As a house mover and flipper Jason was making a nice living. He was feeling like his business was more of a job, and wanted to build some generational wealth for his children and their children. At that time, his team and himself started looking for apartment buildings to syndicate. They found and closed on a 94 unit community in Louisville, Kentucky. Hear his case study of his first ever apartment syndication. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
Best Ever Tweet:
Jason Yarusi Real Estate Background:
- Managing Partner at Oak Capital Partners
- Currently owns a 94 unit apartment complex in Kentucky and flips 10 houses a year in New Jersey
- His family heavy construction business, W A Building Movers, has elevated over 1600 homes to help restore the New Jersey Coastline since Hurricane Sandy
- His family has moved homes for over 50 years
- Based in Westfield, New Jersey
- Say hi to him at www.wabuildingmovers.com
- Best Ever Book: Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Made Possible Because of Our Best Ever Sponsors:
Fund That Flip provides short-term fix and flip loans to experienced investors. If you’re looking for a reliable funding partner, their online platform makes the entire process super easy, and they can get you funded in as few as 7 days.
They’ve also partnered with best-selling author, J Scott to provide Bestever listeners a free chapter from his new book on negotiating real estate. If you’d like to improve your bestever negotiating skills, visit www.fundthatflip.com/bestever to download your free negotiating guide today.
TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluff.
With us today, Jason Yarusi. How are you doing, Jason?
Jason Yarusi: I’m doing great, Joe, thank you so much for having me.
Joe Fairless: Yeah, my pleasure, nice to have you on the show. We have got a treat for all of your multifamily syndicators out there, or any Best Ever listener who wants to be a syndicator. Jason is going to talk to us about a 94-unit apartment community that he recently purchased in Louisville, Kentucky. A little bit more about Jason – he is a managing partner at Oak Capital Partners. He currently owns that 94-unit apartment community and flips ten houses a year in New Jersey.
His family heavy construction business, W A Movers has elevated over 1,600 homes to help restore the New Jersey coastline since Hurricane Sandy. He’s based in Westfield, New Jersey. With that being said, Jason, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Jason Yarusi: Sure. Thanks, Joe. I appreciate you having me on, of course. So yeah, I’m in New Jersey; I come from a heavy construction background. We’re five generations in construction, with our focus being in moving and lifting buildings. So for the last couple decades that’s what we’ve been doing day in and day out. My father really pushed along, and when hurricane Sandy happened, it really became apparent there were a lot of homeowners in need that needed to raise their house to become FEMA-compliant, and mainly just to get homeowners back home. So it’s been very hot and heavy for those last few years, and we’ve been pushing ourselves more into real estate just to better diversify ourselves and create passive income and generational wealth and all those other avenues.
So we have been flipping homes here locally, and then looking at larger apartment complexes out of state, in markets that better met the [unintelligible [00:03:05].10]
Joe Fairless: So you’re moving homes, you’re flipping homes and you’re buying apartment communities. How do you determine where your focus goes?
Jason Yarusi: It’s been a learning curve… It sure has, I’m not gonna lie. I think we both know the term “where focus goes, energy flows”, right? So it’s definitely been a learning curve. Of course, W A Building takes a lot of time, it’s a very unique niche, so I’ve grown the business where we’ve been able to bring in team members that can handle a lot of the components of the business, but there’s still parts of it that I haven’t been able to let go, even if I’ve wanted to, because of this unique nature of the business. But I’ve found ways to block my time in a way that I can put my energy to there at certain times, and then push it to the other avenues – the flipping business, and also now the large apartment business, as allowable.
Joe Fairless: So you’ve got the moving business, you’ve got the flipping business… Those two businesses make you decent money; why move into apartments?
Jason Yarusi: The easiest part is that not everybody is moving their house twice, so I’m currently always having to go out and do a new project, and I’m constantly looking for a new project, and it’s hard work. So I’m always looking to buy properties or move properties or lift properties; it’s basically a job, and what we wanted to do was buy properties that help us — we can improve the value and have them help us grow that wealth factor that can not only help me, hopefully my kids, their kids etc. down the line.
Joe Fairless: Okay, understood. So the first two – the flipping and the moving of homes – don’t have reoccurring income, whereas the apartments, once you buy something, then in theory it will have reocurring income and you don’t have to constantly be eating what you kill.
Jason Yarusi: Correct. Assuming that you buy right and set yourself up correctly, and find the right property that’s able to perform in the way that you hopefully [unintelligible [00:05:06].19] or make the corrections as needed.
