order: operator, market, numbers, structure 08:00 People pay back loans, not properties 09:00 The Busy Professional's Guide to Passive Apartment Investing 11:00 Fraud, from both sides of the table 12:00 What a lender sees that a syndicator pitching LPs does not 14:00 Following the deck versus reading the documents 15:00 Both waterfalls, and why the preferred return is not guaranteed 17:00 Fees, alignment of incentives, and capital call conditions 18:00 Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, run from Los Angeles 19:00 Why she starts with local boots on the ground 20:00 Underwriting rates and insurance in 2026 22:00 Losing money, and why nobody has until they do 24:00 FOMO, and the deal you should regret more 27:00 Transparency after a loss, and the venture rule about cycled founders 29:00 The Final Five 29:30 Purpose: lasting positive impact 31:00 Best advice: you will get ready when the opportunity is presented 33:00 The decision she would take back, and God's timing 35:00 What is on the nightstand 36:30 Defining success: a life of significance 36:50 Life outside real estate: running, reading, family 37:30 How to reach Vessi Vessi's books: The Busy Professional's Guide to Passive Apartment Investing Mastering Multifamily Underwriting This week's books: The Family Office Handbook by Kirby Rosplock, and Raising Financially Fit Kids by Jolene Godfrey. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Most investors say there are no deals. Dr. Jordan Romano says you are looking in the wrong place. Jordan is a physician in the Boston area who has spent about a decade investing in one small New Hampshire town, the town where he did his medical residency. He is hyperlocal on purpose. He uses his own capital only. And his edge is not a list, a lead source, or a dialer. It is curiosity applied to public records, specifically planning and zoning board minutes that almost nobody reads. That is how the subdivision deal happened. A 0.9-acre parcel had been sitting on Zillow for six months, a block from a hospital, on town water and sewer, with the house pushed to one edge of the lot line. Jordan asked whether the town would allow a split, paid for a survey, presented to the planning board, and walked out with three lots where there had been one. A nurse at that hospital is going to build on one of them. The developer who owns 200 units nearby, and drove past that property roughly a thousand times a year, is buying the other. Jordan is also candid about the loss. He needed a zoning variance on a downtown building that should have been four units. A neighbor organized twenty households, the room was the fullest the board had seen in years, and Jordan walked away from the deal. Then he stayed until 11 PM to talk with everyone who had spoken against him. We also get into his B-class thesis, why he passed on a hundred units and does not regret it as much as you would think, how a busy physician finds deals in what he calls the interstitium, and the rule his grandfather gave him: always know where the exit is. Connect with Dr. Jordan Romano: medicalexpertwitness.com Chapters 00:00 Always know where the exit is 00:45 Welcome to Real Estate Underground 01:00 Meet Dr. Jordan Romano 01:20 A physician, a mother in real estate, and a house bought at the 2006 peak 03:00 Invest in what you know 04:00 Put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket 05:00 Why hyperlocal beats long distance 06:00 Diners, broker opens, and off-market deal flow 07:30 Curiosity as a sourcing engine: planning and zoning boards 08:30 Reading the signal when a big developer expands 09:00 The 0.9-acre lot nobody else questioned 10:30 You don't find a deal, you make a deal 12:50 Ed's 58-acre farm and the land he almost missed 13:30 Zillow forensics: empty cabinets, oil heat, and a fall price cut 14:40 Finding the time: deals in the interstitium 16:20 Virtuous capitalism and the small-town ripple effect 17:30 Knocking on doors before you need the vote 18:00 The strikeout: a full room, a lost variance, a dead deal 20:00 Staying until 11 PM to talk to everyone who opposed him 23:00 The Final Five 23:20 Purpose: impact you can actually see 26:00 Best advice: his grandfather's rule 27:00 Sam Zell on markets versus deals 28:00 The one he'd take back: a hundred units passed on 29:00 The B-class thesis 30:00 Five brothers, one highway parcel, and a deal that got away 33:20 What's on the nightstand 36:50 Defining success: optionality and flexibility 39:00 Life outside real estate 42:30 Two grandfathers, two swimmers, one T-shirt 43:50 How to reach Jordan This week's book: The Almanac of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson Get it on Amazon Also mentioned: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, and Am I Being Too Subtle? by Sam Zell. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Joel Friedland calls himself the most risk-averse real estate investor in the United States, and he has the scar tissue to prove it.In 2008 he was carrying $70 million in personal guarantees across 50 buildings. Ten of them were going to have to be sold at a loss. He sat his wife down and told her, and he watched her fall back in her chair. What followed was months of depression he describes without flinching in this conversation. He came out of it with a conclusion most investors never reach: the problem was not real estate, it was the way he was structuring the deals.Today Joel and his team at Brit Properties buy small single-tenant industrial buildings in Chicago, and they buy three out of every four of them with no debt at all. The ceiling is 30% loan-to-value. That boundary is not a strategy so much as a mental health requirement, and he is refreshingly blunt that it costs him upside.He is also one of maybe five syndicators in the country doing it. He does not know who the other four are.This is Joel's second appearance on the show. After the first one, Ed changed how Clark St underwrites deals. That is not a marketing line, it is what happened.What we get into:Why Joel compares over-leveraged real estate investors to gamblers, right down to the part where they hide the risk from their spousesThe 2008 collapse in his own words, and the boundary he set on the other side of itThe buy box: single-tenant only, 7,000 to 30,000 square feet, no flex, no multi-tenant, and specific dock, ceiling-height and parking requirementsHow 20 towns out of 200, and 700 buildings out of 17,000, makes the pipeline small enough to actually work, and why his team still knocks on doors to find dealsThe secret-sauce exit: 77 of Joel's 82 sales went to owner-occupants who pay a premium over cap-rate buyers, not to investorsA live deal he is in the middle of on Stern Avenue, bought for $1.9M with $400K into the rehab, and the neighbor across the street who wants itThe Keebler building: bought for $6M, sold for $17M, a 40% IRR over a 15-year Comcast lease, and why that grand slam required the leverage he now avoidsWhy his 250 investors, averaging roughly $20 million in net worth, are not looking to get rich, and are looking for somewhere that is not the casinoReshoring, tariffs, and the honest math on why manufacturing is not all coming backThe batter who never strikes outLightning round: the mentors (the Podolsky family, and 99-year-old Nate Wagner, who Joel has bought breakfast nearly every Saturday for 15 years), the deal he wants back, the book on his nightstand, and how he defines success.Connect with Joel FriedlandBrit Properties: britproperties.comBook mentioned1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin: find it on AmazonConnect with Ed Mathews and Clark St CapitalWebsite: clarkst.comNewsletter: Underground InsightsSubmit a deal: clarkst.com/submit-your-dealElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Gino Barbaro is a best-selling author and co-founder of Jake & Gino, but he did not start there. He opened a restaurant with his family in 1994, lost money on his early real estate deals, and only found his footing when he partnered with Jake, set hard parameters, and built a repeatable process for buying multifamily from mom-and-pop owners. That framework carried them through the last cycle without the blowups so many operators are living through now. Today Gino has transacted more than 2,600 units, owns 1,900, and his students have closed over 90,000 units and raised more than $800 million. This week on Real Estate Underground, Gino sits down with Ed Mathews to talk about the mindset underneath the numbers. His through line is simple and uncomfortable: money does not corrupt a person, it reveals them. And the reason two investors with the same deal get different outcomes usually comes down to what Gino calls financial flashpoints, the money memories each of us was raised inside. Save for a rainy day, money does not grow on trees, it takes money to make money. Gino spent years unlearning those beliefs before he could raise capital, syndicate, and build the portfolio he has now. What you will learn: Why your relationship with money, not your spreadsheet, decides whether you close deals, and how to spot the beliefs quietly holding you back. The mind shift from starting a business to make money to starting one to deliver value, and why Gino says it is the difference between one restaurant and six. Why the market moved from valuation through renovation to valuation through operations, and what that means for how you win now. The velocity of money, why you only make money when you exit, and the three things worth doing with capital after a sale. And why no deal is better than a bad deal, and how the ten-minute no became a superpower in a market where sellers still think it is 2021. Gino also shares the money-coaching business he is building with his wife and son at Barbaro360, why he believes legacy is not something you leave behind but something you activate today, and the six-acre farm in Florida where he goes to get his hands dirty. As he puts it, if you want to learn from someone, just make sure they are still doing it right now. If you are an operator trying to build something that lasts, this one is full of hard-won lessons from someone still in the work. Chapters 00:00 Your relationship with money starts everything 00:59 Welcome to Real Estate Underground 01:40 The name, and using AI as a force multiplier 02:40 Life before and after Jake and Gino 03:40 Money does not corrupt you, it reveals you 04:40 Why you really start a business: value for the marketplace 06:00 A stuck market and the grit AI can cost you 07:40 No motivated seller, no deal 10:40 Financial flashpoints: the money memories that shape you 14:30 Wealth is an exchange of value 16:20 Valuation through renovation vs valuation through operations 19:40 Velocity of money: what to do after you exit 22:40 Paying down debt as a legacy play 24:40 Retail, industrial, and the discipline to wait 29:20 The final five: purpose, mentors, and the biggest mistake 35:40 This week's book and where to find Gino This week's book: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness/dp/0857197681?tag=clarkstholdin-20 More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast Elevista: elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Robbie Crager bought his first house at 25 with no money, bad credit, and no idea what he was doing. He had just lost a corporate job and had watched Carlton Sheets on late-night television promise he could buy a house with no money down. So he found a wholesaler in the newspaper, contracted the house, and jumped in with both feet while everyone around him begged him not to. Twenty-eight years and thousands of flips later, he calls it one of the best deals he ever did. This week on Real Estate Underground, Ed Mathews sits down with Robbie, the operator behind The FlipFlop Flipper, to talk about what it actually takes to run a lean flipping business at scale. Robbie spent two decades buying a couple of houses a week at Florida foreclosure sales. When the auctions moved online and margins got squeezed, he relocated to the island of Puerto Rico and started buying what locals call zombie houses: abandoned homes with no doors, no windows, no power, and nothing but upside. He renovates them back to the point where a first-time buyer can get an FHA loan, then hands over the keys. What you will learn: Why a 28-year operator who does not even carry a laptop has his team using AI every day, and why he believes anyone who refuses to learn it will be left at a disadvantage. The three-question filter Robbie runs before entering any new market: will our money go further, can we make a bigger return, and will our impact be one we are proud of. The single biggest mistake of his career, flipping a thousand houses before 2007 and keeping none of them, then losing everything in the crash. How he rebuilt by partnering with people who had capital instead of borrowing hard money, and started investing for cash flow instead of chunks of money. And the closing-table moment that still makes every renovation worth it. Robbie also shares the story behind a little red brick house in Ukraine. On a humanitarian trip in 2022 he helped a pastor buy a home big enough to adopt three boys out of an orphanage. That same house now shelters and feeds 70 orphans. As Robbie says, every house has a story, and that one is pretty good. The lightning round covers the joy of missing out, why he says no to most deals that cross his desk, the book he has read front to back five times, and how he defines success now that boats and fast cars stopped mattering. If you are an operator trying to build something that lasts, this one is full of hard-won lessons from someone still in the work. Find Robbie inside his free FlipFlop Flipper community on Skool, or on YouTube. Chapters 00:00 The leap of faith: no money, bad credit, no clue 00:59 Welcome to Real Estate Underground 02:14 28 years, thousands of houses, and Puerto Rico zombie homes 03:33 You don't have to stay in a broken system 04:07 Quitting at 25 and the Carlton Sheets first deal 06:40 Scaling to a couple of houses a week for 20 years 08:47 Using AI every day in a lean flipping business 10:32 The markets: Florida, the online shift, and Puerto Rico 11:23 The three-question filter for entering a new market 13:12 Investing with impact and the Ukraine orphanage house 17:44 Working with his son McKenna in the business 21:31 The deal you don't do: the joy of missing out 23:43 Purpose, legacy, and what gets him out of bed 26:11 The free FlipFlop Flipper community 26:46 The biggest mistake: flipping everything, keeping nothing 29:30 Lightning round: books, success, and travel 32:47 Where to find Robbie This week's book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill https://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Publication-Foundation/dp/193787950X?tag=clarkstholdin-20 More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast Elevista: elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

