This week on Real Estate Underground, Gino sits down with Ed Mathews to talk about the mindset underneath the numbers. His through line is simple and uncomfortable: money does not corrupt a person, it reveals them. And the reason two investors with the same deal get different outcomes usually comes down to what Gino calls financial flashpoints, the money memories each of us was raised inside. Save for a rainy day, money does not grow on trees, it takes money to make money. Gino spent years unlearning those beliefs before he could raise capital, syndicate, and build the portfolio he has now.

What you will learn:

Why your relationship with money, not your spreadsheet, decides whether you close deals, and how to spot the beliefs quietly holding you back. The mind shift from starting a business to make money to starting one to deliver value, and why Gino says it is the difference between one restaurant and six. Why the market moved from valuation through renovation to valuation through operations, and what that means for how you win now. The velocity of money, why you only make money when you exit, and the three things worth doing with capital after a sale. And why no deal is better than a bad deal, and how the ten-minute no became a superpower in a market where sellers still think it is 2021.

Gino also shares the money-coaching business he is building with his wife and son at Barbaro360, why he believes legacy is not something you leave behind but something you activate today, and the six-acre farm in Florida where he goes to get his hands dirty. As he puts it, if you want to learn from someone, just make sure they are still doing it right now.

If you are an operator trying to build something that lasts, this one is full of hard-won lessons from someone still in the work.

Chapters
00:00 Your relationship with money starts everything
00:59 Welcome to Real Estate Underground
01:40 The name, and using AI as a force multiplier
02:40 Life before and after Jake and Gino
03:40 Money does not corrupt you, it reveals you
04:40 Why you really start a business: value for the marketplace
06:00 A stuck market and the grit AI can cost you
07:40 No motivated seller, no deal
10:40 Financial flashpoints: the money memories that shape you
14:30 Wealth is an exchange of value
16:20 Valuation through renovation vs valuation through operations
19:40 Velocity of money: what to do after you exit
22:40 Paying down debt as a legacy play
24:40 Retail, industrial, and the discipline to wait
29:20 The final five: purpose, mentors, and the biggest mistake
35:40 This week's book and where to find Gino

This week's book: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness/dp/0857197681?tag=clarkstholdin-20

More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast
Elevista: elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

This week on Real Estate Underground, Ed Mathews sits down with Robbie, the operator behind The FlipFlop Flipper, to talk about what it actually takes to run a lean flipping business at scale. Robbie spent two decades buying a couple of houses a week at Florida foreclosure sales. When the auctions moved online and margins got squeezed, he relocated to the island of Puerto Rico and started buying what locals call zombie houses: abandoned homes with no doors, no windows, no power, and nothing but upside. He renovates them back to the point where a first-time buyer can get an FHA loan, then hands over the keys.

What you will learn:

Why a 28-year operator who does not even carry a laptop has his team using AI every day, and why he believes anyone who refuses to learn it will be left at a disadvantage. The three-question filter Robbie runs before entering any new market: will our money go further, can we make a bigger return, and will our impact be one we are proud of. The single biggest mistake of his career, flipping a thousand houses before 2007 and keeping none of them, then losing everything in the crash. How he rebuilt by partnering with people who had capital instead of borrowing hard money, and started investing for cash flow instead of chunks of money. And the closing-table moment that still makes every renovation worth it.

Robbie also shares the story behind a little red brick house in Ukraine. On a humanitarian trip in 2022 he helped a pastor buy a home big enough to adopt three boys out of an orphanage. That same house now shelters and feeds 70 orphans. As Robbie says, every house has a story, and that one is pretty good.

The lightning round covers the joy of missing out, why he says no to most deals that cross his desk, the book he has read front to back five times, and how he defines success now that boats and fast cars stopped mattering.

If you are an operator trying to build something that lasts, this one is full of hard-won lessons from someone still in the work. Find Robbie inside his free FlipFlop Flipper community on Skool, or on YouTube.

Chapters
00:00 The leap of faith: no money, bad credit, no clue
00:59 Welcome to Real Estate Underground
02:14 28 years, thousands of houses, and Puerto Rico zombie homes
03:33 You don't have to stay in a broken system
04:07 Quitting at 25 and the Carlton Sheets first deal
06:40 Scaling to a couple of houses a week for 20 years
08:47 Using AI every day in a lean flipping business
10:32 The markets: Florida, the online shift, and Puerto Rico
11:23 The three-question filter for entering a new market
13:12 Investing with impact and the Ukraine orphanage house
17:44 Working with his son McKenna in the business
21:31 The deal you don't do: the joy of missing out
23:43 Purpose, legacy, and what gets him out of bed
26:11 The free FlipFlop Flipper community
26:46 The biggest mistake: flipping everything, keeping nothing
29:30 Lightning round: books, success, and travel
32:47 Where to find Robbie

This week's book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
https://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Publication-Foundation/dp/193787950X?tag=clarkstholdin-20

More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast
Elevista: elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The thesis is contrarian and simple. While most people wrote Detroit off, James and Voytek heard it was in the early innings of recovery, drove down to see it for themselves, and found architecturally beautiful colonials in strong historic neighborhoods trading below the cost of construction. They sold off assets elsewhere, including a primary residence, and bought heavy. Ten years and 600-plus renovated homes later, they run a system that takes an investor from a first phone call to a cash-flowing landlord in 30 to 45 days.

This episode is a practical map of remote and cross-border investing. You will hear how they vet a property with a 300-point pre-purchase inspection and block-level analysis, how a foreign national forms a US entity to qualify for financing, and why they refinance instead of flip to scale a portfolio. Voytek breaks down Detroit's 55,000-room hotel shortage against 17 million annual visitors and how that gap feeds their short-term rental strategy. Then the pair walk through the tax stack: opportunity zones that can wipe out capital gains after ten years, and bonus depreciation that can cover a down payment in year one.

The Final Five turns personal: working alongside a lifelong best friend, the books that shaped them, and Voytek's deep dive into AI, which he calls the single most revolutionary tool of his lifetime.

Find them at USProperties.ca.

Chapters
00:00 The most undervalued market in the country
01:00 Welcome to the Real Estate Underground
02:00 Meet James Lloyd, Voytek Mardula, and US Properties
03:00 Why Detroit: the contrarian comeback thesis
05:00 Buying the right house in the right neighborhood
08:00 Managing a remote portfolio with a local team
11:00 The investor journey from first call to cash flow
13:00 The full turnkey system, step by step
14:00 Foreign nationals and US entity formation
16:00 Buy, hold, and refinance to scale
18:00 Short-term rentals and Detroit's hotel shortage
22:00 Opportunity zones and bonus depreciation
26:00 The auto industry and tech sector renaissance
31:00 The final five
32:00 What gets them out of bed
36:00 A decision they would take back
37:00 AI obsession and the book on the nightstand
40:00 Defining success and life off the clock
42:00 How to reach US Properties

This week's book: You to the Power of Two: Redefining Human Potential in the Age of AI by Joseph Bradley and Don Tapscott

More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast
Elevista: elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Tom has been a full-time investor for two decades. Over that span he has raised more than $50 million in private capital from a network of investors who lean on his experience to place money into alternatives most people never see: multifamily, self-storage, mobile home parks, medical office, and private lending. His pitch is simple. Real diversification is not large cap versus small cap or value versus growth. It is owning assets that do not move when a headline does. As Tom puts it, a tsunami hitting Japan can knock the stock market down 15 percent overnight, but it does nothing to an apartment building in Phoenix or a storage facility in North Carolina.

The backbone of the episode is Tom's SAFE Investing Method, the same screen he uses every day. S is for sponsor: who are you writing the check to, what is their track record, and have you earned the right to ask the hard questions. A is for asset: if you cannot explain the investment to your kid or your elderly parent, you do not understand it well enough to fund it. F is for financials: do the projections hold up, and has this sponsor actually hit numbers like these before. E is for exit: you cannot click your way out of a syndication on a Tuesday afternoon, so you need to know exactly what has to happen, and over what time horizon, before your money comes back.

Then Tom goes off the mainstream script on taxes. The standard advice is to 1031 exchange again and again until you die and hand your heirs a stepped-up basis. Tom's question is blunt: do you really want to be managing properties at 90 the way his mother could be. He prefers the lazy man's 1031, taking the gain, then using fresh depreciation from the next deal to shelter income, all without the rigid timelines and same-title rules that make a true 1031 nearly impossible across a group of 20 or 30 investors. Pay the freedom tax, he argues, and buy yourself passive income and time.

The buy box conversation is just as practical. Tom likes private lending for first-position security and monthly checks. He likes mobile home parks and co-living because they answer the housing affordability crisis with real, unsubsidized supply, and he breaks down how a Philadelphia operator turns a $1,000 row home into $3,000 a month by renting furnished rooms to tenants on fixed income. He covers where self-storage sits after its boom and consolidation, and why he treats it like multifamily underwriting now.

On technology, Tom is candid that he is still early but already getting leverage from AI. His current workflow is to go back and forth with Claude to build a long, specific prompt, then hand it to Manus for deep research on a market like Phoenix multifamily. He even has an AI clone at tomdunkel.ai that will answer your investing questions, as long as you do not bring up the Eagles.

The lightning round digs into purpose beyond family, the best advice he ever got from a nine-figure investor, a job he probably should have turned down, and how he defines success now as an empty nester: geographic and time freedom, plus the room to give back through Tunnel to Towers and a scholarship he started for a friend lost to ALS.

Find Tom at investwitheagle.com, grab his book The Wealth Builder's Playbook, or talk to his clone at tomdunkel.ai.

Chapters
00:00 Don't let the tax tail wag the freedom dog
01:00 Meet Tom Dunkel and Eagle Capital Investments
03:00 Why true diversification lives outside the stock market
04:00 The SAFE Investing Method: Sponsor, Asset, Financials, Exit
08:00 Taxes and the lazy man's 1031 exchange
13:00 The Wealth Builder's Playbook and being the "who"
17:00 The buy box: mobile home parks, co-living, multifamily
22:00 Where self-storage sits after the boom
24:00 Using Claude and Manus to move faster
27:00 Lightning round: purpose, significance, and legacy
30:00 The best advice he ever got
33:00 A decision he would take back
34:00 On the nightstand: Invest Like a Billionaire
36:00 Defining success as an empty nester
38:00 Golf, a rock and roll cover band, and where to find Tom

This week's book: Invest Like a Billionaire: Unlocking the Wealth Secrets of the Ultra-Rich by Bob Fraser and Ben Fraser
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F3W2SNDS?tag=clarkstholdin-20

More Real Estate Underground episodes: clarkst.com/podcast
Elevista: elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Tim is the CEO and co-founder of Corzly, the virtual management company he built after 16 years of operating his own short-term rental portfolio from outside California, then outside the U.S. entirely. His team handles pricing, listings, guest communication, and back-end operations across Eastern Europe, South Africa, the Philippines, and South America—while the owner still controls the housekeepers and maintenance on the ground.

In this episode, Tim and Ed get into why “a B-class property with A-class management beats an A-class property with B-class management,” why the urban short-term rental market is more durable than the vacation-rental crowd realizes, and what the data is actually telling operators about which markets to enter and which to avoid.

What you’ll hear:

• Why the “can’t be hands-on AND remote” constraint is the forcing function that built Corzly—and what it means for any operator stuck in their own business
• The buy box: how Tim underwrites a short-term rental like an apartment building, what data sources actually matter, and the regulatory gotchas that kill deals
• Why urban short-term rentals quietly outperform vacation markets—more reasons to stay, less seasonal volatility, and the medical-professional and conference angles most investors miss
• The lightning round: under-budgeting renovations, Dennis Waitley’s “two choices” framing, and why education became Tim’s purpose once the portfolio could run itself

Books Tim recommended:

• Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy—the framework for finding the right people to delegate to
• The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson—Tim’s most-recommended book; the case for compounding small daily disciplines

About Tim Hubbard: CEO and co-founder of Corzly. 16-year real estate operator. Host of Short Term Rental Riches, a six-year-old podcast covering virtual STR management, market selection, and the operational discipline behind scaled portfolios.

Find Tim: corsley.com | Short Term Rental Riches podcast (all platforms + YouTube)

Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly conversations with operators who’ve been through the cycle and lived to talk about it.

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

That was the wake-up call. While most of his peers spent every pay raise on the biggest house they could buy, Dan was reading books and buying apartments. By the time his snowboarding career ended, he had 70-some units already producing passive income.

Today Dan co-leads Granite Towers Equity Group, a 3,300-unit multifamily portfolio focused on Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, and select Minnesota submarkets. The playbook is disciplined: newer assets (1985 and up), 140 to 300 units, $20 to $40 million purchase price, 95%+ occupancy submarkets with real pent-up demand. Eighty-twenty split with LPs. Sixty-five to seventy-five percent loan-to-value, fixed rate, non-recourse. CapEx raised liquid up front, so the bank cannot force a bad spend.

What you'll hear:

• The chairlift moment that reframed every financial decision Dan has made since
• Why 78% of pro athletes are broke within three years of retirement and the side-hustle move he made to avoid joining them
• The Cleburne, Texas case study: $6.75M acquisition, $2.1M LP raise, full-cycle returns
• A second case study where interior upgrades and water conservation drove a 1.8x equity multiple in two years
• Why Dan believes we are in a generational buying window with multifamily trading at 30-40% discounts versus 2021-22 peaks
• His sharpest definition of wealth, and why "rich" and "wealthy" aren't the same thing

Learn more about Granite Towers Equity Group: https://www.granitetowersequitygroup.com/contact-us

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

In this episode, Ed and JB unpack a contrarian lesson the real estate education industry rarely teaches: the difference between the real estate hustle and the real estate business. Hustle gets you doors. Business gets you a sustainable enterprise. Most operators only ever learn the first one.

JB walks through the Houston duplex pricing math that vindicated his long conviction on the market, from "praying to get $350" on a 2,500 square foot duplex to selling at $479, almost $500,000. He explains his concept-to-keys pocket-development model, Houston's no-zoning-but-deed-restrictions quirk, the 60/40 build-to-sell vs. build-to-hold split for his client base, and why vertical integration (owning the GC) is a margin lever most flippers underestimate.

In this episode:

• Pocket development inside a major metro: the framework
• The duplex math that vindicated a Houston long-hold
• Houston's "no zoning" reality: where the leverage actually lives
• Why "the gurus teach you doors, not business"
• House hacking as the duplex exit strategy
• Generational construction knowledge as competitive moat
• Mayor Sylvester Turner naming February 20 "James 'JB' Thibodeaux Day" (2019)

If you're a flipper, wholesaler, or operator trying to build a business and not just a deal pipeline, this is the episode.

