Commercial real estate expert Corey Peterson shares his journey of becoming a master of scaling in the multifamily industry. He reveals valuable insights and strategies for success, emphasizing the importance of curiosity and learning from others. Corey discusses various aspects of commercial real estate investing, from engaging with investors to navigating challenges like rising interest rates.
Key Takeaways
- The Power of Curiosity and Learning: Corey emphasizes the significance of asking questions and seeking advice from experienced individuals in the field. Being a master copier, he advocates for continuous learning and staying humble, as it's crucial for growth and success in commercial real estate.
- Effective Investor Engagement: Corey shares his approach to working with investors, highlighting that many are more interested in the operator's track record than chasing high returns. He stresses the importance of quantifying your pitch deck and demonstrating clear value to potential investors.
- Navigating Market Challenges: Corey provides valuable insights on dealing with challenges like rising interest rates and handling distressed assets. He encourages open communication with lenders, getting lean during tough times, and being prepared for potential capital calls to weather market fluctuations.
Corey Peterson | Real Estate Background
- CEO and Founder of Kahuna Investments
- Portfolio:
- 3,000 units/beds valued at over $250 million
- Based in: Chandler, AZ
- Say hi to him at:
- Greatest Lesson: Become a master copier of those you admire and want to follow.
Don't forget to grab Corey's latest book, Trust But Verify: The Passive Investor's Guide to Evaluating Real Estate Syndicators by texting "trust" to 480-500-1127 for a comprehensive guide to vetting syndicators and making informed investment decisions.
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Transcript
Ash Patel (00:01.918)
Hello, best ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm Ash Patel and I'm with today's guest, Corey Peterson. Corey is joining us from Chandler, Arizona. He is the CEO and founder of Kahuna Investments. They focus on purchasing stable, income producing, multifamily and student housing opportunities. Corey's portfolio consists of over 3000 units valued at over $250 million.
Corey is also a repeat guest, so if you haven't caught him the first time, Google Joe Fairless and Corey Peterson. Corey, welcome back and thank you for joining us.
Corey Peterson (00:40.366)
Man, excited to be asked back and invited back and really excited to talk about some new stuff that I think is happening. I mean, the one thing about this market is it just kind of keeps changing.
Ash Patel (00:54.79)
You're not kidding, man. Let's deep dive into that. Let's talk to me about your portfolio pre COVID, post COVID and what it is today. And then we'll dive into finding deals.
Corey Peterson (01:08.718)
Yeah, pre-COVID, we were in student, which, I mean, listen, being in student housing during COVID was almost a five-finger death punch, right? It was, to say that it was hard is an understatement. And like you know basically nobody went to school and so they didn't go to the student student housing and that was really hard that represented 70 of our portfolio and the smaller schools the d2 schools the 8 000 kids 9 000 10 000 kids schools they really declined like a lot.
Now your D1s, people still went to D1s and stayed if you were in a good location. But for us, that was 70% of our portfolio. It was tough, right? During that though, we decided to pivot and buy into the pain. I think we talked about that a little bit on your on our last show, is you buy into the pain. So I purchased more student housing. Why? It was at a discount.
Um, you know, and so, but I knew what I was doing and we bought three or four deals in the right markets, um, and coming out of it, it's been a blessing. We're like, Oh my God, now interest rates and all the things are crazy are going on, but we still are getting great rents with parental guarantees. So that's been nice. Right. Um, and the other part of during pre COVID or pre COVID was like, it was gangbusters.
Right. I mean, on our regular multifamily stuff, rents and growth were crazy, slowed it down. It actually ramped up even a little bit more during COVID. And now we're to the spot where rents are starting to, I would say they've not really went down, they've just stayed flat like, which is okay. And some markets, two markets, they've slightly decreased or we've had to put some bigger incentives to get leased up a little bit, right? And those properties are in Arizona, and Arizona is a fairly strong market, good market in Tucson, but most of our properties are based in the Midwest Ash and in the South.
Ash Patel (03:33.954)
Yeah, so I got to ask you, office right now is where student housing was during COVID. Do you have any interest in buying suburban office?
