Zach is the CEO & Co-Founder of Rise48 Equity, an experienced Multifamily Apartment investor, #1 Best Selling Author of “Success Habits of Super Achievers,” and the Host & Founder of The Phoenix Multifamily Association. His passion for providing knowledge about financial freedom inspires him to provide passive income opportunities for investors and alike to use their time for more meaningful events such as spending time with families. Currently, he has now 420 units across five properties in Phoenix, Mesa, and Scottsdale worth over $48MM. In today’s episode, Zach will be going into details about his journey and challenges as a Multifamily Apartment investor and his advice on how he got to where he is today.
Zach Haptonstall Real Estate Background:
- Founder & President of ZH Multifamily
- He is lead sponsor, general partner, and equity owner of over $35,000,000 worth of commercial real estate apartment buildings
- Portfolio consists of 308 units
- Based in Scottsdale, AZ
- Say hi to him at: www.ZHMultifamily.com
Click here for more info on groundbreaker.co
Best Ever Tweet:
“As a passive investor, build your presence and get to know your market while investing with people who are local as they are familiar like you.” – Zach Haptonstall
TRANSCRIPTION
Ash Patel: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to The Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I’m Ash Patel and I’m with today’s guest, Zach Haptonstall. Zach is joining us from Scottsdale, Arizona. Zach is the lead sponsor, general partner, and equity owner of over $35 million worth of commercial real estate. His portfolio consists of 308 units. Before we get started, Zach, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on now?
Zach Haptonstall: Yeah, thanks so much, Ash. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show. This is actually my second time being on the Joe Fairless show, so it’s always a pleasure circling back with you guys.
I was born and raised here in Phoenix, pretty much lived here my entire life. I had different stints in journalism and healthcare, where I did well and was fortunate, but it wasn’t really my passion. So a few years ago in 2018, I basically went all-in on real estate, and we’ve been very blessed just in the last 24 months. Here in the Phoenix market we’ve actually acquired about 90 million worth of apartment buildings and about 700 units. We have another 110 million under contract, another 600 units. So in the next three to four months, and we’re recording this now beginning of March 2021 – in the next three to four months we should double our portfolio and have over 200 million. So basically, the biggest thing, Ash, is I was just looking for passive income. I worked in health care, it was very hectic, always working crazy hours, and I was looking for passive income. So now that I’ve been able to break into this and develop passive income, my passion is really trying to provide passive income opportunities for other investors, and provide that financial freedom so that they can start to ease out of their job, or cut back, and have more disposable income for doing things for their family. So that’s really what we’re focused on now, is really just serving our investors.
Ash Patel: Alright hold on, my head’s spinning. 2018 wasn’t that long ago, and… 90 million dollars. Tell me the details of that journey.
Zach Haptonstall: I was working in hospice care, I was a co-owner of a hospice organization and a director of marketing. I got burnt-out, so in January of ’18, Ash, I resigned and I sold my equity in that company. I had no idea what I was going to do, I just knew I wanted to create passive income somehow, and get control back of my time. So I lived off of savings for about 14 or 15 months. I made no money through all of 2018, and I didn’t have any connections, no family, money, nobody in real estate. I just started reading books, listening to podcasts like this one, going to conferences, and I discovered multifamily and syndication and decided “This is what I want to do.” So 14 months went by since I quit my job and we closed our first deal. It was a long 14 months, burning through savings, going through the grind, the adversity.
So we bought that first deal 24 months ago, and since then we’ve been fortunate to gain a lot of momentum and been able to scale up and continue to syndicate more and more deals. It was really just a matter of just constantly grinding, networking, leveraging my past network, and then more so just going to conferences and being on podcast things like this, that really helped to grow the business.
Ash Patel: Zach, what was that first deal?
Zach Haptonstall: Good question. It was a 36-unit, it was about three and a half a million, so it was a smaller deal; our plan was to syndicate it. My partner Robert and I each had 25,000 non-refundable in earnest money. We tried to syndicate; we were going to investors and nobody wants to invest, because they don’t know us, we have no background. I go “Crap, we better figure this out.” So I’m just calling all these people I had met at conferences, and we had one lady, her name is Elisa Zang – she did a 1031 exchange and we ended up doing a tenant in common, which is not syndication, it’s a little bit different structure; similar to like a JV. But anyway, that first deal there was just a small handful of us, and we put our own money in the deal. We really wanted to learn the business plan and learn how to execute a value-add plan.