This week's book: The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

Guest: JB Thibodeaux, Founder & Managing Partner, J.B. Thibodeaux Homes & Properties

Website: jbthibodeaux.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/james-thibodeaux-8a98b51b7

Instagram: @jbthibodeauxhomes

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

And he built the whole thing around a niche almost no operator talks about: senior-care real estate.

In this episode, Dan and Ed get into the demographic inevitability that drives his business (“should we all be blessed to live long enough, we’re going to need some level of care”), why 1031 exchanges fail for everyone else but never for him, and his definition of success that has nothing to do with the billion-dollar number on his resumé.

What you’ll hear:

• The senior-care thesis: why aging boomers are an inevitability, not a trend, and the RE play sitting on top of it
• How Dan closed 400 1031 exchanges without a single failure—the process, the team, the discipline
• Why “success is doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want” is the only definition that matters once you have the numbers
• The conversation every operator should be having with their family—and almost none are

About Dan Ihara: 20-year real estate veteran. Billion-dollar producer. Built a specialty practice serving seniors transitioning out of long-held real estate, primarily through 1031 exchanges.

Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly conversations with operators who’ve been through the cycle and lived to talk about it.

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Adam runs a modern ISP focused exclusively on apartment communities. His company delivers fiber-to-the-unit (FTTU) in bulk to property owners, who pass it to residents as an included utility and capture the rent spread. Industry data shows 5 to 15% NOI uplift on well-executed bulk deployments. The math alone is worth the conversation.

But the bigger reframe is the one Ed pulls out of him halfway through: the fiber itself is an asset. Billions are flowing into fiber networks nationally. Property owners are in a rare position to own a portion of that infrastructure, a 30-year asset hiding in their own buildings.

In this episode:

• The bulk internet math on a value-add multifamily deal, and how an owner should actually underwrite it
• Why "managed WiFi" gets oversold and what to insist on instead
• Bulk internet versus experience, and why the difference matters more than the price
• Fiber as a 30-year asset class that scales in capacity, not maintenance
• The contrarian take from his industry piece "Managed Wi-Fi isn't all it's cracked up to be"

If you're an operator, syndicator, or value-add multifamily investor, this is the episode that turns a cost line into a revenue line and reframes the building itself as a fiber asset.

This week's recommended book: The Confident Mind by Nate Zinzer

Guest: Adam Bell, Founder and CEO, Internet Subway

Website: internetsubway.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adamlloydb

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Today he runs one of the country's fastest-growing private lending shops, and he sees the DSCR lending industry doubling in size over the next three years.

In this episode, Joel and Ed break down:

- Why investors are rotating from Texas and Florida to Ohio, Kentucky, and the Midwest

- How DSCR loans actually work (and why 1.0 coverage isn't enough)

- The real math on leverage: why the smartest investors stay at 60% LTV or below

- Why "relationship capital" matters more than real estate knowledge

- What happened when Joel wired money on March 5, 2020 and the market froze

- His $99 training modules vs. the $35K guru trap

- The best advice he ever got: "Post that in 5 years. Shut up. Go back to work."

Joel currently reads: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell

Connect with Joel: brrrr.com

Real Estate Underground is hosted by Ed Mathews of Clark St Capital.

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

In this episode, Ed and Ladislas talk about:

• Why emerging market real estate is actually a harder asset than US multifamily (and arguably less risky)
• How he evaluates a new country before putting money in (the Uzbekistan stock exchange story is worth the listen alone)
• Managing property across dozens of countries with local property managers (and why you always need a backup)
• The case for putting a small percentage of your portfolio outside the US
• How $200K in a Panama bank or $400K in Turkish real estate can buy generational citizenship and a Plan B for your family
• The Ivory Coast deal that went wrong and why you should never skip the buyer's agent
• His father's best advice: "You don't have to answer every question"

Learn more about Ladislas at The Wandering Investor and on YouTube.

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

In this episode, Joe gets candid about the deals that didn't work, the market conditions that are keeping multifamily investors in a holding pattern, and the one acquisition strategy most operators are completely ignoring right now: going direct to the lender.

Here's what we cover:

• Why Fort Worth and Orlando are Ashcroft's two highest-conviction markets heading into late 2026
• How Joe acquired a property for less than the outstanding debt — and what it took to get there
• The lender relationship play that gives you first look at off-market distressed deals (even if you don't have your own management company)
• Where the supply/demand shift is — and why Q3 2026 is the number operators keep landing on
• Joe's personal 3.5% math: out of 140 LP deals across 50+ operators, what's actually gone to zero
• The fixed vs. floating rate lesson that still stings
• How Joe defines success — and it has nothing to do with deal count

Joe also shares his three bucket list goals for the year. One involves a fifth grader with a 2040 chess rating. That's all we're saying.

This week's book: The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Pouliot explains Carbon’s buy box: 100–300 unit, older vintage (1970s–1990s) properties in strong school districts and stable submarkets, targeting families and raising rents about 20% through substantial CapEx that prioritizes deferred maintenance alongside unit upgrades. 

They talk about navigating Sunbelt challenges like insurance and taxes by avoiding high-risk areas, staying conservative in underwriting, and emphasizing strong entry pricing. Pouliot shares a bullish view that the next 12–18 months are a strong buying window as the market works through distress, debt maturities, and oversupply absorption, with more constructive sentiment and capital expected around 2027–2028. 

He outlines Carbon’s strategy for 2026: keep buying with fixed-rate, low-leverage debt, hold long-term, and offer investor liquidity via recapitalizations rather than selling assets. 

The conversation also covers regional scaling for operational efficiency, selective adoption of AI tools (voice/chat agents, SOP knowledge bases, automation) to augment staff, and Pouliot's perspective on purpose, mentorship, lifestyle trade-offs versus Wall Street, and how he defines success. Pouliot closes by directing viewers to investwithcarbon.com for Carbon’s weekly newsletter and content.

00:00 Cycle Outlook 2027-2028

00:11 Show Intro and Mission

00:52 Welcome and Subscribe

01:42 Meet Carbon Real Estate

02:44 Insurance and Tax Headwinds

05:07 Buy Box and Resident Avatar

07:01 Why Stable Markets Win

08:34 Distress Deals and Assumable Debt

12:29 Oversupply and Absorption Math

14:58 Strategy for 2026

18:41 Vertical Integration and CapEx

20:32 Tech and AI in Property Ops

14:23 AI Ops Automation

23:28 Human Touch Investing

24:31 Real Estate Tech Lag

25:19 Deal Junkie Purpose

26:23 Paranoia Prevents Errors

28:26 Wall Street What Ifs

33:38 Learning Diet Books

35:56 Defining Success Seasons

38:19 Life Outside Real Estate

41:05 Where To Follow Carbon

This week's book: How Countries Go Broke by Ray Dalio

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Fuzzy shares his background growing up in Hawaii, getting into trouble with drugs and alcohol, going to prison, and using that time to educate himself with books like Rich Dad Poor Dad. 

After struggling to find work as an ex-con, he took multiple jobs, then invested $26,000 in real estate education after hearing about Fortune Builders, and learned to find deals through strategies like bandit signs and Craigslist ads. He explains how taking action led him from deal-finding to partnering with a local developer and eventually building 100+ affordable homes for local families on a more rural island, typically priced around $300K–$425K. 

Fuzzy talks about “The Pono Way,” emphasizing respectful, ethical investing, illustrated by a deal where a distressed homeowner was helped with housing, a car, and additional funds while the investors still profited. He also describes co-founding the Hui Mastermind with Asha Smith, including webinars, bus tours showing the full build process, meetups, and master classes teaching how to get started in real estate and fund deals without traditional bank financing. 

In a lightning round, Fuzzy says family is his main purpose, shares advice about being on time and owning mistakes quickly, reflects on saying yes too often and taking responsibility for a project headed toward a loss, and names motivators he follows on YouTube and podcasts. 

Check out Fuzzy's book, “Out of Paradise: How to Build Wealth Investing in Real Estate the Pono Way,” and shares where to find him online: fuzzyjardine.com, huimastermind.com, Instagram @hifuzzy, and YouTube “Investing in Hawaii.”

00:00 Take Action Mindset
00:11 Show Intro and Opportunity
00:52 Meet Fuzzy Jardine
01:54 From Prison to Real Estate
05:58 Why Building Homes
08:33 Finding Deals and First Partner
10:03 Working Three Jobs to Learn
12:30 The Pono Way Ethics
15:58 Hui Mastermind Origins
19:15 Lightning Round Purpose
20:28 Mentors and Hard Lessons
23:21 Books and Writing His Own
24:43 Defining Success and Fun
26:40 Where to Find Fuzzy
27:24 Final Thanks and Call to Action

This week's book: Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

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Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Cash flows $200/month.

Sounds boring until you realize: $10K all-in. Someone else is buying her a house. And she never left California.

This week on Real Estate Underground: How a self-described "lazy investor" built a portfolio across five markets while coaching 2,000+ investors to do the same. No flying out to properties. No managing contractors. No second job disguised as passive income.

What you'll learn:

• The questions that separate good property managers from disasters (hint: it's not about their fees)
• Why Melissa went from flips and BRRRs back to turnkey investing—and why she's never looking back
• How to vet teams 2,000 miles away when you can't be on-site
• The $99K property that changed everything (and why fear almost killed the deal)
• Property managers as your best acquisition source—if you ask the right question

Why this conversation matters:

Melissa made every mistake you're worried about making. Trusted the wrong contractors. Lost money on flips. Froze on deals for years. Then figured out a system that works.

If you're analyzing deals but not pulling the trigger—she's been there. If you're wondering how to invest out of state without getting burned—she learned it the hard way so you don't have to.

We talk systems, spreadsheets, and the "snowball payoff" strategy she swears she'll start using someday (she won't—because she loves buying deals too much).

For operators who:

• Want to invest out of state but don't know who to trust
• Are tired of real estate being a second job
• Need a framework for vetting property managers
• Want to hear from someone who's helped 2,000 people actually do this

No hype. No theory. Just 11 years of buying properties she's never seen—and making it work.

Hit subscribe. Leave a comment. Tell us what you're working on.

Real Estate Underground. Where operators talk to operators about what actually works.

Check out Melissa's free community at: hellomelissanash.com

This week's book: The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin 

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Kenny shares his journey from a data analyst at Citibank to a successful real estate investor specializing in short-term rentals. He emphasizes the importance of choosing the right markets, investing in amenities, and focusing on the guest experience to succeed in the competitive short-term rental space. Kenny also highlights his strategies for managing properties remotely, leveraging local resources, and the value of balancing work and family life. 

This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to optimize their investments in the short-term rental market.

00:00 Introduction and Podcast Overview
01:19 Guest Introduction: Kenny Bedwell from STR Insights
01:45 Kenny's Background and Real Estate Journey
02:19 The Shift to Short-Term Rentals
02:45 Navigating Regulations and Diversifying Investments
04:00 Understanding the Short-Term Rental Market
09:17 Creating Unique Guest Experiences
15:50 Managing Short-Term Rentals Across Multiple States
20:07 Managing Property Operations
20:57 Human Capital and Property Management
23:35 Personal Drive and Motivation
25:09 Valuable Advice and Lessons Learned
32:41 Defining Success and Personal Growth
34:46 Hobbies and Family Life
37:25 Connecting with Kenny Bedwell

This Week's Book: The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field (Entrepreneurship Simplified) - By Mike Michalowicz

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Alberto Rizzoli, CEO of V7 Labs, reveals how AI workflow automation is eliminating the "purgatory" of real estate paperwork, and why operators who master it now will 10x their competition within a year.

In this episode, you'll discover:

⚡ The "napkin test" for identifying which processes to automate first (hint: weekly tasks taking 1+ hours)

⚡ Why AI fails at big, open-ended requests, and the simple fix that makes it reliable

⚡ How to abstract 1,000 leases without adding headcount as you scale

⚡ A free lease abstraction tool you can test today at scanmylease.com

About Alberto Rizzoli: Computer visionary turned founder, Alberto built V7 Labs into a platform processing hundreds of billions in transactions. His mission? Make work actually matter by eliminating everything that doesn't.

This Week's Book: Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way - by Steven Pressfield

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

• Website: www.stf-capital.com
• IG: @Joaomac_stf
• FB: @STF_Capital 
• LinkedIn: Joao Macavilca

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The one deal was near Ann Arbor in Q1: 9 percent cap on purchase, 7 percent financing locked for three years, $79,000 a door against a $200,000 replacement cost. That kind of math is what Mike needs to see now.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The three-metric buy box. First, a 200 basis point positive spread between cap rate and cost of debt. Anything tighter than 150 bp is not enough margin of safety. Second, a steep discount to replacement cost. Third, a comparable discount to the 2022 peak pricing, which Mike pegs at 20 to 40 percent depending on submarket. If a deal does not clear all three, it does not get capital.
2. Open-air retail as the contrarian play. Tempo Family is eight deals in on open-air shopping. Every one has performed. While multifamily got overbuilt and roller-coastered through 2022, open-air supply got squashed by the Amazon fear and never recovered. Recent example: a San Diego open-air at 9.25 cap with 84 percent occupancy, financed at 6.5 percent fixed for ten years, with anchor tenants like Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory.
3. Industrial as predictability. Flex industrial and single-tenant triple net at 8 to 9 cap. Twenty to twenty-five year leases. Two to three percent annual rent escalators, which in triple net is pure NOI growth because the tenant is paying everything. No surprise capex.
4. The asset classes he refuses to chase. Storage cap rates are too low. Hospitality is an operating business in real estate clothing. Senior living, same. Office is broken. Data centers cost a fortune to build and Tempo Family's net asset value is the "rounding error" on those deals. Better to know the don't-buy box than to chase yield.

The regret he owns: deals done in 2021 and 2022 he wishes he had not. "I'm the fool who's learning from his own mistakes." After that he went back and re-read Howard Marks on cycles.

Books on Mike's nightstand right now: Mastering the Market Cycle by Howard Marks (he says read it after every cycle), How Countries Go Broke by Ray Dalio (third read), and Richer, Wiser, Happier by William Green.

Reach Mike at bigmikefund.com (his podcast entry point, links to the Tempo Family corporate site).