Corey Peterson (03:46.158)
I would if I understood it, right? So here's the challenge, like I'm not that smart. I'd like to think that I am. I mean, but I do a couple things really well. And so I've learned to say, though, and honestly, as entrepreneurs, I think people are listening to the show right now, the hardest thing as a entrepreneur, as serial entrepreneur like me and you, Ash, is two letters and one word, no.
Because as an entrepreneur, when you really understand entrepreneurship, we can do anything we put our mind to. It just takes time and resource. But sometimes you have to be, no, Corey, you don't do that. Do you want to create another business? No.
Ash Patel (04:37.642)
Corey, during the COVID lockdowns, we all saw the student housing complexes go for pennies on the dollar and they were toxic. How much of a struggle was it for you to dive in and start acquiring more?
Corey Peterson (04:54.99)
It was difficult, but I understand the principles of it, right? So what I did when I bought the new properties is I made sure I bought in the right D, I bought more D1s than D2s for sure. And then the press, it made sure that we were well capitalized to get through the COVID piece, right?
And we bought it on the second year of COVID. We started buying into the pain in the second year of COVID, knowing that it's probably going to wean out eventually. We started to feel the claws bearing back a little bit. So it wasn't as crazy. Everybody was trying to figure out how to make it work, how to get into schools. And so was it difficult for the first year that we bought into the pain? Yes, it was difficult.
We had, you know, everybody's wearing masks. I mean, this is, we're dealing with colleges and universities, very, I won't call it left leaning, but like, but the philosophies around college is you got to kind of understand the game that you're playing and who your audience is. And so we had to really mitigate a COVID policy, very stringent, right? And so we did that.
Now, and then eventually kind of just went away. And now that it's went away, Ash, I look pretty smart. I look pretty smart.
Ash Patel (06:26.954)
Corey, right now we've got tons of investors sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out what the Fed's going to do next. I feel like you got too much energy to sit back and wait. What are you doing now?
Corey Peterson (06:38.702)
I think it's a shame to wait. I think you can almost make money in every market if you understand the game. And if you understand your, what is your exit? What is your out, right? And I've long stopped trying to time the market because if I was gonna do that two or three years ago, what about nothing, right? Because insurance went up 100% on properties. I mean, and then now we, and COVID, the interest rates, everything that most investors bought two, three years ago has been pain and suffering, right? That's what I call it. Survived to 25, okay? We have two more years to get out of this thing. But I go back to the fundamentals, man. You just got to put yourself out there, Ash, and just buy.
And because you never know where that home run is going to be. You just don't. And so, but you just buy on the fundamentals, which in my opinion is cash flow. Still to this day, I know cash flow is my main. That's why it's so hard for me to buy in markets like Arizona. Even though I do find some, I buy in Tucson a little bit, but it's really hard for me to buy in Phoenix. I would love to buy in Phoenix more often. But my model says cash flow. And not just hope for appreciation. Because in a downturn economy, if you can cash flow, you survive. If you don't cash flow, you give your property back to the bank.
Ash Patel (08:11.274)
What are you doing to find deals today?
Corey Peterson (08:13.998)
Going to the banks, Ash. So I like, listen, what's happening right now is a big transition because all of us, including me, were buying with these bridge loans that some of us had rate locks and put on them and stuff like that, but those rate locks are coming due. And when they come due, you either have to come up with a lot of new capital, or sometimes they go back to the bank, right? Because you can't. And they go back into receivership. So I have been really hitting the auction.com, all the auction sites. And really, this is the other part of this. Who knows?
Who knows about these properties? The property management companies. They know the ones that are hurting or are in receivership. So I've been door knocking on a bunch of those receivership type management companies and saying, make an introduction, right? And so, but I just so happened to have a property that was right next to my property that I own that it was on auction.com the broker absolutely just happened to reach out to me I didn't see it on this one and it was a property that I own it's right behind mine it it marries my property so nicely I'm like oh my god and so what I found is I mean those sites are not hard to operate with the only challenge Ash is you have to have a have a lot of cash up front because if you win the bid typically you have to put up a million dollars or or pretty close to that, like in 24 hours.
Ash Patel (10:04.394)
Corey, can you explain to the best ever listeners what a property in receivership is?
