5 Talents Podcast

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

Adam Carswell went from managing Sherwin-Williams paint stores to apprenticing beside operators with nine figures of transactions behind them, and he did it with three habits, not capital. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Adam break down building an audience and a follow up machine.

In this episode:

• Post daily where almost nobody does: "less than 1% out of all those users post or engage and interact daily."
• Own an email list that leads with value and never pitches: "I don't think I've actually ever made a straightforward sales pitch on my email list."
• Abel's oldest sales rule: "the money, the dollars, the profit, it's in the follow up."
• On the list: "Start grabbing your names and emails. That's basically what your business is gonna be built on. Value, value, value before you're asking for anything."
• Why the top of the funnel and the follow up are the income line.

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

Jennings Smith went from a trashed $10,000 trailer at 29 to 192 units in a single year, and his capital raising doctrine is built on clarity and asking. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Jennings talk about raising money and building your investor list before you have a deal.

In this episode:

• The first rule: "Biggest thing is ask. A lot of people stop right there."
• Why clarity closes: "you have to paint a crystal clear picture. If your investor is confused, you're just giving them the opportunity to say no, and people always say no to stuff that they don't understand."
• He builds his list before he has a deal, walking investors through a sample package with no pressure.
• Abel's frame: "no one does this alone. It's a team effort and a team sport."
• Why capital follows the clearest picture, not the smartest spreadsheet.

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

Brian Briscoe is a Marine lieutenant colonel who brought "leaders eat last" straight into syndication. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Brian talk about putting investors first and buying your way up the learning curve.

In this episode:

• The ethic: "if there's an issue of do we pay ourselves or we pay the investors, the answer is gonna be the investors, and we are going to eat last every time."
• Proof under pressure: when rates spiked 125 basis points overnight and cut $600K from proceeds, his team moved their own split from 75/25 to 90/10 so investors still hit the promised 15%.
• Why he bought a mentor, an education, and a network with his house sale proceeds, because his father told him "I never figured it out."
• Abel's version: "I joined about four different programs in two years, and dropped a little over 65 grand, and it kind of propelled me."
• The mentor stack: a 4,000 door mentor, someone a few steps ahead, and a peer group.

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

Kyle Mitchell runs multifamily like the business it is, tracking more than 50 KPIs on a dashboard. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Kyle talk about asset management and catching problems before they become fires.

In this episode:

• The goal of the dashboard: "identify bottlenecks as early as possible, if not before it even happens."
• How he finds them: when 50 leads produce 1 appointment, "that's how we identify the bottlenecks, by peeling back the onion a little bit further than normal people would."
• Abel's frame: "It's not a home. It's a business. It's a $15 million business."
• The operator's other law: "the money's in the follow up."
• Why you cannot manage what you do not measure, and the biggest lever is on 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

Kelvin Fu, a former military officer, learned the operations business the hard way, and built GL Capital to control whole blocks in Baltimore. On this episode, host Abel Pacheco and Kelvin talk about vertical integration and cutting the overhead that eats your profit.

In this episode:

• The hard lesson: he spent 8 hours and 2 men fixing a single ceiling fan, because on a small deal "if you pay 7 or 8% to a property manager, there goes all your profit."
• The fix: bring management, sourcing, and screening in house.
• The strategy: "you kinda have to control the street and block to change the profile of the street." "If we buy one, it doesn't change the character of the street. So we have to buy a few."
• Abel translates the value add math live: light value add versus 30 to 40K a door gut jobs on major systems.
• Why the operator who owns the back office keeps the margin the third parties would have taken.

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