Anton Ivanov is a US Navy veteran, real estate investor, and entrepreneur with a 40-unit rental portfolio across four states. His portfolio generates over $20,000 in monthly passive income and requires less than one hour a week to manage. In addition, he is also the founder of 2 real estate software platforms: RentCast and DealCheck.

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Transcript:

Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host, Charles Carillo. Today, we have Anton Ivanov. He is a US Navy veteran, real estate investor, and entrepreneur with a 40-unit rental portfolio across four states. His portfolio generates over $20,000 in monthly passive income and requires less than one hour a week to manage. In addition, he is also the founder of 2 real estate software platforms: RentCast and DealCheck. So thank you so much for coming on the show today, Anton,

Anton:
Thank You for inviting me, Charles, great to be here.

Charles:
So Please give us a little bit about your about your background, both personally and professionally prior to getting invited or getting involved with real estate investing and getting involved with and why you kind of before getting involved with those two real estate platforms as well.

Anton:
Sure. So I kind of going back probably 15, 20 years, I, I joined the US Navy active duty at an early age, pretty much right after high school. Did a little bit of college and then went straight there. You know, at first I would say when I was in my early twenties real estate wasn’t too much on my radar. I did get into personal finance kind of investing, you know, your IRA 401k, like the basics that, that they always teach. You started budgeting, kind of building my personal finance situation, if you will. And then real estate wasn’t on my radar until actually my parents passed away pretty suddenly at a young age. And they had a condo that they used to live in in California. And I basically was stuck with that property you know, after their, their passing.

Anton:
So I was actually deployed in Japan. So I wasn’t even living in the States at the time. You know, I was in the Navy kind of doing my thing. All of a sudden, I have this property, I’m like, oh, man, what, what should I do with this? You know, should I sell it? Should I try to manage it? I really didn’t have any experience, you know, buying real estate, managing real estate. I kind of was familiar with it, obviously, but, but nothing in detail. So I was thrust into this a little bit, if you will ended up kind of talking to a few folks. My mentors, if you would, at the time, older people, they, they said, Hey, why don’t you just keep this property? At least for now you know, it’s, it’s probably not gonna be bringing in a lot of income because California is a tough rental market.

Anton:
But, you know, you can always, when you get out of the Navy or move back stateside, you can kind of reconsider what you do with this property, live in it or rent it out. And, and that’s what I did. That’s exactly kind of how my journey into real estate or my real estate portfolio, if you will, started. I, I ended up keeping that property, renting it out. And over the, the next few years you know, it kind of trickled in a little bit of cash flow every month. Nothing life changing, but it did open up my eyes to what real estate can do as a passive investment vehicle, as a wealth generation vehicle. And, and kind of gave me, you know, a little push to, to get into more of it down the line.

Charles:
Yeah, I think every investor has that property that they make the decision, well, to quit real estate investing or to move forward with it. And that was for me, my second property. And the first one was tougher. The second one, I kind of knew what I was doing a little bit more, more than the first one for sure. And that was like, okay, now I see like how this, how this works. You know what I mean? And I see all the benefits with it, and you kinda, you kind of see it from the whole thing from doing it before, and I think it’s real powerful. So it’s great that you had that so early on in your career.

Anton:
Yeah, I think real estate is kind of a very hands-on I would say endeavor or, or, you know, even career if you wanna make it, that it’s, it’s, you know, I meet a lot of folks that they’re like, Hey, I want to get into real estate. How do I get started? You know, I’ve read a million books, blogs, whatever. And it’s really, you know, owning, buying your first property, whether it’s like a personal residence that maybe you rent out down the line, or if it’s an actual property that you buy to rent you know, you get, you know, maybe inherited it from your family, folks, parents, like, like, what happened to me? I think you learn so much more doing, you know, that first property, going through the buying purses, going through the renting, managing process that you will, learning a lot of books, you know, magazines, whatever you you wanna read. It’s, it’s a very hands-on investment. And, and I think once you get into it, do your first deal, first couple deals, you’ll quickly both get the hang of it and realized like, Hey, is this for me? Can I do this long term? Or maybe, you know, I I’m just, I’m just not cut out for it, which is okay too, right?

Charles:
Yeah. And you’ll have a, I mean, everybody knows people that have that person that has a horror story as a landlord and doesn’t, you know, and was gone after a couple properties. Maybe we’ve purchased properties from people like that. But it’s, yeah, the education and the education piece I find different. ’cause The people that are writing books and are educating you, for the most part, they’re in a whole different stratosphere of real estate investing where you might be buying a, you know, CC minus property and they’re giving you information and a guideline and a guidebook for buying BB plus properties, newer build properties, larger properties, and they don’t always mesh together, you know what I mean? They’re in a whole different kind of ballgame by the time you’re getting in there. So it’s kind of difficult to follow people that are that many years ahead of you or that forget or don’t really know or don’t have those properties anymore that they start it with. So it’s doing it yourself obviously is the way that you’re gonna get a lot of scars. You’re gonna lose money and different things, but you’re gonna learn lessons. But as you, you know, like I said, with my second property, it was cash flowing from the beginning. It was, you know, it was set up much better than my first one, and I kept both of them. But it was something that you have to learn from doing. Abso

Anton:
Absolutely agree a hundred percent.

