Build a BIG Remote Real Estate Portfolio as a W2 with Powell Chee

Busy professionals often wonder if it's possible to build a big real estate portfolio while working. The answer is "YES! But..." And today you can learn what it takes. Powell Chee, our guest on this episode, has built a big multifamily real estate portfolio by syndicating properties while working as a busy professional.

Syndication allows passive investors to invest their capital alongside active investment providers, or syndicators. Powell is one of those syndicators, who brings passive investors into his deals. Syndication is a great opportunity for both parties, because investors can get a preferential position in the cash flow distributions, can directly own an asset, and can partner with active investors they know, like, and trust!

Tune in to learn how a busy professional can become an active real estate syndicator!

Lessons you'll learn today:

  • How to get started
  • How to scale, quickly
  • What assets to buy
  • How to buy those assets

Get in touch:

www.multifamilymasters.com

[email protected]

Other Similar Episodes:

Financial Independence thru Long Term Vision with Scott Price

Scaling to 8,000 Units With Investors with Michael Becker

Powell Chee's Bio:

From 2015-2018, he purchased over 100+ units in Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Memphis. In 2019, he formed a company with his business partner and they worked on their first property together a 208 unit multifamily property in Dallas, TX. In that same year they worked with other syndication groups on a 100 unit apartment in Jacksonville, FL, a 212 unit apartment in Atlanta, GA, a 236 unit apartment in Phoenix, AZ, and a 208 unit apartment in San Antonio. He is a General Partner on all of them doing duties such as sourcing, underwriting, due diligence, raising capital, and asset management. All together in 2019, he partnered on 900+ units spread throughout 5 apartment communities.

He leads MultiFamilyMasters which may be the fastest growing multifamily meetup in the world. In just two years they have grown from one single location in Los Angeles, to currently almost 60+ locations including Hong Kong and Dhubai. He holds two masters degrees and as an awarding winning sales executive he achieved the top honor of President’s Circle Award winner for a fortune 500 company.

Full Transcript

Taylor   0:03  

This is the passive wealth strategies for busy professionals podcast. Thank you for tuning in. We got a great one today for you today, our guest is Powell. Powell has built up a pretty substantial real estate portfolio his general partner got over 1000 doors.

today we're talking about how he got started his old the nuts and bolts of his process of buying his first investment property and then buying his next kind of scale up investment property and how he did that, how he managed that both in terms of the mechanics of doing it and the mindset, the processes, the behaviors that he needed to exhibit to really scale up his real estate portfolio. We also talked about what it takes and what it took him to build his real estate portfolio as a busy professional, those behaviors that he had to put into place just kind of tangentially related to actually building the portfolio.

Things that he had to change to actually make that happen, if that makes sense. you'll understand when you listen to the episode. These are very important lessons. If you want to build up a real estate portfolio as a busy professional, you got to know some of the stuff I'm just telling you.

  Thank you for tuning in. Today, our guest is Powell Chee. For those of you who don't know, I'm a real estate investor, real estate syndicator. I buy real estate with passive investors and share their return. appreciate you tuning in today. Once again, this is passive wealth strategies for busy professionals.

Our guest is Powell Chee. Powell thank you for joining us today. Sure, absolutely. Happy to be here. Taylor. happy to talk with you at 3pm on a Saturday, you're obviously a hustler. For the listeners out there who don't know about you. Can you tell us about your background and you know where you get started?

Powell Chee  1:53  

Sure, sure. Absolutely.

So, a little about me. I started real estate investing back in 2015. I live in Los Angeles myself, busy professional, it's just like like your podcast and wanted to get into real estate investing for the the options of Hey, this I think real estate vesting is really the way to go in terms of the power that real estate has behind it in terms of all the different leverage asset appreciation, depreciation, tax advantages, all kinds of things like that. 

I bought my first single family house in 2015.  and really, that was kind of the genesis of what started with it.

Taylor   2:31  

So. Nice. Nice. you've sent to me the transition in multifamily.  We'll talk about that, but I wanted to first get into that first acquisition you went with a single family, and what was that like? Because a lot of people say that the first deal is the hardest, and I tend to, I tend to agree with that.  tell us about that and what that experience was like,

Powell Chee  2:57  

Sure. um, Like I mentioned, I live in Los Angeles. At the time, I wanted to get into real estate investing probably for a number of years, right? I saw my dad had success with it. he lived, we lived in the Bay Area, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. But around la around the Bay Area, I really thought how am I going to invest in a house where you buy a house, these are like $600,000 houses minimum.

