June 15, 2021

JF2478: Rebuilding Your Business After a Crisis with Rob Mehta


Jumping full-time into real estate right out of college, Rob Mehta’s first move was house hacking. After founding two companies and surviving the 2006 housing crash, Mehta went on to make his biggest deal to date. Tune in to hear a broker’s perspective on rebuilding after the market crash, some similarities, and one major difference he sees in today’s housing environment. 

Rob Mehta Real Estate Background:

  • Full-time real estate investor
  • 10 years of experience
  • Portfolio consist of multifamily apartments
  • Based in Miami, FL
  • Say hi to him at: www.robmehtapartners.com

 

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TRANSCRIPTION

Ash Patel: Hello Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I’m Ash Patel and I’m here with our guest today, Rob Mehta. Rob is joining us from Miami, Florida. Rob is a full-time real estate investor and has a portfolio of multifamily apartments. Rob, how are you today?

Rob Mehta: Hey, Ash. I’m doing well. How are you?

Ash Patel: Doing well, man. Thanks for joining us. Before we get started, Rob, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on now?

Rob Mehta: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been in the real estate space since I graduated college, which was 27 years ago. I’ve done a little bit of everything, I guess you could say. I started investing in small single-family, townhomes, condos, that kind of thing. Eventually, that evolved into getting into the multifamily game. Most of my focus is on smaller multifamily properties, smaller two or four-unit kinds of things. I’ve been involved in some bigger things through some partnerships and things throughout the years as well. As I said, I’ve been in the real estate game for a long time, I am a broker in several states. I’m originally from the Twin Cities, so I’ve been a broker up there for going on 20-some years and bought the last five in Florida here. We do business in both places. We work with a lot of investors as well that are looking to purchase, and obviously, move on and dispose of certain assets, and do all sorts of things.

Ash Patel: Rob, when you went to college, did you know you were going to go into real estate?

Rob Mehta: I did not. Actually, I’ve told this story to just a few people, but I bumped into a newspaper ad at the time. I was basically looking for a side hustle while I attended school… I bumped into an ad, went into the real estate office that was advertising, and interviewed with the manager. The manager kept saying in this sort of interview, he kept calling real estate a career, and that was the last thing I was looking for, because I was in school. So I left that meeting with a pamphlet of material, and I didn’t really think much of it at all, really for the next several weeks. All of a sudden, of course, I’m sure this manager did this with every interview that he had. He sent me a nice little thank you note saying how wonderful I’d be in real estate. Once I received that thank you note is when I thought about getting my license. Had I not gotten that note, I honestly don’t think I would have gotten my license back then.

Ash Patel: So you got your real estate license while you were in college?

Rob Mehta: I did.

Ash Patel: What were you studying? What was your pre-determined career path?

Rob Mehta: It was really predetermined. I was studying business administration, and I knew that I wanted to do something in the business world. I really had no idea what, at the time.

Ash Patel: Okay, so you graduated college and did you go right into real estate? Or did you follow the traditional route and get a job in business?

Rob Mehta: I got my license in my sophomore year of college, and my first solid year or year and a half was obviously very part-time, still going to school. But after that first, I want to say, probably 16 months have passed, I realized that this really could be a career, this really could be a business opportunity. By the time I finished college, I decided that I was going to jump in with both feet at that time, and give it a go.

Ash Patel: Right into real estate?

Rob Mehta: Right into real estate. Yeah.

Ash Patel: Alright. Here’s a good question for you… Some of our Best Ever listeners, if they’re in college and considering somehow getting into real estate, would you recommend they get their license?

Rob Mehta: I do. I think the license really opens up a lot of doors, whether you’re going to be an investor, whether you’re going to actually work with clients, or perhaps it leads you down another path. So I think it does. I think it gives you an appreciation for the inner workings of the business in general. I think it gives you a solid foundation of knowledge to work from.

Ash Patel: Alright, you graduated college and now you are a full-time realtor…

Rob Mehta: Correct.

Ash Patel: When was your first investment acquisition?

Rob Mehta: My first was — I think I’d been in the business about two and a half years and I bought my first property. It was a single-family property but interestingly enough, and the reason why I bought it, is that it was a split-level home that was set up as a duplex, even though it wasn’t a legal duplex. I guess you could call it the proverbial mother-in-law apartment. Separate entrance, two kitchens, multiple bathrooms, all that kind of good stuff. I decided, “Hey, this is a great first investment to make.” It was actually the first property that I also bought to live in, as well as knowing that I could rent out the other half.