So we did well… We sold that deal in 21 months, almost doubled our money, it went very well. It gave us a lot of momentum, experience and confidence to now start to syndicate, take investor money, leverage their money, and grow their money for them, which we’ve been able to do. So it’s been a good development.
Ash Patel: Your first deal, did you not look at doing something that you could take down yourself? You purposely went out and found a potential syndication deal?
Zach Haptonstall: That’s a good question, Ash, because when I quit the job and I said “Okay, I want to go into real estate” I didn’t know anything about syndication. I didn’t know what the word meant, never heard of it, I didn’t know what it meant in this context anyway. I didn’t know about multifamily. I was looking at mobile home parks. I cold-called over 90 mobile home park owners, trying to buy one on a seller carry with my own money. So that was my mindset. But when I started to learn about scale, and syndication, and leverage, I realized I have this much money, I don’t want to put it all into one deal, because then I’m done; I can’t continue to scale.
So, yeah, to answer your question, I wanted to go bigger and I wanted to partner with other people so that I could put my money to work. That was my goal, to put myself in an uncomfortable situation and a scary situation, so that I’m forced to push my comfort zone.
Ash Patel: So three and a half-million dollars for 36 units. Give me more details on that, please. Was it a value-add property? Was it fully leased? Was it in the greater Phoenix area?
Zach Haptonstall: Good question. Yeah, it was in the Central West Phoenix area, right across the street from Grand Canyon University, for those of the listeners who are familiar. 36 units, it was 26 two-bedrooms, and 10 three-bedrooms, so a great unit mix. It was a value-add deal. This was like a late 60s build, but it didn’t have a chiller and it was individually metered for electricity, which was nice. So our plan was to go in there and do exterior and interior renovation. We actually put all new roofs on all the buildings, we did new exterior paint, we recoated the parking lot, we put new LED lighting on the exterior, we put new exterior cameras.
On the interiors, we renovated 26 of the 36 units. So depending on the flooring, we did new vinyl flooring, some of it had good tiles so we left it, we did new countertops, we painted the cabinets, did two-tone paint, new black appliances… This is really a workforce housing type of deal, that was our demographic. That’s most of our deals; we’re doing workforce affordable housing, but we go in there and improve the exterior and interior. It was a great value-add deal; we bought it for 95,000 a door, and we sold it 21 months later for 148,000 a door. It was a quick turn, and that’s just because, again, we were able to improve it, increase the rents which increased the value, and then sell it for that margin for us to make a good profit.
Ash Patel: That’s a great return for your investors. What are some of the challenges with that Phoenix, Scottsdale area?
Zach Haptonstall: In my opinion – I’m obviously biased, but if you look at national context Fundamental Statistics, Phoenix is the strongest –in my opinion– market in the country. When you look at population growth, number one now for the past few years. Job growth is number two behind Dallas. Rent growth has been number one, depending on which index you look at. So it’s extremely hot, it’s extremely competitive; prices continue to go up as they do nationally, cap rates continue to compress… So the big challenge is trying to find deals that make sense and that pencil. We’ve been able to really develop our advantage with the broker relationships.
The first four deals that we acquired in 2019, Ash, there was no secret – they were on the market, we had to compete, go through a best and final process, and we won them. And through that process, I was able to form very strong relationships with the brokers.
For those listeners who are newer, or maybe you’re passive investors, the brokers in any market pretty much control the market. Most of your deal flow is going to come through there. It’s how we get 100% of our deal flow, through the brokers. So through those four acquisitions, we established rapport, credibility, confidence with those brokers, so that now our last three acquisitions have been completely off-market, no competition; we were the only group. We have five deals under contract, like I said, which equals 110 million; we’re close to getting a sixth. These five deals are all completely off-market; no competition. We are probably getting the first look or probably within a group of three to five groups, getting that first look on almost every deal between 15 to 40 million in the Phoenix market, which is really our sweet spot for value-add.
