I was born, now I'm here, what happened in between?

he Final Chapters: Scaling My $18M Real Estate Empire - Lessons, Struggles, and Success

In this heartfelt episode of the Go Big Live Real Estate Investors podcast, I announce the conclusion of the podcast after nearly two years of interviews and deep dives into real estate success stories. I share my personal journey from a financially struggling childhood in Rochester, NY, to scaling an $18 million real estate portfolio. I recount key moments, like my first big deal using hard money, the impact of losing my parents early on, and how I overcame numerous challenges to achieve financial independence by age 33. This episode serves as a final message filled with inspiration and practical insights for experienced real estate investors looking to scale their operations. Stay tuned for the remaining episodes that will distill valuable lessons on eliminating capital bottlenecks, enhancing deal flow, and mastering technical aspects of commercial real estate.

00:00 Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:44 Announcement: Ending the Podcast
02:41 Personal Journey: Early Life and Family Struggles
08:16 College Years and Early Career
11:02 First Steps in Real Estate
17:33 Scaling Up: Bigger Deals and Financial Independence
24:27 Conclusion and Future Episodes

Transcript

0:00

Hey, what is up everybody? My name is Matt Drouin. I'm the host of the Go Big Live Real Estate Investors podcast. The show to listen to and to watch. If you are an experienced real estate investor that you've mystified of scaling and doing bigger deals, bigger commercial real estate deals and you feel stuck. This is a show that I've been recording for almost two years now that goes into great detail with our guests on how they did their big. Their first big deal or was big for them at the time. How they found it, how they funded it, and also the glorious outcome or also and also the invaluable battle scars they en endured and learned during the process of going big absolute tightness that we've had a chance to interview Last week I did announce that we are officially ending. The Go Big Live podcast. So it's going to go away. I'm still going to be dropping valuable stuff on our YouTube channel, more of an on an ad hoc basis when I feel that I really have something insightful or different angle on something I may have already covered in the many hundreds of videos that I've that have recorded. So make sure that being said this is not gonna be a weekly thing after I've gone through, the, the, I'm gonna be doing like I announced last week. I'm gonna be doing like five more episodes, I think including this one until in this sort of format, this sort of like a monologue format that's more of like, kinda like a distillation of my 19 year career as a real estate investor scaling to over$18 million real estate portfolio. And then also a distillation of all of the interviews that I've done with the several dozen guests that we've had that come from all different walks of life and all different backgrounds, which I hope that the listeners here have gotten value and and inspiration out of. So that being said if you've been used to listening to this show in its interview format, I typically start off with a question to my guest. You were born, now you're here. What happened in between? I have had a great time at, interrogating my guests on the show and getting into those excruciating details of their first big deal. And also their background. The reason why I asked that question was because a lot of real estate shows are about like, how'd you get your start in real estate? And based upon my experience is like, it was never really intentional was by accident, but it was a confluence of all the factors that happened earlier in my life, which led me to. Getting into real estate investing to begin with and why I scaled from there. So I always wanted to come like back before their st starting real estate and even if there was like, childhood trauma and all that stuff, that was that was part of,, their formative years and what led them to to become successful. I've never been asked that question on my own show,'cause obviously I've been the interviewer. So I'm gonna answer that today and for, if nothing else, right? If you do not get valued enjoyment out of it. Part of the reason why I dropped so much stuff on social media is because I never really, for my parents, I lost both my parents early on in my twenties. And I don't, I don't have all stuff, right? And I wanna leave this not only for you guys that are listening out there, but also for for my kids and God willing my grandkids as well. So this is the story of my life in, short detail. I'm gonna try to get in less than 15 minutes. I just did a recording where I was up to 45 minutes and I still hadn't gotten beyond college. And so I was like, okay, this is gonna be the abridged a bridge version, but it's gonna be important. And hopefully inspirational for you. Even on a relatability level if you've gone through the, the types of negative things that have happened to me during my childhood and also my early adult years. And also if those things haven't happened and you've had a, a background, we've, had everything hunky dory, like it can be hard for people to actually synthesize a a sense of urgency in doing big things in their life and business. So hopefully this can add some, inspiration to you and help you synthesize that sense of urgency as well. If for nothing else, like you are going to die. And the circumstances for which, which you do die you're not going to be in control of. And every single day is a blessing. So you should have a sense of urgency to really live life on, on your terms and create that big, beautiful life by design starting today because you may not get tomorrow. And the universe in God has been very