How to Scale from House Hacking to Commercial Multifamily, RV Parks, Industrial, and Beyond

Patrick (00:22)
Hello and welcome to the Active Commercial real Estate Investing Show brought to you by the one and only school of commercial real estate investing. I’m Patrick.

Noelle
And I’m Noelle.

Patrick

And today we’re joined with Monick Halm. Monick is the founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses. She is an educator and advocate for female real estate investors and has a mission to help 1 million women achieve financial freedom through real estate. Monick is a real estate investor and syndicator and owns together with her investors over 1,000 residential doors and industrial assets across 15 states. She’s a graduate of McGill University and Columbia Law School. She is the number one bestselling author of the Real Estate Investor Goddess Handbook and Invest Like a Goddess: Advice from the Most Successful Women in Real Estate. Monick is also a TEDx speaker, podcast host, real estate strategy mentor, yogi, world traveler, recovered attorney, wife, and mother of three amazing kids. Monick, you seem to do it all. We’re excited to learn how you do it. Welcome to the show.

Monick Halm (01:26)
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Noelle (01:27)
As I was telling you before, we were listening to a lot of podcasts that you were interviewed on while we were driving up to the mountains the other weekend. So definitely fan girl moment for me. Um, I’m super excited, especially being another woman that is getting into commercial real estate. It’s really awesome to have the diversity in the space and coming from, um, I know you had said in the previous podcast as well, you kind of came from not really knowing real estate, and I feel like so many people come from having a connection prior or having someone who knows about it. So excited to dive in. Would love to hear from you about how you got started in real estate and the why you got started in commercial real estate.

Monick Halm (02:07)
Sure. So I got started really by accident. I live in Los Angeles, which is a super expensive market. And back in 2005, I was working as a lawyer and I had always been taught, the only thing I’d been taught about real estate is that at some point you should buy a house to live in. That was never something you invest in. You just buy the house. So I’d been working for a couple of years. I was like, okay, I guess it’s time to buy that house, but LA is such an expensive market. Even back in 2005, a starter home was upwards of $500 to $600 ,000. And I couldn’t afford that by myself. So I ended up house hacking. That’s how you guys started. But I got with a friend, we bought a multi -unit. We each took a room in a larger unit, we rented out, there was an upstairs two bedroom that we rented out and then there was a little back house, the garage had been converted, we rented that out too, rented out our basement and then I was like a landlord and these people were paying my mortgage, so it awesome. That’s how I got into the game. Still didn’t really think of it as a way to leave my job, which I really, really hated. It was still just, oh, that’s how I managed to buy that house I supposed to buy . But when I met my husband, he had a duplex. And after the crash in 2008, we ended up selling one of the duplexes and we ended up flipping. So we started to flip, which was the only thing I thought real estate investing was because that’s what I’d seen on TV. It’s like, oh, we’ve been investing real estate. So we’ll flip because like the shows! We’ve done rehab in our house. We can flip. And it was a really good time to be flipping because you get houses were super on sale. You could buy a house and fix it. And just you could make tons of mistakes, which, you know, hindsight being 20/20, I realized so many mistakes we made, but we could still make money.

Noelle (04:02)
Thank you.

Monick Halm (04:23)
Um, then we were doing that until about 2015 when houses weren’t so on sale. Looking back there, I wish I bought more then too but they were definitely not as on sale. Um, and it’s a lot more competitive and, and it was also not passive. Right? Um, you, when you’re flipping, you buy a property, fix it up, you’re working and then you sell it. Hopefully at a profit, but then you have to start over again to continue to make money. And I wanted something more passive. I wanted to buy a property, put in tenants, just get that mailbox money, just not have to keep working so hard. But in LA, it was virtually impossible to find something that would cash flow. I was looking for a fourplex. Everything was at least $2 million. And I was lucky if it broke even.

