Michael Messner, Nick Haraden & Marc O'Bryan - Achieving Your Real Estate Goals By Working Together
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Michael Messner, Nick Haraden & Marc O'Bryan form Mattanza Capital Partners, an investing group that focuses on multi-family properties in St. Louis, Missouri. As a group, they've closed 5 successful deals, raised over $10M in capital, and currently have almost $20M in assets under management. These 3 discuss how they got their start, how each of them play distinctively different roles in their organization, and how they work together to build strong partnerships and relationships that help them find deals, manage the assets they have, and foster great relationships with their investor partners.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Learn how Michael, Nick, & Marc are working to master real estate syndication for exponential growth.
- Cultivate strong relationships and partnering together to excel in real estate, with investors & boots on the ground contacts in the cities you invest in.
- Hear how these guys uphold ethics and responsibility in real estate investing.
- Scale your business through strategic partnerships and effective property management.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:23 - Introduction to Real Estate Syndications
00:04:43 - Choosing Real Estate as a Vehicle
00:08:12 - Choosing the St. Louis Market
00:11:10 - Benefits of Investing in St. Louis
00:12:24 - Building Deep Relationships
00:15:33 - Building Strong Relationships with Property Managers
00:19:20 - Thorough Property Analysis for Successful Investment
00:22:52 - Balancing Deal Quality and Timeliness in Property Investment
00:26:30 - Responsibility and Accountability in Handling Investors' Money
00:34:32 - Building Relationships and Inviting Collaboration
Follow: https://www.mattanzacapital.com/
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Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
We see a lot of operators, this column kind of just falling out right now because they grew too fast. They didn't know what they were buying or they knew what they were buying, but they didn't know the cap rates and all this stuff. Right. So our team is really tight, and we're able to grow at the right speed for our investors, too.
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the real free show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some REL Freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of REL Freedom, talking about building time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. You know, real estate is a great gateway for people to achieve their dreams. And so for a lot of people, I'm doing my work by day and I'm investing in real estate at night, and maybe that turns into something full time or it just stays something passive, more passive that I can do in addition to my job as I'm building additional income in addition to my w two income. And so today, I'm super excited. We've got a great story. We've got three guys here who all work together on putting together real estate syndications, and they all play different roles. Primarily, they're investing in the St. Louis area with apartment buildings. And so we'll talk to them and hear a little bit about how they all work in tandem. And so we've got Michael and Nick and Mark here, and they're going to share their story. So feel free, guys, to introduce yourself, share a little bit about your background, and then we'll kind of get into your roles and how it works and how you guys are working together to achieve your goals through real estate.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
My name is Michael. I grew up with real estate a little bit in the background. My dad was an architect. My brother is currently an architect in Chicago. I grew up in Wisconsin, so not too far from you. I have a lot of friends in Minnesota. And, yeah, I think my mom actually, as well, owned several properties and was kind of accidentally house hacking or doing the thing where she would move and rent it out and then eventually fix it up and eventually flip it kind of unintentionally. And, yeah, I started being interested in real estate over 20 years ago, but it took until, like, 2018 to actually pull the trigger. And, yeah, I'll save the full story for a bit, but I've been working in tech and real estate, or, sorry, tech and the business side of tech and finance, I should say, for a long time. But it's been mostly real estate for about three years now.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I'm Nick Herridden, and similar background with Michael with the family was always in real know real estate agent. My dad's a, you know, development stuff. Never really thought about it too much on the real estate side until really, like right before COVID and my wife and I were just talking about how we can get another revenue stream going. Just kind of jumped in and did a ton of research, bought some single family stuff, some Airbnbs, met Michael, and we kind of teamed up and bought a apartment unit. And then from there, we kind of just expanded. That's pretty much my background for that. I also was in hospitality before, so kind of led me to be able to manage people better on the real estate side as well because it is a people business. So that's something that really helped me succeed to where I'm at now. Yeah.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I'm Mark O'Brien. I think I'm the only one in the group who doesn't have any real estate in their family background, but I have a similar background to Michael. Actually works a lot in tech, actually used to work with Michael at a previous company. And for the last eight years, I've been doing mostly digital marketing. But again, I was kind of brought in to kind of help with streamlining some of the operations in the back end. Just keeping things organized and keeping things flowing.
