What are some top advices for an investor looking at growing their portfolio and taking it to the next level? Chris Rising, co-founder and CEO of Rising Realty Partners, shares his top insights on scaling, delegating and syndications.

You can read this entire interview here: bit.ly/3lmpB6z

You have scaled your business to an incredible level. What are some of your top advice for an investor looking at growing their portfolio and taking it to the next level?

On the syndication level, investors do expect a lot of hand-holding, and a lot of communication. And there’s a lot you can do digitally now that you weren’t able to do before. You’re really in two businesses, and maybe even three if you’re a property manager. You’re in the business of identifying real estate that you want to buy, you have the acquisition side, the operation side, and the investor relations, syndication business. That’s what our business looks like.

On the operations side, we have asset managers who are more experienced in the real estate business, they have an MBA that oversees, maybe five assets or four assets. We have property managers, we have four or five people in the acquisitions team, and they are finding deals and underwriting deals. And then, we have about three or four people in our Investor Relations team. The mantra of my former mentor, or of my former boss, John Fishman used to say is, “You have to find them, mine them, and grind them.” And so, you have to be able to find the investors, you have to mine them, and then you’re grinding, you have to keep communicating and you have to keep growing.

You can raise millions of dollars from one person if you keep communicating, even if deals don’t meet the return that we project. That doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. It doesn’t always happen the way we hope it would, but if you communicate with people, they feel like they’re part of your team and they understand the issues that you have. If you don’t communicate, you’ll never hear from that investor again.

How you approach things when you want to delegate things? And when do you want to partner up with people, and what is your process for partnerships?

I have enough scar tissue from bad partners, but I don't want someone to interpret bad partners as a bad human beings. When I say bad partners, it's just that our interests and/or expectations were not aligned, and it gets very difficult. The interesting thing about investing is that everybody's nice when things are good. When you lose a big tenant, or there might be a capital call, then not everybody is so nice. And that can also be within your partnership. I wish I could tell you that I have this wonderful method after so many years to identify partners, but I don't. What I do know is that if I'm talking to someone about being a parter, and if I can't make the decision right away, and I'm thinking about things, I usually say no. It's not always a scientific method.

On delegation, the hardest thing you can do is to hire people. And the reason is, you really don't know what people are until they've been in the company for a while. We now make sure that they take tests to know if they can do their job. If you're going to be an acquisitions person, we're going to make you underwrite two or three buildings before we hire you. You have to have systems that allow you to use your time most effectively to make sure some things get done correctly.

Chris Rising

www.chrisrising.com

twitter.com/chrisrising

instagram.com/chrisrising

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