MFREE 108 Full Episode with Axel Ragnarsson: "Can You Really Win in Real Estate Without Chasing Every Deal?

Maximizing Your Multifamily Real Estate Success with Axel Ragnarsson

In this episode of the Multifamily Real Estate Experiment podcast, host Hutch the Marine Investor is joined by Axel Ragnarsson, founder of Aligned Real Estate Partners. Axel shares his journey from flipping cars in college to managing over 550 multifamily units worth $90 million. They discuss Axel's approach to acquiring properties directly from sellers in a competitive market, emphasizing the importance of buying right to de-risk the investment process. Axel breaks down his direct-to-seller system, from initial contact to closing deals, and offers insights into why sellers decide to sell and how to maintain relationships for future opportunities. The episode also highlights the benefits of off-market deals for passive investors and Axel's experiences and strategies for scaling his business. Tune in for a tactical and insightful session on multifamily real estate investing.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Overview

02:03 Axel's Real Estate Journey

04:51 Finding and Securing Deals

08:50 Direct to Seller System

12:42 Qualifying and Underwriting Deals

18:01 Importance of Off-Market Deals for Investors

21:44 Focus Round and Closing Thoughts

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hutch@hsquaredcapital.com

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Transcript

xel Ragnarsson1: 0:00

Wah Gwan all you multifamily enthusiast. Welcome to another episode of the Multifamily Real Estate Experiment podcast. Look, today we got an amazing guest with you. We're, can be talking about some things that is not widely discussed because, you know, these are topics that I think a lot of it might scare a lot of people because they don't understand some of their fundamental. Look, our guest today, Axel Ragnarsson. Has secured over 300 units, direct to seller, it's in a market where most people say that, you know, it's too tight to make the numbers work. And he's also the founder of aligned Real Estate Partners, managing over 550 plus units. Which totaling over$90 million in transaction. If you're passive investors wondering how sponsors still find deals in these kind of markets, also, if you're small business owners and you are interested in building ownership through, boutique, multi-family properties, this one is directly for you because we we're gonna be touching about, some of those topic as well. So, welcome Axel. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it. Yes, sir. I like to ask my guest, brother, do you have a favorite real estate quote mantra that drives you? Oh man, that's a good one. I don't necessarily there, I don't know if I have a quote that comes to mind. Um, I mean, it's really simple and it's probably just something that's been discussed plenty of times on podcasts or online or what have you. But, you know, making your money on the buy is something that's I very strongly believe in. And if I were to summarize it a little bit differently, it's, buying right de-risks the whole rest of the investing process. And in our business that's what we probably place the most emphasis on, is being able to, you know, find those great deals. But we do make our money on the buy. That is awesome, man. One of my, preferred sponsors that is mantra as well, is you make the money on the buy. You know, so that's a good one. All right. Yeah, it's hard to find those deals, but, it's the worthwhile time investment in the business, I think above all else is, you know, being able to find those great ones. Gotcha. Yeah, man. So, you know, for our listeners that who may not know your full story, can give us a 60 second rundown, you know, how you went from your first multifamily deal to becoming one of the most consistent direct to seller operators in the game. Yeah, absolutely. So, just geographically speaking, I live in Boston, Massachusetts. Originally from New Hampshire. So I grew up about an hour north of Boston, right over the border. and just started buying multifamily way back in, in college. and, the way into the business was, I used to flip cars in college, like that was a little side business. I ran buying and selling cars on Craigslist and you know, I was getting towards the end of my time in college and was trying to figure out. What comes after that? I liked the idea of working for myself. always had a hard time kind of keeping a job down'cause I would always get distracted with other stuff I was doing. Yeah. And, basically learned about flipping houses and I forget how, maybe it was HGTV or an Instagram ad or something like that. Uh, and this is back in, you know, 2016, 2015 kind of before real estate got. A little bit more competitive in that 2018, 2019 through mid COVID timeframe. Yeah. Um, and that was how I got into the business, was trying to figure out how to flip houses. As I was learning about that and learning all about how to find good deals, started learning about rental property and buy and hold real estate, investing, cash flow, all that. And, ended up becoming where I started to focus my time. You know, the idea