Passive Investing in Apartment Syndications with Camilla Jeffs

 

Episode: Passive Investing in Apartment Syndications with Camilla Jeffs

 

Guest: Camilla Jeffs is the founder of Steady Stream Investments a company focused on providing investment opportunities in large multi family and senior housing communities.

 

Big Idea:  When investing in syndications, choosing the right Operator is as important, if not more than selecting the right market.  While you’re technically investing in an apartment deal, you’re really investing in the people running the deal.  By this line of reasoning, your ability to select profitable investments hinges on your ability to select people with whom you’ll invest.

 

 

    

Dan Breslin: Welcome to the REI Diamonds Show. I’m your host, Dan Breslin. This is episode one hundred and ninety-five on Passive Investing in Apartment Syndications with Camilla Jeffs.

Camilla Jeffs is the founder of Steady Stream Investments, a company focused on providing investment opportunities in large multifamily and senior housing communities.

When you’re investing in syndications, choosing the right operator is as important, if not even more important, than selecting the right market or asset. While you’re technically investing into an apartment deal, you’re really investing in the people who are running the deal. It’s probably obvious. But by this line of reasoning, your ability to select profitable investments hinges on your ability to select the right people with whom you will invest.

Camilla brings her background, her experience in the corporate HR world, her ability to select professional talent to the apartment syndication investing business. She also acts as a general partner on her deals. We double click on her investment team, selection process, favorite asset classes, and markets to invest and more during this episode.

Let’s begin.

All right. Welcome to the REI Diamonds Show, Camilla. How are you doing today?

Camilla Jeffs: I’m doing great, Daniel. Thank you so much for having me on.

Dan: Yes. Absolutely. I know a little bit about you. But for anybody who may not recognize the name, could you kind of go through – we’ll call it – the origination story?

What did you do before real estate? How did you find real estate? How did real estate investing evolve into Steady Stream Investments in your business model today?

Camilla: Yes. Perfect. I started real estate investing when I was quite young. I got my first property at the age of twenty-two. It was a house hack that we did.

We didn’t know about it. It wasn’t a cool term back then, house hacking. We just figured out we want to own our own place, but we didn’t have enough money to own our own place, basically.

So we bought a home that had a basement apartment in it. We rented it out. It worked out perfect. We only paid about one hundred dollars a month in rent to live there. It even had a pool in the backyard. It was so cool.

 

Episode Sponsored by the Deal Machine:

Driving for Dollars Software to Build a Team of Drivers, Manage Routes, & Even Automate Marketing.  Free Access at  http://REIDealMachine.com/

 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

www.SteadyStreamInvestments.com

 

Camilla & I Discuss Passive Investing:

  • Investing in 100 Unit+ Apartment Deals

  • Market with the Most Promise

  • Identifying the Biggest Risk in a Syndication Deal

  • Understanding Whether You should consider Syndication Investing

    

Relevant Episodes: (There are 195 Content Packed Interviews in Total)

 

The transcript of this episode can be found here.
Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Getting High Return on Investment through Co-Living Rentals with Johnny Wolff

 

Episode: Getting High Return on Investment through Co-Living Rentals with Johnny Wolff

 

Guest: Johnny Wolff is the CEO & Founder of tech Company, HomeRoom.  HomeRoom is one of the fastest growing co-living companies in the U.S.  Johnny founded HomeRoom after a career as an analyst in Silicon Valley and then relocating to Austin, TX.

 

Big Idea:  Investors can obtain outsize returns by investing in co-living housing.  Co-living is a trend where many young people prefer living with roommates for social & economic reasons.  This trend exists throughout the U.S. and a new industry is arising to provide a professionally managed experienced to both residents & landlords.

 

 

    

Dan Breslin: Welcome to the REI Diamonds Show. I’m your host, Dan Breslin, and this is Episode 194 on getting high return on investment through co-living with Johnny Wolff.

Johnny Wolff is the CEO and founder of the tech company, HomeRoom. HomeRoom is one of the fastest-growing co-living companies in the US. Johnny founded HomeRoom after a career as an analyst in Silicon Valley and then relocating to Austin, Texas, where, in both markets, he actually lived in co-living situations.

Today’s discussion centers around how investors can obtain outsized returns by investing in co-living housing. Co-living is a trend where many young people prefer living with roommates for both social and economic reasons. This trend exists throughout the US, and a new industry is arising to provide a professionally managed experience to both the residents and the landlords. Shall we begin?

All right. Welcome to the REI Diamonds Show, Johnny Wolff. How are you doing today?

Johnny Wolff: Good, Daniel. Super happy to be here and thanks for having me.

Dan: Nice. It’s an interesting business model. So when the booking agents connected us and floated you as a potential guest, I noticed this like, renting rooms kind of a thing, and it probably would be helpful to hear the origination story. Maybe what was the background, some of your experience, even pre-real estate investing? Certainly, a business model now. And then cap it off with kind of the business model as it stands today.

Johnny: Sure. For the last few decades, I’ve lived with about fifty different roommates. I think it’s kind of ongoing growth. I still live in roommate houses. But it really started after college. I lived in Silicon Valley. I worked in finance for technology companies and startups in the bank. And when you’re in Silicon Valley, you rent rooms. You don’t buy houses because they’re all million dollars.

And so we kind of developed different ways of finding new roommates on Craigslist and betting them, and then having really cool dinner parties. And honestly, our roommate house is like the hub. Some people lived alone, but they were boring. And people that lived in roommate houses, they’re the fun ones, and they had the cool stuff going on.