Corey Peterson (10:09.486)
Yeah, great. Thank you. I forget about this. Yes. Property in receivership is now a bank-owned asset. It is now, it has went through the foreclosure process and the bank is now owning and operating assets. And let me kind of set some, here's what I know about bank-owned properties. First of all, do banks like to be in the property management business? They don't, right?
And not only that, Ash, they will spend very generously on things that really don't matter, but like staffing. They will overstaff properties to, and management companies that do this, they know this, right? The ones that work for receiverships, they know the bank has a certain type of profile. They want no issues. They want no deferred maintenance. They want nothing that they can get sued with because they now own these assets. So anything that was like a trip hazard or a potential liability to get their big bank sued, they take care of a lot of those things. So buying a bank asset usually comes with a very large expense basis that they're currently running that most of the times as a normal operator you can squeeze that down quite a bit, which leaves a lot of meat on the table.
Ash Patel (11:39.186)
The question's been asked a lot on how you find properties under receivership. You mentioned going to property management companies, going to receivers. Have you had luck going to actual lenders?
Corey Peterson (11:51.502)
Um, I personally have not had that opportunity or luck yet. Um, but I still ask, right? Um, and I, he, who does the most asking, if I asked more often, I would probably get it more. Right. If I was that just pecker, you know, woodpecker just keep on pecking on the, on the side of the thing, doors will open. And, and so the consistency piece on that is just time and effort.
If you're consistently knocking and asking, what do you have, what do you have? Usually you'll find something.
Ash Patel (12:26.942)
What's the profile of the properties that you're looking for today?
Corey Peterson (12:31.822)
Typically between 10 million to, I'll call it $35 million, maybe $40 million property, has to be 100 units plus. And whether, obviously we'll do a student deal, that's fine for us, but this still has to be 100 doors, bed, or 100 doors, which usually translates to about 300 beds, like 300 beds is about the right size for our student property deal. And we're looking for a micro value play.
So in other words, right now in this marketplace, this is the play for me is, I'm just trying to buy something at today's rate that I can cash flow, that I can hold on for about five years and then hit this refi button that's going to make me a lot of money, right? So I'm trying to put five year debt on purpose, even though normally I would try to be getting 10 year debt, but 10 year debt at the rates right now don't make any sense.
So Ash, the deal that I just got under contract that is at REO, my interest rate is 8.67%. And yeah. And it cash flows. It has to pencil for the bank to sell it.
Ash Patel (13:42.546)
Yeah man, welcome to the club. It is what it is.
Ash Patel (13:52.478)
How did you find that deal?
Corey Peterson (13:54.702)
auction.com
Ash Patel (13:57.522)
What are the challenges, Corey?
Corey Peterson (13:58.318)
But the broker had reached out to me and said, hey, you need to look at this property. Because he called just all the owners around it doing his due diligence. And come to find out there was only five bidders for that property.
Ash Patel (14:14.882)
I like that broker, someone that's hungry.
Corey Peterson (14:17.678)
Yeah, he was just doing his job. He was like, hey man, and you know what's the funny part is, I blew him off. I blew him off three or four times. And finally I opened the email and I was like, oh my God, this is right behind my property. And then I got really interested, right? Then, so, and here's the funny thing is like, I always believe that a good broker will give you a little bit of insider information, right? Like if you establish the right connection with them. And so that's always been my biggest thing that I'm pretty good at, Ash, is that broker relation, right? Making a friend as quick as humanly possible to where he knows me and likes me. He understood my business model. He knew that I'd bought in the marketplace before.
And I just flat out told him, I was like, listen, his name was John. I was like, John, I'm your guy. I'm the guy that's going to buy this property. It makes total sense for me to buy it. And he's like, yeah. And so then I started asking some other questions, which was, how many bidders are they? What have they preregistered their top bid to be? Great questions to ask. And they won't always tell you, but they might.
Ash Patel (15:30.522)
Yeah, there's some tricks to getting around those answers. Yeah.
Corey Peterson (15:34.286)
Yeah, hot or cold, right? Is it north of blank, do you think, or you know?
Ash Patel (15:39.678)
Do you think this will put me in the running to get the deal done? Yeah. Get as much inside info as you can and just get all the edge you can.
Corey Peterson (15:42.99)
Yeah, yeah.