Mike Swenson
Let's kind of touch before we dig in a little bit deeper. Why are you choosing real estate as kind of your vehicle to where you're going to? Obviously you're spending a lot of time in it, and then obviously you're hoping to get a lot out of it, but there's a lot of different opportunities of what you can do. You can invest in other things, and for some people, they're kind of all in on real estate. For some people, it's. I still diversify and invest in other places, but just kind of curious for you guys, being outside of real estate, kind of with your day job, why are you choosing to spend your time in real estate long term?
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
For me, I've always invested in the stock market, and with a background in business, I think I had a small advantage in that I could interpret financial statements and things like that. Right, where most people were just looking at charts and making a guess, and that was helpful. But I think where it falls short is you have no control over operations of the business, right. So you can't actually implement any changes. You're kind of at the mercy of management. And I also hate that aspect of watching charts go up day by day and stuff. Not that that's a healthy habit either, for people investing in the stock market, and we still do. Obviously, you have to diversify. I wouldn't tell anybody to put all their eggs into real estate. But what I love about real estate is not only is there the aspect of analyzing the business and looking at the financial statements and where are we strong and what needs work, but we can also actually influence them. I think with our particular combination of skills, we have a huge advantage compared to most other investors, and that's why we do well at it.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah, just all the benefits of real estate is just insane. Tax benefits. You're getting your mortgage paid off by someone, you're getting equity bill, you paying down your principal, you're getting your equity build on it as well. As years go by, you can take loans out on the house. I mean, there's so many vehicles you can go with real estate. We certainly do real estate as our full time jobs at this point, for sure. But I think that the major benefit for me was just financial freedom with it. Yeah, I have stuff in the stock market, but real estate was the fastest, most efficient way to, and also, I love it, but the most efficient way to get to financial freedom for our family. And also along the way, now it's the job that, it's not really a job, but something I want to do for as long as I can.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah, for me, when I was brought on, I could just see that these two guys are very intelligent guys, and they have a very repeatable process for successfully going full cycle on these properties. And so for me, it just seems like a safe bet and a fast way to kind of grow investments.
Mike Swenson
I say it's an entrepreneurial playground. Like, there's a lot of things you can do within it. And once you gain some knowledge on real estate, you can choose to specialize in different areas. You can choose to kind of go really deep if you want to, you can pop over to something else. If it was storage units or something like that. If you learn how to do syndications, then it's maybe identifying a different asset and partnering with different people. So there's a lot of flexibility that way as well. So there's just a lot of cool stuff that you can do inside of the real estate space. Now, you guys know, at least now that you're together choosing to invest in St. Louis. So for a lot of people, as they kind of decide on markets, sometimes for people, it's paralysis by analysis. Right? Like, I could choose any city anywhere in the world. And so I'm going to choose to do nothing instead, or I pick a city and go with it, and we'll continue to grow off of it. And you can also add other places. But what was it about St. Louis or even just the type of market you were looking for? And this seemed to kind of check off some of those boxes. I'm curious to hear your journey on choosing markets.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I can start it, Michael. You can tag on the end, sure, or tag wherever. But for me is where our first portfolio was. So my wife and I found St. Louis by doing a lot of market research. I literally picked up the phone, called property managers, insurance agents. I tried to learn everything about a lot of different little cities. And then St. Louis is really the one that kind of stuck out, where we could buy something and still make some good money on the rent and cash flow, something. So at the beginning, we didn't want to take a huge risk. So it was that lower end price points. I mean, we're talking like $100 to $200,000 homes renting for $1500 to $2,000 a month. Right? So we want the cash flow. It ended up being a great market because appreciation was going crazy. The Midwest was just going nuts. And then the people that we met, that I met on the ground there were just awesome. Like our property management company from day one, they're still with us on 265 plus units now. So they've expanded with us. They've grown, they've made us a priority. So finding those markets where you can actually connect with people, and also that you can also go there and check it out if you need to, obviously. But we're on the west coast, so going to the. I mean, it's a short, you know, we were able to build those connections where we didn't have to know, walking the streets every day, where we can learn street by street. And then Michael had his profile in Wisconsin. So we were just kind of going back and forth to seeing when we know we wanted to get bigger. Hey, are we going to go to Wisconsin? Are we going to go to St. Louis? Because we already knew those markets so well. We knew the contractors and the pms and everything, and we ended up finding a great property in St. Louis. So we kind of just stuck with that and just grew in the market.