Are There Really Any Differences Between Small and Large Portfolios
“I can point you to a dozen other people that I know personally that have been more successful than me. But we’re just continually growing and pushing ourselves forward.”
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream Podcast. We have an incredible guest for you today, but first please make sure you have subscribed, if you haven't already. We also love getting your feedback through likes, comments, ratings, and reviews. Today, Sean has a conversation with Michael Becker. Micheal is a Dallas native and started his career as a banker then moved to multifamily. In just 8 years he has amassed hundreds of doors. Today he shares how his business model really hasn't changed all that much from $4 million deals to $100 million deals and some of the best practices that have remained true the whole time.
Key Topics
Tell us about your background
What are some of the biggest things you have learned over the years in the industry?
What do you wish you knew when you were first starting out?
What does the American Dream mean to you?
Connect with Michael Becker:
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Abigail Thomson 00:01
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream podcast brought to you by Thomson Multifamily Group. Your hosts, Abigail and Sean will discuss how you can take your American Dream to the next level, through real estate investing, business practices, and personal development. Join us as we share our experiences as a father daughter duo who are trying to accomplish their goal of financial freedom. We hope you learn more about how to define and achieve your American dream. Here's another episode of Next Level American Dream.
Abigail Thomson 00:34
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream podcast. We have an incredible guest for you today. But first, please make sure you have subscribed if you have not already. We also love getting your feedback through likes, comments, ratings and reviews. Today, Sean has a conversation with Michael Becker. Michael is a Dallas native and started his career as a banker than moved to multifamily. In just eight years, he's amassed hundreds of doors. Today, he shares how his business model really hasn't changed that much from $4 million deals to $100 million deals, and some of his best business practices that have remained true the whole time. If you found any value from today's episode, then please share it with a friend and help us grow. For more information on our sponsor, visit thomsonmultifamilygroup.com to start taking your American Dream to the next level through passive investing.
Sean Thomson 01:31
Michael, thanks for coming on the show.
Michael Becker 01:33
Hey, appreciate you having me on.
Sean Thomson 01:34
Let's start by just telling people a little bit about where you got started and how you kind of got into multifamily.
Michael Becker 01:39
Yeah, you know, Michael Becker live in Dallas, Texas grew up in the Dallas area and didn't really kind of come from come from a lot of means pretty pretty solid, middle class working family, you know, my father fix appliances for living my mother was a school secretary. So you know, kind of kind of had was a story. So a lot of people were you kind of, you know, go to go to school and, you know, get out get a job. And you know, it's a really kind of get instilled in me as a young age to really just kind of, you know, live below my means and save money. And so I did that for you know, many years. And, you know, coming out of college, getting into the banking business, I was actually a teller in college and kind of worked my way through college and went to night school as the teller new accounts and out of college, got into the credit department at a bank. So it was underwriting commercial real estate loans. And I did that for a few years and then transitioned to the the production side. And so, you know, I was originating loans on, you know, all the major income producing commercial real estate classes like Office, desk, or retail. And then, you know, the great recession happened in 2008. So I'm in my early 40s. And so I was kind of in my early 30s, then when I, when I looked at, I kind of kind of went down and went from, you know, loaning money to doing problem workout. And so we did, you know, a whole lot of a problem workout for about a year and a half, two years and kind of coming out of the Great Recession, you realize only thing that was really kind of working from, from a lending standpoint, commercial real estate was multifamily. So I kind of really pivoted and focused exclusively on multifamily lending. And kind of through that process just kind of realized I was on the wrong side of all these deals, you know, it's kind of better be the borrower than a lender. So what started out like a lot of people in 2010 or 11 things early 2011, we ended up buying my first investment property, which was a three bed two bath house in Mesquite, Texas, I think I paid about $75,000 or something like that, for this three bed, two bath house, I spent maybe $15,000 renovating it. So I was all in for around 90,000 and rent it out for like 1100 bucks a month. And that kind of produced, you know, four or 500 bucks in positive cash flow. So then I repeated that 16 times, I think I think at 16 rent houses. And then I realized that wasn't very scalable. And then I'm kind of reflecting the all day every day what I'm doing at the bank, and then just kind of realized that he wasn't utilizing everything I had in my resource, all the resources and knowledge and relationships that I had at my fingertips. So I decided to transition so we bought our first multifamily property in 2013. So 120 unit deal on Garland, Texas. So suburb of Dallas, I think we paid around 3.8 5 million if I remember right, so you know, 30 ish a door if I do that math, right. And, you know, we own that for a few years sold it for, like $55,000 Probably worth 110 or $120,000, something like that today. Yeah. And so over the last, you know, gasca gets nice our ninth year of being multifamily owners now. We've done maybe 13 ish 1000 units give or take, we'll have we have about 7500 units in the portfolio, it's worth about 1,000,000,006. So we've sold maybe 5000 units, refinance a whole bunch more out own about 1,000,000,006 About 7500 units today. So so amazing to think about decade ago, I didn't own anything and now we own now we own a whole bunch of stuff. So it's got a kind of a fun ride.