Corey Peterson (15:47.406)
Yeah. And the cool thing, now the only downside to buying like an auction type of property is you don't really get a due diligence. They give you a PCA, a property condition assessment report. It's pretty detailed and it's pretty as current. So you can see, you know, pretty good insight from there, but you don't get to do your normal, I'm sending my whole team and scoping everything.
Ash Patel (16:13.394)
You also don't get all the financials that you would have if this was a normal sale, right? So how do you underwrite these deals? Because you have such limited...
Corey Peterson (16:18.382)
Correct. Well, they gave me enough. So this potential actually receiver had owned the property for three years. So I actually had pretty good at three years of T 12. Which I normally wouldn't get I normally get like this is what you get. Whatever the bank has, you know, a lot of times they're not receivership for that long.
So I actually had a decent amount. And the other part is they have a very short wick. You have to close within usually typically 60 days or they'll give you 30 days and you've got to pay another half a million dollars to get a 30 day extension. So it's a very quick raise. And so we put this property under contract in November. So now it's the 29th. We have another 30 days till we close.
And so in that time period, we've had to put together a PPM, pitch deck, all the stuff required, get all the LLCs, bank accounts opened up. We are just now marketing this project to potential investors.
Ash Patel (17:22.462)
Corey, I know that you've got numerous investors that have done deals with you before. When you interact with new investors, what are you finding? Is there appetite, the reluctancy to get into real estate in this market?
Corey Peterson (17:37.774)
Now Ash, this is going to sound really contrary now to probably what the mark, the mainstream media and honestly most, what most people are doing. We've never had that issue. Right. Um, our people come from the stock market. Most of our investors have come, they, they, they have found us in one of our ways that we out, we go out there through LinkedIn, lots of different places, through books and through education.
They are more interested in the operator than they are top end line. Like they want to make a return. Don't get me wrong, Ash. They want to make a good return, but they're used to six to 8% in the stock market. So anything above that is wonderful for them.
So I don't get as much reluctance. Now I will say this, right? The caveat on that is some of my more savvy investors, they're really looking at the deal and they're looking at how I'm underwriting the deal, Ash, meaning what cap rate are we selling it for, right? What growth rates, what are our growth metrics? Like what are my assumptions in the deal?
They really want to understand, why are you saying you're getting a 6% increase? Because 6% is pretty strong. And so, on this particular deal, we were able to demonstrate very clearly because I own another property that's actually closer to the college, I actually set the market with my property as far as, because I'm the closest to the college.
And so I'm like, based on this, this one's right behind me. They're undervalued because I'm getting 750 for two bed, per bed, for a two bedroom, two bath, and this property is getting 650. And I said, and they shouldn't, it's just, it's just bank on, they don't care. They're just trying to not, you know, ruin the ship. So there's potential there. And I think people are looking for you to quantify your pitch deck. Right.
Ash Patel (19:49.966)
Yeah, Corey, in my experience, and I do non-residential commercial anytime a receiver owns a property, it's heavily neglected. They don't even pay attention to it. They don't pay the bills. They don't try to lease it up. Have you had challenged properties where the receiver is just, they don't know what they're doing, they're not taking care of anything and the property's just going downhill.
Corey Peterson (20:13.326)
I've never bought one like that. Every time I bought one from, I have the exact, now maybe this is because I buy more student and it has to be because they know if they get one shot at leasing up for student. And if not, they're vacant the whole year, right? And so they pay attention a little bit more. I don't know why. Well, I know why because they know if they don't do it, it's going to really negatively impact their bottom line.
Ash Patel (20:24.721)
Yeah.
Ash Patel (20:41.554)
When you finance those properties, do you often use the lender who currently owns the note?
Corey Peterson (20:48.686)
I ask most of the time though, we just go back to our third party. Um, I usually use a broker most of the time, every time I do a deal. And the challenge with student housing is unless you're a D one, 20,000 students, Freddie and Fannie will not play in your marketplace. So we do a lot of CMBS, a lot of used to be local banks or credit unions. Um, they play pretty well, but you're still looking at 35% down. So it's a heavily, you've got to raise a decent amount of capital, you've got to be good at that. And so that's, that's the, uh, the downside is the, the banking, but the upside is, you know, mom and dad guarantee the rents, right? So if you lease up and you do well, it's really not, uh, you know, we have a property in North Carolina, ECU, East Carolina university, that's a D one school, the pirates and I would be really hard pressed to screw that property up. It's going to lease up each and every year with or without me. Um, my team is good, but like it would lease without a great staff because it's just in demand. So that's the beauty of buying in the right marketplace with that.
