Mike Kron - Running a family office of 14,000+ Units
Mike Kron serves as Chairman of the Guardian Net Lease Fund, where he is focusing on finding single tenants on net leases of the top Fortune 350 companies. In addition to that, Mike helps to manage a family office consisting of over 14,000 multi-family units in multiple states as well as being a real estate broker and attorney. He got his start in college after buying a 6 unit complex in Michigan renting out to fellow students while also renovating old houses while attending school. Hear Mike share how his journey has taken him investing in multiple states and asset classes as his portfolio grows and how he works with his family and kids while running a family office.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Master the art of real estate investing for financial freedom and long-term wealth.
- Uncover the essential steps for starting your real estate investing journey with confidence and insight.
- Elevate your real estate portfolio by strategically building a multifamily property empire.
- Unlock the inside secrets of family office real estate investment strategies for sustained success.
- Learn the game-changing tips for launching a net lease real estate fund and dominate the market.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Teaching Kids About Real Estate Investment
00:02:17 - Early Start in Real Estate
00:07:27 - Transition to a Family Office
00:11:27 - Family Office Operations
00:13:28 - Identifying Markets and Properties
00:19:46 - Property Sizes and Evolution
00:23:45 - Launching the Net Lease Fund
00:29:11 - Property Acquisition and Performance
00:31:53 - Conclusion and Contact Information
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Full Transcript Here:
Mike Kron
For families with their kids learning lessons as they go along, it was a good thing for me to do with them because they've started to ask me more questions about how's the building doing, how many tenants do we have? Do we have any vacancy coming up? And they're asking me the questions that they should be asking about what's in it for them and their investment. How's that working? So it's been a good learning tool to be able to teach them about how real estate works.
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the Real Freedom 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 real freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Real Real Estate Leverage Freedom, where we talk about different ways that you can build time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I am your host, Mike Swenson. If you want to get started on your real estate investing journey, check out our website, freedom through real estate.com freedomthroughrealestate.com Our goal is to be able to educate you, give you content that you can read, consume, and then also tell great stories, which is why we do these podcasts to be able to highlight people doing real estate, showing all the different opportunities of what you can do in real estate with the hopes that you find a story that you latch onto, something that excites you, you know, whether it's transferable skills of what you've done in the past or what you're looking to do. Hopefully we find a story that resonates with you to get you deeper and deeper into real estate because it's such a great, great space. So with that being said, today, we've got Mike Kron here. Mike is the chairman of Guardian Net Lease Fund, based out of Newport Beach, California. Great background, which we'll dig into, touching on a lot of different things, but primarily also runs a family office with over 14,000 multifamily units. Currently building over 760 units right now. Also an attorney and a broker in the back and a flipper back in the and taking you all the way back to college. So certainly a long time in real estate, A lot of experience of what you've done and excited to be able to dig deeper and, and have you share your story. So welcome to the show, Mike.
Mike Kron
Mike, great to be here.
Mike Swenson
Why don't you go ahead, just, just kind of share a little bit about your background, kind of your start in real estate and then we'll dig in A little bit deeper.
Mike Kron
Sure. Happy to we. I started way back when I started in college actually. My dad and I, when I was a freshman, bought a six unit apartment building, anticipating I would need someplace to live and why rent when you can buy? So we bought that and I had to very quickly learn how to be a leasing agent, learn how to be a maintenance tech, learn how to pay the bills and pay the mortgage and deal with banks and had a lot of fun going through school just doing all those kinds of things. While I was in college, I had a good friend whose father was a general contractor and he knew how to build things. And in our spare time, because school didn't keep us busy enough, we, we bought a few houses over in Ypsilanti next door to. We were, I was in Michigan, we bought them next door. We'd go over there and at night time, when we were done studying, we'd go, you know, fix windows and get them up to shape and put them in, you know, do all the things to them and try to lease them out and sell them, you know. Not sure we made a whole lot of money doing that, but we learned a lot of things about real estate that both of us took, took into the future.