And at that time I ended up meeting a man who had become my mentor. So I was in a, I was in a mastermind at the time and I was talking to this other guy who was in my mastermind saying, yeah, it’s really tough. I was like trying to find the right properties to flip and then looking for this fourplex and nothing cash flows. He said, you know, my friend Robert Helms is the host of the Real Estate Guys Radio Show. He’s coming to LA tomorrow night. Do you want to have dinner with us? Sure. So we go and Robert was asking me about what I’m doing. And I was telling him that and he said, you know, LA is a really tough market. I always say live where you want to live, invest where the numbers make sense. And I went, Oh, until he said that I just sort of assumed that you had to invest where you live where you can drive to your property, touch it, self manage it. Like it didn’t cross my mind that I could invest outside of my market and LA is not the best market for investing. It’s super, super tenant friendly, great if you’re a tenant, sucky if you’re a landlord. Also really hella expensive and it’s just, you know, I’m like, oh, I don’t have to invest in that light. So literally that opened up the world. And then he said something, which is, you know, the answer to your question, how it got into commercial. He said, and you can buy that four plex, but you’re limited to your own you know, your own capital and credit. Alternatively, you could bring a group of investors together and you could buy a 100 or 200 unit apartment building. And he started telling me about the benefits of that. My brain was like, “What?!” “That’s a thing?!” I literally thought you had to be a billionaire to do that kind of stuff. I had no idea that regular people could buy properties like that, but I had this full body, yes, yes, that’s what I want to do. It was so exciting. I loved everything about that idea. And so I went home that night, told my husband, there’s this thing, it’s called syndication. You bring investors, you know. And so that was October of 2015. In January of 2016, we were at a syndication seminar in Phoenix learning how to do this. And we just went all in. We joined this high -end mastermind. I’ve got a couple of them. And by the end of that year, for less outlay of capital than we probably would have paid to buy that one fourplex by ourselves in LA, we were able to, with my partner and others, acquire over 1 ,000 doors. We got 1 ,012 doors in that one year through this.

Noelle (08:15)
Go big or go home.

Monick Halm (08:17)
Yeah, incredible. So like, so we did, about five deals that year, two of which were passive, three were active. And, it was pretty incredible.

Noelle (08:28)
That is amazing. I mean, that is a huge accomplishment in a very short amount of time going from a quad in mind to hundreds of doors.

Monick Halm (08:37)
It was mind blowing. I couldn’t, yeah, at the end of the year, I was like, wait, what did we just do? How did that happen? It was very cool.

Noelle (08:49)
I love how one idea too and one person being able to say something to spark the idea to be like, oh, oh wait, A, I don’t have to buy in this crazy expensive market that’s no good for landlords anyway, and B, I don’t have to use my own money. How great would that be?

Monick Halm (09:02)
Yeah. I know, right? It was awesome. So yeah, just it’s been like being able to go into the commercial space is really, it’s been such a game changer because you can just, it’s scale, right? It’s not much more work to buy an apartment building or we do a lot of industrial now, like a factory or, you know, mobile home park it’s not that much more work than buying one house. But the impact is so much greater.

Patrick (09:39)
Yeah. And that’s incredible that you did five deals in your first year of syndicating. Can you walk through that kind of emotional and mindset experience? Because I imagine that as you’re doing your first one, it feels like this big whale of a deal. You know, it’s the biggest deal that you’ve done to date. You know, you don’t have necessarily that time horizon to really evaluate like how it’s all going to pan out yet. But instead of just waiting and seeing, you seemingly just went for it and did four more right after that. What was that like?

