GI235: Tracking Your Investment Portfolio with Litan Yahav

GI235 Tracking Your Investment Portfolio with Litan Yahav

Litan Yahav is a successful entrepreneur and investor who began his journey as an officer in the Israeli Navy. Afterward, he co-founded Segoma — an innovative diamond display technology. After selling the company, they began investing in passive real estate and private equity investments. Faced with the complexities of managing diverse portfolios, they recognized a need for a streamlined technology solution. This led them to create Vyzer, a platform designed to simplify and optimize investor wealth management.

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Announcer:
Welcome to the Global Investor Podcast, a show that focuses on helping foreign investors enter the lucrative US real estate market. Host Charles Carillo combines decades of real estate investing experience with a professional background in international banking to interview experts in all areas of US real estate investing. Now, here’s your host, Charles Carillo.

Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host, Charles Carillo. Today, we have Litan Yahav. He is a successful entrepreneur and investor who began his journey as an officer in the Israeli Navy. Afterward, he co-founded Segoma — an innovative diamond display technology. After selling the company, they began investing in passive real estate and private equity investments. Faced with the complexities of managing diverse portfolios, they recognized a need for a streamlined technology solution. This led them to create Vyzer, a platform designed to simplify and optimize investor wealth management. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Litan:
Thanks for having me, Charles. I’m really excited to be here. So

Charles:
You have a very interesting background. Can you give us a little bit more in depth background personally and professionally prior to getting engaged in your passive real estate and private equity investing?

Litan:
Yeah, for sure. So, I was born in the States in la and when I was in, when I was nine years old, my parents decided to take, pack us up and take us on a trip around the world. Our first stop was Israel, and I’ve been stuck there ever since, in a good way. Served in the Navy for six years After that, went to school, studied law and business, and during my studies I was working as a sailing instructor, so nothing really too business oriented. But then during my last year of, of school, I was part of this entrepreneurship program funded by Sam Z. And during that program, me and my co-founder founded our last company, which was Oma, like you mentioned, and came out of a need that we identified in the diamond industry, really crazy industry. But we sort of identified this need inefficiency that took us down this rabbit hole of solving the global diamond trading issues, mainly photographing and displaying diamonds online for trading purposes.

Litan:
And it went pretty well. We scaled that, sold it in 2015, stayed on until 2018 during an earnout period. But basically over the past eight years since the initial acquisition, me and my co-founder have just been deploying our capital on our own. A lot of private equity, real estate startups, crypto, a bunch of, a bunch of different alternative investments. And at some point that just became a mess. These are really good problems to have, like I always like to say. But I mean, still, it just became a mess. And we just built ourselves a platform to automate our wealth management. And then a bunch of friends wanted that as well, and it turned into a whole new startup, but that’s what advisor’s about. So that’s a quick rundown of my background. I do not have a tech background and more business operations. I understand tech and I love tech, but that’s why I have really good people around me.

Charles:
Sounds very interesting. So tell us why you chose real estate as your primary passive investment I guess asset class, once you had that liquidity event of with your, with your first company.

Litan:
So you get this windfall and, and sort of you try to, all right, I have this money and I get bombarded by different financial advisors wanting to help me deploy it. And it’s like, all right, the private mar, early on the public markets for me were like this black box that I don’t understand. I didn’t wanna understand too much. All I knew is I’m gonna average the market just put in an index fund. I don’t need someone to help me do that. But the other part of my capital, I wanted to generate more cash. I wanted sort, I’m still in wealth creation mode. I wanna generate more. I didn’t make tens of millions in this exit. And, and sort of, all right, where are we gonna make investments that have the potential to generate more cap, more capital aren’t net correlated with the public markets?

Litan:
And then when you dive down that rabbit hole of real estate, you understand, well, there’s so many different types of real estate investing, right? It’s like everyone’s a real estate investor. If you have any connection to real estate and, and you, you find that it’s just like really a lot more complicated complex than that. So 80 years ago, our first investments, me and my co-founder, we, we bought two single family homes in, in Ohio through a guy we know who does real estate in the states. Had a property management firm in place to manage these two properties. These was like low end properties, so like cheap properties in an up and coming neighborhood, at least we thought. And at the same time, we, we had another guy we knew who we trusted, who we invested as into a real estate syndication, did multi-family value add stuff type stuff.