Charles:
So before we kinda get into your the real estate software business, because I imagine that was brought in by you building out a real estate portfolio. Let’s talk about like kind of your current real estate portfolio and, you know, what is your real estate investment strategy? Obviously you’re not a full-time real estate investor, it’s a part-time job investment for you. Let us know how that kind of looks for you.

Anton:
Sure. So yeah, I’ve always kinda looked at real estate as an investment strategy, not necessarily as a career strategy. And I think that, that there’s no right or wrong way to go with real estate. You know, for me, my wife, it has always been you know, we had our little IRA, our 401k, our equity portfolio, you know, stocks, bonds, that sort of thing, kind of the more traditional investing. And then ever since that first property that we had as a rental, we also decided, hey, we wanna have a real estate component because I think it’s a very unique you know, kind of investment vehicle and strategy, not only to help you diversify from equities and other investments you may have, you know, kind of add additional asset class to your portfolio. But it also is pretty unique in the sense that it can help you build both your wealth and net worth.

Anton:
You know, kind of your, your paper wealth, if you will, through property appreciation loan pay down. But it can also start generating cash flow from day one, like you said, if, if it’s a good investment. So it provides both cash flow appreciation which you don’t see a lot in, in kind of, for example, stocks, you know, a lot of stocks and even growth focused index funds, they tend to appreciate in value, but then not necessarily provide you that cash flow. So if you, you know, kind of go through the first growth phase, you’re typically focused on appreciation that you have to reposition your portfolio to focus on cash flow. With real estate, you pretty much have both from the get go. And you can obviously kind of skew your portfolio either way, depending on your preferences, but, but I think it’s kind of unique from that perspective.

Anton:
So yeah, so once we once myself then my, my, my wife at the time, future wife, we moved back to the state side. We kind of decided, hey, we, we want to expand our real estate portfolio. I think our initial goal was something like on the order of 50 rental units that we wanted to have, you know, 10, 15, 20 years down the line. And we kinda work backwards from like, Hey, this is how much cash flow we think we need to retire, or at least live comfortably on, you know, what is the realistic cash flow that we could get per unit? And that kind of arrived as to about 50 units. And that’s kind of still our goal today. You know, we’re, we’re trucking along, we’re at 40 right now, so not too far from 50. And, you know, hard to say where we go from there, but, but right now that’s still a good goal.

Anton:
Now, in terms of kind of strategies, we’ve honestly did quite a few different ones. I’ll, I’ll touch on them briefly. So we, you know, the first property I kind of described our actual property that we bought ourselves was a duplex that we house hacked. If you’re not familiar, house hacking I think is a great way to get started with investing, especially for like military folks or you know, people who travel a lot, move around a lot. It’s, it’s, you basically buy a multifamily unit, live in one of the units, rent out the other unit or two units if it’s a triplex or, or three units if it’s a quad. This allows you to take advantage of owner financing. You could put a lower down payment, you know, you’re there to oversee the property but you’re still collecting rental income. In fact, you, if it’s a good, you know, do a house hacking kind of duplex or triplex, sometimes you can get your rental income to pay for pretty much your mortgage, all of the expenses, so you’re living, you know, rent free at a property with your tenants paying for everything.

Anton:
So we went from that. Then we did some turnkey investing out of state. You know, the reason we kind of went that route is because we were in southern California at the time, it’s a very tough market to build a portfolio, especially 50 units. You know, with the home prices there being so high, you need a lot of capital, a lot of money for down payments. You know, if you’re trying to buy 10 units in, in the next 10 years, we’re talking millions probably of, of dollars of capital that you need. We decided, hey, this, this is probably not very realistic. We we’re definitely won’t get to 50 units, so we start looking out of state. And I kind of developed a market selection strategy where I focus on a lot more on linear kind of your quieter markets. They tend to be a lot of Midwestern cities where they may not necessarily experience high growth spurs like your coastal cities.

Anton:
But at the same time they’re more stable. There’s better rent to price ratios, meaning you’re not paying, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in, in property value, but you’re still getting very good rental returns. So we bought a few turnkey properties in Alabama and Georgia. And then more recently you know, kind of once we got more comfortable with out-of-state investing, we transitioned to just focusing on a single market for us, that was Kansas City, Missouri. Again, I looked at a lot of macroeconomic factors affecting that city. You know, it’s, it’s not like a super sexy city. Like, it’s not popping like Phoenix or Vegas was 10 years ago, but it’s a very strong linear market. Good job growth, good population growth, which I think are keys to kind of being a successful long-term rental investor because you want to see the property values go up, you want to see the rents go up.