Monick Halm (10:16)
You know, well first, I didn’t do it alone. So I definitely made sure that I had mentorship. I was, you know, being advised by people that were wiser and had the experience. I think what I’ve really learned with all of this is that you don’t need to have any of the individual things yourselves, right? There are five main resources you need for real estate. You need, to have money, you need time, you need relationships, experience, and the education, right, knowing what to do. But if you’re missing any of those, you can partner with other people that have that. You don’t have to do it by yourself. In fact, you can’t really do it by yourself. Well, maybe you can if you just are a trust fund baby. But even then, I wouldn’t recommend that you do any of this by yourself because that’s how you make mistakes. So we never tried to do it alone, but the first thing we went for was kind of crazy. My next door neighbor was a vice president of a real estate investment trust. At the time, she had done like three quarters of a billion dollars in different real estate transactions. Huge experience, but all of that was under her work. So she was, they were working her like a manimal. She didn’t really have time to do this by herself, but she wanted to do some of her own deals. So what we did was we partnered with her and we said, well, we have the time to look for things. So we’ll find opportunities and she could underwrite in her sleep.

So she was gonna do certain things. And our first deal that we went for was actually a $40 million portfolio here in Englewood, California here. And we ended up getting to the best and final round. We lost it in the end, which was a little crazy, because then I was like.

Wait, what would I have done then? We had to raise all this money. I’ve never raised a penny. But I was like, let’s do it. Let’s go for it. I almost didn’t know what I didn’t know. So we just went for it. And it was through relationships and different opportunities. The first deal we did was a mobile home park. And a friend we’d had was doing a bunch. He said, I know you’re trying to syndicate. We have an investor that was going to bring in money from Korea. He’s not able to bring in that money. Do you want to raise the amount? Do you want to raise this money? We’re like, sure. So yeah, let’s do it. So that was kind of how we started. We just started and we just, we just went for it. It was ready fire aim more than, you know, like ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, we just went. Some things worked out and some things didn’t, but it was that, just go, we just went for it with support.

Noelle (13:22)
Yeah, and you’ve talked about relationships and partnerships and agree those are critical and so crucial to be able to have the mindset of like, okay, I can go in and it’s not all on me. Like I have other people who have some of those other experiences that maybe I’m lacking or that we as a group need. What is your criteria for finding those partners that you work with?

Monick Halm (13:45)
That’s a great question. So one thing I learned from the brilliant Beth Clifford, is that to look for the three Cs. And these are in order of importance. So the first C is character. So what is a character of the person that you’re gonna be partnering with, teaming up with? So it’s not something that can be taught. And when somebody shows you who they are at first, believe them. So, you know, looking for, you know, how, how honest are they? How are they of integrity? How do they treat people? How does, you know, it’s like, how are they treating the, maybe they’re super nice to you, but they’re terrible to the waitstaff or something like that, right? one of the worst, Partnerships that I’ve had ended up really really biting me in the butt. I mean this person I was visiting the market and we went out we stopped and she was saying okay You know, this is my employee. just thinks I’m of the property manager doesn’t know I’m the owner I’m gonna be like point to you and you’re gonna be the you’re most like sure you’re the owner and It’s like okay, that’s weird.

But I should have been like, wait, you’re lying to your employee. You’re like, wait, there were red flags. I should have seen that. But yeah, I was like, all right, it’s like, that is not, wait, what? In other words, don’t partner with people that are dishonest, but also that just have a character that are a good match for you and what you value and think is important.

Noelle (15:08)
Something’s wrong with this picture.

Monick Halm (15:25)
So character is the first thing. And then after that is commitment. So commitment is in a couple of ways. And this is for everybody that you work with. It could be team members. So one is a commitment to this particular project. You don’t want to have somebody that you’re going to partner with. They don’t have the time showing up. They don’t do what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it.

So having that commitment and then also commitment to your shared mission, vision and values. So one of my values is I want to leave a property in a community better than I found it. So if we’re working with somebody who’s there just about getting every dollar out of a deal and willing to be a slumlord or whatever, that is not gonna be a match for me.