of. Doing the work once and you know, you find a good deal, you fix it up and you pull your money out and page in perpetuity was really compelling for me. Went all in on trying to figure out how to buy deals without a lot of cash, with no experience and all that. And the ticket to doing so was finding great deals and borrowing a lot of money from hard money lenders. and that's how I did my first deal, which is a small three unit property that I bought back in 2016 and, uh, and just started organically growing a portfolio. Finding really, really good deals direct to seller, financing them with high LTV debt, pulling my money out when I refinanced and selling some here and there. And just built a portfolio that, that I owned myself. I got to about 70, 80 units, back around 2020. And then, wanted to scale the business, make it a little bit more of a real thing where we bring in investor capital and where we could start doing bigger deals. Starting to feel a little bit stressed out with how many deals I was spreading my own resources and dollars across. So 2020, 2021 started raising investor capital. And, really over the last two, three years, we've built out the, you know, call it the syndication side of the business where we go out, we find small to mid-size multi-family deals. We raise LP capital. This is all primarily throughout the market of New Hampshire, within an hour of Boston. And that's what the business has become now, and we'll do anywhere from 150 to a few hundred units a year. mainly buying 10 to 50 unit buildings or portfolios. and then we manage'em in-house with our property management company. And, and that's what we're up to today. Man sounds very simpler. Yeah. Yeah it does, right? Yeah, man. So look man, you are not just targeting distressed assets, right? So you're actually finding, disengaged, owners, what do you identify as the, psychology or the life triggers that makes some of these small to medium multi-family owners want to sell off market? It's a great question.'cause I think it's oftentimes, a misconception with even folks who are in real estate that are maybe used to buying deals with brokers attached. You know, they think that the direct to seller deal is somebody who's highly distressed, whether it's, they're underwater on the deal, or they're, there's no cash flow or they're coming up in the end of their loan or it's, you know, some type of financial distress. Yeah. What we oftentimes find is it's just lifestyle change. We do a lot of. Cold calling, cold texting, direct mail. Those are, you know, and cold emailing. Those are kind of our big four. And oftentimes the profile of the seller that we buy from is the owner who's owned for 10, 15 years, who is actually financially in a good position. Like they have a lot of equity in the property. There's plenty of cash flow.'cause their loan balance is really low and they've owned it for a long time and they're just in their mid sixties, late sixties, whatever. They wanna retire, they wanna move down to Florida. And they actually like the idea of just an easy transaction. it's kind of funny, like, you know, the, it is a lot of work to sell your property with a broker and I think it's easy to forget that, you know, the real estate professionals who do this for a living, you myself, people that listen to this podcast are like. Well, I know that I'm gonna get the highest and best price if I go and hire the broker, and he sends it out to every single buyer in his network and they go through the whole process. But there's a lot of owners who have owned the building for 20 years who, you know, maybe own it free and clear. And whether they sell it at just to make up numbers 2 million or you know, 19, 195, 1875. They have this person who's gonna give'em an easy deal, short due diligence periods. And they're not gonna have to bring in the broker and walk 20 buyers through the property over the course of two weeks and piss off every single resident who's living there. You know, risk it going on a contract with somebody who's not qualified and a falling out. Takes a lot longer to go through that process. And it's just a lot of work. And oftentimes people who have a lot of money, they just don't wanna do all the work, right? It's why you buy a bottle of water at 7/11 instead of going and getting a 24 pack of Costco. So oftentimes the sellers of our buildings, that we buy are just like, they like the idea that it's easy, you know, it's a clean contract. We tell'em we're just gonna get in there once for an inspection. You know, maybe we, a couple units in the basement for the appraisal that the bank wants to do. We'll tell the tenants where we are, whoever you want us to be, we can be the insurance company going through. So nobody gets spooked and your conversations are easy and it's just a really easy process. Right. And, and I think that's oftentimes who we buy from. You know, the other prototype, or profile is management related distress. Okay. So again, probably not financially or financial distress in the sense that. They have a lot of equity. They're not gonna need to bring money to sell the property, right? It's not like the situation that many. Texas southeast owners are in right now