adamant about reminding me of that and our own mortality many, many, many, many times. Okay. So backing up a little bit I was born and raised in Rochester New York in 1984. I am a proud geriatric millennial. I grew up with having dial up internet in my household. I was, grew up in a, with a computer in the household that didn't even have Ms. Windows, Microsoft Windows. We had Ms. Dos. This is actually like a black and white or a black and green screen where you had to type prompts in to bring up programs you wanted, and if you didn't know the actual language. Like that thing was like, it was nothing, right? There was no word process or anything like that. So had a very, very early early exposure to the sort of beginnings of technology in the house. And I was always, I've always been an always will be, hopefully in an early adopter of of new technologies and how it can make our life easier and also our business more effect effective and also efficient as well. So I was born have a brother whose name is Chris and Chris Drouin. And we were born in a, pretty much a blue collar household. My my mother was a dialysis nurse. She was for the most part of our childhood, the breadwinner of the family. My father was a general laborer, a Genesee brewery and things, and things started happening early on and this is kind of like what. Led to my obsession to success or whatever I thought success looked like as like an, as a, as a, as a child that we're a young adult, right?'cause we see it at this, at the surface level. Because my parents had to they had financial problems and ended up leading leaving them to be driven apart, which you go from a two income household to a two one income households. And that's exactly what happened, right? And I'll never forget the, the moment where I realized where things were not so great in the household was my mother was was arguing with my father and that she wanted him home. My father had gotten a, his real estate license while he was at Genesee Brewery and started showing houses on nights and weekends in order for them to get beyond the paycheck to paycheck situation. And really the only way that my parents at this point in time,'cause this is not when the information was really available, the only way to get ahead. Was to work harder, to work longer, to work more hours. And my mother was content with, kind of just like, treading, treading water. I definitely don't blame her for for that. There's a lot of people in this country that are, that that are in that status. And my father wanted to get ahead, and this is really where things started to create a rift in their relationship. And the singular moment that I remember was they were arguing about my father having to leave the dinner table after dinner to show houses and there was an argument, got pretty heated. My father slammed his fist. My dad was a big guy. He slammed his fist down on the table and hit a a ceramic plate. And this thing ended up shattering into like a thousand pieces, like went everywhere. And this is really where I realized like, okay, things are not right on the home, on the home front. And so they ended up splitting up and kind of like, a bridge the story, not go into great amount of details, but, this is kind of what led to things getting much worse financially for the both of them. My, father had to, move into a, a a basement apartment, a basement of my aunt's house. A lot of basements that were, kind of in my in my, in my childhood, my, in my dad's house. And my mother couldn't afford the mortgage payment anymore for the house that they, that they, that they had bought. So she had to actually get a roommate. And this is where I was actually exposed to the idea of house hacking before house hacking was a thing. She, we lived in a split level house and she got a housemate live in the lower level. How she found that housemate was through the classified ads through the local newspaper. And anyways, the this sort of like money or lack thereof, I was attributing to like, it being the source of all evils and the source of all struggles in life. So I started it early on in developing an infatuation with with money and how to create an abundance of it. So I would never have to go through the same things that that my parents went through. So anyways, I was a good had the Grand Delusion like a lot of other young people is that I'm gonna go to college. That's how I'm gonna get out of this thing and like, and get, and exit the matrix, so to speak. And I thought that if I go to college,'cause we had seen a lot of people that were my parents' age, that like, hey, if you get, if you went to college, like you had like your, you had your ticket to anywhere to do whatever you wanted and, have this, all this financial abundance. And a lot of people in my generation, like, did that, and we were like, all right, there's just a bunch of other college, college graduates out there that are competing for the same amount of jobs. So it really didn't do that. But I ended up going to SUNY Geneseo Co. And it was an experience that was led to me, I'm meeting my wife Nicole. Right now we have two absolutely gorgeous kids together. We are able to live that life of financial abundance. Now I was able to if it wasn't for her, I would, would not be where I am right now. Okay. She's a incredible partner. So anyways. Backing up. I graduated Geneseo thought that I was going to be able to apply to Wall Street firms'cause I had this obsession with, wall Street equals money. I can be, a cigar chomping, Gordon Gecko type and a rapacious capitalist. And, and then just be able to like, create this outcome that I wanted. And I got, my, first, actually second or third of many slices of humble pie in the process. I was out there, applying for jobs in 2006. The economy was doing okay. It was not doing great. And certainly companies were