That’s gonna be like a it’s not they’re not gonna share that commitment to that value It’s not gonna work I also have a relationship for life philosophy. I want us and you when I’m thinking about how we’re gonna work together It’s not let me get the most I can right now like screw you I think I want us to both I want everybody to be happy so we keep working together again and again and again and again forever, right? so that that long-term orientation is something we both have to share. Cause if one of us has that orientation, the other one is like very, you know, mercenary about their relationships and that’s not gonna, that’s gonna be a mismatch, not gonna work either. So that’s the commitment piece. And then the last is the capacity. So do they have the capacity to do what you need them to do? To a certain extent, some skills can be taught.

But I find, this is another thing I’ve learned, work with the best. They won’t cost you money, they’ll make you money. So I prefer whenever possible to partner with people that are at the top of their game, and that’s their capacity. And that will always work out well. So that’s what I look for, the character, the commitment and the capacity. And when those are all there always works out.

Noelle (17:49)
I love that. And I feel like you brought up some good examples of how you can be looking for those things. And it’s not something that’s going to take years to figure out if they’re the right partner, right? It could be over the course of a dinner. It could be over the course of a single interaction. So that’s great. And, you I like that you’re like, listen to your gut as well. You know, if something seems like it’s off, listen to the Spidey Sense, it’s probably off and you should really evaluate that.

Monick Halm (18:03)
Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Yes, see it quickly and just go, you know what, maybe it’s not a right fit.

Patrick (18:20)
Yeah. Well, so building off of then your first year, you did the five deals. You had some success. You said some things didn’t work out, but overall things worked out well enough that you decided to continue moving forward. What was next in the journey?

Monick Halm (18:37)
Now it’s all starting to blur together. Two or three more deals, but also where then we were managing them. So when you’re doing all of the real estate, it’s a little bit like when you, I know you guys have a 10 month old, you have a new baby. So when you’re pregnant, right? And you’re starting to your family, there’s so much focus on the labor. So much focus on like all the books and like, you know the labor the pregnancy would expect what you’re expecting and then it’s like and so much focus on the labor, which even if it’s a super duper long labor, it’s not gonna take much more than a day or two And then you have a whole lifetime where you have a child that you have to raise and you know, hopefully make them good good humans. S after you buy a property, then you have to run it. So that’s, that was what we were, spent a lot of 2017 doing more, you know, running the deals and figuring out what we, we like, what we don’t like as much. And so that, that’s kind of been the journey. And then we’ve just, we’ve explored different asset classes throughout the years too.

Noelle (19:50)
Yeah, I would definitely love to hear more about the asset classes and what led you from one to another and talking about some of the benefits within those asset classes as you moved from, you know, multi to mobile to RV, et cetera.

Monick Halm (20:05)
Yeah. So, um, you know, we’ve mostly been in the multifamily space and more in the probably since 2019 more, industrial. We did one mobile home park, one RV park, not as much are, you know, are their thing. Um, but with the industrial and how that happened. And all of these different things have come up because it’s just through relationships. People have approached us around different things. We’ve looked into different asset classes and different markets and said, okay, yeah, we’re interested. Let’s go there. And by partnering with people who had that experience, we could piggyback off of their experience, their knowledge, and we didn’t have to do it alone and start from scratch. So that’s how we got into different things. And with the industrial, so two of the apartments that we bought in 2016, which were in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One was, let’s just, I’ll say C. Generous. It could have been a D it could have been a D. I won’t lie. It was like it was a real, you know one particular super rough rough property it was like the day before we bought it It was like a drive -by shooting and then there was yeah, there was like Yeah, bullets, It was every every week. We’d call our property manager cringing, like “Oh my god, what is what is gonna happen?”

