Flint Jamison - From Boeing To 2200+ Units

Flint spent 20 years in aerospace as an engineer and program manager. He helped design the wing structure on the Boeing 787 before leaving in 2014. Having endured a great deal of burnout, he turned to purchasing real estate in 2018. He quickly pivoted to commercial real estate, which allowed him to reclaim his time and quit his day job. Having founded Vestus Capital, Flint helps educate others on how they can grow and protect their wealth by passively investing in commercial real estate and break free from the Wall Street rollercoaster. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

It was super stressful life. I was flat out and I was looking for something that I didn't want to work another 20 years of just abusing myself in a day job like that. So I wanted to find a little bit more, as you say, freedom. That's the whole point of this podcast. So I started dipping into real estate.

Speaker 2: 0:22

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 Freedom Real Estate Leverage Freedom where we cover people building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, mike Swenson. If you're listening to this and you want to get started on your real estate investing journey, come check out our website at freedom through realestatecom freedom through realestatecom Great place to just learn. Plug in, answer any questions you might have about getting started and go from there.

Speaker 2: 1:06

For today's guest I'm so excited to share We've got Flint Jamison here. Flint is a founder of Vestus Capital. He's gonna share his story of getting into real estate, being able to invest in some of these large deals. I know a lot of our investors like to think they get started like, hey, I'm gonna flip a home or I'm gonna do something small, but there's actually some really, really good opportunities out there to be able to partner with great operators on some of these larger deals and hit an economy's a scale that you just can't hit on your own, and so that's what Flint's doing and we're excited to hear his story. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, mike. Why don't you just get us started? Tell a little bit about your path and your journey to get into real estate.

Speaker 1: 1:44

Well, I was mechanical engineer and went into aerospace for most of my career up until I pivoted to real estate and I worked at Boeing. I left Boeing back in 2014. And there's a time of this recording. There's a lot of Boeing news right now that left in 2014. I worked on the 787 and then I moved on from there and I modified aircraft for the Air Force as a program manager. So I've done all levels of leadership.

Speaker 1: 2:09

But throughout all that, it was super stressful life. I was put flat out and I was looking for something that I didn't want to work another 20 years of just abusing myself in a day job like that. So I wanted to find a little bit more, as you say, freedom. That's the whole point of this podcast. So I started dipping into real estate. I got in 2018, bought a duplex. I did the birth strategy. That was cool, but it didn't really. I mean.

Speaker 1: 2:36

The realization came through and I realized I was only making about $300 per door and that sounds cool $600 per month on a asset that I bought for 80K and put another 30K in renovations. But I was making 600 bucks a month and I was like, well, that's cool, but how do I even just make $100,000?. Just do some simple math and I had to average $300 a month per unit was above average, based on what I had read. Normally it's apparently $200 per unit per month that people on average make. So you do the math out to $100,000, you need 50 units and to create 50 units or to buy 50 units and have enough liquidity and time, I was like there's no way. I didn't want to spend the next 20 years trying to acquire 50 units on my own because that wasn't my goal. My goal was to go faster. And then I found syndications and economies of scale, partnering with a bunch of experts and people with complementary skills, and then, yeah, I blew up. So now we're recording this in 2024. I have roughly 2,200 units in my portfolio.

Speaker 2: 3:54

So it's pretty sweet, I think, for a lot of people when they get started or they think about getting and starting real estate, you kind of forget about all the time it's gonna suck up too. And so to be able to do those 50 units it's not just how do I have enough money to put into those 50 units, but it's then all the time that it's gonna take to manage that. And for some people they like to start without a property manager to learn the ropes right and then you gotta figure out how to deal with tenants and fine tenants and negotiate the contracts and property manage.

Speaker 2: 4:24

Like there's a lot to it too, and so that's the beauty of a model like syndication is you can kind of just skip past if we're leveling up let's just say there's 100 levels in real estate investing Like you can kind of just skip past the first 25 of those lessons you have to learn just by partnering with people and doing that, and then it's passive to you. But you're really working with people that know what they're doing on every level and you don't have to figure out something you don't need to know. Like you're not calling up the tenant like where's my rent this month? It's a little bit late, and so you just get to blow right past that.

Speaker 1: 4:58

So it kind of feels easy right, yeah, and I think that you hit on a good point there, because I think most people want to get into real estate because they realize there's some benefit. Whether they realize all the benefits or not, they just know that real estate's a good thing and they choose not to get into it because they know that having to buy it, go find a place to buy it, put a bunch of money into it and manage it even managing the property manager it's a boatload of work. And, yeah, the syndication side, it's wonderful. If you just want to be truly passive and get all the benefits of owning real estate, you can just find a good operator and there's a little bit of work there, but it's far less than the other side.