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I was, before I met Nick, as he mentioned, I had a portfolio in Wisconsin, and that was partially because I knew Wisconsin well and know had friends there who were realtors. And it happens to be, I mean, I love the Midwest as a market in general, just based on the numbers. Really, the main metric I look at with the market is the GRM, the gross rent multiple. So how much does it cost to buy property? You want that number to be as low as possible, and how much are these properties renting for? You want that to be as high as possible. And the buy price divided by the rent is the GRM, is the gross rent multiple. And it's still a really important part of how we underwrite individual properties as well. But you can look at that on a metro wide Wisconsin, you know, ranks really well. I was also looking a lot in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, I think, and a few other cities. And when Nick mentioned St. Louis, I was, you know, I had a list and I was like, I think St. Louis is really high on that as well. And there are other know, obviously. But I definitely wanted to invest in property that was already cash flowing. Everybody was buying in Texas and Florida and stuff, and they're all just getting crushed. Right know, we wanted it to cash flow from the know.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
It's.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
It's been fantastic. I was familiar with St. Louis. I'd been going there since I was a kid with my dad for work and things like that, so had a sense, know the people, and there's that sort of midwestern pride and work ethic and things like, um. Yeah, when we found that one, like Goldilocks property, where all the numbers was, it was a no brainer.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah. And people are just awesome in St. Louis. I mean, like, everybody that we meet, we've built some really great relationships, and we wouldn't be able to do what we do without those know. It's. You don't always come across people that are very ethical and honest, and of course, we come across some that aren't. But majority of the people that we've met in St. Louis have been amazing.
Mike Swenson
Now, you talked about relationships. As a real estate agent that works with out of state investors, I know that they can choose to invest with me, they can choose to invest in other areas, and that's why a lot of my investors, they live on the coast. They like investing in the midwest. But I also know people are choosing the St. Louis's, the Milwaukee's, the Ohio's as well, in addition to investing with me. But you talked about, know, keeping with the same property manager. And I think that's the thing. Sometimes investors, they may lose some efficiency or they may have some learning. I want to say mistakes that happen when you bop around a little bit in a lot of different spots. And so it's kind of like if you've got a good thing, stick with it, right? If you've got a property manager that you know, like and trust, you can continue to find good deals, continue to go down that road and build deep. And yeah, you guys can decide to invest somewhere else in the future, too, but you might get better deals, more efficiency and the matching up. I also tell what's on a spreadsheet doesn't always match what actually happens, but maybe you guys have found that you'll be able to produce what your projections are when you have great people that you're already working with versus kind of losing some of that efficiency going in other markets.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
We always talk about our buy box, and we know exactly what we want, where we want it, when we want it, and how we're going to get it, because we've met all the people along the way. And it's funny, the first person I called in St. Louis was the owner of our property management company. His name is Chad, and I talked to him for like 20 minutes. I'm like, man, that is hard to get. So to be able to call someone and actually talk to the owner of the company, it goes a long ways. And I think for agents and stuff like that, just being available, learning the market for your investors and such is a big portion as well.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
This happens to me all the time. I get sucked into the spreadsheets and I'll look at so many properties, and then I'll go to Nick and say, like, oh, my God, I have one that works great. This is the gross rent multiple, right? This is the potential NoI cap rate. And he's like, oh, what's the address? What neighborhood is it? Oh, yeah, I forgot to check. Like, I don't even look at the location. And then Nick will, our insurance broker, our banker, our pms, and they'll just go drive by. We have relationships with all these people, and they'll all just go drive and check it out. And sometimes they come back and say, like, no boards on the windows and the whole neighborhood is whatever. And I would never have been able to tell that from a spreadsheet. But, yeah, you really do need to have boots on the ground, even if you're remote.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Like, just literally last week, our inspector that we use for all our properties, and when we buy properties, he called me, he's like, hey, I was just across the street from wild cherry is a property that we bought early last year. He's like, hey, everything looks good. I'm like, hey, can you go check out the trash situation? Because we're having a couple of little issues. He's like, oh, yeah, no problem. Let me turn around. I'm right down the street. So, like, stuff like that where someone calls you for no reason just to be like, hey, your property is looking good. I was just driving by them. Nothing to worry about. Hey, yeah, no problem. I can go back and check it out really quick. So stuff like that, that's like gold for an investor, right? Especially when you bring on investors. You need to have people that can actually watch your back and give you that little extra nuggets here and there. Like, hey, this is looking good. Or don't worry, or something like that.