Monick Halm (21:45)
There was always something. It was like the day after Valentine’s, the property manager went and saw that one of the vacant units had been open and they found rose petals and hyperdermic needles. That was like, so it was, it was just, it was not, it was not a fun. Not a fun place to, not a great place. Um, or it looked like it was up and coming. Not quite. So we were pretty desperate to get rid of it cause it was just such a pain in our butt. Uh, and there was another one too. It was not quite so bad, but neither of which were great. And this was definitely divine intervention, but I was praying like I could use a miracle about our property manager said, hey, would you consider selling these? I like, I’d consider it for the right price. You know, we have investors and so we went and figured out a price that was kind of crazy, but like that’s kind of the price we need, but we’re going to go high. And then they’ll, you know, they’ll negotiate down. But it was this like 1031 investor from California. And we gave this crazy price that was basically, it was essentially this, it was a four cap. It was our, you know, an Albuquerque, like a really, like a D -class in Albuquerque, New Mexico at a four cap. And they took the price. We sold it. We sold it. So, which was awesome as a seller, but it was very, very scary for me as a buyer of multifamily. I was like, wow, I do not want to compete against people that will pay that price for those types of assets. What else is out there? And we were approached by a partner we’d done some deals with before who was saying, yeah, I’m buying this industrial property. He’s like, really industrial? Tell me about industrial. And so we started looking into it, but industrial didn’t have the feeding frenzy at the time that other commercial did, but there was an increasing demand for industrial as things were going online and online retailers need industrial space. They need warehouses. They need, you know, they need distribution centers. I mean, it was like there was this increasing demand for industrial. And so at the beginning of 2019, we started getting into that. We did very well during the pandemic. It was the best performing asset class, still doing well. And we love it because it’s triple net too. So triple net is, we buy it and the, tenant pays rent. They also pay all the property taxes, pay all the insurance and they pay all the maintenance. So there’s a problem with the toilets. They fix the toilets. Something wrong with the roof. They fix the roof. It’s like all of the, you know, all of the inflationary pressures that have happened, like all of that is on the tenant. None of that is us. We pay our debt service. And then then we have long term, like 20 year leases with built in rent increases. We know exactly what the rent is going to be, exactly what our expenses are going be. There are no surprises. It’s wonderful. Love it.

Noelle (25:02)
It feels like passive without actually being passive. That’s amazing.

Monick Halm (25:05)
It is super passive. It’s like passive to the 10th degree. Yeah, it’s great. So with, you know, super and our, the tenants are like eight, nine figure businesses that have been around for decades. And yeah, it’s great. So that’s what we really like. And then we’re always exploring different things.

Noelle (25:32)
Yeah, it sounds like once you got into the industrial though, that was kind of a moment of, oh, wait a second. I can probably scale this using great relationships and being able to raise money to make this happen further so that it’s less work for me and having to worry about what’s gonna happen on Valentine’s Day at a property and who knows what neighborhood and be able to take an approach. Is that something that you’re continuing to explore in terms of, you know, if you’re looking at the percentage of your portfolio as industrial, the one thing that you’re kind of like, this is the thing I know I can do and I’m gonna do most of?

Monick Halm (26:11)
Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of industrial. So for the most part right now, our focus is more on the fundraising space as opposed to the operations. We have partners that are doing, they’re dealing with more of the property management and that kind of thing. So we, as we went on, we realized we don’t like that as much. Right? So I love, um, I love acquiring the properties. I love being involved in design and shifting things, although most of our industrial, we do sale lease backs. So we’re actually buying, we buy it from a company that is using the property. They want to sell it, but then lease it back. So we do sale lease backs mostly. So we don’t even have to touch those properties. It’s really very quite easy. So those, yeah, we love them and we have them and we’ll continue to put those in our portfolio and then just as different, you know, when the right opportunities come up, I think commercial right now, there’s a lot of distress in commercial and which means there’s a lot of opportunity to help people that are in distress and get those assets off their books at a nice discount. So we are, we’re open to different opportunities that are gonna show up where we can solve problems and get things that are really well priced.

Patrick (27:44)
Yeah. Can you quickly touch on the sale lease back concept and in particular, what is the benefit to the business that is selling to you and then leasing it back? Like why, why do companies do that? Yeah.