Mike Swenson
So when you guys had your six units, the intention going into it was instead of paying, you know, room and board to the school, let's get something, get you in it. To be able to stay in one unit and then rent out the rest. Was that the intent there?
Mike Kron
Absolutely. My, my dad was a real estate guy also. He was okay. He was in the corporate real estate world. His father's company was a, they built a grocery chain in Michigan, the Farmer Jack Supermarkets, way back in the day. And he doesn't, you know, he didn't want to pay rent, he wanted to own a piece of real estate. And I had some money and we went in together and the idea was, yeah, this is going to be a place for me to live and we can generate some income from it while I'm. Rather than paying rent, I was making money. Why not? And you know, great building still there to this day.
Mike Swenson
I think for people listening, if you're too late in the, in the story where you can do that yourself, think about that when you have kids. Because when I get asked, you know, ways to get started in real estate, something like that makes a lot of sense, especially with the price of, you know, campus housing these days, to be able to have tenants, you know, pay you rent, be able to get yourself living there for a reduced cost at the, at the lease and then to be able to earn some equity, maybe add some value along the way. Certainly a smart, smart move if you're in a position to be able to do that. And then to your point too, like you had mentioned, you know, working on other houses, not, not making money, but getting experience that's super valuable, you know, for, for people to, that, hey, I have to make money. I always say, at least for your first flip, think about it as an education because there's so much to learn and you came out of, you came out of college with an actual education, rental property, and a ton of experience on, you know, flipping and fixing up homes. So you were able to shoot right out of the gate after graduation.
Mike Kron
Yeah, no, absolutely. It was, it definitely was a lot. And now I go back, knowing what I know about managing big complexes. You look back on some of the mistakes you made, but you learn lessons. When you make mistakes, you learn something and you move on. And we were able to take that six unit building and my dad didn't want, when I left school, he didn't want to run it. So we ended up selling it and buying a few units down in Dana Point near me out in California. And we ran those for a while and made some money as real estate appreciated and bought a building in Arizona and did the same thing. And now that thing from way back when that my boys are involved in turned into an office building in San Antonio, which I still own to this day. So it just builds on itself. And like you said, you have the education, you learn the lessons, and you try not to make the same mistakes twice.
Mike Swenson
Now you mentioned about, you have kids that are running alongside with you in real estate.
Mike Kron
They're sort of running alongside of me. They pick up the bits and pieces. They're more interested in being investors at this point, but they've learned that real estate is cyclical because some of their income is related to the real estate, and particularly in office. Ours is a medical office building, so it's a little more insulated, but we've had some tough times in that market over the last several years. And when you have to find new tenants, you figure out that it's expensive, you have to pay brokers to get those tenants, you have to do tenant improvement work to get them into the building, and that impacts the cash flow. So as we've gone along, and this is, as you were saying, for families with their kids learning lessons as they go along, it was a good thing for me to do with them because they've started to ask me more questions about how's the building doing? Many tenants, do we have, do we have any vacancy coming up? And they're asking me the questions that they should be asking about what's in it for them and their investment. How's that working? So it's been a good learning tool to be able to teach them about how real estate works.
Mike Swenson
So getting into a family office. Would love to hear a little bit more about how that came to be. And then two, because we haven't had a lot of folks on the show that do a family office. Would love for you to explain a little bit more about it and how it operates.