Speaker 2: 5:37

And to your point you had mentioned your job was super stressful and super difficult, and so for people that maybe are higher income earners, they probably have a certain level of responsibility and stress to be able to earn the income that they're earning. So it's like to deal with all that in your day job and then have to go through something in your night job right of trying to build wealth. Like that's tough. So you should have something where you can kind of push the easy button a little bit and not have to have that also drain you emotionally on nights and weekends as kind of your side hustle right as you're getting started.

Speaker 1: 6:11

I remember I was working my day job and I had customers in for a three day meeting. We were doing some massive review and in the middle of that I get a call from my property manager on the duplex and a tree had been blown down and luckily it didn't hit the house but it took out the fence, so everything's fine and safe. But I was just like not now not now Because I mean the property. I had a property manager in place and they could make the calls, but it was still me having to get in the middle and make some decisions and it had questions for me and it's just like gosh, I don't need this right now.

Speaker 2: 6:47

So how did you get exposed to syndications and how did that journey start for you?

Speaker 1: 6:52

To be honest, it was just podcasts. I got into real estate because I just walk in my dog every day. It's been a blessing because I have to take me for a walk. It's good for my health, probably too, even though I work out aside from that. But just to learn stuff, I just constantly am digesting podcasts for audio books while walking my dog. And then that's how I got into real estate. And then from there I realized, oh, this isn't good enough and I get heard a syndication podcast and I was like, oh, that sounds like the right thing and started digesting that too.

Speaker 2: 7:21

In terms of kind of getting started, then I assume you started out as a limited partner on deals.

Speaker 1: 7:26

I did. I invested into two deals as an LP before I became a GP and then since then, I've done a couple more LP positions because with retirement funds so for those out there who don't know this you can invest in a real estate with your retirement money using what's called a self-directed IRA, so you can roll your old 401k, your current IRAs, over to self-directed IRA and put them in, and as a GP, we aren't allowed to use our retirement money in our own deals. I won't get into the rules behind it, but there's a bunch of rules so it's easier for me to invest my retirement money into really it's my friends' deals. At this point I have so many friends that I trust as operators and when I have some money available and they have a deal, I'll throw money so they can make me money.

Speaker 2: 8:14

So talk a little bit about for people that it's like wait a second, I can kind of hit the passive button here, put my money into other people's deals. What's important when finding these people? You know, if there's a lot of people out there doing it, how should I make a decision on who I kind of want to work with?

Speaker 1: 8:29

Gosh, there's so many things I have a checklist of. I have a hundred point checklist when I do due diligence and a lot of that. A lot of those check boxes are the operator. I think the operator is the most important person. To that, I mean, the deal comes secondary, because a strong operator can make a good deals to revive or succeed. For operators it doesn't matter how good the deal is. A poor operator can fail or is more likely to fail.

Speaker 1: 8:59

So, getting into that, there are simple things you can do, like just background checks or what's their track record when you ask them a bunch of questions. Really understand how they answer things. I mean this isn't just about Did they give me a very surface level answer or did it sound like they truly knew what they were talking about? And is their character sound good? Did it sound like they were just trying to blow you off? You want to get that character sense because someone who's likely to try to be fraudulent or is an operator that is not very confident. You're going to get that and how they answer not necessarily in what they're saying so take close attention there. There's a whole bunch of other things you can go through, but I think that character is one of the top things, and then track record really helps.

Speaker 2: 9:56

So for your first couple of LP deals, share about them. Where are they at? Because people also want to know like where do I invest?

Speaker 1: 10:02

What states.

Speaker 2: 10:03

What's going to be helpful for me? What types of returns help kind of walk? Through that with your just starting out becoming an LP type hat.

Speaker 1: 10:10

In pursuit of me becoming an active syndicator on the GP side. I had paid for Kalamoguru someone with an educational course I'd pay for that and ultimately through that I ended up investing into two deals. This was right in the middle of COVID in 2020. They went most of 2020 without a deal that they had these two back-to-back deals. I invested in those because I liked and trusted them. Now I'm going to throw words of caution here, because the gurus are having challenges. They've been around for a while. They've been in the upcycle on the market. They've been. It's easier to succeed when you have the wind at your back. What I did notice, though, on the first deal I invested in, as the interest rate started climbing, the property started not succeeding because of the bridge debt and the interest rates. They managed to offload one, which is good. So I went full cycle in two years on the first deal and, it's oddly enough, it became to be about a 15% IRR. So totally nailed that, but only for two years. The second one they had to quickly refi, so they saved themselves.