Monick Halm (27:49)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, why would they do that? Yeah, that’s a good question. That’s what I, when I first was like, wait, why would they do that? They want the property. So usually they’ll do it. There are a couple of reasons, but mostly it’s because they want to get the equity out of the property to put it back into their business. So they could do a cash out refinance, but normally they’re not going to get much more than 40 % of the equity out. But if they want to get all of the equity out, they sell it.

There are also benefits to them, there are tax benefits to them. So if you own a property outright, you’re not spending anything on it, you’re actually not getting any tax benefit. But if you’re renting, you can deduct the cost of your lease, right? And a bunch of other things that are deductible. So it can be more tax beneficial, and then often to get the equity. And sometimes we’ll get these properties because the business is being sold to another entity and the entity will want the business of the business, but they don’t want the real estate of the business. So we might buy the real estate and they’ll keep the business. So that’s mostly why.

Patrick (29:08)
Yeah, I find all of this about commercial absolutely fascinating because the business component or the fact that your tenants are businesses means that their motives for doing things are entirely different than in residential, right? So what you mentioned with the sale lease back is also similar to what I’ve heard is commonly done with things like ground leases where there are lots of companies out there who don’t want to purchase a piece of land and then go through the years of rezoning it to what they need and then build, which is another 12, 24, 36 months, because that ties up their capital for way too long and they’re not receiving tax benefits. So instead, especially for some of these smaller chain coffee shops, they’ll just go in, they want a ground lease that is already ready for them to build. They pop up a super modular building that they can construct in a matter of months rather than years.

And then they’re off to the races and the investor just owns their land and the ground. But the company is willing to go ahead and front the cost for the construction and do the land development simply because they don’t want to tie their capital up for longer than they need to, which I think is absolutely incredible and makes total business sense, but is not something that you necessarily think about when you’re first getting into commercial.

Monick Halm (30:27)
There’s so many different ways. I know somebody who essentially flips land. So he’ll buy the land, entitle it, do all that thing, but then sell it ready, entitled, ready to go with often with the architectural designs, you know, somebody just buys it and runs with it. So there are a lot of different things that people can do. And I think when people have been in the residential space or they think about, most people think about investing in real estate as buying a house, a single family house or apartments. They don’t think about, it’s like every piece of property, every time you’re standing on land, there’s a roof over your head, somebody owns that. And that somebody could be you. Any type of business building or even just land is owned by somebody.

Noelle (31:27)
I am waiting now for the HGTV land flipping show to come out to start to inspire people.

Monick Halm (31:31)
That would not be exciting. There’s nothing visual about that show. It would be very boring. Or like, here’s the land! It’s still land! You know? Yeah, it’s like, here it is before, and now here it is with the documents that you can…

Patrick (31:32)
Hahaha!

Yeah, the side by side before and after is the exact same.

Noelle (31:57)
You just put the profit super over the top of that and that’s all anyone will pay attention to.

Patrick (32:00)
Yeah.

Monick Halm (32:01)
Yeah, the before and afters will not be super exciting. I don’t think that show would do very well, but the investors can do very well. That what’s important.

Noelle (32:13)
Yeah.

Patrick (32:16)
Yeah. And one of the things that I’m picking up on that I really appreciate about you is that you’re not very eager to categorize yourself as a specific type of investor. You know, you’re not like, I’m a multifamily investor through and through, and that’s all I do. And I’m not an industrial, you know, investor, and that’s all I do through and through. You’re very much open to opportunity and finding what makes sense for you, given the particular market that you’re in. And that seems like a dominant characteristic of your investing from when you first began. So I think that’s something important to call out and probably something that has contributed to your success. Just this notion that yes, you can specialize in something, but you don’t necessarily have to, to be successful if you are looking at the bigger picture of what’s going on and being opportunistic and open -minded about what’s in front of you.