where they maybe bought when rates were low with low cap rates. And cap rates have expanded their underwater, the northeast, extremely resilient market. There's no real financial distress, but you get the guy who's got his 20 unit building, who's self-managing and he's just burnt out completely. He just doesn't wanna do real estate anymore. You know, maybe he's not looking to retire. He is forties, fifties, something like that. But he's owned it for a while. He's working through an eviction on three tenants.'cause he did a terrible job screening him and was lazy on the screening. And he's like. Someone else just do this. I just want it off my hands. I just, you know, again, clean, easy deal would rather just get, get it done and the broker's going to bug'em and have'em try to send me all your financials. Oh, I can't show these three units. They're gonna get really upset'cause I can't see these units. You know, because they're under eviction and we're like, it doesn't matter. We didn't need to walk'em. We know what we're getting into. Yeah. So the two big ones are just people looking to get out of the game and retire lifestyle and then it's management distress. And then the distant, distant third is that financial distress. You say distant third. Distant third is that financial distress. Okay. Terms of like, the typical Yeah. Triggers that cause people to wanna sell. No, I got you man. So let's get a little bit more, tactical man. Can you describe, your current seller to seller system? Like, how does that work? What tech are you using? What does the team look like? how do you track the KPI on a weekly basis? What does that look like? Yep. Yeah. So in terms of like high level, beginning with the end in mind, like what's our goal, right? Our goal is to just be top of mind with all the people who own real estate in our market, right? The other big kind of mindset shift, we aren't doing all of this marketing and prospecting and all that to find a deal. We're doing it to just build relationships with all the people that own the real estate, makes sense in our market. Makes sense, right? Makes sense. So I think it's a key shift, right? It's not like we're sending mail to get a deal from Joe who owns 123 Main Street. We're sending direct mail to get to know Joe, to introduce ourselves, to just be somebody that he's aware of. And yeah, we'll mention that we're interested in making him an offer and all that, but like, that's not the only objective of getting to know him and having a conversation with him, et cetera. Makes sense. So with that being the end game, then we back into how we do that. For me, it kind of evolved over the years, but early it was. I have an abundance of time and a constraint of dollars. I don't have a lot of money to spend on a lot of direct mail. So it was go buy a list from list source, filter it based on the geography of where I wanna buy the cities in New Hampshire. You know, at the time, or whatever your list size is now, it's wider for us, but at the time it was, you know, 3 to 20 units in size. And with people that have owned it for more than five years. Right? So we want to assume that they got a little bit of equity there, at least more so than the guy who bought it last year, for example. And I just started reaching out to'em. Skip Trace the list. There's all kinds of services that do that. You know, lead Sherp is one, if I'm just gonna plug one, that's what we use. And I just would send the owners an email. Hey, my name is Axel. I'm a real estate investor in, you know, this area. saw you on the property at at 123 Main Street. Would love to. Introduce ourselves and potentially make an offer on it. And if not, we'd just love to get a, get to know another investor in the marketplace and, you know, maybe there's some way in which we could, you know, work together, help you out, or share resources, et cetera. And then we just start having conversations with folks. And the real big thing is the sales cycle is extremely long, right? It's, yeah. You have a conversation with somebody on July 1st. They may not be interested in selling for another year or two years, et cetera. So the whole game is in just having patience and the follow up. you know, I started using a free CRM early, like, I think I used HubSpot to start. Then we moved to Zoho, another free one. Now we run everything through Resimpli, which is the CRM platform that we use, which is a really, you know, robust tool that does everything for us. CRM we can send mail through, we can call through it all that. And over time as we started getting good at each channel, as I like to call it, cold emailing was the first channel. Okay, now I got some money and we've done some deals. Now I'm gonna start reinvesting in the business. I'll spend some money on mail. We send mail each quarter, four times a year to the same list. Basically a very similar message as to what we include on. Or in a cold email, right? But we have a little bit more space, so we're including like, eh, this is what we own. So we show that we're credible and we're worth talking to. Here's why we're good to work with minimal contingencies. We won't bug your residents, you know, no broker commissions, et