Speaker 1: 11:29

Now the point I want to make here this particular guru in their courses was teaching in the underwriting. You put in a cash out refi after two or three years, depending on how long you think it will take you to renovate. You should never, ever, put a cash out refi in the underwriting and give potential guarantees or projected sorry, not guarantees projected returns on the investor deck. Your deal has to survive without a cash out refi in the middle because it will blow your returns. If reality happens and you do cash out refi, it's cherry on the cake and everyone can celebrate.

Speaker 1: 12:15

But if the deal, if the returns are not good without that cash out refi, stay far away from the deal, and that's what this guru did. They taught it and they did it and I experienced it. So, back to the two years, interest rate was skyrocketing. It was about ready to we were about ready to just do a cash out refi, but interest rates climbed. The assumptions on that cash out refi were way off compared to two years prior. So, right there, the assumptions were blown up and the deal no longer worked. Luckily, they were savvy enough to make a quick change and do what they needed to save the properties and save our money. So there's some good to that, but I think a lot of people have learned now, hindsight being 2020 for investors coming in and you will see who have survived the storm or who have suffered greatly through the storm.

Speaker 2: 13:14

You know I've given this a lot of thought too.

Speaker 2: 13:16

Even if you didn't make any money and you got your money back, rewind to what if I tried to do this myself? Because I get asked this about kind of like worst case scenarios, and so we kind of talk about investing in real estate versus investing in a stock market, and I had somebody that I'd interviewed that had lost everything because they had invested in a speculative stock and it tanked. Well, that could happen, but in real estate, like you have a couple of levers that you can pull if things happen. But even if you just got your money back, what would it have looked like if you tried to do it all by yourself, you know? So go back to that first duplex or something like that. You could screw it up yourself. And so I think you know giving some of the syndicators some credit to like there's we're human beings, it's a fluid market, things change. And go back to I could have done it all by myself, learned everything myself, dealt with the property manager, dealt with the tenants myself and still lost money too.

Speaker 2: 14:11

You know, and so I think, obviously we want to project, we're going to make money on this. But go back to if I wasn't completely passive and doing it all myself all the time it would take and I still could lose money myself as well.

Speaker 1: 14:24

Yeah, absolutely, and, if you, I like to tell this story to the people that are in the stock market. In December of 2021, that was the prior all time high and after that the stock market dipped. It tanked. I don't know how far I went down, I wasn't paying that close attention to it and then it started climbing back up and by January 24. So two years later, we get a one penny higher and all of a sudden, the news goes goes off crazy.

Speaker 2: 14:51

We're in all time high.

Speaker 1: 14:53

Like, yeah, well, not only did you lose money in between you finally climb back to where you were two years ago, plus inflation was in all time high, plus you were paying fees to your brokerage no matter what. So technically you aren't recovered yet. You're going to have to climb a lot more before you actually recover where you were two years ago. In real estate, most of my assets are all of my assets. They were floating through there. We're still making money. They're still cash flow, even if we're not distributing because high interest rates, the properties are still surviving. They're still appreciating and then when the economy recovers, it's still there. So there was no technical loss at all.

Speaker 2: 15:34

Yeah, there's lots of other benefits between the income, the tax benefits, things like cost segregation studies. So there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of hedge your bet and minimize things versus comparing that to the stock market. Talk a little bit about kind of becoming a general partner what that was like, and kind of that first deal for you.

Speaker 1: 15:52

Yeah well, the first deal I crashed and burned on. I lost my own money on that one. No investors were harmed. The second deal I got is so this is where I making a long story short.

Speaker 1: 16:03

I serendipitously found myself as a capital raiser. For the most part, it allowed me to be remote. A lot of the other positions. You need to be boots on the ground or you need to be continually traveling to the place where it makes sense to buy, and where I was living didn't really make sense to buy or there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity. A cost per door was too high. So I started partnering with experienced operators. What I found was my friends, family and investors loved to invest in these operators who had a track record, who had all the right systems in place. It was a more comfortable investment for them. On top of that, I was able to start working with other operators around the countries for different asset classes, diversify in different locations and cities. All of a sudden it just became a really great thing for the investors. Rather than to just work with a sole operator who might only work in one city, they were able to diversify. Now I'm able to do built-to-rent developments. I'll probably do some self-storage, I can really bring a multitude of asset classes.

