Anthony Vicino, Co-Founder of Invictus Capital, joins us to discuss targeting smaller multifamily real estate assets in a single market, building a vertically integrated real estate investment company, raising capital, publishing a book, and much more.
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Transcript
Devin Elder: (00:03)
Anthony, welcome. How are you?
Anthony Vicino: (00:05)
I’m doing pretty good. How are you doing?
Devin Elder: (00:07)
Doing great. Thanks for jumping on today. And I appreciate you making some time to talk about real estate investing like we do here on the podcast. We’re chit-chatting a little bit before we jumped on about kind of what’s going on with current market and stuff like that, but let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up? Where are you? Where you based out of, and how’d you get into this crazy real estate game?
Anthony Vicino: (00:33)
Yeah, this is a crazy real estate game. Isn’t it? So for me, first, I’m just really thankful to be here. Thanks for taking some time to chat about real estate. I think a lot of people who are probably listening to this, they’re excited about real estate investing, but maybe they don’t have a lot of people in their life that they can talk about it with. And so, it’s always good to geek out with other like-minded individuals. So for me, my dad was military, so we didn’t call any place home. We traveled a lot. Right now, I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is home base for Invictus Capital. We’re a vertically integrated firm. And what we do is we go and buy apartment buildings. We operate them and we have a lot of fun doing it.
Anthony Vicino: (01:12)
Sometimes we work with passive investors. Sometimes we just use our own money. Sometimes we do joint ventures. And I mean, to answer the question of how did I get into this crazy real estate game? You have to go way back into the time machine, because the universe tried to put real estate in front of me at a couple of different points. And I kept ignoring it. I kept telling the universe, go away, I don’t care about this. The first time was in college, my roommate and his dad were fixing and flipping houses and I helped them in exchange for cheap rent. And only thing I learned coming out of that was that I hate construction. I can swing the hammer, I can’t hit a nail. I don’t want to fix and flip homes. I can’t do it. And so I walked away from that experience being like, real estate’s maybe not for me, no interest in it.
Anthony Vicino: (01:55)
Because that was my only exposure. And I think for a lot of people listening to this are probably like, that’s what they see when they watch HGTV is Chip and Diane or Chip and Joanna, fixing and flipping houses. And I was like, nah, that’s not for me. So I went off and I did my own thing. I have severe ADHD. And so like I knew I wasn’t going to cut it in the corporate world, which kind of forced me into the entrepreneurial track, even though I’m not really, I don’t have an entrepreneurial bone. When I was a kid, I wasn’t ripping up daisies and selling them to the neighbors. I wasn’t doing that. So I was forced into it out of necessity. And the second time the universe put real estate in front of me, I was actually living with a guy who owned the house that we were in.
Anthony Vicino: (02:35)
And he was renting out on the rooms to all these different people. And me and my friends, none of us could figure out how he was doing it. We’re like, is this guy a drug dealer? How can you afford this? This doesn’t make any sense to us, we had no context. And all we knew was real estate is big, and scary, and expensive, and hard. How is this guy doing it? He must be a drug dealer. That’s where our minds went. And it wasn’t until maybe five years later, for whatever reason, universe took us a third swing at the bat. And I was driving into downtown Minneapolis and was hit with the question, okay, wait a minute. Who owns all these buildings? I always assumed it was rich people, or organizations, or institutions, things of that nature.
Anthony Vicino: (03:14)
And that’s true to a large extent, but as I dug into it, I started to discover guys like my buddy, who I thought was a drug dealer. They own these buildings and they, it wasn’t super hard. It wasn’t super complicated. And that was super fascinating to me. So that’s what really launched my real estate career. So I went into an FHA, did a triplex, how sack that bad boy, and then scaled to the moon from there.
Devin Elder: (03:38)
Awesome. So how sacking, you get the mortgage and then you get some revenue by renting out the other pieces of it, right? Whether they’re rooms or the other side of the house.
Anthony Vicino: (03:47)
Exactly. And it’s such a simple, powerful strategy. This is what my buddy was doing. We just never asked him about it. We never got the details. If he had explained it, we would have been like, really, it can’t be that simple. And that’s the thing that blows people’s minds. And it’s the whole impetus for our podcast which is Multifamily Investing Made Simple and the book, Passive Investing Made Simple. It’s really not rocket science. It’s not easy, but it is very, very simple. And at the end of the day, when you’re first met with how simple it is, you’re like, it can’t be that simple. It has to be harder. Right? But it’s really not.