I mean, we're talking like, minimum most of them were higher at that point. I was like, I don't see how I'm gonna buy a $600,000 house. I'm gonna have to work a long time before I can put down a down payment. I'm buying a loan from all kinds of people to get this down payment.

I just don't know how this is going to actually work. I really just put it off. Then after learning, listen to a lot of podcasts, books and things like that and want to get into it. I just came across the idea that you can invest out of state that you don't have to invest near me, right and I thought, Wow, that was really eye opening. I was like, you know what I can do, I can invest anywhere. The first house that I bought was a house in Kansas City.

That was a house that I've purchased.  I hadn't visited the property or anything like that and ended up doing really well, I was really happy with it, it just wasn't really a repeatable process for me. But I was really open to the idea now that hey, I can invest in buying something out of state, I don't have to buy something that's hidden here in California, I can find something across the United States now. now the whole United States became open to me and I started thinking about Wow, I could, I can invest in all these other markets or any of these markets, whatever I choose.

That was kind of like making a big turn in my life in terms of, wow, what , what is available and what can be done.

Taylor   4:53  

I think that's, that's great during that first deal from a distance and what kind of there's a big step. They're What gave you the courage or, I don't know, the, I guess courage is is the best word that comes to mind to, to really extend yourself by that first property, especially sight unseen, like you said, I mean, it's, you're, you're now in the space where you're syndicating buying properties with, with investor capital.

But when you're spending your own money, and especially, you've never seen the property before, and you at least for most new investors, we don't know up from down. yeah what, what brought you that courage and to do that first deal?

Powell Chee  5:36  

Sure. I did a ton of research, right? And I try to figure out like, where do you know how to do this, how people are buying out of state, listen to a ton of podcasts and things like that really got inspired about that. then,

you know, I thought, really,

I want it to go where you feel like you're comfortable. You feel like I've been to Kansas City before I traveled there. I had friends There, so I felt like, okay, it's a good city that I like, and, and so I just kind of researched as much as I could.

then there's, I tell people you get about 90% of the knowledge, but you got to make a leap sometime, right? It's like, it's like riding a bike right? Your first time riding a bike, it's like you can learn about riding a bike, you can read about riding a bike, you can watch people riding a bike, but until you jump on that bike, you're not gonna know how to ride a bike. Are you going to fall? Are you going to mess up? Yeah, of course.

But eventually you're going to learn to ride the bike. Right? And so that was kind of it is like, I got as far as I could, I thought in terms of just knowledge and picking up from books and podcasts and YouTube videos, and I thought, I can do this and it's not gonna be the end of my life, if it doesn't work out it was a $100,000 house, right? So you're putting down at most like 20 25% or something like that, right? I did it in a weird way.

That kind of just, it wasn't very conventional. it wasn't that's why I couldn't really repeat it. But it kind of worked out. It really worked out anyways. But yeah, I mean, once I did that it kind of gave me the confidence that I could do this again So, but I really quickly kind of figured it out that, hey, I can't really repeat the process that I did.

it was because I basically bought it all I basically maxed out a bunch of credit cards, took a bunch of cash off the credit cards, paid in cash off the property, refinance the property, and then paid the credit cards back and I didn't have very much of that hundred thousand dollar house I only paid about $8,000 for that house, instead of paying like 20 $25,000 for the for the house. I realized as I did that, I was like that's not repeatable. I don't do that with my credit, boil his credit cards and everything like that. I was like, that's just not what I want to do anymore.

I really quickly started thinking how I could scale this because I'm not going to be able to buy these houses like that and I kind of feel like I did as much research As I code to make sure the house was good, but I kind of got lucky. then and, you know,

I don't know how often that's gonna keep happening. So I started thinking, Hey, I got a I got a scale, I got to grow faster and, like bigger. That's what kind of led me to thinking about all the things that I'd heard really about multifamily and about buying apartments going a little bit bigger and economies of scale and, and the advantages that multifamily has that may be a little different than single family.

