Jeremy Roll Investment Group Podcast

Jeremy Roll from Roll Investment Group on Vetting Syndication Sponsors

Leaving the corporate world to become a full-time passive cashflow investor, Jeremy Roll has gone on to become a figure in the world of real estate. He is the Founder and President of Roll Investment Group and the co-founder of the non-profit organization, For Investors By Investors, the largest group of public real estate investor meetings in California. Jeremy brings in his knowledge and insights about the business by going in-depth about vetting syndicators, deal sponsors, and people that are bringing investment opportunities. He talks about background checks and vetting sponsors, while also showing us what an ideal passive investor is.

Jeremy Roll on Why Investors Should Be Vetting Sponsors

Our guest is Jeremy Roll. He started investing in real estate and businesses in 2002 and left the corporate world in 2007 to become a full-time passive cashflow investor. He is an investor in more than 70 opportunities across more than $1 billion worth of real estate and business assets. As Founder and President of Roll Investment Group, Jeremy manages a group of over 1,000 investors who seek passive/managed cashflowing investments in real estate and business. He’s also the Cofounder of For Investors By Investors, a nonprofit organization that was launched in 2007 with the goal of facilitating networking and learning among real estate investors in a strict no sales pitch environment.

FIBI is now the largest group of public real estate investor meetings in California with over 27,000 members. He has an MBA from the Wharton School, is a licensed California real estate broker for investing purposes only and is an advisor for RealtyMogul, the largest real estate crowdfunding website in the US. He welcomes emails at [email protected], to network or help with other investors and to discuss real estate or business investments of any size. I’ve seen Jeremy speak at conferences. It’s awesome. I learned a lot. Jeremy, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

I’d like to dive into something that I’ve heard you speak about before, which is vetting syndicators, vetting deal sponsors and vetting people that are bringing you investment opportunities. As a professional investor, you’re clearly very good at that. Let’s talk about how you do that. Can you get us started and give us the super basic overview of how you get started vetting a sponsor?

The first thing I want to say is I’ve been investing in these syndications for many years, full-time for over eleven. I was talking to someone and I realized that one of the most important things I’ve had since I started is that essentially if you’re always making a vet on a person or a sponsor, in my opinion, that’s the number one thing you want to look for. The number two thing is the actual property. I live in Los Angeles, South of Beverly Hills. I like to say that if you invested in the best building that was a 100% occupied in the best location on Rodeo Drive but the manager ran it to the ground and you’re giving the keys back to the bank and it’s foreclosed. It didn’t matter that it was the best property in the best location. What mattered is who you made the vet on to manage it.

Vetting a sponsor and understanding who you’re dealing with is the single most important thing when you’re looking at an opportunity. The property is extremely important as well, but I consider it in second place, even though it’s almost as important as the sponsor themselves. If I had to summarize it, what I typically look for is I try to find someone who seems trustworthy, who is looking to underpromise and overdeliver for investors and to build long-term relationships with investors via conservative assumptions and a conservative view on everything that they’re presenting to investors. Instead of someone who is overpromising, making the numbers look good and trying to attract investors by the numbers and they don’t care if they go to a longer-term relationship with those investors. They want to get investors and move on to the next step that they need to. That’s the quickest summary I can give you as to my general philosophy on vetting a sponsor.

It does not matter whether you have the best property in the best location. What matters is who you made the vet on to manage it. Click To Tweet

I’ve seen that in my own experience as a passive investor. A bad sponsor can make a great deal bad and a good sponsor should be able to run any decent deal but a good sponsor’s also going to be conservative and trustworthy and all these other great things. The first investment I made passively in the syndication, one of the sponsors was not trustworthy and took a little extra money from us. That was a rough learning experience. We still made money on it, but it very much could have gone wrong. If you’ve ever read a PPM, it’s 100 pages of, “Here are all the ways you’re definitely going to lose your money.” We definitely could have lost our money and we didn’t but vetting the sponsors a little bit better could have protected us a little bit. When I saw you speak and talk about this, you’ve clearly got a very defined and detailed system. You said, “Let’s get into some of those weeds about how you look into the sponsors.” I remember you saying about background checks and even further, how do we get started vetting those sponsors like the professionals?