Mike Kron
Sure. No, happy to. We. I was practicing law when I got out of college. I went through a JD MBA in Michigan and got out. And my dad had always said I wanted to use the mba. He said, go practice law for a while. Said, okay, I'll practice law. And I was a real estate lawyer doing real estate land use work. And after about six years, I knew I wanted to be in the real estate world. It just so happens at the time, my wife's father was getting bigger in the apartment world and he was starting to get pressure to have somebody alongside of him if, God forbid, he got hit by a bus. And that's always in a family office. What's the continuity plan? And he had been bugging me to come work for him. And I felt like I was at a point in my legal career where I wanted to make a jump. So I did. And this is back in 1993, you know, 32 years ago. I'm still there. It was, it was a good opportunity. He taught me a great deal about extending the knowledge I had from running small units into what that looks like when you're managing large units where you have staffs of people to do the work that, you know, I would have to do on my own. It taught me a great deal about how to grow a portfolio. One of the things that I always tell people, cash flow is king. And if you're willing to forego some of your current enjoyment of that cash and put it aside and put it to work and buy another building, you can start growing a portfolio. You might not grow it like we do, 500 or 1,000 units at a time, but you can grow it, you know, three units, five units, 10 units, 50 units, just by being smart about where your money goes. So the family office, you know, we largely run, there's a. There's a patriarch, which is generally the case. And we built up an organization we're almost 450 people now. Actually, I think we're over 450 now. You know, we've, we've grown from about 2,500 units when I was started up to 14,000 units now. And we're growing still. A lot of our. We got into development about 30 years ago, actually now owning a piece of property that had 20 acres attached to it that we couldn't figure out a way to sell. So we just said, well, why don't we just build some more units? And that turned out to be successful. So it turns out we had another property with 12 acres next to it. Okay, why don't we build some more units? Well, that worked. Then we said, well, why don't we go out and start finding vacant pieces of land and doing our own development? And 3,000 units later, we have a larger portfolio because of it. We're still building, but in terms of the way the family office runs, we have a good team. We have regional managers who are out in our various regions who keep the, the overall responsibility for those regions. You know, over them we've developed a series of vice, you know, two or three vice presidents who handle anywhere. One handles construction, one handles property management, and one is more the overall director of the real estate operation on a day to day basis. And, you know, at the end of the day, the good part of a family office is that the decision matrix is very small and very short. The bad part of the family office is the decision matrix is very short and very small. You know, I need about 30 seconds to make a decision about how to do something. I walk down the hall, two doors and I poke my head in his office and I say, do you want to do this? He says, yes. Then I go to my team and I go, okay, let's do this. That part's been a lot of fun. You know, the flip side of it is you're also focused on growing value. And in how that looks. You know, I compare what I'm doing there to the Guardian venture, which is a private equity venture, in that in the family office you're more long term focused. I'm not worried about what happens tomorrow. If I've made good decisions and we've bought quality properties in good locations, we're okay with down cycles. After 32 years, I can tell you for absolute certainty there will be another down cycle. And following that down cycle, there will be another up cycle. It's just the nature of the beast. So we continue to look out into the future. And what does that look like, and while at the same time positioning ourselves so that we can withstand the down cycles, we don't get overly aggressive on the leverage side. We don't need to, you know, we call it the sleep at night quotient. You know, if you're loading, the value is down in the 50% range or 60% range, it's a lot easier to sleep than some of the guys who go out and want to borrow 90%. If I have a hiccup at 90%, I have no wiggle room. If 50 or 60%, I have plenty of wiggle room. And I know that tomorrow things will be okay. I might not make as much money, but I'll make, I'll make money. And that's kind of our focus and how we look at the world.
Mike Swenson
Now, out of curiosity, so you'd mentioned, you know, growing from 2,500 ish units to 14,000 units when it came to deciding what to buy. I know you walked in when it was already, you know, up and running and moving. But in terms of identifying markets, identifying properties. Would love to hear more about how you guys shouldn't say how you made the decisions, because I know you mentioned it was pretty quick, but, but in terms of deciding where to spend your time and where to find based on the market or based on the specific properties, we'd love to hear more about that.