So basically, to answer your question, the competition is tough; to find the deals that make sense is tough. It’s a needle in the haystack. So we’ve been fortunate that we’re active, we’re in front of the brokers constantly, we’re local, so we can act quickly, and we can strike quickly on these deals. That’s what gives us an advantage.
Ash Patel: I’ve seen amazingly low cap rates in Phoenix. What kind of cap rates are you buying these multifamily units for?
Zach Haptonstall: Right now, as of March 2021, this is a four to a four and a quarter cap market. A lot of people think “That’s crazy. Why would you do that? You’re overpaying.” I understand, a four cap is low and it sounds low. But you have to understand the dynamics of the market and these deals. Most people need to realize a cap rate is a fraction; the cap rate is the net operating income divided by the purchase price. When we’re buying a deal, that might be a four cap here in Phoenix, we’re looking at a lot of different factors. In order for our deals to pencil, we of course have to have the value-add upside, where we can go in and we know that we can renovate units, renovate the exterior, increase the rents. That’s a given, we have to have that element for it to work. But in addition to that, we also have to have what we call loss to lease, meaning that the rents are currently below market. So the current rents at the property are already below market, meaning that if that lease expires, then I can renew that lease right now, without doing anything to the unit, and immediately increase it anywhere from $50 to sometimes $200. We’re looking at the loss to lease plus value-add.
There are other components too, which I’ll get into. But when you have those things, you have to realize that these cap rates may be artificially deflated. If their net operating income is very low, because they’re 85% occupied, or half of their tenant base has rents that are below market, that’s going to make your cap rate very low. And because of the market, you’re going to pay the market price per door.
I personally secret shop all the comps. So I drive to all the comparable properties, I walk in there, I get the rents, I tour them, I get the square footage, the price per square foot amenities, what do their finishes look like… So what we do is we say, “Okay, we’re going to take this property to this finish.” Meaning new interior floors, new quartz countertops, new cabinet doors, LED lighting, etc, everything interior. When I’m shopping comps, we’re looking for deals that have that same interior finish, and we’re looking to see what rent they’re achieving.
When we’re projecting our pro forma rents, we’re saying, “Okay, we’ve already seen in the market, in this immediate area. We can achieve these renovations.” And that’s what we’re modeling to take it to. We might buy a deal at a four cap, Ash, but within a year or two, that deal could easily be a six or a seven cap, because we’ve immediately started to push up that NOI. That’s where the returns really start to become lucrative for the investors, which is our goal. So yeah, cap rates are always an important discussion, but you have to understand the market and what’s going in the cap rate.
Ash Patel: Zach, the secret shopping – do you do that posing as a tenant?
Zach Haptonstall: It’s a good question. So initially, when I first started, I was acting like a tenant. I would say, “Hey, my wife and I are looking for this. What do you have?” And I’d go on tour. But I started asking all these questions like, “Is this a chiller or individual HVAC? What are your RUBS or utility costs?” They kind of look at you funny, like why would a tenant be asking these things?
So about a year ago, I was talking to another experienced syndicator. He’s like, “Just tell them you’re buying a deal down the street.” That’s what I do now; for the most part, I’ll just go in there and say, “Hey, I’m Zach with Rise48 Equity, we’re buying an apartment down the street. Is it okay if I ask some questions? I’m trying to do a market survey.” Surprisingly, most property managers are totally fine with it. They’re used to getting calls for market surveys and things like that, and they’re fine to tour you.
Ash Patel: What kind of debt are you putting on these loans? Or what kind of debt are you putting on these properties, rather?
Zach Haptonstall: Good question. So we have a blend of agency and bridge financing. We’ve done seven agency loans, which were all Freddie Mac. In regards to agency, for this market the best loan product is a Freddie Mac floating rate, as opposed to a fixed rate. The reason for that is we have a couple of deals that are fixed-rate, meaning your interest rate does not change over the 10-year term. However, Freddie Mac really nails you on the back end with the prepayment penalty, known as yield maintenance or defeasance. So we actually have deals right now that we could sell in less than 24 months and achieve a 2x multiple for investors, but we cannot sell them right now because our yield maintenance is so high; that’s the fixed rate.