Taylor   8:31  

Yeah, I mean, there are many advantages we'll definitely, we'll get to hear. you said, You paid cash for the house, things like that. Like, why didn't you go out and get conventional financing into the house not qualify, or what were the issues there? Um,

Powell Chee  8:50  

no, the house I think would have qualified for it, but I just would have had to put $25,000 down, right. I knew that like, Well, I don't know if I knew but I was pretty sure that it was gonna be praised for more than it, then I purchased it for so I there was some because it will praise higher, they're going to give me more in terms of the loan amount when I refinance.

it was able to, I think, take like I wasn't gonna have to put in the full amount for a downpayment, right? I wasn't gonna have to put in 20 to $25,000 for the down payment, I knew I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to do less. That's why that's why I paid it all in cash and then I just refinanced it right away. So

Taylor   9:29  

gotcha. Okay, that's smart. then making this transition from single family to multifamily. I mean, a lot of people. a common thing you hear from folks is, yeah, I realized that I'd have to get so many of these single families to really produce any appreciable cash flow or income over time, that I realized I needed to add more and more units and all those things.

It sounds like you had a very similar thought process, but where did you know the next Step really because it's great to have that goal in your mind that, hey, I want to get into these multi families. But as far as the mechanics of doing that, like, what did you do? What did that mean to you?

Powell Chee  10:15  

Sure. 

you know, it all becomes it all comes down to education again. Right, so now I'm looking at a different asset class in multifamily. I have to get educated on multifamily. it was going through a lot of the as many of the free resources out there that were available, right.

learning for podcasts, learning from online, different forums and things like that books as much as I could. then I got to a point where I was like, Okay, I probably need to invest in a sort of a paid course. I invested in some of the paid courses out there.

And they gave me some good

tools to use really what I needed. The tools to use to analyze these deals, because they're analyzing a multifamily is different than analyzing a single family, especially when you start to raise capital and you have different partners involved.

things like that where a single family house, you may not have a partner, he may just be you doing it, but different different models and things like that. having those tools and those resources and things like that have really helped me to, to understand how to evaluate multifamily property, right.

then from there, it's evaluating as many multifamily deals as you can. talking to as many brokers as I could, and calling brokers and, and getting listings and putting them through the analyzer, and going through the whole process and getting a lot of a lot of practice of just analyzing deals, analyzing deals, analyzing deals as much as you can. And

at that time, I was

I had chosen three markets and I thought anywhere between these three markets, I feel pretty comfortable in all three, and I would be willing to invest in any of these three.

I tried to see as many deals that I knew is possible that were that I felt like I could purchase and So I wasn't looking at 200 unit deals, I wasn't looking at 100 unit deals, I wasn't looking for things like that I was looking for something that was in the range of like 500 to $800,000 in terms of the total purchase, right, that's kind of what what what my range was. And

and then that's,

you know, knowing that those were the kind of the deals that are around that I was analyzing, and then eventually, one after you get after you analyze so many deals you start to see some of the numbers start to talk to you a little bit and you start to see like deals and things and think well hey, this one

really looks different. I haven't

seen anything that's like this deal. then that one came about right you happen to see that one. when you get really excited about it, you just kind of gotta jump on that deal like you can find out really quickly if it's still on market or if these numbers are real, can you get more information all that you want to talk to the brokers about?

Taylor   12:57  

So what about that first deal. He'll really set it apart. I mean, you. I don't know how many you looked at before you came across that one, but it sounds like it was quite a few. You know? Yeah, it's what really made it seem different from that.

Powell Chee  13:14  

You know, just without getting into the, to the numbers just yet all the all the pure numbers like the T 12, or anything like that, yet I was just looking at like, age in terms of age, this property was a lot newer than the ones that I had seen that were that were around this price point.

Everything that I was looking at was much older. this one was, it was like 1984, and everything I'd looked at before was like, all the newest was like, 1950. There's your like, other ones are like 1948 1930, things like that.

I was like, Oh, 1980 that's pretty unusual. then you look at like, just just really quickly look at the price per unit. you're starting to think wow, the price per unit. I mean, wow, it's pretty good, right? I mean, when I was looking at it, it was around like $20,000 per unit and I was like $20,000 a unit. Everything I'm looking at before is like for $20,000 a unit, you're, you're looking at a 1920s building with a heavy heavy lift, and all kinds of stuff.

I was like, wow, okay, well, so you just start to see some numbers that start to speak to you a little bit like, Okay, this is around my price range.