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

• YouTube:  Rios Business Funding
• Instagram: @riosbusinessadvisors
• TikTok: @riosbusinessadvisors
• Amazon:  Decoding The Mystery of Business Credit 
• Website: riosbusinessfunding.com

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Today Casey runs Bighorn Capital Fund, Wile Homes, and Gregersen Properties. He invests primarily in Wyoming, a market where his only real competition is the lack of contractors to keep up with demand. That contractor shortage was the central problem he had to solve to scale.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The VA build during COVID layoffs. Shell laid off 40 percent of Casey's team in 2020. Instead of waiting to see if his number got called, he sat down and read The 4-Hour Work Week, then recorded himself doing every property management task he was already running from Houston. Wrote it all into SOPs. Hired and trained a virtual assistant. The VA owned the SOPs from that day. That was the unlock that let the side hustle scale.
2. The local bank shortcut. Early on, instead of working with big mortgage brokers, Casey walked into a small local bank in the Wyoming town he was investing in and did a deal. The relationship compounded across dozens of properties. Most new investors miss this because they assume the broker network is the only path.
3. The in-house contractor model. Wyoming does not have a deep GC bench. Casey solved it by hiring four to five 1099 crews directly. When a deal hits his pipeline, he is talking to the guy who will actually do the work, and that guy controls the schedule. The timeline gets predictable. The carry costs drop. The investor pitch becomes "here is our budget and here is our timeline, and we know we can hit it" because the labor is not a third party balancing five other clients.
4. The two-exit rule. Casey scaled up to $500,000 to $700,000 fix-and-flips in the TCU area with a new GC and project manager. Properties stopped selling. He had to drop the list price by $10,000 a week until they cleared, on the advice of his hard money lender. The lesson, in his words: never run a flip where your only exit is selling at ARV. Always have a refinance-and-rent fallback. In Wyoming his $150,000-buy / $50,000-rehab / $300,000-sell deals could always pivot to a rental that covered the debt. Every single deal has a curveball.

Book Casey keeps coming back to: Capital Gaines by Chip Gaines, for the "win-win either way" framing.

Reach Casey at @CaseyGregersen on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or text him directly at 307-317-2494.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The model is simple to describe and hard to operate. You buy a 2,500-square-foot 1990s house with a boxy floor plan and a non-HOA neighborhood. You convert every square inch that is not the kitchen or one common area into a bedroom or bathroom. The dining room becomes a bedroom. The garage becomes two more. A 10-bedroom house in Charlotte that would rent as a single-family at $2,200 a month rents by the room for $8,500 net of utilities.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why the unit economics work right now. Sam is creating a price point that did not previously exist: a clean, professionally managed room that goes for 50 to 75 percent of the cheapest studio in the same submarket. The target tenant is the $15-to-$25-an-hour worker priced out of every other option. HUD now allows housing choice vouchers to be used for rooms, not just full apartments. That is a quiet but significant policy shift Sam reads as official cover for the asset class.
2. What an actual co-living house looks like. Minimum 2,000 square feet, ideally 2,500 to 3,000. Built in the 1980s or 1990s so the floor plan is "boxy" with real walls between rooms (not open concept). B-minus to B-plus blue collar neighborhood, no HOA. Three-to-one bedroom-to-bathroom ratio at worst. Sam routinely picks up homes that have been sitting on market 100 to 150 days because no single-family buyer wants them. He gets them at a discount specifically because they are awkward for everyone except a co-living operator.
3. The three rules of managing eight strangers in one house. Clean (cameras in common areas, professional cleaners twice a month, fines for dish-duty failures). Quiet (hard quiet hours, headphones after a set time because some tenants work first or second shift). Safe (FBI-level background checks, individual locks on every bedroom door, no weapons). Without those three guardrails locked in, the house empties out fast.
4. Membership agreements instead of leases. Sam runs a master-lease structure: his ownership LLC leases the whole house to a separate management entity, which then signs individual "membership agreements" with each occupant. The technical answer to "how many leases do you have in your house" becomes "one." That structure gives him fast removal options outside the standard landlord-tenant process and helps in jurisdictions still enforcing old "no more than four unrelated people" zoning. Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have now banned that kind of local restriction outright.

The best advice Sam carries: a mentor told him, "Lower your standard, but raise the consistency with which you hit your standard. Consistently good always outperforms occasionally great." That reframed how he runs his team.

Books that shaped his pivots: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson (Sam held his martial arts business five years too long), and Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers.

Reach Sam at scaleyourrealestate.com (his five-day free co-living challenge runs monthly) or on Instagram @samwegert.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Today he runs Passive Investing Mastery, a fund that gives accredited investors access to litigation finance, an asset class that until recently required twenty-million-dollar minimums. The Passive Investing Mastery fund opens at $100,000.

What landed in this conversation:

1. What litigation finance actually is. Mass-tort attorneys representing thousands of harmed individuals (Camp Lejeune Marines, paraquat-exposed farmers, sexual assault survivors of the LA Juvenile Detention system, Roundup plaintiffs) often hit a working-capital wall in late-stage cases. The case is near settlement, the science is in, the case law is precedent, but they need another one to five million dollars to extend the claimant pool or carry expert witness costs. Patrick's fund underwrites the docket the way a real estate investor underwrites an apartment building, gets a loan-to-value position with a lien, and participates in the settlement waterfall.
2. Why "late stage" matters. Patrick avoids speculative early-stage cases. His fund engages once discovery is done, misconduct is documented, and either a settlement framework exists or case law has already priced similar outcomes. That puts the realistic settlement timeline at two to five years (front-loaded), not the open-ended decades of big commercial appeals. Camp Lejeune is the cleanest example: a 17-year harm window, a passed law providing a settlement grant based on condition and exposure, and an underwritable payout.
3. The structure he uses. Not a straight loan. A prepaid forward contract, which returns as capital gains rather than interest. Lien against the case the same way a deed secures a property. Waterfall payback: the fund gets made whole plus a return before attorneys collect their 20-to-40 percent fee, then participates in upside if the settlement outperforms underwriting.
4. Why this asset class is non-correlated. Patrick puts up legal industry charts next to the dollar, gold, oil, the S&P, and real estate. The first four roller-coaster. Legal goes straight up and to the right. People sue more in booms. They sue more in busts. The market does not care. For an investor trying to build resilience instead of riding multifamily cycles, this is the kind of allocation private equity and sovereign funds have used for decades. Now it is accessible at the accredited level.

The book that reshaped Patrick's last year: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. He says it changed how he treats the one input fully under his control. Pairs it with a Whoop band for daily sleep, recovery, and biological age tracking.

Reach Patrick at investwithpatrick.com (PDF list of his favorite alternatives) or grab his book Lessons from Thought Leaders at passiveinvestingmastery.com/book.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Recorded the week the One Big Beautiful Bill passed. Shauna walked through the four provisions that actually move the needle for real estate operators.

What landed in this conversation:

1. 100 percent bonus depreciation is back. Anything with a 15-year-or-less life can be written off in year one. For real estate that means cost segregation again does its full lift: buy a million-dollar building, run the seg study, write off six figures the first year. Combined with real estate professional status it can drive a tax bill to zero for years. One gotcha buried in the bill: the provision starts January 19th. The Hummer (or G-wagon) you bought January 18th does not qualify.
2. Business interest just got dramatically more deductible. Previously, business interest was capped at 30 percent of taxable income after depreciation. For real estate operators doing cost seg, taxable income was small and the cap chewed up the interest deduction. The new bill adds depreciation and amortization back into the calculation, which means operators get to deduct much more of their loan interest. For leveraged portfolios this is a quiet but material change.
3. SALT cap moved from $10K to $40K, with a trap. If your adjusted gross income as a married couple is under $500,000, you get the full $40,000 state and local tax deduction. Cross $500,000 and it phases back down to $10,000. So a well-designed tax strategy now has a bonus reason to keep AGI under the threshold. Pair that with the pass-through entity tax workaround that 39-plus states have implemented: your S-Corp or partnership can pay the state tax on your behalf, deduct it as a business expense, and you still get the personal credit. That is the legal double-dip.
4. The aggression scale. Shauna ranks tax strategies zero to ten. Zero is "the IRS never calls." Ten is "we are all going to jail." Her firm operates at six: strictly legal, every position fully documented, audit-ready. Eight is the same legal posture with thinner documentation. Nine is hoping you do not get caught. Real estate professionals get audited at roughly a 35 percent rate (versus 1 to 2 percent for typical filers), so the documentation discipline is not optional. Photo every receipt the second it hits your hand, drop it into Evernote, and use MileIQ for vehicle mileage.

The lesson Shauna ran back to in her own business: "Trust without inspection." Her fix was reporting and KPIs across her now-123-person firm.

Book on her counter right now: The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday.

Reach Shauna at taxgoddess.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

100 percent bonus depreciation is back. For a real estate investor with $150,000 of rental income from a million-dollar building, that can mean zero federal tax in year one, with the saved cash flow redeployed into the next acquisition. The strategy that pieces it together looks like this.

What landed in this conversation:

1. What cost segregation actually is. A reverse-engineering of a building's purchase price to identify the portion (typically 10 to 20 percent) that legitimately belongs in 5, 7, or 15-year property class lives instead of the standard 27.5 or 39 year real-property life. Window treatments, decorative lighting, appliances, kitchen cabinetry, certain floor coverings, dedicated wiring, land improvements like pools and irrigation and gates. KBKG's engineers walk the property and price it out. The qualifying short-life dollars then take 100 percent bonus depreciation in year one.
2. Turnaround speed. A study runs under 30 days in the normal queue. KBKG has turned them around in under a week when an investor calls during deadline week (September 15 partnerships, October 15 individuals). Speed, quality, price: pick two.
3. The real estate professional gate. If you (or a spouse) meets the 750-hour-plus and more-than-50-percent-of-working-time tests, the depreciation losses flow against W-2 or other ordinary income. If you do not, the losses sit as passive carryforwards waiting for future rental income. An attorney billing 2,000 hours a year as an attorney needs to log 2,001-plus hours in real estate to qualify, which is the math most people overlook.
4. The cradle-to-grave zero-tax path. Buy a $500K duplex. Cost-seg it. Sell it at $750K, 1031 exchange the gain into a $1.5M property. Cost-seg the step-up. Repeat for 40 years. Hold to death. The heirs get a step-up in basis to fair market value, which means the gains accumulated across the whole investing lifetime never get taxed. Jason has worked with investors who have gone an entire career without paying federal income tax on real estate.

Bonus mention: Opportunity Zones got renewed and slightly expanded under OBBB. For investors who already have built-in gains they want to defer and would prefer to make the next gain entirely tax free on a ten-plus year hold, this is back on the table.

Book Jason runs his firm on: Traction by Gino Wickman. KBKG runs on EOS.

Reach Jason at kbkg.com (use promo code underground2025 for a discount on KBKG's cost segregation tool for smaller properties) or on LinkedIn.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

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Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

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Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Storage is not multifamily. Joe is direct about it: you cannot outplay Extra Space and CubeSmart in primary markets. So Bellrose does not try. The whole strategy lives in secondary and tertiary markets where the REITs do not bother to operate.

What landed in this conversation:

1. What 2023-24 actually was for storage. The first ever stagnant transaction cycle in the asset class since data started getting properly tracked around 2000. Storage does not care about real estate values. Storage cares about transactions: people moving, downsizing, divorcing, displaced. When real estate transactions dry up, storage occupancy and rates fall. That happened for the first time in modern storage history coming off the COVID peak. Bellrose still came through with 16 of 20 facilities fine and only one true loser.
2. Why secondary and tertiary markets are the moat. The institutional REITs do not chase smaller MSAs. That gives a disciplined operator room to underwrite at 65 percent LTV, do two seller-financed deals at 75 LTV with stripped-out covenants, and out-operate the local mom-and-pop competition. Bellrose's value-add is invisible from the road: smoother gravel, better lighting, cameras, a fence here, a sign there. The real lift is the management. Mobile rentals, auto-pay, software-driven marketing, embedded insurance, all standing up in about a week after a takeover.
3. The storage cycle math. Storage's historical returns sit around 15 to 17 percent versus multifamily at 12 to 13. The peak return advantage matters. The deeper structural advantage is that storage's lows are much shallower than the lows in multifamily, retail, or office. Through the worst downturn the asset class has ever seen, storage was still the best-performing commercial real estate category.
4. What Pro Storage is. Joe and partners are also building Pro Storage, the B2B storage product. Unit sizes 500 to 1,000 square feet (versus 50 to 200 in consumer self-storage). Month-to-month versus the three-year leases of flex industrial. Target customer: contractors, caterers storing chairs and glassware, furniture retailers with overflow inventory, businesses being displaced by Amazon and Walmart gobbling up traditional warehouse space. The thesis: same-day delivery now means every consumer product needs to be within an hour of your house, which is forcing a structural re-pricing of small warehouse and flex space everywhere.

The mistake Joe owns and learned twice: not knowing what was going on in the kitchen. First time was a bar and restaurant he ran post-college. Trusted the chef, lost a hundred thousand, learned the lesson. Repeated the mistake 20 years later in storage by trusting an outside underwriter and manager. The single facility he is losing on is the direct result. The fix now is regular check-ins, questioning everything, knowing or pretending to know what is going on so the checks and balances actually function.

Books shaping Joe's last year: The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham, and Who Not How by Dan Sullivan, which Joe says is really a framework for recognizing your unique ability and finding the who, not a delegation book.

Reach Joe at jo@belroseam.com. Bellrose also runs the student fulfillment for Scott Meyers' self-storage academy.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

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• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Ironton runs three funds in parallel. Lon describes the structure as a synthetic way to recreate whatever cash flow and growth profile a client used to get from owning property directly.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The three-fund stack. Short-term income fund pays roughly 8 percent, high liquidity, underpinned by hard money lending through a partner running a $270 million, 300-loan book. Medium-term income fund pays 11 to 13 percent with a one-year lock and 90-day notice, underpinned by medical accounts receivable (not real estate at all). Long-term growth fund targets capital gains over a five-year horizon through equity positions in development and rehab projects. A typical limited partner ends up allocated across all three to mirror the cash flow plus growth profile they had as an active operator.
2. Why medical receivables are the non-correlated piece. Ironton's medium-term fund advances about a third of the value on a basket of about 95 small medical claims (call it $30,000 each) from a clinic. The claims are cross-collateralized, so a 2 to 3 percent fraud rate gets absorbed by the other 97 claims in the basket. The economics do not move with interest rates, real estate cycles, or geopolitics. For an investor sitting heavy in real estate, this is the kind of allocation that lets you actually sleep through a Fed surprise.
3. The diversification dividend. A typical Ironton fund holds about 30 assets across 10 to 12 sponsors in roughly 15 states, mostly Sunbelt. Two-thirds multifamily, the rest industrial with the occasional storage or specific hospitality segment. Last fall when two hurricanes hit Tampa within a couple of weeks, Ironton's exposure was 3 percent of one fund. The other 97 percent of the portfolio was fine. That is what diversification actually buys you.
4. The mistakes he owns. Three of them. First, holding the brokerage four or five years too long before launching the passive investing firm. He says he was on autopilot, making cash, and did not want to start something new. Second, taking too long to make the active-to-passive shift personally; he is 57 and no longer needs to slay the dragon. Third, the first Ironton fund only had eight investments (not enough diversification), and one of those was a Sugar Land Houston office building purchased three months before COVID broke out. Lost everything on that one. On the other side of the same fund, a build-to-rent project he underwrote at low-20s returns delivered 54 percent because the timing happened to be perfect. Lon says the same luck-versus-skill question is what every passive investor should ask when a sponsor trots out a grand-slam story.