Mike Swenson
A little bit more. Maybe like a vip type level of service. Not that a property management company wouldn't give you good service, but it's some of the little extras that you don't necessarily ask for to expect because you have a good relationship. They want to keep that with you. And it's not know, oh, this is Nick. I better go give him a high priority. He likes you, he's worked with you, he trusts you. And it's like, oh, yeah, I can just swing back and do that. So I think that's, sometimes people don't put, it's hard to put a price tag on that, but it really matters. Now, I'm sure for some people, you maybe were just fortunate enough to run across a great property manager from the beginning. Some people, they might have to cycle through a few that don't work as well to find that good one.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
It takes work on the investor side, too. You can't just expect. You call someone like, hey, I got one property can you management, that's not going to do much, right? You got to put in the time and actually care about these people, right? The people are going to be your main people on the ground and give them a call, ask them how their day is going, maybe write down when their birthday is, send them something. I mean, the first agent I ever worked with in St. Louis for single family stuff, he was awesome. He walked through all the units with me, took the time. And for his birthday, I sent him a golf club. Stuff like that just goes a long ways to build those relationships and you never know where it's going to lead you later on. And we've gotten deals, off market deals from about everywhere. At this point, just because we took the time to put in, to build the relationships, it can't just be like the PM helping you, right? You got to help them out too with different things. So we make sure we pay our people on time. Right. That's a big one. Stuff like that. Yeah.
Mike Swenson
And you mentioned getting off market deals because for people that maybe work with smaller multifamily, they might see stuff on the MLS or might network, but for the larger stuff, it's through the relationships and you could reach out to somebody and say, hey, what do you have off market? But it's much more likely when they find something off market they think, oh yeah, these are the guys I got to call because they've owned this other stuff. So you kind of benefit from getting better deals when you've poured in a little bit more and built a big reputation in a community like that even.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Before that, because we try to get on the list of every broker out there and it helps to have a track record of acquiring large properties. Right. But even before that, one thing I do is if a broker sends a property over, I'll always analyze it, always write up. If not an Loi, I'll still show them the underwriting that we did and the number that we came to and why it wouldn't make sense for our buy box and send that. So they don't just send, we don't want to be people that they're just sending properties into a black hole and they never hear back. We want to show them like, hey, you took your time to send this to us. We took our time to analyze it and maybe this is why it's not working. And a lot of agents have written back and said that they appreciated that.