For the 200th episode of the Real Estate Underground, the conversation lands on a city near and dear to Ed's heart: Detroit. His guests are James Lloyd and Voytek Mardula of US Properties, a Toronto-based team that has spent ten years building a full turnkey operation on the ground in Michigan.The thesis is contrarian and simple. While most people wrote Detroit off, James and Voytek heard it was in the early innings of recovery, drove down to see it for themselves, and found architecturally beautiful colonials in strong historic neighborhoods trading below the cost of construction. They sold off assets elsewhere, including a primary residence, and bought heavy. Ten years and 600-plus renovated homes later, they run a system that takes an investor from a first phone call to a cash-flowing landlord in 30 to 45 days.This episode is a practical map of remote and cross-border investing. You will hear how they vet a property with a 300-point pre-purchase inspection and block-level analysis, how a foreign national forms a US entity to qualify for financing, and why they refinance instead of flip to scale a portfolio. Voytek breaks down Detroit's 55,000-room hotel shortage against 17 million annual visitors and how that gap feeds their short-term rental strategy. Then the pair walk through the tax stack: opportunity zones that can wipe out capital gains after ten years, and bonus depreciation that can cover a down payment in year one.The Final Five turns personal: working alongside a lifelong best friend, the books that shaped them, and Voytek's deep dive into AI, which he calls the single most revolutionary tool of his lifetime.Find them at USProperties.ca.Chapters 00:00 The most undervalued market in the country 01:00 Welcome to the Real Estate Underground 02:00 Meet James Lloyd, Voytek Mardula, and US Properties 03:00 Why Detroit: the contrarian comeback thesis 05:00 Buying the right house in the right neighborhood 08:00 Managing a remote portfolio with a local team 11:00 The investor journey from first call to cash flow 13:00 The full turnkey system, step by step 14:00 Foreign nationals and US entity formation 16:00 Buy, hold, and refinance to scale 18:00 Short-term rentals and Detroit's hotel shortage 22:00 Opportunity zones and bonus depreciation 26:00 The auto industry and tech sector renaissance 31:00 The final five 32:00 What gets them out of bed 36:00 A decision they would take back 37:00 AI obsession and the book on the nightstand 40:00 Defining success and life off the clock 42:00 How to reach US PropertiesThis week's book: You to the Power of Two: Redefining Human Potential in the Age of AI by Joseph Bradley and Don TapscottMore Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast Elevista: elevista.com/podcastElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

If you are within three feet of Ed Mathews, you are probably talking about real estate. This week the conversation is with Tom Dunkel, managing principal at Eagle Capital Investments, and it is a clinic in how to vet a deal before a dollar leaves your account. Tom has been a full-time investor for two decades. Over that span he has raised more than $50 million in private capital from a network of investors who lean on his experience to place money into alternatives most people never see: multifamily, self-storage, mobile home parks, medical office, and private lending. His pitch is simple. Real diversification is not large cap versus small cap or value versus growth. It is owning assets that do not move when a headline does. As Tom puts it, a tsunami hitting Japan can knock the stock market down 15 percent overnight, but it does nothing to an apartment building in Phoenix or a storage facility in North Carolina. The backbone of the episode is Tom's SAFE Investing Method, the same screen he uses every day. S is for sponsor: who are you writing the check to, what is their track record, and have you earned the right to ask the hard questions. A is for asset: if you cannot explain the investment to your kid or your elderly parent, you do not understand it well enough to fund it. F is for financials: do the projections hold up, and has this sponsor actually hit numbers like these before. E is for exit: you cannot click your way out of a syndication on a Tuesday afternoon, so you need to know exactly what has to happen, and over what time horizon, before your money comes back. Then Tom goes off the mainstream script on taxes. The standard advice is to 1031 exchange again and again until you die and hand your heirs a stepped-up basis. Tom's question is blunt: do you really want to be managing properties at 90 the way his mother could be. He prefers the lazy man's 1031, taking the gain, then using fresh depreciation from the next deal to shelter income, all without the rigid timelines and same-title rules that make a true 1031 nearly impossible across a group of 20 or 30 investors. Pay the freedom tax, he argues, and buy yourself passive income and time. The buy box conversation is just as practical. Tom likes private lending for first-position security and monthly checks. He likes mobile home parks and co-living because they answer the housing affordability crisis with real, unsubsidized supply, and he breaks down how a Philadelphia operator turns a $1,000 row home into $3,000 a month by renting furnished rooms to tenants on fixed income. He covers where self-storage sits after its boom and consolidation, and why he treats it like multifamily underwriting now. On technology, Tom is candid that he is still early but already getting leverage from AI. His current workflow is to go back and forth with Claude to build a long, specific prompt, then hand it to Manus for deep research on a market like Phoenix multifamily. He even has an AI clone at tomdunkel.ai that will answer your investing questions, as long as you do not bring up the Eagles. The lightning round digs into purpose beyond family, the best advice he ever got from a nine-figure investor, a job he probably should have turned down, and how he defines success now as an empty nester: geographic and time freedom, plus the room to give back through Tunnel to Towers and a scholarship he started for a friend lost to ALS. Find Tom at investwitheagle.com, grab his book The Wealth Builder's Playbook, or talk to his clone at tomdunkel.ai. Chapters 00:00 Don't let the tax tail wag the freedom dog 01:00 Meet Tom Dunkel and Eagle Capital Investments 03:00 Why true diversification lives outside the stock market 04:00 The SAFE Investing Method: Sponsor, Asset, Financials, Exit 08:00 Taxes and the lazy man's 1031 exchange 13:00 The Wealth Builder's Playbook and being the "who" 17:00 The buy box: mobile home parks, co-living, multifamily 22:00 Where self-storage sits after the boom 24:00 Using Claude and Manus to move faster 27:00 Lightning round: purpose, significance, and legacy 30:00 The best advice he ever got 33:00 A decision he would take back 34:00 On the nightstand: Invest Like a Billionaire 36:00 Defining success as an empty nester 38:00 Golf, a rock and roll cover band, and where to find Tom This week's book: Invest Like a Billionaire: Unlocking the Wealth Secrets of the Ultra-Rich by Bob Fraser and Ben Fraser https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F3W2SNDS?tag=clarkstholdin-20 More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast Elevista: elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Short-term rentals are supposed to be the most hands-on asset class in real estate. Tim Hubbard runs hundreds of them across the U.S. and multiple countries—without ever being on the ground. Tim is the CEO and co-founder of Corzly, the virtual management company he built after 16 years of operating his own short-term rental portfolio from outside California, then outside the U.S. entirely. His team handles pricing, listings, guest communication, and back-end operations across Eastern Europe, South Africa, the Philippines, and South America—while the owner still controls the housekeepers and maintenance on the ground. In this episode, Tim and Ed get into why “a B-class property with A-class management beats an A-class property with B-class management,” why the urban short-term rental market is more durable than the vacation-rental crowd realizes, and what the data is actually telling operators about which markets to enter and which to avoid. What you’ll hear: Why the “can’t be hands-on AND remote” constraint is the forcing function that built Corzly—and what it means for any operator stuck in their own business The buy box: how Tim underwrites a short-term rental like an apartment building, what data sources actually matter, and the regulatory gotchas that kill deals Why urban short-term rentals quietly outperform vacation markets—more reasons to stay, less seasonal volatility, and the medical-professional and conference angles most investors miss The lightning round: under-budgeting renovations, Dennis Waitley’s “two choices” framing, and why education became Tim’s purpose once the portfolio could run itself Books Tim recommended: Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy—the framework for finding the right people to delegate to The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson—Tim’s most-recommended book; the case for compounding small daily disciplines About Tim Hubbard: CEO and co-founder of Corzly. 16-year real estate operator. Host of Short Term Rental Riches, a six-year-old podcast covering virtual STR management, market selection, and the operational discipline behind scaled portfolios. Find Tim: corsley.com | Short Term Rental Riches podcast (all platforms + YouTube) Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly conversations with operators who’ve been through the cycle and lived to talk about it. Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

What does it take for a professional snowboarder, six X Games appearances, gold and silver medals, fifteen years on tour, to land in real estate? For Dan Brisse, the answer was watching the guys five and ten years ahead of him lose their houses, their cars, and worse.That was the wake-up call. While most of his peers spent every pay raise on the biggest house they could buy, Dan was reading books and buying apartments. By the time his snowboarding career ended, he had 70-some units already producing passive income.Today Dan co-leads Granite Towers Equity Group, a 3,300-unit multifamily portfolio focused on Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, and select Minnesota submarkets. The playbook is disciplined: newer assets (1985 and up), 140 to 300 units, $20 to $40 million purchase price, 95%+ occupancy submarkets with real pent-up demand. Eighty-twenty split with LPs. Sixty-five to seventy-five percent loan-to-value, fixed rate, non-recourse. CapEx raised liquid up front, so the bank cannot force a bad spend.What you'll hear:The chairlift moment that reframed every financial decision Dan has made sinceWhy 78% of pro athletes are broke within three years of retirement and the side-hustle move he made to avoid joining themThe Cleburne, Texas case study: $6.75M acquisition, $2.1M LP raise, full-cycle returnsA second case study where interior upgrades and water conservation drove a 1.8x equity multiple in two yearsWhy Dan believes we are in a generational buying window with multifamily trading at 30-40% discounts versus 2021-22 peaksHis sharpest definition of wealth, and why "rich" and "wealthy" aren't the same thingLearn more about Granite Towers Equity Group: https://www.granitetowersequitygroup.com/contact-usElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