Ash Patel: Good. What was your next acquisition?

Rob Mehta: The next one wasn’t as great of a slam dunk as the first one. I ended up buying a townhome on a golf course. This is up in the northwest suburbs of the Twin Cities. A beautiful property that needed a little bit of cosmetic rehab, but the location was great. I kind of did the same thing. My first few acquisitions were made as owner-occupied. So I buy a property, I live in it for a while, do a little bit of work, and then I move on. So same thing about this townhome and said, “Okay, I can go in here, I can replace the fuchsia carpet, I can get rid of the wallpaper, and the bones were good. The location was fantastic.” It rented out fine. It definitely wasn’t as great, when I call it a slam dunk — that first property that I bought really was the slam dunk. It really did well over the years. The second one was just kind of so-so, but was okay.

Ash Patel: Rob, so now you have two properties. What year was this?

Rob Mehta: Let’s see, I got my license in late 1997. This would have been about 1999.

Ash Patel: Okay, so we’re heading into the 2000s and you’ve got two properties. What’s your next move?

Rob Mehta: My next move, I made another acquisition after that townhome. I bought another single-family this time. This one, I bought it as owner-occupied. I actually never lived in it. Don’t tell the bank that… But the money was flowing. It was easy to get loans at the time, I’m suure some people remember, and it made sense so I did that. That was my third, back to the single-family route.

The other thing I realized with the townhome is HOA fees and that was something that I thought I’d done a good job calculating, and really, when it came down to it, it ate up a good chunk of the rental revenue on the townhome that I purchased. So then I decided “You know what? Let me focus back on single-family. Let me get back and look for my next buy in that direction.”

Ash Patel: Alright, so Rob, now you’ve got three properties and we’re heading towards the financial crash and the housing crash…

Rob Mehta: Yes.

Ash Patel: Take me through the journey up to that point.

Rob Mehta: Well, let’s see. Let’s talk about the housing crash. I can recall distinctly, for us, we were starting to feel, I would say, sort of the initial preliminary effects of it around ’05; the market just seems to have changed, and ’06 is really when it hit for us. At that point, I had opened my own company after being in the business for about three years. I opened my own brokerage, and that was around the end of the 2000s. By ’04 to ’05, we’re doing great business, we’re growing as a company. ’05 came along and we started to feel a little bit of a hiccup. In ’06, the market went off a cliff, at least where I was, in the Twin Cities. All of a sudden, my little company went from doing 80 to 120 deals a month with my agents, we were doing 30 deals a month. Not enough to justify the lease that we had, the overhead, and etc., etc., etc.

Luckily or unluckily, I’m not sure which one, I did not buy a lot of real estate leading right up to the crash, mainly because a lot of my funds were being funneled into this company to keep the company growing. Again, I had no hindsight there whatsoever. That’s just how things happen. I had stopped personally investing, I would say, probably around 2002 to 2003. Again, with every other sort of available dollar that I had in growing the company. Unfortunately, we took on more office space around, I want to say, early ’05 which was, in hindsight, not a great move, but we did because we were growing. We needed to house agents, and all that good stuff. So when ’06 came around and all of a sudden we’ve got more space than we need, agents are starting to drop off throughout that year because of the business – it just put us in a really, really bad position financially.

Break: [00:08:36][00:10:37]

Ash Patel: The fact that you were spending money on office space, and not spending money on single-family houses or other real estate investments meant that you didn’t overpay for a lot of deals leading up to that crash.

Rob Mehta: Yes, good point.

Ash Patel: If you can go back to that time, is there anything reminiscent as to what’s going on today?

Rob Mehta: Yes, and no. This question comes up quite a bit. Everybody’s wondering. Of course, the first thing I always say is, “Boy, if I had that crystal ball. I may know lottery numbers and everything else.” But the main difference that I see right now, some similarities and differences. The big difference… I’ll start with the difference first. When you look back at that time in the marketplace, the early 2000s, money was cheap, money did not really require really anybody to do anything more than to have a social security number and have the ability to borrow. I remember one of the first loans I ever got, it was a stated income loan because I was self-employed, and I needed to do a stated income loan to qualify.

Ash Patel: The infamous no doc loans.

Rob Mehta: The NINAs, yeah, or the NINJA, whatever you want to call it. I remember that the lender that I was working with, the last piece of paper that he needed to get this loan approved through the underwriters – he needed a business card.

Ash Patel: You went to Kinkos and got a business card.