Mike Swenson
I feel like sometimes I've gotten kind of like the last scraps. When you reach out to them, it's like, well, I got this one property that I can't move and I've sent it to everybody else, but maybe you're a sucker and we'll take. So it's hard to do that. Now, you'd mentioned about when it comes to finding deals, Michael, you kind of took a different approach or a thorough approach with your background to be able to kind of analyze at detail some of these properties. So talk a little bit about kind of finding and analyzing the deals.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah, I think one thing a lot of folks don't realize, getting into it, or even people who do get into it and unfortunately are struggling is just the volume of analysis that you have to do to be successful because literally most of the deals that you come across don't work. And when I got started with, I never did single families, but with multifamily quads and duplexes and stuff like that. What I did was I worked with an agent and I said, I want to see the entire MLS. Like, I don't want you to bring me the handful of properties that you think will work. I just want to see everything and I'll do the analysis myself. And even she struggled with that a little bit. I actually had to take an online video course to teach myself the MLS software that she was using so that she could send me spreadsheets with literally hundreds or even thousands of properties at a time, like her entire region. Show me every property that is more than one unit, for instance. And then I put all those into a spreadsheet with each row as a property. Right, so you have hundreds and hundreds of rows. And then I started adding columns for like, okay, well, here's the income that it's generating. Luckily in most, most brokers are good about putting in the rents and stuff like that into the MLS. Some put it unit by unit and I would have it do the math. And then, okay, so what's the asking price? What is the monthly rent that it's earning? Okay, now here's a column for the interest rates that I would be paying and what a mortgage payment would be. For expenses. I just use the 50% rule, which is pretty common. Usually about 50% of the revenue ends up being expensed. And that would get me to a very rough, but rough underwriting that right away. Let me eliminate 80% of those properties, right. That they're just not going to work.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Right.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
And then I could focus on that top 20%. And some of the ones at the top, they would say, I'm looking back at it now, it would say like, oh yeah, this is a 40% irr or you're going to get a 40% annual. And you'd go in and it would be too good to be true.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Right.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
These are the ones kind of like we were talking about with Nick where like, oh, you look at the pictures and there are boards on the windows and stuff. But that would allow me to get down to those two or three that actually would work. So I probably looked at 2000 properties before I bought two and that was how I got my first ten units. And with multifamily, with large multifamily, it's a little harder. I mean, the smallest properties we're buying now are like 25 plus units. And you don't get to look at dozens every day, but you still have to look at a lot. We still look at LoopNet and all those where people say that's where deals go to die. That's kind of the mls of large multifamily, but we also have brokers sending us lots of properties. We underwrite everything, and most of them don't work. But I hear of so many people who will see some property and they'll be like, oh, yeah, nice neighborhood, this and that. Maybe this will work out. The chances of just chanceing into a property where the numbers work really well is very low. I'm a big proponent of just get as much deal flow as you can, get as much data as you can, and kind of go from there.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, I tell investors it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we've got to go through the haystack to find the needle. Like, if we really want to find a top notch property, it's going to take some work. And I've got an investor now that's kind of bugging me. Like, when's the next deal going to be? It's like, hey, I'd love to find a great deal, but I also definitely want to make sure that I feel comfortable with the returns that that property is going to produce. So I could go rush and find one tomorrow for you, but if you want one that's really going to help you make money, it's going to take a little bit of time. And so it's finding that balance between getting a good enough deal to move forward with. And yeah, you could take deals that are okay or maybe above average, but we're looking for the top deals here, and it's going to take some time to find those.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
It took us, I'm thinking of Ben and Shirley Gardens. Nick, there was a physician who wanted to place some capital with us, and he kind of led a group of four physicians, or was sort of speaking for them, what they were looking for. I was like, that's not really in our buy box that I see those properties all the time, but it still took almost, it took over a year, I think, of looking at the properties that kind of came by to find one that worked for these guys. And then it worked out really well because we had been so picky. And then those guys ended up making introductions for us that led to a deal literally almost ten times that size and introduction to some real estate funds and stuff like that because we had been so picky, found a property that worked so well, and then they were like, hey, these guys are the real deal. If you can get those introductions made, like, holy cow.