Joe Fairless: Okay, alright… So now that’s a segue to 94-unit apartment community in Louisville; you’re in New Jersey – how did you find it? Tell a story about it, please.
Jason Yarusi: Sure. We started focusing on markets that had a number of things. We wanted something that had growth, and the growth was happening. It wasn’t aggressive, there weren’t some huge peaks, but 2%, 3% over the last 10-15 years; has jobs and job diversity. It has UPS, FedEx, Amazon, the University of Louisville, it has a ton of tourism for the Kentucky Derby… So it has a lot of action there and it’s not based on just one different sector; you have Bourbon, you have a million different things pushing that area.
Beyond that, I had seemingly boots on the ground, and that was I had friends that grew up with me in New Jersey, very good friends that their family is from there, they moved back there… And my sister randomly found her way there over ten years ago and works for GE there in the market. So I knew Louisville, even though I’m not there day in and day out, and I just had seen this growth and this transformation that continued to happen there. So that was one of the major reasons that we chose that market and said “Okay, we’re gonna look at this market and we’re gonna go after B and C assets that are 75 to 100 units, that have some kind of inefficiency to it”, whether it be on the management side or the property side, built 1970 or newer, and in certain submarkets where there wasn’t a lot of new apartments coming online within the immediate or the next few years.
Joe Fairless: Okay. 75 to 100 units – how did you pick that window of units?
Jason Yarusi: When we were looking at it, it was a mind barrier at first, because we had just had rentals, and the rentals were duplexes, triplexes, and to make that jump, it seemed so aggressive. But as we got our mind around to that, we realized that when we’re at 75, or really pushing to 100 allowed us for the economies of scale to be able to have a management staff, have an on-site resident manager, hire maintenance staff… Also, leveraging got easier, because at 100 units, if we have 10 units vacant, we’re only 10% vacant. But if I have a fourplex and I have one unit vacant, well now I’m 25% vacant, and the mortgage companies are now looking particularly at the property first and foremost and making sure the property is performing, and then now I can focus on myself. So that was the first avenue there.
Joe Fairless: Why not 400 units, or 200 units?
Jason Yarusi: Good question. We’re open to go bigger now, but I think it was that first hurdle that I made myself into, and also once I get past 200, from what I heard – I didn’t have this experience, but I was competing with a much larger player, maybe a REIT and other institutional funds that were allowed to buy stuff at more aggressive rates than we were able to afford, because we are syndicating the deals, and we’re looking to make certain returns for our investors.
Joe Fairless: Okay. So what types of returns were you looking for when you were searching for properties?
Jason Yarusi: We wanted to be able to get into the point where we were going to have an investor come in, we were looking to offer a preferred return of 8% and cashflow for that, so we were looking at cap rates that we wanted to be at 7% or 8%, and cash-on-cash we wanted to be at 10%. So we were not into the best areas of Louisville, but we were not into the worst areas of Louisville. It’s basically a blue-collar area where you may have some people working on the line… It’s gonna have some crime, just like any area would, but it’s just a moderate crime level; maybe they’ll have some vandalism or other points from time to time… And it has strong population growth and it has very low vacancy for the area, even though there’s 600 different apartments just in our general blocks, that’s at 3% for the market right there.
Joe Fairless: You said 1970 or newer… Why not 1965, 1960 or 1980?
Jason Yarusi: You know, when we were looking at just the construction that was built in that area, that seemed to be like when there was a lot of boom in building for that particular area, so we were searching there for that, and different property types that actually fit the submarket we were in. So we found that a 1980 construction in that submarket it was almost eliminating a lot of the properties there… Just from moving homes and lifting homes, of course, the older the property gets, the more problems we always have, so we put 1970 here as a safeguard, just so we’re not running into a lot of issues that may come up with older properties.
Joe Fairless: Quick example, what would be an example of an older property when you’re lifting a house…? Let’s pretend you’ve got a 1970 build house and a 1960 build house; what would be some potential problems with the ’60 that you might not get with the ’70?
Jason Yarusi: There’s different framing techniques and there’s one that back at the time they used to call it balloon framing. What it means is actually the walls of the house would get built straight onto the foundation, and then the floor would get built straight onto the foundation. SO the floor was almost separate from the walls; so when I go to lift a house like that, if I was just to lift it underneath the floor, the floor would just lift up by itself and the walls would stay down to the foundation… So of course no one would be happy with that model. We had to lift that in a different way where we tie it together.