JB Thibodeaux grew up in Acres Homes in Houston and is a third-generation carpenter and concrete specialist who turned that craft into a vertically-integrated real estate development business. His firms, J.B. Thibodeaux Homes & Properties, CCB Construction LLC, and CCB General Contractors LLC, have led over $100 million in projects across mass development, pocket development, and affordable housing infill. This year, the Houston market crowned him the "Duplex King."In this episode, Ed and JB unpack a contrarian lesson the real estate education industry rarely teaches: the difference between the real estate hustle and the real estate business. Hustle gets you doors. Business gets you a sustainable enterprise. Most operators only ever learn the first one.JB walks through the Houston duplex pricing math that vindicated his long conviction on the market, from "praying to get $350" on a 2,500 square foot duplex to selling at $479, almost $500,000. He explains his concept-to-keys pocket-development model, Houston's no-zoning-but-deed-restrictions quirk, the 60/40 build-to-sell vs. build-to-hold split for his client base, and why vertical integration (owning the GC) is a margin lever most flippers underestimate.In this episode:Pocket development inside a major metro: the frameworkThe duplex math that vindicated a Houston long-holdHouston's "no zoning" reality: where the leverage actually livesWhy "the gurus teach you doors, not business"House hacking as the duplex exit strategyGenerational construction knowledge as competitive moatMayor Sylvester Turner naming February 20 "James 'JB' Thibodeaux Day" (2019)If you're a flipper, wholesaler, or operator trying to build a business and not just a deal pipeline, this is the episode.This week's book: The Miracle Morning by Hal ElrodGuest: JB Thibodeaux, Founder & Managing Partner, J.B. Thibodeaux Homes & PropertiesWebsite: jbthibodeaux.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/james-thibodeaux-8a98b51b7Instagram: @jbthibodeauxhomesElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Dan Ihara has sold over $1 billion of real estate, moved 1,600+ units, and completed 400+ 1031 exchanges—without failing a single one.And he built the whole thing around a niche almost no operator talks about: senior-care real estate.In this episode, Dan and Ed get into the demographic inevitability that drives his business (“should we all be blessed to live long enough, we’re going to need some level of care”), why 1031 exchanges fail for everyone else but never for him, and his definition of success that has nothing to do with the billion-dollar number on his resumé.What you’ll hear:The senior-care thesis: why aging boomers are an inevitability, not a trend, and the RE play sitting on top of itHow Dan closed 400 1031 exchanges without a single failure—the process, the team, the disciplineWhy “success is doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want” is the only definition that matters once you have the numbersThe conversation every operator should be having with their family—and almost none areAbout Dan Ihara: 20-year real estate veteran. Billion-dollar producer. Built a specialty practice serving seniors transitioning out of long-held real estate, primarily through 1031 exchanges.Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly conversations with operators who’ve been through the cycle and lived to talk about it.Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Most multifamily operators treat internet as a tenant problem or a cost line they grumble about. Adam Bell, Founder and CEO of Internet Subway, says they're leaving real money on the table.Adam runs a modern ISP focused exclusively on apartment communities. His company delivers fiber-to-the-unit (FTTU) in bulk to property owners, who pass it to residents as an included utility and capture the rent spread. Industry data shows 5 to 15% NOI uplift on well-executed bulk deployments. The math alone is worth the conversation.But the bigger reframe is the one Ed pulls out of him halfway through: the fiber itself is an asset. Billions are flowing into fiber networks nationally. Property owners are in a rare position to own a portion of that infrastructure, a 30-year asset hiding in their own buildings.In this episode:The bulk internet math on a value-add multifamily deal, and how an owner should actually underwrite itWhy "managed WiFi" gets oversold and what to insist on insteadBulk internet versus experience, and why the difference matters more than the priceFiber as a 30-year asset class that scales in capacity, not maintenanceThe contrarian take from his industry piece "Managed Wi-Fi isn't all it's cracked up to be"If you're an operator, syndicator, or value-add multifamily investor, this is the episode that turns a cost line into a revenue line and reframes the building itself as a fiber asset.This week's recommended book: The Confident Mind by Nate ZinzerGuest: Adam Bell, Founder and CEO, Internet SubwayWebsite: internetsubway.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adamlloydbElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Brandon Cobb's business model is simple: take farmland, get it approved for housing, and sell it to national home builders like Lennar and DR Horton. The builders have no choice but to buy. They're publicly traded. Plan A is buy land and build houses. Plan B is buy more land and build more houses. There is no Plan C that doesn't involve buying land.Brandon returns to Real Estate Underground to break down how HPG Capital creates new housing neighborhoods in Nashville, why he stopped building homes but kept developing land, and how he structures deals that pay investors 18% preferred returns with no personal guarantees.What you'll learn:- The three phases of land development and how to profit from each one without ever building a house- How to de-risk a deal by lining up your buyer and getting city approval before spending real money- Why "big puzzle pieces next to small puzzle pieces" on a GIS map is the buy signal- How he gets 20% deposits from national builders, released day one, to fund development- Why he ditched vertical integration after hitting $22 million in annual development- The biggest mistake he made with strategic partners and how to avoid it- His "Body, Being, Balance, Business" framework for measuring successBooks mentioned: The Surrender Experiment and The Untethered Soul by Michael SingerLearn land development: learnlanddevelopment.com (free 8-hour course)Invest with HPG Capital: hbgcapital.net/waitlistElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Ben Reinberg has done over $1 billion in commercial real estate transactions. He didn't get there chasing returns. He got there by treating CRE as what it actually is: a hard asset that produces cash flow, not a bet.Ben is the Founder and CEO of Alliance CGC, where he's built one of the most respected portfolios in the country, with deep focus on net-leased properties and medical office buildings.In this episode, Ben and Ed cover:- Why medical office is recession-resistant in any market (the "human body never goes out of style" rule)- The over-leverage mistake that taught Ben the real lesson of commercial real estate- Cash flow, tax efficiency, and long-term security as the only three goals worth chasing- How to navigate one of the most chaotic markets in decades- The difference between treating real estate as a commodity vs. a hard asset- What old-school CRE investors do that the new wave gets wrongConnect with Ben: benreinberg.comReal Estate Underground is hosted by Ed Mathews of Clark St Capital.Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Clay Lehman spent 20 years in real estate, starting at Arthur Andersen, running the Ocala controller desk for Pulte Homes, and eventually building Lehman's Strategic Partners to help agents grow their businesses. He runs an AI Facebook group with members in 65 countries and now spends most of his time helping real estate pros turn AI from a shiny object into a revenue tool. If you're still using AI to write listing descriptions and calling it a day, this one will push your thinking.In this episode you'll learn:- Why Clay calls obscurity, not competition, the biggest threat to any real estate business- How the "eliminate, automate, delegate" framework turns documented processes into leverage- Which AI tools Clay actually uses daily, and how Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT scored in his blind writing test- How Ed built an AI voice agent that gets a lead on the phone in 45 seconds, across five languages- Why the Harvard 391% rule makes speed-to-lead the single biggest edge in real estate today- How solo operators and small teams can look and act like companies many times their sizeResources Mentioned: Google NotebookLM for deal prep and process documentation. Gamma for instant presentations. ylopo for lead nurture automation.Takeaway: AI is a force multiplier, not a crutch. It levels the playing field on access, but experience and wisdom still do the heavy lifting. Use it as the spotter at the gym, not the guy lifting the weight.Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Joel Kraut co-founded BRRRR Loans after losing $4.2 million in the 2008 crash. He had 144 properties at over 100% leverage when the market turned. Five tenants called the same day to say they couldn't pay rent.Today he runs one of the country's fastest-growing private lending shops, and he sees the DSCR lending industry doubling in size over the next three years.In this episode, Joel and Ed break down:- Why investors are rotating from Texas and Florida to Ohio, Kentucky, and the Midwest- How DSCR loans actually work (and why 1.0 coverage isn't enough)- The real math on leverage: why the smartest investors stay at 60% LTV or below- Why "relationship capital" matters more than real estate knowledge- What happened when Joel wired money on March 5, 2020 and the market froze- His $99 training modules vs. the $35K guru trap- The best advice he ever got: "Post that in 5 years. Shut up. Go back to work."Joel currently reads: Buy Back Your Time by Dan MartellConnect with Joel: brrrr.comReal Estate Underground is hosted by Ed Mathews of Clark St Capital.Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Ladislas Maurice left a corporate career at Nestle to spend the last nine years investing in real estate across emerging and frontier markets around the world. He buys apartments in Nairobi for $65,000, sits on land in Nicaragua, and flips properties in Montenegro. His approach is the opposite of what most US investors are used to: no leverage, no perfect data, and no rushing.In this episode, Ed and Ladislas talk about:Why emerging market real estate is actually a harder asset than US multifamily (and arguably less risky)How he evaluates a new country before putting money in (the Uzbekistan stock exchange story is worth the listen alone)Managing property across dozens of countries with local property managers (and why you always need a backup)The case for putting a small percentage of your portfolio outside the USHow $200K in a Panama bank or $400K in Turkish real estate can buy generational citizenship and a Plan B for your familyThe Ivory Coast deal that went wrong and why you should never skip the buyer's agentHis father's best advice: "You don't have to answer every question"Learn more about Ladislas at The Wandering Investor and on YouTube.Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Tyler Vinson has spent 25 years in investment real estate, from duplexes and flips to multifamily, commercial, and Class A storage. Now he's building the infrastructure to bring real estate into the digital age as the founder of RE Tokens, one of only about 10 companies in the US with an SEC-registered digital broker dealer ATS license, and the only one focused exclusively on real estate.In this episode, Tyler breaks down what real estate tokenization actually is, how it enhances (not replaces) traditional syndication, and why it matters for both GPs and LPs. He explains how restricted shares can become tradeable digital assets, how non-accredited investors can participate after 12 months under Rule 144, and what the secondary marketplace looks like in practice. He also shares the personal story that became his mission: a friend from high school who wanted to invest but didn't qualify.We also get into the lessons Tyler learned from being over-leveraged during the 2008 financial crisis, his disciplined approach to education, and why the future of real estate investing is undeniably digital.What you'll learn in this episode:- What real estate tokenization is and how it works (the gold brick to gold coins analogy)- How tokenization creates a pathway to liquidity for traditionally illiquid LP positions- The SEC compliance framework: Rule 144, ATS marketplaces, and why registration matters- How non-accredited investors can access deals that were previously off limits- Why over-leverage is the #1 risk in real estate and how Tyler rebuilt after 2008Book on Tyler's nightstand: The Power of the Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph MurphyConnect with Tyler Vinson and RE Tokens:- Website: retokens.com (free Quick Start Guide to Real Estate Tokenization)- LinkedIn: Tyler Vinson / RE Tokens- YouTube: RE TokensElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Ashley Garner grew up swinging a hammer on student rentals near West Virginia University. Decades later, he jumped from a 35-unit portfolio to a $21 million, 196-unit acquisition in North Carolina. In this episode, he breaks down what that leap taught him about conservative underwriting, why his dad's "cash is king" advice saved his business more than once, and how he manages a growing portfolio with a core team of three.What you'll learn:- Why Ashley underwrites for what a property does right now, not what it could do- How flat rent growth and rising expenses are squeezing multifamily operators and what to do about it- The KPIs he tracks every Monday to keep 200+ units running- Why he's evolving from B-/C value-add to larger markets with better financing- The mindset shift that makes raising capital feel like offering an opportunity instead of asking for money- Why "if you need to raise $10 million, go ahead and raise $11"Ashley is currently raising capital for Bryn Mawr Village, a 196-unit property in Jacksonville, NC being refinanced to a HUD 223(f) loan. Learn more at abgmultifamily.com.This Week's Book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon HillElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Neil Henderson is a general partner and Director of Investor Relations at Nomad Capital, a Wilmington, NC-based private equity firm with a twist on self-storage: they buy vacant big-box retail buildings and convert