The floating rate means that your interest rate is floating over an index, depending on the loan, LIBOR or SOFR, just depending. What you do is you buy a cap. You buy a cap so that the interest rate cannot go above that. The appeal of the floating rate is that after 12 months, you can sell the property and you only have a 1% prepayment penalty for a Freddie floater. That’s our ideal agency product.
The other product that we’re doing is bridge loans. A bridge loan means that the lender is financing your rehab dollars, and you have a lower debt service coverage ratio requirement, which is important. We have a couple of deals under contract right now that we’re doing these bridge loans on, and the bridge loan terms right now are just amazing, Ash. These are three-year terms with two one-year extensions. So it’s a three plus one plus one, so three to five years. Three years of interest only, non-recourse; we’re getting 75% LTV, and we’re getting 100% of our cap-ex financed. And our interest rate, we’re getting quoted at a 3.4% to 3.5% interest rate for a bridge loan.
The idea with these is to go in, do your value-add in year one or year two, and then in year two or year three you can either sell it, or you can do a refinance, return a big chunk of capital back to investors, and then refinance into an agency loan, a 10-year term, hold it, and continue to cash flow.
Ash Patel: What kind of down payments are you having to put down on these?
Zach Haptonstall: Typically, we’re around anywhere from 25% to 35% would be the max. So 25% to 35%. We’re looking at 65% to 75% LTV, loan to value.
Ash Patel: What’s the difference between a 25 and a 35%? down? What determines that?
Zach Haptonstall: It really just depends on how the property is performing. So you have what’s called a DSCR, which stands for debt service coverage ratio. For easy math, I’ll say it this way – an agency like Freddie Mac, they require typically (in this market anyway; this is considered a standard market) they consider what’s called a 1.25 debt service coverage ratio. What that means is that if your monthly mortgage, for easy math, is $100, then the property needs to be producing at least $125 per month.
When you have a higher debt service coverage ratio, you can get a higher number of loan proceeds. Whereas if you’re not producing a lot of NOI, then you’re going to be limited. For an agency loan, you can be in the 60% LTV, meaning you could be 30% plus downpayment. That’s what makes it tough in a market like Phoenix, because it’s getting so expensive, that a lot of these loans are debt service restrained, because you’re paying X amount of price for a property that needs to have some type of renovation done in order to skyrocket the NOI. Whereas with the bridge loan, they have lower debt service coverage ratio requirements, and they’re designed for these renovations, going in there, renovating it, quickly increasing the value, and then selling or refi’ing it. It really just depends on the purchase price that you’re paying into the NOI, Ash, and that’ll determine what your down payment will be and how much loan proceeds you can get.
Ash Patel: Earlier, Zach, you mentioned that the prepayment penalty is significant. What are those prepayment penalties?
Zach Haptonstall: It’s a good question. Yield maintenance is a very tough calculation. I could not even tell you how to calculate it right now. It’s basically a number that’s tied to the LIBOR index. And as interest rates go down, which everybody expects them to continue to stay low for the next few years, your yield maintenance or defeasance prepay will go up. Yield maintenance basically means that Freddie Mac, whatever their yield was going to be or whatever they’re going to make over a 10-year term, they’re going to make that from you regardless of how long you own it.
Ash Patel: That’s a significant penalty.
Zach Haptonstall: It’s a significant penalty. To give you an idea, we have a deal, Villa Serene. We bought it for 17.5 million back in 2019, 18 months now. Right now, our prepaid penalty if you want to sell it is 3 million bucks. It’s insane. So we are basically waiting until the third quarter, so we can keep pushing the value up to get our purchase price high enough to absorb that prepay and still get our investors at least a 1.8 to 2x multiple in about two years… Which is still going to blow the projections out of the water, because typically we underwrite for five years. We’re going to do very well on those two deals, don’t get me wrong. We’re going to hit a 2x probably within 30 months or less on both of those. But if we didn’t have that yield maintenance, and if we were more experienced in the beginning, we could have achieved that probably in 18 months. So going forward, we’re not doing any more of that fixed-rate yield maintenance; we’re doing the floating rate, which is simply, you have what’s called a 12-month lockout, you cannot sell the property for 12 months after buying it, and then after that, it’s only a 1% prepayment penalty on the loan, which is very minimal. So that’s agency, Ash.