So I move to Austin, Texas in 2015 to invest in real estate more actively. I have been investing in single-family homes in Texas since 2008, which was about a year after I got out of college remotely and wanted to do that up close. And so I moved to Austin, bought a number of properties there in 2015, and turn them all into roommate houses.

And it was difficult to cash flow. It’s impossible to cash flow in Austin or very difficult. We can do it with home remodel, but it was pretty hard back then, too, with a standard rental and good area. So by renting by the room, I was able to get a lot more rent, and that enabled me to buy more aggressively while I was down there.

I moved to Kansas City in 2018 to kind of do it again with a different type of property. I kind of think of Austin as a really awesome appreciation potential market, but Kansas City is really stable as it gets cash flow. So I wanted to balance my portfolio.

And then when I moved here, I had a lot more trouble finding roommates than I had in Austin and San Francisco and thought maybe it’s about time that someone figures out this whole find-a-roommate situation where it’s not through Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and it’s not sketchy and weird and uncomfortable.

So that’s why I started HomeRoom in 2018, and we’ve, since then, housed over four hundred roommates in Kansas City, Austin, and Dallas. And yeah, we’re pretty happy campers on the tenant side. Now, we’re partnering with investors to buy these properties in these cities and happy investors as well.

Episode Sponsored by the Deal Machine:

Driving for Dollars Software to Build a Team of Drivers, Manage Routes, & Even Automate Marketing.  Free Access at  http://REIDealMachine.com/

 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

https://LiveHomeRoom.com/

 

Johnny & I Discuss Getting High Return on Investment with Co-Living Rentals:

  • How to Get 20% more free cash flow than conventional rentals

  • Tech Stack Developed to Run HomeRoom

  • Risks involved in owning Co-Living Rental Property

  • Scaling to more than 325 Rooms in Several States

    

Relevant Episodes: (There are 194 Content Packed Interviews in Total)

 

The transcript of this episode can be found here.
Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

How to Rehab a House the RIGHT Way with Van Sturgeon

 

Episode: How to Rehab a House the RIGHT Way with Van Sturgeon

 

Guest: Van Sturgeon owns more than 1,000 rental properties throughout the U.S. & Canada.  He’s rehabbed even more-picking up countless methods along the way.

 

Big Idea: Rehabbing houses is a breeze for highly successful real estate investors.  Buying property cheap, due to condition, then renovating them to force value is one of the most powerful methods of real estate investing for compounding wealth.  BRRR, or the buy, renovate, rent, & refi strategy is one of real estate investor’s favorite strategy for building a large portfolio with a limited amount of capital.

 

 

    

 

Dan Breslin: Today’s guest, Van Sturgeon, personally owns more than 1,000 rental properties throughout the US and Canada. He’s rehabbed even more, picking up countless methods along the way. Rehabbing houses is a breeze for highly successful real estate investors. Buying property cheap due to the condition, then renovating those properties to force value is one of the most powerful methods for compounding wealth. The skill of rehab is crucial to the BRRRR method. You know, the Buy, Renovate, Rent, and Refi strategy is used to build a large portfolio using a limited amount of capital. During this episode, Van and I will dive deep into the renovation aspect of the real estate business along with other topics such as large multifamily investing and market selection. Let’s begin.

Van:  I went off to University. Graduated. I had an opportunity to go off and become a lawyer. Got accepted to several law schools, but my heart wasn’t in it. And I had a very difficult conversation with my parents saying, “Hey, I just don’t want to do this. I don’t see myself being a lawyer. I really enjoy Real Estate, really enjoy being a junk contractor.” And so, that’s where they begrudgingly gave their approval, and I went off in Chicago and became a general contractor. I started knocking on doors, started to network, started to create relationships with individuals, and trying to grow this business. Thankfully, the early 90s was a period of time that I started to get busier, and one of the things I kept running into were these career Real Estate Investors. People that this was their means of business, whether they were buying and flipping properties or buying and adding them to their portfolio. I started to network with these people. Start to see what these people are doing, and then I got around to actually doing it myself.

The first property, I remember it like it was yesterday, I purchased it for $43,000 or $44,000, something like that. It was a real beat-up little bungalow. I still have some decrepit, little photographs of it for what I did to it because I was so proud of it. I bought it and I renovated it. And several months later, it cost me around $17,000 to $18,000 at the time to renovate it, I put it up for sale. I sold it for 90 something thousand dollars. All in all, I made $30,000. At that time in 1991, to make $30,000, that was a heck of a lot of beans, because the average salary was around $25,000 to $30,000 and I made that in four, five months.

So I immediately got hooked on it and I was like, well, this is something that I wanted to do. So it was sort of, it ran in parallel. I was growing just the general contracting business and at the same time doing flips on the side and growing that side of the business. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate in my life and through real estate, I was able to create a number of successful businesses where I’ve been. I’ve built subdivisions, custom homes, real estate developers, property management companies, and do also restoration work on commercial high-rise buildings. I’ve done everything that you can think of under the sun and I’ve been truly, truly blessed to the point where I’ve got over a thousand properties across North America that I look after and that I collect income from. So it’s been a great ride.

 

Episode Sponsored by the Deal Machine:

Driving for Dollars Software to Build a Team of Drivers, Manage Routes, & Even Automate Marketing.  Free Access at  http://REIDealMachine.com/

 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

www.VanSturgeon.com

 

Van & I Discuss How to Avoid Capital Gains Tax:

  • Market Selection-according to an International Real Estate Investor

  • Van’s best deal-which turned out even better for the next buyer

  • Why you should own a property management company

  • How to renovate a house on time & on budget

    

Relevant Episodes: (There are 193 Content Packed Interviews in Total)

 

The transcript of this episode can be found here.
Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.