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah. And that's why? It's really important to know your market, because once you find the numbers that work, then you got to be like, okay, is it in the right spot? Does it hit all the boxes? Is it all one units? What is it? Right. You can't be spread too thin on all your markets because then you'll be finding stuff left and right, but then you're not going to know, oh, it might be a bad area or it might be just a crappy place. Who knows? You got to make sure.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Once you find fire damage, flood zone, crime, endless stuff.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah, these are the things that don't.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Show up on spreadsheets.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Right.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Just to add to that, I mean, the level of due diligence that we do for these properties is really insane. I mean, Nick and I on the last property, walked 144 units individually just to kind of write down what things would be needed for rehab or just to get our rehab budget in order. So it's a tremendous amount of work when you are actually going to go in and potentially buy a property.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, I think a lot of times people think capital raising is just trying to get somebody to give me some money for a deal. But there's a responsibility aspect to it. Like, they are giving you their future retirement or future whatever money, and they're trusting you. You've got to be a good steward with that money. And if you're going to promote some returns, obviously you're not promising anything. But if you're going to advertise, like, here's what we're expecting, you better make sure that you've got your stuff figured out to be able to confidently feel good about saying, here's what I think this building is going to do.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I could tell you 100%. It keeps every one of us up almost every single night thinking about every single thing that goes wrong. What are we going to do differently? How we're going to fix it? Everything. When you buy a place, stuff goes wrong every day, right? Or not every day, but definitely weekly. Something is happening, not always wrong, but something different than you planned on. And when you have other people's money in your hands and you're responsible for me, I think about it at 01:00 a.m. 02:00 a.m. 04:00 a.m. Multiple times a week, for sure.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I'm part of this group. I'm going to be speaking about underwriting with this group, and they asked everybody to introduce themselves and say their goals. And the dozen plus people that went ahead of me, all their goals were, I'm going to acquire this many units this year and raise this much money. And it got to be it. I'm like, I'm going to get my investors 15 plus percent irr beat our projections. Ultimately, that's all that matters. If you nail your numbers and you get your investors the returns thereafter, then it's easy to raise capital. Right. And then it doesn't help find deals, but then you can start going after the much bigger stuff.
Mike Swenson
Now talk about a partnership here, because I know for some investors, it's like, I want to do this on my own. I'm a lone wolf. What I love about kind of larger and especially syndication is there's very much a partnership piece to it because you have to work with each other to be able to put things together. Because, number one, there's a lot of work involved, there's a lot of moving pieces. But two for you guys talk about finding each other, like kind of a shared vision and saying like, yeah, this is a group we're going to kind of link arms with here. If not for life, for at least the next phase of life to be able to build this together with each other.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah, I had stuff in the midwest. I was on Facebook and some forum and people were asking how we made the numbers work in Southern California. And I said, we don't, we buy in the, you know, Nick saw that comment, I think, and he reached out and said, hey, I'm in Southern California. I buy property in the midwest. I'm looking to scale just like you. Let's, let's compare notes. And I had been through a couple of partnerships before that that didn't work out for various reasons, but for me, what worked out really well is when we talked about what sort of energized us and charged us up, it was very different between the two of, like, I could see Nick liked the construction side. He liked the people know, he was more detail oriented. Things like, and like for me, I liked looking at financial statements, analyzing the business, making a business, what, that was sort of my background.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I can't imagine someone being in the syndication world as an operator by themselves. I mean, if they are, they're not being hands on. There's no chance because there's so much work that needs to. I mean, we brought on Mark because we knew if we wanted to get bigger, we had to have everything covered for our investors, not for us, but literally for people that are investing with us. We wanted to make it the best experience possible for them, obviously. And we wanted to keep buying and getting bigger. So the only way to do that is with the partnership. You can partner with your property management team, but there's no chance that they're going to take care of anything like, you know. So for me it was really similar. Obviously, that's how Michael and I met. We both had similar goals that we wanted to reach. I just always wanted to kind of get bigger. I was always a hands on person with my single family stuff and my smaller, you know. I wanted to learn the property management business more, so I took a bigger role in that. When I first started. I did some property management stuff locally too, for where I am. So that was just an easy transition for me. I just learned the construction side a little bit more and contractor talk a little bit. I