Books that shaped him: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki (the crystallizing read 25 years ago), and Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards for the communication side of running a fund. Lon has written 13 of his own books, five of them on Colorado real estate; download a free copy of The Complete Guide to Passive Diversified Real Estate Investing at irontoncapital.com/reunderground.

Reach Lon at irontoncapital.com, email lonwelsh@irontoncapital.com, or text him at 303-619-0633. He offers 15-minute strategy calls to anyone considering passive investing.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

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Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

That mandate puts Peak 15 in places most multifamily private equity shops will not go. Carwashes (with the land). Build-to-rent and build-to-sell communities. Ground-up development. Flex industrial. The next fund expands the box further into student housing, senior living, storage, and commercial office.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why carwashes are in the portfolio. Peak 15 only owns the dirt underneath. Standalones, not strip-mall plays. Carwashes generate more current cash flow than any multifamily holding in the portfolio. The thesis is simple: a real estate fund delivering quarterly distributions needs assets that throw off cash today, paired with assets that throw off liquidity events tomorrow.
2. Why flex industrial looks like multifamily. Take a 50,000 to 100,000 square foot building with 10 to 30 small tenants (plumbers, electricians, GCs, contractors needing office plus storage). You diversify the same way an apartment building diversifies. Lose one tenant, you absorb it. Compare that to a 200,000 square foot big-box industrial leased to an Amazon-scale tenant: that tenant sets the price, and if they leave, replacing 200,000 feet of demand in one shot is a different problem. The flex bucket runs cleaner.
3. The cash flow versus liquidity event balance. Jon is direct: "Six to ten percent is not going to make anybody rich. That is nice mailbox money. Generational wealth comes from liquidity events." A well-run alpha fund stages assets so cash flow keeps the LPs comfortable while the development and value-add deals build toward the exits where the real money lives.
4. The two mentor lines that shape Peak 15. First, an early mentor in trading and investment banking: "Don't worry what the market is doing. The market is going to do whatever it is going to do. As long as you are in the market and putting your reputation forward every single day, the deals will find you." Second, from his older brother: "Always underwrite for the worst. Then maybe underwrite even lower. When the market turns against you, you are already there. When it does not, you are pleasantly surprised." Both are written into how Peak 15 sizes deals.

The mistake Jon owns: he did not listen to his gut on one specific deal. The numbers worked, the property worked, but something was off about the sponsor he would be partnering with for three to five years. He went in anyway. The seller did not disclose certain value-impairing facts, the sponsor handled the resulting blow-up badly, the deal went sideways, and Peak 15 lost its deposit. The fix is now company culture: no deal closes until one of the Peak 15 principals has met the other side's principals in person.

Books Jon is rereading right now: Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman.

Reach Jon at peak15cap.com, email azar@peak15cap.com, or LinkedIn (the only social he checks). His soup-to-nuts multifamily course and three-day bootcamp launch this fall.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Flex space is the hybrid that sits between warehouse and small office: roughly 10 percent office, 90 percent warehouse, bays of 2,000 to 4,000 square feet that can move with demountable walls. The typical tenant is a contractor, plumber, electrician, HVAC operator, or a niche operator like the guy in one of Alec's New Braunfels buildings who packages every bingo chip in America and clears seven figures a month from a small bay.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Do not maximize density. On a five-acre site that could hold 70,000 square feet of flex, Alec will build 40,000 instead and put a two-to-three-acre outdoor storage yard on the rest. Inside space rents at $14 to $20 a foot. Yard rents at $1.50 a foot. The yard leases faster than the buildings because contractors and equipment dealers want a fenced spot for bobcats, materials, and overflow. The combined site stabilizes faster and at a higher blended return than a 70,000 square foot all-building site.
2. Pick the jurisdiction before you pick the dirt. Inside the city of New Braunfels, site plan approval runs about a year and a half. Five miles north in Comal County, the same approval runs about two months for similar rents. Same submarket, same buyer pool, twelve months of carry cost difference. Alec's first filter on a deal is which county or city will let him build before the second filter is whether the land works.
3. Look for retail sites that cannot be retail. Alec is targeting high-traffic frontage along I-35 (around 100,000 to 150,000 cars a day) that should be retail but has a sewer constraint or another issue that knocks retail off the table. Flex needs much less sewer than a restaurant or strip center. He gets the traffic count without the retail competition, and front-row rents in the high teens or low twenties instead of the $14 a foot the same product gets in the industrial park behind it.
4. The metal building is a Lego set. Standard kit, three to four months to put up plus two to three months of site work. Alec orders from Cornerstone (not Chinese kits, because a missing part on a Chinese order is a six-month problem). He sticks to one building size and lets his architect cookie-cutter the floor plan, which keeps engineering costs down. Cost is around $120 a foot if a GC builds it, less if he self-performs with the right subs. He performs to a $250 to $270 per-foot sale price on stabilized flex.

The mentor line Alec carries with him: "Bigger is not harder. It is just bigger." His first deal was a duplex he overpaid for by $5,000 at age 23. This year he is doing about 250,000 square feet of development. The 250K feels easier than the first deal did.

Reach Alec at land-play.com or on LinkedIn.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Today Ben runs a niche financial advisory practice — securities-licensed, but he doesn't touch stocks, bonds, mutual funds, insurance, or annuities. All Perch Wealth does is help accredited investors who built real estate portfolios over 20, 30, or 40 years get out of active management without writing a tax check that wipes out a decade of appreciation. Ten advisors nationwide. "They've done well, and they do not want one more single phone call from a tenant." The conversation walks through 1031 exchanges and Delaware Statutory Trusts — a structure that most CPAs, attorneys, and sophisticated real estate investors have still never heard of.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The 1% to 3% problem. Eight out of ten of Ben's prospects are earning between 1% and 3% in current income relative to today's property value. They bought a building for $1M, it's worth $5M today, rent grew at 3% to 5% a year and never kept pace with the value. They're also fully depreciated, so they're paying full ordinary income tax on what little yield is left. Move that same $5M into a diversified DST portfolio and income can jump from $120K to $300K — with the depreciable basis reset, so the cash flow is tax-advantaged again.
2. DST mechanics in plain English. A Delaware Statutory Trust is a single trustee holding fractional ownership for up to 499 beneficial owners. Created in the 1980s; the IRS validated the structure in 2004 as eligible for 1031 exchange purposes. The sponsors are not boutique shops — Apollo, Starwood, Invesco, Cantor Fitzgerald. They go out and close on $100M multifamily projects in Dallas, $50M medical office campuses in Orlando, $50M self-storage portfolios in Raleigh. They stabilize the asset, then offer fractional ownership to retail investors. "This is not an industry that is in its infancy. The big boys are here."
3. The 45 and 180 day reality that breaks traditional 1031s. Once an investment property sells, the seller has 45 days to identify a replacement property and 180 days total to close. For a seller who is over active management, that timeline is brutal. With DSTs, Mrs. Smith who just sold a $2M Orange County duplex can split her exchange — $200K into Cantor Fitzgerald multifamily, $500K into a Jones Lang DST in Orlando, and so on. Each leg closes in about a week, distributes monthly, satisfies her exchange, and spreads her risk across geography, sector, and operator. She never has to chase a property she doesn't want.
4. Swap till you drop. Defer the gain through life, exchange forever, and the heirs inherit at the stepped-up basis on the date of death. The entire deferred liability evaporates. Ben's example: a $1M property compounded across 30 years of exchanges becomes a $50M portfolio. The would-be tax bill might be $20M. The heirs pay $0 on the gain. This is the wealth-preservation math estate planners build around — and it exists in the tax code on purpose, because the government wants private operators (not the government) providing housing.

The advice from Ben's college professor, Mr. Short, that has stayed with him for twenty years: "It's not hard to make money. All you need to do is follow demographic trends." The silver tsunami — 76 million boomers retiring and ultimately passing wealth down over the next 30 years — is the trend Ben built his entire practice to serve.

Get in touch: perchwealth.com or call Ben directly at 818-269-4972. Perch Wealth has 10 advisors nationwide and Ben does free education calls regardless of whether you're ready to move.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

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Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

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Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The three businesses split Mark's week roughly into thirds: architecture, multifamily investing, and the new golf venture. His kid brother is one of the country's leading real estate taxation authorities. Five other family members are commercial brokers. Mark went to the University of Washington business school in 2002 for a certification in commercial real estate development on top of his architecture license. He has sold most of his Seattle portfolio because the regulatory environment got intolerable, and now plays almost entirely in Houston. "Real estate is the ultimate form of entrepreneurialism," he says. "You can't wing it. You've got to really have an A game going on to be able to do this successfully."

What landed in this conversation:

1. Vertical integration, end to end. SGRE has 200+ people on the payroll, all W2. The company owns its construction labor, its asset management arm, and its supply chain. Direct vendor relationships in India and China feed containers into the Port of Houston and then into a 20,000 square foot SGRE warehouse where a warehouse manager catalogs every door, every fixture, every slab. When they order doors they order a thousand at a time. Slab countertops cost SGRE $50 a slab; Mark just priced slabs for his own home renovation at $1,500. That's three layers of middlemen cut out. It's why SGRE's renovation cost is $18,000 a door versus the $35,000 to $40,000 the rest of the market spends — and why SGRE returns four to five extra IRR points to its investors.
2. The 5%-a-month renovation cadence. Minimum purchase is 250 units. '80s product and newer (older means surprise wiring, plumbing, and electrical panel replacements that turn the lift into a different deal). Deep value-add, C-class assets, repositioned to quality finishes for the same workforce tenant — rent bumps of $100 to $150 a month, "some of the nicest housing these folks have ever lived in." Crews are on site the day after closing. Target: 5% of units turned per month, 100% renovated inside 20 months. NOI grows fast enough that lenders give SGRE 60% to 70% LTV without losing sleep. Q4 of last year SGRE took down two distressed deals at 2018 prices after the prior operator evaporated $14M.
3. Why Houston, only Houston. The 34th largest city in the country but the second largest apartment market. A massive wave of 1970s and '80s product built during the oil boom needs renovating. Year-over-year permit activity and housing deliveries are down 72%, and occupancy is set to tighten. Mark refuses to chase other metros. "I don't want to have to figure out the personalities in multiple jurisdictions." He knows the regulators, the brokers, the lenders, and the labor pool in one market and goes deep instead of wide. SGRE's business strategy is depth.
4. Insurance, hedged through Lloyd's of London. When premiums went vertical after the Florida hurricane cycle, the SGRE partners got on a plane and flew to London to negotiate a blanket policy across the entire portfolio. They self-insure layered underneath. A friend of Mark's owns a deal in the 9th Ward of New Orleans where the per-door insurance went from $850 to between $2,500 and $3,000 and may never recover the deal. Meanwhile, in King County, Washington (where Mark lives) a residential permit takes 16 months through approval — by design, because the county is slow-walking permits to keep development out of unincorporated areas. The compounding effect on housing supply is exactly what you'd expect.

On growth and mentorship Mark is blunt: "Once you stop growing, you die." He dropped $10K on a mastermind last year and called it the smartest thing he's done in three years. On the personal side: six grandkids, a partner who keeps him grounded, and a severely-ADHD stepson Mark mentored from a 1.4 high school GPA to a 3.8 (six high schools, ending at a military school), now a high-end audio mechanic flipping cars on the side. Mark gets up to model that for the next generation. "Once you stop growing, you die" applies to both halves of his life.

Get in touch: sgreinvestments.com or email investor@sgreinvestments.com. Mark says expect a response in roughly three minutes — he's in front of the computer all day.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The team is roughly 22 people across both locations. Vertically integrated end to end except property management. The Bogotá team (15 to 17 people) handles acquisitions, underwriting, structuring, capital markets, and remote project management. The Atlanta team (7 people) handles everything that needs boots on the ground. We talked about why Apex built a Colombian sister entity instead of going the VA route, why every property sits inside a two-hour drive from the office, why they built a debt fund instead of running another 506B, and the construction mistake Daniel still regrets.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Employees, not VAs. Most operators going offshore stop at virtual assistants. Daniel built a Colombian entity with actual employees who are part of the Apex team. Three reasons it works: same time zone all year (give or take an hour), shared culture and accountability through a real chain of command, and bilingual fluency that pays off on the construction side of a Georgia operation where a meaningful share of the labor and subs are Spanish-speaking. The bilingual edge alone is a competitive advantage Daniel calls one of Apex's "different shaders."
2. The two-hour radius rule. Every Apex property sits inside the 13 metro Atlanta counties — nothing further than two hours from the office. Daniel's thesis is that during the 2012 to 2022 bull run, location knowledge didn't matter much because the rising tide raised everything. Today it matters intensely. Atlanta is a "pocket by pocket" market — some submarkets are for-sale plays, others are cash-flow rent plays, and treating them the same blows up the underwriting. Going out-of-state would mean re-learning that pocket structure in every new metro. Apex would rather go deep than wide.
3. Why a fixed-return debt fund instead of a 506B. Daniel's lesson from years of LPGP raises: passive investors say they want 20% to 30% targets, but what they actually want is certainty, flexibility, and predictable cash flow. "Sometimes singles, sometimes doubles, sometimes you foul, and sometimes you grand-slam" — investors don't want a portfolio of swings, they want a yield. The Apex fund pays fixed tiered returns based on check size, compounds for investors who want growth, distributes monthly for investors who need cash, and has an 18-month lockup followed by periodic liquidity windows. That structure answers the "my kid is going to college in three years" problem that LPGP deals handle badly, because you can't force a deal to full-cycle on demand.
4. Drag construction in-house earlier. Daniel's biggest professional regret is the time he spent trying to make outside GCs work for Apex before pulling construction under the Apex roof. Every healthy value-add machine he has met eventually does this — third-party construction breaks down once you actually care about cost-per-door and schedule discipline. His personal regret is the mirror image: he should have left the corporate job sooner and started Apex faster. Both regrets have the same shape. He sees the right move clearly now, and wishes he had moved faster then. "Never late, but could have been faster."

Mentor advice that turned Daniel's career, from a former colleague in Colombia he later converted into a mentor: "Just try it, but make sure you burn your ships." Cortez burning his boats so his men couldn't retreat — the same principle, applied to a transcontinental career move. Daniel's working definition of success has shifted to match: "Every situation in life, whether it's good or bad, it's temporary. Just make sure you're enjoying what you're doing." He calls it "enjoy the ride."