This is a lot newer, this is,

looks like the price per unit is looks to be very attractive. you start to think about, okay, well, now I got to, I got to call this broker, like, I got to find out if this is real, right? Is this real? Is this the oldest thing? Is this actually current? Do they have any more numbers? What's the story behind the project? the property. 

As soon as I kind of looked at those kinds of things, just like really quickly, I immediately started to make phone calls, just do a phone call right away and try to find out what's what, what's the deal with it.

Taylor   14:56  

So let's walk through presumably closed on that Deal, let's, let's walk through that. you know that whole process because you need to get the financing and if it's obviously it is not where you live. you figure out the property management situation, how you're gonna run the property, all of that? How do you identify all of those service people beforehand the property manager and everything? Or was that something that you kind of figured it out on the back end?

Powell Chee  15:25  

Yeah, I figured out kind of as we went, right, because so because you don't want to get too bogged down with trying to put together your full team. then all of a sudden, you find a property in a different market, right? Or it's even in the same city, but it's not really the market that that property manager or that anybody that that that they really work on, maybe you're on the south side, and that they're on the north side, and all their properties are on the north side, so it doesn't really work. you're trying to think, well, I don't want to build all that team and then all of a sudden, I have to find out if this property that I like is not a really good fit for that team. Right.

or it doesn't doesn't fit them at all, and you bought it at a different market things like So spend the most time on things that are going to really make the most difference, which is really finding the deal. Right? After you find a deal, which is like after I found a deal, then I can really figure out the financing. Okay, figure out what I need, who I could get recommendations for property managers for, right who I could interview with property managers, what other when it comes to doing the inspection and doing the phase one, this one had to do a phase two all kinds of different things like that you have to do is like, you can find that out quickly once you'd sort of know where the property is and, and put all those pieces together after you've either got the property under Li or maybe under contract or things like that are really close to it, you can start to get into those type of things.

Taylor   16:50  

So you said it was 20,000 a unit and it wasn't the 500,000 $800,000 range. How many units was it? How big was the property?

Powell Chee  16:58  

Yeah, so it was 40 units. it was just a little over $20,000 a door. when I purchased the price when I was negotiating, it was a little higher than that, but I was able to knock some, some off the purchase price.

And so the end end of the purchase price ended up being like 100 820 $120,000

Taylor   17:21  

Wow, for 40 doors. I mean, that is a steal

Powell Chee  17:26  

1984 built around it so it's so it's kind of like, you start to see those kinds of things.

Like, I jumped on that right away and I was lucky right. I mean, I don't know, I guess I say I was lucky. But when I tell people that they were lucky, I don't I don't really tell people they're lucky because if you're actually doing this, and you're actually making the effort and action to do these things and get out there, things like this come your way, right? If you don't do the action, then it just looks like luck.

Oh, it was just lucky. like, what if you're actually doing the action and you're doing that and getting things going come your way, it's just like somebody might tell you something, and then

you wouldn't have come across that

deal if that guy didn't tell you that.

Unknown Speaker  18:07  

But

Powell Chee  18:08  

if you weren't doing it it wouldn't have happened. you need to be doing these kinds of things.

If you're doing a lot of them, and you're really taking that action, these kinds of things come your way. this kind of came my way and made the call to the broker and she said, I was probably the second person that called her. 

I was like, I'm really interested in this and that, I want to see some paperwork on it like, what type of financials do you have? I'm proud of the part of the reason that it was being sold. That was because there were no financials on it. there was like,

it was like,

yeah, there it was going through pre almost foreclosure going to pre foreclosure. It was like there were lawsuits going back and forth and stuff like that. they really like no documents and so I had to deal with documents, right. a lot of a lot of other buyers. There will be like, no documents. Alright, like, I'm out. Hear, like I'm out of here.  um,

one thing that ended up

extremely in my favor is that the lender, the lender for the current, the current owner, or the owner, previous owner, their lender was the same as my lender. they already knew what was going on.

they knew kind of me going into it, and they were like, Look, it'll be probably easier for us to, like, get him out and then we could just replace it with you we can use some of the previous history that we've had on the property, and just kind of use that as a, as a basis for what we would lend to you and things like that.

it really worked out really well for us, in that case, and yeah, that was a huge that was beneficial. Definitely.