Devin Elder: (04:21)
Yeah. Rents come in, pay the mortgage, pay some bills, got some cashflow leftover, on you go. Right? I mean…
Anthony Vicino: (04:27)
Yeah, rents and repeat.
Devin Elder: (04:29)
Kind of the game. That first flip that you had an opportunity to do some real work on some labor. Did you see the numbers? Did you see what their proforma, what it looked like it was going to, what they were going to make?
Anthony Vicino: (04:43)
No. And I remember at the time, I just had no interest in learning that stuff. All I was really paying attention to was like, okay, when we bought this house and now it’s a turd. Now we’ve got in it, now we’re living in the dirt and the beams are all exposed and we’re building it back up. And it all felt really expensive and crazy at the time, looking back on it, now I can probably back into pretty easily. What kind of ARV and numbers that they were operating under. And the crazy thing is it was very lucrative. Even at that point, we’re in college and my roommate wasn’t this brilliant guy, but just had a knack for construction. So he leveraged that ability. He loved doing these projects around the house, which is a thing, if you’re a person who likes working with their hands and likes repairing things, fix and flips can be a really great way to go. But for me, all I walked away with was like, man, that’s a lot of work.
Devin Elder: (05:40)
It is a lot of work. There’s no doubt. It can be a good way to get started. Can be, make some money. It’s a good way for one guy to get started and make money that he needs to maybe leave a job or get into multifamily investing. It’s definitely work though. There’s no question about it.
Anthony Vicino: (05:53)
And if you’re going to stay in that route long-term, you really want to systematize it, build out teams around it and you can be effective that way. Because you don’t want to be the guy that’s swinging the hammer indefinitely.
Devin Elder: (06:03)
Yeah. There’s no way to scale that, you got to be a business. So you did the triplex, you said you got an FHA loan for that. Right? Really low down payment, good interest rate, all that stuff.
Anthony Vicino: (06:13)
Yep. Barely put any money into it. I think I got into it for about $7,000. Bought it for $246,000. And the crazy thing was I just bought it at the right time and the right place. Nine months later, I went back to refinance it, to get out of that FHA because at that point, like the FHA, the PMI that sticks with you forever. And so the only way to get out was to refinance. And went to refinance and it appraised for $125,000 more than what I bought it for, I was like, wait, what? I was like on the one hand, that’s really cool. Right? When you walk into the bank and they’re like, that’s worth $375,000 and you’re like, wait, I paid two $250,000 for that nine months ago we were talking about, it felt like something was wrong there.
Anthony Vicino: (06:53)
And it didn’t sit well with me because at the end of the day, it wasn’t based on me being some genius operator that went in and added all this value. It was just that I was riding a wave of organic appreciation and it wasn’t rewarding me for beret. It wasn’t based off of me doing good work. And so that was a moment where I was like, okay, real estate is cool, but I need to go bigger where I have more control where the results are linked to my efforts.
Devin Elder: (07:20)
Yeah. Hey, it’s nice to be lucky. That’s great. That can go both ways. But being lucky is good. Especially if it allows you to get a start. And I just looked at, was looking at some personal financial stuff. I’ve about 12 single families that I’ve had forever. And I hadn’t looked at the values in the last, I don’t know, two years. And I was like, holy smokes. And there’s just little rentals just chugging along. So appreciation happens, equity happens. That’s a fact, but I get it. You want to have more control, you want to be able to do it consistently. What was the next step for you after that triplex seeing some success? What kind of projects did you get into after that?
Anthony Vicino: (08:06)
Yeah. So from there we started rolling into the larger commercial and when I say large, I’m not talking a hundred and 200 unit complexes. I’m talking like 15 to 60 units. And that’s really our sweet spot. A lot of new syndicators, a lot of new operators they want to come in and they’re like, I got to get 200 plus units. I got to go big. And it’s like, okay, well that’s hard, it’s competitive, it’s expensive. And you don’t have any operational capacity yet and so good luck. For us, we really liked that 15 to 60 range because it’s right in the sweet spot between two types of investors. One being like the small investors who can’t quite conceptualize or don’t have the operational skills yet to take down a 15 unit, they feel like that’s too much. And then on the flip side, a 60 units, just on the bottom side of what a lot of institutional investors will even sniff out. Right?
