Daniel Holmlund runs a multifamily general partner career on top of a full time job at Intel by engineering his week around the clock. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Daniel talk about building a real estate business while keeping the W2.

In this episode:

• The system: "the first thing I do in the morning, especially on Mondays, is I start laying down all the different tasks I'm gonna do on a half hour block basis for the week," with asset management calls at 7 AM and email after hours.
• Partition by what runs without you: "I partner on things that can be done after business hours, a lot of investor relations, potentially asset management, dealing with CPAs."
• The stress test Abel pulled out: a 55 percent break even occupancy, the number that tells you how far income can fall before the deal is in trouble.
• Why, for a W2 operator, the scarcest expense is his own time.
• The mindset: "Nobody gave me permission. I decided I was gonna do it."

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Lee Yoder took a 25 to 30 percent pay cut on purpose, not to buy time but to buy bandwidth. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Lee talk about scaling into multifamily from single family flipping.

In this episode:

• Why he took the pay cut: he left a job that "consumed" his thinking for one that gave him "the time and the energy and just the capacity, the bandwidth to really start thinking about it."
• What he buys: "You have to take the properties that the big boys aren't interested in."
• The result: he "created $300,000 of equity with this nice, pretty slick plan," on a $350K building nobody else would touch.
• The real scarce resource: not hours, but bandwidth, the mental capacity to make good decisions and spot the overlooked deal.
• The reflection: "We've moved so much slower, and yet we've moved so much farther."

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Bruce Petersen reframes the whole game: "you're buying an existing proven operating business. It's not real estate. It's a business that owns real estate." On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Bruce talk about running the operation and scaling without burning out.

In this episode:

• The core reframe: "It's not real estate. It's a business that owns real estate."
• The cost of forgetting it: burned out doing every job himself, he fired his third party manager and became the management company.
• How he survived: "with scale, I started putting really talented people around me so I didn't have to wear every single management company hat, because it was driving me into the ground."
• Abel extends it: "what we're buying, we're buying businesses, we're buying streams of cash flow."
• Why a business that owns real estate lives or dies on operations, and operations are the expense side.

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Tim Kelly reframes capital raising from a burden into an offer. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Tim talk about networking, visibility, and raising money by giving value first.

In this episode:

• The reframe: "you're not asking people for money. You're offering an opportunity for people who are actually looking for an opportunity."
• The tier of networking most people miss: "it's a little bit about what you know. It's more about who you know. But it's most about who knows you."
• The income law: "your income is in direct connection to how much value you give."
• Abel's sales doctrine from his dad through Zig Ziglar: "you can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want."
• Why capital flows to the operator whose network knows what they offer.

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Chris Salerno's company held 364 units and beat a group holding over 15,000 for a Greenville deal, on trust and conviction, not size. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Chris talk about winning deals through relationships and forcing appreciation.

In this episode:

• How the smaller group won: "Broker even came to me and said, I don't know this group, but I know you guys. I put a significant amount of hard money down, because that's how confident I am on the deal."
• Disciplined income creation: buying at just over $95K a door in a $129K market and manufacturing value.
• Abel ran the math live: "from the creation of net operating income, the valuation is much different than a single family house."
• Why you never get to force appreciation on a deal you cannot win.
• How broker relationships and credibility at the top of the funnel feed the whole pipeline.

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Eric and Tamara Leever's first 70 unit deal came from a relationship that sat unused at the family lunch table for 50 years, until they said their goal out loud. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and the Leevers talk about deal flow through relationships.

In this episode:

• Tamara's rule: "tell people what your goals are. You just never know who knows who that knows who. So tell people what your goals are."
• Abel's doctrine: "the moment you have a different mindset, that your net worth is in your network, then you say, oh, there's an expert."
• Why the deal was not found on a listing site. It was found by making the network visible.
• Tamara's "care calls," contribution first outreach that "just dominoes."
• The takeaway: "You grow through what you go through."

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Maureen Miles runs a vertically integrated shop, acquisitions, a construction company, and third party management, and she treats investor money as a standard she operates to, not a promise she hopes to keep. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Maureen talk about stewardship and never missing a distribution.

In this episode:

• The standard: "we've never missed a frigging projection or been late on a distribution."
• Why never missing is operational discipline, not luck.
• Abel names the ethic: "the mindset of being a financial steward," and pushes past the legal floor: "Beyond fiduciary, you've gotta make sure that money is safe."
• Why vertical integration exists: own the management, own the construction, own the back office, and net operating income stops leaking.
• Stewardship in plain terms: watching expenses so closely that the promised return actually arrives.

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Reid Bennett's edge is data nobody else compiles: he tracks every existing multifamily deal in his markets. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Reid explain why the cap rate lies and how data wins.

In this episode:

• The database: "I track every single existing multifamily deal, typically 50 units and above, when it was purchased, who owns it, the acreage, how many buildings, who's paying the utilities, what the loan maturities are."
• Why he distrusts the favorite number: "the reason that I hate cap rates is they're totally arbitrary depending on what numbers you're looking at."
• His truth serum: an expense ratio of 46 to 55 percent on market rate deals. Below that, something is missing.
• The takeaway from Abel: "when you have that education, that mindset, no one's ever gonna take that away from you."
• The rule: "the cap rate is only one sanity check of a number of sanity checks."

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Omar Khan's filter funnel kills 90 percent of deals before anyone opens a model. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Omar break down a screening system that saves you from chasing the wrong deals.

In this episode:

• The funnel: define the resident and submarket first, check rent upside, scan the T12, call the broker, tour, drive the comps. "In about 15 to 25 minutes, you've done 90% of the work. So why even bother underwriting if it doesn't go through all of these things?"
• Everything else is "noise. And the more you chase your tail, the worse your life will become."
• The defensive core: "if you take care of the downside, the upside takes care of itself."
• Abel's confession: "I get excited, I chase the shiny object." This is the discipline that fixes it.
• Why the scarce resource is judgment applied fast enough to matter.

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate

Bruce Wuollet flipped over 2,000 houses, then rebuilt in multifamily and made the pipeline the whole job. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Bruce talk about the boring daily discipline behind raising capital.

In this episode:

• The daily rule: "on my to get done list every day is I will talk to three investors a day, one investor I've never talked to before, brand new," tracked by an app that asks him every evening, "How many calls did you make?"
• No makeup days: "Don't say, all of a sudden I gotta do 10. Just start tomorrow with a new start. I'll do three to five tomorrow, regardless of what you did yesterday."
• Abel adopts it live: "I like the goal of three new investors a day, so help me hit my goal too."
• The operating chain: "you take care of the residents, the residents take care of the property, the property takes care of the sponsors and investors."
• Why capital does not raise itself, and consistency beats intensity.

Abel Pacheco is a San Antonio real estate operator who went from 8 single family houses to a share of roughly 1,500 apartment doors, and now works as a fractional Chief AI Officer helping small and mid sized businesses put the back office on autopilot.

Go deeper and connect:

• Abel Pacheco
• 5 Talents, fractional Chief AI Officer
• The Open Door, the book
• 5 Talents commercial real estate