Book mentioned: Traction by Gino Wickman. Apex is running the EOS playbook and Daniel rereads the book every year — "so simple, but it just makes sense." Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: apexinvestments.us or LinkedIn (Daniel Angel Mejia).

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Chad cofounded Left Field Investors in early 2020 as a local Columbus, Ohio meetup. The first meeting was scheduled for March 18, 2020. The world shut down three days earlier. He moved it to Zoom — and 18 months later the community had grown to 2,000 members and was tracking over $50M of LP capital that its membership had deployed. BiggerPockets acquired the group last year and rebranded it Passive Pockets. Chad sits on the advisory committee. Alongside that he bought a Brian Tracy FocalPoint coaching franchise and built Chad Ackerman Real Estate, a coaching practice for aspiring LPs — monthly free webinars, tiered workshops (one-on-one, two-on-one, three-on-one), and direct coaching. A book is in progress.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The MythBusters book for LPs. Chad's thesis is that most prospects think LP investing is for accredited high-net-worth individuals or institutional money. He was an HR guy. "It doesn't take something special. Anybody can do this." The minimum check is often $25,000 to $50,000, but tools like TribeVest let small groups pool capital so an investor can be in for $5K. The name "Left Field" came from financial advisors telling Chad and his cofounder that "all that syndication stuff is way out in left field" — so they took it as the badge. The "active passive investor" framing he uses now: it's called passive investing, but it takes real activity to do it right.
2. Goals first, deals second. Chad's first investment was a 17-story Cleveland office-to-multifamily conversion with a 7x pro forma. It checked every box he was excited about. It also didn't fit his actual goal, which was cash flow to fund leaving his W2. The bridge loan ran out, construction financing never closed, the deal went under. "I shouldn't have been in it in the first place because it didn't align to my goals." Before any private placement memo crosses your inbox, define what you're solving for. The buy box does the screening for you. Chad now teaches that step before he teaches anything else.
3. Bet the jockey, not the horse. Before evaluating a deal, evaluate the operator. Chad won't write a check to a GP that no one in his LP community has heard of. If nobody recognizes the name, he watches them for a year. The five-year shakeout has done a lot of free vetting for everyone — the operators still standing have at least one full cycle under their belt, and the best of them survived 2008. That's why Chad says now is actually the best time in years to be an LP: the cowboys have been exposed, loan-structure discipline matters again, and the surviving operators have answered questions Chad didn't know to ask five years ago.
4. AI for due diligence. AI is not yet good enough to tell you if a deal is a go or no-go. It is good enough to check a private placement memo against your buy box and surface the misses. The value is not the AI's verdict. The value is that writing a buy box at all forces the discipline to take emotion out of the decision. Fear of missing out is the most expensive feeling in this business. "There's going to be another deal coming around the corner. Don't make one squeeze into your buy box."

The advice that changed Chad's trajectory: "You're the product of the five closest people next to you." He went looking for five better people — a mix of investors a few steps ahead of him (who could show him the next move) and several steps ahead (who could show him the destination). Both layers mattered. He still curates that group consciously.

Book on his nightstand: Invest Smart: Spotting Red Flags in Real Estate Syndications by Gary Lipsky of Bay Capital — Chad is reading the genre to make sure his coaching material reinforces (and doesn't duplicate) what's already out there for beginners. Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: LinkedIn (Chad Ackerman) or chadackermanrealestate.com. Chad offers free one-on-one calls to help prospects figure out which workshop tier (or one-on-one coaching) actually fits.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Social Media:

• www.facebook.com/vince.gethings
• www.linkedin.com/in/vincent-gethings-50420a137
• www.instagram.com/vince.gethings

Email: 

• vince@wheelbarrowprofits.com
•  tricityequitygroup.com

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

• Book: https://a.co/d/hAegcXI
• Facebook Group: https://urlgeni.us/facebook/unlockedguide
• Mini Course: https://www.unlockedrentals.com/minicourseoptin

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Today Chris and EM Capital run more than 800 multifamily units across the Southeast: Charlotte, Raleigh, Columbia, and Atlanta, with 420 units already in Atlanta and another property under contract there. Acquisition price band is $10M to $50M. He targets markets with 250,000-plus population, real job diversity, and meaningful population growth. He caps it at four markets because deal flow has to be balanced against actually knowing the neighborhoods.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The two-bedroom test as a quality signal. Chris will look at a 1985 build if it has two bedrooms and two baths. A two-bedroom one-bath from the same vintage tells him the original developer was cutting cost everywhere else too: cheaper wiring, cheaper plumbing, cheaper everything behind the walls. The unit mix is a tell.
2. Atlanta's insurance problem isn't hurricanes. It's the state's high liability cap. One resident hitting another in the parking lot can expose the owner to seven figures in liability. Premiums reflect it. The mistake is finding that out after closing instead of underwriting it in upfront.
3. Preferred equity to 85% LTV. Chris stacks institutional or family-office preferred equity between the senior debt and the LP equity, holding the senior LTV at 62 to 65 percent. That keeps the structure conservative while raising less LP equity per deal.
4. The Monarch deal almost broke. Last fall the 10-year treasury spiked during election week, capital tightened, and Chris had already gone hard on earnest money before the raise was fully closed. Seller extensions plus a pref-equity gap fill saved it. The lesson he ran back to: have an A plan, a B plan, and a C plan locked in with your partners before you go hard.

The line that wraps it: a mentor told Chris, "If you can't make a deal pencil at 6.5 to 7 percent, that might be a you problem, not a building problem."

Reach Chris at emcapitalgroup.com or on LinkedIn.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Shine is built for the messy version of the question. Three states (California, Colorado, Massachusetts) have virtual net energy metering, where you slap one big array on the roof and allocate the benefit to tenants by square footage. The other 47 states do not. In those, the only way to actually decarbonize a building is to install a small dedicated PV system on every single apartment unit's meter. A studio gets four panels. A one-bedroom gets five. A two-bedroom gets six. From the roof it looks normal. Inside, every tenant has their own solar system and their own bill.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The unit-economics math. Gross cost about $6,000 per unit. The transferable federal tax credit takes it to roughly $4,000 net. Each unit then generates about $620 of new NOI per year for the owner. Mid-teens IRR. Double-digit cash on cash. The owner leases the equipment to the tenant: tenant goes from a $100 utility bill to $50 ($45 to the owner, $5 of net savings to the tenant).
2. Common-area solar is a distraction. Most solar contractors pitch multifamily owners on installing solar under the common-area meter, the leasing office, the gym, the parking lot lights. That meter is only five to ten percent of total building emissions. Tenant load is the other 90-plus percent. If you actually want the decarbonization story or the income, you have to go after the unit meters.
3. The buildings that work. Garden style is the best fit. Mid-rise works. High-rise generally does not unless there is surface parking for carport solar. Roof age 12 years or newer or Shine will tell you to replace the roof first. And because the per-unit systems are individually small, electrical service panels almost never need to be upgraded, which is the line item that usually wrecks commercial solar timelines and budgets.
4. The runway lesson. Owen quit a cushy corporate job in 2012 to start an LED lighting company. Eighteen months with zero revenue, sold his 401k, ended up on food stamps, was a week from moving back in with his parents. The lesson he took into Shine: most businesses do not fail because the idea is wrong, they fail because the time it takes to get to revenue is three to five times longer than anybody expects. And the second you start a company, you are in charge of sales.

Book Owen is reading right now: Money for Couples by Ramit Sethi.

Reach Owen at getshine.com (the new AI tool on the homepage estimates how much solar and NOI any building can generate) or on LinkedIn.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Property Lens is a Carfax for houses, with a forecast bolted on. You give it an address. It pulls aerial imagery, weather event history, building permits, FEMA flood data, soil type, neighborhood infrastructure, MLS listing copy, and assessor records. A minute later you get a 50-page report for about $69. It tells you what has happened to the property and what is likely to happen.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The roof score. Bob's team machine-reads aerial imagery and gives every roof a one-to-five condition score plus an exposure rating (New England is low exposure; Texas is wind, hail, and tornadoes). For real estate investors screening properties, that single number is often the call between making an offer and walking away when the insurance market is this tight.
2. Permits as history. Most investors only look at permits when their own deal needs one. Property Lens reverses it: the permit history tells you the age of the roof, the HVAC, the plumbing, and the electrical work. Bob's team translates 8,000 different municipal permit formats into one English-language read.
3. The flood signal beyond the zone. FEMA flood zone designations are a coarse instrument. Property Lens layers in proximity to ocean and river, soil composition, and historical flood events, and will flag a property as flood-insurance-recommended even if it sits outside the 100-year zone. The 500-year zone alone is not the answer.
4. The investor use case Bob did not build for. Property Lens was designed for retail home buyers. Real estate investors found it on their own. Bob's open invitation: if you are running a few-million-dollar apartment or commercial deal and you find the report useful at the consumer price point, reach out and they will build a product for your scale.

The mentor line Bob carries with him, from his late friend Jaffer Ali: "Just quit making excuses, go do it, and believe in yourself." Bob took the corporate route too long before listening to it.

Book on Bob's nightstand: Breakfast with Seneca by David Fideler. The Stoic frame of what you can and cannot control.

Reach Bob at propertylens.com (download the sample report on the homepage) or on LinkedIn.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The Nice operation is four companies: The Nice Agent (the brokerage), Nice Property Management, Nice Tax Company, and Nice Construction Management. Carl's wife runs property management. A former employee who became a partner runs the tax company. Carl's high school friends run the construction arm and the brokerage office. The stated company value is "love," and Carl means it operationally — if you don't love the people you're doing it with and for, don't be in it. He's based in Pembroke Pines, Florida. His very first property was bought sight-unseen for $370K in the mid-2000s, dropped to $190K by 2009-2010, and is worth $850K today. He hasn't sold. He spent the next decade in single family rehabs out of the court auctions earning 20% to 30% returns, and is now transitioning toward multifamily with a five-year plan to layer in subdivision development as his last act.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The South Florida barbell. A $920K listing in Pembroke Pines just got a cash offer at $950K in two days. A $775K listing 10 minutes away has been sitting for three months. High-end product is moving because money keeps flowing into South Florida from out of state. The $300K to $500K buyer is priced out — they can't afford what's on the shelf, and what's affordable isn't there. Meanwhile Central Florida (Orlando, Haines City, Lakeland, Tampa) is dropping fast. The metro and the submarket matter more right now than the asset class.
2. Florida multifamily insurance, in real numbers. A six-unit in Miami, two stories, roughly 10,000 square feet. Wind insurance alone runs $18,000 a year and has to be written through Lloyd's of London. Add hazard and liability and two of the six units are paying just for the policy. Carl is trying to refinance the property and can't pull cash out because the insurance load crushes the underwriting. His advice for operators in this environment: stomach the pain, lean on your network, and remember the people who survived 2008. The morning we recorded he had just gotten word that a problematic city lien on another property had been approved and a separate agent issue had resolved overnight — both after weeks of stress. "Sooner or later something great will happen."
3. Buy dirt. Carl's favorite story is about a Miami family during the Great Depression who bought up beachfront land everyone said was worthless because you couldn't grow crops on sand. Three generations later that family owns nearly a small city on the beach. Gary Keller, of Keller Williams, has worn t-shirts that read "Buy Dirt" for the same reason. Carl's five-year plan ends with subdivision development — buying the dirt is the last move, and the longest-compounding one. "They are not making any more."
4. Excitement kills deals. Carl overpaid for a 3.5 acre parcel in Fort Pierce, paid the architect, paid for full plans — and then learned the city wouldn't allow subdivision on lots under five acres. He recovered by offering the eventual buyer owner financing instead of demanding cash up front, taking the long view to get out clean. The lesson stays with him: "Excitement is like being angry or being in love. You don't know what you're doing." Never pull the trigger from that state.

The advice Carl heard on his own podcast from a guest named James, that he can't shake: "I try every day to be the person I needed 20 years ago." Close your eyes and picture who you were two decades ago. The person you needed to show up didn't. Be that person for someone else now. The story that anchors it for Carl: he just handed an entire flip deal to one of his agents — a woman who had never bought a property in her life and was struggling. The morning we recorded, she got approved for the mortgage. "This is what I wake up for every single day."

On running four companies without spreading himself thin, Carl points to Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited for the technician-versus-entrepreneur distinction. He's currently reading Raging Referrals by Brandon Barnum — the 3-2-1-1 system (touch 3 existing relationships daily, add 2 new contacts to your database, refer 1 person to a business, end every day with 1 referral received). Carl's own memoir, This Is The Nice Life of Carl Christian, covers his first 40 years.

Books mentioned: The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Find it on Amazon. Raging Referrals by Brandon Barnum. Find it on Amazon. This Is The Nice Life of Carl Christian by Carl Christian. Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: theniceagent.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Matt got into real estate on a tuna fishing trip out of Long Island. A buddy who ran a mortgage company was self-managing a 50-property single family portfolio from his phone in the car between casts. Matt asked how. By early 2016 he had bought his first single family in New York. Ninety days later he bought his second in Texas. Eight months after that he bought his first multifamily in Arlington, walked into a hoarder unit on day one and an eviction on day two, exited the deal at a 300% return, and never looked back. Today the Buchalski portfolio is Arlington-heavy (a few miles from AT&T Stadium), with concentrations in Richardson and Garland, a student housing asset in Waco inside the Baylor bubble, and an RV storage facility in Cleburne south of Fort Worth that he added about a year ago.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why the buy box shrank. In 2021 Matt and his partners bought 34 units across two adjacent deals and poured nearly $1M of CapEx into them ($30K a door). Today they wouldn't look at that deal. The market has changed: vacant units take longer to fill, rent growth is flat, and heavy value-add doesn't pencil the way it did. Current buy box is 80s product or newer, 70 to 250 doors, in family-safe submarkets where his partners would be comfortable bringing their kids on a Saturday. They want operational upside (rent and occupancy), not a million-dollar lift.
2. The HVAC tariff math. Two-and-a-half-ton HVACs that Matt was installing for $3,500 each in 2021 and 2022 ran $4,700 to $4,800 a few months ago, with more increases coming as tariffs work through the supply chain. Compound that with the two largest line items on every T12 (taxes and insurance) running uncontrollable while rent growth flattens or declines from new supply, and you understand why most operators are now in defensive mode on every utility contract, trash hauler, and property manager they touch.
3. Why Ownwell exists and why it's growing fast. CEO Colin DePace worked inside a billionaire family office and watched how the rich actually mitigate taxes at scale. He paired with CTO Joseph (PhD in computer science) and built an AI-first property tax appeal platform. 350,000 appeals in 2024 across seven states. On pace for 800,000 to 1,000,000 appeals in 2025. When Texas assessments came out a week before Matt and Ed recorded, Ownwell's team had already analyzed three-plus million properties across eight or nine counties to map what happened year over year. Matt's job is to take that engine into commercial and institutional accounts.
4. Property taxes in Texas are not what they were. The conventional wisdom used to be that Tarrant County would assess at 88% to 90% of purchase price times the mill rate. In 2023 the entire deck reshuffled. Counties moved to 100% of purchase price in year one. There are still levers: assets under $5M may qualify for a circuit breaker that caps growth at 20% year over year. Five or ten percent of variance in the single biggest line on the T12 is the difference between walking away from a 90% deal and doing the 100% deal. Matt's pitch to operators is that the freshness and accuracy of Ownwell's data is what makes that forecast actually reliable.