Anthony Vicino: (08:58)
And so we kind of find ourselves in this happy little spot. And our trick then is to group these assets geographically because around the twin cities, this is where we invest. It’s an old market. We don’t have a ton of really big communities, apartment communities. We have a lot of little buildings, little brownstones that have been around for a hundred years and they’re built like tanks and they’re going to keep going. And so we group these assets together. So our property management team can realize the efficiencies of scale without those buildings, all actually being linked together in one purchase.
Devin Elder: (09:29)
I love it. Yeah. And I think there’s a real opportunity there as you guys have exploited in those, when I say smaller, I mean, look to the guy that has one single family rental, 40 unit is like unfathomable. So, to the guy, that’s got a thousand doors, 40 units, not something you wanted to mess with, you don’t want to mess with it. So, it’s all relative, but it is a sweet spot. And I imagine you guys probably deal directly with owners. A lot of times, the principal transaction, is that the case or a lot of these going through brokers?
Anthony Vicino: (10:00)
Well, here’s the really interesting thing and I’m sure it’s the same and pretty much every market across the US is that the majority of inventory seems to congregate in the hands of very few number of players. And a lot of the players are very old at this point. They’ve been in the game for 20, 30 years. And so our strategy has been, well, let’s go find those old dudes and gals. Let’s go be their best friends and cozy up to them because when it’s time for them to sell, we want to be the first person that they call.
Anthony Vicino: (10:27)
In the last five deals that we’ve done, have all been a result of people who’ve been in the business for over 30 years, calling us up and saying, hey, we want to sell to you because we heard that you guys are good. You do what you say. You’re not going to renegotiate. You’re not going to retrade on us. You’re going to follow through. You’re going to get the deal closed. You’re not going to cause headache because for these old guys, they’ve had these things forever. They practically have no debt on them. They’re cash flowing like crazy. They don’t need to sell. They just want to sell and they want it to be easy. And so that’s where we come in to solve a pain point for them is, hey, we want these properties at a good basis. And we’re going to be easy to work with. And we’re going to be the guys that you can count on to do what we say.
Devin Elder: (11:06)
I love it. There’s a secret folks. The secret is out. Do what you say and be easy to work with. It’s funny, it’s like, I don’t know why maybe it’s from movies growing up or whatever. We all have this idea of negotiating is just being difficult to work with and fighting for every penny and so forth. This is some of that out there, but I’ve kind of taken the opposite approach. Let me be the easy guy that closes and let the people that know. Because that is weird. The deals do congregate in the hands of a very few people in any market and they kind of control the deal flow. And it’s not that they’re necessarily a gatekeeper. They just have all the relationships, they know all the deals, they’re entrenched and that’s how it goes. So you’re the guy that can deliver, and close, and be easy and do what they say. That’s going to lead to more deals, right?
Anthony Vicino: (11:51)
And reputation is everything in this game. It takes years to build, takes seconds to destroy. And these old guys and gals, they talk, they all know each other. If you do somebody dirty on this deal, you’re done. Nobody else is going to return your call. And so you only get one shot and you got to keep making that shot consistently and showing up as that person. Our core values in Invictus, two of the five is, one is we show up and number two is we do what we say, every day. We show up and we do what we say, you do those two things and you’re going to be pretty well in life. You’re going to do good.
Devin Elder: (12:22)
I love it. So simple but easily overlooked because of its simplicity. So you say we, and you talk about Invictus, your company, who is it besides you? And what’s the structure look like today?
Anthony Vicino: (12:35)
So Invictus at the highest level is me and my partner, Dan Krueger. We formed the company a couple of years back. At this point, we have about nine full-time employees across the gamut of leasing agents, maintenance agents, graphic designers, marketing, things like that. So it is a team effort. The thing with real estate, and this is something that my partner Dan likes to talk about all the time is that in his early days he had a “I’m a” mentality. I’m a going to do this and I’m a going to do that, I’m a going to own the whole thing. He wanted to be the guy that everybody looked at and was like, ah, he’s the guy. And so he didn’t like partners. He didn’t like outsourcing. He had a role control issue. And once he got over that and realize real estate’s a wee game, not a me game.
