How a Busy Engineer Scales a Real Estate Portfolio with Austin Curry

Austin. Thank you for joining us today. 

Thanks for having me, Taylor. 

It’s been a great chat here. I feel like you and I could probably talk for hours upon hours and probably not find much that we disagree about for our listeners out there who don’t know about yourself and your background. Can you tell us about what you do in your business and how you invest in real estate?

Sure. So my name is Austin Currie. I’m based in LA. I’m a mechanical engineer by training and I invest and syndicate multifamily and mixed-use commercial and residential real estate. So I have a small team. I look at a lot of deals in the Southeast largely Atlanta and North Carolina. As well as some stuff here in LA.

And we’re just getting started. I’m about five, or six years into my journey. Started in Chicago, then a lot of learning and I just looked for opportunities to connect with folks like Taylor on podcasts, like these, to build a brand and build, deal flow and grow the network. 

Awesome. Can you tell us a bit about your portfolio and the types of deals that you’ve done?

I’m sure we’re going to dig more into that in our conversation. 

Yeah, absolutely. So I started with a duplex in Chicago and then from there and I’m sure you’ll have more follow-up questions about deal specifics, but I’m just running quickly through my track record. I did the duplex in Chicago, and I did a quad for the partner.

That was my first partner deal managed both of those. And then in 2020, we syndicated our first deal in Atlanta. So we did an eight-unit property in Atlanta and the vine city neighborhood. We had some funny stories about all those properties. And now we’re under contract on a short-term rental opportunity also in Atlanta, in the same neighborhood, walking distance from the Falcons station.

And then lastly, one of my business partners manages a small construction company here in LA. So we are opportunistically looking to take advantage of California had some new laws passed to allow you to build up to four units on any single-family lot. Of course, lots of rich people are very upset about that’s another topic.

So we’re looking to build some supportive housing. Co-living. Type or styles of project constant single-family lots. So that’s, what’s in the pipeline for us here at home.

Awesome. Great. And first I want to dig into, ask it’s a broad question, how do you make the time?

How do you make it work? You’re a, at least at this stage, when we talk a busy professional, you’ve worked at startups throughout your career. How are you finding the time to do you know, all of these deals and continue to scale your business, build these partnerships, shoot, and be on a podcast with me right now.

I, how do you make it work? 

Honestly, I think I’m still systematizing that if you will, so it’s looked differently at every stage of my process. So when I started, when I was managing the smaller multi-families in Chicago it was just old school. Cause I was going into an assembly plant and working a full eight to 10-hour day.

And it was just grit and grind. It was upon the phone early going by the properties early, going by the properties app for work nothing fancy or call it well thought out about it. And then after struggling through that, I ended up hiring an associate to help which was an interesting hack.

I couldn’t afford the property manager for just a two-unit building. I hired someone who had never done it before and spun it out as a mentoring exercise, which is the, say if that was worth it or not, but, but so now. That was the start. In the middle, it got a little bit better.

I started working with partners, obviously for an eight-unit property. We have property managers and then the one where we’ll bring online, I’m working with a partner that has several Airbnbs in his portfolio currently. But to answer your question now, I worked from home most days, which is hugely helpful and I’m just incredibly Disciplined or dictatorial with my time.

So everything is scheduled on a calendar. My calendar tells me, that I probably wouldn’t know when to eat. I didn’t look at my phone. It tells me when to do everything on a calendar and a task list. So my favorite items are events and a task item And with those two things, I feel like I can conquer the world.

So nothing incredibly sexy, but that’s what I, that’s what I got for you

Hey, it’s a system. And a system that works and can be improved upon is, exactly. I think what we all need to, conquer the world to use your phrase. Then you mentioned not being able to really afford a property manager on that first deal.

I think a lot of people run into that, especially early on. And I would imagine there’s been, you’ve had some mindset shifts about the importance of property managers and having margin and the concept of a quote-unquote affording, or being able to afford a property manager. Whereas I would imagine you felt you couldn’t afford it before but maybe now you probably feel you can’t afford to not have a property manager.