The advice that has stayed with Matt since he worked at a butcher shop in New Rochelle, New York as a 15-year-old: "First right, then quick. Don't worry about doing things fast until you know how to do them right." He's watched that lesson get violated for the last seven years inside every sales organization that thinks an automated email cadence can substitute for the upstream work. It can't.

On the personal side: after his divorce, Matt chose to be the parent who shows up over the parent on 150 nights of road. His son was warming up for a little league game one night and Matt asked his fiancée where she'd rather be. Nowhere. That's been his North Star ever since, and it's why real estate as a wealth vehicle matters to him: it lets him keep saying no to the CRO job that would put him back in airports.

Books on his nightstand: Untangled on raising teenage girls. Find it on Amazon. When Pride Still Mattered, the David Maraniss biography of Vince Lombardi. Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: LinkedIn (Matt Buchalski). For property tax questions, matt@ownwell.com. For multifamily, matt@deepbluere.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The twist on Dave's method is that he runs it the opposite way most real estate operators run a show. Most syndicators start a podcast hoping to grow an audience by interviewing the Grant Cardones and Robert Kiyosakis of the world. That's a lot of hoping and not a lot of happening. Three years ago Dave heard another podcaster describe the inverted model: stop trying to grow the audience, and instead use the guest seat itself as the relationship vehicle. Interview the kind of people you actually want as clients. Shine the spotlight on them. Start the relationship that way.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Who the accredited investor actually is. Successful business owners, successful entrepreneurs, doctors, dentists, accountants, C-suite executives. The kind of people Dave used to work with in Silicon Valley. A lot of them are interested in publicity and exposure, and almost none of them have ever been invited onto a podcast. Dave has one client whose first booked guest runs a billion-dollar fund (with a B). The guest had never been on a podcast in his life. He was nervous, out of his depth, and excited. The client put him at ease, had a wonderful conversation, took him out to coffee, took him out to lunch, and built the relationship at warp speed. Cold-calling that same guest to get coffee would have been almost impossible.
2. The conversation flow that converts. The show starts on the guest's business or profession (what's their secret sauce, what comes easier to them than to their competition). Then a few questions on work-life balance. Then a soft pivot toward the financial side: "It sounds like things are going amazingly well, Dr. Smith. A lot of busy doctors like you are making excellent income now but want that income to keep going when they don't want to work so hard. What are your thoughts about creating passive income?" That's it. No pitch. Dr. Smith answers (stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever) and you note it.
3. The magic happens after you stop recording. "Dr. Smith, congratulations on all your success. You mentioned you're dabbling in stocks and bonds. How do you feel about the returns, the security, the stability of those investments? Is there maybe a little room for improvement?" The answer is yes 100% of the time. Even Warren Buffett would say there's room for improvement. "Cool. We're doing something really interesting with other busy doctors in the alternative investing space, getting solid double-digit returns secured by real estate with significant tax breaks. Is that something you might be interested in taking a look at?" Book the discovery call. The first call doesn't close a check. It opens the door.
4. Lead with the giving hand. Dave's framing for the whole model: provide value first, before you ever ask for anything. Give them the spotlight. Make them look good and feel good. After the interview Dave's agency packages three or four short-form reels, LinkedIn articles, and social posts the guest can use on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, wherever they live. The guest gets to strut. Dave's client gets reciprocity, eyeballs on the show, and the conversational permission to circle back. One client had an audience member (not a guest, just a listener) reach out and invest $75,000.

The advice that shaped Dave was counterintuitive. When he was packing his bags to go start a business in Costa Rica, his father took him aside and said, "Son, I love you dearly, but you don't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. I've tried it. I failed at it. I know you. I don't think you've got it in you." That ticked Dave off so badly that he went and did it anyway, just to prove his old man wrong, and the spite carried him through stretches when he would have otherwise quit. Five or six years in, his father took it back. "I was wrong."

The biggest professional regret was trusting greed over intuition on a rent-to-own tenant whose spidey sense Dave overrode. Family of five trashed the house, months of cleanup, very expensive lesson: pay attention to the little voice. His wife has the same gift, and Dave learned in his thirties to stop overriding her too.

Book mentioned: The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes (the originator of the Dream 100 concept). Dave is currently rereading the updated 2.0 edition. Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: grab a free copy of Dave's book at 20accreditedinvestorsbook.com. Trade your name and email, get the book, land in his ecosystem.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Jacopo's real estate focus is the three South Florida counties he knows best, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. He is also LP and GP in multifamily syndications across other parts of the country. Multifamily, in his view, is the cleanest way to manufacture the cash flow that "sets you free." His framework for everything he builds, business or personal, is four steps: research, growth, action, contribution.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The three-step real estate stack. Flipping first to generate capital reserves (because he doesn't believe in starting cash-flow investing if you have no cash). Cash flow second, because cash flow is what changes life options. And then, with the surplus after both, land development as the 20X play. Each step funds the next. Most investors skip step one and try to start at step two with money they don't have, which is why they get into trouble.
2. How land becomes a 20X. Jacopo studies public records for big projects coming into specific sub-areas of the city, places that are city-near but not yet on anyone's radar. He buys land ahead of the news, holds for three to five years, and benefits from the zoning change that follows a major project announcement. The zoning change alone is typically a 2X to 3X. Selling to a builder afterward (or partnering with one, depending on the project) captures the rest. He's clear that he is not the builder. "When you build the unit, the investor has more risk." His role is to package the entitled land and hand it off.
3. Why the worst deal of his career was a million-euro lesson at 23. He bought a shop inside a large commercial center in Italy that he did not control. The center deteriorated around him. He lost €1M at 23 or 24 years old. The lesson has shaped every investment since: never invest in real estate without control of the parts that drive value. Buy, fix, resell, leverage, all done knowingly. "Everything in life, if you use it knowing the correct way, comes back to you."
4. The wellness building. Jacopo's current project is to develop a residential building organized around the idea that the place you live is the place you recharge your energy. Sound healing inside the building, water purification, meditation spaces, materials chosen for what they do to the people who live there. He has been working on this for a couple of years. The thesis is that if you don't have a correct place to live, you're missing the first step of every other goal in your life. The book and the building are two sides of the same contribution.

The morning ritual that anchors his day is what he calls MPE: meditation, prayer, and exercise. He runs his year on a calendar pre-scheduled with what he wants to learn each month (right now: communication and marketing). The four questions he asks himself every morning have changed the texture of his days.

His father is his single most important mentor, and the advice that defined him was simple: "Every day you wake up, communicate with people, go to work, and do good action for other human beings. You will have a lot of doors open every day until you die."

Books that shaped him: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Find it on Amazon. Jacopo's own book, Healthy, Rich and Happy, pairs the morning ritual with a step-by-step real estate strategy; all proceeds are donated to Hermano de la Calle (Brothers in the Streets), a homeless support charity.

Get in touch: healthyrichandhappy.com for the book, or Instagram (@jacopo_the_investor_broker) for direct contact and deal-sharing.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Earnest's fund started in 2010 buying non-performing loans, where borrowers were not making payments. That work is dynamic, problem-solving every day, but it makes investor expectations hard to manage. So Nathan pivoted to buying performing seller-financed notes, which are far easier to underwrite to a predictable return. The fund is Reg D 506C (accredited only). It pays investors 8% annual, and it's deliberately positioned as the sleep-at-night portion of an accredited investor's portfolio: a lower return than a multifamily syndication might project, but secured by real estate with a minimum 25% equity spread on every loan the fund acquires.

What landed in this conversation:

1. How notes actually get sourced. There is no MLS for mortgages. The closest thing is paperstack.com (which Nathan helped develop at the beginning, his semi-claim to fame), and even that surfaces a small fraction of what's available. The real sourcing happens at conferences and through relationships. Nathan went to his first note conference in 2009 as the Canadian guy, which alone made him memorable. Everybody in the note world is either buying or selling or both. You build a list, you call, you ask what they have.
2. The math of pricing a note. Nathan buys to a yield target of 12%. On a $200K seller-financed note at 8% to 10% interest, he'll typically offer some discount to balance face value (say, $190K down to $160K depending on rate, term, geography, and underlying property value). On a bank note at 3% to 5% the discount required to hit 12% is so large that the deal almost never happens. Longer term gives him more room to discount lightly. Texas underwrites very differently from New Jersey. Most factors that look secondary at first end up moving price materially.
3. Why banks sell at all. Banks typically sell large pools at par or near par to recycle their liquidity. They make their money on origination fees and lend it out again. They're not selling because they think the loan is bad. The exception is the 2008 to 2015 period when non-performing residential paper traded at 30 cents on the dollar because a non-performing loan is worth zero on a bank's balance sheet regardless of face value. On the individual side, a private seller-financed note holder might sell because they want cash today instead of payments over time (kitchen remodel, college tuition, another investment).
4. What workout actually looks like. Nathan does not want the house. He has almost never wanted the house. Once he owns the property, liability and work attach to him, and he's trying to simplify, not add work. So when a borrower falls behind, the first conversation is "what happened?" Most defaults are temporary (lost job, new job hasn't started, between paychecks). The fund will adjust the rate up or down, stretch the amortization out, shrink it in, forgive some of the arrears, add the arrears to the principal balance, or carry them as a 12-month overage. Whatever keeps the borrower in the home and the loan performing. Foreclosure is reserved for vacant properties where the borrower can't be found. In every case Nathan has ever filed, the foreclosure went through. It's a matter of time and money.

The advice that has stuck with Nathan since he was 17 or 18 came from an older man at his church after a nervous public speaking moment: "Stand up, take a deep breath, let it out. If you want to close your eyes you can. Then just go." He's used it before every stage appearance since.

The biggest professional regret was holding the Curves franchise (he and his wife owned two of them) one year too long before listing for sale. The Great Recession hit and people cancel gym memberships when they're nervous about money. They ended up carrying years of debt out of that decision, which paradoxically taught them how to overcome and pay back big sums of money. Better to sell a year early than a year late.

Books on his nightstand: James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (Nathan got the whole set last Christmas and is working through them in order). Find it on Amazon. The serious read is The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung, after his doctor warned him he was almost pre-diabetic. Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: diversifiedmortgageexpo.com for the May conference (the Thursday-night ax-throwing tournament is included with the ticket and is where most of the relationships start). earnestinvesting.com for the fund.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

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Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Sal's real estate career started in 2012 with cold calls to distressed sellers and door-knocking in the five boroughs. Wholesaling first, then fixing and flipping in New York City, then enough deal flow by 2018 to open the lending arm with their own capital. That snowballed into a fund. WeLend now operates in nearly every state except the few (Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota) that still require a brick-and-mortar branch or local licensing. WeLend's edge is that the founders were operators before they were lenders, and they underwrite like operators.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why the average loan size doubled. When WeLend opened, the average loan was around $400K on standard 1-to-4 unit fix-and-flips. Today the average is roughly $800K because the strategies have shifted. The old cookie-cut flip numbers don't pencil the way they did five to ten years ago. The smartest sponsors are running conversion plays: take a two-family home, add two vertical floors, end up with four condos. The original two-family might have sold for $2M. Each new condo now sells for at least $2M. Construction cost on a vertical expansion runs $800K to $900K instead of the cost of a standard rehab. The math works, but only if the sponsor knows what they're doing.
2. Why most lenders can't underwrite the conversion play. It's hard to project the ARV on a vertical expansion if you've never done one. Most lenders weren't developers in a past life. WeLend's founders were. They've done conversions themselves, so they understand how to project finished value, how to phase construction, and what to push back on in a sponsor's pro forma. The flip side: WeLend won't lend on a conversion play to a sponsor doing their first or second flip. They'll tell that sponsor to bring in an experienced partner, and watch sponsors who ignore the advice get stuck on the deal a year later.
3. NYC is an equity play, not a cash flow play. Sal hears it from borrowers all the time. "I'm really not cash flowing on this property I'm buying in New York City." Correct. New York is dating the rate, riding the appreciation, and refinancing later. The buyers in markets like Park Slope (where WeLend recently funded a beautiful ground-up project) aren't rate-sensitive. Compared to a $200K Ohio single family where one major repair eats the year's cash flow, a New York equity play with $400K to $500K in forced appreciation over two years is a different category of return. Both have their place. Sal lends on both. He just wants borrowers clear-eyed about which game they're playing.
4. How $1,300 loans turned into zero principal losses. Sal's brother Moses runs credit. He looks at every loan before it funds. The two things they screen for are sponsor track record (especially that the sponsor's experience matches the scope of work) and clean exit math (is the sponsor actually making money on this deal, not just on a frothy ARV?). Their value-add culture: a lot of lenders are loan-to-own, hoping the borrower defaults so they can take the asset. WeLend's posture is the opposite. When a GC walks off a job, the WeLend team connects the sponsor with another GC in their database. Architect, expediter, wholesaler, same approach. Help the project move, get the loan paid back, get the next deal.

The biggest mistake Sal will talk about was a Bronx two-family flip where the team tried to save $60K to $70K by not digging out the basement to expand its footprint. The deal sat for nearly two years. They lost roughly the amount they had saved. The private lender on that one made every dollar of his interest on time. Lesson, in three words: "Don't be cheap."

The advice his life coach gave him recently that he keeps coming back to: "Slow it down. Just relax. Enjoy what you have." First-generation immigrant kids are not natural at that one, and Sal knows it.

Books he's working through: Measure What Matters by John Doerr (OKRs, the book that genuinely shifted how WeLend runs internally). Find it on Amazon. Anything by Robert Greene; Sal was listening to one of his audiobooks the morning we recorded. Find his catalog on Amazon.

