$485 Million in Assets, >3,000 Units, and How Understanding Your Market Leads to Success with Venkat Avasarala
Venkat, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. It’s been a great conversation so far, you have so much experience and you will spend some time talking about your experience in a ground-up development today, and what you’re going through for our listeners out there who don’t know about your background.
Can you give us an introduction as to where you come from, what you’ve done, and then what you’re up to?
Sure. So I live in Dallas, Texas. I’m originally from south India. And I came to the United States back in 2001 to pursue my master’s degree in electrical engineering. After that ended up in, it worked in corporate America for 14 years.
My last year was with a bank of America again on it, nothing with. I gave up the job in the summer of 2018 after starting commercial real estate. As a side gig, I have no idea that it’ll get this big for me. So I started in 2016 doing some commercial real estate and by mid-2018, I quickly realized that look, I got to make a choice.
To go stick to the job and take it stolen the real estate or the other way round. So I chose the latter and walked away from my career, pretty happy. It’s over three years since I’ve been full-time with real estate and I’m just loving it.
Awesome. I’m glad to hear it. And the market has certainly changed quite a bit, in your time in real estate.
I had exposure to, the types of deals that you’ve done. And then also what you’re up to today in terms of, yeah.
Like most people, I started with a single family. I have no idea what syndication is. And I bought I started buying some new family properties. I bought about three properties just before the great recession in 2007.
And then I was like, why did I even buy the foreclosures? They were cash flowing, but the values got shocked quite a bit. Deep discount to its replacement value. There was a foreclosure where I bought for $50,000 built-in eighties in Dallas. And the insurance value would be like 150,000.
And I was like the replacement courage, right? That’s what I wanted. The replacement courage would be a hundred and $50,000 to rebuild that house that I just bought for 50,000. So it stays like that. Why the bed, and then starting 2012. 2011, we had a double-dip recession, right? So 2012 is where I see secular growth because I know that because that is when the wholesaler stopped calling me and now I had to call them.
I said, okay, there’s definitely a shift into them. So I started in 2012, again, restarted buying homes and I about 20 homes. The Eighties, nineties build around the rim of 6 35 is 6 35. It’s a loop actually loop 6 35 in a DFW and did really well. But what happened is that I hit the ceiling of 20 Fannie Mae loans.
So Fannie Mae gives up to 20 loans. There was no such limit before the great recession, but after so many investors walked away from their homes. They limited it to 20, right? 10 per spouse, so 20. And once I hit that, I wanted to scale. I was doing really well on the cash flow. I feel secure financially, even if I lose my job, no big deal kind of thing.
But I definitely wanted to scale. And without any other way, I looked into several other things like laundromats, gas stations, and all that debt, all buying another job. I already have a job. I don’t want it. I want something. Like on the side. So it started that way where I can hire a property management company, a professional management company.
So apartments made a lot of sense. So I started with a hundred unit apartment complex in Norman, Oklahoma, then 120 units in Phoenix in Glendale actually Glendale is a suburb of Phoenix, and then started in Dallas with 360 units and keep buying that. And I bought about 3,500 units, mostly in the Dallas area.
And I already sold like most of those properties, right? I sold about 3000 units, 2000 units just to September, and basically exited the Texas value ad market. But I’m really focusing my efforts on doing value, add in Colorado and Arizona specifically in Denver and Phoenix markets. If I can find off-market properties, I’m no longer worried about how big it is.
Even if I find it 80 units I’ll do it in Dallas. I’ve been buying 200, 300, 400 unit complexes, but the market changed, right? It has to be a true off-market where it still makes an underwriter. An open-ended. Huge amounts of risks. Try to stretch at this time. So I’m doing those deals in Western markets.
I really like Western markets pro-value-add and when it comes to ground-up construction and doing projects in Dallas, Austin, and. And that is billing 300 units for 300 units. I tried to build 300 units in Texas. Otherwise, it doesn’t underwrite really well. And I’m also doing some land development deals in Texas because that land plays the best way to play Texas markets, especially Dallas is this insatiable demand for zone land.
So what I do is that I go by 50 to a hundred acres projects and then develop them. Take it through the city, zoning on it, and then sell it in pieces. We can do really well on that. So these are the. Three kinds of properties, three kinds of asset classes that I’m doing and I’m playing to the strengths of each Metro.