not looking to hire recent college graduates out of a liberal arts schools with no experience. And that's exactly what I was. And the the best job I could find was as a part-time. Bank teller at Chase Bank. And I grew up, my brother and I grew up in a in a neighborhood that was like, or a town that was more like a, it was a white affluent suburb and we were kind of like in, in like blue collar people, right? We're kind of always like living paycheck to paycheck and that sort of thing. And I would have colleagues that I went to high school with that, like on their 16th birthday would have like, get a, brand new. Lexus, they'd beri, driving the school parking lot. So I developed a lot of this like resentment around people with money and certainly kids with kids with money and that sort of thing. And it, developed this inferiority complex that that, was unhealthy for a young adult to have. But nonetheless it was what it was. And here I was, graduated college, got a job at a part, part-time bank, bank teller, chase Bank in the village of Pittsford that's a town that I ended up growing up in. And there I was. Cashing paychecks for my colleagues who went, ended up going to like fancy, private Ivy League four year schools. And I was like, this is like eating a shit sandwich every day. Like, I cannot do this. I was complaining with my, to my father about I hated standing behind a desk. I certainly didn't like the, the idea of like, being like subjugated to the people that were more well off than me or had better circumstances. And so I was gonna take any opportunity to leave that my father extended me the opportunity to. Get my real estate license.'cause he had basically worked up his book of business working at Genesee Brewery and also at Nothnagle Realtors so that he could work, full-time as a real estate agent. And I took the opportunity, he's like, get your real estate license. I'll show you the ropes. I'm not gonna give you any business. You're gonna have to earn your own business, build your own book just like I did. And then you can you can do this, do this on your own, right. And so I was gonna take any opportunity to do that. In the meantime backing up a little bit, this is a major, thing that happened in my life too during college. My mother, my mother passed away due to a long battle with cancer. And that was really a a. A situation where I was like, okay, this is a, we're not in this world forever. And and also going through the estate issue realizing that my mother's estate was completely upside down. I saw the actual court paperwork with creditors going after her, and she had more. Liabilities. And then she did assets. And I was like, how could this person who worked so hard and was the breadwinner in our family come, with a financial outcome like this, with literally nothing left over. So this is like another way that the, the universe or God was like slapping me around is like, you need to figure out this money situation or else you're gonna wind up like your mo, like your mom or your dad or whoever. Fast forwarding again. I was working at a, a part-time as a as a clerk in a liquor store to to have some walking around money. I was living with my dad. I was, trying to build this real estate business. And my dad saw the, the commission incomes I was getting. And within a few months I was able to, through really, really grinding it out and selling, grinder city properties in city of Rochester that were between like. 30, 40,000 bucks. He's like, Hey, I see you've earned like about, 15, 16,000 bucks in commissions. It's time for you to go, son. It wasn't my dream to have a 20-year-old something living with me at home. So you got until the end of the year to to either, get an apartment with your friends or to buy a house, all right? And and live out on your own. I really liked the idea of not having to pay rent because it was, that was a situation I was living with my dad. So I was like, okay, this idea of like maybe buying a multifamily property and renting out all the units and being able to defray my cost of ownership or living rent free, so to speak seemed really attractive to me. I set out to find a multifamily property within which to owner occupy. And I was able to find one. I bought the property and I closed in the middle of the month and two weeks from closing. I ended up getting, magically it seemed like magic to me. It seemed to, a combination of criminal and magic. 1800 bucks in rent check, sitting in my mailbox. And I was like, damn, I knew how hard I had to work to earn 1800 bucks in commission income selling$40,000 houses. This is the ticket, this is that, I, I knew I wanted to become financially independent. I just wasn't sure how, and I realized like this was the way. So I started doubling down and tripling down on growing a real estate portfolio. And the second deal that I had, because. I had spent every single penny on this first deal. I bought 16,000 bucks, boom, gone. And the cash flow from deals that that you buy is never gonna be enough, like to really accelerate your portfolio growth. So I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna have to now, I got away with this deal as an owner occupant. Putting 16,000 bucks down for my next deal I'm gonna have to put, put down 20% and that's gonna be like 50,$60,000. How in the hell am I going to save up that amount of money? And there was a property that was down the street that my dad would tease me about. It was a property, it was another four family property. It was falling into the ground 76 Rutgers Street. And every time I got together with like, for, pizza and beer with my dad, he would be like, did you check on that property yet? That's property gonna sell someday. So he kept harping on me and every time I lied to him, I was like, oh yeah, I can't get ahold of the seller and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so