Taylor   19:47  

Yeah. Wow. I mean, to go back to what you said before, I mean, people like to kind of put others down and say, Hey, you were just lucky but the world is littered with, quote overnight successes, that 15 years of hard work to become overnight successes in your repeated failures on all those kinds of things. 

absolutely, there is a, there's always a factor of being in the right place at the right time. But you also have to kind of figure that you were in a lot of the wrong places at the wrong time or the right places at the wrong time to get to the right place at the right time.  you made it happen. 

Powell Chee  20:24  

yeah, and you have to be ready to take that action. You know what I mean? Like, there's times I mean, I could tell another store was

really lucky, it didn't really

a really lucky opportunity, again, a lucky opportunity. It's considered luck. But it's one of those things that like if I wasn't there, and that happened to be at that moment, and then I wasn't able to take action on it. It would have just flown right by me. Right? It would have just been in one ear out the other, never heard about nothing, nothing, right.

No, no, nothing of consequence. But yeah, I was you're constantly doing things. You're constantly active. You're constantly talking to people and trying to make things happen, then sometimes These little things just kind of slick low into your ear. then if you can just grab onto it and take some action to it, you can really take advantage of your opportunities there.

Taylor   21:10  

Yeah, yeah. tell us about executing on that deal and executing the business plan. Tell us how you got your financing in place and happened to know the right person. that's, that's fantastic. As far as executing on that, did you? How did you work with the property manager? Do you have any issues with them? Do you still own the property? Like, tell us that whole process?

Powell Chee  21:32  

Yeah, sure.  um when you don't have any paperwork, right, you don't have any t 12. Right. I had like maybe a month or two because, like I said, there was some litigation going on with their previous management and things like that. there was no paperwork that the owner had for me, except for what he was doing in the last couple months, which, so I had the lat I had to handle it really through the tax returns.

I had to base up a lot of office tax returns, which is what the bank was gonna have to do based on what the tax return said, what is his income and expenses on the property? Was he claiming, right? So, as a use of that having the bank being the same bank that I that I use was obviously, like I said, beneficial in that way that they, they already had the mortgage, they already knew about it, they already knew about the property and everything they wanted to they knew he was wasn't doing well recently.

they would like him to, to leave and like somebody else to take over this, right. They didn't want it to just go into foreclosure. That's not what they wanted. it wasn't like the property actually was running. He owned it for 10 years.

he was doing fine with it for 10 years. Then it wasn't till the very end where this sort of thing with the property management happened, the situation that forced him to have to get to the point where he had to sell it and so yeah, lined up the financing. I would tell you, I went through a phase one just like you're gonna have to do like if you're buying a multi family property, which is the environmental reports, right? saw the basically the paperwork on the history of the whole plot of land that you're buying. in that phase one they found some things that they're like look you probably need a phase two, which is actually testing you know going and testing ground water testing radon testing for things like that.

normally that's like a big sort of red flags about Okay, it doesn't pass these tests or you got things that are environmentally not the best on your on your property, just may not you may just want to pass

but we went through it and

went through phase two and came back clean, everything came back clean as they tested the groundwater they tested it for radon, things like that and it's fine, everything looks good. that was those are big reliefs right. a lot of this I had to work with that owner which was good because they knew kind of the situation like they're like he's taken over.

He's not Gonna buy it if it doesn't pass phase one and phase two? Yeah. There were a lot of extensions or a lot of constantly extending constantly standing, but I was diligently working towards getting the property closed.

they were fine with that. But you do want to have that communication back and forth that you don't want to go dark to the seller or the so that you want to have the communication of what you're doing so that they understand, okay, that person is working hard.

if I do need to extend them, I understand that they're not just kind of yanking my chain here and just trying to drag me along. They're actually putting in more money, they're doing work. It's just that they can't force the bank to make a yes or no on this. They can't force the bank to make their appraisal.

Come back tomorrow and then make a decision on it. You know that those are things that are just out of your hand. Then, yeah, eventually I closed on the property, went through and closed on the property, hired a property manager, that was from referrals. I had three previous girls kind of interview three different people on that and then choose one of them. Going through that right now. I still have that. I still have that property. Right.

I still, I would tell you that like right now, kinda like, we'll see what's happening with the property manager. That's still a little. We'll see. But yeah, that's, that's kind of a whole nother story we'll do. We'll do a recap in about six months, and they'll be able to tell you that story a little bit. But,

Unknown Speaker  25:29  

but yeah,

Powell Chee  25:30  

Property management is a huge, important thing, right? You got to make sure you understand who the property manager is, you got to be aligned with them. You got to be on the same page, you got to be on the same philosophy and same communication style, that's probably a big thing that breaks down a lot of times is your communication with your property manager. that's something that you need to

make sure that you're at an alignment with them.