Sean Thomson 04:52
That is amazing. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, I thought you've been doing this a lot longer given what the success that you've had. Actually, that's kind of inspiring. But you've done this so rapidly and had the ability to do that. And I've had several people on the on the show that you know, are successful and things like that. But I want to talk to you if I can about where you're kind of at today and, and some of the things you're seeing at the level that you're at now that you may not have noticed when you were just getting started. Sure. So let's talk about was there a point in your business during that growth time that you noticed a change in how you operate? Is there is there like a unit count or a period in your business where you said, Oh, I've got to, I've got to scale this up, I've got to change the way I do things. I've got to add employees, I've got to, I've got to look at my business differently. Because you know, we, to a business really, right?
Michael Becker 05:39
Yeah, we started out it was my other business partners, my partner, Sean and I, and then we had one employee when we started, which was kind of how we got going. So he was kind of like an analyst slash transaction coordinator, kind of, but we all will jack of all trades. So you know, we started, we're just kind of, you know, a couple of guys, three or three guys out there doing some deals. And so we ended up doing, I want to say around eight transactions, we were probably averaging 200 units, we're probably about 16, or 1700 units give or take, before we kind of realized, man, this is a lot of work. And we get all these deals, no and stuff to kind of manage. And so we decided we needed to kind of start layering in some additional employees. So we probably probably honestly waited a little too long to start trying to scale up. And we're kind of pulling our hair out. And so we started with some administrator, I was kind of the first thing we did try and get a bunch of 10, or, you know, 10, or $12 hour tasks, off my plate and on somebody else's plate. And then and then from there, we hired Jennifer, who's now who now is a principal of our company, after you know, several years of working for us. And then Jennifer kind of came into a shell IT project management background. So it came in kind of systematize everything, we had no systems, no organization, and we're kind of you know, just everything's kind of disorganized, thrown everywhere. We're just so busy running, doing deals that we didn't really have systems in place to make make things easier. So you know, everything was a little bit harder. So then we kind of, you know, step by step, just sort of system sizing systematizing our business. And then from there, we kind of built out the administrative team, got some asset management help, got some accounting help, and house, you know, really got some marketing help here recently. So just started kind of, you know, step by step, sort of finding some of the deficiencies that we have within our organization and trying to find a resource, whether it's technology, or whether it's human capital, whatever it is, and, and put it in place. And it's been kind of incremental thing. And that's one thing that, you know, I no one's really born knowing how to run a business, right. And I certainly went to business school and was a banker, but I didn't really actually know how to run a company, do all this stuff until you kind of get thrown in the fire and make a few little minor mistakes along the way, and then figure out the Hey, that's a list of stuff we don't want to ever do. Again, we need to we need to find a way to not do that mistake again. And, and that's kind of really kind of how we've evolved over the last years. And a lot of it's not, you know, really wish it was greater planning and you know, more for, you know, foresight and thought behind it. But we kind of just got in there and figured it out along the way to be honest with you.