finally I was like, I gotta make this old man shut up and stop asking me about this. Out of just being pissed, I ended up finding out who the owner was. And trying to make contact with them. And I saw that it was an estate, right? And I was like, ah, I can't find the estate attorney, so it's over. So anyways, I was walking home from the bar. It was like a Thursday night, and this is the only good thing that's happened to me at being out past 10 o'clock drunk, drunk walking home from the bars with my friends. And I saw a guy on the front porch who was of this house. And his name was Allen actually. And I was at, I asked him, I was like, Hey, do you, who do you. Make your rent checks out too. And right then and there, he gave me the, name and number of the estate attorney that was dealing with this thing. I mean, I could like, saved myself a lot of grief and a lot of arguments with my dad if I just would've knocked on the door. But I just didn't have the courage or confidence to do that. And who knows, I may have never even had this opportunity if I, if I, if I would've waited like this, some other investor could have scooped in and bought Thes out from underneath me. And, and, my whole, whole trajectory would've been changed. I got in touch with the state attorney and I was able to walk the property. I ran some numbers on it, some conservative rehab numbers'cause I'd already like done some slight cosmetic rehab on 1 0 2 Rutger Street, which is the first property I bought. And then I had and then what ended up happening is I was like, okay, I had to buy this thing for 80,000 bucks. I'm gonna have to put together a$60,000 rehab budget. So I put an offer to the estate attorney for 80,000 bucks thinking it was gonna go nowhere, and they ended up accepting it. Alright.$80,000 cash. This property could not be financed. It was com It was a complete wreck. And so the so we got under contract and I brought the contract back to my dad in the office. I was like, dad, I have good news and I have bad news. I got this property under contract, but I. Don't know how I'm gonna finance it. And this is how I got introduced to hard money or hard money lenders. Or private money lenders. And so I had he said Phil Nothnagle, who owns Nthe Home Securities, actually does some private money lending. So why don't you contact him, present your opportunity to him with the money you need for the acquisition of the rehab. And and then, maybe he'll, maybe he will fund it. It. So I presented the opportunity to him. I needed 80,000 bucks for the acquisition. I needed$60,000 conservatively for the rehab, and the property was gonna be worth,$200,000 conservatively at the end of this thing. So my whole objective was buy this thing with the bridge financing. We called the bridge, bridge loans at that point in time. This was back in 2008. And then and then bring it to a bank, refinance it, and take the hard money out. So that was the whole plan. And so he said yes. So I was able to buy this deal with having zero money out of outta my pocket. First deal was the magic of house hacking. Second deal was, okay. I do not have to have my own capital as a bottleneck for scaling this thing. Okay, so I'm gonna fast forward big time from, from now'cause we're about 20 minutes in this recording. That being said I left brokerage for a while, started working for a national real estate development company as their director of operations. So I was responsible for everything from a. Apartment buildings, student housing, medical office buildings, industrial self storage, retail, mixed use office buildings, hotels, everything you could possibly imagine across the entire real estate asset spectrum. And my job was to rapidly turn around properties that were hemorrhaging cash. And a lot of these properties were taken over. Our, our company took over these properties from large institutional private lenders. And our job was to rapidly. Turn these properties around, get them bankable. Bring them to a bank. Bring them to a bank. Pretty much using like the BRRRR strategy, like on steroids. Like we're not talking about several hundred thousand dollars deals, we're talking about multimillion dollar deals. Okay? So this gave me exposure to like, okay, I can scale, I can, bring this thing to a different order of magnitude to get to my goal, which was financial independence or financial freedom by the time I was 40, much quicker. And so I so I thought the way that I needed to scale was just to buy more small multifamily like I did. And so for the first 11 years of my real estate investor career, as I, I acquired 25 properties, 76 doors, and by the time I was 33 years old, I was able to replace my income and and not have to trade my time for dollars anymore. I started this journey when I was single, remember? It missed the missed this whole thing in 2013, I got married to Nicole and now I was like, I had financial independence, but if I was gonna go backpacking through Europe for two months at a time with my wife, that was gonna be a thing. If she was stuck in a high school math, math classroom, right? Not very flexible hours. Yes, you get summer, you get summers off, but teachers like work themselves to the bone. And so I was like, oh my God, I was buying one to two deals a month. Really, really hopping, burning. The candle both ends while I was scaling this thing and I was like, I cannot do it the same way. I actually, looking back on it, I don't know how I actually did it. I think it was just like pure adrenaline, pure from all this stuff here. Like, losing both my parents and my in, in my twenties and all this, obsession with money and all this sort of like childhood trauma socio thing, like, and all this dark. Matter energy that I use to like, like conjure the spirits to, to conspire in my favor. I was able to, do this and I