Rob Mehta: I actually had business cards, because I was in the business… But at that moment, I had my laptop with me and I didn’t have a card. So I quickly hopped on Microsoft Word, created a card and I sent it to them. Sure enough, the loan got approved. This was the craziness of that market.

On another side note, I can tell you about being invited to some insanely over-the-top parties that mortgage brokers used to throw with all this money that they were making back then too, but that’s a whole other conversation. Back then that was kind of the norm. But the big difference, of course, is the money situation. The money situation today, people have a lot more skin in the game. We don’t have these mortgages out there. We do. I don’t want to say that we don’t. There are NINA mortgages. For those listeners, maybe they don’t know about that, they are out there.

Ash Patel: And NINA is no income, no assets.

Rob Mehta: Yeah, no Income, no assets. I think NINJA was the other word, which was no income, no job, no assets, something like that. There are all these great phrases back then. These loans are around, they’ve come back. But today to get a loan like that typically involves 25% to 30% liquid into the deal… Whereas back then, 0% and you sign your name on a piece of paper and you’d be in business. That’s a big difference that I see right now is with the financial situation in terms of being able to qualify and people having a lot more liquid into their properties, a lot more cash deals, we see so many cash deals in Florida. Our group, we operate all over the state and we probably see upwards of 40% of the clients that we work with are going cash, partly because of the market, but partly because they’ve got the liquid to do it. So that’s really the big, big difference that I see back when you think about ’03, ’04, ’02 even, versus today, is the situation with the financing, people having the liquid into the game, all of that.

Ash Patel: Today, there’s a ton of liquidity out there.

Rob Mehta: Yes, absolutely.

Ash Patel: I never heard of that NINJA loan, but what a great acronym; instead of a no-doc loan, I got a NINJA loan. It actually makes you feel pretty good about yourself.

Rob Mehta: It kind of does. Yeah.

Ash Patel: So 2008 unfolds, and what does your world look like after that?

Rob Mehta: That was ’06, ’07, ’08. I’ve told people this, too. People said, “Well, you survived sort of the dark ages of the real estate market” I said, “Yeah, I did.” But honestly, I did because we didn’t know how long sort of the dark ages was going to last. ’06, as I said, was kind of like the market falling off a cliff. But for myself and many other people that I knew in the industry that had never experienced that, we were thinking, “Hey, this is a six-month or a one-year blip.” Then one year went into two, two went into three, three went into four. It’s not that I was stubborn by any means, or saying I’m going to ride this thing out to the end. Nobody knew how long that end was going to last or how long that market was going to be. I think looking back, for us, I think we started to see a recovery maybe around 2011, a realistic recovery.

From 2006 to 2011 – quite a bit of time there that went by. Maybe 2010 as well, but even so, it was four years now that have gone by with the markets doing what they did. When you say ’08, it was not a good time. The company that I had – I ended up selling the company. I owned a franchise RE/MAX office. I was in the RE/MAX network at the time. I ended up selling my RE/MAX to my biggest competitor, which was another RE/MAX group that pretty much had circled my little office with a number of their offices. So it was kind of a, “Well, if I can’t beat them, I better join them, and stop the bleeding as well.” So we did that toward the end of ’07; hindsight, again, being what it is, we should have done it in 2004, but at least we were able to stop the bleeding, stop the losses and get back into focusing on sales at that point.

Ash Patel: Alright, so you stayed in the game, and you’re back into selling houses… How do you continue to acquire more real estate?

Rob Mehta: Well, really, the biggest opportunity that existed there for any of us at that time really was when the market did what it did. We saw foreclosures go through the roof and short sales, all of that. That took place, again, during let’s say, ’07, ’08, ’09, ’10. I wish I had more liquid to make purchases at the time, but I didn’t. We did make a few acquisitions, again, some smaller properties, duplexes, and things like that… Again, kind of focusing on knowing that the rental market is always going to be there, and if we can acquire at the right price, it made sense to jump into that. The natural progression, for me, at least was okay, now I’ve owned a few single families, a townhome here or there, what’s the next thing? Well, I should certainly take a look at duplexes, triplexes, quads, fourplexes, that kind of thing.

That was kind of the natural progression. Of course, these properties also, you can obviously finance them with a traditional mortgage as well. You don’t need to step into commercial financing or anything of that sort. So again, I made a couple of acquisitions during that time, really not a whole lot. I didn’t have a whole lot of money to play with, of course, because my income was solely derived from our property sales from working with clients. Again, hindsight being what it is, it would have been nice to make 10 acquisitions during that period, but that didn’t take place. But we did pick up a couple of properties that we held on to for some time. As the markets, of course, recovered and bounced back, the equity there and the appreciation was a great thing to see recover.

