Pixels & Properties

Jove Kuang is a graduate of University of Chicago and founder of FK Capital Partners. He started investing in single family residential real estates in 2010, and soon into various categories of commercial real estates such as multi-family, medical condos, national tenant net leases and more recently industrials in both California and Texas. In this episode, you'll hear Jove's story of how he got into investing in real estate, why he decided to focus on commercial real estate instead of residential real estate, and what he thinks about pros/cons of the several categories of commercial real estates he had experience with.

Great insight: Jove has truly leveraged his software industry W2 background to accelerate his growth within real estate. For his first deals, he leveraged his coding background to scrape Redfin and Zillow and identify properties that met his pre-defined investment criteria. Now, he's leveraging his skillsets in enterprise sales to develop tight relationships with commercial tenants for his medical office and industrial spaces. Never assume you don't have anything relevant to bring to the table!

Other great nuggets:

• "We look at assets that are more tech resistant.....to get my teeth a deep cleaning...that  day may may come very, very late like in the future because for the foreseeable future I probably still go into a dental office to get my get my get my deep cleaning done. Industrial is a lot of light manufacturing...we still need to have a lot of goods in our life right so these goods just got to be manufactured at a place. I mean, it can't be remote."
• "One of the big reasons I chose commercial over residential over the years is because in commercial, you can more closely, definitively say how much this is [worth]. The reason is because its simply a function of math of rent [given it is triple net lease]. So as long as I know the rent...let me put a seven or an eight cap, depending on the type of tenant and duration of lease and and a bunch of factors, I then can calculate the sales price. Whereas residential...I cannot predict."

How to get in touch with Jove:

• Visit fkcapital.xyz

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About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.

Great insights

• “I’ve got some very strong opinions about 401ks: I don’t think it’s the best place to put your capital as a high W2 income earner. The challenge with 401ks is that if you were to get the call about the layoff, the 401k sitting out there does you no good whatsoever, unless you’re willing to pay very, very hefty taxes and very, very hefty penalties in order to get access to those dollars.“
• “Single family investing by nature you’re not making a lot of money on those unless you’re getting good appreciation. We were of the mindset that if we underwrote them for $100 or $200 a month (cashflow) then we were very pleased that we were getting that. And when you’re a guy that’s making $250 to $300 an hour, every hour that you’re spending working on these (single families) is really having a negative impact on your pocketbook.”
• “When I got into turnkey and BRRR strategies I thought that was passive and it was anything but passive. When you’re spending tens of hours per month on these deals, that is not passive. Passive income by definition means you find an operator that is doing some type of business plan whether it’s apartment, self-storage, office, retail…and true passive income is investing in those operators and allowing them to go out and buy whatever it is that they do, and you sit on the sidelines and literally get checks or ACH every single month.”

Randy Smith

Randy Smith is the Founder of Impact Equity which was formed to help investors achieve strong results in their passive real estate investing strategies.  Randy and Impact Equity have helped more than 75 investors place over $5M across three operators and eight different opportunities since launching in June of 2022.

Randy started his real estate investing career doing out of state, single-family, long term rentals, and he quickly realized the many additional benefits he could receive by switching his strategy to passively investing in multifamily syndications. Randy has now invested in 23 different passive investments with 9 different operators which gives him the unique knowledge and expertise to recognize a strong passive opportunity. 

Randy currently resides in Peoria, Arizona with his wife Jenny, and he spent 25 years working in various business development and leadership roles in Corporate America. 

Get in touch w/Randy 

• www.impactequity.net
• LinkedIn

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For more insights and content to accelerate your real estate success, join our free newsletter at follow this link: pixelsandproperties.beehiiv.com

About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.

Safi Aziz writes The Physicality, a light-hearted exploration of the changes to how we live and play. He also is the CEO of Hyperbeam that helps early-stage founders find the fundraising and sales story that sticks. Previously, he was a Director at MetaProp, a PropTech venture capital fund with 100+ portfolio companies, and was on the Leadership Board for the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation.