Litan:
And these single family homes were just bad, like a lot of work. And even if, even though we had a property management firm in place, it was just like a whole mess. Phone calls cache to cash out. But at the same time, we, we, we were in this passive investment deal, you know, making cash flow without doing anything. It was performing better than the single family homes. And, and so we narrowed down into, into that and Agile was just beginning of doing more and more of these passive investment deals. Honestly, it wasn’t even about the asset class, real estate specific. It was about good people, operators to invest with that happened to be in real estate. And real estate has the cash flow component to it has a lot of tax advantages to it. And so that just was really interesting for us to dive into. No, that’s,

Charles:
That’s a lot of great information and I wanna circle back to that going through a little bit more of how you invest passively and maybe some guidelines that you work by. But I really wanna talk about advisor, and I have to say I am a user advisor. And I found it through a couple other people that I knew that had a number of private investments and kind of were sick of doing the whole spreadsheet type thing. And you know, can you give us a little overview of the software, some of the main features that maybe you utilize the most and that you like?

Litan:
Yeah. So I’ll touch down for a second on the problems that we suffered and what we’re trying to solve with Pfizer. And that will make mm-hmm, <affirmative> more sense, right? So we’d get an email from these gps that we invested with, and we’re like, Dan, when did I invest with this guy? And, and is how much did I invest? And is the money that we’re distributing now is, is it what we planned on receiving? And you have multiple of these, again, good problems now, but you have multiple of these streams and then cash in and cash out and documents. And so basically what we built for ourselves is a place where I’ll just forward these emails to upload documents, distribution statements, investment documents, and then it’ll automatically identify, read those documents for me, and pull out the relevant information and set up assets or update existing ones.

Litan:
For me, that’s one component of what advisor does today a lot better than what it did when we founded a three something years ago. The second component is, I, I wanted to go into my bank accounts and identify transactions in my bank account to, to search for those distributions, those capital calls, those those transactions that are relevant for those investments, and automatically link those to the investments themselves, right? So if I expect distributions every month of 2000 bucks, I want advisor to identify those transactions in my bank and lemme know, Hey, there was not a transaction that came in, or there was, it was more or less of what I expected, blah, blah. So that’s another component of what advisor does. So the idea is it aggregates all of my financial life into one place. It doesn’t matter if it’s a private investment, if it’s a public investment, if it’s an insurance policy, everything is aggregated, analyzed into advisor, and then tracked as automated as you can imagine.

Litan:
So we’ll even sink into your investor portal and pull out the information from the investor portal. We’ll project your cash flow and we’ll moving forward, right? Because a lot of people that have multiple of these investment cash flows, you know, lose track of like, all can I, if I invest a hundred thousand in this deal, what will I look like from a cashflow perspective in six months? I might be worth 10 million bucks, but I’m not seeing enough cash to maintain my cost of living. And that’s stupid. So we have this whole cashflow planning aspect of it, which is also super important in scenarios and what if stuff. But I think the most interesting component of advisor is what we’re building towards, which is sort of giving more insights into the private markets, even all investment products holistically. So we show our clients anonymously where other people are investing, which how people allocate their money from an asset allocation perspective, which products are, which funds or operators are managers, are they investing with and more insights into those managers with a completely transparent, unbiased standpoint. So there’s a lot of things that you can unwrap in each of those elements that, that I mentioned. But that’s the gist I think, of the main value propositions that advisor has to off. The idea is to keep, is to automate as much of my finance as possible to keep passive investing passive.

Charles:
No, that’s a great way of putting it. I found it is that you know, you have multiple spreadsheets tax time is a nightmare, you know what I mean? And it’s, so I’ve got a spreadsheet for K ones, I got a, like an investment tracker spreadsheet, I got a cashflow. I mean, it’s just like, it’s, it’s insane. And then when one sells, God forbid now I gotta remove that from here, but I haven’t gotten K ones and it’s just like a mess. So that’s why, you know, using what I’ve, what I’ve liked about the software, what I was looking for in software was finding software that was able to, number one, I could see exactly how it’s performing, right? Because I’m told that it, like you said, $2,000 or $500 a month, whatever it’s supposed to be, or, you know, $5,000 a year.