Ash Patel: Yeah. Being a realtor, does that give you the inside track on deals? Is there any issue with if somebody comes to you wanting to list their duplex or quad, is there any issue with you saying, “You know what? I’ll buy it.”

Rob Mehta: I don’t think there is, as long as you are representing your client properly and thinking about your fiduciary duties to your client. I think that’s very, very important as a licensee. That’s something — in practicality, that means that you are having a very open conversation about the valuation of that property; if you yourself have an interest in it, of course, obviously bringing that to the conversation as well. This is a problem that I think doesn’t matter what market you’re in, but it’s something that’s out there. If you look at today, there’s a lot of listings that are what we call pocket listings, they never hit the open market. Well, if the listing never hits the open market, did that seller really achieve the highest and best price that they could have? Again, as you mentioned about having an interest – I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I think the right thing and the right way to operate ethically is to, of course, do a proper market analysis for your client, present them with that, and obviously, if you have an interest in the property, that’s great. Have that discussion as well. There are people that don’t really want the hassle of going on the market. Or in the case of an investment property, if they’ve got renters there, they don’t want to inconvenience the renters, and they very well might want to do an off-market deal. But I think you have to present those options.

Ash Patel: Yeah, thank you for that. I wondered what the ethical rule or what the standard practice was for that. That clears that up. Let’s keep going. So you’ve got some quads, you’re building up your portfolio of real estate now, and what’s next?

Rob Mehta: Next was really survival through those years. That was really what was next. As I said, I think we started to see recovery in the markets around 2010, and really, I think significantly in 2011, those things really started to bounce back. We saw obviously, the amount of foreclosures and short sales finally starting to dwindle a bit. In my market at the time, in the Twin Cities, we were experiencing, I would say probably about 35 or so percent of the market, maybe even 40% were comprised of short sales and foreclosures. It sort of became a running joke that if you unlocked the door, you walked in, and if you saw furniture, you were sometimes surprised by that. Wow, somebody actually still lives in this house. That was kind of the reality for a long time.

So yeah, the immediate future was really just survival, getting through that period of time. Once I got through that, I made, I guess you could say a lateral career move. I stayed in the industry, but after I sold my company and I joined the company that bought my company out, I joined that company just as a broker associate. I was with them for a couple of years and then I got recruited away by a large national firm to manage for them. Actually, that was — as you talked about a career, that was the first time in my life where I had a salaried position. Because  the whole time before that, coming out of college was commissioned sales; of course, owning a company, but that still meant that I was beholden to the commission model with that.

So I didn’t really start acquiring again until after I made that move. I got hired by this national firm to manage a part of their local real estate business in the Twin Cities, and had that stability again, had that income again, could qualify for a traditional loan was something that I…

Ash Patel: Now that you have a real job you can get a loan.

Rob Mehta: Yeah, a real job.

Ash Patel: What kind of assets were you managing?

Rob Mehta: I was managing a sales office for that. It was a large company with about, I think at the time, about 16 to 17 branches in the Twin Cities in Greater Minnesota. When I joined the company, it was as a sales manager role to manage for them. That’s what I did for a few years, while I still kept selling, of course, as well; that was part of our agreement, was that I could still take care of my clients. At that point, having been in the business for upwards of let’s say about 12 years, or whatever that was, I had a book of business that I didn’t want to give up at that point. So I didn’t start acquiring yet until I had a “real job” with a real salary and could finally get financing and pursue some acquisitions.

Ash Patel: And then what was your next big move?

Rob Mehta: The next one – I was always thinking about, “Okay, let’s make some moves, pick up some duplexes.” And then it’s like, “Okay, well, now let’s start thinking about bigger properties.” The next logical step was, “Hey, well, what about fourplexes? Let’s start taking a look at quads or fourplexes.” Whatever you want to call them. My next couple of purchases were done as partnerships with a client that I’d worked with over the years, that had become good and trusted clients and felt like, “Hey, this could be a good partnership to enter into and spread the risk a little bit in terms of moving upwards a little bit.”

Ash Patel: Were you finding those deals?