Ash Patel (22:03.642)
Over the years, there have been colleges that will form a real estate department and they'll start buying, building student housing. Have you encountered that? And is that unfair competition for you?
Corey Peterson (22:15.982)
It is, so here's another example of what they'll do. And this is what we've seen in some of the other smaller D2 schools. Enrollment has been declining for a good amount of years. So the one thing with student is proximity to college is the location, location, location. If you're far away, I would never buy that asset. I would never buy an asset that's not really like almost, it's gotta be within a half a mile to the college, or it's probably not a deal that I will be interested in.
But we've seen where, on one property that we own, they used to have just mandatory freshmen live on campus in the dorms. And last year, they announced beginning of August that freshmen and sophomores are now living in the dorms. Now it backfired on them.
This year they are reverting and saying no longer the case. Because they could not handle all the students. They were putting three students in a dorm. Right? Three. Two is hard enough because they're already on top of each other. To put a third is parents were so upset. Now I understand what they're trying to do. They're trying to fill make sure their dorms are filled up because that's a cost to them, right?
What they now had to do is give, they give vouchers. So now there's a workaround for it. And of course, you know, they don't want to tell you, but it's there. And so our job is to educate the masses. And so we're parked outside those dorms every day with our college kids handing out flyers.
Ash Patel (24:03.75)
And those vouchers are good for using the room and board money towards private apartments.
Corey Peterson (24:09.326)
Yeah, I'm sorry, not vouchers, but like we give them the information of here's a form you have to fill out to get out of not having to go to the dorms. But they make you fill out a form and get approval. Everybody gets approved by the way, but, um, unless they don't know about it. Right. And so our job is the education of it.
Ash Patel (24:29.93)
Do you ever use college students to disseminate that information? Have them...
Corey Peterson (24:33.966)
Oh, we hire them. Yeah, absolutely. That's part of our strategy. We call them CAs, community ambassadors. These are our college kids that live with us, that they work part time and their job is to go pollute, or I say pollute, go populate, go, go out into the college itself and go mingle and bring brochures and, you know, put flyers on cars, all that stuff.
Ash Patel (24:58.522)
Ambassadors so the colleges probably call them infiltrators.
Corey Peterson (25:02.094)
Yeah, actually, you know, here's the real truth is when you do it right, you work well with the college. They like us, right? We invest in their for like the football programs. Usually we're buying ads for that. We're trying to be sponsors. We know that our job is to get the coaches and, you know, the athletic director, AD, to like us.
And as many people on that to get, you know, like we will keep our job is try to keep their kids safe. Does that make sense? Like every coach, their biggest fear is there's someone's going to have an all nighter and, you know, party it up. And so we try to mitigate that as best we can that we try to have what I call clean, safe, disciplined properties. And the discipline is we try to, we try to shut down the party and as much as we can.
Ash Patel (25:40.03)
Yeah.
Ash Patel (25:57.322)
How do you do that?
Corey Peterson (25:58.83)
We have patrol, we have usually patrol officers on site. Some of them, different colleges have a higher level, we'll put it like that. Every college is a little bit different. So we kind of figure out what the right amount is for that and who we need. But the job is just to mitigate, you know.
We don't mind it happen because it's going to happen. It's just that we don't want all of a sudden there's now a hundred people in a room. Like we had a property, we bought it this way, but there was a, you know, somebody had a party at third on the second story and everybody was just jump, jump, jump, a couple of three, 400 people. And it, the whole floor caved in. Like, yeah, the rafters everything. So it had to be totally, it was a big claim. And, um,
Ash Patel (26:40.883)
Whoa.
Corey Peterson (26:49.198)
Yeah, so we had to put a policy in place to say no more than 15 people in your property or in your dorm.