For example, I don’t go try to build a 300 unit apartment complex in Denver because it’s very, it’s hard. It’s swimming against the tide there. And I don’t try to do a value at class value and in Texas also, because whole different reasons. Our taxes and insurance are very high in Texas.
It’s are expensive. Expenses are growing faster than income. So not a great place to do value adds for anyone in Texas, at least for me. There are a lot of other people who do it. So I try to understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of each of the Metro, and I’m playing it to the strengths and taking my investors along with them.
So I have around $485 million for the different projects in the management. And there’s about $107 million worth of equity. I know large checks are just a hundred thousand dollars checks for my masters. So that is what I have done. That’s awesome.
That’s great. At what point, just to clarify, at what point, how many deals have you done when you decided, okay.
I can leave the corporate job to do this real estate. Full-time.
Seven deals by the time. I should have walked away, but look, it’s a bad job. It’s like a man it’s as safe as it’s going to get for you. And I was brought up in that kind of with that kind of mindset where you go to school, get good grades, go work for some big company, and that success, that is how success was defined to me while I was growing up. And it’s hard to just walk away from that just because you started this thing two years back doing some real estate deals. Okay. Let’s leave all this. It’s hard. The shift takes a little bit of time to get accustomed to. But I would have, I should have left a year into this thing again, the market was so good, right?
The market was so good. With values going up. But yeah, about six or seven deals is what I have done at that time. I had around a hundred million dollars worth of assets under management. At which point I was, I felt really comfortable walking in with my day job.
$485 Million in Assets, >3,000 Units, and How Understanding Your Market Leads to Success with Venkat Avasarala
Awesome. So I really appreciate how you talk about understanding the strengths of a given market and deciding your strengths.
From there. And I think ground-up development, in particular, is one strategy that we see people doing a lot less of at least in this kind of space that we’re in. We hear still a lot about value add, you described the process a bit in terms of landed title bed and everything that you’re working on, but that really digs into it.
And there’s. How that all works. So the folks out there can understand, if they’re looking at a business plan, really, whether it’s crazy or if it’s, founded.
Absolutely. So let’s start with the land development, right? So there is this tremendous demand for zoned land, right?
Let me give you an example, right? So I’m doing a 338. A unit apartment complex in Austin in a town called style, just suburb of Austin, 20 minutes, just Austin downtown on highway 35 and we’ve paid $8,500 per foot. $8,500 per unit. Now, when we talk about zone land, nobody’s talking. A dollar per foot anymore, right?
They’re saying the luck, this is zoned to build X number of units. So you pay me this much. So we were we got into a contract and closed on it, but that was pre-COVID pricing, $8,500 a foot, the same land, if I don’t want to build anymore, if I can just, if I just want to sell it and walk away from it, I would get something like $35,000.
So that is the scale of the problem that we’re talking about here, because. That there is, we are all caught off guard. This household creation went through the roof after COVID for several different reasons, people were forced to live together for so long. You can’t go out, you cannot eat at the restaurant and it just puts tremors.
Pressure between people who, a lot are forced together for so long. The roommate’s split-up divorce rates went through the roof, right? Even the gray divorce, people after 50, are divorcing now. And the kid won’t want to live with the family. They want a breathing space, so they want to move up.
So whenever somebody moves out from their existing household while a new hospital gets. So even though our population growth is decelerating, our household creation accelerated during the pandemic and it’s still. So we will call it off our, we don’t keep it a hundred thousand units just sitting around like China does to keep people in it.
It’s always is America is always about efficiency, right? On-time delivery. Anything for you? That’s why, the same thing with the paper towels, right? $20 because we don’t keep them around. Oh, thinking that somebody would need it. We’ll just keep just enough.
So there is the scarcity of this housing because of this household creation explosion in America, which is still going on by the way. And also so now everybody wants to build, and there’s not enough zoned land. So when something is in shark supply, it will iron out. It will even out in the next three, four, or five years.
But today, just like how the paper rolls all for 20 $20, it was on the news. Somebody was gorging and selling it for $20 and people are buying it. It’s supposed to cost 56. It’s the same exact thing that is happening here. When something is in short supply, everybody wants that. Now obviously prices go up. So land play is really good.
