Discover how to build a successful acquisitions pipeline for multifamily and commercial real estate investors by using an intentional, scalable approach to finding off-market deals. Key strategies include prospecting through cold calling and emailing, marketing via direct mail, and cultivating relationships with brokers and industry contacts. Newer investors are encouraged to focus on consistent, repeatable actions that generate deal flow rather than simply chasing the next deal.
Here’s some of the topics we covered:
- Unlocking Endless Deal Flow
- Top 3 Secret Sources for Game-Changing Deals
- Prospecting Like a Pro for Unstoppable Deal Flow
- Turbocharge Your Deal Pipeline with Targeted Marketing
- How to Attract More Multifamily Deals to You
- Build a Killer Track Record So Deals Chase You
- Getting Your Multifamily Business Off The Ground
- Double Your Deal Flow
- Scaling Your Messaging to 10x Your Multifamily Growth
To find out more about partnering or investing in a multifamily deal: Text Partner to 72345 or email Partner@RodKhleif.com
For more about Rod and his real estate investing journey go to www.rodkhleif.com
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Full Transcript Below
00;00;00;02 – 00;00;29;25
Axel
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode here on lifetime cash flow through real estate investing. Again, as you can tell, I am not Rod Cleef. This is Axel Ragnar, and I’m here with another episode regarding acquisitions and finding off market deals. Now, as you’ve probably heard on the podcast feed, over the last couple of months, I’ve been releasing episodes where I discuss how multifamily investors, or really any commercial real estate investors, can build their acquisitions pipeline, find more off market deals, find better deals, and fundamentally grow their business faster.
00;00;29;25 – 00;00;55;25
Axel
That’s what I’m trying to do here with these episodes on the podcast feed. And in this episode, I’m going to be talking about how you need to think about building your ideal pipeline. And when I say think about building your deal pipeline, I mean the framework in which you need to think about acquisitions. I think a lot of investors, and I’m probably going to be describing a lot of the folks listening to this episode don’t really take an intentional approach to building their acquisitions pipeline or fundamentally finding deals in general.
00;00;55;25 – 00;01;10;28
Axel
There’s a lot of investors out there. And again, this may describe you that more or less just wing it right. When they think about finding deals, they’re probably emailing some brokers when they receive a deal and maybe they underwrite the deal. Maybe they email some feedback. Maybe they said, hey, could you keep me in mind on the next one?
00;01;10;28 – 00;01;29;15
Axel
Maybe give me an early crack at it or first look at it? Something like that. You may be somebody who is going to a meetup without really a lot of intentionality. You go to some here and there, you don’t really go to the same ones frequently, some in person, some online kind of share that you’re a multifamily investor in this area, but there’s really no plan around it, right?
00;01;29;15 – 00;01;47;28
Axel
You’re not sitting down and actually looking at the process of building your ideal pipeline through a lens in which you’re building a framework with actions that are repeatable, that you can go back to and actually build a strategy and a plan around. And that’s fundamentally what I’m going to try to do here in this episode, is to give you the framework in which to think about building your deal, pipeline.
00;01;48;01 – 00;02;14;14
Axel
And notice that I keep saying deal pipeline. I’m not saying to find a deal, right. Fundamentally, what we are trying to do as multifamily and commercial real estate investors is define the actions that we need to take that generate deal flow, that put deals in the top of the funnel at a higher rate so that we have more deals to underwrite, so that it’s more likely that we buy the next deal, the next five deals, the next ten deals, etc. we are not in the business of thinking about how do we buy a deal or the next deal.
00;02;14;14 – 00;02;30;12
Axel
We need to think about how do we build our pipeline, because fundamentally, what we are trying to do in this business is look at 20 deals, 100 deals, thousands of deals. And because that’s what we have to do in order to find the ones that make a lot of sense just to look at hundreds of deals. So how do we put ourselves in a position to look at hundreds of deals?
00;02;30;12 – 00;02;49;05
Axel
So first things first, let’s talk about the three places that deals come from, or the three avenues in which deals come into a multifamily investors inbox. And again, we’re going to assume direct to seller here as well. Step one is prospecting. Right. These are 1 to 1 actions that an investor takes to generate deal flow to generate a lead.
00;02;49;06 – 00;03;06;04
Axel
So this would include cold calling cold texting cold emailing. This could be to a broker or this could be to a seller or as a broker or any other deal. Find wholesaler another investor, etc. these are the actions that we take where we are trading time for leads, right? That’s the other way that I want you to think about this.