cetera. Talk about how we want to, you know, build a relationship with them. And then very recently, I shouldn't say very recently, last 18 months, I brought on a, you know, an acquisitions manager to the business who's full-time Okay. Who's doing some calling as well, you know, amongst answering our inbound phone calls when we send direct mail. So, very slowly grew over time. But I think the big thing in terms of like what's an actionable next step is it's really just three steps. You define your acquisition criteria and you buy your data list. You pick one particular channel of how you'd like to reach out to everybody on that list, and then you just do it for a consistent period of time and use a CRM to track your follow up.'cause the follow up is really the biggest thing. Gotcha. And just align your expectations with, you know, your list size and how much time or money you're willing to spend and eventually. You'll see some results, man. That's an amazing growth story, man. All the way from college to figuring out this system that is actually working for you, man. All right, got you. You send out cold email or you send out a snail mail, you know, you get a response, can you walk us through, how your team qualified a seller, underwrites the deal, you know, move to LOI all without having a broker involved. Yes. Yeah. This is tricky because it's different. I think it's, I think it's a slightly different process if you live near where you're investing or if you're remote. Right? Correct. If you're in Boston and you're buying down in Florida, well, you can't really go meet the seller. Right. Or else your life would be turned upside down if you did that every time. For us, we're within driving distance reasonably of the markets that we buy, right between 45 minutes to an hour and a half. So what we typically like to do is, you know, we send a piece of direct mail, sell it calls, Hey, I got your letter. What do you give me for, right? That's always how it starts. There's just cut to the chase, what are you gonna offer me for it? And it's like, listen, we gotta ask you a couple questions, as would you most likely if you wanted to buy the property. I'm sure you'd like to know about, you know, what the rents are and all that. And we just, you know, five minutes we get some information for you, we can start to put together an offer. If you're open to it, we'd love to meet you at the property and walk it. If you aren't, you know, if you don't have the time for that's understood. You know, we can still put together a number based on what we can find through public record and then some questions we have for you. Yeah. The, the big questions like rent roll with unit mix is like we just table stakes. We absolutely need that. Um, how many bedrooms, bathrooms are in each unit? What are the rents? Who pays which utilities?'Cause that's gonna be the vast majority of what we'll need, to really get to a price. The rest of it we can basically figure out. Through Google Street view, a drive by or public record. The other thing that we like to ask and we try to ask in an open-ended capacity is talk about some of the work that you've done over the last three to five years at the property. Right? Have you spent any money on some big stuff like the roof, the siding, you know, have you turned over any of the units? And usually through that conversation you start to get a sense of like, all right, most of the stuff's pretty old. We might have to budget for this or that, or at least put some money aside in the underwriting. And then the last thing is. You know, timeframe and that starts to try to open up the motivation conversation. You know, why are you calling me? What's, you know, what's the timeframe? And just trying to get them talking around. Oh, well, you know, I, me and a partner own it. We've owned it for a while. He kind of wants to sell, and, you know, I kind of wanna hold, but, eh, we're just starting to evaluate the options and make note of that. Or, I'm getting old. I, you know, my kids don't want it. I kind of want to just get rid of it and, all right, take note of that. And that starts to tell you a little bit more about what terms in your offer are gonna speak to their situation, which is obviously something that we want to address when we make an offer. With the rent roll, we get in there, we know the expenses in our market, right? We look up the taxes. We know what the insurance is gonna be. That leaves repairs and maintenance utilities, contract services, right? And we know what that is for all the buildings in our market'cause we already own in our market. So it's really easy and managed. And manage. Yeah. Yeah. so it's a situation in which it's like we don't need to ask him for a T 12 or for his tax returns or anything like that. We can include that in the offer if we really want it and make that a deliverable. But we're never gonna do that really upfront. Now, if he wants to meet us there, great. We always want to get in person as much as we can. We think that's a really good use of our time, is to spend. You know, even though it's a couple of hours total or round trip drive time to just get in front of a seller and get face to face right, puts you so far