And then as far as what you're expecting, what it is that you're expecting from the property manager, and what are they going to do? You, right? And then in what timeframe those are kind of things that you want to make sure that you understand and they understand. that if you do have to take over or if you do have to get a new property manager, you want to make sure that you're asking them those same questions.

Taylor   26:14  

Well, we'll have to have you back on the show, to talk maybe more specifics about the situation like you said in there, so it's a bit more resolved. do you still own the property? I'd like to fast forward to your acquisitions today. I mean, where do you stand and obviously, you haven't, you're still doing this. What else have you bought? Where do you stand now? You know,

Powell Chee  26:41  

yeah, so right after that, so it took me about a year or two. That was a property I did by myself, right? Just be right. Just I wanted to do it by myself. I didn't want to do it with anybody else. I didn't want to raise capital.

I don't want to enter a new asset class. I didn't want to ask any of my family friends for money or anything like that for this property.

The next one is I did, I was like, hey, like I'm pretty comfortable with this. I've done it now like I can do it. I raised some capital from a small group of investors, maybe just like five of us and we went and bought another 61 unit property in Indianapolis. then that so that took me a year to do that year to do that one.

And then from there, I started getting more involved. looking at syndications. I'm starting to think of like if I want to go bigger, because like, I can see that I can see some issues with where I'm at with the 40 unit 60 unit, I can see some issues of the management and things like that that are difficult at this stage. But I would like to go at a higher stage and work with more people that are experienced as well. Right.

In 2019, I got involved in five different syndications. I was a general partner on five different syndications and we're buying hundred unit properties 200 unit properties. We have a number of different investors.  we have it could be like 7080 investors, right.

we're, the scale of everything is just getting a lot larger. I'm working with a number of different partners where they have a lot more experience in certain things, they have more operational experience, or they have this much experience. you have a much more of a team aspect of this.

Whereas I was a little bit more kind of a lone lone wolf for a while. I start to realize that there's much more power in the team, and especially as you get on the larger properties, there's a team aspect of it that becomes really important, and just a lot more fun, to be honest. I mean, it's just you want to just hang out with people, you want to go visit property with people, you want to take a look at evaluating deals with Brock with people. 

I was able to get involved in a deal in Dallas. I was also a general partner in a deal in Atlanta, in Jacksonville in San Antonio and in Phoenix. all that happened in 2018. 2010 Here we are 2020 it's a little little different right now but, that's kind of the sort of story of what happened to me through real estate investing. nowadays, primarily looking at either syndicating things or JV with partners on like, maybe a smaller deal.

maybe when I say smaller, some like 100 to 150 units, maybe with maybe 567 partners, things like that, and doing a JV instead of doing a syndication. That's something that I'm very intrigued about doing right now. otherwise, I will still be involved in syndicating deals and things like that. So

Taylor   29:41  

nice.  my information indicates that you're, you're still working the W two and you know what, what we have you wanted to ask about balancing these things how do you do that with your schedule, like I said at the beginning of the interview, it's Saturday afternoon here, so that obviously has some thing to do with it. But how do you handle that? Because this stuff will keep you busy?

Powell Chee  30:04  

Yeah, absolutely.  you need to develop some type of routine with yourself, right? So, for me, I happen to be a night person, but I really transitioned to being a morning person. That was sort of a struggle, but nowadays, nowadays, I wake up early.

I have my morning routine that takes me anywhere about half an hour to 45 minutes now. then for a couple hours, I'm really diligently working on the business side of things, right.

trying to do anything that has to be involved with real estate is a thing that I need to get done, because a lot of the properties now are in different time zones than LA. calling them in the morning is already mid day sort of for them, right? So you want to do as many tasks as I can early that involve anything with other time zones, and getting all that stuff done.

Going to work, my job is in sales . I'm out in the field a lot which is good for me because it gives me a lot of flexibility. When I'm driving around, I can make calls, I can take calls, I can do a lot of things, I can kind of work through lunch, I can do a lot of these things that give me a lot of flexibility.