Sean Thomson 08:05
Well, you went you got to eight properties before you started to really staff up, that's quite a lot. Actually. I can imagine that you had to rely heavily on your third party management. And one of the other things to kind of keep that stuff going. I guess you guys had more systems, I couldn't imagine running eight properties, with just just running a gun like that. But that's good. So after about eight properties, you started to snap up are you seeing in your transitions? Because you're up to what you said 7500? Now,
Michael Becker 08:31
yeah, are you a portfolio now? Yeah.
Sean Thomson 08:33
Are you starting to see a transition now to where you're having to sort of think of your business a little bit differently? Again?
Michael Becker 08:39
Yeah, you know, we continually to evolve as we go. So you know, where we've always used third party management. So we've chosen not to take that in house, you know, no, right or wrong, I don't think but it's kind of what was worked for us. I mean, if we had a management house, we probably would have and there's there's 12 of us in our company, my partner 910 employees right now. And if there were were fully vertically integrated with property management house would probably be 250 employees or something like that, you know, with a with a lot more headaches and accounting and HR and what just stuff like that. So utilizing third party management's helps kind of minimize a lot of that for us, you know, get no right or wrong, just kind of what's what's worked for us. And you know, what we've kind of transition which we haven't talked about, when we first started out, we did a lot of workforce housing. So, you know, think in Texas, where where we focus on was a lot of 60s and 70s, vintage, you know, kind of year construction, that's kind of what we bought transition, the kind of more B class and kind of 80s and 90s kind of for a year construction and now what we own is generally kind of what I call eight A minus so you know, generally your 2000 or newer 20 years or younger, you know, mainly a lot of stuff in mind kind of brand new stuff actually last, you know, maybe one or two years old. So that's been kind of a transition and then you know, kind of layering and asset management help and then getting assistance for the asset manager and make sure he's on top of, you know, all the rents and capital improvement projects who might have going on and you know, property tax protesting and city stuff, you know, whatever, whatever comes out to you on a day to day and kind of scale that out. And then on the administrative side, we were apartment syndicator. So we haven't really taken private equity. So we you know, instead of getting one single check for one investor, we tend to get 100 or 200, checks, you know, 100,000 on time from a bunch of, you know, high net worth kind of regular regular folk probably pretty similar to what you do. And that's great. And there's a lot of advantages to that. But there's a lot of something some of the nothing's free, and the cost who pays a lot of administrative nightmares, right? You know, you have your, your, your investor, they get divorced, or they move or they change their bank account, or, you know, you got to do I think we're in do 1700 or so maybe a little bit more K ones this year. So we got to get all those out by the end of February, or your your investors start complaining to you like, where's my K ones? How do you manage all that in 30 days, 30 to 40 day window and get all that efficiently, build out systems, things like that. So you know, just a lot of that is just kind of, you know, getting something that comes at you and is trying to build out a system, either through technology or hiring some people and making sure we're extremely organized and get very prepared ahead of time. So you live working on our K ones for, you know, you know, we start working on that around November, I get ready to make all these out by February, and then we take self directed IRA money go to the fair market value forms, and we have three 400 of those, we got to get out by January 15. So, you know, you gotta, you just gotta gotta be organized. And that that's a lot of what we've been successful in implementing.
Sean Thomson 11:35
Yeah, awesome. I want to kind of rewind a little bit. So what do you think so you you've had a pretty smooth trajectory? It seems like a growth throughout your, your career in multifamily. What do you think is the thing or one or two things maybe that were made? The big difference for you, as you were trying to transition? are first getting started? And then moving moving up? But what what do you think your critical success factors were in that? Is it broker? Relationships? Is it funding? What do you think was was really critical?