Anton:
You don’t want to see them stagnant because over time, you know, you’re gonna have inflation, you’re gonna have rising expenses, so you need the increased rental income to keep up with that. Obviously, build your cash flow. And then at the same time, you do want property values to go up, because that’s a great component, as I mentioned, of real estate investing, is that equity buildup. So Kansas City pretty much met all the criteria. We, we worked with a local team there, you know, we built a team of property managers maintenance crews kind of insurance agents, brokers, that sort of thing. I actually flew out there several times kind of to, to meet with all the folks we’ve ended up working with. And over there we started buying more multifamily property. Again, this came from our goal of 50 units.

Anton:
You know, buying 50 homes is a lot more work than buying, you know, let’s say just a handful of fourplexes or even a couple, like 10 unit complexes. You can just get much, many more units in a single transaction. So you kind of kick in a little bit of economies of scale. So we st we stuck, we stuck with multifamily, a lot of fourplexes there. It’s, it’s kind of a great market for that. Not every city has, you know, fourplexes a nice area. Sometimes multifamily is kind of in, in not so nice areas that we tend to avoid. And yeah, we’ve been very successful with that. That’s how we got to, to 40 units. You know, we would look for usually off market kind of value add multifamily properties not complete tear downs that, that’s not our forte, but properties that are maybe dated need some cosmetic work, maybe had a, you know, an out-of-state landlord that just neglected them a little bit, hasn’t been raising the rents, hasn’t been keeping up with the property conditions.

Anton:
So what would pick them up? A lot. Again, a lot of it is off market, so we can get a good discount on the property values, and then we’ll come in and over time rehab the units as the tenants move out, kind of update the appliances, the kitchen, the bathrooms. Usually again, I would, I would call this cosmetic work, and then we can raise the rents up more to the market values and start collecting increased cash flow, you know, kind of build our equity again through some sweat equity as it’s called, when you’re improving property condition. And, and yeah, so that, that’s kind of the gist of where we are now. I would say for the next, you know, at least five, 10 years, that’s what we’ll probably continue is kind of the, you know, probably Kansas City, probably still multifamily.

Anton:
And in recent years as kind of market conditions became a little more challenging, we haven’t been buying as many properties. First there was, covid brought a lot of uncertainty. I I wasn’t actually sure what was gonna happen with the market. And then after that, I, I just felt like, you know, the prices continued to rise. A lot of the properties are a little overvalued, and then combine that with really high interest rates nowadays is just tougher to find good deals. Still possible, just not as many as, as probably five years ago. So we focused a lot more on operation improvements, kind of efficiency, working to minimize our vacancies improving those rents, because I think once you have 10, 20 plus units, there’s a lot to be said for actual you know, operational improvements that you can make that’ll have a significant, you know, double digit percentage improvements to your cashflow and profit, as opposed to just saying, Hey, I just want more and more units. A lot of times it makes sense to focus on what you already have and make smaller, you know, incremental improvements that would kind of pay dividends long term.

Charles:
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Long-Winded

Anton:
Answer. Sorry, <laugh>. No,

Charles:
That’s perfect. That’s great that you got into everything. One question I had is, because you are doing this part time, and I think you know, when people say passive investing and they’re actively buying real estate, I feel that’s kinda like silly. It’s as best as I feel like you have, it is a semi-passive type setup and which I love. It’s great. And that’s when I’ve had small portfolios of properties in different areas that were managed by a property management company. Can you tell us a little bit about kind of how your, how you’re overseeing your current real estate portfolio? Like, what, what is kind of your team look like on the ground? You went into some of the different contractors that you have and stuff like this, but obviously you’re not the middleman on a lot of this between different parties. So tell us a little bit about that, because that is something that’s difficult, I think, for some real estate investors as they’re growing their portfolio to be able to put their people together, you know what I mean, and have them issues. And then you kind of like get an email or a text afterwards saying that, Hey, we, you know, we changed out this hot water here that was leaking, and you didn’t have to go all these different people back and forth on the phone, right?

Anton:
So, to, to me, again, real estate you know, throughout our investing journey, I had, you know, my career first, then my, my, my own business, my own company that I run now. So that has always been my kind of full-time occupation as opposed to real estate, because real estate for us has been more of an investment vehicle, not a job, you know? And, and not to say that you can’t make real estate kind of your full-time gig I just always you know, suggest you look realistically at where you can make pretty much the most money for your hour, for, for your own time, right? So if it is real estate, maybe you get into flipping, for example, to help you generate some of that capital and then invest that into rental properties. I’ve met people that do that with great success.

Anton:
For me, it was more, Hey, I can make better use of my time if I work on my own software company, if I work on my career, and then take the money that I make there and invest it in real estate. So that’s kind of where, where, where our head sat, where what made more sense for us. So from the get go, I knew that I didn’t wanna spend time specifically on property management because I think that’s probably the most time consuming other than like, deal acquisition. That’s the most time consuming part. And it’s actually not a very good paying, you know, part because if you look at how much property managers actually make, you know, it’s typically eight to 10% of rental income. And if, if you actually look, you know, at a property that’s, I don’t know, making a thousand dollars a friend a month, we’re talking like you know, 80 to to to a hundred dollars that they make a month, it’s not a lot of money.