Anthony Vicino: (13:17)
Relationships dictate how far and fast you can go. That’s when things really started changing for him. So, if you’re listening to this at home and you’re thinking about becoming an active investor, partnerships, whether formalized or through relationships. And so something you said before Devin, I still never feel like I’ve actually entered into a negotiation as I’ve imagined it in my head. When you read books on negotiation, they make it sound like this thing that you’re at this table and it’s this intense thing and it’s really not. I’ve been in a lot of conversations with sellers, but it never really feels like a negotiation in a lot of cases, just trying to figure out like, how are we going to make this thing work? It’s a lot like, talking to your significant other and being like, where do you want to have dinner tonight? It’s a conversation, it’s not a negotiation usually.
Devin Elder: (14:05)
Yeah, that’s right. It’s not shootout, a duel kind of like, hey, we’re trying to solve problems for everybody and come up with some solutions here, pretty straight forward. And there’s a lot of conversations, I mean, getting a deal done, any size deal, a lot of back and forth. That’s the game.
Anthony Vicino: (14:25)
At the end of the day, you still have to eat together. So you don’t want to nuke relationship and the negotiation phase, if you really want Olive Garden and she wants Sizzler.
Devin Elder: (14:35)
Yeah. You still going to eat dinner together. I love it. So you guys built the management company from the get-go or were using some third party to start, how’d you approach that? Because that’s an interesting, you talk about operational capability, right? And that’s an interesting piece to scale. How did you guys treat that?
Anthony Vicino: (14:54)
Yeah, so we started from the very beginning with building that, and there’s only ever two times to build a property management company and there’s only one of two times to hire somebody, it’s either too late or too early. Those are your choices. Either do it too soon or too late. And for us operational costs or the opportunity cost of waiting to implement it later was greater than we were willing to pay. So we took on the struggle from the early days of hiring and bringing in full-time employees before the numbers could really justify it on their own. Knowing that we’re not building the company for where we are, we’re building for where we’re going to be in one to two years and quickly, we realized that by bringing those people in you scale much faster than you would have been able to predict otherwise.
Anthony Vicino: (15:37)
And so now we’re ahead of schedule and now we’re actually behind and we’re trying to hire more people. So we actually have three new people starting next week. And it’s like, okay, so too soon or too late, those are really the only times. But for us, I have a manufacturing business that I built a couple of years back in. One of our core thesis is that we took from that business into real estate was that whoever’s closest to the consumer wins at the end of the day. And for us, our consumers are our residents. Because if you take care of your residents, they take care of your buildings. If they take care of your buildings, they take care of the returns. So that’s number one, take care of the residents. And we can only guarantee that if we, are the boots on the ground in control of that relationship, or at least that’s how we feel.
Anthony Vicino: (16:20)
And the second is our investors, we don’t like to bring in external capital raisers. We want to be the ones who are, where the buck stops. You come to us, you have a conversation. You’re an ordeal that we manage, we operate. And so that’s how we can guarantee, not guaranteed because there is no such thing, but that’s how we can sleep at night, knowing that we’re doing everything in our capacity to deliver results that are in alignment with the resident and investor expectations.
Devin Elder: (16:46)
That’s the beauty of the vertically integrated multifamily company, right? You got the whole stack and there’s always going to be challenges in any business, but at least you’ve got a really short line of sight to any of those challenges. Maybe it’s directly an employee or it’s your investor that you’re the relationship with. I like that approach a lot. We’ve ended up in the same boat with our company for those exact reasons. And, and I like it, gives you a lot of control.
Anthony Vicino: (17:15)
Yeah. And honestly there’s not a right or wrong to it. It’s a personality thing and understanding, you’re trading one set of problems for another. And when you’re going to scale and be vertically integrated, you’re trading the ability to scale quickly and efficiently with people problems and people problems are the hardest types of problems. And so you’re really just trading headaches for different types of headaches. And if you have no interest in building systems, and people, and relationships, and culture, and all that stuff, well then going vertical is going to be very, very difficult. And you should probably think about third party. So it’s understanding and being self-aware about your strengths and weaknesses.
Devin Elder: (17:50)
Yep. Yeah. A hundred percent. The decision to start that property management company is not one to be taken lightly. I love it. You’re just trading one set of problems for another that’s a hundred percent the case. Tell us about the book. You mentioned the company and the book. How did that come about? And how’s that going for you guys since you published?