Given his direct and broad exposure to the PropTech space, we dive into the ideas and companies shaping the future of real estate, the challenges early-stage PropTech companies have faced, and the opportunities that lie ahead.

 Great insights

• Safi suggested we are now seeing a new generation of PropTech companies, such as:
  • Kindred: Allowing members to swap homes in cool markets for free and also earn credits that can be used toward future stays for housing others.
  • TrueHold: Offering elderly owners to sale-leaseback their homes in exchange for not only maintenance and risk assumption but also senior care services.
  • BonusHomes: Enabling owners of homes seeking to move but locked in at a low rate to sell yet retain some equity in the original home
  • Bonside: Helps retailers grow with a repeatable revenue agreement

Great nuggets

• "PropTech has been defined both narrowly and broadly. The way I like to explain it most often is, it's everything from insurance tech, all the way to FinTech as it relates to real estate. So that encompasses construction tech...new financing products...robotics...3D printing. It is very broad in terms of sort of what you can bucket into property technology...But anything that's trying to improve the built environment, I think can be, um, can be lumped in and and assessed as PropTech."

How to get in touch with Safi:

• Twitter: @s_afiaziz
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/safiaziz/
• Blog: thephysicality.substack.com

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For more insights and content to accelerate your real estate success, join our free newsletter at follow this link: pixelsandproperties.beehiiv.com

About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.

Please join us  for another installment of the Barstool Investor Webinar Series with featured guest Peter Lohmann of RL Property Management! In this episode, you'll have an opportunity to learn about Peter's journey from W2 employee to CEO of a 700+ door property management firm and lessons learned along the way.

Peter Lohmann

Peter is the CEO & principal broker of RL Property Management, a residential property management company located in Columbus Ohio. RL manages over 700 units. Peter also owns a small engineering company also located in Columbus, run by his business partner.

Peter received his Bachelor’s in electrical engineering and spent 5 years in the control system engineering industry full-time before founding RL Property Management in 2013. He lives in the Olde Towne East neighborhood of Columbus with his wife, 2 daughters and their dog Oxley.

Great insights

• As a CEO / Founder of a Property Management firm, Peter gave great tips around how to diligence a PM
• He also gave tips around how to set up PMs for success

Great nuggets

• "The more narrowly you can define what you're gonna be great at, the easier it's gonna be to scale up...the saying is niche down to scale up...Because in the long run, if you just say yes to everything, you're gonna be pulled in a million different directions, you're not gonna do a great job at anything. And it makes your job harder in every dimension. Marketing, sales, operations, financial modeling and forecasting, all this becomes really difficult when you have too many SKUs."
• "There's a big problem with the culture of America, which is very infused with this Puritan work ethic that you have to work hard and your results are directly correlated with your amount of hard work and effort, and that's actually not true at all. Your results are completely disconnected from the amount of hard work and effort. There's no correlation. There's people who work hard, who make no money, and there's people who work not at all, and make tons of money."

Get in touch w/Peter: Twitter @pslohmann

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For more insights and content to accelerate your real estate success, join our free newsletter at follow this link: pixelsandproperties.beehiiv.com

About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.

Listen to the next installment of the Barstool Investor Webinar Series with Brooke Ceballos-Piñero of Empower Capital! In this episode, you'll have an opportunity to learn from Brooke's rapid journey to >500 units as a GP and >600 units as an LP, lessons learned along the way, and the noble mission that drives her.

Brooke’s using her 20+ years of servant leadership experience in corporate America and her educational and team-sports background to build her active real estate portfolio. Brooke’s on a mission to empower marginalized communities financially where they work, live, and play through investing.

Brooke is passionate about health and fitness, travel, female empowerment, and fighting injustices. She and her husband David live in Northern CA with their four daughters and dog Bella.

Great insight: In her FIRST capital raise, Brooke raised $36M in 72 hours. She applied two tried and true tactics. 1) Prior to the deal, she expanded her network through multiple masterminds and attendance of dozens of meetups. 2) She created highly digestible content around the deal that spoke from the perspective of investors. Specifically, she personally toured the property, took videos, had a viewing platform, and sent investors snippets of the property. In her short, 1 minute videos she shared what she liked the property, what she didn't like about the property, and the plan to provide value. And then in the body of the email, she articulated what was in it for them.