Well, somewhere down the line someone came up with the idea to move to Western framing or conventional framing, where they actually build on the [unintelligible [00:10:22].02] they’ll put the flooring on top of that and they’ll build the walls, so it’s tied together.
Joe Fairless: And in terms of … Because you’re not picking up and moving the apartment community — God willing, you’re not doing that, so in terms of the ’60 versus ’70, why ’70 versus ’60 there?
Jason Yarusi: We came to the point where we may — and it still happens even in the ’70s constructions, some of the wiring may be different, so we may have some upgrades for wiring where we’re running into the point where one of our properties — it was missed during all the inspections, but it had aluminum wiring in there, and that’s made that a little bit difficult. We had to change up our insurance package on the complex, certain things that are now becoming a norm, GFI’s and other points were already installed on the building, where our funding and our financing for it required that, so it was one of the cap-ex items that we had to tackle day one when we got onto the property. We had a timeline of six months that that had to be part of it.
So the older the properties, the more non-conforming they are to today’s standards, especially in fire codes and other safety issues. So the farther we go back, the more we’re gonna run into that. There wasn’t many codes in those days, it was just kind of the Wild West.
Joe Fairless: During the due diligence – I know you were doing a lot of due diligence on the property and the inspection period – who was responsible for the identifying aluminum wiring? It seems like that usually comes with the property condition assessment.
Jason Yarusi: We have five buildings within the 94 units, and one of the five buildings has 14 units; it was actually missed on all points, between the property management inspection and the initial insurance inspection.
Joe Fairless: Wow.
Jason Yarusi: So it was missed three times. Only after the fact was it found.
Joe Fairless: How was it found?
Jason Yarusi: They came back for — this was the pre-inspection, prior to closing, and then it was a post-inspection, post-closing, with a few items that had to be tackled, and they discovered it then.
Joe Fairless: How does that change your projections with insurance costs?
Jason Yarusi: Funny enough, we are now into a different package that is actually running with the same coverage, but we had to split off that building from the other four buildings. So under the same LLC, we now have two insurance packages. One just for that building, and then one for the other four buildings. It’s within the couple hundred dollars. It [unintelligible [00:12:35].15] because that package that we currently had to start the property was canceling at a timeline that we had to get this other program in place.
Joe Fairless: Okay. Now more high-level – you said you were looking for opportunities that had upside, or run inefficiently… What’s the business plan for this property?
Jason Yarusi: Well, we were very patient and we’re continuing to be patient in finding properties. This one – the owner of the property is actually in his 90s and the kids (I’ll call them kids) are in their 60s, and they have 1,000 units in Kentucky, and this was their one large one; a lot of the other portfolio was made up of single-family homes. The kids are not in the business and weren’t in the business, and they thought this would be the easiest one to move off. Maybe it was the most troubled, because it was the largest one.
There were many different elements here. The rents were substantially under market; they were between $75 to $100/unit under market. They weren’t charging application fees. They had a number of pets in the units – they were actually not allowing pets and they still had pets in the units, where all the other apartment complexes around have a $300 non-refundable deposits and pet fees.
They currently have two basements that were just used as storage, or just random items [unintelligible [00:13:49].09] We’ve taken them out and we’re putting in storage units in the basements. We’re gonna be able to get, based on comps in the area, $35/unit for each storage unit. We’re doing that as a test, because we have room to build another 24 down there.
It is an owners-paid property for utilities, so a lot of our play there is that we’re losing a ton of revenue just on our utility purchases, because being based in the ’70s, you have high flush toilets (3.8 gallon toilets); we’re taking those out for all low-flush toilets, we’re changing out showerheads, faucets, looking to reduce our water bill by an estimated 30%. That’s in the process right now.
The boilers – two of the five buildings are on boilers, and they’re rough, to say kindly, so we are replacing those boilers, which are probably running at best about 40% with 82% boilers. And lastly, we’re changing out all of the windows, which are our biggest cap-ex item there, because they’re already old. It’s brick facades, old windows with the aluminum frame right there. Once we do improve our heat, that the heat is not just billowing out the old windows.
Joe Fairless: I normally would question the window changing, but since it’s an all bills paid property and you’re paying the expenses for utilities, that makes a lot of sense.
Jason Yarusi: Yeah. They’re the old guillotine windows too, so for a lot of these it’s just a safety factor as well, and we really wanted to get these out. Our plan is to resell at year five, and this is really gonna help us on the resale, as well.