Ash Patel (26:58.194)
All right. So you're not instituting quiet hours. You're just making sure things don't get crazy.
Corey Peterson (27:02.834)
Yeah, but we do have, we have also created separate buildings that are your graduate buildings, right? And in to live in this section, you have to sign additional waiver of quiet hours, right? Because we still we're trying to, you know, you're grads, they don't want to deal with that crap.
Ash Patel (27:17.278)
Got it.
Ash Patel (27:24.99)
So part of your job is probably going to a bunch of college football games and writing off the bills, huh?
Corey Peterson (27:30.145)
Yeah, yeah, it's a horrible time. Ha ha ha.
Ash Patel (27:32.967)
Corey, did you get caught with interest rates rising? Did you have enough rate caps to cover you?
Corey Peterson (27:38.122)
Uh, yeah, I got caught. I mean, I mean, like I'm getting, I'm refining three properties this month, that January 5th. Oh my God. Can't even wait. I'm in cash management on two properties, Ash, that I went into cash even though I have a rate lock. Right. They are not counting the rate lock money towards my DCR test.
And so because of that, even though my properties are 97, one's 95 and one's 93% and profitable, right? But they're not using the rate lock money to that was required to put into and pays my property for this bridge loan that I have. They put me in cash management. I've been in cash management for almost a year. And for anybody that listening, what that means is all your rents go to the bank and the bank only gives you your expenses and only the expenses that you put in the initial part of your loan when you said here's my budget so if you didn't budget it right you're screwed you're gonna be negative because they're only going to give you what was on your on that paper
Ash Patel (28:54.238)
Corey, you use brokers, CNBS, Fannie Freddie type loans. If you had used local lenders, do you think that would have happened?
Corey Peterson (29:02.526)
No, local learners don't do it. But I would have had to personally guarantee them as well. So there's always, because we do, we do. A lot of people, the reason we were all using Bridge Notes, because they gave you so much money for the CapEx. And looking back, we learned a lot. This was a good lessons to learn out of this market cycle that will probably help dictate what we do in future markets, even though we'll just go and raise the money privately more so than, and now that we've become better money capital raisers, even though the cheap money, what would theoretically be cheap money, in those brazed loans when they were low, it was great.
But like when they swung, it's terrible, right? And we would have been better just to have a locked in, a fixed rate long-term way back then. And that's the beautiful thing about 2020 vision looking backwards, it's crystal clear.
But you got to take those lessons and say, okay, what I learned from it, what I do it again, on some deals I probably would still do it the same way. We've been able to get out of all our bridge debts and the only reason we were able to so far is we have really hit our business plans. Meaning we've been able to raise the value enough to get out and get into notes, right? So I have one property that I actually don't have a rate cap. And it wasn't required. And my rates are now like 10.4%. It is ginormous. And we refi that on the 5th of January. And it goes down to 6.5, 6.75 and I am doing the happy dance, right? Because we are now going to be super profitable.
Ash Patel (31:02.174)
Did I hear you say that in the future you're going to look at buying deals all cash?
Corey Peterson (31:07.014)
No, just fixed terms, fixed rates, right? And just raise all the cap X, all cash or through investor proceeds, right?
Ash Patel (31:10.686)
Got it.
Ash Patel (31:19.786)
Corey, what's your advice to people that have assets that are, they got hit, you know, the rate caps expired, interest rates are taking a toll on them, and maybe they're underwater. What's your advice to somebody in that situation?
Corey Peterson (31:36.65)
Negotiate like hell with your bank. Talk to them, communicate, over communicate. Ask for everything. Ask what you can do. Get lean. You need to get as lean and mean.
Um, and we had to do that during COVID. I mean, when COVID happened on my students, it was like, I had, I had one work ride, you know, uh, forbearance on one, one property that I had to do. And we cut everything that was not essential. Just had to, and it was just survive. It was just survival mode. And so, um, and then get good at, I think we've all had to get good. I've had a couple, I've one capital call is you're going to have to get good at a capital call, right? And that's the reality that a lot of investors have had to face.