Anton:
You know, they’re able to scale because they have a hundred, 200 units. But for you to self-manage, unless you kind of really want to do it or you have a small scale local portfolio, I think maybe it makes sense for us, it did, it, it was out of state. It was a lot of units. And, and it’s, I I wasn’t going to be, like you said, you know, fixing toilets, managing tenants. So I would say the key, you know, to answer your question, how best to approach it obviously you need to build kind of that initial team. I would say the two biggest individuals or companies that, that you should find are first is a realtor or a broker. So a person who can help you buy the properties. And, and you want a very knowledgeable kind of, you know, honest, good communication person or, or a team of, of kind of agents that can actually guide you through the market, especially if you’re not familiar with the market, answer your questions very forthcoming you know, kind of the basics of what you want to work with.

Anton:
I always recommend getting referrals from other investors as opposed to just googling or finding kind of a blind company. So actually, you know, network may be on BiggerPockets locally in your local real estate groups. Find those people, you know, see who they use, who they recommend fly out or, or go drive, meet this person, you know, have a little informal talk lunch, whatever, coffee with them, you know, explain where you want to be, make sure that your kind of goals and, and your situations align. Because for example, if it’s an agent that doesn’t really work with investors much, they mostly represent homeowners. They’re not gonna be familiar with if you say, Hey, I want a cash on cash return of x, I want cap rate of B, that they just may be curly familiar with those terms, but that’s not their forte.

Anton:
So find an agent broker that’s actually specializes it. When it comes to property managers, I would say probably out of, you know, five property management companies, like, there’s probably three good ones. Like, that’s kind of the ratio I’ve seen. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of property managers and you know, a few of ’em, maybe half are just not, you know, not that good. They tend to, I feel like, be larger, you know, more like national companies multi-state companies. They may have hundreds of units per, per each individual person. They just don’t spend a lot of time on each unit, on each property owner so that you kind of can get put on the back burner and neglected a little bit. I personally prefer a little smaller local company, so maybe that operate within a specific city and also that operate within your specific asset class.

Anton:
So for us, for example, in Kansas City, this was multifamily when I was looking for property managers, a I got referrals from other investors, friends that I knew in that market. BI specifically looked for multifamily managers because that was the property class that we were buying. And CI was very you know, I had a list of very specific questions based on our investment strategy. For example, I knew that we were going to be buying value add properties that needed some work, needed some rehab work. So I wanted to find a property manager that can also be a project manager or a general contractor, if you will. Or even if they had their own maintenance and rehab crew, which we ended up actually finding that they can do in-house, not every property manager can do that. Sound will straight up say, no, I don’t manage rehabs.

Anton:
I don’t even get into that. You’ll have to find your own contractors. So if you go that route, you have to be realistic. Well, you’ll be on the hook for managing rehabs, or you need to find a third person, like a general contractor to do that for you. For us, eventually we were able to find a property manager and kind of actually work with them a little bit to, to hire a few more people on their team you know, to kind of fit the model that we were doing, which is, again, buying, you know, a little dated, somewhat distressed properties, rehabbing them fixing them up. Nowadays, we basically have essentially our own, you know, contracting teams, our own rehab crews that our property manager has for us. And there are other clients that know exactly what we want, know the fixtures, know the cost, know, you know, which aisle at Home Depot we buy our tile and, and flooring and all of that stuff.

Anton:
So the process is very ironed out. Obviously at the beginning you’ll have to kind of work with the property manager, and I would tell kind of every perspective owner not to be afraid to get a little more involved, especially in the first year or two of operation, especially if you’re doing rehabs, you know, kind of not micromanage, but but, but check a lot of stuff. Like look over the, you know, the costs, look over the analysis, look over what materials they’re using, where they’re buying and ask them to make changes as necessary because it’s, it needs to be kind of a dual relationship, not just them doing stuff how they see fit. And also not you just telling them like, Hey, here’s exactly how I want stuff to do. It’s more like, I would say a mutual thing where you give some input on how you want things done.

Anton:
They have some processes that they already have that they obviously use for your properties, maybe with some modifications based when you tell ’em. So initial work kind of took a little bit of time. Again, I flew out there a few times. We would actually go to a unit with our property manager, with our rehab guys. We would say, Hey, this is kind of the checklist of how I would approach this rehab. The items I would replace, we would go over the budget. And then over time, I didn’t have to do this every time, right? Because we had a standard checklist. We had, same for like leasing. We had a standard set of guidelines that I always wanted them to use for leasing. They knew kind of, you know, where I stood on pets or smoking or, or whatever, the little nuances.

Anton:
And then over time, they just used them. And what I, another thing that I would do, and I still do, would be regular checkup calls. And I think this is essential, especially for large portfolios. If you have a property manager with five, 10 plus units, call ’em every month. Just say, Hey, you know, if you guys don’t mind, which they should not mind, you know, if they push back on this, I would say it’s a red flag saying, Hey, let’s do a phone call every month, beginning of the month, you know, whatever for first Monday or something like that. Let’s put on the calendar and just get on the phone with your actual property manager or whoever’s overseeing your portfolio you know, run through your checklist, say, Hey, how, how are the vacancies going? Are we having issues with renting the units?