Monick Halm (33:08)
Yeah, that’s true. I think to the extent that I’ve focused, right? My focus has been on relationship building and working with other investors and helping those investors, right? So, and then I think it’s a value to our investors that we offer diversified opportunities. I personally don’t like having all of my eggs in one investment basket like different markets, like different asset types. And now we’re looking at some international stuff. I like even having different currencies that I’m investing in. So all of that, I think, is a value that I can offer to my investors. Look, this is, you know, we just, we bring opportunities that we like and that are vetted, but that are, you know, they’re not all the same. It’s not all a cookie cutter.

Patrick (34:07)
Yeah. And when you talk about providing value to investors, you’ve done very well with fundraising and raising capital. Can you provide like the 101 overview of fundraising for commercial and maybe a few key things that you learned along the way?

Noelle (34:07)
Yeah.

Monick Halm (34:26)
Hmm, that’s a that could be a very long answer. But let me see if I can distill down to the the main nuggets. I think one of the main things that’s helped me is to focus on It’s not about me that’s actually about the other person and what do what do they need? What’s a match? What’s so really learning about other other people and their what they’re they’re needing?

Patrick (34:31)
You

Monick Halm (34:56)
What problems do they have? How do we help them solve their problems or meet their desires? And when I shift, because when I first started, I remember thinking, who’s gonna give me money? Like, why would they give me money? And of course, they don’t wanna give me money. They want their money working for them. They want their money to go make money. They want to grow their money, they don’t wanna give me money, it’s not about me. And when I was able to really shift and think, okay, how can I just really learn what other people need and then help them to do that? That’s when things really shifted and then it became really easy to raise money for the right deals and I look for deals that match people more than I look for people to match deals. That makes sense. Yeah, so, you know, and there are some patterns, right? So not that I’m looking like, okay, I’m gonna look for this particular deal for Noelle, but there’ll be a pattern of things that our investors will like, right? And they want different types of returns or tax benefits or they want a diversification. And so we look for things that will match that.

Patrick (36:23)
Well, that’s really fascinating and nice that you take that into consideration. Because I think it’s important to keep in mind, these are not necessarily short -term commitments, right? So if someone gets into something that isn’t a great fit for them or vice versa, then it’s not something that you’re just easily tie out of quickly. So I think that’s a really wise lesson for newer investors to keep in mind that raising capital is great and something that you need to do if you want to be syndicating. But just taking every dollar from anyone may not be the best choice for you long -term throughout the lifespan or the holding period of the investment.

Monick Halm (37:08)
Yeah, if somebody want you know, they want something quickly or they’re gonna they want to put them away, but they’re gonna need it back Yeah, just these things are not they’re relatively illiquid. All right You can’t it’s not easy to get your money back out and you have to see the investment through and if it’s gonna be three years five years that’s how long you need it.

Noelle (37:31)
It’s definitely a benefit. You want it to be mutual beneficial for both parties. So I do appreciate that and like that. I mean, syndicating is not something that I know particularly a lot about. I think the idea of fundraising can be a little scary, at least for me personally. I don’t know if you… It seems like you have thrived off of that because you love the relationships. Terrifying. Like, oh my gosh, you want to give me how much money? You know, like when you get that first check, I’m sure it was like…

Monick Halm (37:49)
Yeah. It was terrifying at first. Really scary. It was so scary.

Patrick (37:53)
Hahaha

Noelle (38:00)
Okay, I have to make sure that I’m going to work hard for this person to make sure they get what they need. So as you’re evaluating the deal and like making sure to your point, it’s beneficial on both ends. Like, yeah, that just personally seems like a big mental hurdle to overcome for the first time for sure.

Monick Halm (38:22)
I think the main thing to remember is that it’s not, again, it’s not about you as a syndicator. It’s you’re helping this person who, I mean, now the banks are giving you a little bit more interest, but for a long time, it’s like, okay, there’s somebody that’s sitting there with money making 0 .1 % and is just sitting in the bank and is not doing anything they don’t want to have everything in the stock market or they just want to have. They want to be able to have the tax benefits of real estate. They want to be able to own. They want to be able to have their money working better for them. And so when you think about the fact that you’re helping somebody grow their wealth, you’re helping them to diversify, you’re helping them to have these tax benefits.