A background check is one thing I want to put out there immediately because I talked to hundreds of investors every year and maybe even thousands. One of the most common denominators I find is that the majority of passive investors do not do background checks. They’ve saved me several times over the course of several years. Background checks are really critical. I don’t really know that much about a lot of online services. I use something called TLO, which is owned by TransUnion. There’s another really well-known one called Accurint, which is owned by LexisNexis. Those are the types of databases that private investigators use. In fact, the police use TLO when they’re looking at a suspect. That’s their first step. They’re hard to get access to those databases.

If you cannot get access to those and I can give you a little more detail about what the requirements are and stuff, then you can always hire a private investigator to run the check for you. Granted it will be more expensive, but you’ll be getting some really good insight and probably much more insight than I would have reading it. Number one, it’s always do background checks. Another thing I want to point out, too, you’re asking about the tricks and the actual details of what I get into, I always run background checks on all of the managing members within the manager LLC. I say to each manager, “I’m going to run a background check. I need your name, address and date of birth. Is there anything I should know before I run the background check that you want to let me know of?” Maybe there’s a good explanation for it or something like that.

Two very important pieces to that. Number one is the reason why I asked for the name, date of birth and home address is it’s a bit of a test. I don’t ask for Social or anything like that but if somebody’s concerned about giving me their date of birth or their home address, that’s already throwing up a yellow flag. I’ve got to look into it better and I need to better understand why, for example, because it’s really rare that somebody pushes back on that. Another thing too is that unless someone has a name, like Steven Smith, a very common name, I can run a background check on someone with their name and probably match up who they are by knowing their email address and their phone number. I ask for those pieces information and most of these are also 100% matchup that I have the right person to make sure I’m analyzing the right person. That’s one test that I do on the sponsor.

The other thing that I was mentioning I do is ask them if they have anything they want to tell me. That’s another test where I’m also giving someone the benefit of the doubt, which is fair because what I have found over the years is that sometimes something weird comes up on a background check and you don’t have all the details to understand exactly what it was. It could have been a police stop, it could have been a minor arrest or whatever it is. If the person gives you the upfront look, “Fifteen years ago, I was transporting my gun into my trunk, but I didn’t realize that I wasn’t allowed to leave it in my trunk but it was my gun. That’s what that is.” Assuming they have a license for the gun, that seems to be a reasonable explanation. Sometimes, somebody will not say anything to me and then I start finding stuff because maybe they’re thinking it’s going to come up with five or ten years of information, it goes very far back. That’s another test to see if they’re being completely transparent with you.

I find that if someone who’s going to take the time to explain something upfront and warn you or something, it starts to break down the barrier, “Maybe I could start to trust this person.” Those are a couple of tests I do even within the background check. It goes beyond doing a background check. There are certain things you can do like test them and one of the common themes is I do a lot of testing. I’m talking about reading between the lines, asking them questions, not necessarily because I care about the answer as much as how they’re answering it and other things but to really understand who it is that I’m dealing with.

PWS 15 | Vetting Sponsors
Vetting Sponsors: Sometimes, the answer is almost less important than how they’re answering in some cases.

You’re first starting with vetting the team. Before we move on to talking about the opportunity, is there anything else related specifically to vetting the team members that you want to bring up?

Before we get into the actual opportunity, what I’ll do is I’ll review the documents. I’ll create a very long list of questions, probably send some of the questions via email first and see what their answers are. Then I’ll schedule a call and the point of scheduling a call is to get more details on some of the questions that maybe weren’t fully answered or maybe I want more detail about certain things. The other point of scheduling a call is that I want to hear how people are responding to me. Let me give you an example. I ask somebody why they used a 2% inflation assumption on rent increases for a multifamily deal because that seems a little low to me. If their answer to me is, “We used 2% even though we think it’s going to be 3%, we used 2% to be conservative. We think that we might do better than that, but we don’t want to give investors the wrong impression about what the returns might be.” That is great. That’s the under promise overdeliver that I am looking for.