Anton:
Are, are they sitting on the market? Maybe we should adjust our you know, target rent a little bit. How is the maintenance going? Rehabs, just kind of run through them. Make sure that everything is going smoothly. Because I think for a large portfolio, you need to treat yourself as basically the CEO, you know, whether you’ve ever been a CEO or not, you are now in charge, you know, you have multiple units, you have multiple people managing, working at, overseeing the units. And you as the owner, you’re essentially the CEOA good CEO does not go and do the job of each individual p person because you hire them to do that job. So a good CO doesn’t micromanage, but a good CEO kinda looks at the trends, kind of the overall picture. And if there’s any inefficiencies, any kind of, you know, bigger systemic issues going on in, in this area may be leasing or maintenance or maybe advertising the, you shouldn’t be able, you shouldn’t be afraid to step in, kind of, you know, dig into a little bit, understand what the issue is, and kind of brainstorm solutions for improving that, then communicate that to your property manager.

Anton:
And then from there, hopefully it kind of gets back on track. But then you monitor that, you know, as the months go on. So I think if you can establish like a, a mutual kind of trust relationship, but also a, you know, a good working relationship where you’re able to provide feedback to your property managers and other members of your team I, I think, you know, it’ll be a little bit of work upfront for the first few years, but then you know, nowadays I can probably talk to our property manager a few times a year on, on our existing properties. I don’t even have to do the regular monthly phone call because I know that, that they’re super on board and kind of on the same page as far as what I want done and how I want things done.

Charles:
Yeah, that’s great. That’s a, a lot of great information for someone that wanted to set up a portfolio themselves of buying properties and really step back from the day to day and have a a team that’s able to handle that, which is one of the things that I think steers most people away from becoming real estate investors. ’cause They don’t know if they can, they want to get to that as soon as possible, but like, you already have a little bit of scale of units, which makes it much easier to get there. So if you had all these requirements and you had a fourplex, they might not, you know, that property manager might not feel that they have enough, you know, making enough from this relationship to do that. Whereas now you have 40 units, it’s now a, you know, they’re getting a sizable monthly check from you for helping you and keeping you happy and keeping you as a client long term.

Anton:
Yeah, no, that, that’s a good point. And again, obviously you have more leverage as, as your portfolio grows, right? Like you said, four units versus 40 units is a big difference for a property manager in terms of income. So I would say, you know, if you do find a good property manager, if you vet them, get good referrals, you know, they have a good reputation among real estate investors, you probably will be pretty good. Even, even off the bat, even if you just kind of said, you know what, you guys just do what you typically do. I, I’m not gonna go in there and give you very specific requirements. And that’s not kind of, I’m, I’m advocating either, right? A good property manager should have a lot of different processes in place. So I think a lot can be said for doing that initial selection, kind of interviewing, vetting the, the pro the property managers, not just picking the first one you come across on or the cheapest one.

Anton:
Even you know, so if you do a good job vetting, I think probably, you know, nine times out of 10 or something like that, you will be just fine. You know, you know, to, to get go, you might have to do some things yourself, like maybe contract management, right? If contractor management, if, if that’s not what your property manager does. And then as your portfolio grows, I would definitely kind of you know, make sure that you communicate with your property manager if there’s something, some problems or some changes that you wanna implement.

Charles:
Yeah, that’s a lot of great information. The best property management companies and or contractors I found is all through referrals, not just not from brokers from other similar landlords in that area and finding, yeah.

Anton:
Yeah. I a hundred, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Charles:
It’s like you’ll get stuff from brokers and stuff like gets from brokers even. I hate to like, you know but it’s, it’s just like you’re, you’re not getting a lot of, some of the stuff you just get and you’re like, they’ll send you I’ll get some money. You’re just like, no, this is, or, you know, this just doesn’t fit what I am, you know what I’m doing. And you, they haven’t used them much before. And getting referrals from people in the trenches, quote unquote, is really is really, it speaks volumes about what you’re getting. And also finding, like you said, local product managers completely, I doubled down on that. Like if there is as entrenched for decades in that market, you know what I mean? And they know the rent.

Anton:
Yeah, they would know the area as well. Correct.

Charles:
They know everybody in the town hall first name basis, they have it on their phone you know, all this stuff. And it’s it, it, this is what you’re paying for. You’re not just paying for them to click rent and to call their handyman to fix the, the, the faucet or whatever. I mean, you’re paying them also for their knowledge in the area saying, rents are at a thousand. Can we go to 10 35? No, we can go to 10 20. That’s where we are. Okay. So then I know, and that’s what I’m paying for. I don’t want want, I don’t want you to like say, yeah, we’ll go to 10 35 and then I can’t rent it for two months. You know what I mean? And you’re like, well, if you just, you know, if you just told me what I should have done initially, or is this a good price on roofs?