Speaker 2: 17:07

Talk about that because on your side, as a capital raiser, get to benefit from the best of both worlds as well, because you don't have to learn how to do build-to-rent yourself, you don't have to learn how to do self-storage yourself. You're just leveraging the relationships that you get. It comes back to this idea of it feels too easy and yet, at the same time, it's strength through the relationships that you build.

Speaker 1: 17:28

It has been years in the making, lots of conferences, lots of sitting down with people doing investors will come to me and they're like Flint, have you ever worked with these people before? I'll say no, but I've known them for a year and a half, or I've watched them for a year and a half and we've known each other for a while. It's a time thing. After a while, these relationships grow and an opportunity finally comes my way. Randomly, I'll get invited to hey, flint, you want to invest in Columbus, ohio? It was totally not even on my radar, but they needed some capital. I was like, yeah, man, you guys are strong operators, I'd love to work with you.

Speaker 2: 18:04

So talk about that relationship piece, because it's a hard thing to define when you just say build relationships with people, like how do you go about doing this? So if I'm somebody that's new and it's like the syndication thing sounds cool, flint sounds pretty cool, actually know somebody that does this. Like, how do you kind of navigate the relationship building piece?

Speaker 1: 18:23

I don't think there's a science behind it. I mean, it's like building friends Some people you don't want to be friends with, other people you totally want to hang out with. But in this you get a little bit more of a professional sense about it too. If you like him as a person, you like their character, and you get a sense of how much grit and how much effort they put into their job, how much they care. I think that that goes a long way.

Speaker 2: 18:50

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Speaker 2: 19:27

I've priced it super low, so price can't get in the way, but did want to have some skin in the game for you to help with that accountability. So go check it out realfreedomcom click on the store. We're excited to connect with you and excited for you to connect with your tribe of real estate agents investing, trying to build their financial freedom. So talk about the future here. What some of the stuff that you're working on? You'd kind of mentioned build the rent, self-storage, you know, kind of going back to the flint that just started with syndication and where you're at today, talk about kind of how maybe you've changed a little bit. Oh man, it's so much.

Speaker 1: 20:00

This would turn into an hour long episode. I think what's crazy is because I'm an engineer, naturally skeptical, analysis, paralysis I think it's been ingrained in me through my life, especially working in aerospace. One thing I realized is I could have taken action much sooner. I'm never gonna be the expert in anything and I'm never gonna know everything, so I need to just start taking action. You do need to learn how to take those risks and being okay at taking risks and some first steps don't feel scary, but they're not. They're no risk. Like some of you, just pick up a book and start reading it. Take your first step. There's no risk. After a while you get a little riskier, but at least you're gaining confidence. So in that by the time I got into my first deal and Capital Raise partnered on a deal within two months and I would have never said this prior to After the first deal, I got into a fund to fund.

Speaker 1: 20:58

I was managing my own fund to fund. I brought some other partners in with me and we partnered on a big. I think it ended up being 700 units. Now 500 units, or three properties in three different cities, two states, and that was my second deal was a fund to fund portfolio thing. And if you had asked me that two months prior, I'm like no way am I able to do a fund to fund. That's like advanced right, I'm limiting beliefs. So get rid of those limiting beliefs. It happened I had mentors in the process that were like, yeah, you could do this, this is, it's not that bad. And so I took the leap, I did it. Now I'm doing built to rent. I'm doing one thing that's it's a gonna be a one-off built to rent.

Speaker 1: 21:41

It's a 10 year deal. We're taking the law of compounding returns into a development deal, cause we can develop within around two years and then we sell and the target is, every time we develop a piece of property, we're doubling the investor money, but we don't give them their money back. We take that two X money and put it in another property, double it again. So then it's four X, continue, continue, continue.

Speaker 1: 22:05

We do five cycles of those and if you do two, two times, two times two, you know two to the fifth, it's 32 X, which is mind-blowing, cause in 10 years we could potentially we're targeting the 32 X your money. We have totally taken a different business model approach to not only your standard syndication of a five year value add. This is a 10 year development with 10 cycles of development in between, or five cycles of development. So and we're already we're raising $35 million for this fund and we're already somewhere between 25 to 28 million raised A lot of excitement. I'm not a developer. I'm partnering with these guys who are super experienced in it, and my investors get to join me if they want.