You’re probably only going to hear that on a phone conversation in terms of how they say it and what they’re saying to you. I can also give you the opposite example, which is I asked somebody, “Why do you have a rent increase of 6% in year one, 6% on year two and then 3% thereafter when you have expense inflation increasing at 2% per year?” Their answer may be, “We’re in a really hot market. We think we’re going to be able to get rents up for the first couple of years and then the market’s really strong, so we should be able to beat expense inflation.” To me, that is not conservative and maybe realistic in the end. They may achieve their goal but they’re not setting themselves up to underpromise and overdeliver. If anything, they’re setting themselves up to that if it doesn’t happen the way they think, they’re going to overpromise and underdeliver. It’s those types of things that I try to ask over the phone. The answer is almost less important as to how they’re answering in some cases.

I do all those types of tests when I’m asking some questions via phone, but I always start with questions via email because they’re more efficient and you’re not going to waste your time on a phone call in addition to putting a bunch of questions together. If the answers are good, then I’ll schedule a phone call and dig into it further. Another great reason why you want to schedule a phone call is the basic question of, “How did you find this opportunity and why do you like it?” You would be amazed at what you can find out with that question. There could be a really interesting story behind it. It could be they are pursuing the seller for four years and there was an older seller and they were waiting for it to come around. There could be a thousand things to answer but you’re going to get some insight most of the time that’s not included in the documents that could be very valuable either way, pro or con. Those are some examples of what I do and how I vet the managers directly before getting into the actual opportunity itself.

If someone does make a fairly, objectively conservative assumption like the example you gave of 2% inflation annually and rent growth annually after the property is stabilized. If that’s the assumption they made in their response to your question, is it possible they could give you a bad answer even though they made a conservative assumption?

I have a good example of what you’re talking about. Let’s say you buy a property at 20% below market rents. Someone is planning on bringing it to market rents in year two, but their argument is that they’re being conservative, maybe they’ll say they’re going to go 5% below market rents. That’s their being conservative. They say, “We’re going to increase rents 15% because we’re going to turn a lot of the property, we’re going to bring it to market rent right away in year one,” and it’s showing in year two. They may be thinking they’re conservative because they’re not going all the way to hit market rents, but the reality is that, especially depending on the type of property. Mobile home parks are a great example.

A lot of people don't realize that it's against the law to sell your shares in the syndication. Click To Tweet

I know somebody who bought a property and rents it for $295 a lot. They said, “We’re going to raise it to market rents,” and they raised it to $420 a lot within a few months after buying it. In mobile home park land, it is at least $3,000 to $5,000 to pick up and move the home into your own on that property and that is not affordable for a lot of those tenants. If someone’s being presented with the rent increase from $290 to $425, their hands are tied because they’ll walk away and leave their property because they can’t afford to move it or they’ll pay this crazy exorbitant rent increase. What happened is the residents called the media, brought them in and show them what happened. Media started making a stink and the state got involved and passed the rent control laws because of this one incident on this one property across the entire state. Because the residents got so upset that they brought the media in and it got the politicians’ attention and they got involved.

Here’s the thing. If their argument would have been that they’re bringing rents up from $295 to $385 because the market is at $425, that’s them saying, “We’re being conservative. We’re leaving $40 on the table. We’re going to be 10% below market rents in year two.” My argument is that it may look conservative on paper but in actual execution, that is a huge How to Run a Mobile Home Park 101 error. You’re taught when you’re learning how to buy these things. They may position it as being conservative but that’s still not okay. Is that what you meant?

Not exactly. I think if you objectively thought going back to your example of an assumption is objectively conservative. We’ll take that as a given. You agree that it’s objectively conservative and you’ve asked the sponsor to justify this assumption a little bit and they give a bad answer even though it is conservative. If you’re testing them about what their answer is going to be and if their answer is, I suppose maybe the only thing if they pulled that 2% out of thin air, even though it looks conservative to an expert in the field, they’re happening to get lucky with a conservative assumption.

If their answer to me is, “Let’s use 2% across all our deals,” that’s really not a good reason. It’s not what you think you’re going to hear. What’s so interesting is that you can read a document, look at a 2% and say, “These guys are really conservative. That’s a really good sign,” but then hearing that answer, they’re not conservative. They haven’t even thought about that number, it’s not even purposeful. That’s almost worse because they haven’t thought about the number. To your point, this is why I’m having a conversation and asking some of these questions is critical rather than reading the documents.