mean, that's not too hard to pick up, but we hired good people to help us with that, of course. But I knew the PM company already, I knew a lot of people on the ground. So that wasn't a hard transition for me either. So that's something that I really wanted to do. And then Michael had all the business background and how to actually put it all together, how to bring on investors. And then we took the leap. We found a 24 unit that was like way more than we've ever done. But we both were extremely confident in our own abilities. And we'd raised our capital in, I think, 2 hours after our call. So we are able to lock down that property really fast. And then, like I said, we brought on Mark last year and he's been a huge asset to our team. Making sure that we can grow and do it successfully without failing. Because you see a lot of operators, just columns kind of just falling out right now because they grew too fast. They didn't know what they were buying, or they knew what they were buying, but they didn't know the cap rates and all this stuff. Right. So our team is really tight and we're able to grow at the right speed for our investors too.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Yeah, I will say what I really like about our team is that we each have a pretty specialized skill set. So we each bring. There's not a ton of overlap. So it's a very kind of efficient team, I would say. And we work really well together. And also we have kind of the same. There are some people in this business who maybe don't operate with the highest standard of ethics. And I can safely say that all three of us, we really care about our tenants. We always try to work with our tenants, and we always try to be as fair as possible. But that's also, I think you want to have people on your team who have the same mindset as you in.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
That regard as well, and also just being available. I mean, we meet multiple times a week. We're constantly texting and having our stand up calls two times a week, but we meet more than that, obviously, but we probably are on a video call, I would say four times a week minimum. And our families all know each other at this point. For the most part, we've taken investors out to dinner altogether with our families. So a partnership is going to be the biggest factor. As someone starting off and they want to get into 510, 2050 units, you might go through some not so good partnerships, but finding that partnership will be probably their biggest asset as they go.
Mike Swenson
Well, that is the thing that I love about syndication is it's really this one plus one equals three mentality. Like, I can go flip houses on my own and I can build a pretty good life, or we can decide to do something like this together. Everybody plays their part on the assembly line and we can produce a lot more results together when everybody kind of has their role, does what they're supposed to do, and you can achieve it and then be a vehicle for investors, right? Like they want to place capital. They don't want to take the time or may not know how to take the time to be able to go find these deals and find these property management companies and vet all this stuff themselves. And so they're trusting you. So it really is the best of all worlds put together here to find great deals.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
I'm stunned when I read in bigger pockets forums and stuff like that the number of people who say don't partner because I partnered with my brother once and I got screwed or something. And don't use property managers because nobody's going to care for your property the way you do and stuff. And both of those are true. You need to be thoughtful choosing partners. You need to be very thoughtful choosing a PM. But nobody scales without partners or without property managers, you can't buy 144 pound homes like we just did and planning on painting every stuff like that. It's a team sport, and we've used partnerships and property managers from the start, so that's how you get big.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you guys so much for coming on and sharing. There's a lot of really cool stuff, so much that we didn't cover. Maybe we come back and do another episode sometime in the future and talk about it. But thank you guys for sharing just about your goals, what you guys have accomplished, how you're working together for people that want to reach out to you, learn more about what you guys are doing. How can they do so?
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
We don't really have something to pitch today. We're kind of in between acquisitions. But we love meeting potential investors, just other people who just want to chat real estate. Some of our best relationships have just come from talking Rei with people. So I would encourage anybody listening. If stuff we've said has kind of resonated with you, go to. Our website is matanzacapital.com. Hopefully you can put that in the liner notes. The spelling is a little funny, but Mattanza capital and I'd say sign up for our investor list. We don't spam at all, but when an opportunity comes along, we'll reach out and feel free to. There's a button just to the left of that to set up a meeting with us. And you don't need to have a big agenda or anything like that. We just like chatting real estate with anybody. So don't hesitate. Set up a meeting and let's talk. And if you want to invest, we generally want to have a pre existing relationship with folks beforehand, so we're doing those right now. We're just getting to know folks for our next deal.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Awesome.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you guys so much for coming on. We appreciate it. And invest as you guys continue to grow in the future.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Thanks, Mike.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Thanks, Mike.
Michael Messner, Nick Haraden. & Marc O'Bryan
Thank you.