Get in touch: Instagram (@welendllc or @sal_solomons), or call Sal directly at 212-257-3888. When he's not working he's on the racetrack at Palmer Motorsports Park in his 2020 Mercedes-AMG GT-R.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Michael runs a vertically integrated turnkey shop in Indianapolis. The team acquires five to ten homes a month, owns the construction crew, owns the property management arm, and has an ownership stake in a self-directed IRA company so investors can buy inside their retirement accounts. There is no fund and there is no syndication. Each home is matched to one investor. His top investor lives in Ventura, California, owns 88 doors through the platform, and has physically laid eyes on four of them.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why Indianapolis checks every box. The buy box is $150,000 to $200,000 single family homes, roughly $30,000 down, 15-year mortgages that still cash flow positive, and DSCR-eligible for no-doc loans. Michael frames market selection as offense (cash flow) versus defense (insurance, property taxes, eviction timelines). Florida fails the insurance test. Nevada and Texas have no income tax but spicy property taxes. California is tenant-friendly to a fault. Indianapolis is the county seat, sits within 700 miles of two thirds of America, and is landlord-friendly enough that he can move a non-paying tenant out in 40 days for $500.
2. The deal pipeline is a Rolodex, not the MLS. Tax liens, foreclosures, courthouse steps, probate attorneys, and wholesalers. If a property is on MLS, Michael and the five buyers ahead of him have already passed. He gets 911 calls from his network while he is on the pickleball court, wires earnest money from his phone, and closes. The phone rings because the relationships are 15 years deep. A 23-year-old with a million dollars cannot compete with that.
3. The 1031 partnership with East Coast equity. Northeast investors call him with a million dollars of capital gains from an appreciated commercial building or an inherited property, and no cash-flowing replacement they can afford locally. Michael's pitch: roll the 1031 to Indianapolis and he hands them seven cash-flowing houses against that million. Coastal properties appreciate. Interior properties cash flow. He runs the interior side of the trade and takes the rehab risk off the investor's plate before they ever close.
4. The six-figure title mistake that built a system. Michael bought a property at HOA foreclosure auction without catching a hefty first lien buried in the title work. The rules at that particular auction had changed and no one in the room caught it. He found out six weeks later when he tried to sell. Loss was close to six figures with no recourse. He now pays a retired title professional a monthly retainer to pull and review title on roughly 70 properties at a time. Calls it an investment, not an expense.

Michael's framing on action over knowledge stuck with us. His mentor told him that if everything were about knowledge, every librarian in America would be a multi-millionaire. If someone has lived a thing for three to five years and can teach you what they know in a month, paying them is a better return on your time than reading another book. He lost his dad at age 31, eight weeks after a melanoma diagnosis, which sharpened his view that becoming wealthy is mostly a math problem and time is the part you cannot buy back.

His own book, Retire on Rent, is $15 on Amazon and reads in 45 minutes. He also reads James Clear on systems and Jim Rohn on disciplines: you do not rise to your goals, you fall to your habits.

Find Michael at realestatedone4u.com. Book a strategy session, leave your checkbook at home, and he will ship you the book.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Southview is currently raising a $50 million Regulation D 506(c) fund with a $100,000 minimum, accredited only. They have been onboarded to the Charles Schwab alternative investments platform by invitation. The buy box is 500 to 2,500 acre tracts, almost always all-equity at close, with two thirds of the strategy in pine timberland and the remaining third in farmland, recreational, and other complementary uses on the same dirt.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The "four plus" model that beats public timber REITs. Most timber funds stop at the trees. Southview underwrites every parcel against soil quality and mill infrastructure first, but then layers two or three additional income streams: farmland cash rents to professional farmers, recreational hunting and camping leases, pine straw harvesting, cell phone tower ground leases, and opportunistic highest-and-best-use land sales. Public timber REITs that manage millions of acres are stuck at four to six percent total returns because they cannot operate at parcel level. Southview targets at least double that on most deals by staying in the 500 to 2,500 acre range where one team can actually run the property.
2. Why biological growth changes the math. The trees are growing while you sleep. The asset becomes more valuable every day regardless of what is happening in equities, interest rates, or inflation. Southview buys with all equity in most cases, which means there is no debt service pressure on a 12 to 20 year crop. That is the structural reason the fund can be patient enough to wait for the best exit on every individual tract.
3. Terry's deal sourcing network beats every screen. A third of his deals come from families winding down estates where heirs disagree on what to do with the land. A third come from operator groups he has known for decades where a relationship call gets him through the door. The rest come from properties he has already sold once or twice over 35 years that the current owner is ready to flip again. There is no Loopnet equivalent for the timberland Southview wants. The 35 year Rolodex is the moat.
4. Solar is on the watchlist, not in the portfolio. Northeast investors keep asking about solar field ground leases because the per acre numbers look attractive. Southview has stayed out for a specific reason. Solar leases get sold from operator to operator, panels become obsolete in 20 years, and the EPA cleanup obligation can land back on the landowner. Terry has watched it play out across several Georgia projects. The fund is keeping a close eye on it for a corner of future deployment, but right now the strongest market in the South for the actual timber product makes that the highest and best use of the dirt.

The advice that has stuck with John came from Terry: when you do not know what to do, go wash your car. Get busy. Self-reflection without action is just procrastination dressed up. Terry's anchors came from his dad ("do what you say you will do and never make excuses") and from John Dixon, a Marietta auction-business veteran who took Terry under his wing in 1995 and 1996 and taught him 1031 exchanges and conservation easements.

John pointed to the Founders podcast by David Senra as a regular listen for the way it pulls timeless lessons from historical entrepreneurs in under an hour an episode.

Best way to reach the team: southviewtimber.com or email John directly at johnjohn@southviewtimber.com. Terry is the operator on the dirt. John is the wealth-management-fluent partner walking accredited investors and RIAs through the asset class.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

That parallel-career path is the entire thesis behind Joel's book, Build Real Estate Wealth: Enjoy the Journey of Rental Property Investment. The target reader is someone who loves their vocation, hobby, or trade and has no interest in quitting it, but also has no plan in place for the years after they stop earning. Rental real estate is the second income stream that pays for the first one to feel less like an obligation.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Tenant selection starts before the property exists. Joel teaches landlord one-on-one inside his local investor association and his core lesson is that the universe of likely tenants is being narrowed by every decision you make before you ever pick up the phone: city, neighborhood, building type, condition, marketing channel, asking rent. By the time someone calls, you have already chosen what kind of human being lives in that unit. His income rule is three times take-home pay (not gross) when the tenant pays utilities, lower when you include utilities, and the screening philosophy is to make the applicant qualify to you, not the other way around. The one exception he and Ed both make: medical-related credit dings get worked with. Optional spending choices do not.
2. His son bought his first rental at 19 with seller financing. A week after high school graduation last June, the now-19-year-old closed on his first rental with 5% down, a 30-year amortization, 6% interest, an 8-year balloon, and $10,000 off a $135,000 asking price. No bank involved. Joel's broader point on capital stack: he bought his very first house with conventional savings-and-loan financing in 1978 and has barely used a conventional bank loan since outside of two larger apartment complexes acquired in the past several years. The other deals were owner-financed at low or no money down.
3. The hard-money model is hyper-local on purpose. Joel lends only in his county and the next county over, the area between Cleveland and Buffalo where he can drive to every property himself and meet every borrower at his local landlord association. He underwrites either a fix-and-flip exit to a retail buyer or a stabilize-then-refi exit to a portfolio lender. His most-undervalued service is the walkthrough itself. He asks questions during the visit that have caused multiple borrowers to walk away from the deal before signing anything. Sometimes the best loan is the loan you do not make.
4. The 60,000 square foot commercial mistake. Joel replaced the managing partner in a three-way ownership group on a roughly 60,000 square foot office building. The two anchor tenants combined for 75% of the rent roll: a catalog showroom corporate office and a well-known local restaurant and banquet operator. Both filed Chapter 11 within two months of his taking over, then converted to Chapter 7. Ten years of putting out fires followed. Joel eventually gave his ownership share to the other two partners just to be free of it. The lesson he carried out: with concentrated tenant rosters, dig deeper into the financial health of the major tenants before you close. The silver lining: he met his wife in that building. One of the realtor branch offices was a tenant, and as managing partner he kept a backup key ring there. She was the keeper of the keys.

The line that anchors Joel's whole approach to mentors: do not take advice from anyone you would not want to change places with. He recommends two older books that have aged well: Napoleon Hill's Grow Rich With Peace of Mind and Sterling Sill's How to Personally Profit from the Laws of Success. His own book covers everything from entity formation through eviction.

Joel's success definition: if he had to choose between losing all his money and losing all his relationships, he would lose the money in a heartbeat. The relationships will help him get the money back. The reverse is not true.

Find Joel at joelmillerbooks.com. The homepage has the full table of contents and sample writings from every chapter so you can see exactly what you are buying before you decide.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The model is the same as self-storage in concept but built entirely for contractors. Each yard is enclosed by panels concreted in place, with cameras, power, and on-demand portable offices and shipping containers. The panels move. If a tenant needs to expand from 1,500 square feet to double that, the panel between two yards moves over and the lease scales with the business. Long Yards builds out at $130 to $200 per square foot on tier-one land. Sites can launch in three months when no civil engineering or site plan approval is required.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why licensing beat franchising. Long Yards is SBA-approved (search the SBA directory for "Long Yards" just under Longhorn Steakhouse), but Chris cannot personally use SBA because he is Canadian and does not have a green card. The workaround built the model: he partners with American operators who qualify for SBA on the property, puts his own money into the deal, runs the construction himself (he was a general contractor for 10 years), and takes equity rather than franchise fees. The new entry point is the "Go Long or Go Home" $5,000 territory fee, fully refundable inside 14 days if the candidate does not like what they see. The intent is more partners and longer relationships, not a fast franchise license churn.
2. The buy box and the IP behind it. Five acres is the sweet spot, but the real number is net usable square footage. A 10-acre property can be a five-acre Long Yards if half of it is wetlands. Chris built an internal feasibility tool that grades any parcel in 30 seconds against a gross rent multiplier and spits out a tier classification. Tier one is ready to park on. Tier four needs full site plan approval. Long Yards is steering hard into tier one to ship in 90 days instead of two years. They also do not have to buy the land. SBA allows land arbitrage where Long Yards leases the dirt on a profit-share with the landowner and finances only the build.
3. The candidate profile is operator with skin in the game. SBA qualification (good credit, liquidity, net worth), real estate or business experience, and willingness to take some bruises. Chris is explicit that perfection is not the bar because he was not perfect either. His first location took door knocking and grinding to lease up. What disqualifies a candidate is more about culture fit and drive than resume polish, and because Long Yards puts its own equity in every deal, the screening is happening from both sides.
4. The 12-to-1-to-better mistake. Chris scaled his earlier general contracting business to 12 employees by saying yes to too much, mixing residential and commercial work he had no business mixing, and chasing growth instead of focus. The company shrank back to one. Him. Tool belt back on. Two years later, he was making more money than the 12-employee version with a fraction of the people because every system had been rebuilt from scratch around the highest-value work. The lesson he calls the most painful and most valuable of his career: systematize the business, be methodical about who you bring in, and be selective with the partners you take on. Easy to say, hard to do.

The advice line that stuck: say no quickly. Chris credits it to his early business coach Bruce Firestone, the founder of the Ottawa Senators. Time is the most valuable thing the operator has, and clarity on purpose makes the no-quick easy.

On the reading side, Chris is currently in Atomic Habits by James Clear and Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer for the partnership-equity work, and he tracks Alex Hormozi and Sam Ovens for operator content. The Long Yards leadership team runs on EOS rocks.

His success definition is operator-honest: no alarm clock, slow mornings, and freedom to choose who he does business with. With a wife at home and two daughters, he says he already won, he just has to remember to be grateful.

Find Chris at longyards.com or email seelong@longyards.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

• Grocapitus Website – https://www.grocapitus.com
• Free eBook: Location Magic – https://multifamilyu.com/lp/location-magic-ebook/
• Join Our Investor Club – https://multifamilyu.com/club

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Two thirds of the portfolio sits in SoCal, where Motiva targets 1960s and 1970s vintage in what Zihao calls the secondary market. Not Beverly Hills at a 3% cap. The other layer of the market, where a 70s product can still trade in the 5.5% range. The deal closing at the end of January when we recorded was going in at exactly that, with a 5-year underwriting horizon to a 7.5% return on cost (closer to a mid-8% cap rate after the equity goes in).

What landed in this conversation:

1. The capital stack is built for preservation, not maximum leverage. Motiva caps debt at roughly 65% LTV or LTC and fills the rest with family equity. They will occasionally stretch a bit higher if the rate is meaningfully cheaper, but never to the 80% range that broke a lot of bridge-financed Texas operators when rates moved. The 2022-2024 rate ramp was survivable because the leverage was already low when it started. Some deals were on floating debt during ground-up; the family paid those off rather than ride out the rate spike. Liquidity is the moat.
2. The deposit-based bank relationship beats agency debt. For the current close, Zihao shopped Fannie and Freddie at 6.5% to 6.75% and went elsewhere with the local bank: 6.25% with two years of interest-only, no prepayment penalty, and a quarter-point loan fee. The bank gets it because the parents' fashion business keeps significant deposits there. The tradeoff is recourse, which Motiva is comfortable with because of the family liquidity and the conservative leverage. On a $4.25 million asset with a $3 million loan, the recourse risk is essentially asking whether the property could be worth less than the loan. The honest answer is no.
3. The Pasadena door that explains the family office mindset. The first asset Zihao's parents bought is now 16 years old in the portfolio. Basis was $130 per door. Today's comparable would be around $430 per door. There is no equity in it anymore because they refinanced their original capital out long ago. They will not sell it. There is no fund clock to satisfy, no disposition fee to earn. Patient capital changes which exits make sense. Motiva has also sold properties inside three years when the appreciation curve and a 1031 buyer at the door made the math obvious. Underwrite to a 5-year exit, give yourself the flexibility to do either.
4. The mom test for due diligence. Zihao's first mentor was his mother. When he was younger and working the property management side of the family business, she told him he could never do enough due diligence on an acquisition. He thought that meant deeper checklists: leases, T-12, rent roll, the usual. Then she took him to a local shop next door to a building they were about to buy, sat down with the shop owner, and asked what the neighborhood was like and how that specific property and that specific neighbor were operated. That conversation was more useful than any T-12 review he had done. He still leads with it.

The COVID lessons came in two flavors. Floating-rate debt on two assets cost the family some sleep before they paid it off outright; he had never lived through a full rate cycle as an operator and assumed they would not move that fast. The second was supply chain. An electrical panel order for one ground-up came in 8 months later than promised. To compensate, Zihao flew to China and bought cabinets, countertops, and fixtures direct, saving 15 to 20% on each line item. Resourcefulness in chaos counts more than the original plan.

Zihao reads like a venture capitalist because the family office is run like a venture. Zero to One by Peter Thiel is on the list, alongside Elon Musk's first-principles thinking. Twelve people running half a billion in real estate is not a coincidence. The team operates flat, moves fast, and resists getting bigger because biggest usually means slowest.