00;03;06;04 – 00;03;25;19
Axel
What we are fundamentally doing here is going out to the marketplace and contacting individuals and sharing our deal criteria. We’re sharing exactly what we want to buy. We’re asking them if they’ll sell us their deal, if it’s a seller that we’re speaking with. And really, this is time intensive and that’s how we’re actually generating leads. It’s not scalable, fundamentally speaking.
00;03;25;22 – 00;03;42;20
Axel
The second avenue in which we’re looking for deals is through marketing. If you’re in the single family world, which is predominantly not the listener of this podcast, but this could be your marketing for, oh, you’re selling direct mail. This could be you are paying for, PPC ads. Maybe you’re paying for online social ads or some other kind of ads.
00;03;42;20 – 00;04;01;22
Axel
A drive traffic to your landing page, your website. That’s fundamentally not what we’re talking about doing here in commercial real estate, PPC, socialize. That’s not really money well spent, fundamentally speaking. What I’m really talking about here, from a marketing standpoint is direct mail. And this is direct mail that you were sending the property owners. This could be direct mail that you were sending to other investors that you want to build a relationship with.
00;04;01;22 – 00;04;21;20
Axel
But fundamentally, what I’m talking about here is you are trading dollars for leads again and prospecting or trading time for leads. You have to pick up the phone. You got to tell you about the text. You got to send the email. You were trading time for leads, trading time for deal flow, marketing or trading dollars for deal flow takes the same amount of time to spend or to to send, I should say a thousand letters as it does 2000 letters as 5000 letters.
00;04;21;20 – 00;04;36;20
Axel
And that’s assuming you’re not handwriting them. This is assuming you’re working with a service and you’re just, you know, uploading your lists and sending mail. Obviously the cost is different. Obviously you’re going to receive more leads. The more dollars you spend going out into the marketplace. The third avenue in which deals come into your business is the relationships.
00;04;36;20 – 00;04;54;00
Axel
And this is where people bring you deals. Now, these could be brokers. These could be other service professionals, mortgage brokers, deal finders, etc.. These could be sellers coming to you because they are aware of who you are. They heard that you bought Joe’s building down the street and figured, hey, let’s go bring him, our deal. When we’re looking to sell.
00;04;54;00 – 00;05;23;28
Axel
Fundamentally, you want to spend as much possible time as you can developing your deal pipeline so that people bring you deals. Now, it’s much harder to get to that place early on. And I think that’s where a lot of investors make the mistake as they try to become the deal magnet before they have a reputation, credibility, a demonstrated track record, and frankly speaking, your time is going to be better spent developing your track record and then executing on the actions that bring you deals and turn you into an omnipresent figure in your marketplace that becomes a deal magnet again.
00;05;23;28 – 00;05;41;27
Axel
To recap, the three places that deals come from prospecting 1 to 1, right? We’re training time for for deals. Trading time for deal flow. I should say number two is marketing, right? That’s one to many. We’re trading dollars for deal flow. Number three is many to one. That’s everybody out there bringing you deals. That’s the most scalable component of the business.
00;05;41;27 – 00;05;55;21
Axel
That’s where most investors find themselves after being in the business for a long period of time and doing a lot of transactions. And that’s where this game gets really easy, is when a lot of people start bringing you deals. You don’t have to grind so hard to find the next one and to build your pipeline. So let’s go back to prospecting again.
00;05;55;21 – 00;06;10;16
Axel
The actions that we want to take here calling, texting, emailing, whether it’s sellers on your list or whether it’s brokers or professionals. If you are new to the business, this is where you should be spending the bulk of your time. You should not expect people to be bringing you deals because why would that? You don’t have a track record.
00;06;10;16 – 00;06;28;12
Axel
You don’t have reputation in the marketplace. You don’t have that credibility, the demonstrated ability to close. So it’s going to be much harder for you to rely on other people to bring you deals, because you don’t have that built yet. So when you’re in the prospecting phase, you should be going out there. You should be buying a list of the properties in your target market within the criteria, the physical criteria that you want to pursue.
00;06;28;14 – 00;06;49;28
Axel
You should be calling them, you should be texting, and you should be emailing the owners. Not going to spend a lot of time in this episode and skip tracing, etc. I’ve done plenty of episodes on that already on this feed, and you can listen to them if you scroll back 30 or 45 days. When you are getting your business off the ground, when you’re doing your first one, two, three, four deals, depending on the size of the deals you’re doing, obviously if you’re doing much larger deals, it only takes a couple to really build a track record.