I do have that that sort of advantage for me is that I do have a lot of flexibility with my job and then and then when I come home and just kind of like pound out a few more hours of what else that I need to do that day to I might be at home in work like things like that but try to make sure that I'm consistently working on the business all the time.

trying to put in a few hours in the morning two hours in the afternoon here in there phone calls during the daytime as well. or emails and things like that that I need to make and all the while just trying to you know you know just kind of work around the W two w two houses, it's there. It's you got to do that job, you gotta do it well. But in the meantime, there's a sprinkler. Things, emails, phone calls and things like that for me, I can't, not everybody can. You might have a different type of job or you can't do that, really.

But you probably have some type of advantages, right? So, so if you're, maybe you're a police officer, and you can't really make calls or something while your, your emails like that to while you're on shift, you might have maybe a three or four days where you're actually off or something like that your schedule might be a little different I mean, so you, you could go to try to take advantage of whatever schedule that you have. If you're in front of a computer all the time.

you're able to send emails back and forth a lot faster or texts a lot faster than say, me, I'm on the road. I can't really do that all the time. you just need to take advantage of whatever sort of environment that you are in, that you have and make it work for you. Everybody has something.

Taylor   32:46  

Absolutely. I think that making that progress on a day to day basis is a recurring theme that comes up with the busy professionals who have built their real estate portfolios as a side hustle type of business, it's that commitment to taking daily action. I, I admire that you change yourself from being a night person to a morning person. That's not an easy habit to break. But it's not.

Powell Chee  33:14  

It's not a good one though. yeah, that's good. That's good. Now, I enjoy it now, but yes, it was difficult before. Absolutely. the other thing too, is like,

it becomes important, but once once you start to develop a team, right, because

at this point, I'm not the lone wolf anymore, right. I do have a team and I have several different projects that I'm working on. they all have maybe different team members, right. when you have different team members, you can rely on a lot of different team members who have special skills in in something else that you do, maybe they have operational skills, or they have computer skills and marketing skills or whatever it is, and you can let them focus on on those type of skills and,

and, and just sort of remove yourself from doing Every single thing that you had to do when you were sort of doing the solo thing by yourself.

Taylor   34:04  

Yeah building the systems, getting people in place, I think especially for busy professionals who are not used to managing people, I mean, especially if you're an outside salesperson where your job is to go sell not to manage employees, for the most part. That's, it's a tough skill to learn, but it's a very important one. Yeah,

Powell Chee  34:25  

yeah, for sure. it's as rewarding as you can, it's good to see other people and get excited about what they can do and how good they are at their skills as well too. I like seeing that.

Taylor   34:36  

Good. Glad it's fulfilling. Right now. We're going to take a quick break for our sponsor.

All right, Powell. I've got three questions. I asked every guest on the show. Are you ready? I am ready. Great. First one, what is the best investment you've ever made?

Powell Chee  34:53  

You know, I mean, I love the multifamily wants and everything but really the first one that gets started with that the single family house that I had just getting started was a great deal. You know? A lot of the big syndications that I do now too I really enjoyed them but they're they're pretty new I would say 2019 so I haven't had a lot of history with them yet to really see but they're all doing really well are really excited about and they're really good projects and I'm excited about doing that but that first one you know when you're kind of doing it by yourself and you're you're really scared about hey, I don't know if real estate is right or this is all just scam snake oil people are selling me and things

like that.  Am I really going to be able to invest out of state? I heard people can do it, but I I don't know of many people doing it, those kinds of things. when you take that leap, and it works out, and yeah, you have some bumps here and there but then it starts to pay rent and things like that it starts to feel pretty good.

you think Wow, that's really nice and the property did really well and I was really happy. I ended up just selling it just a few months ago, but it was a property. I really, really liked it and in terms of numbers whose numbers are really good on it if you only spend $1,000 on the house, right, and you're making cash flow, like anywhere from two to $300 a month, right? You see the return, like two or $300 a month on $1,000 purchase.

Powell Chee  36:16  

Yeah, plus it appreciated pretty pretty well.

Taylor   36:19  

That's great. That's great. On the other side of that, I love hearing about the best investment. I almost prefer to hear about the worst investment. What is the worst investment you've ever made? Yeah.