Charles:
Because they’re dealing with roofers all day long. So if you have a third party roofer that comes in, obviously they’re not gonna have their own roofing company most of the time. And you’re like, what is this? They’re like, yes, a similar property two miles away from you. This is, you know what I mean? Then you’re like, okay, so now I, you know, it, it, it helps you save a lot of time because you’re bouncing it off someone that actually has knowledge. You know, social media’s great, but you’re bouncing a price of something and someone’s responding from four states away that maybe doesn’t own any property compared to someone that’s integrated into the, the area and knows exactly all the players and contractors to deal with. So long-winded on my end, but that’s kind of the praises of what you’re saying about property management. ’cause It is what keeps everything together and makes everything run smooth.

Anton:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. And I would just add something I kind of mentioned earlier is there is a big difference between a property manager who manages single family homes and kind of a plus neighborhoods versus a property manager who mostly manages, you know, 200 year 200 unit apartment complexes. So I would make sure that you’re matching property managers, agents, brokers, but especially property managers that that kind of fit, you know, what the asset type, the building type, the property type, even maybe the neighborhoods that you’re investing in, you know, so if, if you want to buy fourplexes and up or 10 unit complexes, find a property manager that has a bunch of them, or maybe that’s their specialty, you know, any property manager probably tell you, oh yes, we’ll, you know, we’ll manage your 10 unit apartment complex. But if this is the first 10 unit apartment complex they’ve ever managed, I guarantee you there’s gonna be some learning on their end, some little friction and hiccups, because there’s little nuances that, that are maybe not evident to them or to you at the beginning. So ma you know, match yourself to the actual property manager in terms of the properties where they’re located, the types of tenants that they’re familiar with. You’ll just be better off, you know, ’cause you’re probably paying about the same amount that, that they’re, they rates are very similar, but find one you know, like Charles said also, that that has the expertise that that was referred to you that that kind of really matches what you’re trying to do as well.

Charles:
Do you have money sitting in the stock market? And you’re worried about it or worse. You have money sitting at the bank, not keeping up with inflation. My name is Charles Carillo, founder and managing partner of Harborside Partners. And since 2006, I’ve been investing my money and my family’s money into income producing properties. These are real assets, real properties with real addresses that produce real cash flow. At Harborside Partners, we provide passive investors who love real estate with a turnkey investing solution. If you want to put your money to work in real estate, but can’t find deals, don’t have the time to get funding in. The last thing that productive people want to do is manage real estate. We find the deals. We fund the deals and we manage the tenants, the termites and the properties. Partner with us at investwithharborside.com. That’s investwithharborside.com. Go to investwithharborside.com. If you love real estate, you like the idea of passive income and believe that income producing properties will appreciate over time. Go to investwithharborside.com. That’s investwithharborside.com.

Charles:
One last thing on your portfolio before we kind of get into your software quickly and then close up here. And you mentioned it that you started investing through turnkey. Turnkey is something I’ve never done, but you touched on it quickly and you seems like you went off and started building your own portfolio. Can you tell us you know like really what your experience was with turnkey? What was good, what was bad? And because there’s investors that probably find that to be the easiest path to building a portfolio themself.

Anton:
Yeah, so turnkeys, they do get a bad rap. And I would say there’s definitely a lot of dishonest, or maybe less than honest, you know, turnkey companies or providers. To me turnkeys was always just a, a different acquisition strategy right. And, and that’s all. Like, it’s not a magic like, hey, you get a great property for no work. If, if you think it’s akin to buying like an index fund or something like that, meaning you buy it, forget about it, it, it’s growing for you, you’re gonna be disappointed if you kind of look at it as just, you know, a little bit different way to acquire properties as opposed to normally. So normally, you know, you would find a market have to build a local team presumably, right? Agents, property managers find properties in that market, maybe distress, maybe off market, you know, buy ’em, rehab them, rent them out.

Anton:
And then you’re, you know, the property owner and you go into the management phase, right? Turnkey properties takes a little bit you know, saves you a few of the steps. Presumably a company is in the local market, they are finding all the properties, they’re rehabbing them, and then they’re selling them to the investor sometimes already with the tenant in place. So you’re kind of skipping the part where you have to build a big local team. You’re skipping the part where you have to source your own deals, you know, off market or distress. You’re also skipping the rehab part. The rest of the process kind of still applies, you know, basically is every, you know, area or market where turnkey properties are going to be advertised or sold at a good area to own long-term rental properties? No, in fact, probably most are not.

Anton:
So you still need to research the market. You still need to research the neighborhood where the property is you know, is the rehab that the company performs going to be? Absolutely a hundred percent. You’ll never have to fix anything in 10 years. No, you, you know, they, they do some form of rehab. You know, you’re still gonna be responsible. Stuff’s still gonna break from then on. So I think the keys, you know, with being successful with turnkey companies and my personal experience has been good. Like the, they’re probably not the best deals we’ve ever bought, but we still own a few turnkey properties that we bought 10 years ago. They’re doing great. They’re appreciating, the rents are growing you know, they have good tenants in place. Looking back, does it really matter if I bought ’em, throw a turnkey company or myself?