Anthony Vicino: (18:11)
Yeah. So the book is the Passive Investing Made Simple. It came out last month and honestly it was, it just exceeded expectations. We hit number one on Amazon, which was really, it’s always cool when that happens. But when we first started this book, it wasn’t with the idea that we were going to be on the top of the bestseller list or anything. Really what we’re trying to do was two things. One was, we were always having the same conversations with people who were new to multifamily investing. They’re like, what’s a cap rate? How has this value add model work? How do I vet an operator or understand a deal, all these things. And so instead of having the conversation each and every time we decided, well, let’s start a podcast. And that’s where Multifamily Investing Made Simple came in, so we could point people and say, hey, just go listen to this episode where we talk about cap rates and boom, now they learn it, they understand it.
Anthony Vicino: (19:01)
But we found that people still wanted to go deeper, that we still had some people that didn’t want to listen to the podcast, or they just wanted to have a different medium. And the book is a great way because it’s a physical resource. You can flip through it and be like, oh, I want to brush up on this concept. Cool. And so we wrote that book because something I didn’t mention is that in a prior life, I was a science fiction and fantasy author. So I just had a core competency in writing in general. That’s how I communicate best is through the written word. And so we wanted to create something that could be targeted towards people that aren’t interested in being active investors. Like this conversation about being vertically integrated or not, there’s probably a large portion of the audience listening to this.
Anthony Vicino: (19:41)
That is like, I have no interest in either of that. I just want to invest in real estate, but I don’t care about operating or managing the property, whatsoever. I don’t want to deal with that. And that’s who this book is for is to say, what do you, as a passive investor need to know? What are the skills, the competencies you need to bring to the table? Because passive does not mean there’s no work. You still have to show up and do some things. This book is going to tell you what those things are and how to do them so that you can confidently move forward.
Devin Elder: (20:10)
I love it. Yeah. And then you can kind of set yourself apart too it, it takes a lot of work and some money to publish a book versus some other platforms and mediums really are. So it’s just so easy to publish online or put out other types of content, nothing right or wrong about any of it. But the book is kind of a different tier. How long did it take you guys to write it?
Anthony Vicino: (20:35)
So that took, we started that right when COVID hit. And so when COVID hit, the deal flow dried up in May, June, July, nobody was really transacting. And so we looked around and we said, well, what are we going to do to keep busy? Let’s do something, let’s be productive. And so we started writing a book, I would say, we finished the book in about April, so maybe nine months total to get it done. And then it just launched in August. And as anybody that’s ever published a book will tell you writing it seems like the easy part and hindsight, I saw getting it across the finish line, that really makes me want to pull your hair out at the end of the day.
Devin Elder: (21:10)
Yeah. I bet it’s some herding cats there at the end.
Anthony Vicino: (21:12)
Yeah.
Devin Elder: (21:13)
Imagine, I’d imagine. Well, excellent. Well, congratulations on getting that out. And I think that’s a good use of time during a weird year after March, 2020 is kind of strange time and good use of time and resources there. Looking ahead. So we’re talking in mid 2021 right now, having this conversation, looking ahead, I won’t ask what you think is going to happen because nobody knows, but what is your strategy for the next 18 months as you guys keep building the business?
Anthony Vicino: (21:46)
That’s a great question. I always like to say, everybody’s crystal ball is equally murky. Nobody knows what’s going to come. And so we just, we try to operate under the assumption that the world is always on the brink of ending. Because as Howard Marks says, if you take care of the downside, the upside takes care of itself. So we like to go around operating as though everything is going to go really badly in the future. And so when we go into opportunities specifically what we’re looking for right now, isn’t super different than what we were looking for pre COVID, but how we realized the business model is different. And so before COVID, we were looking at heavy value adds, things where we could go deploy capital, move tenants out, renovate, bring new tenants in, boom, great. But that becomes really hard. And an eviction moratorium where you can’t move out the bad tenants to get in there, to do the renovations necessary.