was like, okay, I can't do this over again. So I always knew from the very beginning when I, bought my first couple of deals that I needed and I wanted to buy bigger apartment deals and bigger commercial assets because I saw firsthand, I. The amount of wealth that it was creating for the people that I worked for at the development company. So I started off on on, okay, I gotta stop making excuses for myself. I have to buy a larger commercial deal. I need to replace my wife's income as quickly as possible so both of us can live life on our own terms. And so I found a through, working. Yeah, working networks. And by the way, I, I, spoiler alert, this first larger commercial deal that I bought, replaced my wife's income alright, with one deal in one year. And I actually have a full case study on that in my YouTube channel. I'll have it linked to this video right here, but, I bought this deal, I was able to get it under contract for a million bucks. It was a 20,000 square foot office building in a neighborhood in the same neighborhood of where I owned all my other small multifamily properties. And so I had a similar moment, with a seven six Ruter Street. That property was not bankable. I was like, I got this thing under a contract for a million bucks. I need$300,000 to close it, which I don't have. I had all of my cash tied up in a major rehab. I had to go at the time. And so I was like, how do I do this thing? I was like, alright. I never wanted to raise capital. I was always, kind of comfortable with doing the, hard money, buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat model. But this was not gonna be a thing with a million dollar purchase there. I just didn't have any relationships with hard money lenders that had, they had that much dry powder within which to do that. So what what I ended up doing is I ended up going out the friends and family route, right? So I told all of my family members of like this opportunity. I told'em what the upside was on the deal. And by the way, I have all the underwriting that I used on this deal, by the way, in that and that related video. And so I raised a 300,$350,000 at$75,000 a pop from friends and family, and I was able to take that deal down and, and I was able to push the value of that property from a million bucks to$1.6 million within a year period. I was able to refinance that property later on and to pay my investors back their 300,000 bucks. And that deal added half a million dollars to their net worth and about 60,000 bucks a year in cash flow. Now remind reminder, I had to replace my wife's income. My wife was a teacher, and the 60,000 bucks was, was, was plenty enough to do that. And so this is really where I got bit by the bug of scaling into bigger deals. And so from there I started. Pushing the envelope, and instead of buying one deal or two deals a month, I wanted to buy like one big deal a year, right? I was sick of being busy. I was sick of feeling like I was, being a deal junkie and spinning my wheels and buying properties were paying me chump change. So I was like, okay, that part of my career is over on a focus on larger commercial deals in the process. So I just started, telling everybody about what I what I was doing. I knew that the friends and family I was gonna, I was gonna tap out of them eventually, right as I was scaling. You're gonna run outta money regardless of who you're getting capital sources from. So I started getting active on social media, posting about what I was doing as a real estate investor, just to, not only grow my sphere, but also indoctrinate my sphere of influence with like, the idea that Nat is in real estate and he's good at it. And repeating that mantra over and over again through value-based content I was doing. And this is, why I do what I do now. That's the story of really, my journey in in going big. I have extensive trainings on MI channel on that deal in particular that you can check out. But since then I've graduated into doing several million dollar, million dollar deals from there. And the order of magnitude of this thing, guys, if you're thinking about doing commercial, it is like. It would blow my mind. I thought I, making$50,000 on a on a residential deal was like a big deal. We just we're doing a refi right now on a property we bought for$2.75 million about a year and a half ago. We were, we signed one lease with a commercial office tenant. This is a government tenant and that one lease alone for an additional 8,000 square feet they're taking into the building is adding$1.8 million in value to this deal, one lease deal, and about$125,000 a year in cash flow. You don't have to be busy chasing deals, to yield really, really life-changing results associated with that. So that's how, we've been able to scale to an$18 million real estate portfolio. And I hope this this story helps you along the journey. And certainly stay tuned for the next four episodes that we're going to drop, which are going to be a, a distillation of of really the, the three components of successful commercial real estate deals, and that's capital. How to eliminate capital as a bottleneck to you growing how to enhance your deal flow expand your deal flow, bottleneck and really marry those two together. And then also a lot of technical components that I've learned along the process that have, I've gotten, fallen in major pitfalls along my journey that I'd like to, share and also the pitfalls that my that my guests have fallen into as well during their journey of going big and also and also since then throughout their careers. So anyways hope this helps and as always, a please like. Comment, gimme your feedback on what on what you think. Do you like this format? do you not like this format? And what you had gotten in terms of a nugget out of this whole thing? And I greatly appreciate it till then see you next week.