Anton:
I probably missed out on a little bit of kind of initial equity. You know, meaning a turnkey property will be probably sold at market value, so you’re not gonna get any discount. So, you know, looking back, maybe I bought a property for a hundred thousand from a turnkey provider. I probably could have bought it for and rehab maybe for 85, you know, 90,000. So I would’ve had a little bit more initial equity. But once you own the property long term, the kind of the operating period, the, the actual, you know, rental period is what matters. So, you know, it honestly does not, it, it doesn’t become as important how the property was acquired. What, what is important still, whether you’re buying a turnkey or not, is that you research the city, the market, the neighborhood where the property was purchased, you know, it’s, it’s a good growing kind of area where prices are appreciating, values are appreciating which it happened in our case because I did do that research on the markets, on the neighborhoods, instead of just blindly going the turnkey website, finding the property with like the highest returns, you know, I don’t know, sorting them by cash, on cash return or, or whatever by the cash flow.

Anton:
I think that’s the worst thing you can do is if you just approach, you know, buying turnkey properties across different markets, akin to like purchasing stocks or something, you’re just looking for the best performer. You don’t even care what industry they’re in. You don’t care who’s managing it. Same with turnkey properties. I’ve seen some investors, they will just get a giant spreadsheet from a provider properties in different cities, different states, they don’t even look at that. They’ll sort it by cash flow and say, you know what? I’m gonna buy the top two or, or one you know, that’s setting yourself up for failure because A, you don’t know where the property is located, you don’t know what’s going on with the market. A lot of times the turnkey properties will kind of skip over all of that. They’ll just focus on the numbers because that’s what sells, you know, to the end buyer, which is you the investor. But if you research all of that, and then again vet the turnkey provider, obviously, because again, some of them will kind of do subpar rehabs, try to hide major issues you know.
Anton:
Look at their reviews online. Sometimes you can find it, some forums like BiggerPockets or Ask ’em, Hey, can you send me some contact info of other investors who have used you? Preferably the ones that have owned the properties for five plus years, because that’s when the big problems start to appear is not initially, initially everything’s probably gonna be good, but then later on and then also vet the property manager if the property is already rented and there’s management in place, do the same vetting you would do for a property management company t hat you would do normally, but for this property management company, that’s basically you’re gonna get, you know, because you buy the property. And again, it could be related to the turnkey provider, it could be just some random company they used. But if, you know, if the property management company start looking into this, it’s raising some red flags, not, not good reviews, can’t find anybody, whoever was happy with them as an investor, like that’s another red flag, you know?

Anton:
So I guess bottom line is is I would just approach turnkey properties as kind of another acquisition channel. You know, you have your MLS like you’re looking on listing websites. That’s one way you can work with wholesalers or other off market channels, or you can work with turnkey providers. It’s, it saves you a little bit of time. It costs you a little bit of extra money because you’re, you’re not gonna get a discount on the property value. It could be a good way to purchase and acquire, especially out of state rental properties. But I think if you’re skipping that initial research into the market, into the actual companies that you’re working with and if you’re kind of thinking that, hey, you know what, they’ve done all the due diligence and I don’t have to do anything to save me time, I think you might be in for a little bit disappointment and, and some, you know, some problems down the road because again, it’s, it’s, there’s some markets and providers that are just not good.

Anton:
And, and if you don’t kind of focus on that because once you buy the property, you are the owner, the turnkey provider pretty much has nothing to do with it. You know, there might be some, I don’t know, guarantees or something that they have in the contract, but ultimately you’re the owner, you have this property, you’re responsible for it. So from that day, it doesn’t matter how you acquire the property, all the same kind of, you know, management and, and other decisions that they still apply. So that’s my not so short answer on that, <laugh>.

Charles:
No, that’s great. That’s a lot of great information. Yeah, I have a lot of listeners that have messaged us before asking about turnkey. I’ve never invested, I’m not a turnkey investor, so it’s, it’s one of those things, I’m, I don’t have any information for them to help them. So that’s a lot of great information that I can point them to. As we’re kind of wrapping up here, you, you founded those two real estate software platforms, deal check and rent cast. Can you explain you know, what they do, why you founded these platforms and how they’ve assisted you in becoming a better real estate investor?

Anton:
Yeah. So I know we’re kind of running a little long, so I’ll mention them really briefly. And then if you guys are have more questions, you’re always welcome to go to our websites and check ’em out. So the two platforms that we own is, the first one is deal checks been around for almost 10 years that’s focused on property analysis. So obviously a key part in buying properties is you know, they say you, you make your money in real estate when you buy, which really means you have to research the property, the cashflow projections or your profit projections for flips, for example, to make sure it’s going to be a good deal long term, actually make you money you know, improve your financial situation and not be a burden, because otherwise, why are we buying this investment property? So deal Check is an all around platform that assists investors with analyzing rental properties, flips burrs you know, rehab projects, wholesale deals multi-family properties, a a very wide range of real estate investments.