Michael Becker 12:03
Yeah, but you know, to be successful being an apartment syndicator or, you know, an apartment operator, like, like myself, you know, the two most critical things, you need to do the highest value tasks you need to do, or you got to find deals and find money, right. So you got to, you know, source equity, whether that's 100,000 at a time, like, like I do, or, you know, getting, you know, institutional kind of relationships with private equity firms, you know, that that's one aspect of it, that's, you know, usually about a third of the money, about two thirds of the money comes from your banking relationships, and making sure you have, you know, good strong banking relationships, you get the right type of debt for that fit the projects that you're trying to doing. So we spend a lot of time on that. And then we spent a lot of time on on brokers, right. So broker relationships, brokers control, the majority of the deals, whether the market or off market, the brokers kind of control these deals, we're constantly in front of those guys, you know, we're recording this the beginning of 2022, I'm just getting ready. Last two days, I'm spending all my time setting up meetings for animate, see the national multi Housing Council meeting in Orlando, that's coming up here in the very near future. And so just trying to make sure that, you know, that's the conference where virtually all the brokers across the country go, and all the larger owners, and a lot of the lenders and Equity Partners, etc, they're all they all go to one place will be for 30,000 people, just one conference. And so we're going to spend a bunch of time do meetings and going to events that evening, and just trying to figure out how we can source some something out of there, whether it's, you know, an equity source, a loan lender, or, you know, preferably a deal from from a broker that has a deal out. So that's what we're spending a bunch of time on. So I'm constantly getting myself in front of these brokers, whether it's by by the phone or going to a meeting or 20 deals or going to conferences. So that's what we spent a lot of time on. As far as the growth in our trajectory. I mean, I think a lot of is simply, us making a conscious decision to you know, continue to grow, we've set out annual goals every year, we're always kind of pushing ourselves slightly past our comfort zone, some of the first thing we did was around 4 million bucks, then, you know, we quickly got to about 8 million ideal and it was uncomfortable. And then we got to, you know, $15 million deal and a 20 or $25 million deal. And, you know, this slide is last year, we did a two property portfolio for 110 million or something like that, right. And so now I need to be able to push myself, I know I can do that. So that probably means I could do 130 or $150 million deal. And that's kind of what the what the goal is going into 2020 to just constantly kind of pick incremental steps slightly past my comfort zone and continue to push forward and not settle for stuff less. So that's really kind of what we focus on. And that's kind of what's been helpful for us to, you know, kind of grow and as successful as we've been, I can point you to you know, a dozen other guys that I know personally that have been more successful than me that you know, that were able to grow a little bit quicker, a little bit faster in their own way. So there's always someone doing more bigger, better faster than what you're Doing so don't I try not to get down on myself when you see someone being maybe a little bit, accomplishing something that I want to accomplish a little bit faster than I have. But you know, we're just continually growing and pushing ourselves forward.
Sean Thomson 15:12
So it sounds like you're going through the same, the same things you had early on, you still have today, it's just, it's just a matter of you, you're doing much larger deals. So you're probably still sweating the rays, every time you're still sweating, the closing, you're still kind of, you're still kind of going through that stress, or, you know, of getting the deal closed. But it's 100 $100 million, instead of a $4 million.
Michael Becker 15:34
Yes, to a certain extent, but I have this history, all these deals that we've been successful doing, that I have this innate confidence in my self and our ability to actually solve whatever problems come at us, where when you start now, you don't have that kind of reference of a successful track record to point to so you're, you have all this fear and doubt that other you're gonna share if you can overcome, we're now I'm pretty sure we're gonna overcome whatever comes at us and we have so far today. But yeah, we had a, we had a deal that got a little, you know, some deals go easy, and some deals don't go easy. We had three deals that closed right for them in the year, and we had to have one close that was a domino for these other ones. And that was a hard one. And we just had a you know, just buckle down and grind it out. And it was, you know, a little stressful there for a little while, and you're kind of relying on on some third party to do something that you don't have control over. And that's kind of holding up everything and you know, just so you just had to kind of work through it. But, you know, I figured out that in the day, whatever it was, we're gonna figure out one way or another, and I you know, it all it all kind of worked out. But yeah, we still, sometimes we still sweat it, it's not nearly as much as what we used to. But, you know, as you continue to grow and scale up, I mean, you know, these these checks get real, real big. And you know, it's real money that you're going to lose it the day if you don't do what you say you're going to do.