Rob Mehta: I was, yeah. I was sourcing the deals, by and large, and then bringing what I thought were good deals to the group. Then the group would look at the numbers, obviously, look at the rent rolls, expenses, all that good stuff, and say, “Okay, this is a good buy. Here’s where we can go in, here’s where we can maybe go in and do a little bit of value-add as well.” We really became a fan of what I call value-add, meaning if we find something that has good bones, but hey, if we can dress it up a little bit, we can put in some landscaping, if we can repaint, put in some new appliances, redo a few things and raise rents by 50 or 100 bucks a month, that made a lot of sense.

Break: [00:21:34][00:22:10]

Ash Patel: So the reason for that partnership – was that to use other people’s capital as well?

Rob Mehta: It was. Yeah, that was a big part of it. Absolutely.

Ash Patel: Was that a straight 50/50 split? Or how did that deal work?

Rob Mehta: It generally was. I did a deal once where two other investors were involved, so we were all 33/33/33 so to speak, part of the deal. I had another deal where we did it with three other investors and myself, so there were four of us, so we were all basically a quarter.

Ash Patel: Who managed the property?

Rob Mehta: We stepped into a few properties where there was already a property manager, an outside company that was managing. The ones where we bought where there wasn’t one, we hired companies to do it. I never wanted to do it myself. The reason was, even though of course, the real estate background, and all that… Number one, dealing with renters was not my forte and I didn’t want to touch it. Number two, having been a broker, having had my own company before, and then of course, now at this point, I was working for a very, very large national company, as I said, in a sales manager role, liability was always kind of at the top of my head in terms of what am I doing here? Am I creating more of a liability situation for myself and my own license? That was the other reason. I always felt that having a good property manager was money well spent; fewer vacancies, somebody that’s very proactive in maintaining the property, checking in with the tenants, all of that. That’s what we did. We always hired it out.

Ash Patel: Yeah. Rob, what’s the biggest deal that you’ve done?

Rob Mehta: The biggest deal personally, is we bought an eight-unit building in the city of Minneapolis. That was the deal where I had three other investors involved in that deal. So we brought the investors together. That deal was kind of interesting. The existing owner was willing to carry a note for us for some time. When we first bought it, the owner was willing to act as the bank, which was really nice. We were able to step in with some favorable rates. The cash flow already was pretty decent.

Ash Patel: Let’s dive into that a little bit. Did you present that offer to the owner?

Rob Mehta: Yeah, we were dealing directly with the owner on that property.

Ash Patel: How did you approach him about seller financing?

Rob Mehta: Well, what was interesting is the owner was referred to me through another contact, and that agent wasn’t involved in the deal. This was actually an off-market deal. It was an agent that I knew that knew the owner. The agent who made the introduction said “This is somebody that would consider doing a financing carry back situation, holding paper, that kind of thing.” When I first made contact with the owner, that was one of the natural conversations that we had, “Hey, if you are willing to do this, what would the terms look like?” That sort of thing. Again, having a little bit of lead helped with that.

Ash Patel: What was the purchase price of that?

Rob Mehta: The purchase price of that one was, at the time, I want to say was about eight and a quarter, roughly.

Ash Patel: How much did the seller hold back?

Rob Mehta: We all came to the table total with about $300,000. About five and a quarter roughly is what the seller agreed to carry back.

Ash Patel: Did you get a loan on that as well?

Rob Mehta: No, we brought our own capital. We all had cash that we brought to the table and that’s why I said there were four of us in that deal, because we knew that we would need more capital than any one of us had access to by ourselves.

Ash Patel: Why didn’t you try to go to a bank to get some of that?

Rob Mehta: I could have. Mainly it was because we had this group already established. We just felt like, “Okay, if we’re going into this deal, obviously, we needed to have some capital in to make the numbers work, primarily.” So that was the main reason, and all of us have the capital to invest in that deal. So we felt like, “If we do this deal, we’ve got a seller carry-back, we’ve got a note, we can always go back and refinance with the bank at some point; maybe we do a cash-out or some form of a cash-out at that point if the valuation makes sense.”

Ash Patel: What were the terms of the seller financing? The five and a quarter that the seller held.

Rob Mehta: It was a five-year arrangement. Basically, a five-year term if you want to call it, with a balloon, basically. We had five years if we were keeping this property to refinance it into a mortgage and all of that. I don’t recall what the rate was at the time, to be quite honest. That might come to me, I’ll have to think about that. It was pretty favorable. That was a pretty favorable rate. This guy was retiring and he actually had a number of assets that he was looking to get off his plate. What’s interesting, too – and I  I didn’t understand this because of the way that I thought about it, but he was actively managing his properties as well. He did not have a property management company in place. Not only did he have all these units, but he also had different buildings, he had some fourplexes, and things too… But he was the guy that was collecting the rents and doing the maintenance and all of that. When it came time for him to get out of the game, so to speak, and I think that was one of the reasons why he was so motivated to do some seller financing at a good term.