It’s something where you can quickly go in and out. And I do that in Texas because Texas cities are very development-friendly and It’s easy. It’s easy to deal with cities in Texas to take a piece of land to them and give them the mixed-use. Nobody’s doing spot zoning anymore and in good olden days, you buy your 10 acres at the corner side, Atlanta, and you take it to the city.
Hey, I want to build it, my family can design it for me. They will do that for you. Not anymore. Now, if you want 10 acres of multifamily, you need to go with 50 acres of flat. And say that. Look, I give me my 10 acres a month academy here, but I’m going to put 15 acres of single-family, 10 acres of townhome, some co some retail, some fast-forward, and then they will approve.
And then you keep the multi-family land and you sell everything else. That’s pretty much how you create a zoned land these days. Or if you don’t want to bail, if you’re not a builder, that’s fine. You just sell everything and you get a premium for the residential. So that’s the business process at this point.
So you go by and also what’s happening is the main four counties in Dallas, Trent. And Colin county, these are the four large counties and it’s, you cannot buy a $300,000 home, newly built anymore. You just, it doesn’t exist. Because land prices have been shared. There’s so much that it’s just not possible.
This is what a new for Texas, especially for Dallas. This was never the case. We always have an abundance of everything, but not anymore. So now what’s happening is that, is this Grayson county on the. And Kaufman called me on the east. Those two are exploring, right? So I’m going there buying land for a dollar, $2, four, and then taking it through the city that the zoning and we can net out really two X, three X, four X on the land on what we paid for the land.
It’s just hard to do it in an apartment complex in Texas, you can buy a hundred. A hundred thousand dollars per unit apartment complex in two years, sell it for 400. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t work that way. But land all day long, right? That’s the value add so that I really digging this land play and I have done one so far and I have two more in the pipeline that I’m about three more actually to do so in, in this area with there’s, there’s money to be made and all of that, but there, in order that for that to be.
Yeah, sustainable in some way, there has to be something. Barrier to entry or barrier to actually do it, so what are the potential stumbling blocks along the way, or really what prevents everybody from knowing and doing this and just, washing out all of the profits? No, absolutely.
That’s a great question.
So first of all, you work with somebody who have done this. Not something, especially when you syndicate, right? I syndicate, I bring my investors into every deal. But before I do that, I risk the deals because problems are easy to handle when there is not, when you haven’t brought investors inside the bill yet.
It becomes really tricky. And now you have to solve the problem and handle investors too. If the problem arises, I’m a big believer is like delay. Bringing investors into the deal, especially development deals. I’m only talking about land development and ground-up development deals and B risks.
The deals. Where is the risk? Will we get it? Will we get zoning? Yes, you are. You put this a hundred acres under contract and you have something in mind, but will you get zoning if you don’t get zoning? It’s not going to work out, you just have to sit on the land until God knows when so you go and talk to the city and get an encouragement letter from them, right?
So you show them what the vision if it aligns with their vision builds. Good boy, go do it. Otherwise, it’ll sit down. No, I’m not going to let that happen. Not in those words, but we can feel that every city has a comprehensive plan, right? So every city has that. Okay. This is the land I got, and this is the vision I have a 10-year vision, 20-year vision, 50-year vision.
And this is how I’m going to use my land, even though they don’t own most of the land, it’s all private land, but they have. And the comprehensive plan is what gives the default zone. So this is ag land. This is on that. This is on that. So now you go and ask him, ask them to rezone Atlanta. Let’s say you want to build a hotel right next to it.
That will say no, I don’t think so. So you had a back off at that point, even though it makes sense to, for other ways, maybe there’s demand, maybe there are employers close by, it makes sense to build a home, but you cannot go against city against their comprehensive plan. So this is the know-how right?
So that is where the most of the. And then obviously, we cannot kid ourselves when we try to underwrite the resale prices of each of these own land. So that is something that you have to work with. And there is no MLS per se for all this land. So you work with experienced brokers who are doing a lot of deals and take their input while you’re underwriting inland, Altman.
The key is to pay attention to the industry especially when you're making investment decisions in real estate.
Those are the two places where you have a lot of risks. So I deal with that before I bring investors.