It’s no secret that we’re in a tighter market than it has been in the past as far as finding true value add opportunities out there. I’m sure you’ve seen a few performers from syndicators that were like, “You’re being too optimistic here.” Once you’re getting into the opportunities, are you bringing your own expertise to the table? Are you becoming a market expert on each of the geographic markets that you invest in? Talking opportunities-specific, how do you get into what you are getting?

In terms of vetting an operator, it’s almost like not trust but verify. Their job is to understand what to acquire. When I end up finding a really good sponsor, I end up on the same page with them nine out of ten times. Meaning that if they send me ten deals, I will invest in nine of them, which is not normal obviously. The point is that they end up with the exact same conservative thought process as me and they cover all the same angles and after a while, you realize you’re almost thinking the exact same. It doesn’t happen often but it happens.

PWS 15 | Vetting Sponsors
Vetting Sponsors: Predictable cashflow is probably very appealing to a lot of retired people, but don’t get into that position unless you have that backup cash.

Long story short, I depend on the sponsor to do the vetting of the market and to decide if it’s a good market. If I don’t know the market at all and never been in it before, the first thing I’ll do is I’ll ask them why they liked the market and what they think about the market via phone. Sometimes, it will be great answers, “Population increased this much this year. The economy is building up. We talked to the Chamber of Commerce and we liked what we see,” or even, “We’ve been in this market before, we understand it and here’s why we like it. It has been growing for a long time.” What I always do is ask the question as to why they like the market and understand that better. I almost always fly to the property and walk it before I move forward with a sponsor. I always ask their take on the market at that point. In fact, I have them drive me around, forget being out in the property. You want to drive around the surrounding area and understand why they liked the location and what they saw around the area.

That’s also really telling because if they can give you a good one-hour tour of the surrounding area and they start pointing all this stuff out to you, you know they’ve really thought about this market. Whereas if the answer is, “Here’s this retail strip center, we’re on the corner of Main and Main and there’s X amount of traffic count.” That’s all very important for retail for example but if they can’t tell you that there’s limited retail supply, there’s no more building. “Let me show you where the next strip center is and what’s been going on lately. Here’s our competition. Here’s all the residential that surrounds us. Nobody can build any more of this type because of zoning.” All of these other things are taking you on this tour. You really start to get some insight as to whether they’re doing their jobs. That’s number one.

If it appears as though they’ve done their job, what I’ll do for a specific market to be 100% comfortable is I’ll start up pulling data of how has the group really been. It’s almost like trust but verify at that point. Is the growth really what they say? Who are the biggest employers? Is it depending on one employer or many? What’s the population trends over the past number of years and what does the population growth forecast going forward? What’s the unemployment rate compared to the national average? You can find a lot of these things very easily and very quickly online. At the end of the day, I like to vet that they’ve done a lot of research but then, in the end, it’s a trust but verify type of thing. I’m not an expert in running any of these individual types of properties even though I’m invested across many asset classes in over 70 deals. I’m never going to be able to assess a property and a market as well as a sponsor who’s really experienced. You’re trusting them to do that work and then you’re verifying they’ve done it correctly and that they know their stuff.

If we’re talking to somebody out there who has not started passively investing or they’re thinking about it, maybe they’ve got some stock holdings and there’s been a lot of noise in the markets lately. In your opinion, what’s the right profile for someone getting started as a passive investor in syndicated real estate deals? Do you think only accredited investors should get involved? Do you think you should have a minimum liquidity of a couple hundred thousand dollars? Some of your opinions around the profile of an ideal passive investor to head down this path.

This is my perspective as an investor here. A few important thoughts come to my mind and I also want to give the caveat that my personal focus is very low risk. I focus on 80% to 100% occupied stabilized properties that may or may not add any value at the upside. The reason why I got into all these years ago is for more predictability. I look for more predictable cashflow. When I say more predictably, I may compare it to the stock market, for example. My mindset is all about predictability and lower risk. With that in mind, in terms of how I’m answering, if someone’s looking for a similar profile to that because that’s what I understand, the first thing I’ll say is, if someone’s older and they’re retired or looking to retire, it’s very important to understand that there’s a lack of liquidity in these types of opportunities.