If you all pardon the double negative, you tell us about any of those mindset shifts that you’ve had as you’ve learned by doing. 

Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a big one. So it’s the cost of a bad system or the cost of bad is what I learned. That was my tuition, if you will, is having cause along the way, I’ve also had a fire property manager.

So I had a really bad property manager for one deal and I kept them because they were quite affordable and the other options looked more expensive on paper. They were more expensive. But once I was finally fired. The immediate improvement in rents collected and turnover time and cost to turn units, of it, shot up dramatically.

And so the biggest lesson I’ve learned is just, to fight sunk cost fallacy, and understand the costs of poor work which are incredibly high. And so I guess to your question, What a two-unit, it is always going to be hard. You’re going to really crush your profits. So the property manager, but maybe the strategy is either scale quickly or short-term rent one of the units.

Does that bump your income? So high? The thing was at the time, I didn’t know how to underwrite deals when I bought my first property. So I really didn’t even know how to look at the levers that I could turn like I’ve spent so many years really approaching perfection with underwriting. At least these basic deals.

Like now, when I look at a problem like that, I have a huge spreadsheet and I’m just turning 10 different dials to figure out how to make the deal work in a manner that works for me. So the deals in Chicago. It works for me is going to be, to have someone managing it. So I had to figure it out using those tools.

Absolutely. That’s that engineering mindset, right? Look at the numbers and how can the numbers work and how can the business plan work now, if we can I’m curious about your evolution on underwriting and learning about underwriting from that first deal to the deals that you’re doing now, obviously you’ve you have a system now you’re, really.

Approaching it as a business owner, rather than, I don’t know, somebody that’s just trying to do a deal. So you tell us about that, the evolution of your mindset and, on that topic of underwriting and how it went from, I guess I’m curious how you even approached looking at that first deal and then how that’s evolved to how you look at deals today.

Yeah. I think. There are so many resources on the internet, but a lot of the more social ones, like the Instagram personalities and whatnot, make it all look so easy. And so I’m very much the opposite of risk-averse. I would say. I saw when I saw, when I was reading, doing my reading on real estate investment and this and that, and back in 2015, I was like, of course, that.

Like people way less smart than me, have figured this out. So I kinda jumped in, I did no analysis, but they didn’t know how to, I put, three and a half percent down on a property that only costs 150,000. So my exposure was pretty well. And I pretty much got my lunch eaten on that deal.

That didn’t go well. So I, that was my, that’s what I called my tuition to get in the game. And after that, As I was exiting the Chicago properties, the second one really went quite well, the quad. And when I was exiting, I was also transitioning to syndicated and I spent years just consuming everything I could consume.

Like I was pretty deep in analysis paralysis, to be honest, but I had the. So from 2016 or, sorry, I bought the quad in 2017, from 2017 to 2020. I didn’t buy new deals. I operated the two, of the six units I had in my portfolio. And then it was just input consumption, podcasts, books, papers, networking. And in 2020, I network to the point where I had a team of people, I was interested in working with. And one of the guys was working for a private equity firm, real estate, private equity firm. So he was rather overqualified to work with someone like me, but we hit it off. Our demographics are the same age, same interests, really excited about the mission of what our firm is today.

And he was the first lens. Like the first person, I talked to looking at deals, underwriting them, and sending me models to look at, to digest as a part of that jesting and deal. So looking at something other than a listing and from there, that was the point where I was like, this is the answer.

This is what I am missing. This is what has not happened in my first two deals that caused me a lot of money on my first deal. And from that point, I was like, I have to learn how to do this. And I’m an engineer. So like I do calculus in my real job. I was like, I can figure out, or I can figure out a spreadsheet as addition, subtraction, multiplication here.

Like I can figure this out. So from there, it was a lot of times like spinning models with him, creating models, passing them to him passing them back. A couple of online courses and just going as deep as I can on understanding the professional way to do it and seeing the difference when I post a deal from that angle, when I suddenly, I was the shark in the water versus the goldfish if you will because I feel if you read it Instagram post, And then you go do a deal, like you’re jumping into a pool and you think you’re a shark, but you’re a goldfish, right?