For these bridge loans, what we’re seeing is that the bridge loans will allow you to sell at any point. You could buy it and sell it six months later. Their prepay penalty is also very friendly to us. It’s simply 18 months of interest. Whatever they would have made over the first 18 months in interest, you have to just pay that to them. If you hold it for six months, and you sell it, then you have to pay them 12 months of interest as your prepayment penalty. So it’s not bad at all. In a growth market like Phoenix, you want to have flexible prepay, so that you have flexible exit plans, depending on what you want to do, whether that’s a refi or a sale.
Ash Patel: And how long do you lock your rates in for? Or are all of them floating?
Zach Haptonstall: If you do the fixed-rate, it’s locked in for 10 years with Freddie Mac. That’s the fixed-rate loan; but that has the nasty prepay with the yield maintenance. That’s where they get you, because people are like, “Oh, I want to guarantee my interest rate. I can model that out.” With a floating rate agency and a bridge loan – they’re both interest rates that float over an index. But you buy what’s called a cap. So you’re buying a cap, it’s typically depending on the deal – 20 to 40 grand, you underwrite it into the deal into the model, and that’s paid at closing. So basically, your interest rate will not exceed that amount. So that’s how that works.
Ash Patel: Okay. What’s been your biggest challenge with scaling your business?
Zach Haptonstall: I think the biggest challenge right now is keeping the cost of construction and materials down. In Phoenix, there’s just a lack of supply, for example, of stainless steel appliances, and we’re doing stainless steel appliances in most of our renovations. So in a couple of months here, we’re going to be doing at least 30 to 40 units a month, we’re going to be renovating, across our portfolio. We’ll own about 1,300 to 1,400 units and a few months… And that’s our biggest thing, is making sure that our supply chains are in good shape. We can get appliances and all the other materials – flooring, countertop, cabinets, etc. we can get them on time and on a budget for the supply chain. In addition to that, making sure that our construction crews are renovating on schedule, and are staying under budget. We’ve really been extremely conservative with our renovation budgets by building in a lot of contingency and a lot of cushion. We’re telling our construction crews, “This is your budget”, when internally, we might have two or three grand per unit on top of that, just in case they go over.
That’s really the biggest challenge when you’re scaling and you’re doing value-add – you have to be renovating units, you have to be adding value to the property by renovating it. And labor continues to go up, things like that. So we’re always wary of that, we’re very conservative when we stress test our deals with these models, so that we can make sure we’re staying on schedule and on budget.
Ash Patel: So, Zach, historically low cap rates, historically low interest rates – does that come into play? Does that worry you that if something changes in the market, you’re holding a tremendous amount of assets and you may not be able to dispose of them the way you had hoped?
Zach Haptonstall: It’s definitely a good question and it’s a valid question. We’re always concerned about that and we always keep that in mind. That’s why we have such a conservative stress test for these deals. We’re extremely conservative. In our model, we’re saying that we’re going to hold each deal for five years, and exit in year five or year six. In our model, we’re assuming that right after we buy the deal, there’s going to be a recession or an economic downturn. We’re assuming that rent growth is going to drastically decrease, that vacancy is going to increase, and that expenses are going to increase. And if the deal still pencils and meets that stress test, then we’ll do the deal. Because in our model, we’re assuming that there’s going to be a recession right after we buy it. We can execute our business plan, hold through the recession, sell in year five or year six, and achieve those returns… When in reality, we’ve been blowing those numbers out of the water and selling 18 to 24 months, and matching or exceeding the return we were telling investors over five years.
So you just have to be conservative. You can’t get too aggressive with these deals and with the underwriting; you can’t get caught up in it. We have not won a marketed deal on the market, Ash, in 18 months. August 2018 was the last one we even won a deal. We keep getting second and third place because, in our model, we cannot go to the purchase price that these other groups are paying. They’re getting bid-up on the market, these best and final bidding processes. Just like I said, in a few months when we close these deals, it’ll be our last eight acquisitions were all completely off-market with no competition. That’s probably the main reason they actually work, because we’re not getting bid-up on the price.