And so that's the stigmatism in a lot, what you're talking about in that reference earlier, Ash, is a lot of people are a little bit gun shy from multifamily because as investors, a lot of them haven't got paid. And this is just one of those weird market cycles where everything's kind of went weird and crazy and um but the only caveat to that is what I've learned is that if you hold real estate long enough it always works out. Now to get investors in that mindset that's a whole different trait and um it you have to communicate with them and it's not always the greatest news and it's not always the news they want to hear but it's the news that you've got to deliver and then you've got to work very hard judiciously in the endeavor to make them whole.
Ash Patel (33:24.362)
Corey, you've built an absolute empire. What keeps you going?
Corey Peterson (33:30.518)
Man, I don't know what else I would do. I love coming to work, Ash, right? I mean, I really do. People say, when's enough? I get this asked to me a lot. They're like, why are you, what are you doing? I look for things to drive me, I guess. I don't know, but like, my kids are getting ready to go out of the house. And so my new kids have been my employees.
You know, we took on property management. I've got, you know, now 49 extra kids. And I, what I found is I like it. I enjoy the process and having them a building culture. And so I think that's the part of, the part of what I really want is I'm driven. Ash, I want to create a family office. I want my company to be here long after I'm gone.
I don't know why, but I would like to think that because I want to take care of people, my staff. I want to help them grow and obtain what they want and maybe eventually give that business to them or a piece of it to them. And also, you know, I think my son, he's 18, he has interest of he wants to do real estate and he'll eventually probably come into my shoes. There's still a long road he has to travel.
But yeah, I want to become a family office where we eventually, when we sell all the assets that we've done with investors, now we'll probably always partner with our investors that we have now, but there's going to be a day, you know, but maybe four to five years when we start selling some of our big assets, we'll reinvest in deals just with our own money and be our only investor. And I think that's when things really change.
Ash Patel (35:19.786)
Corey, when you look at other syndicators, other business owners that are just turning wheels and not really getting ahead, and here you are, a master of scaling, what are most people doing wrong?
Corey Peterson (35:35.114)
I think they don't ask enough questions. I think the one, I've just been curious, right? I've always been curious to say, how can I? And then I asked lots of people for advice and asked questions. Not all advice was good, but I kept finding great people that I had a lot of respect for that did it and asked them, how do they do it? I wrote a book called, Copy Your Way to Success, and it is my mantra. I'm not that smart, Ash.
But I'm a master copier.
Ash Patel (36:07.686)
I just wrote that down. Copy your way to success. Um, yeah. And that's really kind of a superpower, right? Being able to continuously ask for help and advice.
Corey Peterson (36:10.716)
Yeah.
Corey Peterson (36:19.614)
It is, it really is. And there's no ego in it, right? I think I've let my ego go out there. I don't have an ego. I don't care who am I, right? But I'm always the one that says, here I am, send me, right? And I've always been willing to fail to make mistakes. And I've been resilient enough that I know that even if I fail, I just get back up and I've learned something.
I take that learning and I say, okay, we won't do it that way, but I'm going to keep trying and I'm going to get around to my goal because I see it clearly. I have to sometimes, you know, dodge all the things that come the way, but like my eyes are always focused on my real goal, which is a family office. I know that is.
Ash Patel (37:10.106)
And Corey, thank you again for your time today, man. It's always great talking to you. How can the best ever listeners reach out to you?
Corey Peterson (37:16.958)
I would love to give everybody a book. I just wrote a book. I think this is really revelant. It's called Trust But Verify: The Passive Investor's Guide to Evaluating Real Estate Syndicators. I wrote this for the investors because I feel like sometimes they don't know the questions to ask people like us to really do it in a way that's meaningful. So to get the book, if you'll text the word trust to 480-500-1127. So the word trust to 480-500-1127, follow the prompts, we'll send it to you for free. But it's a great little book that I think opens up that world of here's what you should be looking for if you're looking and wanting to vet syndicators like you and I, Ash.
Ash Patel (38:05.45)
That's awesome, Corey, very gracious of you as well. Again, man, thank you for your time. Again, always great having you on here.
Corey Peterson (38:11.886)
Thanks, Ash. Appreciate it, brother.
Ash Patel (38:13.694)
Best ever listeners, thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review, share this podcast with someone you think can benefit from it. Also follow, subscribe and have a best ever day. That's a wrap, man. Good work.