Charles:
And, and now can I track that? And I’m, am I getting this, I mean, because I know when I look at the performa, it’s gonna be below or above, it’s not gonna be exact right? For most deals. Maybe you have some set debt deals that it comes in. Exactly. But for most deals, like what we’re talking about, private equity, real estate it, it’s probably not gonna be exact. So being able to actually, you know, track it. And then also every month when you’re having all these like you said, all these deposits coming in and you can’t, like, you know what I mean, you’re trying to link out where it is, and these are great problems and, but they’re all sometimes like a lot of smaller ones that are coming in, and you want to make sure that they’re connected together so that, you know, you’re getting the full picture of this is what it was supposed to be and this is what I’m actually getting, and then these are the documents that go with that, which made my life, or has made my life a lot easier.

Litan:
The, yeah. So if you, if you think of like billionaires that have family offices, this is what a family office does for them. We’re trying to replicate that feeling for everyone else. It’s like a virtual family office. I get an email, I’ll just forward it to Visor, or Visor will already be CC’d to it because advisor is my family office advisor will have access to my bank account and identify transit. So that’s exactly what a family office does for me. Right? Yeah,

Charles:
No, it’s exactly true. Yeah. It’s, it’s a lot of great software. It allows you someone a smaller investor that’s just kind of getting involved with alternative investments, the ability to easily track them, and you can put all your brokerage accounts in there, all that stuff too, which is great, but it’s also, it’ll, the main thing I find is that, you know, your alternative investments are able to be tracked and you can keep track of what you’re getting. Just kind of like in your experience, I’ve only been using this for a few months how has tracking your investments like performance, how’s that changed your, your passive investing process and maybe how you do it or how you choose where to invest now?

Litan:
So my life is all on efficiency. You can imagine that when we build a software like this, and, and, and I’m not just me, but I’ve also heard people around me would prefer to invest with one operator. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> just for the ease of use, not having to log into, into multiple investor goals. And so I don’t think about it that way anymore, right? I just think about it. I just wanna make the best investings possible. I don’t have to think about how this will affect me from a, you know a, a mess or, or, or an overwhelming aspect of managing my stuff if I deploy it in with multiple managers. So that’s one thing. I think it mainly saves a lot of time in headache building my crazy spreadsheet, maintaining it, updating it. It’s also helped, you know, gather my information for tax season.

Litan:
Like, all right, what, what did I invest in? When did I invest in, did, where did I get my K ones? Did I not get my K ones? And just everything’s in one place. It’s also been a lot easier for me to have conversations with my wife about our finances. It’s really important for me to her, for her to, for, it’s important for me, for her to be involved so that she knows what’s happening. You know, if God forbid something happens to me, at least she knows where the things are and who to talk to and all that stuff. And, and, and also it’s, it’s helping make better decisions of understanding should I invest in this deal or should I not from a cashflow perspective. And understanding was this a good operator previously. Also, there’s a thing that I noticed when I started tracking it this way. A lot of gps that I invest with report IRR based on when they closed the deal and not when I transferred the money. Ah, and for me, it’s like, I don’t, I don’t care if it took you three months to close, like I transfer the money, that’s when I start calculating my IRR and, and there are operators that do that as well. I’m just saying that there are, that don’t, and so for me it’s like, it helps me understand my investment from an actual perspective and not what is being reported by the gp. Right.

Charles:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I never thought of it like that. I’ve, I’ve heard of different operators sometimes thinking about adding, you know, paying some sort of interest or something during that time. But, you know, I think it gets into like a murky water on their end. But it’s true. Yeah. Know if it’s, it’s sitting in, it doesn’t matter.

Litan:
It’s like everything in life. I think if the communication is proper, it doesn’t matter if it’s underperforming. I mean it does, but it’s a lot worse if it’s underperforming, the communication is really bad.

Charles:
Yeah, no, I totally agree. Communication is one of the big things. And you know, I have operators that we work with that that I’ve passively invested with before, and it’ll be, you know, very good. It’s monthly communication. I have questions are answered quickly, and then you’ll have other ones that are set more on a quarterly, but it’s a very in-depth report. So just that you’re aware of how their communication goes. And if I have questions, I reach out and you get like the true story of what’s happening. I totally agree. Yeah.