A lot of people don’t realize that it’s against the law to sell your shares in the syndication, I believe for the first twelve months. That’s an SEC law. You’re not allowed to flip your shares. That alone can be an issue. Whereas if you have a family emergency and you don’t have enough savings for example and something comes up three months later, that’s a big problem. Even if the operators are willing to buy your shares back at par, you’re breaking the law by selling them, theoretically. That’s one important thing to consider. Another thing is from a cashflow perspective, when you’re investing in these opportunities, typically I’m investing for five or ten-year period, I’m looking for as predictable as cashflow was possible.

Being married to a syndicator or a team for a long amount of time can be daunting. Click To Tweet

My mentality going into these, because of the lack of liquidity, they’re very hard to sell. They can’t be sold for the first year. You have to be very comfortable with the idea that your money is going to be locked up for a long time. If you don’t have that certainty, you don’t have enough savings to be able to do that with whatever amount you’re considering investing. I would not recommend considering it at all. It’s not realistic to wake up on the third year of an opportunity and say, “I need to sell my shares. I want to sell my shares.” It’s very difficult. It could be a multi-month process and may not be achievable at all because, at the end of the day, the onus will be on you to find someone to buy them. Even if you find someone to buy them, the challenge is that you’re not going to pay for an appraisal for several thousand dollars on a commercial property probably.

What it’s worth is anyone’s best guess. You have to negotiate that often. You’re going to sell it at a discount because people are buying your shares with the uncertainty of even knowing what it’s worth. There are a lot of disadvantages to selling your shares. Don’t put yourself in a position where you cannot be locked in for a long time with that money. That’s definitely one thing that comes to mind. That’s why I was referring to people who are retired or looking to retire. If you need access to your cash, make sure you have backup cash. Predictable cashflow is probably very appealing to a lot of retired people but doesn’t get into that position unless you have that backup cash.

Number two is that when you’re passive, I like to tell people that I consider myself someone who trades control for diversification. The difference to me on being active and passive is really control in exchange for diversification. When you think about it that way, you’re going to be a small piece of a bigger deal. You’re going to have a vote in certain important issues but that vote is going to be so small most likely in terms of you being a very small piece of the deal that it’s not very meaningful. You’re not going to have control. You’ve got to be comfortable being passive and be willing to make a bet on other people. I have a conversation with people all the time who are more active investors that have an active mindset or like to have control. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not the right fit for them.

That’s something definitely to consider as far as whether it’s the right personality. Another thing I would do is that if you’re uncertain as to whether passive is the right thing for you, I would strongly recommend you take enough time to sort it out up front because what I’d like to tell people is that let’s say you’re more of an active mindset and then you put your toe in the water and you go into several passive opportunities. If you decide after the third opportunity, this is not the right thing for you. You want to be more active, now you’ve got two problems.

One is that you’ve only invested in three opportunities and you have not gone for the control. You trade control for diversification. You haven’t achieved the diversification. While the problem with that is you’ve got more risk across very few operators because you haven’t diversified across operators, geographies and asset classes. That’s the three things I look to diversify across. You’re not diversifying enough and your risk is increased on that perspective. Furthermore, it’s very hard to sell your shares as we talked about. You can’t turn around and backtrack on that path and go back to the active path. You’ve got to be very careful and make sure that the passive piece is the right fit for you before you start going down the path.

I will address that as far as how much money to have. First of all, that depends on how much of your portfolio you want to allocate towards these passive opportunities. That is going to be different for everybody. As far as comfort level, I am personally 100% allocated to passive. I have zero ownership in stocks. The one ownership I have in stocks is with a friend of mine who runs a fund that’s shorting the stock market to try to benefit from the downturn. The irony about that is not just the short part, it’s the fact that I don’t even have control because it has an investment in a fund. It’s not even technically directly in stocks. That’s a question of how much you want to allocate. I would recommend going very slowly. Take a lot of time to learn before you dip your toe.

I consider it a very dangerous time to invest right now. Asset prices are very high. I am sitting mostly on the sidelines, not fully but mostly and you don’t want to start at the wrong timing. The funny thing about real estate is that if you invested in a deal in 2010, if it was even mismanaged to a degree and you sold it in 2017, you probably were okay as long as it wasn’t a total disaster. While if you invested in an opportunity that was well-managed but you invested in 2007, it could have been a total disaster because of the timing.