Mike Kron
Sure. Now we, you know, a lot of this was grown with. Obviously the patriarch is very much involved, always has been, even as he's getting a little older now. But we. Originally he was California based. When I came to work for him, he had just started to buy property in Texas and we were starting to grow a portfolio down there. He liked it essentially because you could buy the same income stream in Texas and people will laugh when you tell them these cap rates. But California, it was a whopping 6% cap rate, in Texas was an 8% cap rate. Now you can't even touch either one of those. But. And he just said, if I'm getting the same property in a good location, why should I pay more for the same income stream, particularly if I'm not gonna, if I'm not worried about selling the building later. You know, maybe California appreciates faster than Texas today, maybe not. But he was interested in the income stream. So he was drawn to Texas particularly. He went down there in the late 80s, early 90s when you could shoot a cannon through Texas and not hit anything, and had a vision for what Texas has ultimately become. I mean, you know, the lesson for a lot of people Is that when you wait till things look really, really good, you're too late. It's, you know, to really do well in, in the real estate business, a lot of times you. You have to do your research, but be a little early and be willing to take the chance that what you think is going to happen is what's going to happen. You know, Texas for us and for him was a dynamic, growing market. You know, we could see the early signs of what it was going to become. I, you know, I won't tell you that we knew it was going to turn into the, you know, be a Methodist become, but we had a pretty good idea that it was growing in stature and would continue to grow. And the leadership there looked pretty good. And, you know, the way they treated businesses was really good. And we just made our bets in Texas. You know, the same thing was sort of true of Arizona. We got into Arizona after I got there, and at that time we owned a lot of stuff in California that was class C, class C plus properties. And we were trading that and buying class A properties and really upgrading the face of the portfolio. And we would, you know, we would look at properties. A lot of times he. He'd be the one that would be out scouring the market. Brokers would call him. We'd get things, and then he'd toss it to me and say, what do you think? And I do the underwriting on the deal. I'd look at the locations, I'd go see the property, and together we would make a decision, yeah, this looks really good. Or, you know, if the case was we didn't think there was some hair, you know, some fleas on the dog, we'd say, no, we'll pass on that one. And we'd continue to grow. And as we did, and it got harder and harder to buy property at competitive prices, we started looking at development. I mean, we started, as I said, with a couple of properties where we already own the land, and we figured that we could do this. So I started going out in looking for land in areas that we were already present. And we started in San Antonio, built a few properties there. What I'd like to think are class A, A plus properties. We had gotten into the Arizona market pretty well, and things were sort of changing in the feel of the markets. And we started moving a little more towards Arizona because we thought that they had a better growth shot than did Texas at the time. And we started buying properties and pieces of land in the Arizona market, the greater Phoenix market. And we've developed Three of them now, we're on our fourth and there's a fifth one that's all teed up, just about ready to start. And we just looked at the market and said, yeah, this is the place we want to be. It's a growing population, even if it's a little overbuilt right now. And it is, we know that's going to pass in time. As a matter of fact, it's starting to pass now. We're seeing there was this great boom right after Covid. Everybody and their uncle wanted to build apartments and they did. And those units are all coming online now. Well, in the last couple years, not so much. It's gotten a little tougher as the Fed has raised interest rates. All the private equity guys have sort of stepped aside because that raise in interest rates took their profit out of the deal. So it's left to owner users like us who have a longer time horizon to come in. And we started building this project a year ago in March and we figure we opened the office last month or earlier this month. We'll have our first tenants beginning of July. We figure we're hitting that market pretty well now for what's happening with the building cycles where all of a sudden we're seeing a drop in deliveries right about the time that ours is coming online. So, you know, couldn't be happier. I'd love to tell you that that's all pre planned. You know, you like to think you're that smart. Sometimes you are. But sometimes, you know, never underestimate the role that luck can play in, in your decision making.
Mike Swenson
Out of curiosity, kind of in those earlier days for you when you guys were looking at properties, how many units for each property or what size buildings were you looking at the time?