Interesting. Okay. And I don’t know what’s available in terms of like financing for these types of deals, because of the D completely different story. When we were doing a 50 to 65% they would do that and you get both recourse and non-recourse obviously it’s recourse.
The rates are like three and a half, 4% right now, if it’s non-recourse, it’s six and a half percent. But you get about 50 to 65% leverage on this land. So that’s another great. And banks will really comfortable because they know that this land, as soon as we put zoning on it, it’s, what’s so much more than what we paid for.
And even though they did a 50 to 65% LTC loan, now the new LTC after immediately African zoning, they’re sitting at 20, 30%. So they feel comfortable with the land.
Interesting. How about. Capitalized going into the deal. And then I’m not even sure how DSCR works on this type of debt, service coverage ratio works with this kind of thing.
Cause that’s what they’re going to look at that for a multifamily deal, but there’s a cash flow here.
There’s no cash flow here. What they do is like either they will. It all depends on the experience that the sponsorship team has. They might ask you to. A couple of years of interest or they might make it a recourse or partial recourse, but yes, you’re right.
There’s no income coming out of it. So there is no DSCR basically they will get an appraisal as is. And to be appraisal after zoning and they get comfortable were anywhere between 50 to 65,000. And then you just escrow some amount and then they’re happy with the restaurant.
Okay, interesting. So I really was talking before we hit record.
And we’ve talked to here about understanding your market, especially as it pertains to the local municipalities and people who actually control the zoning and their appetite for new development and especially how that impacts the overall real estate market. Rents flying upward because of, shortage of supply and all of that.
And I’d like to dive a little deeper into the specific markets that you’re working in and the different rules and laws that they have, just to understand how that impacts you. Your business play plan, not say to give everybody a, and it’s like Lapidus’s definition of how everybody, how these different areas see development, but how this impacts real estate investors, business plans.
Absolutely. So see, real estate is bast, right? So you can do land development, ground-up development, even in that you can do multifamily storage industrial hotel. And then you can do adapt to reuse, taking a, buying up all homes and converting to multi-family. There’s just so much that you can do in the real estate space.
It’s a catchall term if you can think about it. So for me, I only want to concentrate on three and I don’t want the fourth one, because I still have only 24 hours in the day and I don’t want to be spread too thin. I want to ask what I’m working on and I want to master the metros I’m working on and the same way.
I have a landfill. Ground-up development of multi-family and value add multifamily. These are the only three things that I do. And if you look at metros there are just so many metros, Dallas is not the only one that is growing. There are just so many, even in Texas, you have four metros, large metros, and if you go to Florida, you’d get another two, three large metros.
I tried to play in the large controls. Metro means I don’t understand these small metros really well. And that’s my I wouldn’t say ignorance, but it’s my handicap. I try to work with something that I know for sure. There’s plenty of data available. So I stick to the main metros, right? So again, there are 20 main metros here and I’d be spread to 10 if I go after everything.
So I selected these formatters, Austin, Phoenix, and Denver. These are the only four metros. So three kinds of asset classes and four grand metros. This is all I play in. This is my sandbox and I don’t try to tread out of it. I might passively invest. If somebody brings a deal and let’s say Las Vegas, I would invest my own money, but I don’t try to them.
Anything outside the sandbox. So now if you look at Texas or Arizona and Colorado, right? That is what we’re talking about here. It’s in Texas. The reason I don’t do value-add anymore is that we do not have state income. So that, that sounds really well. But if you look at who is paying taxes, it’s the poor middle class and the seniors who’re paying a bigger share of state taxes in terms of sales tax and local other local taxes, and more importantly, property taxes.
So basically if you look at why did Ilan must move to. Because everybody else, we are subsidizing his taxes where it’s more like a tech tax in Texas is more like a consumption tax. If you buy something, you pay sales tax and your tax money. If you live in a home, a hundred K home versus a 500 K home, you pay more taxes, it’s a consumption tax.
So if you see, coming, how much would he consume? He means, he might make $50 billion a year, but you don’t consume 50 last. I heard he’s living in a $50,000 home. At mobile home. A little skeptical.
Yeah.
But you see what I’m saying? So in Texas, they made it a consumption tax. So it’s really hard, hit hard for the people who are poor and middle-class and the scene, especially senior folks, right?