Understand that the timing is very challenging. It looks like we’re right at peak pricing and you may want to wait until there’s a downturn or at least a year or two to learn more before you really decide, educate yourself enough to decide if the pricing makes sense. I didn’t directly answer your question about how much money to have but you can find minimum investments starting in about $25,000. $50,000 is probably the most common easy point defined. If you can’t get diversified, in my opinion, across ten to twenty or more opportunities in $25,000 chunks, I’m not sure if this is necessarily the right fit for you to go down.

When I first got started as a passive investor, I realized that the mental barrier for me would be a little bit lower if I used capital that I’m not going to be able to touch for a while anyway. I made the decision for me personally to start investing out of my self-directed IRA because I’ve got a while until I can touch that money. It’s patient. It’s going to be locked up anyway no matter where I put it so I might as well invest it in this asset class that I’m interested in. I agree that being “married” to a syndicator or a team for a long amount of time can be daunting. I’ve passed on opportunities with really awesome teams who I fully believe in and I believe in the opportunities, but the time horizon was ten years and it doesn’t fit with what I’m looking for. I’ve passed on quality opportunities that I’m confident are going to make money because I wasn’t comfortable with the time horizon. That’s my own experience there.

If you’re not comfortable with ten years, I actually am only comfortable with seven or ten years. Neither of us is wrong. That’s the point. If you’re starting, it’s important to have to learn enough to know what all these parameters should be for yourself before you go in and make a mistake. The learning process is very important and also don’t copy what other people are doing. You’ve got to learn it well enough to understand what is optimal for you and then go and pursue that strategy.

Jeremy, what is the best investment you’ve ever made?

The best overall return on an investment I’ve ever made, which I call a lottery ticket and that’s very rare for me. I’ve probably only invested in ten startups in the last ten years. It goes back to what we talked about in the beginning. When I’m looking into startups, it’s all about who’s running it up. If I have to make a vet on a person that I know has been very successful, I go for it. I invested in a startup. I bought shares at about $0.26 a share in the seed round. Current price as of a couple of years ago is about $13.33. I’ve run the numbers on it and it didn’t make sense.

The return is like the percentage ROI. It was something like 10% or 30% a month for years. The shares got to that point in about two to three years. They’re liquid and I sold a little bit of it but I’ve gotten in for the long run. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it was a pretty amazing situation. That’s the best return I’ve ever had. The most consistent cashflow and best return I’ve ever had are some ATM machines I’ve invested in that have over ten years and they’re still going averaged at about 35%, not exactly but roughly per year. I get monthly checks, so that’s been really good.

The best commercial real estate deal I’ve invested in and when I say best, I mean from a quick return, which was completely unexpected. I invested in a two-storey office building, mostly dentists and doctors in Calgary, Canada back in 2005. We bought it for $5.5 million. We bought it for cashflow at 10% to 12%. We got an unsolicited offer for it. It was either one or two years later for about $12 million. We hadn’t even started the value of it. We basically put no extra money in the building. For some, that’s probably an average deal if they do a lot of value add but for me, it was stabilized. That was a very unique situation as far as unexpected ROI. I’ve invested in so many deals. I can get into a whole bunch of other examples but those are the ones that stand out.

What’s the worst investment you’ve ever made?

I invested in startups that mostly got nowhere and have gone to zero and were a complete write-off. Those were back in 2006, 2007, 2008 timeframe. It’s really bad timing in combination with me not focusing on the right thing, which is not focusing on the people but focusing on the idea. I used to get caught up like a lot of people, “This is a great idea. I’ve got to invest in this idea.” I’ve learned the hard way that it’s all about the people because of a lot of times startups, you’ll pivot. Founders will have a good idea but then they’ll have to pivot because it won’t be quite as well-received as they thought or the market may change. All of a sudden, that good idea at the beginning didn’t matter because that’s not where it makes sense for the market. What matters much more is how they handle and how they pivot as operator and as the founders. I’ve invested in a couple but still a really good lesson on that. From a real estate perspective, I have a long story of one which looks to be going bad but it turned out to be okay because of the sponsor. The worst real estate investment I’ve had has lost about 5%. I was in one foreclosure but that foreclosure, the sponsor transferred everybody to another deal because it was such weird, unique circumstance. There was a 1% risk that they did that for the investors.