them into climate-controlled storage facilities.The numbers behind their model are hard to ignore. Ground-up self-storage construction runs $120-130 per square foot and takes nearly three years. Nomad's conversions come in at $60-65 per square foot, acquisition to occupancy in 12-14 months. Half the cost, a third of the time.In this episode, we get into:- Why old Kmarts and strip malls are the perfect conversion targets- How vertical integration keeps construction costs at cost-plus-12% vs the industry standard 25%- Their current deal: a 171,000 sq ft strip mall in Rocky Mount, NC for $6M with seller financing- Why 2026 loan maturities could create a wave of distressed self-storage opportunities- The Sam Zell principle that guides every acquisition: buy below replacement cost- Neil's Las Vegas condo in 2005 and what it taught him about buying when everyone else is greedyLearn more about Nomad Capital at nomadcapital.usBook recommendation: "How to Break Up with Your Phone" By Catherine PriceElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Joe Fairless built Ashcroft Capital into one of the most recognized multifamily syndicators in the country — $2B+ in assets, properties across the Sunbelt, and a vertically integrated management company. But he started with $30K, student loans, and an apartment in New York where one paycheck covered rent and the other covered everything else.In this episode, Joe gets candid about the deals that didn't work, the market conditions that are keeping multifamily investors in a holding pattern, and the one acquisition strategy most operators are completely ignoring right now: going direct to the lender.Here's what we cover:Why Fort Worth and Orlando are Ashcroft's two highest-conviction markets heading into late 2026How Joe acquired a property for less than the outstanding debt — and what it took to get thereThe lender relationship play that gives you first look at off-market distressed deals (even if you don't have your own management company)Where the supply/demand shift is — and why Q3 2026 is the number operators keep landing onJoe's personal 3.5% math: out of 140 LP deals across 50+ operators, what's actually gone to zeroThe fixed vs. floating rate lesson that still stingsHow Joe defines success — and it has nothing to do with deal countJoe also shares his three bucket list goals for the year. One involves a fifth grader with a 2040 chess rating. That's all we're saying.This week's book: The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott PeckElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

In this episode, Ed welcomes Michael Pouliot of Carbon Real Estate Investments, a vertically integrated private equity firm operating workforce housing apartments across the Southeast. Pouliot explains Carbon’s buy box: 100–300 unit, older vintage (1970s–1990s) properties in strong school districts and stable submarkets, targeting families and raising rents about 20% through substantial CapEx that prioritizes deferred maintenance alongside unit upgrades. They talk about navigating Sunbelt challenges like insurance and taxes by avoiding high-risk areas, staying conservative in underwriting, and emphasizing strong entry pricing. Pouliot shares a bullish view that the next 12–18 months are a strong buying window as the market works through distress, debt maturities, and oversupply absorption, with more constructive sentiment and capital expected around 2027–2028. He outlines Carbon’s strategy for 2026: keep buying with fixed-rate, low-leverage debt, hold long-term, and offer investor liquidity via recapitalizations rather than selling assets. The conversation also covers regional scaling for operational efficiency, selective adoption of AI tools (voice/chat agents, SOP knowledge bases, automation) to augment staff, and Pouliot's perspective on purpose, mentorship, lifestyle trade-offs versus Wall Street, and how he defines success. Pouliot closes by directing viewers to investwithcarbon.com for Carbon’s weekly newsletter and content.00:00 Cycle Outlook 2027-202800:11 Show Intro and Mission00:52 Welcome and Subscribe01:42 Meet Carbon Real Estate02:44 Insurance and Tax Headwinds05:07 Buy Box and Resident Avatar07:01 Why Stable Markets Win08:34 Distress Deals and Assumable Debt12:29 Oversupply and Absorption Math14:58 Strategy for 202618:41 Vertical Integration and CapEx20:32 Tech and AI in Property Ops14:23 AI Ops Automation23:28 Human Touch Investing24:31 Real Estate Tech Lag25:19 Deal Junkie Purpose26:23 Paranoia Prevents Errors28:26 Wall Street What Ifs33:38 Learning Diet Books35:56 Defining Success Seasons38:19 Life Outside Real Estate41:05 Where To Follow CarbonThis week's book: How Countries Go Broke by Ray DalioElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

This week, Ed welcomes Hawaii-based real estate developer and educator Fuzzy Jardine to Real Estate Underground. Fuzzy shares his background growing up in Hawaii, getting into trouble with drugs and alcohol, going to prison, and using that time to educate himself with books like Rich Dad Poor Dad. After struggling to find work as an ex-con, he took multiple jobs, then invested $26,000 in real estate education after hearing about Fortune Builders, and learned to find deals through strategies like bandit signs and Craigslist ads. He explains how taking action led him from deal-finding to partnering with a local developer and eventually building 100+ affordable homes for local families on a more rural island, typically priced around $300K–$425K. Fuzzy talks about “The Pono Way,” emphasizing respectful, ethical investing, illustrated by a deal where a distressed homeowner was helped with housing, a car, and additional funds while the investors still profited. He also describes co-founding the Hui Mastermind with Asha Smith, including webinars, bus tours showing the full build process, meetups, and master classes teaching how to get started in real estate and fund deals without traditional bank financing. In a lightning round, Fuzzy says family is his main purpose, shares advice about being on time and owning mistakes quickly, reflects on saying yes too often and taking responsibility for a project headed toward a loss, and names motivators he follows on YouTube and podcasts. Check out Fuzzy's book, “Out of Paradise: How to Build Wealth Investing in Real Estate the Pono Way,” and shares where to find him online: fuzzyjardine.com, huimastermind.com, Instagram @hifuzzy, and YouTube “Investing in Hawaii.”00:00 Take Action Mindset00:11 Show Intro and Opportunity00:52 Meet Fuzzy Jardine01:54 From Prison to Real Estate05:58 Why Building Homes08:33 Finding Deals and First Partner10:03 Working Three Jobs to Learn12:30 The Pono Way Ethics15:58 Hui Mastermind Origins19:15 Lightning Round Purpose20:28 Mentors and Hard Lessons23:21 Books and Writing His Own24:43 Defining Success and Fun26:40 Where to Find Fuzzy27:24 Final Thanks and Call to ActionThis week's book: Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert KiyosakiElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Melissa Nash spent $10K on a fully renovated $190K property with a tenant already in place.Cash flows $200/month.Sounds boring until you realize: $10K all-in. Someone else is buying her a house. And she never left California.This week on Real Estate Underground: How a self-described "lazy investor" built a portfolio across five markets while coaching 2,000+ investors to do the same. No flying out to properties. No managing contractors. No second job disguised as passive income.What you'll learn:The questions that separate good property managers from disasters (hint: it's not about their fees)Why Melissa went from flips and BRRRs back to turnkey investing—and why she's never looking backHow to vet teams 2,000 miles away when you can't be on-siteThe $99K property that changed everything (and why fear almost killed the deal)Property managers as your best acquisition source—if you ask the right questionWhy this conversation matters:Melissa made every mistake you're worried about making. Trusted the wrong contractors. Lost money on flips. Froze on deals for years. Then figured out a system that works.If you're analyzing deals but not pulling the trigger—she's been there. If you're wondering how to invest out of state without getting burned—she learned it the hard way so you don't have to.We talk systems, spreadsheets, and the "snowball payoff" strategy she swears she'll start using someday (she won't—because she loves buying deals too much).For operators who:Want to invest out of state but don't know who to trustAre tired of real estate being a second jobNeed a framework for vetting property managersWant to hear from someone who's helped 2,000 people actually do thisNo hype. No theory. Just 11 years of buying properties she's never seen—and making it work.Hit subscribe. Leave a comment. Tell us what you're working on.Real Estate Underground. Where operators talk to operators about what actually works.Check out Melissa's free community at: hellomelissanash.comThis week's book: The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Mastering Short-Term Rentals with Data-Driven Real Estate Strategies - Featuring Kenny Bedwell from STR InsightsIn this insightful episode of the Real Estate Underground podcast, host Ed Mathews welcomes Kenny Bedwell from STR Insights to discuss the intricacies of short-term rental investments. Kenny shares his journey from a data analyst at Citibank to a successful real estate investor specializing in short-term rentals. He emphasizes the importance of choosing the right markets, investing in amenities, and focusing on the guest experience to succeed in the competitive short-term rental space. Kenny also highlights his strategies for managing properties remotely, leveraging local resources, and the value of balancing work and family life. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to optimize their investments in the short-term rental market.00:00 Introduction and Podcast Overview01:19 Guest Introduction: Kenny Bedwell from STR Insights01:45 Kenny's Background and Real Estate Journey02:19 The Shift to Short-Term Rentals02:45 Navigating Regulations and Diversifying Investments04:00 Understanding the Short-Term Rental Market09:17 Creating Unique Guest Experiences15:50 Managing Short-Term Rentals Across Multiple States20:07 Managing Property Operations20:57 Human Capital and Property Management23:35 Personal Drive and Motivation25:09 Valuable Advice and Lessons Learned32:41 Defining Success and Personal Growth34:46 Hobbies and Family Life37:25 Connecting with Kenny BedwellThis Week's Book: The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field (Entrepreneurship Simplified) - By Mike MichalowiczElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

What if you could turn a 10-hour due diligence process into 20 minutes of review?Alberto Rizzoli, CEO of V7 Labs, reveals how AI workflow automation is eliminating the "purgatory" of real estate paperwork, and why operators who master it now will 10x their competition within a year.In this episode, you'll discover:⚡ The "napkin test" for identifying which processes to automate first (hint: weekly tasks taking 1+ hours)⚡ Why AI fails at big, open-ended requests, and the simple fix that makes it reliable⚡ How to abstract 1,000 leases without adding headcount as you scale⚡ A free lease abstraction tool you can test today at scanmylease.comAbout Alberto Rizzoli: Computer visionary turned founder, Alberto built V7 Labs into a platform processing hundreds of billions in transactions. His mission? Make work actually matter by eliminating everything that doesn't.This Week's Book: Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way - by Steven PressfieldElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Episode Resources:Website: www.stf-capital.comIG: @Joaomac_stfFB: @STF_Capital LinkedIn: Joao MacavilcaElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Mike Zlotnik moved from technology executive into real estate full time in 2009. Today his shop, Tempo Family, is a capital partner. They marry money to opportunity, write checks behind operators they trust, and stay out of asset classes where they cannot find a deep enough discount. So far this year, Mike has done one multifamily deal. He is not in a hurry. The one deal was near Ann Arbor in Q1: 9 percent cap on purchase, 7 percent financing locked for three years, $79,000 a door against a $200,000 replacement cost. That kind of math is what Mike needs to see now. What landed in this conversation: The three-metric buy box. First, a 200 basis point positive spread between cap rate and cost of debt. Anything tighter than 150 bp is not enough margin of safety. Second, a steep discount to replacement cost. Third, a comparable discount to the 2022 peak pricing, which Mike pegs at 20 to 40 percent depending on submarket. If a deal does not clear all three, it does not get capital. Open-air retail as the contrarian play. Tempo Family is eight deals in on open-air shopping. Every one has performed. While multifamily got overbuilt and roller-coastered through 2022, open-air supply got squashed by the Amazon fear and never recovered. Recent example: a San Diego open-air at 9.25 cap with 84 percent occupancy, financed at 6.5 percent fixed for ten years, with anchor tenants like Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory. Industrial as predictability. Flex industrial and single-tenant triple net at 8 to 9 cap. Twenty to twenty-five year leases. Two to three percent annual rent escalators, which in triple net is pure NOI growth because the tenant is paying everything. No surprise capex. The asset classes he refuses to chase. Storage cap rates are too low. Hospitality is an operating business in real estate clothing. Senior living, same. Office is broken. Data centers cost a fortune to build and Tempo Family's net asset value is the "rounding error" on those deals. Better to know the don't-buy box than to chase yield. The regret he owns: deals done in 2021 and 2022 he wishes he had not. "I'm the fool who's learning from his own mistakes." After that he went back and re-read Howard Marks on cycles. Books on Mike's nightstand right now: Mastering the Market Cycle by Howard Marks (he says read it after every cycle), How Countries Go Broke by Ray Dalio (third read), and Richer, Wiser, Happier by William Green. Reach Mike at bigmikefund.com (his podcast entry point, links to the Tempo Family corporate site). Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Episode Resources:YouTube:  Rios Business FundingInstagram: @riosbusinessadvisorsTikTok: @riosbusinessadvisorsAmazon:  Decoding The Mystery of Business Credit Website: riosbusinessfunding.comElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Casey Gregersen worked twelve years as a petroleum engineer at Shell. The job had an unusual rhythm: two weeks on a drilling rig, two weeks completely off with zero work responsibility. He used the off weeks to start buying houses. In October 2022, with three companies running, he walked away from Shell. Today Casey runs Bighorn Capital Fund, Wile Homes, and Gregersen Properties. He invests primarily in Wyoming, a market where his only real competition is the lack of contractors to keep up with demand. That contractor shortage was the central problem he had to solve to scale. What landed in this conversation: The VA build during COVID layoffs. Shell laid off 40 percent of Casey's team in 2020. Instead of waiting to see if his number got called, he sat down and read The 4-Hour Work Week, then recorded himself doing every property management task he was already running from Houston. Wrote it all into SOPs. Hired and trained a virtual assistant. The VA owned the SOPs from that day. That was the unlock that let the side hustle scale. The local bank shortcut. Early on, instead of working with big mortgage brokers, Casey walked into a small local bank in the Wyoming town he was investing in and did a deal. The relationship compounded across dozens of properties. Most new investors miss this because they assume the broker network is the only path. The in-house contractor model. Wyoming does not have a deep GC bench. Casey solved it by hiring four to five 1099 crews directly. When a deal hits his pipeline, he is talking to the guy who will actually do the work, and that guy controls the schedule. The timeline gets predictable. The carry costs drop. The investor pitch becomes "here is our budget and here is our timeline, and we know we can hit it" because the labor is not a third party balancing five other clients. The two-exit rule. Casey scaled up to $500,000 to $700,000 fix-and-flips in the TCU area with a new GC and project manager. Properties stopped selling. He had to drop the list price by $10,000 a week until they cleared, on the advice of his hard money lender. The lesson, in his words: never run a flip where your only exit is selling at ARV. Always have a refinance-and-rent fallback. In Wyoming his $150,000-buy / $50,000-rehab / $300,000-sell deals could always pivot to a rental that covered the debt. Every single deal has a curveball. Book Casey keeps coming back to: Capital Gaines by Chip Gaines, for the "win-win either way" framing. Reach Casey at @CaseyGregersen on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or text him directly at 307-317-2494. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Sam Wegert built a chain of martial arts schools for 15 years before pivoting full time into real estate. Today he and his wife own around 250 rooms in Charlotte and manage several hundred more, all under one strategy: co-living. Single-family home, single-family debt, multifamily income. The model is simple to describe and hard to operate. You buy a 2,500-square-foot 1990s house with a boxy floor plan and a non-HOA neighborhood. You convert every square inch that is not the kitchen or one common area into a bedroom or bathroom. The dining room becomes a bedroom. The garage becomes two more. A 10-bedroom house in Charlotte that would rent as a single-family at $2,200 a month rents by the room for $8,500 net of utilities. What landed in this conversation: Why the unit economics work right now. Sam is creating a price point that did not previously exist: a clean, professionally managed room that goes for 50 to 75 percent of the cheapest studio in the same submarket. The target tenant is the $15-to-$25-an-hour worker priced out of every other option. HUD now allows housing choice vouchers to be used for rooms, not just full apartments. That is a quiet but significant policy shift Sam reads as official cover for the asset class. What an actual co-living house looks like. Minimum 2,000 square feet, ideally 2,500 to 3,000. Built in the 1980s or 1990s so the floor plan is "boxy" with real walls between rooms (not open concept). B-minus to B-plus blue collar neighborhood, no HOA. Three-to-one bedroom-to-bathroom ratio at worst. Sam routinely picks up homes that have been sitting on market 100 to 150 days because no single-family buyer wants them. He gets them at a discount specifically because they are awkward for everyone except a co-living operator. The three rules of managing eight strangers in one house. Clean (cameras in common areas, professional cleaners twice a month, fines for dish-duty failures). Quiet (hard quiet hours, headphones after a set time because some tenants work first or second shift). Safe (FBI-level background checks, individual locks on every bedroom door, no weapons). Without those three guardrails locked in, the house empties out fast. Membership agreements instead of leases. Sam runs a master-lease structure: his ownership LLC leases the whole house to a separate management entity, which then signs individual "membership agreements" with each occupant. The technical answer to "how many leases do you have in your house" becomes "one." That structure gives him fast removal options outside the standard landlord-tenant process and helps in jurisdictions still enforcing old "no more than four unrelated people" zoning. Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have now banned that kind of local restriction outright. The best advice Sam carries: a mentor told him, "Lower your standard, but raise the consistency with which you hit your standard. Consistently good always outperforms occasionally great." That reframed how he runs his team. Books that shaped his pivots: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson (Sam held his martial arts business five years too long), and Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers. Reach Sam at scaleyourrealestate.com (his five-day free co-living challenge runs monthly) or on Instagram @samwegert. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Patrick Grimes lost everything in 2009 and 2010. He was a snot-nosed engineer out of college, indexed all-in on a pre-development real estate deal with a personal guarantee. The market turned. The advice he had ignored, from the founder of his old machine design firm, kept coming back: "Don't put everything in high tech. If you want a financial future for your family, take your high money and your high tech and dump it in alternatives." Patrick spent the next decade and a half rebuilding around that one sentence. Today he runs Passive Investing Mastery, a fund that gives accredited investors access to litigation finance, an asset class that until recently required twenty-million-dollar minimums. The Passive Investing Mastery fund opens at $100,000. What landed in this conversation: What litigation finance actually is. Mass-tort attorneys representing thousands of harmed individuals (Camp Lejeune Marines, paraquat-exposed farmers, sexual assault survivors of the LA Juvenile Detention system, Roundup plaintiffs) often hit a working-capital wall in late-stage cases. The case is near settlement, the science is in, the case law is precedent, but they need another one to five million dollars to extend the claimant pool or carry expert witness costs. Patrick's fund underwrites the docket the way a real estate investor underwrites an apartment building, gets a loan-to-value position with a lien, and participates in the settlement waterfall. Why "late stage" matters. Patrick avoids speculative early-stage cases. His fund engages once discovery is done, misconduct is documented, and either a settlement framework exists or case law has already priced similar outcomes. That puts the realistic settlement timeline at two to five years (front-loaded), not the open-ended decades of big commercial appeals. Camp Lejeune is the cleanest example: a 17-year harm window, a passed law providing a settlement grant based on condition and exposure, and an underwritable payout. The structure he uses. Not a straight loan. A prepaid forward contract, which returns as capital gains rather than interest. Lien against the case the same way a deed secures a property. Waterfall payback: the fund gets made whole plus a return before attorneys collect their 20-to-40 percent fee, then participates in upside if the settlement outperforms underwriting. Why this asset class is non-correlated. Patrick puts up legal industry charts next to the dollar, gold, oil, the S&P, and real estate. The first four roller-coaster. Legal goes straight up and to the right. People sue more in booms. They sue more in busts. The market does not care. For an investor trying to build resilience instead of riding multifamily cycles, this is the kind of allocation private equity and sovereign funds have used for decades. Now it is accessible at the accredited level. The book that reshaped Patrick's last year: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He says it changed how he treats the one input fully under his control. Pairs it with a Whoop band for daily sleep, recovery, and biological age tracking. Reach Patrick at investwithpatrick.com (PDF list of his favorite alternatives) or grab his book Lessons from Thought Leaders at passiveinvestingmastery.com/book. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Shauna Wekherlien is a CPA, a Master's in Tax, and a Certified Tax Strategist. Her firm, Tax Goddess, has saved clients over two billion dollars in taxes. She works mostly with executives and operators taking home a million-plus a year and paying $150,000-plus in federal tax, though the real estate provisions in this conversation matter to anyone in the asset class. Recorded the week the One Big Beautiful Bill passed. Shauna walked through the four provisions that actually move the needle for real estate operators. What landed in this conversation: 100 percent bonus depreciation is back. Anything with a 15-year-or-less life can be written off in year one. For real estate that means cost segregation again does its full lift: buy a million-dollar building, run the seg study, write off six figures the first year. Combined with real estate professional status it can drive a tax bill to zero for years. One gotcha buried in the bill: the provision starts January 19th. The Hummer (or G-wagon) you bought January 18th does not qualify. Business interest just got dramatically more deductible. Previously, business interest was capped at 30 percent of taxable income after depreciation. For real estate operators doing cost seg, taxable income was small and the cap chewed up the interest deduction. The new bill adds depreciation and amortization back into the calculation, which means operators get to deduct much more of their loan interest. For leveraged portfolios this is a quiet but material change. SALT cap moved from $10K to $40K, with a trap. If your adjusted gross income as a married couple is under $500,000, you get the full $40,000 state and local tax deduction. Cross $500,000 and it phases back down to $10,000. So a well-designed tax strategy now has a bonus reason to keep AGI under the threshold. Pair that with the pass-through entity tax workaround that 39-plus states have implemented: your S-Corp or partnership can pay the state tax on your behalf, deduct it as a business expense, and you still get the personal credit. That is the legal double-dip. The aggression scale. Shauna ranks tax strategies zero to ten. Zero is "the IRS never calls." Ten is "we are all going to jail." Her firm operates at six: strictly legal, every position fully documented, audit-ready. Eight is the same legal posture with thinner documentation. Nine is hoping you do not get caught. Real estate professionals get audited at roughly a 35 percent rate (versus 1 to 2 percent for typical filers), so the documentation discipline is not optional. Photo every receipt the second it hits your hand, drop it into Evernote, and use MileIQ for vehicle mileage. The lesson Shauna ran back to in her own business: "Trust without inspection." Her fix was reporting and KPIs across her now-123-person firm. Book on her counter right now: The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday. Reach Shauna at taxgoddess.com. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Jason Melillo runs KBKG, a firm that does not prepare tax returns. KBKG works with real estate investors and their CPAs on the specialty tax strategies most tax preparers do not run themselves. Cost segregation is the headline service, and the One Big Beautiful Bill just made it more valuable than it has been in years. 