Anton:
And we’ll walk you through the whole process of helping you, you know, understand what your purchase costs, rehab costs will be, what your cash flow will look like, as well as what your long-term projections are going to be in the future to see. So you can plan your exit strategies and how much profit you will actually make from the deal. So you can try deal check for [email protected] or you can download the deal check iOS or Android app on your mobile device. Either ways you know, it’s, it’s a great platform. We have hundreds of thousands of users using it. And then our second platform that’s a little bit newer is specifically geared towards landlords and rental property owners. It’s called Rent Cast. Again, you can start with it for [email protected]. And Rent Cast helps you first analyze rental markets.

Anton:
So if you would like to see like, Hey, we’re the rental projections in the market, are the rents going up or down stagnant? Again, I think it’s very important for a good rental market to be appreciating both in values as in rents. We have a whole market analysis tools in there, and you can also analyze and track rental rates for individual properties. That’s a key component of those cash flow projections, because if you overestimate how much a property will collect in rent, you know that that affects your whole bottom line. So rent costs, you can look up rent estimates, rental comps for any property, as well as track your portfolio so you can see how your rents have progressed versus what you’re charging to see, Hey, maybe it’s time to bump up the rents a little bit. So rent cast.io, again, both are you can start using them for free. There is very nominal upgrade fees if you’d like, like the full feature plans. But we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of users using them. And we’re, I use ’em myself personally, both deal check and rent recast for all property analysis, all deal acquisitions because I just think that’s such a crucial part of the real estate investment you know, cycle is to make sure that, that you’re actually gonna get a profitable investment before signing that contract.

Charles:
That’s a lot of great information there. Is there anything else that you wanna leave with our listeners with other than those two websites, which we will put into the show notes?

Anton:
Sure. Charles, I’ll, I’ll say my, kind of my best piece of advice that I always give regardless of what you’re doing, but especially with real estate, is don’t be afraid to start small. It’s very easy to listen to an interview with myself, with other guests that you guys have on the show saying, Hey, I have 40 units, some people have 200 units. You know, I’m buying these huge apartment complexes. We didn’t start that way. And, and it’s, if anybody tells you that they’re maybe exaggerating, you know, maybe lying a little bit or maybe they got lucky, but I think most investors start small. You know, start with your first deal. It could be even the house that you personally live in and then decide to rent out. I think that’s a great way to start in real estate. Maybe you house hack a duplex like me and my wife did.

Anton:
And then move on to multi-family properties. As we touched on at the beginning of the podcast, real estate is a very hands-on practical, I think endeavor and, and task. It’s very hard to learn everything from books or podcasts or you know, articles online. But once you do that first deal, maybe it’s not, you know, gonna be your best deal, actually probably won’t be, you’ll probably make mistakes, but you learn a ton. And kind of every deal you do from then on, like Charles said, his second house was, was much better than his first. I can relate to that. We’ve, we’ve incrementally improved probably on every deal in every property that we’ve purchased because you learn so much along the way. So don’t be afraid to start small, you know, buy that first property, buy your own home, you know, even if, if, if you’re currently renting, buy a little duplex to house hack. See how that goes. And then let kind of the natural progression take, you know, take hold and, and over time, you know, before you know it, in 10 years you might have 40, 50, you might have 200 units. And then kind of you look back and be doing this podcast with Charles and, and telling other people to not be afraid to start small. Right,

Charles:
Exactly. That’s, that’s the plan. The a lot of great information there. And the other thing too is that, you know, when you’re starting small real estate’s really a buy and kinda weight investment strategy versus other ones. When the wealth is made and you hear these stories, it’s people that bought, they had an inkling, they had an idea about the area, the property, whatever it is, and then they looked at their property price, you know, decade plus down the road and they go, wow, you know, this is, this is what happened to it. ’cause You’re not something that you can easily keep track of. So right. Thank you so much for coming on today. A lot of great information. Listeners, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We’ll put all the links into the show notes and looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future. Anton, definitely

Anton:
Charles, thank you for having me.

Charles:
Hi guys! It’s Charles from the Global Investors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you’re interested in get involved with real estate, but you don’t know where to begin, set up a free 30 minute strategy call with me at schedulecharles.com. That’s schedulecharles.com. Thank you.

Announcer:
Nothing in this episode should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Any investment opportunities mentioned on this podcast are limited to accredited investors. Any investments will only be made with proper disclosure, subscription documentation, and are subject to all applicable laws. Please consult an appropriate tax legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Syndication Superstar, LLC, exclusively.

Links and Contact Information Mentioned In The Episode:

• RentCast Free Forever SignupUse Code BESTDEAL for 20% Off
• DealCheck Free Forever SignupUse Code BIGDEAL for 20% Off

About Anton Ivanov

Anton Ivanov is a US Navy veteran, real estate investor, and entrepreneur with a 40-unit rental portfolio across four states. His portfolio generates over $20,000 in monthly passive income and requires less than one hour a week to manage.

Anton is also the founder of two popular real estate software platforms: RentCast and DealCheck. RentCast helps real estate investors and property managers grow, track, and optimize their rental portfolios by giving them access to nationwide rental data. DealCheck is the leading real estate analysis platform for quickly analyzing and comparing rental properties, flips, and commercial buildings.

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