ahead of everybody else who's not doing that. So we always wanna try to do that, even if we think his number is gonna be too high in terms of what we're willing to pay. But long and short to kind of round out the process, we take all of this, throw it in, you know, here's where we can get the rents to. This is what our projected CapEx budget's gonna be. Put together an offer with terms that we think are gonna address. Their situation, you know, like a big one is, yeah, I had a buyer who wanted under contract on it, but it fell through. It's like, okay, well now we're gonna do no financing contingency and we'll do a meaningful deposit. Right. And we'll still have our DD contingency to, to do it, but like, we want to try to alleviate that concern. Yeah. I just don't want my tenants finding out. All right. So we write in the contract we'll only access twice and you know, only access the units of your choice. So we try to solve as many of those problems as we possibly can in the offer. So we shoot it over with a summary over email. We always want to present it over email if we can, if it's a, you know, an older gentleman or a seller who doesn't have email. All right, we'll call'em. But we like to recap it in an email so that we can like, sell it, verbal or, in written word. And then we put'em on a follow-up cadence. Right. The big thing is we always try to push urgency around the offer we're making. Um, you know, hey, you can say, Hey, it's only good for 48 hours. That doesn't really mean a lot to a seller. They're like, okay, sure. I'll, I'm sure on day three you'll still probably buy it if I accept it. But we say, Hey, we're offering on a handful of properties. We have a. You know, we're, we have a 1031 clock that's ticking and we try to create some level of urgency around him getting us or her getting us a reply. And from there, 90% of the time, 95% of the time, it's, yeah, price is a little too low, or I wanna be high, or, ah, timing's not right. And then we just put'em on follow up every 30 days, every, 60 days, whatever we feel like is the appropriate cadence, you know, touch base. How's it going? Doesn't make sense to further chat. And at some point down the line, we have some real productive conversation around it. And that may not result in a deal, but that seller becomes a true seller at some point where they are 100% gonna sell the property. And our job is to have been there along the way, staying top of mind. that is awesome. So we're the first one he calls. Yeah. Yeah. And a pretty, pretty simple, straightforward process, man. But, however, you guys being managers in the area definitely give you some keen insights of, what the highest and best use of a property can be, right. managing so many properties in the local area, man. So that, that's dope. You know, so for, for passive investor, Axel. who's listened to this podcast, you know, why should they care about, you know, deals that are off markets, how does it impact their returns risk, profile, and control? Yeah, it's such a good question. I think, first of all, the term off market, I feel like is, has become a vague term. You know, and I'll quickly define it, right. You'll get somebody who's raising capital for a deal that says this is an off market deal. Right? Well, is it a direct to seller deal where a buyer source it through a cold call or something? Or is it a direct to seller with a broker only called this one buyer. And I'm doing quotation marks here for everyone who's listening, you know, not watching this. But, so it's important to understand what that actually means. Right off market could mean any number of things. Get clarity on that, and that'll give you some true insight into like, how many buyers. The buyer may have been competing with as they won that deal. Gotcha. Now, the reason that it's important to care about that if you're an LP is, there are three key. Kind of three key events in the life cycle of a real estate deal, and I'm really oversimplifying, but it's the day that you buy and you lock in your basis in terms of what did you pay for the property is the most impactful financial decision from a mathematics standpoint in the entirety of the investing process, right? So be because that's the biggest number. If you're gonna spend a hundred thousand dollars per unit, you know, and$10,000 in closing costs per unit, I mean, that's, that would be really high. But just for round numbers, you know, and you're at 1 10 cost basis per unit, you're probably only gonna spend in multifamily anywhere from 5 grand to 20 grand just for round numbers on the unit in renovations. Right? I mean, it's a small fraction of compared to the purchase price. So when you're able to reduce that to 90 k, you know, 10% below market, 90 K instead of a hundred, that's a massive delta that. Drastically impacts your returns down the line as an investor. So not only do you, you know, obviously you lock in the ability to earn higher returns, but you're also de-risking the remainder of the process in terms of, okay, you went over a little over budget on your renovations. That's not the end of the world because you bought it at the right price and you created a buffer there. The market adjusts a