Then it’s not as scary because you’re not really thinking about oh gosh they’re giving they’ve just wrote me a check for a hundred thousand dollars. Like, they didn’t write you a check for a hundred They wrote you know they’ve like invested in this property they they must know like and trust you enough to have you know entrusted that money to you and you’re gonna go off and bring it back to them with friends but you’re doing them a service and helping them solve a problem. And it’s win -win, right? At least when I think about it in that way, it’s not scary, because then it’s, I’m just trying to help.

Noelle (39:53)
Yeah. No, you’re so right. Thank you for that, for that reminder. It’s a good reminder. You’re helping someone else. And ultimately that’s what we want to be doing. And I know that’s what you want to be doing too, in terms of core foundational fundamentals. We can do it both in audiences and sharing that information, as well as in the investor route and helping investors be able to make a better return. Then they can get at the bank or having their money just sit in a savings account, you know, thinking that that’s, that’s all you can do. And there’s not just the stock market.

Monick Halm (40:18)
Or even in the stock market.

Noelle (40:22)
There’s plenty of other ways to invest.

Patrick (40:26)
You mentioned something about, investing almost being like a service that you’re providing to passive investors. And I’m curious with that, what does your typical communication or interaction with your passive investors look like?

Monick Halm (40:44)
Yeah, it depends on the deal. So usually it’s monthly and we’ll just update, let them know what’s going on. I think when things are not as good the communications should be more frequent, but generally once a month.

Patrick (41:05)
And those are just updates about the property and general market conditions, what you’re seeing, what the plan is. Okay.

Monick Halm (41:08)
Mm -hmm.

Yep. Exactly.

Noelle (41:15)
I was gonna say not to cut us off, but I know we’re getting close to time, so Patrick, Jeopardy round, get your one last final question in.

Patrick (41:23)
Less of a question and more just a quick recap. I think that there are a few really important nuggets that Monick has called out here from many years of experience that a lot of new investors can really benefit from. The main one that I’m taking away is that you shouldn’t be doing this alone and don’t necessarily expect to be doing it alone. It takes a team, it is a team sport and the better quality of person or partner you can surround yourself with, the easier the process will be and the more successful the process will likely be because if you’re partnering with that higher quality experience or capacity, then you’re likely to be able to overcome the challenges that each deal will inevitably throw at you. And then the second thing is really be opportunistic about where you are and what the market is doing at any given time. And don’t necessarily feel the need to pigeonhole yourself into one specific asset class or type of property. There are lots of deals out there to be done.

And the more open -minded you are and the better quality people you’re surrounding yourself with to do those deals, the better likelihood you will have of succeeding. So just want to say thank you, Monick for sharing all of that with us because I think as a beginner commercial investor, like there are things that you have preconceived notions of. And I think those two things are obviously very important, and not necessarily intuitive for the newer investor. So thank you for calling those out based on what you’ve learned and how you found success.

Monick Halm (43:10)
Yeah.

Noelle (43:11)
Monick I know you have so much more to share and you also have multiple platforms that people can find you on. So can you share where people can find you to learn more about you and about real estate investing goddesses as well?

Monick Halm (43:25)
Yeah, the best place is probably to go to my website, REIGoddesses .com. There you can connect with our different social platforms and our blog and the podcast and all the things.

Noelle (43:38)
Perfect. We’ll make sure to put those in the show notes as well. And seriously cannot thank you enough, Monick This has been really great. It’s been so amazing talking with you and learning from you. So thank you for joining us and we hope everyone listening has gotten the same value that we have out of this.

Monick Halm (43:55)
Thank you both.