100 percent bonus depreciation is back. For a real estate investor with $150,000 of rental income from a million-dollar building, that can mean zero federal tax in year one, with the saved cash flow redeployed into the next acquisition. The strategy that pieces it together looks like this. What landed in this conversation: What cost segregation actually is. A reverse-engineering of a building's purchase price to identify the portion (typically 10 to 20 percent) that legitimately belongs in 5, 7, or 15-year property class lives instead of the standard 27.5 or 39 year real-property life. Window treatments, decorative lighting, appliances, kitchen cabinetry, certain floor coverings, dedicated wiring, land improvements like pools and irrigation and gates. KBKG's engineers walk the property and price it out. The qualifying short-life dollars then take 100 percent bonus depreciation in year one. Turnaround speed. A study runs under 30 days in the normal queue. KBKG has turned them around in under a week when an investor calls during deadline week (September 15 partnerships, October 15 individuals). Speed, quality, price: pick two. The real estate professional gate. If you (or a spouse) meets the 750-hour-plus and more-than-50-percent-of-working-time tests, the depreciation losses flow against W-2 or other ordinary income. If you do not, the losses sit as passive carryforwards waiting for future rental income. An attorney billing 2,000 hours a year as an attorney needs to log 2,001-plus hours in real estate to qualify, which is the math most people overlook. The cradle-to-grave zero-tax path. Buy a $500K duplex. Cost-seg it. Sell it at $750K, 1031 exchange the gain into a $1.5M property. Cost-seg the step-up. Repeat for 40 years. Hold to death. The heirs get a step-up in basis to fair market value, which means the gains accumulated across the whole investing lifetime never get taxed. Jason has worked with investors who have gone an entire career without paying federal income tax on real estate. Bonus mention: Opportunity Zones got renewed and slightly expanded under OBBB. For investors who already have built-in gains they want to defer and would prefer to make the next gain entirely tax free on a ten-plus year hold, this is back on the table. Book Jason runs his firm on: Traction by Gino Wickman. KBKG runs on EOS. Reach Jason at kbkg.com (use promo code underground2025 for a discount on KBKG's cost segregation tool for smaller properties) or on LinkedIn. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Joe Downs spent seven years as a financial advisor before 9/11 made him stop and reassess. He moved into real estate. The 2008 mortgage collapse forced a second reinvention. That second pivot landed him in distressed real estate, which eventually landed him in self-storage. Today his firm, Bellrose Asset Management, has acquired 20 storage facilities, mostly with institutional capital. Storage is not multifamily. Joe is direct about it: you cannot outplay Extra Space and CubeSmart in primary markets. So Bellrose does not try. The whole strategy lives in secondary and tertiary markets where the REITs do not bother to operate. What landed in this conversation: What 2023-24 actually was for storage. The first ever stagnant transaction cycle in the asset class since data started getting properly tracked around 2000. Storage does not care about real estate values. Storage cares about transactions: people moving, downsizing, divorcing, displaced. When real estate transactions dry up, storage occupancy and rates fall. That happened for the first time in modern storage history coming off the COVID peak. Bellrose still came through with 16 of 20 facilities fine and only one true loser. Why secondary and tertiary markets are the moat. The institutional REITs do not chase smaller MSAs. That gives a disciplined operator room to underwrite at 65 percent LTV, do two seller-financed deals at 75 LTV with stripped-out covenants, and out-operate the local mom-and-pop competition. Bellrose's value-add is invisible from the road: smoother gravel, better lighting, cameras, a fence here, a sign there. The real lift is the management. Mobile rentals, auto-pay, software-driven marketing, embedded insurance, all standing up in about a week after a takeover. The storage cycle math. Storage's historical returns sit around 15 to 17 percent versus multifamily at 12 to 13. The peak return advantage matters. The deeper structural advantage is that storage's lows are much shallower than the lows in multifamily, retail, or office. Through the worst downturn the asset class has ever seen, storage was still the best-performing commercial real estate category. What Pro Storage is. Joe and partners are also building Pro Storage, the B2B storage product. Unit sizes 500 to 1,000 square feet (versus 50 to 200 in consumer self-storage). Month-to-month versus the three-year leases of flex industrial. Target customer: contractors, caterers storing chairs and glassware, furniture retailers with overflow inventory, businesses being displaced by Amazon and Walmart gobbling up traditional warehouse space. The thesis: same-day delivery now means every consumer product needs to be within an hour of your house, which is forcing a structural re-pricing of small warehouse and flex space everywhere. The mistake Joe owns and learned twice: not knowing what was going on in the kitchen. First time was a bar and restaurant he ran post-college. Trusted the chef, lost a hundred thousand, learned the lesson. Repeated the mistake 20 years later in storage by trusting an outside underwriter and manager. The single facility he is losing on is the direct result. The fix now is regular check-ins, questioning everything, knowing or pretending to know what is going on so the checks and balances actually function. Books shaping Joe's last year: The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham, and Who Not How by Dan Sullivan, which Joe says is really a framework for recognizing your unique ability and finding the who, not a delegation book. Reach Joe at [email protected]. Bellrose also runs the student fulfillment for Scott Meyers' self-storage academy. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Lon Welsh spent eight years as a strategy consultant before going into real estate full time in 2002. He started a brokerage called Your Castle Real Estate in 2004, grew it to 750 agents (the largest independent in Colorado), and sold it to private equity about three and a half years ago. Around the same time, he sold his title company to Compass. He then launched Ironton Capital, a private equity fund built for the active real estate investor who wants to move to passive without giving up portfolio shape. Ironton runs three funds in parallel. Lon describes the structure as a synthetic way to recreate whatever cash flow and growth profile a client used to get from owning property directly. What landed in this conversation: The three-fund stack. Short-term income fund pays roughly 8 percent, high liquidity, underpinned by hard money lending through a partner running a $270 million, 300-loan book. Medium-term income fund pays 11 to 13 percent with a one-year lock and 90-day notice, underpinned by medical accounts receivable (not real estate at all). Long-term growth fund targets capital gains over a five-year horizon through equity positions in development and rehab projects. A typical limited partner ends up allocated across all three to mirror the cash flow plus growth profile they had as an active operator. Why medical receivables are the non-correlated piece. Ironton's medium-term fund advances about a third of the value on a basket of about 95 small medical claims (call it $30,000 each) from a clinic. The claims are cross-collateralized, so a 2 to 3 percent fraud rate gets absorbed by the other 97 claims in the basket. The economics do not move with interest rates, real estate cycles, or geopolitics. For an investor sitting heavy in real estate, this is the kind of allocation that lets you actually sleep through a Fed surprise. The diversification dividend. A typical Ironton fund holds about 30 assets across 10 to 12 sponsors in roughly 15 states, mostly Sunbelt. Two-thirds multifamily, the rest industrial with the occasional storage or specific hospitality segment. Last fall when two hurricanes hit Tampa within a couple of weeks, Ironton's exposure was 3 percent of one fund. The other 97 percent of the portfolio was fine. That is what diversification actually buys you. The mistakes he owns. Three of them. First, holding the brokerage four or five years too long before launching the passive investing firm. He says he was on autopilot, making cash, and did not want to start something new. Second, taking too long to make the active-to-passive shift personally; he is 57 and no longer needs to slay the dragon. Third, the first Ironton fund only had eight investments (not enough diversification), and one of those was a Sugar Land Houston office building purchased three months before COVID broke out. Lost everything on that one. On the other side of the same fund, a build-to-rent project he underwrote at low-20s returns delivered 54 percent because the timing happened to be perfect. Lon says the same luck-versus-skill question is what every passive investor should ask when a sponsor trots out a grand-slam story. Books that shaped him: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki (the crystallizing read 25 years ago), and Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards for the communication side of running a fund. Lon has written 13 of his own books, five of them on Colorado real estate; download a free copy of The Complete Guide to Passive Diversified Real Estate Investing at irontoncapital.com/reunderground. Reach Lon at irontoncapital.com, email [email protected], or text him at 303-619-0633. He offers 15-minute strategy calls to anyone considering passive investing. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Jon Azar runs Peak 15 Capital out of Charlotte. Peak 15 is his third firm. Before this one, he and his brother transacted a few thousand multifamily units across the Southeast between 2013 and 2020. They started sunsetting that portfolio mid-pandemic, and Jon launched Peak 15 the same year. The new firm is built around something Jon calls an alpha-driven fund: results first, asset class second. That mandate puts Peak 15 in places most multifamily private equity shops will not go. Carwashes (with the land). Build-to-rent and build-to-sell communities. Ground-up development. Flex industrial. The next fund expands the box further into student housing, senior living, storage, and commercial office. What landed in this conversation: Why carwashes are in the portfolio. Peak 15 only owns the dirt underneath. Standalones, not strip-mall plays. Carwashes generate more current cash flow than any multifamily holding in the portfolio. The thesis is simple: a real estate fund delivering quarterly distributions needs assets that throw off cash today, paired with assets that throw off liquidity events tomorrow. Why flex industrial looks like multifamily. Take a 50,000 to 100,000 square foot building with 10 to 30 small tenants (plumbers, electricians, GCs, contractors needing office plus storage). You diversify the same way an apartment building diversifies. Lose one tenant, you absorb it. Compare that to a 200,000 square foot big-box industrial leased to an Amazon-scale tenant: that tenant sets the price, and if they leave, replacing 200,000 feet of demand in one shot is a different problem. The flex bucket runs cleaner. The cash flow versus liquidity event balance. Jon is direct: "Six to ten percent is not going to make anybody rich. That is nice mailbox money. Generational wealth comes from liquidity events." A well-run alpha fund stages assets so cash flow keeps the LPs comfortable while the development and value-add deals build toward the exits where the real money lives. The two mentor lines that shape Peak 15. First, an early mentor in trading and investment banking: "Don't worry what the market is doing. The market is going to do whatever it is going to do. As long as you are in the market and putting your reputation forward every single day, the deals will find you." Second, from his older brother: "Always underwrite for the worst. Then maybe underwrite even lower. When the market turns against you, you are already there. When it does not, you are pleasantly surprised." Both are written into how Peak 15 sizes deals. The mistake Jon owns: he did not listen to his gut on one specific deal. The numbers worked, the property worked, but something was off about the sponsor he would be partnering with for three to five years. He went in anyway. The seller did not disclose certain value-impairing facts, the sponsor handled the resulting blow-up badly, the deal went sideways, and Peak 15 lost its deposit. The fix is now company culture: no deal closes until one of the Peak 15 principals has met the other side's principals in person. Books Jon is rereading right now: Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman. Reach Jon at peak15cap.com, email [email protected], or LinkedIn (the only social he checks). His soup-to-nuts multifamily course and three-day bootcamp launch this fall. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