Let’s say they’re living in this 300 K home. They’re paying $9,000 in property taxes every year. They just. Yes, we are tough luck. You still have to pay $9,000 a year. You don’t get a break. They’ll cap you at once you hit 65 years of age, it won’t go up, but you still owed them $9,000, but your income went to.
So that this is an issue. And why are we doing all these things too, so that we can subsidize the top 1%, right? I’m a capitalist myself. I’m not that other people. Okay. Tax there is that’s not what this thing at all, but we had to call it what it is. And then I’m not trying to change anything I want.
I want to play to the strengths of the city, right? So obviously I don’t want to do these value, add deals anymore because rents are low people’s affordability to pay. These rents are very low and more importantly, property taxes and insurance and very rough weather and everything. So those are both.
Those are about the line items, right? When you calculate NOI. So we’re looking at a 60% expense ratio. Wow, that is just insane. That is one of the highest so let’s say there is a $200 rent bump. I go do the rehab and I increased the $200 rent at the end of the year. Most of the gains made are lost to higher insurance and higher profits tax.
And I’m seeing actually the expenses are outpacing the income growth. So personally, I’m not going to do value adds in Texas. What are, so those are all the weaknesses, right? What are the strengths? A lot of people move to Texas. Cities are very friendly and now apparently there is a genuine scarcity, even in Texas, we didn’t have scarcity for anything until COVID right.
Land more houses and everything, labor, no problem. But now everything isn’t scary. Scarcity. So I want to play to the strengths of taxes where I know that. Buy some land in a good area, close to a major highway. I know that I can take it through the city, get the zoning I wanted and quickly sell it.
And I know that if I build something, they’ll come that absorption Dallas is the absorption leader in the country. So if you build a 300 unit apartment complex, it leads us a fast in Dallas than anywhere else in the country. And as a developer, that’s a big, important thing, right? Or at some point in building something and nobody shows up, right?
So those are the strengths of the market. So that’s why I chose the Dallas market to do land deals, land development deals, and ground-up dolls. And I’m not going to do well, but on the flip side, I go to Denver and Phoenix. What I see is just ridiculously scares. It scares me in Denver, I just recently bought another property in Lakewood and that city has a moratorium where they call it lake word.
Initiative. That’s the name of that, Gloria, but it’s an oxymoron, then what they’re trying to do is to limit that new inventory to 1% and the problem there is, so you have Denver here, you have liquid ridged between Denver and the mountains. So the mountain starts in a little while. So you’re landlocked there.
There’s not a whole lot of land and maybe there is a reason why they should do that 1%, but that is where I want to do it. ’cause I know for a fact that my competition is not going to grow 10 for Everywhere else. And I can reasonably think that I can hold that property for five, 10 years and maybe do two to three times.
Even though we don’t tell all that investors, so we tell investors three to five years, but if, if we can pull all our money out and then some in two years into the deal, we’re going to show the investors and why, if they agree, we’re going to refund, just keep it. But that is where you should be keeping holding onto the properties because you know about the model.
So there are like Bitcoins, there’s an infinite supply of those, right? The properties are in Lakewood, Denver. So these are some things that you have to pay attention to and play to the strengths of that particular Metro in Phoenix, up until 2008, they were giving out these permits like candy and they built so much and Phoenix didn’t have anything to offer only.
So a lot of investors bought all those houses, not the guys with the jobs over there, and all the investors walked away at the first sign of trouble in 2008 and they got crushed. The home values dropped by 55% in Phoenix, Metro health. So they were like really to get to the heart. And the city stopped giving permits for 10, 11 years.
Now they have a lot of jobs, more and more people pouring in, but now it starts to restart the engine than the stock back in 2008, it’s taken forever and the labor shortages medieval short, it’s making it worse. So Phoenix makes it. Excellent. Excellent place. They don’t have monitors standing up. So I want to build there in Phoenix if the cost allows because it’s very expensive to build.
They still make sense for now, but I don’t know for how long I’m trying to do a 94 unit project in downtown Mesa. And I would buy value there because of the scarcity. So these are things that I think through and play to the strengths of any given Metro and just not go to Willie, Nellie value-add, and this.
Wow. That is, I appreciate you diving into details on each one of those. I find it amazing that the Lakewood growth initiative is actually restricting growth and making the property more expensive. But, if you understand that you can benefit from it and, and yeah just all those things.