00;06;50;04 – 00;07;03;13
Axel
If you’re doing smaller deals, you should be able to bang out a few of these direct to seller. That’s what’s going to give you a good story to go and and tell other folks. Again, we’re going to get to the relationships piece of this, which is many to one. But that becomes a lot easier when you actually have closed deals.
00;07;03;13 – 00;07;18;29
Axel
Now number two, let’s talk about marketing. So again, assuming that you’re going direct a seller here, you should probably start with prospecting because it’s more budget friendly. Now if you have cash that you’re willing to burn and you already have, you know, again, I talk a lot in other episodes about the power of consistency and the importance of consistency.
00;07;19;00 – 00;07;34;26
Axel
You can’t just send one round of direct mail and expect to do deals. It’s just not how this works. It’s a long sales cycle when you’re buying multifamily or commercial real estate, and you need to have the patience and the foresight to plan five, six, seven rounds of mail, likely every quarter, likely going to take you a year and a half to do this.
00;07;34;26 – 00;07;49;28
Axel
But if you have the budget attached to that and you are ready, ready, willing and able to spend those funds, let’s say you have $5,000 to spend on marketing and you’re going to do a list of called, you know, a thousand. You’re going to send five rounds of mail. That’s good. That’s going to put you in a position to have conversations to build your pipeline.
00;07;50;03 – 00;08;07;10
Axel
Great. By all means, go ahead and do that. If you are somebody that does not have the budget, you probably need to spend more time on the prospecting components of the acquisitions framework. Now, if you do have a budget and you do have time, what you should be doing is doing some prospecting as well as direct mail, and that’s where you’re really going to start to see results grow from a direct a seller standpoint.
00;08;07;10 – 00;08;22;28
Axel
For example, you send your mail out on the first of the month, you know that it’s going to hit mailboxes by the seventh. And then between the 10th and the 15th, you’re sending your emails and you’re calling in your referencing your direct mail when you reach out to sellers. Again, when we start to work down the framework, if you don’t have a big budget, you’re going to be spending a lot of time prospecting.
00;08;22;28 – 00;08;37;23
Axel
If you’re inexperienced and you haven’t done deals, probably not going to be getting deals from brokers. So you’re going to want to spend time prospecting to sellers, marketing to sellers so that you can get some deals under your belt so that you can then go out into the marketplace and tell your story more effectively. And that’s where we’re going to get you now, which is the relationships.
00;08;37;23 – 00;08;55;12
Axel
And that’s many to one. So again, relationships is where most investors want to work to get to. And there’s a lot of content out there that discuss how you can build better relationships with brokers, how you can build better relationships with other deal fighters. And all of that stuff is great and that content’s worthwhile. I spend a lot of time talking about that as well, how you can actually be somebody who is top of mind.
00;08;55;12 – 00;09;15;27
Axel
Right. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that now, but fundamentally, it’s really hard to be that person if you haven’t done deals right. And it’s kind of a chicken or the egg situation. Well, how can I do deals if brokers aren’t going to send me deals because I haven’t done deals? Well, that means you need to go back to prospecting in marketing the first two, and you need to go out there and go direct the seller and take a couple deals down, or buy a much smaller deal right by a deal.
00;09;15;27 – 00;09;43;20
Axel
That is where your experience is. No objection. Let’s say you’re trying to buy 50 unit deals. You got there by a ten unit deal. Do a deal that isn’t so dependent on the buyer’s credibility to win that deal. If it’s a brokered deal, right, you got to get some deals under your belt in order for you to be someone that a broker feels confident bringing a deal to, especially now where the market is a little bit more turbulent and credibility track record demonstrated ability to close is more important now than it has been in previous years, where there was so much more money flying around, debt was easier to secure, investor capital was easier to
00;09;43;20 – 00;10;02;11
Axel
raise. So long story short, we all want the secret of how to get brokers to send us more deals. Number one, the easiest thing to do is just do more deals. That’s goes without being said. Now I’ll talk about all the other stuff you need to think about. How do I become omnipresent in my marketplace? And there’s all kinds of actions that support the goal of becoming omnipresent in your marketplace.
00;10;02;11 – 00;10;13;29
Axel
You need to think about when somebody has a deal, whether it’s a broker, whether it’s a property manager who hears their client wants to sell, whether it’s a mortgage broker who hears about a deal that fell apart, and they want to go and try to link up another buyer with the broker, they want to try and help out.
00;10;13;29 – 00;10;31;03
Axel
Whatever. How do you become omnipresent? Well, you need to get out into the marketplace and build relationships at scale. And the way that we do that is by executing on scalable messaging. Right. And there’s a few different things here. Namely, posting on social media is number one, right? Posting on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, starting a podcast.