Sean Thomson 16:52
So I'm just gonna rewind a little bit, I asked your question in there. But so, so from the beginning to where you are now, I think the two critical things is that you, I guess, really, it's mostly one critical thing is that you've you've solidified the relationships necessary for deal finding. And then for funding, both on the banking side and on the equity side. So just maintaining consistency with reaching out to those people that have deals and getting in front of those people and getting those opportunities sent your way. And then also, you know, making sure that people that are funding your deals are understanding your business and you're interacting with them. So that's really kind of been was what it sounded like when you said that's kind of been the the most the most beneficial thing in your business that's helped you kind of consistently grow, right,
Michael Becker 17:32
the lifeblood of your business. If anyone does what I do for a living, that's the lifeblood of your business, you got to find deals and find money. And fortunately, the more you do, the easier that gets, you know, it's a completely unfair business. You know, a lot of this is who you know what, you know what chips you can tray, the guy who's got 100 deals has a very distinct advantage over the guy who's done one or two deals, you know, I mean, that the deals that come my way, I mean, I don't get questioned anymore, when we say we can do something people assume I can do what I say I'm going to do because I have 100 instances of me actually doing what I said I was gonna do. So you know, people don't question me where my equity is gonna come from, or can I qualify for a mortgage, when you start now, that's, you know, those are things that you gotta, you got to be able to communicate effectively to get because you don't have this long track record of all these deals you can point to you got to be, you know, no one believes you until you actually do it, right. So until you, the more you do it, the easier to believe and then when you start returning more full cycle on these deals, and returning capital, investors have a lot more confidence in you than they did the first the first time they invested with you, they have a lot more confidence on the 10th or 20th time they give you give you some money, they tend to give you more money because you've returned capital with with you know, some appreciation with it as well but then they start referring all their friends and you know, then it kind of starts snowballing from there so you know, I do nothing every week we get you know, three to five new investors at my my database of I just do absolutely nothing, you know, it just kind of organically grows and some of those people convert and some of them don't, but it's kind of a numbers game is gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And you know, sometimes people have things going on that maybe a normal investor would invest in every deal but the daughter got married and they had to pay for a wedding or you know, whatever happened so you always have to get a further and ever growing database to make sure that you have you know the funding available to close the deal on time because we're putting up real non refundable earnest money in pursuit costs saying that we're going to do we're going to do so that's you know, something that we we spend, you know, consistent effort focusing on expanding the investor database as well.
Sean Thomson 19:38
Yeah, that success sort of breeds more success.
Michael Becker 19:40
Yep.
Sean Thomson 19:42
Well, let's talk about one of the things that you wish you had known getting started today you know, you know today that you didn't know back then what is this was there like one like, like, Man, I wish I had started here. I wish I'd known this.
Michael Becker 19:54
Yeah, I wish our new capillaries were gonna compress by four or 500 basis points. You know, we started buying deals at 888 and a half caps and sold them when they hit six caps didn't know they're gonna go to fours. But I know in all seriousness, you know, I think that we have made any fatal or critical mistakes during our career. You know, one I think we've been we're, you know, I mentioned my background was banking. I was grim reaper, you know, guess what is 13 years ago, 1213 years ago is the Grim Reaper during the great recession took a lot of those principles applied into our business. So we've always been pretty conservative in the way we structure and the types of deals I would go after. So we never really made any critical mistakes. But the one mistake we had made multiple times, which costs us literally 10s and 10s of millions of dollars, is we kind of mismatched a little bit the