So very impressive, great information right now. We’re going to take a quick break for ours. All right, Ben banquette I’ve got three questions. I ask every guest on the show. Are you ready? Yes. All right. Great. First one. What is the best investment you ever made other than in your education? So again, it’s education into real estate.
I believe that time is the most important resource. That for anybody, than money. So I quickly paid somebody to get started in real estate. Real estate is not something that came naturally to me. This is an acquired skill for me. So I paid people to teach me how to do single-family, how to do multifamily ended so very big investment because it expedited my learning.
And the mistakes I probably would have made without that education. But again, I would default to this education, obviously, I, but other than your education and your education, you don’t want to even count the real estate education.
We’ll take that off the table too.
Okay. All right. So then I would say that the, in the people, right?
You hired good people, you pay them and the tools and right. So again, whatever helps me to do a job quickly, efficiently and where I can Delaware if I had to pay money to get that, I’m always up for it. And for that matter, I love toll roads. People hate toll roads. It’s are you kidding me?
I paid 3, 4, 5 bucks and I can get better an hour early. That’s cheap actually. I bought an hour for five, 10 bucks. That’s my way of thinking.
Nice. We had the best investment. Now we go to the other side of that coin, the worst investment. What is the worst investment you ever made? It’s the worst investment I made.
Isn’t it. Placement. Okay. So that was 2014. Oil was up and up all the way until then I was itching to get into the oil. I have, I still don’t understand how it works, how to underwrite, and all that. And I enlisted that just $50,000, not a whole lot amount, but still, at the time it was a lot of money for me.
So $50,000 and they send me like about $2. And they won’t let me forget it. So we need that it’s tax benefit and all that. And it’s some six Wells put together in Bach and shale in North Dakota or something. And I was like, okay the office looks scared. Okay. Maybe it will pan out. I want to forget that, but they won’t let me forget because every month, like clockwork, they sent me $2 via ACH in my bank account.
So every time I see that it reminds me of that, but it’s in a good way. I used to feel heard every time I see that because it didn’t pay me anything nearly what they said, the word. But it reminds me, so my biggest learning from that does not to get into things, which you don’t feel.
That’s, I have no business to be in investing in. I’m not it guy. Didn’t give me an education. I didn’t have any education. How do I know to invest in that? So I just took a guess and it didn’t pan out. Wow.
It would be even more insulting if they mailed you a check every month. Oh, they did.
They didn’t for a while and later it’s probably costing them more. To mail me the check then what the check amount is. So once they realize that this which days yet, wow.
My favorite question here at the end of the show is what is the most important lesson you’ve learned in business and investing? My, key lesson would be to pay attention to the index.
Okay. When you’re getting started. Yes. You can pay somebody to learn the basics, right? To learn the basics, go pay somebody and quickly learn what you need to. But then again, when you’re trying to make investment decisions like where you’re buying, what you’re doing in real estate, and things like that, pay attention to the industry, there cannot be a big team, a better team.
Then the industry, and then here’s what I mean by that. So if you look at, let’s say Cortland or Camden, and we had an apartment industry, right? So these are the big boys of the apartment industry and follow these people, see what they’re doing. And there, they give out a lot of information because they all have investors and all that.
They had to put out industry reports and all that. To see what, they’re, what they’re thinking. What they’re thinking, what they’re expecting the future to look like. So just pay attention to these people and try to follow them, try to follow them, and swear after these big whales. And this is exactly what I did on my very first land development deal in Sherman which is a city north of Dallas.
And I bought 54 acres there. And why, because next door a billion-dollar project came up. Okay. So they probably did some research and all that, and I was able to work it backward and I see that the jobs are coming there, but I couldn’t have arrived at a situation where I would have bought the property all by myself, but I was able to get comfortable buying the piece of property because it billion-dollar project came up.
And then I got lucky after I got the zone. The Texas instruments, which is right. Opposite smack-dab opposite to me, they declared that they are going to build four more fat plants with $30 billion. Opposite my side. Wow. And it was like, wow, this is what happens. So when you follow big money and not these gurus and all that, they’re really required.