Charles:
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Charles:
So with all this passive investing that you’ve been doing as a real estate investor here, I mean, how are you accurately vetting operators and deals? I mean, what are some of the preliminary things you’re doing? Because it sounds like you work with a, I would say it sounds like a wide range of operators, maybe from the beginning that’s maybe come down a little bit more narrowed into who you like working with.

Litan:
I think I’ve spoken to over 200 operators over the years. I haven’t invested with 200, but I’ve Wow invested with, with quite a, quite a bunch. And it’s, it’s really not, for me, it’s not rocket science, just ’cause it’s even the opposite. It’s really primitive. It’s how do I get to know this person on a personal level, reaching a point where I know this person is not gonna screw me over? Like that for me is the basic of the basic, like the integrity part of it all. So, so that’s like the, the first part for me is like vetting the operators, making sure that I know this person and that that has some, some side effects, right? Because, you know, obviously then, you know, the mega big operators, the chances of me knowing personal interaction or relationship with the GP or the lead managing partner is very slim.

Litan:
I’ve met many of ’em, but that’s like, that’s, that’s sort of taken off the table, all these big operators. Second thing I I look at is, is I’ve, I’ve, so again, it’s really changed now asset class wise in terms of this whole financial, like the whole financial world is changing. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. But there are que like, I’d, I’d, I’d ask an operator Now, and this is a very tactical question, but I’ll ask them, I’ll a lot of questions around refinance because that’s like really technical, but tactical questions that they don’t get asked a lot, I assume. But because I’ve experienced these situations of refinance over the years that have been dealt differently from operator to operator, it’s really interesting to hear operators or the investor relations or the operator, the gp, whatever their response is when I ask a question, so for example, you know, typical deals, you invest a hundred thousand to a deal, there’s some sort of preferred return, cash flow, whatever, and in five, seven years there’s an exit, right?

Litan:
But then I’ll ask you, what happens if after a year you return 50,000, $70,000 refinance the cash return that you distribute is, is it based on what’s based on a remaining capital that have in the gang through the remaining 30,000? Is it based on the 30,000 and everything on top of that you split based on the, the hurdle or the, the, the waterfall that you guys defined? And so it’s, it’s, every operator has a different answer to that, which I thought there was a standard, but there isn’t, even if it’s distributed in, if even if there’s a description of PPM, most people don’t even look at it or ask about it. That’s been a question that I ask operators. And the, the, the, the way they answer it has shed a lot of light on the, per the person that I’m talking with, if they’re gonna go and look into it, if they’re gonna gimme a bad answer, if they’re gonna gimme a good answer, and all those, all those matter.

Litan:
Another thing is like the size of the operator, the larger operators, the li the larger, the larger gps or sponsors or whatever. By the way, the terminology is also something I learned over the years, right? Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, like, I don’t, I prefer to personally, I have access directly to the operator. But I’ve spoken with capital raisers who don’t say that they’re a capital raiser and they’ll portray themselves being the operator. And then when you ask more deeper into that, then wait, hold on. What’s your position in this deal? So I, I, I, so again, there’s a lot of vetting that goes in for me into the, the operator. I don’t even look at the deal, the deal until further down. But once the operator has passed those like checks from me where I can trust this person and I want to be a partner with him, partner with in deals he does when they excel, when the, when, when the, the decks come through my mailbox, it’s easy for me just to look at the deal and see, all right, does this match my strategy or does it not in terms of like returns time-wise cashflow and and so on.

Litan:
Does that make sense? Yeah,

Charles:
Yeah. It makes perfect sense. It’s, it’s difficult because, or it’s different because you’ll have some operators and because that’s something that really can’t be I mean, how do you foresee that? You know what I mean? So you’re gonna say, you’re gonna get this value in this time. Well, why don’t we just sell it? I mean, why are, you know, so these are all different things that I always, because right now it’s much tighter. So if you had a refi pencil in three years ago and it was for now, it might not happen.