Anthony Vicino: (22:37)
So now you’re sitting on all this capital, that’s frustrating. So we’ve made a slight pivot towards more stabilized assets, things where there is a Delta in place between in-place rents and market rent. And we can realize that rent growth without having to go and deploy capital immediately. And so we can go put some lipstick on the pig, but some new floors, some appliances, some new paints, some new fixtures and all that stuff to make the units better. But for whatever reason, we want to find assets where there’s good tenants there. They’re just not paying as much for rent as the market would say is as average. And so everybody hears that and they’re like, well, yeah, Anthony, that, duh, of course I want to buy something that doesn’t require a lot of work, but there’s a lot of meat on the bone, like, duh, where do you go and find that?
Anthony Vicino: (23:25)
And that links back to the conversation we had before about finding these old people, not old people, like people had been in the game for a long time to have these assets that don’t have a lot of debt on them anymore. They haven’t been driving the rent aggressively because I don’t know, when you only got like 20% LTV leftover, you don’t need to have market rent, you can afford to keep tenants in there for long period of time. And so those are the assets that we’re tracking down right now, were things that the owners just haven’t been pushing the rents very hard. They’ve just been letting it slide comfortably. And we can move into that asset, deploy capital from the beginning to improve the units, and then justify rent premiums from there, if we want to.
Anthony Vicino: (24:03)
Or we can just do slow rent bumps, because we’re a big fan of the idea that a dollar saved is worth more than a dollar earned, right? A dollar saved is a full dollar. A dollar earned is usually on a margin. And so we’re not going in there usually and trying to just move everybody out day one, we want to keep people in and reduce the trauma of turnover and churn because the expenses of having a down unit and having to go deploy the capital it’s immense. And so if we can keep somebody in there and only bump the rent marginally each year to get to our desired end state in three years, we’ll take that every time.
Devin Elder: (24:37)
Yeah. Dollar saved is a dollar to the NOI with straight to it.
Anthony Vicino: (24:42)
Boom. It’s pure value. Right?
Devin Elder: (24:44)
Yep. Love it. What would you say to the person that’s wanting to get started as that active operator that hasn’t done their first deal? You’ve been there. I’ve been there. There’s kind of all these things swirl around in your head. Maybe you’re excited about real estate. What do you say to that person from your vantage point now having built this company?
Anthony Vicino: (25:02)
Don’t do it. It’s horrible. You’ll hate it. No, no, it’s great. It’s fantastic. I would say, first, is get your mind right. And understand that this is going to take a while. Real estate is the best get rich slowly but surely plan out there. And a lot of people come in with the false expectation that you need to have your first deal in the first six months. And that’s not true. It could take a year, could take two years. And if it takes three years, that’s okay too. Like it is going to take a while, especially in this market where it is better to do no deal than it is to do a bad deal. And so be patient from the very beginning and don’t look at social media and what everybody else is doing. And then use that as a barometer to say, I should be doing more or I’m not succeeding because this person over here just closed 200 units. And they started last month.
Anthony Vicino: (25:49)
That’s a fool’s game. You’re going to only end up on the wrong side of disillusionment. So first, get your mind right. Be patient and then focus on the things within your control. And the things within your control, the two most important things is investing in yourself and investing in your network. Those are the two biggest things, because every skill that you can level up in your own arsenal, that’s something that nobody can ever take away from me. So it’d be brushing up and sharpening your blade on underwriting, in accounting, in operations, like whatever, learning your market. And then also be investing in your network because again, your ability to succeed in this industry is predicated on your relationships.
Anthony Vicino: (26:28)
So start making those relationships now, but don’t front. If you’re new, don’t come to me being like, I’m the next big thing, own where you are, because guys like us Devin that are a little bit further back, further along the journey, we look around and we’re like, we want to help. We want to help the next generation, the next person to step in and do what we’re doing. But we only can do that if you’re being true and authentic from the beginning and representing where you’re weak and where you’re strong accurately.
Devin Elder: (26:59)
I love it. And just like you said about the brokers, you want to work with people you like, there might be people that want to work with you or get mentored by you, whatever. But there’s only so many hours in a day, you want to work with people you like. And I love what you said about the network, that’s the most important thing. So that’s really good insight for somebody that is at the beginning of their journey. What about that person that’s hearing all this going, you alluded to them earlier, I don’t want to touch any of that stuff.