When you’re getting started when you’re. Oh, yeah. That is what you need. These mentors, where you pay the money, they’ll tell you how to underwrite an average thing, but then you have to quickly get out of there because they’re not doing deals, not, they are investing a lot of time and resources to, to do research and give us the best advice possible.
Once you know, the fundamentals, get out of those things and just like I did, and then follow the big money, follow the big money. And I think that is the biggest learning I have.
Nice. I love that. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today and for all the fantastic lessons. If folks want to reach out, if they want to track you down, if they want to learn more about what you’re up to or anything like that, where can they find you?
They can go to my [email protected] it’s strykerproperties.com. And you have a contact form. You can email me at D E N Ka [email protected] or reach me on my cell phone at (281) 727-9238, man, give it out the cell phone number. That is a power move. I, yes.
Wow. Thank you so much once again to everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. If you’re enjoying the show, please take a moment and leave us a rating and review on the apple podcast. Five stars. If you don’t mind you guys, I appreciate that so much that helps other people learn about the show, because that helps us rank higher in the apple podcast ecosystem.
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Thank you for tuning in once again. I hope you have a great rest of your day. If you want to reach out and learn more about what I’m up to just go to invest with taylor.com. Fill out the form, take the next steps, and I will talk to you soon. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.
$485 Million in Assets, >3,000 Units, and How Understanding Your Market Leads to Success
About our Guest
Venkat Avasarala
Venkat Avasarala is the co-founder and principal of @raven_multifamily @ravenmultifamily Raven Multifamily.
He is also the Managing Principal & Founder of Stryker Properties. Venkat has several years of experience in strategic acquisitions and overseeing of Operations of large multifamily assets.
Venkat has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from UAH, Alabama and worked for 14 years in IT Domain at several Fortune 500 companies such as PepsiCo, Halliburton, Bank of America. Venkat’s last corporate job is as an SVP in Global Transformation on Operations LOB with Bank of America. Since 2006, Venkat lives in Plano, Texas with his family.
Episode Show Notes
Venkat Avasarala is the co-founder and principal of Raven Multifamily. He is also the Managing Principal & Founder of Stryker Properties. Venkat has several years of experience in strategic acquisitions and overseeing Operations of large multifamily assets. Venkat has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from UAH, Alabama, and worked for 14 years in IT Domain at several Fortune 500 companies such as PepsiCo, Halliburton, Bank of America. Venkat’s last corporate job is as an SVP in Global Transformation on Operations LOB with Bank of America. Since 2006, Venkat lives in Plano, Texas with his family.
[00:01 – 09:30] Opening Segment
- Get to know Venkat Avasarala
- Started from a real estate gig
- Venkat recalls his properties from the past and present
[09:31 – 16:11] $485 Million in Assets, >3,000 Units
- Now, you can leave your corporate job!
- Is your land play business plan crazy or well-founded?
- How to Get the Most from Land
[16:12 – 29:25] How Understanding Your Market Leads to Success
- Delaying bringing investors in the deal may be good for your business
- Let’s talks about lands and capitalization
- Concentrating and knowing only three markets
[29:26 – 40:12] Closing Segment
- Quick break for our sponsors
- Groundfloor offers short-term, high-yield real estate debt investments to the general public. Check www.passivewealthstrategy.com/groundfloor/ to get started.
- What is the best investment you’ve ever made other than your education?
- Good people and tools
- Venkat’s worst investment
- Oil placement
- What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned in business and investing?
- “Pay attention to the industry.”
Connect with Venkat Avasarala through [email protected], Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Give him a call at 281-727-9238. Visit Raven Multifamily and Stryker Properties.
Invest passively in multiple commercial real estate assets such as apartments, self storage, medical facilities, hotels and more through https://www.passivewealthstrategy.com/crowdstreet/
Participate directly in real estate investment loans on a fractional basis. Go to www.passivewealthstrategy.com/groundfloor/ and get ready to invest on your own terms.
Join our Passive Investor Club for access to passive commercial real estate investment opportunities.
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Tweetable Quotes:
“There is a scarcity of this housing because of this household creation explosion in America.” – Venkat Avasarala
“I bring my investors into the deal. But before I do that, I de-risk the deals because problems are easy to handle. When you haven’t brought investors inside the deal yet.” – Venkat Avasarala