Mike Kron
We would initially we would start with smaller buildings. I mean we had some, they were as small as 30 units, up to 300 plus units. As we started to get bigger, we started to focus on 150 and greater and we, we still have a few that are smaller than 200. And it just gets to be a size question. As we kept evolving and kept getting more units, our number changed to well, we really would like 300 units. We'll look at a project that's smaller than 300. But it really has to be an exceptional project because there's, as you get bigger, there's just economies of scale, you know. Now we're building a 760 unit complex. So we've, we've gone from, you know, and I built smaller ones but We've gone from 70 units up to 10 times that in one, in one product. But it really, it evolved over time. I, I think, you know, you need to handle what you can handle at any given point in time. And you know, not everybody can jump in and buy a 500 unit complex. You might need to start. I mean, when I, you know, when we traded out of our apartment in Ann Arbor, I bought some units in Dana Point, I traded those in. The first apartment building I bought myself was 52 units. It operated like, you know, I had an on site manager and an on site maintenance guy who took care of everything and it operated like a real apartment complex. But there weren't a lot of economies of scale for me. Not like I can get when I own three or four or 500 units. But that's where I had to start. And as I mentioned, I since sold that and traded it into an office building in San Antonio to get into a different area that I thought was going to be up and coming.
Mike Swenson
I think the interesting point here of your story or listening to this is you had mentioned about being in class C or C, going to a different area, getting into better units. You had talked about smaller buildings, getting into bigger buildings. I think for people listening is that this stuff takes time. I mean, they hear, oh, Mike owns, you know, or is running 14,000 units and doing these 700 unit developments and all that and think, oh, I could never do that. But realizing it's, it starts small and it grows bigger and bigger and bigger. And yeah, when you do a certain number of 50, 100 unit projects, now all of a sudden you're looking at 300 unit projects and then being able to trade into those larger ones. That's where that natural growth happens. And so not only type of building changes, but also the market that you're going into changes and the size of the buildings that you're looking at, changes.
Mike Kron
Yeah, no 100%. I think the word I'd use is flexibility. Looking at being willing to look at different things in different areas and branch out as you grow and finding opportunities that will allow you to have that growth. And that's sort of the story of what we did.
Mike Swenson
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Mike Kron
Sure. Well we, you know, I, because of where I've gotten in, in the family office, I do have a lot of bandwidth. I have a great team working for me and I wanted to go out and do something that was my own. In about four years ago, we launched the Guardian Net Lease fund concept with the idea that we were going to create a private equity group that would have multiple funds and this would be our first one. Well, when you're starting on your first fund, you have to overcome a number of hurdles, one of which is that you're a first time fund and you need to get investors to trust that you know what you're doing. Well, I have a fair amount of experience, although in the private equity world, as I found out, they discount that at least the institutional players. So we're talking to high net worth individuals and family offices. But we wanted to develop a concept that would provide a fairly safe, secure return for people with a pretty good upside. The Net lease sector seemed to be all of that and then some. And I've been following it for quite a while. I personally have bought a Walgreens in Tempe, Arizona. So I've known the market and I've paid attention to it for quite a while. So we decided we would focus on nothing but credit tenants, Fortune 350, think O'Reilly Auto, 7Eleven Dollar General, DaVita, dialysis in that space. Some of the others, Sherwin Williams Tractor Supply and we would just target those tenants and we specifically picked those tenants because they were relatively Amazon resistant neighborhood businesses. I didn't want to do something that was suddenly going to be taken over by the 10,000 pound gorilla. I wanted to do something where I was fairly comfortable that they would be there tomorrow. So we narrowed it down that distinguished us from all the big players in our sector, which was intentional. You look at Store Capital or Agree Realty or Blue Owl or the Apollo and Ares of the world are getting into the space. The best of them are about 65% credit tenants. We said we wanted to be 100% and I'm not giving up a lot of return to do that. I just never understood that concept where I can sleep at night and more importantly, my investors can sleep at night knowing that those tenants are going to be there tomorrow. You know the, an example I'd give you, we have to underwrite the tenants as much as we do the real estate. And the perfect example is Walgreens. They