Speaker 2: 22:52

It's so cool Cause you know, going back to the beginning here, like you're a guy that worked at Boeing and here you are now talking about this this 10 year 32 X opportunity on a build to rent development, and it took a few years to get there. But the thing that I always encourage people with is like you don't have to be either, yet You're not going to find the 32 X development opportunity the first thing you do in real estate. But then he comes back to the relationship side. Right, the more you talk to people, the more you connect, the more you build those relationships, you'll find better deals. And so the deal that you invest in for your first deal might not be the best deal, but it's the learning and the growth that happens that gets you to that 32 X deal, you know, and it takes time to get there and the relationship navigation to get there.

Speaker 1: 23:37

Part of that. That relationship was born out of me getting invited to speak at a conference and I was just standing here on the hallway amongst all the people who had booths and I just started hanging out with one of the guys at the booth. He was a marketer and we're just hanging out drinking the free beer that was coming out at the end of the day, and, sure enough, we had a conversation after that. I was talking to him about his marketing thing and then he's like hey, flint, do you do build to rent? Oddly enough, I was already doing build to rent on something prior, so this whole thing was just serendipitous. It was being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right person and all of a sudden, here I am on a 32X steel doing build to rent. You just got to be there. You know, luck is the what is it? The cross between skills and opportunity, or something like that. I was ready and I got in the right place at the right time.

Speaker 2: 24:27

Out of curiosity, like for a 10 year project like that or some of the ones that have kind of gone full cycle for you, how do you handle questions from investors about things not going according to plan? You know like you're trying to say here's what happens year one and here's what's going to happen year five, but obviously nothing ever happens according to the spreadsheet, it's like how do you kind of talk through people that have those questions when things come off track?

Speaker 2: 24:53

And still show them like your money is, we're in good hands. Here's how we try to correct this, you know, and move forward To be honest.

Speaker 1: 24:59

You had a great point vetting an operator, asking them what the worst thing that has happened to them was, and every person there's only one person I've met that has had no wild stories. You know, like three single family homes in a really nice neighborhood. Other than that, everyone has a wild story, including myself. Always ask those questions because you will learn a lot about the person, because they will tell you what happened and how they recovered. For me, my first indication I told you I lost money. It was earnest money. We tried to make the deal happen and we had to back out before we closed and any investor money that we had raised we gave back.

Speaker 1: 25:36

I learned a lot in that process and prior to that, my duplex. Actually, I had a lady who was doing arbitrage in my duplex and she was running a geriatric Alzheimer's care through the duplex that she was renting from me, which was a break of contract for one but two. It really increased my risk. Imagine if one of those Alzheimer's patients tripped and fell and something really bad happened. I would have been liable as the landlord. So there's always lessons learned. It's good when you talk to someone who has that humility to tell you what happened and how they got past it, or maybe it was truly a failure like mine. I truly lost my own money.

Speaker 2: 26:21

No investors were harmed, and yet at the same time, I heard somebody that talks about chalking that up to an education expense. I could have gone to college. Go to school for four years. I'm gonna spend a bunch of money that's gonna help me make more money in the future. That's exactly what this is Like. You just spent money on the School of Hard Knocks 101. School of Hard Knocks.

Speaker 1: 26:42

So that's exactly what it was, but now.

Speaker 2: 26:43

It's gonna help me for the next deal, which will help you make more money in the future.

Speaker 1: 26:47

Yeah, that's. The other thing is I didn't quit. The other partners in that deal all just quit and walked away. I didn't let it stop me. I chalked it up to help. That sucked. I learned a lot more and I'm not gonna make those mistakes and everything we do. I mean even people that have been in it for 20 years. They'll get surprised. The fire will happen in a unit and they'll have to deal with it for the first time, whereas a first year person might be dealing with a fire for their first time too. I mean just events happen and you just gotta be able to get through it. So does the operator have grit and the willpower to fight whatever surprises come? Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 27:26

For people that wanna reach out and talk more about your battle scars from the past and hear more about what you're doing now. How can they do so?

Speaker 1: 27:33

Yeah, yeah if you want my 100 point checklist, I'll give you that. So my company's called Vestis Capital, but a lot of people screw up the spelling on it, so just go to investwithflintcom. It'll take you right there. You can contact me from there and actually reach out. I don't actually have that 100 point checklist available on the website, so just reach out and I can get up to it.

Speaker 2: 27:52

Well, thank you so much, Flint, for coming on and sharing. It was great to hear the stories, and best of luck as you proceed with your new build to rent opportunity. That sounds great. It was great to hear the stories and best of luck as you. Internet events are so fun coming back with.