Powell Chee  36:30  

And it's, it's just

After that single family house, I bought another single family house, okay.

it was about the same time that I bought the 40 minute, but I'm kind of at the same time. I bought this one in a Memphis single family house. it's it's it's been a terrible thing this whole time like so it's it's just been rough. Like I bought it probably overpaid for it. The people that sold it to me were probably like a sold out California investor.

more money than it should have been, it should have sold for then had a lot of work, they ended up kind of just doing half of the work and then signed it dissolving their company because it just went bad. I had to find my own property manager to kind of come in there and clean it all out and try to fix it again.

they did for a while and it was okay and we got a renter in there and then eventually we decided to evict the renter, evict the renter and then now he has to go through a lot of the changes because he has to upgrade a lot of different things in it.

put more money into it. this whole time I'm trying to think like, can I sell it? Can I sell it for just like a breakeven point or just kind of maybe make $5,000 and sell this thing and it's like no can't right like not yet. Like, oh man, that's not good. i still have it still working on getting it fixed up.

It was about to get fixed up and was about to be ready. then I don't know if the rain came and then it's like mold and air, we have an insurance claim on it, and then all caps. we have weighed on weight on the construction side of it. it's still not rented. I don't know, it's probably I've owned it for I don't know how long I've owned it for now, three, three or four years or three years or something like that. I mean, it's probably been rented sick now.

I've been rented a year of those three years and yeah, so and plus i put more money into it so it's, it's one of those things like yeah, it's it's not as, as a disaster, but it's, hopefully one of these days I'll be able to like sell it, get rid of it and move on from it. 

Taylor   38:37  

One of those ones, you can't wait to get out of fat pain. Yeah. My favorite question here at the end of the show is what is the most important lesson that you've learned in business and investing?

Powell Chee  38:50  

So I think the most important lesson that I've learned and and really talk on is is really the power of the partnerships, really, when you start networking with people and you start Seeing what

what you can do together.

It's, it can propel you so much faster than doing this by yourself. Like if I stuck there and did this by myself, I would only have these four units. I would have nothing else if I didn't have any partners. But I was able to bring in some partners, a small group of partners to buy my next one, right.

then I was able to network and find other people that were involved in real estate and, and really sort of put myself in a position to be a general partner on these syndications. That was, that was another group that I joined and like, that's, there's a lot of power in that right.

the power of the partnerships and the networking there. It just could really propel you a lot faster and a lot farther than you even thought. I mean, if I was to look back in 2018 and say 2019 I think I'm going to be in one syndication I would have been very happy.

But then the Via 2345 it's like well, how you know that's that's like that would have just like In my mind about that, but I really wasn't able to happen unless I formed those partnerships and those friendships and things like that.  I mean, when you get into multifamily, and just like with any other business and things like that, you really it's really dependent on how strong the team is.  you're always constantly looking to improve your team looks like that.

That's what my advice to everybody is to really think about the power of partnerships.

Taylor   40:28  

I love it. I love it, pal. Thank you for joining us today telling us about your journey and building that tailor that builds passive wealth. If folks want to learn more about you, where can they get in touch with you?

Powell Chee  40:42  

Sure. There's probably two best ways to do it. I'll give you my email is [email protected] and that's multifamilymasters.com  that's my email. It's probably easiest honestly if you're on Facebook to friend me and just Send me a message on Facebook. I'm on there a little bit more than checking

emails all the time. I just got bombarded with emails. The other thing is like the group I run as a multifamily masters, check them out online. It's a meetup group. That's really I'd like to call it the fastest, the fastest growing Meetup group in the world, but I want to say the universe or the galaxy, but it's growing extremely fast, right? We have over 60 chapters throughout the whole United States where you have two that are global.

we started with just one here in LA and now we have so many chapters all over and so nowadays with COVID-19, we're online, but in general, we like to meet in person

meetups and so it's a great thing to be involved in that as well. So

look for me there.

Taylor   41:48  

I love it. I think in person meetups are a great way for anybody to grow their real estate investments and most successful real estate investors out there are typically very avid networkers so that's fantastic. Well, thanks once again. Thanks once again for joining us today. I really appreciate it and take it some time. Had

Powell Chee  42:09  

a great time. Had a great time.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Taylor   42:12  

Me too. It's everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. If you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts a very big help.

If you know anyone else who could use a little bit more passive wealth in their lives. Please share the show with them and bring them into the fold. Thank you for tuning in. Once again. I hope you have a great rest of your day and a great week and we'll talk to you on the next episode. Bye

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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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