Joe Fairless: By doing these improvements, will that help your insurance go down at all?
Jason Yarusi: We’ve also put in a few other things in here. We are in an area where we may have some conditional tenants, meaning that their threshold for their application may be on the borderline, where were put other points in like lease lock and some other things to help on the application side that is helping our insurance. There’s a green initiatives program there that has just been implemented. I believe it was trying to be implemented right when Trump came into candidacy, and it kind of got back-burned for that… So it’s just being put in place now; they’re trying to find a way into that program, and we walked in the door and we said “Hey, do you have anything like this?” So we are looking to be the guinea pig in that program, and that could bring us a lot of tax credits back if we do all these points to basically make the property more green.
Joe Fairless: Okay. How much money did you have to raise, and how did you raise it?
Jason Yarusi: It was all hands on deck, that’s how we raised it… But we learned a lot, it was an awesome experience. Our top market was 750k, and we raised 725k, and basically we were able to roll some of the cap-ex items that we were gonna do on the property into the loan we got. It started with all family and friends, and that’s how we really got out there. We had been talking about what we were trying to do for months; we were going out there, telling people that “Hey, we are looking to buy apartment complexes. We don’t have one, but if we do, this is the kind of apartment complex we’re going to be looking for and this is the returns that we are going to be offering when we do find this apartment.”
It was many different layers. We were trying to make people comfortable with the idea that “Oh, here’s Jason who does heavy construction, does some house flipping and now he’s buying apartment complexes.” So “How do we get them comfortable with the model?” and for that we wanted to set them up with a mock deal of how our deal was going to be structured once we did get into that.
So when we did find this property, going back to them for the second time, it wasn’t that hurdle of having to show them what we’re doing; they already knew we were doing this, and now we had a property that was gonna fit that model.
It was interesting, we had 13 people that were in on this first one, which is awesome; we’re really excited for it. We had a lot of people who were super interested, but there were a lot of different barriers for that. We had one gentleman who I believe he had started a business and he didn’t realize his tax burden was gonna be so high; he had committed money to put in for this, and I think he felt bad telling us what had happened. So we were about three weeks out and all of a sudden he told us that, and I think he was putting in a pretty good amount of money, so that of course a surprise. It happens, so we just rolled with it, figured it out and got to the finish line.
Joe Fairless: How did you figure it out?
Jason Yarusi: We just got the word back out there. We had constantly been talking about this, knowing that this isn’t gonna be the only one, so for that, we are looking to do more… So we were telling people that we really wanna continue this growth and this process, so even when we hit our raise mark, we were still talking to people as we were looking for future projects, so we were able to just go to other people that were interested.
Joe Fairless: What’s the least and what’s the most anyone put into it?
Jason Yarusi: 125k and 25k.
Joe Fairless: Okay. And did you invest alongside with them?
Jason Yarusi: I did. I felt like that was really important, especially on the first run here. They need to know that I’m committed to this, too. This wasn’t something I’m trying, this is something I’m committed to doing and I’m committed to accomplishing, and I feel super confident in the property. I know it’s a great property, we’re really excited about the property and how it’s gonna perform.
Joe Fairless: And how much did you put into it?
Jason Yarusi: I put in 100k.
Joe Fairless: Okay. And did they ask that question when you were talking about the deal?
Jason Yarusi: You know, it was a mixed bag. I think the biggest question I got — we’ll say half did and half didn’t, believe it or not. The one question I got throughout was “Who’s gonna run this property?” That was an important question. We use a third-party professional management there; they currently have 5,500 units under management, and that was one of the biggest pieces that we put in place prior to looking for this property, was making sure we have a team on the ground when we got there.
Joe Fairless: For someone who wants to do apartment syndication but has not yet, what advice would you give them?
Jason Yarusi: We set ourselves up in a market that we felt very comfortable with based on the metrics. We wanted to have strong population growth – there was at least people moving in over what was moving out, [unintelligible [00:19:40].24] We wanted there to be jobs, and all the jobs weren’t tied up into one sector. We didn’t have 20% or more tied into one different area, and if that employer left we were gonna have some big dip.
And then the big thing was to put together a team. We’re not there, so we wanted to find, based on referrals and making a lot of calls and making a lot of entryways and meeting people on Bigger Pockets and on different sites, we started finding property management companies that specifically dealt what we were looking for. They don’t manage just 1,000 single-family homes, they were not just into new construction; they were a management company that particularly focused on B and C apartment complexes and they were very comfortable with that niche, and even more importantly, they had over 5,000 units under management, so if I got 94 units, it wasn’t gonna be this big hurdle for them; it was just something they could put right into play with the tools they already had there.