were originally on our schedule and they started to hit some financial issues that made us put them on our watch list. And then they just got taken private by Sycamore Partners. So they're no longer on our list at all. We just didn't want to touch them. In launching the fund, though, we also needed to be very cautious of our success in that. I mean, I wanted to be able to deliver for our investors what I said I would because if I want to have a Fund two, I need to make Fund one work really, really well. We started to launch this in 2022. Well, if you remember what happened in the real estate world in 2022, the Federal Reserve decided that they were going to raise interest rates. That doesn't work real well for what we're doing. As a matter of fact, for a number of reasons, it works very poorly for what we're doing. And we had to just table our offering and say, we can't do this. If I do this now, the values are going to go down. I'm going to be underwater. This is going to look terrible. It's going to take me two years to climb out. And then I don't know if we're going to make money. So we had to put it aside. That's been an expensive proposition. But we brought it back out last October when the Federal Reserve, I felt, had gotten to the top of the interest rate cycle, which turns out that they have. They're not lowering as fast as I'd like them to, but that'll, that'll change at some point. But we finally went back out where we could have comfort that interest rates were going to start coming down. And why that matters for us is that a lot of different segments of the real estate market, they're all correlated to interest rates. I mean, interest rates play a huge factor in how you invest and what you invest in. But net lease retail is the single highest correlated to interest rates of any of the real estate sectors, which means that when interest rates are going up, values are going down pretty quickly. When interest rates are coming down, values are going up pretty quickly. And a lot of that's just because it looks like a bond. The tenant pays you on the 1st of the month, you pay your mortgage on the 10th of the month, and the rest of the money is sticking your pocket. It's pretty straightforward. So we felt that we finally found a good entry point and we relaunched the fund. And now we're losing capital, trying to get more money in the door. We've bought our first three properties, one in North Carolina, one in Georgia, and one in Wisconsin. Very happy with them. You know, we. We think even with neutral leverage, we've been able to do very, very well for our investors, getting them a nice 5 to 6% coupon. And we still think the end story is there with interest rates heading back down. So it's been an exciting venture for us. I always wish things would go more quickly, but patience is a virtue, and I've had to be patient. And we're going through the process.
Mike Swenson
Obviously, you've had experience, and you've mentioned California, Arizona, Texas. Now you're talking about North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin. How do you make those connections or how have those connections come to be to where you. I know you talked about, you know, working with a certain tenant base, Obviously those Fortune 350 companies. But in terms of kind of finding those properties, how do you do that in areas that, you know are quite a ways away from where you are?
Mike Kron
Sure. Now, and you're right. Some of the areas I'm very familiar with, other of the areas are newer to me. We did a lot of. A lot of demographic research going in to find the areas that were exciting to us that we thought had positive job growth, positive population growth, you know, potentially rising incomes, things that would really benefit the retail segment. And then we started reaching out. My brokerage team spent a lot of time on the phone with brokers in those markets and other people, getting to know the lay of the land and where things were. And, you know, at the end of the day, I can have a lot of confidence that My tenants have really good research departments, and if Dollar General is looking at a site for a store and they're willing to put their name on that store for 15 years with a corporate guarantee, I can feel a little less concerned about how they feel about the market. I know how they feel about the market. Does that mean they're going to be right all the time? No. Am I going to be right all the time? Probably not. But if you do your research up front and you make educated decisions about where you want to go in the long run, you'll do. You'll do pretty well.
Mike Swenson
You certainly covered a lot of different topics for us here. Exciting to hear your journey and how you've grown, how things have changed, how you're diversifying long term and obviously you've seen a lot of real estate cycles and so you have to adjust and adapt as things change. So thank you so much for sharing, Mike, your story. For people that want to reach out to you and learn more, how can they do that?
Mike Kron
Happy to have them. Email me directly. It's Mike. Guardian-advisory.com Awesome.
Mike Swenson
Thank you so much for sharing, Mike. Exciting story and exciting to hear where you guys take this fund and where it grows.
Mike Kron
Absolutely, Mike. My pleasure. Enjoyed it.