Ash Patel: Yeah, so that was a win for everybody.

Rob Mehta: That was a win for everybody. Yeah, that really was. It really worked out well all the way around, basically.

Ash Patel: Rob, what’s your best real estate investing advice ever?

Rob Mehta: My best advice, to be quite honest, is don’t ever rush into something, do your due diligence. We run numbers probably eight different ways before we decide to make a move on something. Now, that’s easier said than done. Right now, you look at the markets and how fast things are moving, and all of that. It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy. It really is. Are people overpaying? Are they not? We can’t necessarily be the judge of that, but I think if you’re using good fundamentals – and every investor is different. Every investor has the magic number that they need to be on, whether it’s their cap rate, whether it’s their cash on cash, or whether it’s an IRR, whatever yardstick they’re using to measure… I think the key is to stick to that. Stick to your fundamentals, and have some flexibility, because the markets are different today than they were three or four years ago. If you’re looking for the golden goose out there, it probably doesn’t exist. But if it does, the numbers probably aren’t all that accurate maybe. If it looks like it’s a golden goose, it’s probably not.

Ash Patel: What’s the most important metric that you use when you evaluate deals?

Rob Mehta: We look at a couple of things, but I would say probably most important just to give us an idea of even if we want to further look at a property, it’s just to run a cap rate scenario. Take a look at the revenue versus what the asking is, and is it even in the realm of possibility? Does it even fit the mold of what we want? So we kind of start there usually.

Ash Patel: What kind of cap rates are you looking for?

Rob Mehta: To be quite honest, not that great. And again, we’ve ended up adapting, of course, to the market as well. These days, if we see something north of five, we’ll give it a good hard look. Obviously, there are investors that are looking for the golden goose out there, and they’re looking for the nines and 10s and all of that. I’m not saying that they don’t exist, they’re out there. Sometimes they’re challenging properties, challenging neighborhoods, that kind of thing. We tend to stay away from those.

For me, I would much rather have a lower cap rate, but have a better area, have a better client mix, that kind of thing, versus the opposite, where it’s much more challenging. Yeah, might make a little bit more money, but the headaches might be greater as well. We usually start with a cap rate, and then if it sort of fits, like “Hey, okay, this is the realm of where this fits. Alright. Now, we can do a little bit more due diligence and figure out where we’re at.”

Ash Patel: Have you considered non-residential commercial?

Rob Mehta: I personally have not gotten involved in that, except for working with some investors that have made moves in that direction. We have a client that has an investment group that we’ve worked with, that has done a number of strip shopping center purchases, that kind of thing. We have another client that’s done some larger multifamily as well, with obviously some family money and some different things as well. I personally am not, for my own portfolio. But for our clients – yeah, we’ve definitely worked on some bigger things like that. We get into the odd-out parcel and things like that as well as needs come up.

Ash Patel: Yeah, I would suggest looking into that. There’s a lot of information on the Best Ever website about non-residential commercial deals. The cap rates are a little bit higher today than what you’re seeing with multifamily.

Rob Mehta: Yes.

Ash Patel: Rob, are you ready for lightning round?

Rob Mehta: Sure. I think so.

Ash Patel: Alright, let’s do it. Rob, what’s the Best Ever way you like to give back?

Rob Mehta: I give back to a few charities throughout the year that I personally have some connection to. We do some things with Books for Africa, and we do some things with Feed the Children. Again, just some personal causes and things, and then we do some direct donations to some charities as well. My family’s background is my parents were both born in India, so we do some direct giving to some charities in Mumbai, where they’re both from as well.

Ash Patel: Rob, how can the Best Ever listeners reach out to you?

Rob Mehta: They can reach out to me a few different ways. My website is robmehtapartners.com. They can reach out to me through the website. They can give me a call at my office, 305-771-0155. If they want to email me, my email is very simple. It’s just rob@robmehtapartners.com. They can reach out to me in whichever manner they prefer.

Ash Patel: Yeah. Rob, thank you so much for being on the show today. You’ve taken us through the journey of becoming a realtor in college, and you’ve taken us with you on your journey to acquiring a fair amount of real estate. You survived the 2008 crash… Thank you for all the great advice today and have a Best Ever day.

Rob Mehta: Thanks, Ash. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

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