loan type with the business plan. Meeting, we started out we pretty much exclusively Did you know, Fannie Mae 10 year fixed rate money. And, you know, we started buying deals like since 2013. And interest rates were extremely low around 5%. And other markets started loosening up, and we get, you know, a whole year of interest only. And it was great compared to a couple of years prior. So we did a bunch of fixed rate money. And we thought that these loans that we took, they're all assumable. And we thought that when we'd sell these deals that they you know, being a below market interest rate at the times you thought rates were going to go up, that'd be accretive to our situation, and we get paid for having a loan. And that could not have been more wrong. Because you know, one year of interest only turned into three years of interest only turn into five years of interest only 5% rates turned into 3% rates. And the way these yield maintenance are the pieces prepayment penalties work is so it's a formula based on how much time is left to maturity. And if kind of your your note rate compared to current market interest rate. So if you're the your rates higher than what the current market interest rates are prepay, goes up. So we've had, you know, several deals that we've had to sell on a loan assumption and got a lower purchase price due to that, or we just ate a bunch and prepayment penalties. So literally, to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars over the years, and in spite of all that we still have done really well. So I think maybe being a little bit more intentional, and kind of matching your business plan and your low maturity and not trying to get too cute about trying to see if there's low and be a little bit more creative. You know, I mean, especially when you start now, you know, I learned that one of my one of the guys I really liked a lot in business told me once that, you know, well you own apartments in dog years, you know, every year you own apartment feels like seven, you know, and the older and smaller the apartment building more true that statement is. So when people get in, they get all excited. And they go, you know, getting out of single family and they go buy the first 40 or 50 unit deal. They feel like this is this is great, I want to own this thing forever. Well, the reality is, is you know, usually one of two things is going to happen to you either you get the business and you absolutely hate it. And this sucks, you can't wait to get out of it and can't wait to sell this deal move on, or you get in it, you absolutely love it. And you can't wait to sell the small deal to go buy a bigger deal and continue trade up. But either way those like 50 unit deals as first deals that you do are kind of started properties. And most people tend to be in those for you know, relatively short period of time two to three years. So if you have a big prepayment penalty associated with that, that that tends to be a mistake. It limits your flexibility and your and your exit on the deal. And I'm sure you know, you know, many, many people have made that same mistake I made. So that's probably the biggest the biggest single mistake that we made, you know, repeatedly and fortunately we learned learned our lesson a few years ago, and we don't do that anymore.
Sean Thomson 23:22
Yeah, that's interesting, I deal with that quite a lot. I have a lot of assumable loans come come our way that we looking at it. You just can't make them work in today's environment. The bidding is too competitive. And you're the funding sources that you have now are much different. So our first deal actually we bought with a with a prepayment penalty on it. We structured it more creatively than I think others did. That's what made that's kind of one of the things that allowed us to to get the deal actually so and you don't so you don't use private equity in yours in your in your business. You all yours is funded through syndication.
Michael Becker 23:52
Yeah, we have not taken private equity do a deal. We did recapitalize one deal last year, we took some prep, preferred equity, but it was a really small group behind it. But yeah, generally speaking, you know, we just we go bang it out 100,000 at a time, you know, we're average check is probably 150 160,000 is our average investor, you know, the people that are new to us tend to invest a minimum if you've been with us a few years, you tend to invest more than that we probably average at around 150 or 160,000 per per investor or something like that.
Sean Thomson 24:24
That's amazing that you build such a business with with that level investing and not being not having to take you know other private private money so that's really good.