little bit downwards, cap rates expand, interest rates go up, what has, what have you. Okay? You still have a little bit more of a buffer. And yeah. The other two key events are what you spend on all of your renovations on your business plan and what your final cost basis is. That's, you know, the other key thing that needs to be executed. And then what do you sell at, like, what's your sales price per unit? Right. Those are the three big numbers. Yeah. The one that you can control is what you pay for it. Yep. You can control what you spend, but like, only to an extent you can stop spending money, but you might have to keep spending money to keep renovating the units and filling it up. Right. If you open up the walls and you gotta do all the plumbing and electrical and you didn't expect to do that. Well, you, you still have to do it if you want to get a body in there that's paying rent. So it's still out of your control to an extent. You can't control what you sell it for. I mean, you, again, you can, but again, you're at the extent of what the market gives you in a sense. So we control what we pay and that's the easiest thing to get rights. so as an lp, that, that tells you a lot about what the future of the deal looks like, and it's one of the more verifiable. Data points as well. Okay. You mentioned you're gonna spend this or you're gonna achieve this in rent, and you think that the cap rates are going to, you know, be this when you sell it, all projections, when you're buying something, right? It's, we have this sales price. These are all of the comparables, you know, properties that sold in the last 12 months. These are the cap rates they sold at. This is the per unit price they sold at. You know, these were the rents in the units when they sold compared to the rents and the property that you may be investing in versus the price that it's proposed to be bought at. And you have all the information. So that's why it makes a lot of sense to spend time really understanding that. Right. And getting a good feel for it because it's the easiest thing for you as an LP to get really comfortable with outside of, you know, the team and, and their experience. I got you. Yeah, that, that's awesome, man. Appreciate you breaking that down for me, man. So I got about another four minutes left with you, man. Before I gotta go do the Marine Corps thing. So we're gonna dive into the focus round, man. it's just an acronym, man. And this is kind of a lightning round. Could be quick answers, could be a little bit more extended, but more so quick answers. What do you do for fun? Yeah, I try to get outside. I live in New England, it gets a little bit hard to do that, but golf in the summer, skiing in the winter, love to travel. And you know, I think all of us in real estate, it's, it becomes our hobby as well as our work pretty quickly. I'll say that we ski, we golf, get outside as much as possible, and then real estate takes up a lot of the other free time. Gotcha, man. What is one opportunity, that was a game changer for you? really quick story. Lost my wallet coming home from a bar in South Boston and it was found just on the street by a guy who looked me up on social media and said, I found your wallet. And he ended up becoming my biggest business partner, which is a funny story. Yeah, that's guy name. I might have heard Guy Tj, his name. I might have heard him tell a story before. Yeah. He gets on podcasts now. He was an engineer at Amazon and he was my first LP. Okay. And it just, it was the biggest chance encounter and now he raises a lot of money for our deals. So a lost wallet led to a very long-term profitable business relationship and a nice personal friendship as well. So that's an opportunity that I think was a game changer for our business and really launched us into raising capital and working with partners and all that. That is awesome, man. Can you connect us through the podcast interview? That'd be great. Yeah, I would love to. I'll put you guys on email. Let's do alright, man. What would you say is your number one thing sponsors, mess up when talking to lp? They get too deep into the tactical data too quickly, right? And most LPs, their eyes gloss over and they get confused. One of a mantra to go back to your original question, a confused mind says no. And that is so true with LPs that are not from the real estate world. So instead of being like, we're only projecting X rent growth versus y, talk about the. Story around the deal, talk about what's easily understood. This is how we found it at a high level. This is why at a high level, the seller's looking to sell, craft a narrative around the market and the opportunity that gets them excited outside of the data. And only introduce data once they've become comfortable with all of the stuff that isn't, you know, data's not required to communicate. That's awesome, man. Story sales, you know? So, look, what did you not understand about a seller psychology until you, maybe full into direct to seller? Yeah, I think, I don't know if it was, so I may be answering a different question than when you're asking, but it's similar to seller psychology. I wasn't patient. you know, I, as a young guy, I really wanted