Devin Elder: (27:28)
Mid-teens, IRR on some real estate that I don’t have to mess with, sounds pretty darn good. But it’s crazy because you and I probably talked to investors and in our deals and stuff like that, and that’s kind of our world, but the truth is most people are not in real estate passively. So the amount of people we’re talking to is 1% of America and there’s 99% out there that it has the wherewithal to invest passively in real estate, but is not. And that’s where resources like your book come into play and help bridge that gap. What do you say to that person? That’s got capital to deploy, has zero interest in building a company like yours, but they’re also kind of worried about the whole thing and they’re new to it. What’s your take for that type of person?
Anthony Vicino: (28:21)
You’re nailing it on the head. It’s frustrating to know that only 0.001% of the population of people that could invest in these investment vehicles know about it or have the connections to take advantage of it. And that’s frustrating because we know, like you and I, we know how powerful this is. We see the returns, the tax benefits, the stability, all of these things. And if you could just get the word out and everybody could know about it, you wouldn’t have to sell anybody. They would all go, oh yeah, no, this makes perfect sense. I want to do that. And so the first thing for somebody that’s listening to this and they’re like, I want to be active, but I’m kind of interested, it is just to know first, this is possible for you where you are right now in your investing career.
Anthony Vicino: (29:08)
Not only is it possible, but it is something that you should be doing. I’m not giving investing advice here, I’m not a tax or legal advisor. So take that into consideration. But when you do the math on the difference of returns and tax benefits in a real estate syndication versus owning stocks, or a REIT, or a bond, it’s night and day difference. And if you want to accelerate your financial future, or if you just want to have a more steady, solid financial future, it is built on land and is built on real estate. And it is built on these real assets. And so get over any of the preconceived notions that you might have about real estate being hard, or scary, overwhelming, realize that it is simple. It is going to require some work. You got to put it in to understand the model, but once you put in that work, again it’s leveling up your own skills, once you do that, you’ll have it forever.
Anthony Vicino: (30:06)
Nobody will be able to take that away from you. And you’ll be able to look at these opportunities and realize, okay, that’s the one for me. That’s the one for me. That one, that’s a hard pass, I’m not going to do that one. But that one, I want that one. And at the end of the day, guys, I was in the boat for many, many, many years of my life, I have six brothers and sisters and a family that is not financially sophisticated or savvy. Their strategy has been, put their head in the sand and just do what everybody else is doing and hope it works out. And hope is not a good investment strategy.
Devin Elder: (30:35)
Very common strategy.
Anthony Vicino: (30:37)
It’s very, is the number one strategy, but it’s a very poor one. If you want to live an uncommon life, right? If you want to have uncommon results, you cannot do what everybody else is doing. And what everybody else is doing is born out of ignorance and fear. And so don’t be ignorant. Go educate yourself. And don’t be afraid. Find people who you can trust to talk to, to learn from, podcasts like this. Devin, you’re a great resource. Reach out, have conversations because what do they say? The confused mind says no, and fear breeds uncertainty. So let’s get over that. Let’s address this and educate ourselves.
Devin Elder: (31:12)
I love it. There’s a lot of good resources out there. You’ve got the new book out. You’re helping to educate people. We’ve got a lot of work to do, spreading the word.
Anthony Vicino: (31:19)
Yeah, so many people still.
Devin Elder: (31:22)
We’ve got good tools to get there. Listen, if somebody wants to reach out and connect with you and your teammate, and learn more about what you guys are doing. What is the best avenue for that?
Anthony Vicino: (31:31)
Yeah. You can find me literally on all the social media because I’m there too much. So you can find me, Anthony Vicino. Otherwise, go over to invictusmultifamily.com, we have a free resource that we’re hocking to the world right now. And it’s actually kind of cool, it’s the five rules of investing. And what we did is just, we looked at all the people that have done what we want to do. So billionaire real estate investors and said, what worked for them? What are they doing? What do they say we should be doing? And we distilled those down to five rules that everybody can implement into their investing right now. So if you want to go get that resource, go to invictusmultifamily.com and pick up.
Devin Elder: (32:05)
I love it. I love it. And thanks for creating another resource there. We’ll link to that in the show notes, those of you that are listening, you just go to the show description, click straight through to Anthony, his company’s website. Anthony, thanks so much for jumping on the show today. Tons of hard one insight. I really appreciate you sharing and I wish you continued success.
Anthony Vicino: (32:24)
Thank you, Devin. And I really appreciate everything that you’re doing. Keep it up, man.
Devin Elder: (32:27)
Awesome. We’ll talk soon. Take care.