In an attempt to learn more about how successful business and real estate professionals think; I ask every guest of the show my 5 Key Questions. These questions are meant to give you, the listener, a glimpse at what makes a successful real estate professional tick on both a personal and business level. This round of 5 Key Questions is answered by yesterday's guest, Antoine Martel, I hope you enjoy it.
*****Thank you so much for listening to the Making Money in Multifamily Real Estate Show! This show covers everything to do with Multifamily Real Estate Investing to help you, the listener, become an expert in your real estate ventures. The host, Dave Morgia, brings on guests who are already experts in their respective fields to discuss what principles and practices they follow that have helped them achieve their success so far.
Intro:
Welcome to the Making Money in Multifamily Show, where we discuss everything to do with multifamily real estate investing. We believe it's the best way to gain financial freedom and build lasting wealth. This is where you'll find the best information and practices to help you succeed in your real estate business, whether you're already experienced or just starting out. Here's your host, Dave Morgia
Dave:
In an attempt to learn more about how successful business and real estate professionals think, I ask every guest of the show my five key questions. These questions are meant to give, you the listener, a glimpse at what makes a successful real estate professional tick on both a personal and business level.
If you could only pick one trait that explains her success, what is that trait and why
Antoine:
Um, I think the trait would just be work ethic. Um, I think it trumps everything. I mean, you don't even have to be the smartest guy in the room if you're, if you're not the hardest. I think the hardest working person in the room is always going to win over the smartest person in the room. No matter what, um, And so, yeah, I mean, yesterday I was sitting here from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM nonstop and, um, you know, my girlfriend was trying to talk to me and I told her, I need one more hour, you know, like, and it was 9:00 PM already. Right? So it's just working hard, working hard and hardworking and waking up every single day with that ambition and drive to go and do it again.
What is the most uncharacteristic thing you've done in your business? And why did you do it?
Antoine:
I think the most uncharacteristic thing that I've done, I don't know if it's a character trait, but just like in the whole real estate investing world, starting a turnkey business and not even living. In the market that I have the turnkey business in is probably one of the weirdest things. Like you go look at night. I don't even know another turnkey company. That's at our scale that does it like we do. But, um, we're we're, we don't even live in the market. You do go look at many of the turnkey companies out there, all of them live in the market. So Memphis turnkey lives there, Cleveland turnkey lives in Cleveland, you know? And so I think that's probably the, the most characteristic thing for us being in this. Then the space.
Can you name a time where you felt like you were not going to end up successful? How did you overcome that fear?
Antoine:
Yeah. And so, yeah, we spoke a little bit about this and it's man. I mean, every, every month, every couple months, almost every day, I've I've, I'm scared about something or nervous about something or fearful about doing something. And, you know, at the end of the day, I think you just have to trust your gut and trust your numbers too. So, you know, a lot of the times, you know, we were buying for example, our first apartment building and it was 20 units and it was a million bucks. You know, from that point, you know, the biggest thing we had bought was like a four unit building for 150 grand. Now we're buying something for a million bucks and me and my dad looked at each other and we're like, Holy shit, we really gonna, you know, send this wire out and, you know,$600,000 wire, are we really going to do this thing? Or I'm sorry.$400,000 wire. Are we really going to do this? Are we really gonna buy this thing? And it's like, I dunno, I'm scared, but let's just go look at the numbers one more time. Let's just like, you know, put super conservative numbers, like just worst case scenario kind of thing. And Oh wow. We're making a 8% return. That's fine with me, you know? So it was, you know, fearful as is normal. It's part of the process. I'm scared every time I do something bigger or, or scale up even more, I'm scared every single time. But you know, at the end you have to trust the system, trust the process. Um, and just, you know, if you're normally what I'm doing when I'm very nervous about something, I just, again, like. Put work into it. So like go back and look at the numbers, run the numbers in a different way to make, make sure I'm not fearful and kind of, it kind of always helps me like be less fearful if I just kind of attack it head on instead of just like, Oh, I'm scared about this. Well, anyways, let me go focus on something else. Kind of just attack it, head on and make sure you just ask the hard questions.
Can you name a time where something in your business went perfectly. And what did you do to make that a reality?
Antoine:
Yeah, the perfect thing was kind of retiring my parents from their day jobs. And that was kind of a goal since I started was, you know, helping my parents retire. And that's why we started burning the properties and that would have taken a whole lot of time to retire. My parents buy burning properties and it would need the a hundred single family homes. Um, And we only had 10, so kind of, you know, retire my parents for their day jobs. Now, both my parents work in the, in Martell turnkey, so that's great. And that's, that's something that went perfectly and it went way quicker than I could have ever imagined. You know, I thought it would take me five or 10 years to do so it took me two.
What have you been focusing on lately to improve yourself or your business?
Antoine:
Yeah. And so that's something where we're always doing. I mean, I was up late last night, like I said, 10, o'clock just setting up meetings with, you know, my sales people. We brought on a new sales person as well. So just like building more systems to help. Cause I'm the first salesperson. I trained personally. So she sat here with me for three months straight and I taught her everything, but that's not really a scalable thing. And, you know, putting all that down on paper and building a system and building kind of like a map behind the scenes behind the CRM so that everybody. So that the new salesperson and also all future salespeople know like, Hey, this is, you know, literally just follow that. I want people to just not even have to think just like the people at McDonald's, they just click a button and it does the rest of it for you. It's I want you, I want people to just be able to, to understand what's going on behind the scenes, but also just like have a very easy, simple template to follow on their day to day operations. And so building that kind of thing, working with my, my. One salesperson to help educate the second one and building a system around doing that. So that's something we're working on, you know, as we speak right now.
Dave:
Thank you for listening. This has been the Making Money in Multifamily Podcast. If you have any questions, comments, or would just like to connect, please feel free to check out the show notes for how you can connect or visit longviewacquisitions.com