00;10;31;03 – 00;10;44;20
Axel
This is the most scalable way in which we can communicate with the marketplace, and it does not require a lot of energy to do this. If you just have a LinkedIn account with, I don’t know, a few hundred people that are in real estate in your market, and you just post weekly for a couple of months, you’re going to find more deals.
00;10;44;20 – 00;11;00;22
Axel
It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. Now there’s all this is a spectrum, right? It’s not. Are you active on social media or are you not? Right. It’s how active are you or how inactive are you? Just get started posting some type of content on LinkedIn. On Facebook. Get active in the Facebook groups in your marketplace.
00;11;00;25 – 00;11;18;24
Axel
I’m sure your market’s got a couple of Facebook groups that are tied to the local real estate associations. Get in there, talk about what you’re looking for in a right, you know, provide value. Start doing things where it takes you five minutes to create this message, but it’s getting in front of 100 people, 300 people, 500 people, whatever the number is 50 people, 20 people.
00;11;18;24 – 00;11;30;27
Axel
All right. Let’s say you just start your Instagram account, you start putting up videos and you follow a bunch of other people in your market. All right. So you make a little video 15 seconds, you’re out of your property, you’re filming a renovation. 50 people see it. Most people look at that view count and think, well, that’s atrocious.
00;11;30;27 – 00;11;44;26
Axel
That’s not a lot of views. Well, you still reach 50 people and you’re still getting your message out there. And this is a scalable activity. Again, this gets so much easier when you do deals and you have more to talk about, and you have that credibility. And there’s and it gives people a reason to tune in to what you’re doing.
00;11;44;26 – 00;12;11;13
Axel
And an interest in what you’re doing. Number two is you need to leverage email marketing, right. And specifically you need to start an email newsletter. We talked a lot in the podcast about this, but put everybody in your marketplace geographic speaking in your local marketplace where you’re pursuing deals. I shouldn’t say local. You know, maybe you’re looking for deals out of state and it’s not technically local to you, but everybody that’s doing deals in your marketplace and send a monthly newsletter that brings them value updates about that market data, about that market stuff, about your business that maybe you’re learning that you find to be valuable.
00;12;11;15 – 00;12;24;16
Axel
Write it in your own words. Get it out there, right. It takes a few hours a month, but if you get it to a couple hundred people on that email list, it’s one of the more scalable things you can do from a communication standpoint. Helps to build your mind. Share with all of the folks in that network. Try to speak at real estate meetups.
00;12;24;16 – 00;12;49;29
Axel
Try to go guest on podcast again. Scalable activities. Long story short, what all of this does is build your reputation and your awareness in that marketplace. And when you do all of this and you execute patience, and you do this over a long period of time and you take a long term mindset to it, you’re building that mindshare and it makes it even more likely that the next time somebody has a deal, they associate that deal with your criteria and who you are, and they bring you that deal.
00;12;49;29 – 00;13;13;04
Axel
Again, let me go all the way back to the top, specific to relationships, which is a many to one activity. It’s the most scalable way to find deals. It’s going to be really hard for you to gain attention of folks and to really develop a reputation. If you are not someone who has done deals or a deal, even if you’ve only done a handful, a couple, 2 or 3, whatever it is makes this whole process significantly easier because you have something to point to that says you are an active real estate investor.
00;13;13;04 – 00;13;27;28
Axel
So before you start spending a ton of time posting on social media, doing your newsletter, all of this stuff, if you haven’t done a deal, if you haven’t closed the deal yet, you should go back to the first step, which is prospecting. Trading time for leads. If you have a budget, trade it. You know, jump to marketing trading dollars for leads.
00;13;28;02 – 00;13;47;22
Axel
You should spend time there until you’ve done a few deals, and you are somebody who has a good story to tell on the phone with a broker or a deal finder or whoever. And then you should start pouring more time into developing your presence in the marketplace, which is that relationships components of the step. So in recap, deals come from three places prospecting 1 to 1 marketing.
00;13;47;22 – 00;14;07;21
Axel
That’s one to many relationships, many to one. You have to walk down this path as a new investor, and this is where you need to follow. And depending on the stage of your business development or your portfolio’s development, your development as an investor understand where you are and allocate your time and energy into the work that most closely aligns with where you are in the process.
00;14;07;22 – 00;14;22;26
Axel
If you found this episode helpful, please leave Rod’s Pod here, a rating and a review. If you’d like to connect with me at Multifamily Wealth on Instagram, or feel free to shoot me an email axel accel at aligned alig ND rep.com.