And the next piece is we actually found that deal with the property manager, but we did keep meeting brokers, and that’s really helped us now finding more properties in the area.
Joe Fairless: It sounds like the team, in particular the property management company – you’ve gone back to that a couple of times; that was important stuff to get this deal done.
Jason Yarusi: Yeah, it’s definitely for us the most important part, because they’re your face there, they’re your representation there, they’re putting together the plan that you have in your vision for making this property work, they’re the ones implementing that plan… So if they’re not comfortable with this property or with the program, then you need to move on to the next.
Joe Fairless: Got it. How do you make sure that you’re finding the right management company?
Jason Yarusi: It was mostly trial and error, but we called a lot and we started talking to different management companies, just finding out their contacts, and for this management company in particular, a lot of other management companies were saying that “It’s not our niche”, but this management company did this. Beyond that, we talked to other investors that were there in the market that were using them for their experience for them, and then lastly we went out there and met this management company. We actually were vetting them just based on the other properties we were looking at.
We want them to really give us their honest feedback, and that’s probably the most important thing – maybe you can go in there and improve rents, maybe you can go in there and improve the look of the property, but most likely the property is gonna operate at an efficient cost to run the property, and for them to be honest with us, not tell us that it’s gonna cost us $2,000/unit just to make the property look good.
If it costs $3,700 per unit per year to run the property – great; that’s what we wanna know, because we’re not expecting you’re gonna run it for any less, and we can always factor that in.
Joe Fairless: Okay. Your initial projections versus what the property management company said after they looked at your projections – what changed, if anything?
Jason Yarusi: I would say we were very conservative and we’re still conservative going into the deal, just for most we’re putting in a lot of different [unintelligible [00:22:38].04] because it was our first one. That can be a good and a bad thing, because if you make it so conservative on your point where you’re so outside the box you’re never gonna be able to get into the property, on the same part we were bringing other investors’ money in there; it was our first one we were going into, so we wanted to have that step where we had just a lot of comfort in there.
One of the biggest things, we didn’t anticipate that we would be able to increase rents as much as we’ve actually been able to. We’re actually $19 over where we anticipated even when we bought the property, which is great; we’re really happy with that.
So far – we’re only a couple months in, but so far the changes with procedure out there, we’ve been able to keep our expenses at where we think we should be operating… A little bit over where we should be operating, but definitely not in the top line where this property could run if it was running very poorly like it was before.
Joe Fairless: Based on your experience as a real estate investor in general, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Jason Yarusi: You have to get started; you just have to get started. I would say that you’re always afraid of the unknown, but you can’t let it stop you from taking a step, because you’ll realize that you’ll be so scared of something bad that’s gonna happen, but most likely that bad thing never happens, and when it does happen, it’s usually not as bad as you had imagined it. So for us, jumping into this large apartment complex – it was a huge thing, it was a big step for us, but if we hadn’t set up the steps and just kind of jumped off the cliff into it, we would never get there.
Joe Fairless: Your investor or investors who invested 125k – I’m not looking for names, obviously, but how did you meet them? And I ask for Best Ever listeners who are wondering how they can find investors who invest six figures.
Jason Yarusi: Sure. High school. One was from high school. Another one had started looking into doing this himself and was very curious of going out there and buying apartment complexes and was studying as much as he could, but he was just so busy with his job, he had just had two kids, and he saw this as a great avenue where he could also learn a lot about the process, too.
Joe Fairless: Okay. How did you structure it with them? You said 8% preferred return, and then what else?
Jason Yarusi: We did an 8% preferred return, and how we’re looking to go forward with our deals – 8% preferred return with a 70/30 split, and if we hit a market of 30% IRR, it would drop to a 50/50 split in the back-end.
Joe Fairless: Got it. Simple enough. Are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?
Jason Yarusi: I hope so.
Joe Fairless: I think you are. First though, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.
Break: [00:25:20].07] to [00:26:21].18]
Joe Fairless: Okay, best ever book you’ve read?
Jason Yarusi: It’s always the last book, but Rich Dad, Poor Dad of course is the one that really sets your mind into the right motion, so we’ll stick with that.
Joe Fairless: What’s the last book you read?