Michael Becker 24:30
And you know, that's one thing when I look at some of my competitors that gone well faster than me they've all generally gone the private equity route and you know, a little easier to scale quicker but you know, we've been fortunate enough to with our structures always been pretty similar pretty flat. It's a simple 8020 deal no, no preferred return where you know, if you take private equity money, you have to pay that perhaps so you know, you that that's something that's been important to us to try to avoid paying, you know, preferred return so we, you know, that's like said nothing, it's worlds free, so to avoid paying them for return, I got to do 17 100k ones. So kinda you know how you pay for it a little bit with some administrative work or you pay for it with with money. So one of the two ways,
Sean Thomson 25:08
right, exactly. Well, so I asked everyone on the show kind of the name of the shows next little American dream. So I always asked everybody kind of what is your American dream? And what are you doing to kind of, I guess you've already explained what you've done to achieve it, but what is it that what is the American dream mean to you,
Michael Becker 25:23
you know, just kind of looking back that, uh, you know, certainly I grew up in, you know, with everything I really needed. I mean, I didn't grow up poor. But you know, we certainly weren't rich, you know, my father grew up on a farm and moved to Texas before my sister and I were born and like, you know, worked, you know, still still working, he's 73 or four years old, and he's still going to work part time hopefully will retire one day fix and appliances are living so blue collar. And then mother was a was a school secretary. And you know, so we certainly had what we needed, but we weren't rich. And we, you know, I don't think I got on airplane. But maybe one time before I turned 18, we always drove everywhere we went. So I you know, didn't grow up with this with this type of, I didn't have a fire rich father that could teach me how to do private equity deals and invest in real estate. And I certainly didn't have a lot of money to do it. But today's day and age in America, you certainly still have the opportunity to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go out and achieve stuff. And if you have the drive and determination and the stones to go out and take a little bit of risk. And that's kind of what I had to learn, I was in my kind of mid 30s, before I bought my you know, kind of early mid 30s, for I bought my first investment piece, piece of investment, real estate, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty young compared a lot of people but you know, you see some other people that started even earlier. And so I think it's still possible still still achievable. I mean, I think the system is set up as a set of rules, I think if you can understand the tax code, understand how banks work, understand how to raise private money, you can certainly get out and do large scale commercial real estate deals like I do, and like you do, you know, or you can have a buddy who started out and I don't know 1520 Different Jimmy John's franchises and he kind of started out and just kind of started with one paid it off and kind of grew and kept reinvesting into the into his company. So you know, there's different ways of, if you put your mind to it will take a little bit of risk and work work pretty hard. You know, this is a pretty wonderful environment to go out and achieve a lot of things. And, you know, one thing I've kind of learned in this business, it's an exponential business, you know, and a lot of ways what I do, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs out there just kind of success, you start out you weren't put your head down, you work, you work, you work, and you do pretty well. But then, you know, 10 years from now, all this, all these relationships, all these meetings, all this work, all this goodwill that I had all these events, I went to all these things I did 10 years ago, you know, you never know what's going to compound upon itself. And 10 years later, make it a little easier for me to buy this deal or raise this money or do whatever I need to do. So it's kind of an exponential business. And you know, so going from $4 million deal to $105 million deal or $110 million deal in a matter of eight or nine years is pretty, pretty unbelievable. So you know, I think just consistency hard work, taking the opportunity, taking a little bit of smart calculated risk along the way, I think you can achieve a lot of things. And that's kind of what the American dream really has been for us now. But I don't want to do anything I try not to do things I don't want to do anymore. I still achieve that all the time. I still do a lot of stuff. I don't want to do but uh you know, getting getting closer, closer to getting all that kind of stuff off my plate. I don't want to do focus on traveling and spending time with the family. And you know, really the things that excite me anymore in the business. If it doesn't excite me, I don't really want to do it anymore.
Sean Thomson 28:31
Yeah, that's awesome. Well tell the people kind of how they can reach out to you if they want to invest with you if they want to. You were telling me earlier to do the old capital podcast. So that's the kind of best place to connect with Michael Becker.
Michael Becker 28:43
I'll give you two resources. As you mentioned, I'm the co host the old capital real estate investing podcast. We do that with all peoples for God seven or eight years now, I guess at this point. So you find us on iTunes or Spotify are probably new where you hear my voice right now he's typing old capital, you'll you'll find our podcast or my company that I run is a company called SPI advisory. So you just go to our website, which is www dot SPI advisory comm it's SPI like spy advisor.com. There's a whole bunch of information or portfolio information on what we do. There's a Contact Us form on there as well, if you want to get added into our database and see future opportunities.
Sean Thomson 29:21
Yeah, awesome. Well, Michael, I really appreciate you coming on the show. And we've talked a few a couple times at dinner parties and things like that. So I finally got you to come on. I appreciate it. I appreciate you giving us the time.
Michael Becker 29:31
I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks so much.
Sean Thomson 29:33
Thanks a lot. We'll see you at the next one. Bye bye.
Abigail Thomson 29:35
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Next Level American Dream. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today, want to contact the team directly or interested in passively investing and being a part of our deal room, head over to our website at https://www.thomsonmultifamilygroup.com/. Before you go please leave a review your comments help us create more episodes for you to enjoy.