Connect with Zihao on LinkedIn or at motivaholdings.com. Best fit for institutional partners, family offices, and accredited investors who want patient-capital multifamily exposure in supply-constrained coastal markets.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

That was 2021. In December 2021 Christian put $300,000 of raised capital into a $2,000,000 38-unit on seller-financing terms with 15% down. Eleven months later the appraisal came back at $4,100,000. He did a cash-out refi, bought out the partners for $600,000, and walked away with $350,000 in his pocket having put $0 of his own money in. He still owns the deal. It cash flows about $10,000 a month. Today he has more than 330 rental units across Washington State and Texas. Seventeen of his last twenty acquisitions were seller-financed.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The opportunity dictates the money, not the other way around. When Christian focused on his bank account, he could only think in fours: four units, four years. The shift was treating the opportunity as the input. A 38-unit at $2M that can be worth $3M with the right financing is worth finding $300K for. Finding $300K to make a million is a deal worth doing. You tailor the money to the opportunity. The cap on his thinking was self-imposed.
2. Long-term cash flowing fixed rate debt is the only test. Christian's screen has four pieces and they are non-negotiable. Multifamily. Long-term debt of at least 10 years. Fixed rate. Cash flows on day one. If those four are true, the asset will be worth more in a decade, period. No 10-year stretch in US history has seen real estate down on average. So buy what makes sense today, hold forever, and the appreciation arrives whether the market is up or down.
3. Stop saying the words "seller financing." If you open a conversation with an owner by asking whether they would carry the note, you are signaling that you have no money and want them to give you something. Talk about the deal first. Map the goalposts of what they need. Then propose specifics. Not "would you seller finance" but "I will give you $200,000 down today, $X per month for five years, and refinance you out." Same deal, completely different psychology. On a 25-unit in Stephenville, TX, he bought at $2M, 85%+ LTV at 5%, but the rents were 50% of market. So he ran reverse amortization for two years (paying 3.5%, the rest accruing to principal), added $50,000 to the principal balance, and still bought $400,000 below value while cash flowing the whole time.
4. Ten phone calls a day, 52 owners a year, zero money spent on lists. Christian's only two sourcing channels are Google Maps and Crexi. On maps he scans residential areas for big roofs (almost always small multifamily), pulls parcel data to find the owner, looks up phone numbers (free sites like OpenCorporates for LLCs), and calls. Ten calls a day equals one coffee meeting on average. Fifty-two owners who know him, like him, and trust him every year. He has never asked a single seller to sell. Every deal was a proposal in response to either an owner's call or a broker's call. The other channel is calling brokers on Crexi listings, analyzing the deal with them, submitting offers even on deals that will not work, because the offer puts you at the top of their call list for the next listing.

The single line of advice Christian credits with the biggest impact came from the worst mentor he ever had. "Don't add steps." If your goal is to be a real estate investor, getting a broker's license is not on the list. Buying a property is. The detour into qualifying yourself is the difference between an entrepreneur and a credentialed employee. He pointed to Ryan Reynolds' marketing company going from concept to delivered product in 48 hours as the operator example.

His reading list is short and weighted: the Bible first, then Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss for negotiation and mapping every party's win, then Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort for the Straight Line Method (listen to the audiobook for the tonality chapter). Christian's hack: read the physical book and listen to the audio at the same time. Retention goes up significantly and you read faster.

Find him on YouTube at Multifamily Strategy (over 100,000 subscribers) or his Dallas-Fort Worth property management company at apexam.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

His thesis is that franchising is the fastest path to wealth for someone who does not want to invent anything. The middle manager with operational chops, the realtor wanting a hedge against a slow housing market, the corporate refugee watching AI eat their job description: a franchise lets them execute someone else's proven playbook without inventing the product, the brand, or the marketing. The skill they bring is operating, not creating.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The asymmetrical buy box. Cliff's recommendation framework is the opposite of what most people assume franchise consultants push. Low cash up front, maximum leverage available, short ramp to breakeven, high margin (which immediately kills most food concepts), few employees, and highly scalable. That last filter is what eliminates most brick-and-mortar from his recommendations and elevates non-brick-and-mortar service brands. The HVAC van with vehicle number 103 painted on the side is the visible signal of a scaling operator: every new dollar of growth is a new tech and a new lease, not another six-figure store build.
2. Collective intelligence is the moat nobody calculates. Most buyers focus only on the brand and the unit economics. What they never weigh is that joining a 300-unit brand means there are 300 existing operators wearing the same logo who will answer the phone, take you to lunch, and tell you what is working on marketing, how they retain managers, how they hedge inflation, where they find labor in the tightest hiring market in history. That cannot be replicated by an independent operator. It is impossible to hang your own shingle and access that database of solved problems. Cliff treats it as the actual product the franchisor is selling, more than the brand itself.
3. The realtor-and-flipper hedge most agents miss. Every home inspection report in America has roofing at the top, drywall somewhere in the list, and a handful of aesthetic issues that are 100% present 100% of the time. Real estate agents and investors are sitting on top of natural demand for handyman, roofing, HVAC, junk removal, landscaping, staging, and water-fire-mold remediation. Nobody is asking them to swing a hammer. The franchise brings the playbook and the operational infrastructure, the operator brings business acumen. 1-800-Got-Junk did $750 million in revenue in a recent year with an average unit doing $2 million. Cliff has competing junk-removal brands in his book hitting $1.5 million per unit at 15 to 20% margins. Low skill, low capex, high recurring.
4. The minimum-wage manager mistake. Cliff once invested in a business whose fundamentals he loved but whose workforce he could not manage. He runs well with six-figure direct reports and middle managers, not with $15 to $20 an hour hourly staff. The business had to be shuttered. He recovered financially by keeping the entity open, using the capital losses to offset gains on a profitable subsequent investment, but the lesson is now baked into how he qualifies franchise buyers. He asks every prospect when they last managed a minimum-wage employee. The answer is usually "never." The next question, "and you want to manage 15 of them?" closes a lot of deals before they get made.

His best advice line: never take advice from people who are not where you want to be. He learned it teenage-young from a bad recommendation his accountant gave him about buying a Subway franchise in the early 1990s, before Subway had 4,000 locations. Accountants in his frame are paid to manage risk, not to embrace it. He still uses accountants and lawyers, just only for the work he hired them for. He does not ask them whether a deal is good.

On his nightstand right now: Atomic Habits by James Clear (he calls Clear one of the best at distilling complex ideas into sound bites), and The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. Cliff's own book, Beyond the Brand, is coming Q1-Q2 2026 with Forbes.

His view on the labor market is worth sitting with: AI is going to crush the white-collar tier in the next decade and the pendulum will swing violently to the trades. He believes the average plumber and HVAC tech will be making $250+ per hour and that the kids who chose vocational school over $200,000 of liberal arts debt will be the operators with capital and time.

His podcast, Pursuit of Profit, interviews founders of franchise concepts and a small number of franchisees doing 5x the average revenue. Find him at franocity.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The firm name comes from a dog. GSP is German Shorthaired Pointer. Ron has two, his other partner Wade has had one his entire life, and the breed's combination of high energy, focus, and loyalty maps to how they wanted the brand to feel.

What landed in this conversation:

1. The buy box is a fully-rebuilt single family at $130,000 all-in. Acquisition runs about $30,000 on the deeply distressed properties they target, construction adds roughly $100,000. ARV used to land at $165,000 to $185,000. Today it is more often $185,000 to $250,000, with the bulk under $250,000. The under-$250,000 single family is what Peter calls a scarce commodity: less than 3% of new homes built in the past year were priced under $250,000. You cannot get the land cheap enough and you cannot build cheap enough. So the only meaningful supply of that price point comes from redeveloping existing housing stock. 2BR rents go for about $1,650, 3BR rents from $1,650 up to $2,100.
2. The hospitals are the secret sauce, and they only realized it in retrospect. When the team mapped the portfolio for their latest fund launch, roughly 90% of their assets fell within a defined radius of major hospitals. This was not by design at first. It became the design once they saw it. Hospitals do community investment: they own surrounding land, they support local programs, they care about the trajectory of the neighborhood because they cannot move. So the area around a hospital is by definition trending in the right direction. That is the geographic filter. Once they recognized it, they layered it deliberately on top of every new acquisition.
3. Three sourcing channels, in this order. Auction sites first (Ashland Auctions in Baltimore is the primary one, very local, almost unknown outside Maryland). Wholesalers and listing agents second, particularly the wholesaler who calls and says "this one is pretty bad, you probably are not interested," because that is exactly what GSPREI wants and most investors do not. Direct-to-owner third, which Peter handles personally because his commercial brokerage background made him comfortable on the phone. The last off-market Philadelphia property they closed came from one phone call he made after a listing agent stopped returning him. The owner picked up in two rings and they had a great conversation.
4. The bus-stop garage fire mistake. They once bought a property in a Baltimore location they liked, in an area heading the right direction, with the one variable they did not weight enough: it was directly next to a bus stop. Transient foot traffic created constant management headaches. The breaking point was someone setting a fire in the garage. They sold to an LLC that converted it to commercial use. The lesson Peter took: "location, location, location" is a multi-dimensional filter. A great street can still be the wrong corner of a great street. They underwrite both long-term rental potential and short-term salability for every acquisition now, because the second test would have caught the bus-stop property earlier.

The best piece of advice Peter has ever received came from his commercial broker mentor early in his career. The mentor held up his phone and said, when I started this business, my own mentor told me, if you just pick this thing up, you are going to be successful. Peter has built a same-day-return policy into the firm. Investors have stopped working with operators they liked because their emails and calls took weeks to come back. The phone is the moat.

His foundation books, given to him on day one by the CEO of the firm where he started after college, were Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and the audio of The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale. The book that lives on his nightstand and that he goes back to repeatedly is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. He treats real estate as three buckets: capital, acquisitions, and execution. Carnegie applies to all three.

GSPREI's slogan: redeveloping essential homes for essential workers in essential communities. Many of their tenants are nurses (the hospital proximity again), teachers, and city workers. Reach Peter at gsprei.com, or schedule directly through the site.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

The lunch was with a retired commercial banker named Randy in Tampa Bay. Randy had done loans for mobile home and RV park operators for the last decade of his banking career and realized he was sitting on the wrong side of the P&L. He had three parks of his own by the time he and Kevin met. He spent two hours explaining why the asset class beat multifamily, particularly on tenant stickiness (residents own their homes; many stay 20, 30, 50+ years) and management intensity (the homeowner calls the plumber, not the operator). Kevin left the lunch and committed to buying his first park. Took him a year. Closed in 2012. The next 13 years built Sunrise into a firm that has owned more than 50 communities across 18 states, currently holds 17 to 18 with about 3,500 lots, and is operating Fund IV at $100 million.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why they stopped selling. Kevin's biggest professional regret is selling six or seven of the best parks they ever owned. Returns were grand slams. Investors loved the front end. But every sale triggered recapture plus capital gains, every refill required finding a new asset Kevin knew less about than the one he sold, and they were not making more mobile home parks. Sunrise restructured Fund IV around long-term holds, continuous cash-out refinances, and 1031s when sales are unavoidable. Their investor profile shifted with the strategy. They are no longer a fit for IRR-driven buyers chasing two-to-three-year turnarounds. They are a fit for investors who already have wealth and want consistent quarterly cash flow without a tax burden every three years.
2. The four lines of the parking buy box. Sunrise looks at roughly 100 parking deals to find one that fits, and they have only bought one a year for the past five years. The first filter is that parking must be the lowest use the lot will ever see. Meaning whatever the asset is doing today, eventually that footprint becomes worth dramatically more as something else, and Sunrise underwrites zero of that future value. Today's parking economics have to carry the deal on their own. The second filter is inelastic demand: the asset must be the closest parking to whatever drives the local foot traffic. Their Clearwater Beach garage is one block from the sand and covered. Their downtown Charlotte garage is a stone's throw from the Spectrum Center (where the Hornets play). Their downtown Phoenix garage sits next to the Maricopa County Courthouse (second largest courthouse in the country) with Phoenix Suns and Diamondbacks stadiums two blocks away, plus a full entertainment district across the street. The third filter is 24/7-C: daytime, nighttime, weekends, all generating demand. The fourth filter is that office cannot be the dominant demand driver, because that is a problem nobody knows how to solve and nobody is willing to underwrite.
3. The Charlotte deal as a master class in distressed unwind. The Charlotte garage Sunrise just closed came packaged in a CMBS loan that was in special servicing, but the garage itself was not in distress. The garage shared a parcel ID with a Wake Forest University office building (where Wake Forest had given back 70% of its lease) and a Doubletree hotel. Three properties, one loan, one parcel. Kevin's team submitted a revised plat while under contract, lined up a separate buyer for the office (who is now converting it to 280 market-rate apartments at essentially zero basis on the building) and sold the ground lease to the existing Doubletree operator. Sunrise walked out with the garage they wanted, at a deep discount, with the office and hotel risk handed to operators better suited to it. They get paid as real estate professionals to solve complex problems. That deal was the textbook.
4. The 2008 lesson Kevin would unsay. He spent three years post-crash hunkered on his own bleeding portfolio and shut himself off from the broader market. He knew the adage about buying when there is blood in the streets. He could not act on it when it was his own blood. If he could rewind, he would have pulled his boots back up faster and started buying in 2009 or 2010, when the discounts on the table were the largest most operators will see in their careers. He still bought heavily once he started, but the missing 24 months were the best window of the cycle.

The mentor line Kevin credits with reshaping how he thinks about scale came from Rod Cleave, who showed him that staffing is an asset, not a liability. Bigger is not better for its own sake, but a certain scale is necessary to hire people who are better than you at specific functions, which is what creates a business that runs without you. That reframe was the difference between Kevin running 122 single family homes himself in chaos and Kevin running a $100M fund with a team that lets him coach his eight-year-old and his eleven-year-old's activities and disappear to the boat without anything breaking.

The book he gifts most often is The Go-Giver by Bob Burg. Short, sweet, high-impact, hard to find a Sunrise staff member who has not received a copy. Kevin's own book, The Cashflow Investor, is on Amazon and is built to be a reference manual rather than a cover-to-cover read.

Reach Kevin at investwithsunrise.com for the current Fund IV offering, or find him on LinkedIn under his unusual last name (B-U-P-P).

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!

Elevista - Speed as a Service™
Elevista Connect is the first AI-powered lead conversion system built for real estate investors.

🎧 Subscribe to Real Estate Underground for weekly insights on building wealth through real estate, without sacrificing your sanity.

Additional Resources:

• Clark St Capital -> Passive real estate investments for busy business owners and executives
• Elevista -> AI SaaS for real estate investors
• Clark St Academy on YouTube -> Learn how to invest in real estate

Social Media:

• LinkedIn -> Ed Mathews (President at Clark St and Elevista)

Heads up: If you find this week's book intriguing and you buy using our link, we receive a small commission that helps support the show. Thank you!