Jason Yarusi: Actually, Jason Buzi “Smash Your Alarm Clock!” It doesn’t have much actual stuff, but — well, I guess let’s not say it the wrong way… It just shows that it’s the same thing – you’ve gotta take steps and do it, and you’re gonna get kicked and knocked down a hundred different times, but you’re not out there running into a field with bullets; you’re doing something that you hopefully wanna be doing. So take the steps, go after whatever that wants to be – you wanna open a franchise, or you just wanna get a better job. You just have to take steps and take action.
Joe Fairless: What’s the best ever deal you’ve done that we haven’t talked about already?
Jason Yarusi: You know, actually we’re flipping homes and we do marketing, and the marketing brings a lot of deals that just don’t fit our specific model, and we decided that we were gonna start wholesaling deals. We just had a double close on a $111,000 wholesale, which was a pretty large one that we weren’t even marketing specifically to this area, and it just happened to be really one that a lot people really wanted to jump on.
Joe Fairless: That’s great, so $111,000 wholesale – is that your profit, or is that the price that you’re wholesaling it for?
Jason Yarusi: That’s the profit.
Joe Fairless: You made six figures on the wholesale?
Jason Yarusi: We made six figures on the wholesale, and the great story here for this one is the homeowner needed to get out. They’re making a good amount of money, so we were able to buy it at a great price for them. This is a great play for the back-end for the B2C, whoever is buying this transaction, because they are now able to go in there and they have a couple options. It works still as a rental; there is a price for square foot in this market, they’re getting $500/square foot for a renovated unit, so they have a ton of upside onto it, and if I was working that area, man, I would even think to keep it… But it wasn’t the right fit, so you just had to make a quick move.
Joe Fairless: Oh, I’m sorry that that happened to you… [laughter] You had to make the move, I’m so sorry… [laughter] $110,000 profit…
Jason Yarusi: Yeah… I would say that if I ever got anything close to this again I’d be shocked…
Joe Fairless: Yeah. Well hey, you really just need one, and then do something smart with that money. How did you get that lead?
Jason Yarusi: Direct mail. One of our team members actually went out there and met with them, and then came back and talked to me, and I went and met with them again, and we put it under contract… I felt it was a really good number for them and us; it was a win/win.
Joe Fairless: What’s a mistake you’ve made on a transaction?
Jason Yarusi: You always make mistakes, so you learn from them. I actually did make a mistake on one of our flips, where — I’ll give you two quick ones. We bought a house, and it was a hoarder house, and I thought a room was a bathroom that I couldn’t get to… There were like Christmas lights that were running in the house together, and piles of trash… It ended up being no bathroom on the first floor, so that was a whole different charge I had to put in there.
And another one was a heavy construction one when we were moving a house that we were working on a part of our flip; just going back to that framing issue, I missed on lining up a foundation based on the framing, just on tying too many projects, so that’s why you had to put more team members and more checks in place.
Joe Fairless: What’s the best ever way you like to give back?
Jason Yarusi: I lost a lot of friends in high school, all from just things that were accidents, and were very unrelated, they happened for a number of different years… It was just a very weird time where you just didn’t know how to handle it. And there’s a group that was started, and one of the friends who passed away, his father is chairman on the board; it’s called Imagine, and they’re a center for basically grief and loss coping. I’m sorry, I’m not giving it the best run there, but it allows children and parents who have been faced with this element of the community to come together and be able to talk about it… Because lots of times, if you’re a kid who’s 13 or 14 and you lost someone very close, or you even lost a parent prematurely, you go back to school and you don’t know how to react, other people don’t know how to react to you.
This community now has 7,000 across New Jersey, and it’s running in about — I don’t wanna say anything incorrectly, but it has two different facilities and carries a bunch of different counties where it allows people to have a base where they can get that support.
Joe Fairless: And how can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you?
Jason Yarusi: Sure, you can see more about us for our house lifting at wabuildingmovers.com, or you can e-mail me at info@oakcappartners.com.
Joe Fairless: Cool. Jason, thank you for being on the show. Thanks for talking to us about this first apartment syndication – 94 units in a state that you don’t live in, but you did have familiarity with, and you did qualify it based on predetermined criteria. How you found it and what you look for and how you were able to close the deal – family, friends, a property management partnership, and a bunch of resourcefulness along the way.
Thanks for being on the show, thanks for sharing your story. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon!
Jason Yarusi: Thank you so much, Joe. It was great!