it, I wanted results quickly. Gotcha. I think that's a, I think it's easy for people to have short term expectations when they do anything in business or life, I guess. But, for me, it really, really took me a while to become comfortable with the fact that all of the money was gonna be made in the follow up. And I would always push for closure from sellers. I would try to, I would try to convince sellers to become sellers. When you as a buyer are never going to convince a seller to become a seller unless you offer some. Insane price, which obviously we're not doing as investors, right? You're never gonna convince them to sell. You just want to be around them when they decide themselves to sell. Right? And that was a big change for me. That is awesome because ownership is actually a good feeling, especially the guy that I'm working to working with right now is 82 years old. Fun fact, he doesn't use email. So everything I sent to him has to be snail mail. You know what I mean? So I've been there, man. Yeah, yeah. Being able to talk to him about why is he wanting to sell? He wanted, ideally you want to transfer it all that asset down to his son, but his son was like, dad, you want moms to sell that property and live off the money, but he also want his kids to benefit from the money. So we start talking about setting up trust and all that good stuff, you know? So, you know what I mean? Understanding psychology of why they want to become sellers instead of owners. You know, so lemme ask you this, man, it's the last question in the focus round, you know, what's your success built on that you think most people overlooked? I think it's, it dovetails with the previous answer, but. Patients combined with focus, against quick sidetrack, I'll bring it back. Biggest mistake I made in real estate was becoming distracted in 2021, 2022. Started looking at other markets. We did a deal in Florida, we did a deal in Indianapolis. Got away from the core competency of direct to seller in Southern New Hampshire, which we had figured out really, really well, and which really, really worked. I think people jumped from strategy to strategy from, you know, market to market whatever really quickly when. All of your efforts compound in the multi-year process, right? So it's when you're doing direct to seller, when you're trying to build a real estate business, when you're establishing those connections, all of that, et cetera, first couple years, you're not gonna see those results years 3, 4, 5. That's when you hit that exponential on the graph. So for me. I think that now I've become very cognizant of that and it's, I have a very, very narrow focus and I'm very, very patient. And because I understand I'm gonna be doing this for another 30 years and that I think has helped me generate more results than the people that jump around. Man, that is awesome, man. That bravo to tell. I like what you used. I like that you used the words. Core competency. I think as I go into work today, that will be my words of the day, the core competency.'cause I work in the maintenance department and we have to do some maintenance core competency, right? Each prospective work center have their own core competency. Competency that supports the entire maintenance department. So that will be my word of today, core competency. Alright, brother. So you know that listeners, that's a wrap, man. A tactical session with Axel. So whether you are looking to find a better deal, your vet operated more critically or you know, start building your own pipeline, you know, the information you say to share today was definitely golden. So Axel, if our listeners want to get in touch with you, how do they do that? Easiest way, I mean, you could just shoot me an email Axel axel@alignedREp.com, so A-L-I-G-N-E-D-R-E P.com. That's also our website. Find my Instagram, I'm very active on there. That's try to, that's where I post, you know, the content that I find to be valuable for the folks who are, you know, doing what we do. And that's, at Multifamily Wealth is that, Instagram handle, but any of those three channels tight, tight. We'll make sure that our, my VA add that information into the show notes. and it will also send you some, some trailers, maybe about four or five trailers, and then also the link to the full episode. Say, if you feel, if you're willing to share those information, be great. Greatly appreciate as well, you know, so listeners, absolutely. Yeah, listeners, thank you again for listening to another episode of the Multifamily Real Estate Experience Podcast. We trust that this episode added a ton of energy and value, and man, if you choose to add some numbers to your portfolio, some good numbers, uh, to your portfolio, whether it's in acquisition or the way you manage your property and all else fell, you can't figure it out. Give Axel a call or give Axel Connect and ask the question. I'm pretty sure he'd be willing to assist you, with creating a mutually beneficial relationship. Absolutely. All right. So until next time, Axel, thank you so much, brother. Until next time, listeners, thank you for spending your time with, the Multi-Family Real Estate Experiment podcast. I'm Hutch Marine Investor out. I.