Ash Patel: And what are some of the different ways you’re finding these off-market deals?
Zach Haptonstall: It’s all broker relationships, 100%. The brokers that we performed with were probably in the top one to three groups for the top four to five brokers. So we’re getting a first look at a lot of these deals. We perform with the brokers, they know that we can execute, and they bring us the deal. When they have a good deal, they bring it to us first. They say, “Hey, what do you think?” and we act quickly. I cannot stress the importance of acting quickly.
There’s been a few deals just in the last month or two, that it was us and like two other groups. But the other groups – one was in Canada, for example, the other one was in California. Well, you call me – I’ll get out there right now. I’ll be there in an hour to tour the asset. I’ll go shop the comps for the rest of the afternoon. We’ll get a CoStar report, we’ll get a debt quote from our lender the next day, we’ll fully underwrite it, and we’ll be able to make an offer within 24 hours, and we’ll pounce on it.
There was a deal we won four weeks ago, where the group offered around 500k more than us, but we just beat them to the punch. We toured it, we underwrote it, we made the offer sooner, and we already have accepted LOI by the time they were getting ready to schedule their tour. So it was too late for them.
Ash Patel: That first-mover advantage is a real thing. What else do you do to nurture the relationships with the brokers, other than moving fast?
Zach Haptonstall: Good question, Ash. So let’s say you’re newer… And this is what I had to do. In the beginning, I didn’t know any brokers; I’m a younger guy, I was terrified, and I was intimidated by the brokers. You get nervous, because you feel like you don’t belong or do you feel like you’re wasting their time… And you have to remove all that from your mind. So if you’re trying to get into this, then you need to understand that these brokers – they want to tour the deals, because they want to show their seller that they’re getting a lot of volume and a lot of activity. So what I do all the time, – I do this regularly; I just did it last week – if there’s a broker you haven’t talked to in a while, or maybe you’ve never met them, and you know that they’re one of the top brokers, you need to go to the websites of all these brokers… Like CBRE, NorthMarq, Berkadia, Marcus, and Millichap – all these top national broker companies, go to their website, they usually have something where you can sign up for their deals. You can put in your market, whatever… They’ll send you all the marketing deals that they have, and you’re going to start seeing a blast of these deals. Then you need to start calling or emailing these brokers and say, “Hey, I’m so and so; this is our background, this is our business plan. Can I tour?” What I do, Ash, is I constantly crank tours with brokers. I’ll tour deals that I have no interest in buying. I know it’s a crappy deal in a crappy area, but I’ll look through the offering memorandum of the broker, I’ll get some familiarity, and I’ll show up – and I always look professional, I always wear a tie; I’m not saying you have to do that, but that’s what I do. I always look professional, I have a notebook, and my partner and I will go through and tour this asset. We’ll be taking pictures – deals that we don’t even care about, we’ll act like we care. I’ll even ask hypothetical questions to demonstrate my knowledge of the asset, so that the broker knows that “Hey, these guys look legit. They came in, they understood, they look prepared.”
Then a day or two later, I’ll get back to the broker and I’ll just be like “Hey, Mr. Broker, thanks for the tour. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. We’re going to pass on this one; we can’t get to your price because of these reasons.” And you give them feedback, that’s all they want. You have to understand, these brokers, 99% of the time, hear “No”, constantly. They’re just trying to get a commission, they have no guarantee check. So you have to constantly crank the volume with them, stay in front of them, and just give them good feedback, so that they don’t feel like they’re wasting their time. If you tell a broker “no” within a day or two and you give them a good reason, then he’s going to be a lot happier than if you just never hear from you again. Because he’s going to be like, “Well, that guy’s not serious. I’m not going to waste my time sending him the deal.”
So I’m constantly staying in front of the brokers, and as I’m walking the property I’m just trying to feel them out. I’ll talk about our criteria like, “Hey, we’re looking for 15 to 40 million dollar deals, with value-add, in these areas, 80’s build.”