Litan:
It won’t happen for sure. <Laugh> also, but I, I think the capital raises are great. I I think they have a, a lot of room in this world. I just think that at the, they should bring more value than just connect two dots. Because if a capital raiser will not tell me who the operator is, that’s a red flag. The capital raiser is the val, the value they bring is they help vet the deal, they help get better terms because they’re, they essentially are a fund to fund or a feeder fund. So they, they, instead of putting a thousand, a hundred thousand dollars check and getting specific terms, they have the ability to put a hundred thou a million dollar check within 10 investors and they get better terms. And so there has to be value from that capital raiser a lot more than just saying, Hey, yeah, there’s a deal coming from X now. That’s sort of what I meant, I think from Yeah,

Charles:
Yeah. No, it’s, the underwriting’s a perfect thing because if you can now work through a trusted capital raiser that is really doing their underwriting, I think that’s a huge benefit. And you can look at that underwriting and specifically I know when we look at any kinda deals, what we’re doing, if no matter what our position is in the deal, we have a third party underwriter that we send our stuff out to. And I will share that with any investors that we work with and they can look through it and, you know, most of the time it’s all green flags and then there’s gonna be a couple things, Hey, you know, we’re, you’re a little low on, you know, what your what your onsite management is or something like, you know what I mean? Like what your payroll is. And so these are things that we would look through. I’m gonna look through because if it was my partner that’s doing the underwriting, these are things that we should look into as well for our numbers. But I’m gonna open book with giving it to investors. So,

Litan:
Oh, I used that when I said it was when I was talking about the refi then, because that’s like my <inaudible> <laugh>. That was a big mistake. Again, but other than that I mean the active part, I wouldn’t do, again, just a passive, passive one. To get closer to the good operators and find people I can trust. I probably should have done that earlier in the game. Because I, I mean, again, only after a few years I understood that the, the key metric for succeeding is investing with good people. So I don’t have a good answer to that question ’cause I use that on the refi. How

Charles:
Has your relationship towards money changed?

Litan:
I’m a lot less afraid of debt. Even in these current markets. There’s always ways to find good debt and, and also sort of with, with the, when you look at at, at deals, there are gonna be good deals that even with the current market conditions, in terms like the debt or the terms of debt, even if you take a loan now and it’s at high, a higher rate, if the deal’s good, you can always, if, if the, if the rate goes up, if the terms like if interest rates go up, you made a good deal, right? Because you, and if they go down, you just refinance. And so I think debt overall is still a good thing. ’cause It’s leveraging what it’s, it’s your leverage towards wealth. I think that taxes is a, is a slippery slope that many people slide too fast down and spend a lot of time trying to find a way to write off taxes and not find good deals.

Litan:
But I just think being minded of taxes is a good thing. ’cause There are ways to really leverage all these investments to mitigate tax taxes. I, I mean I’ve learned a ton and I, the whole company we’ve built is around money management wealth. And so I’ve learned a lot it’s like, it’ll be too much for this podcast, but, but you know, also it’s all about the network. It’s always been about the network, but I think finance is it even more just learning from people around us, putting yourself in that, in that zone where you’re comfortable to talk about money. Alright,

Charles:
Great. So how can our listeners learn more about you and your business advisor?

Litan:
So I love to speak with people about passive investing in general and advisor specifically at Facebook, LinkedIn. You can email me@tonatadvisor.co VYZE r.co Twitter, wherever. Happy to talk. Well

Charles:
Thank you so much for coming on. I will put links in the show notes below. I know that your team sent us out a offer for our listeners of 10% off if they move from one of the free plans, which I think start at about, and then the paid ones start $29 a month. So hopefully people will check that out. And thank you so much for coming on today. Looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future.

Litan:
Thanks a lot for having me, man. Appreciate it.

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.

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About Litan Yahav

Litan Yahav is a successful entrepreneur and investor who began his journey as an officer in the Israeli Navy. Alongside Tomer Salvi, he co-founded Segoma — an innovative diamond display technology that reshaped the global diamond market. After the successful sale of Segoma, they delved into passive real estate and private equity investments. Faced with the complexities of managing diverse portfolios, they recognized a need for a streamlined technological solution. This insight led to the creation of Vyzer, a platform designed to simplify and optimize wealth management for investors.

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