Great nuggets:

• "This journey is not easy. If you have a partner, you have kids, you have a demanding W2 job, people are going to poke holes in your boat that you think are on your side. You have to have a bigger why. Bigger than the money. For me, it's about showing people you can come out of the darkness and come into the light. Your past can either paralyze you, or it can propel you. Use it to propel you. So when you get through this hump, now you can share it with other people and inspire other people."
• "You have to be able to have the mentality to discuss millions of dollars. If you have a scarcity mindset and you are not comfortable with money, you need to work on your mindset first. You're in a world of abundance, and if you're in a scarcity mentality, change your mindset, work on that."

Get in touch w/Brooke: [email protected]

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For more insights and content to accelerate your real estate success, join our free newsletter at follow this link: pixelsandproperties.beehiiv.com

About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.

This next installment of the Barstool Investor Webinar Series featured Justin Smith of Relequity Enterprises! In this episode, you'll have an opportunity to learn from Justin's broad experience that spans student housing, development and construction, and large multifamily syndications.

Great insight: Justin  emphasizes having a well defined buy box to leverage and further hone one's core competency. For example, when evaluating multifamily deals, his target is a 100 - 120 unit, Class B- property, built in 1970s in urban areas with a strong economic footprint with medium crime. There are so many shiny objects in real estate that it is so easy to get distracted without having clearly defined criteria to keep focused and disciplined.

Other great nuggets:

• "In this environment where you see in the news [all this negativity]. If you're an investor, turn that off. Look for the opportunity. Now is the time to go in...Now is the time to put your buying hat on...this is the buying opportunity...when there is economic uncertainty that is when you want to start picking up assets."
• "If you change your mindset and you sit across the kitchen table from someone who is in dire straights. They've probably had people knock on the door before you even got there...the fact you can have that conversation, don't take it lightly. Be understanding. Put yourself in their shoes....In the foreclosure world, [it's important to have] that position of empathy...when we say 'distressed assets', it's typically not the asset that is distressed it's the person that is more distressed. How you relate to them and how you solve their problems will get you that property, will get you that particular deal."
• "You have to think about: what is your unique advantage. Because you can't go after everything. You can't go after shopping malls, and strip centers, and single families, and multifamilies....What is your distinct advantage. Hone that advantage, hone that skillset, practice that skillset, build relationships around that core competency and that skillset. And then go in on that."

Justin's recommended book: Nothing Down How to Buy Real Estate with Little or No Money Down (Robert Allen)

How to get in touch with Justin: [email protected]

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For more insights and content to accelerate your real estate success, join our free newsletter at follow this link: pixelsandproperties.beehiiv.com

About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.

We are proud and excited to launch the Barstool Investor Webinar Series with featured guest, Miyana Epps of Ask M.E. Investments! In this episode, you'll have an opportunity to learn about Miyana's investment philosophy, journey, and best practices. 

Miyana Epps is a proud Bay Area native and the owner of Ask M.E. Investments. She has over 20 years of real estate experience, which includes lending, wholesaling, rehabbing, interior design, consulting and being a California licensed agent. She currently has an ownership interest in 244 multifamily units. She is former military with a very structured sense of self discipline. She is also a proud wife and mother of a Cal Berkeley Bear. In her spare time she loves learning, reading, cooking, working out, spending time outdoors and being with family.

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For more insights and content to accelerate your real estate success, join our free newsletter at follow this link: pixelsandproperties.beehiiv.com

About Pixels & Properties:
Welcome to Pixels and Properties - the only platform for busy, high-caliber tech professionals seeking financial transformation through real estate ventures. Subscribe to our complementary newsletter through the show notes to receive weekly deep dives, expert insights, and resources to accelerate your investment journey without buying yourself another job. Ready to build wealth on your terms? Let's get started.