Things go wrong sometimes. 5% loss isn’t bad. I know I’ve lost on a percentage basis more than that on a couple of stocks, even on an up market. 5% isn’t bad, especially if it’s only in a few deals.

I am very low-risk. The fact that I haven’t had 50% or 100% loss in a real estate deal, it doesn’t mean that I’m an amazing investor. It’s more that I invest a certain risk profile where it could be 100% occupied building. Getting it to go to foreclosure from that point will take such an immense amount of crazy things to happen that it also has to do with the profile in the deal in investing and not necessarily because I’m the best deal picker ever in the world.

Going for base hits and there’s nothing wrong with that because then you keep making them and you keep playing. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned about investing?

Don't copy what other people are doing. You've got to learn it well enough to understand what is optimal for you. Click To Tweet

When you’re passive, it’s all about who you’re making the vet on. I cannot stress that more. People look at the deal, they think it looks good, returns look really good and the numbers are big but they’re not taking enough time to take a look and evaluate the sponsor and that’s the key.

What is the best way for folks to get in touch with you?

The best way to reach me is definitely through email. My email address is [email protected].

I appreciate it. I was looking forward to our conversation. If you ever get a chance to meet Jeremy or hear him speak, send him an email. It’s totally worth your time. Whether you’re on the passive investing side or the syndication side, he’s got such a wealth of knowledge. There’s a lot that you can learn. He’s more than happy to share. Thank you for joining us, Jeremy.

Thank you so much for having me. I am happy to help anyone in any way that I can. I’m happy to network. If you’re new, if you have some questions about how this works, I’m happy to help. I’m on the phone with a lot of new people or whoever all the time. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

It’s my pleasure. I hope our audience learned something. If you are enjoying the show, please leave us a five-star rating on iTunes and a comment. That’s a big help. If you know anyone that would benefit from the lessons that we bring on the show, send them a link. Invite them and bring them into our little squad here that we’re forming and hopefully we can help them learn something and grow their wealth. I hope you have an awesome day.

Important Links:

About Jeremy Roll

PWS 15 | Vetting SponsorsJeremy started investing in real estate and businesses in 2002 and left the corporate world in 2007 to become a full-time passive cash flow investor. He is currently an investor in more than 70 opportunities across more than $1 Billion worth of real estate and business assets. As Founder and President of Roll Investment Group, Jeremy manages a group of over 1,000 investors who seek passive/managed cash flowing investments in real estate and businesses. Jeremy is also the co-Founder of For Investors By Investors (FIBI), a non-profit organization that was launched in 2007 with the goal of facilitating networking and learning among real estate investors in a strict no sales pitch environment. FIBI is now the largest group of public real estate investor meetings in California with over 27,000 members. Jeremy has an MBA from The Wharton School, is a licensed California Real Estate Broker (for investing purposes only), and is an Advisor for Realty Mogul, the largest real estate crowdfunding website in the US. Jeremy welcomes e-mails ([email protected]) to network with or help other investors and to discuss real estate or business investments of any size.

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About the Host

Taylor on stage

Hi, I’m Taylor. To date I’ve acquired or partnered on over $250 Million in Commercial Real Estate Investments. I help busy professionals invest in multifamily and self storage real estate through my company NT Capital

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Real Listener Reviews

Extremely useful podcast
Extremely useful podcast
@thehappyrexan
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Short, impactful with excellent guests. If you have a full time W-2 job or business and are looking for ways to get involved in real estate on the side, this is for you.
Simple & effective information!
Simple & effective information!
@jjff0987
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This podcast is worth listening to for investors at all levels. The information is simplified for the high level investors but detailed enough to educate seasoned investors about nuances of the business. I recommend!
Awesome Podcast!!!
Awesome Podcast!!!
@Clarisse Gomez
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The host of Passive Wealth Strategies for Busy Professionals podcast highlights all aspects of real estate investing and more in this can’t miss podcast! The host and expert guests offer insightful advice and information that is helpful to anyone that listens!
Great podcast!
Great podcast!
@Owchy
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Love all the information and insights from Taylor and his guest. Fun and entertaining. Highly recommend.
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