And if I’m interested in the deal, then I use that time to try to kind of get into their mind of how I can get an advantage. I’ll usually do the entire tour, learn about the property etc, and then as we’re done walking into the office or the parking lot, I’ll just start to say like, “Okay, so what do you think for terms, Mr. Broker? How much earnest money? Do you think they’re going to be open to a 10-day inspection or 14 days? What does it take to win it? What’s the process?” Things like that. So you just establish that rapport. And yes, I make a point of regularly touring deals with brokers, simply to stay in front of them and then stay on top of their minds.
Ash Patel: Very interesting. I love it. Zach, what’s your Best Ever real estate investing advice?
Zach Haptonstall: Oh, the Best Ever real estate investing advice… That’s a tough one, Ash. I think that you need to understand the market. If you’re a passive investor, I think you need to invest with people who are local. I know a lot of people are not local; I’m not saying you can’t succeed, but I think if you’re getting into it, maybe it’s a new sponsor for you, or you’re not familiar with it… I think being local and investing with somebody who has experience in that market is very critical, because for every investor that’s investing in Texas and they live in Florida, and they’re doing well, I can tell you about five investors who are in a different state, and they’re not doing well. Because they simply don’t have proximity and they don’t have the market knowledge. I think it’s very important to have some type of presence in the market and also invest with somebody who has experience in the market.
Ash Patel: Good advice. Zach, are you ready for the lightning round?
Zach Haptonstall: I’m ready, Ash. Let’s do it.
Ash Patel: Good. First, a quick word from our partners.
Break: [00:30:40] – [00:31:02]
Ash Patel: Zach, what’s the Best Ever book you recently read?
Zach Haptonstall: I just finished it; it’s like the second time in the last few weeks, and I’m going to read it again. It’s called How to Own Your Own Mind by Napoleon Hill. He’s the guy who wrote How to Think and Grow Rich. This is more of an expansion on those principles, and it goes pretty deep. He’s interviewing Andrew Carnegie, the steel industry tycoon. I think the book was written in the 1920’s, or 30’s, or something, but it’s very interesting. I do audiobooks, Ash. I listen to books when I’m at the gym. But it’s very interesting how a lot of the things he’s saying – and it’s almost been 100 years now – are very relevant. You wouldn’t know that it’s old or outdated. I like that book.
Ash Patel: What was your biggest takeaway from that book?
Zach Haptonstall: There are a couple of things. I think this is a pretty common theme in books that are self-help books. It’s about visualizing what you want to do and then taking the action to achieve it. So How to Own Your Own Mind by Napoleon Hill is all about action and how over the generations and the centuries, there is a formula. If you can envision it, be positive, be determined, take action. That’s the best lesson.
Ash Patel: What’s the Best Ever way you like to give back?
Zach Haptonstall: The Best Ever I like to give back… We’ve done How to Feed your Starving Children, I helped with that and donating. We help out at our church. Grace and I want to go on a mission. We were going to do it last year and then COVID hit… And that’s a big thing. As far as the real estate context, I’m always happy to help new people who are trying to get into it, because I went through the grind and I know how hard it is. So I’m always happy to share any of my contacts. I have a truly abundance mindset, so I don’t view people as competition. I’m all about competition, healthy competition. So I like to just give back; people always call me just to kind of pick my brain and I try to help them on their journey.
Ash Patel: Yeah, that’s a great outlook. Zach, how can the Best Ever listeners reach out to you?
Zach Haptonstall: Yeah, you can just go to our website, it’s rise48equity.com. You can email me at zach@rise48equity.com. If you go to our website, you can set up a call with me. If you’re a passive investor looking to invest in deals, I’m happy to educate you on this market and establish a relationship. If you’re trying to get into it on the active GP side, I’m happy to give you any advice, tips, or resources that I have. So yeah, go to the website or email me and we’ll get back to you quickly.
Ash Patel: Zach, thank you for being on the show today. You’ve got a great story. In just a few short years you’ve used some great tactics to take down a huge portfolio. I loved the secret shopper program, the relationship-building with the brokers… You’ve accomplished a lot since 2018. So thank you again for sharing all of your advice and have a Best Ever day.
Zach Haptonstall: Thanks so much, Ash. I really appreciate the time.
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