We explore how real estate debt funds work for passive investors and why becoming a limited partner might be the smart solution for steady income without property management headaches.• Investing as a limited partner means putting your money into a professionally managed fund that lends to real estate investors• Limited partners earn consistent returns (typically 7-10% annually) without dealing with tenants, renovations, or property management• Real estate debt funds lend money secured by properties, typically at 60-70% loan-to-value ratios• Returns are distributed monthly or quarterly as interest income that is likely taxable• This strategy works well for busy professionals, retirees, or anyone seeking passive income backed by real assets• Most suitable for investors prioritizing capital preservation and cash flow rather than appreciation• Income is typically taxed as ordinary interest income, making tax-advantaged accounts worth considering• Next episode will cover fund structures, deal sourcing, and how investors get paidIf you enjoyed this format and got some value out of it, leave a comment and tell me what else you want to learn about.🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Alec McElhinney runs LandPlay, a flex space development shop in central Texas. He started in industrial value-add. When cap rates compressed and interest rates climbed, he met someone at a conference doing flex space and ran the numbers. The margins held up at higher rates. He pivoted into development. Flex space is the hybrid that sits between warehouse and small office: roughly 10 percent office, 90 percent warehouse, bays of 2,000 to 4,000 square feet that can move with demountable walls. The typical tenant is a contractor, plumber, electrician, HVAC operator, or a niche operator like the guy in one of Alec's New Braunfels buildings who packages every bingo chip in America and clears seven figures a month from a small bay. What landed in this conversation: Do not maximize density. On a five-acre site that could hold 70,000 square feet of flex, Alec will build 40,000 instead and put a two-to-three-acre outdoor storage yard on the rest. Inside space rents at $14 to $20 a foot. Yard rents at $1.50 a foot. The yard leases faster than the buildings because contractors and equipment dealers want a fenced spot for bobcats, materials, and overflow. The combined site stabilizes faster and at a higher blended return than a 70,000 square foot all-building site. Pick the jurisdiction before you pick the dirt. Inside the city of New Braunfels, site plan approval runs about a year and a half. Five miles north in Comal County, the same approval runs about two months for similar rents. Same submarket, same buyer pool, twelve months of carry cost difference. Alec's first filter on a deal is which county or city will let him build before the second filter is whether the land works. Look for retail sites that cannot be retail. Alec is targeting high-traffic frontage along I-35 (around 100,000 to 150,000 cars a day) that should be retail but has a sewer constraint or another issue that knocks retail off the table. Flex needs much less sewer than a restaurant or strip center. He gets the traffic count without the retail competition, and front-row rents in the high teens or low twenties instead of the $14 a foot the same product gets in the industrial park behind it. The metal building is a Lego set. Standard kit, three to four months to put up plus two to three months of site work. Alec orders from Cornerstone (not Chinese kits, because a missing part on a Chinese order is a six-month problem). He sticks to one building size and lets his architect cookie-cutter the floor plan, which keeps engineering costs down. Cost is around $120 a foot if a GC builds it, less if he self-performs with the right subs. He performs to a $250 to $270 per-foot sale price on stabilized flex. The mentor line Alec carries with him: "Bigger is not harder. It is just bigger." His first deal was a duplex he overpaid for by $5,000 at age 23. This year he is doing about 250,000 square feet of development. The 250K feels easier than the first deal did. Reach Alec at land-play.com or on LinkedIn. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Ben Carmona started his career in 2006 and 2007 selling real estate syndications. The biggest operational problem he and his team had was keeping paper in the fax machine because the new business was coming through so fast. Then 2008 and 2009 happened, the syndications cratered, and baby boomers who had worked their entire lives to accumulate real estate watched it evaporate. Ben was a spring chicken on the sales side, and he could have hidden behind that. He didn't. He moved to the analyst side of the business and never went back. "I need to know what I am selling" is how he describes the turn. Twenty years later, that lesson is still the operating principle behind everything Perch Wealth does. Today Ben runs a niche financial advisory practice — securities-licensed, but he doesn't touch stocks, bonds, mutual funds, insurance, or annuities. All Perch Wealth does is help accredited investors who built real estate portfolios over 20, 30, or 40 years get out of active management without writing a tax check that wipes out a decade of appreciation. Ten advisors nationwide. "They've done well, and they do not want one more single phone call from a tenant." The conversation walks through 1031 exchanges and Delaware Statutory Trusts — a structure that most CPAs, attorneys, and sophisticated real estate investors have still never heard of. What landed in this conversation: The 1% to 3% problem. Eight out of ten of Ben's prospects are earning between 1% and 3% in current income relative to today's property value. They bought a building for $1M, it's worth $5M today, rent grew at 3% to 5% a year and never kept pace with the value. They're also fully depreciated, so they're paying full ordinary income tax on what little yield is left. Move that same $5M into a diversified DST portfolio and income can jump from $120K to $300K — with the depreciable basis reset, so the cash flow is tax-advantaged again. DST mechanics in plain English. A Delaware Statutory Trust is a single trustee holding fractional ownership for up to 499 beneficial owners. Created in the 1980s; the IRS validated the structure in 2004 as eligible for 1031 exchange purposes. The sponsors are not boutique shops — Apollo, Starwood, Invesco, Cantor Fitzgerald. They go out and close on $100M multifamily projects in Dallas, $50M medical office campuses in Orlando, $50M self-storage portfolios in Raleigh. They stabilize the asset, then offer fractional ownership to retail investors. "This is not an industry that is in its infancy. The big boys are here." The 45 and 180 day reality that breaks traditional 1031s. Once an investment property sells, the seller has 45 days to identify a replacement property and 180 days total to close. For a seller who is over active management, that timeline is brutal. With DSTs, Mrs. Smith who just sold a $2M Orange County duplex can split her exchange — $200K into Cantor Fitzgerald multifamily, $500K into a Jones Lang DST in Orlando, and so on. Each leg closes in about a week, distributes monthly, satisfies her exchange, and spreads her risk across geography, sector, and operator. She never has to chase a property she doesn't want. Swap till you drop. Defer the gain through life, exchange forever, and the heirs inherit at the stepped-up basis on the date of death. The entire deferred liability evaporates. Ben's example: a $1M property compounded across 30 years of exchanges becomes a $50M portfolio. The would-be tax bill might be $20M. The heirs pay $0 on the gain. This is the wealth-preservation math estate planners build around — and it exists in the tax code on purpose, because the government wants private operators (not the government) providing housing. The advice from Ben's college professor, Mr. Short, that has stayed with him for twenty years: "It's not hard to make money. All you need to do is follow demographic trends." The silver tsunami — 76 million boomers retiring and ultimately passing wealth down over the next 30 years — is the trend Ben built his entire practice to serve. Get in touch: perchwealth.com or call Ben directly at 818-269-4972. Perch Wealth has 10 advisors nationwide and Ben does free education calls regardless of whether you're ready to move. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Mark Schuler has been a practicing architect for over 40 years, licensed in 1992, and has designed and built close to 500 structures across his career. By his own count, the permit set he produces today is 1,000 times more complex than the one he produced when he started. He has the battle scars to prove it. He also owns north of 4,000 multifamily units through SGRE Investments, and is launching an indoor golf simulator business in Phoenix on the side. He is not slowing down.The three businesses split Mark's week roughly into thirds: architecture, multifamily investing, and the new golf venture. His kid brother is one of the country's leading real estate taxation authorities. Five other family members are commercial brokers. Mark went to the University of Washington business school in 2002 for a certification in commercial real estate development on top of his architecture license. He has sold most of his Seattle portfolio because the regulatory environment got intolerable, and now plays almost entirely in Houston. "Real estate is the ultimate form of entrepreneurialism," he says. "You can't wing it. You've got to really have an A game going on to be able to do this successfully."What landed in this conversation:Vertical integration, end to end. SGRE has 200+ people on the payroll, all W2. The company owns its construction labor, its asset management arm, and its supply chain. Direct vendor relationships in India and China feed containers into the Port of Houston and then into a 20,000 square foot SGRE warehouse where a warehouse manager catalogs every door, every fixture, every slab. When they order doors they order a thousand at a time. Slab countertops cost SGRE $50 a slab; Mark just priced slabs for his own home renovation at $1,500. That's three layers of middlemen cut out. It's why SGRE's renovation cost is $18,000 a door versus the $35,000 to $40,000 the rest of the market spends — and why SGRE returns four to five extra IRR points to its investors.The 5%-a-month renovation cadence. Minimum purchase is 250 units. '80s product and newer (older means surprise wiring, plumbing, and electrical panel replacements that turn the lift into a different deal). Deep value-add, C-class assets, repositioned to quality finishes for the same workforce tenant — rent bumps of $100 to $150 a month, "some of the nicest housing these folks have ever lived in." Crews are on site the day after closing. Target: 5% of units turned per month, 100% renovated inside 20 months. NOI grows fast enough that lenders give SGRE 60% to 70% LTV without losing sleep. Q4 of last year SGRE took down two distressed deals at 2018 prices after the prior operator evaporated $14M.Why Houston, only Houston. The 34th largest city in the country but the second largest apartment market. A massive wave of 1970s and '80s product built during the oil boom needs renovating. Year-over-year permit activity and housing deliveries are down 72%, and occupancy is set to tighten. Mark refuses to chase other metros. "I don't want to have to figure out the personalities in multiple jurisdictions." He knows the regulators, the brokers, the lenders, and the labor pool in one market and goes deep instead of wide. SGRE's business strategy is depth.Insurance, hedged through Lloyd's of London. When premiums went vertical after the Florida hurricane cycle, the SGRE partners got on a plane and flew to London to negotiate a blanket policy across the entire portfolio. They self-insure layered underneath. A friend of Mark's owns a deal in the 9th Ward of New Orleans where the per-door insurance went from $850 to between $2,500 and $3,000 and may never recover the deal. Meanwhile, in King County, Washington (where Mark lives) a residential permit takes 16 months through approval — by design, because the county is slow-walking permits to keep development out of unincorporated areas. The compounding effect on housing supply is exactly what you'd expect.On growth and mentorship Mark is blunt: "Once you stop growing, you die." He dropped $10K on a mastermind last year and called it the smartest thing he's done in three years. On the personal side: six grandkids, a partner who keeps him grounded, and a severely-ADHD stepson Mark mentored from a 1.4 high school GPA to a 3.8 (six high schools, ending at a military school), now a high-end audio mechanic flipping cars on the side. Mark gets up to model that for the next generation. "Once you stop growing, you die" applies to both halves of his life.Get in touch: sgreinvestments.com or email [email protected]. Mark says expect a response in roughly three minutes — he's in front of the computer all day.Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcastElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Daniel Angel Mejia grew up in Colombia, built a corporate finance career inside the Bogotá funds world, and moved to the US roughly ten years ago for a corporate role at a cement and ready-mix company. He started flipping houses on the side, applying what he had learned from the funds back home. Eventually he closed the chapter on corporate, took the leap, and founded Apex Development Group with another Colombian operator who had moved from Miami to Atlanta. Today Apex runs single family rehabs, single family ground-up for sale and for rent, and multifamily value-add — out of one office in Atlanta and one in Bogotá. The team is roughly 22 people across both locations. Vertically integrated end to end except property management. The Bogotá team (15 to 17 people) handles acquisitions, underwriting, structuring, capital markets, and remote project management. The Atlanta team (7 people) handles everything that needs boots on the ground. We talked about why Apex built a Colombian sister entity instead of going the VA route, why every property sits inside a two-hour drive from the office, why they built a debt fund instead of running another 506B, and the construction mistake Daniel still regrets. What landed in this conversation: Employees, not VAs. Most operators going offshore stop at virtual assistants. Daniel built a Colombian entity with actual employees who are part of the Apex team. Three reasons it works: same time zone all year (give or take an hour), shared culture and accountability through a real chain of command, and bilingual fluency that pays off on the construction side of a Georgia operation where a meaningful share of the labor and subs are Spanish-speaking. The bilingual edge alone is a competitive advantage Daniel calls one of Apex's "different shaders." The two-hour radius rule. Every Apex property sits inside the 13 metro Atlanta counties — nothing further than two hours from the office. Daniel's thesis is that during the 2012 to 2022 bull run, location knowledge didn't matter much because the rising tide raised everything. Today it matters intensely. Atlanta is a "pocket by pocket" market — some submarkets are for-sale plays, others are cash-flow rent plays, and treating them the same blows up the underwriting. Going out-of-state would mean re-learning that pocket structure in every new metro. Apex would rather go deep than wide. Why a fixed-return debt fund instead of a 506B. Daniel's lesson from years of LPGP raises: passive investors say they want 20% to 30% targets, but what they actually want is certainty, flexibility, and predictable cash flow. "Sometimes singles, sometimes doubles, sometimes you foul, and sometimes you grand-slam" — investors don't want a portfolio of swings, they want a yield. The Apex fund pays fixed tiered returns based on check size, compounds for investors who want growth, distributes monthly for investors who need cash, and has an 18-month lockup followed by periodic liquidity windows. That structure answers the "my kid is going to college in three years" problem that LPGP deals handle badly, because you can't force a deal to full-cycle on demand. Drag construction in-house earlier. Daniel's biggest professional regret is the time he spent trying to make outside GCs work for Apex before pulling construction under the Apex roof. Every healthy value-add machine he has met eventually does this — third-party construction breaks down once you actually care about cost-per-door and schedule discipline. His personal regret is the mirror image: he should have left the corporate job sooner and started Apex faster. Both regrets have the same shape. He sees the right move clearly now, and wishes he had moved faster then. "Never late, but could have been faster." Mentor advice that turned Daniel's career, from a former colleague in Colombia he later converted into a mentor: "Just try it, but make sure you burn your ships." Cortez burning his boats so his men couldn't retreat — the same principle, applied to a transcontinental career move. Daniel's working definition of success has shifted to match: "Every situation in life, whether it's good or bad, it's temporary. Just make sure you're enjoying what you're doing." He calls it "enjoy the ride." Book mentioned: Traction by Gino Wickman. Apex is running the EOS playbook and Daniel rereads the book every year — "so simple, but it just makes sense." Find it on Amazon. Get in touch: apexinvestments.us or LinkedIn (Daniel Angel Mejia). Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Chad Ackerman spent his career in human resources at Cardinal Health — the spreadsheet side of HR, not the people side. A coworker mentioned multiple income streams one day. He started reading. Three years later he liquidated his 401k, ate the 10% early-withdrawal penalty, and went all-in on real estate syndications as a limited partner. Five years after that, BiggerPockets bought the community he had built. Today he coaches the next wave of LPs through his own practice, on the principle that every search result for "syndication" teaches you how to be a GP, but almost nothing teaches you how to write a check into one and not get burned. Chad cofounded Left Field Investors in early 2020 as a local Columbus, Ohio meetup. The first meeting was scheduled for March 18, 2020. The world shut down three days earlier. He moved it to Zoom — and 18 months later the community had grown to 2,000 members and was tracking over $50M of LP capital that its membership had deployed. BiggerPockets acquired the group last year and rebranded it Passive Pockets. Chad sits on the advisory committee. Alongside that he bought a Brian Tracy FocalPoint coaching franchise and built Chad Ackerman Real Estate, a coaching practice for aspiring LPs — monthly free webinars, tiered workshops (one-on-one, two-on-one, three-on-one), and direct coaching. A book is in progress. What landed in this conversation: The MythBusters book for LPs. Chad's thesis is that most prospects think LP investing is for accredited high-net-worth individuals or institutional money. He was an HR guy. "It doesn't take something special. Anybody can do this." The minimum check is often $25,000 to $50,000, but tools like TribeVest let small groups pool capital so an investor can be in for $5K. The name "Left Field" came from financial advisors telling Chad and his cofounder that "all that syndication stuff is way out in left field" — so they took it as the badge. The "active passive investor" framing he uses now: it's called passive investing, but it takes real activity to do it right. Goals first, deals second. Chad's first investment was a 17-story Cleveland office-to-multifamily conversion with a 7x pro forma. It checked every box he was excited about. It also didn't fit his actual goal, which was cash flow to fund leaving his W2. The bridge loan ran out, construction financing never closed, the deal went under. "I shouldn't have been in it in the first place because it didn't align to my goals." Before any private placement memo crosses your inbox, define what you're solving for. The buy box does the screening for you. Chad now teaches that step before he teaches anything else. Bet the jockey, not the horse. Before evaluating a deal, evaluate the operator. Chad won't write a check to a GP that no one in his LP community has heard of. If nobody recognizes the name, he watches them for a year. The five-year shakeout has done a lot of free vetting for everyone — the operators still standing have at least one full cycle under their belt, and the best of them survived 2008. That's why Chad says now is actually the best time in years to be an LP: the cowboys have been exposed, loan-structure discipline matters again, and the surviving operators have answered questions Chad didn't know to ask five years ago. AI for due diligence. AI is not yet good enough to tell you if a deal is a go or no-go. It is good enough to check a private placement memo against your buy box and surface the misses. The value is not the AI's verdict. The value is that writing a buy box at all forces the discipline to take emotion out of the decision. Fear of missing out is the most expensive feeling in this business. "There's going to be another deal coming around the corner. Don't make one squeeze into your buy box." The advice that changed Chad's trajectory: "You're the product of the five closest people next to you." He went looking for five better people — a mix of investors a few steps ahead of him (who could show him the next move) and several steps ahead (who could show him the destination). Both layers mattered. He still curates that group consciously. Book on his nightstand: Invest Smart: Spotting Red Flags in Real Estate Syndications by Gary Lipsky of Bay Capital — Chad is reading the genre to make sure his coaching material reinforces (and doesn't duplicate) what's already out there for beginners. Find it on Amazon. Get in touch: LinkedIn (Chad Ackerman) or chadackermanrealestate.com. Chad offers free one-on-one calls to help prospects figure out which workshop tier (or one-on-one coaching) actually fits. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Episode Resources:Social Media:www.facebook.com/vince.gethingswww.linkedin.com/in/vincent-gethings-50420a137www.instagram.com/vince.gethingsEmail: [email protected] tricityequitygroup.comElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Episode Resources:Book: https://a.co/d/hAegcXIFacebook Group: https://urlgeni.us/facebook/unlockedguideMini Course: https://www.unlockedrentals.com/minicourseoptinElevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Chris Lento spent 17 years as an aerospace engineer before deciding the defense industry wasn't the right runway. He spent that same 17 years buying small multifamily in Boston as a side project. In 2017 he flipped which one was the side project. Today Chris and EM Capital run more than 800 multifamily units across the Southeast: Charlotte, Raleigh, Columbia, and Atlanta, with 420 units already in Atlanta and another property under contract there. Acquisition price band is $10M to $50M. He targets markets with 250,000-plus population, real job diversity, and meaningful population growth. He caps it at four markets because deal flow has to be balanced against actually knowing the neighborhoods. What landed in this conversation: The two-bedroom test as a quality signal. Chris will look at a 1985 build if it has two bedrooms and two baths. A two-bedroom one-bath from the same vintage tells him the original developer was cutting cost everywhere else too: cheaper wiring, cheaper plumbing, cheaper everything behind the walls. The unit mix is a tell. Atlanta's insurance problem isn't hurricanes. It's the state's high liability cap. One resident hitting another in the parking lot can expose the owner to seven figures in liability. Premiums reflect it. The mistake is finding that out after closing instead of underwriting it in upfront. Preferred equity to 85% LTV. Chris stacks institutional or family-office preferred equity between the senior debt and the LP equity, holding the senior LTV at 62 to 65 percent. That keeps the structure conservative while raising less LP equity per deal. The Monarch deal almost broke. Last fall the 10-year treasury spiked during election week, capital tightened, and Chris had already gone hard on earnest money before the raise was fully closed. Seller extensions plus a pref-equity gap fill saved it. The lesson he ran back to: have an A plan, a B plan, and a C plan locked in with your partners before you go hard. The line that wraps it: a mentor told Chris, "If you can't make a deal pencil at 6.5 to 7 percent, that might be a you problem, not a building problem." Reach Chris at emcapitalgroup.com or on LinkedIn. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Owen Barrett spent eight years buying multifamily in the Midwest, accumulated 650 units of his own portfolio, and used it as a guinea pig for one specific question: what is the actual way to put solar on existing apartment buildings? Two years of building later, the answer became a company. Shine is built for the messy version of the question. Three states (California, Colorado, Massachusetts) have virtual net energy metering, where you slap one big array on the roof and allocate the benefit to tenants by square footage. The other 47 states do not. In those, the only way to actually decarbonize a building is to install a small dedicated PV system on every single apartment unit's meter. A studio gets four panels. A one-bedroom gets five. A two-bedroom gets six. From the roof it looks normal. Inside, every tenant has their own solar system and their own bill. What landed in this conversation: The unit-economics math. Gross cost about $6,000 per unit. The transferable federal tax credit takes it to roughly $4,000 net. Each unit then generates about $620 of new NOI per year for the owner. Mid-teens IRR. Double-digit cash on cash. The owner leases the equipment to the tenant: tenant goes from a $100 utility bill to $50 ($45 to the owner, $5 of net savings to the tenant). Common-area solar is a distraction. Most solar contractors pitch multifamily owners on installing solar under the common-area meter, the leasing office, the gym, the parking lot lights. That meter is only five to ten percent of total building emissions. Tenant load is the other 90-plus percent. If you actually want the decarbonization story or the income, you have to go after the unit meters. The buildings that work. Garden style is the best fit. Mid-rise works. High-rise generally does not unless there is surface parking for carport solar. Roof age 12 years or newer or Shine will tell you to replace the roof first. And because the per-unit systems are individually small, electrical service panels almost never need to be upgraded, which is the line item that usually wrecks commercial solar timelines and budgets. The runway lesson. Owen quit a cushy corporate job in 2012 to start an LED lighting company. Eighteen months with zero revenue, sold his 401k, ended up on food stamps, was a week from moving back in with his parents. The lesson he took into Shine: most businesses do not fail because the idea is wrong, they fail because the time it takes to get to revenue is three to five times longer than anybody expects. And the second you start a company, you are in charge of sales. Book Owen is reading right now: Money for Couples by Ramit Sethi. Reach Owen at getshine.com (the new AI tool on the homepage estimates how much solar and NOI any building can generate) or on LinkedIn. Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast Elevista - Speed as a Service™Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors. 🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.Additional Resources:Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executivesElevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investorsClark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estateSocial Media:LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!