Devin and Justin Liggitt, Manager of Investor Relations at DJE get together again to discuss the sale of our most recent multifamily investment. They highlight the merits of the sale, the business plan, and the nature of how these sorts of investments originate and conclude.
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Transcript
Justin Liggett:
All right.
Devin Elder:
Justin. Hey, welcome. Good to be back in the studio. Let’s jump in. We’ve got an exciting topic today. Full cycle exit. We don’t do a lot of these.
Justin Liggett:
Oh, it doesn’t happen very often.
Devin Elder:
And so let’s jump in. Just by way introduction. I’m Devin Elder, principal at DJE, Justin Liggett, manager of investor relations, marketing, and many other hats you wear. But yeah, let’s talk about this full cycle exit deal.
Justin Liggett:
Absolutely. I think congratulations, let’s-
Devin Elder:
To everybody, yeah.
Justin Liggett:
Celebrate to everybody that was involved with this deal. To DJE to San Antonio to the investors, to the community. I think this is a pure example of just being in alignment with our values of everybody wins kind of thing. So I’m really happy about that, I just wanted to say congratulations to everybody. I thought we would start off kind of just by talking about what’s happened. Like how did it wind down? What are the highlights of the sale for a lack of a better term, because that’s the sizzle that everyone wants to hear and start off with. Sure. Then we could kind of just talk about how came to find this deal, how we came to think about selling it, and then what are the next steps. Where are we at right now, and what are we doing moving forward.
Devin Elder:
Love it. Yeah. So I’ve gotten some feedback from investors where they literally like screenshot our email and highlight one thing. And that is the average annualized return. So there’s a 2.5 year hold, when the dust settles we’re probably about a 30% annualized return. We returned capital at 28% average annualized return. So $100,000 investment turned into $170,000, 1.7 equity multiple. It’ll creep a little higher, we’ve got to pay some final bills and things like that. So we’ll have one last smaller distribution, but I’m comfortable calling it 29, 30% average annualized return. And that’s a home run. We projected 19% average annualized return. When we put this deal out in front of investors in 2019. We had a whole adventure running the property, we can dive into all that. But alls well that ends well. We had distributions from day one, 8% pref going out every quarter. We do monthly distributions now, but this deal at the time we set up, quarterly distributions went out and then caught everybody up on the pref and then sent out distributions this week, a couple of days after closing. Which [crosstalk 00:02:19]
Justin Liggett:
I think we announced the sale to investors like the day before Thanksgiving. So some good holiday news for everybody. so yeah, there was a big week this week, I think.
Devin Elder:
Yeah, that’s right. And so what we like to do as a firm is get capital back immediately. There’s clearly some accounting work that we need to do to really dial in every last penny, but we can return just about all the investor initial capital plus gains. And this is over a holiday. You’re talking like two, three business days later. Right. Boom, we got it in our account. And then obviously give us a few more weeks on the accounting stuff, but very happy to have gone through that. Great feedback from investors. We always say five year hold, and then if you look historically, we’re kind of always like selling at two and a half years.
Justin Liggett:
2.24. This might hatch that up a little bit, but I wouldn’t mind.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. So, that’s fine. I always kind of frame it to people that the metric I look at is average annualized return. We can have the pref, the preferred return going out, that’s great. And equity multiple’s important, but I could tell you I’m going to double your money, sounds great. If I tell you if it’s going to happen in 15 years, not so exciting. So the average annualized return is like the, in my mind, like the great equalizer. We could use IRR, but frankly IRR, you kind of need an Excel spreadsheet to calculate. Average annualized return, if I [crosstalk 00:03:40] Yeah, it’s so cut and dry. So that’s the kind of the headline on going full cycle on that deal, is exceeding that average annualized return by 10%.
Justin Liggett:
Right. And to be able to do that, and one thing that really stood out to me that you mentioned a second ago, that I want us to kind of revisit later in the conversation as we kind of talk about what’s next in the phase two of distributions and things like that, is one thing that has always struck me, and then I’ve gotten feedback on from a lot of our investors is just the way that we approach the business and the structuring and the communication of these investments from an, an area of simplicity. Like not trying to overcomplicate. And that goes from everything from when we’re structuring the deal and talking about waterfalls or distributions, and that thing, all the way down to, hey, once this is over with, we’re going to send you as few big chunks of money as possible to get you up to parity and get you your money back without having it be some sort of like three or four distribution, a thing that goes over six months.
Justin Liggett:
And I think that that shows a real amount of consideration for our investor base and our audience for a lack of a better term, as far as just being considerate of their experience. So that’s really kind of what jumped out to me after I kind of celebrated the overperformance.
Devin Elder:
Sure. I’m hyper cognizant of having anyone’s capital, that’s not accruing a return. So there’s a little bit of that when we raise capital for a deal, hey, if we’re going to close a deal January one, we’re going to need your capital in before that, obviously to close and we’re. We’re dealing with large number of investors, so there’s going to be a period there where we’ve got investor capital, it’s not accruing until we close. I’m very cognizant of that. And then boy, it’s almost like a hot potato, once that wire comes in from title and we’ve got our proceeds in, get it out of our account. Because I am ending the accrual of all benefit at the sale date. So if I hang onto your money for another three months, like that’s not doing anything for you.
Devin Elder:
So that’s, to me, it’s like a hot potato. We got it in, do the quickest math we can to return the largest amount of money possible, while still leaving enough in there to settle final bills, pay the last paychecks for the employees, stuff like that. And it’s a very… If I’ve got money in a deal, give it back, we sell the deal. Let’s return the capital as quick as possible. I understand there’s a lot of accounting intricacies things that need to happen, but let’s build the firm around, this is a cliche, investor first, and then we’ll figure out everything else that may be inconvenient to the firm. But that’s why we’re where we are as investor first, right?
Justin Liggett:
Exactly. Yeah. I think that’s a big part of it, is just the consideration that we give to the people that we work with. And I experienced that immediately whenever I came on in February of last year. And we started having a conversation of how do we pull people closer and make them feel that it’s business as usual here at DJE, and that while everything else might be a little nuts, we’re here, we’re not hiding. We’re here for questions, whatever it is. So that’s one thing that really kind of gave me a real good feeling about where I was at, in a time that was kind of encased by a lot of uncertainty.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. You came on February, 2020.
Justin Liggett:
End of February. Like two weeks later, they were making announcements of shutdown. So like-
Devin Elder:
Two weeks later our firm loses a $100,000, on earnest money.
Justin Liggett:
I wasn’t going to bring it up.
Devin Elder:
And I’m like, welcome to the firm, Justin.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah, that deal to me metaphorically, is kind of like not saying Voldemort’s name in harry Potter. The assets shall remain nameless.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. Let’s just move on from that. But, anyway trial by fire, you jumped on and have had an amazing run since that. I can’t believe it’s only been like two years but, if that, but sometimes it feels longer. But so let’s talk about Mila.
Justin Liggett:
Going back, let’s shoot back to 2019. This kind of my radar. Paint the picture of me like, how this came to us, who were some of the people that introduced it to us, maybe like touch on some of the relationships there, how they came to be. But also like, what does DJE look like in 2019? What kind of deals it? We done up to this point, and how does this really kind of set the stage for future stuff I think for us.
Devin Elder:
Love it. Yeah. So, June, 2019, so we started looking at it a couple of months before that. This was a deal that a broker out of Dallas had, that I had a relationship with. And so it’s one of those things where you get the notification about the deal, and I was on site 15 minutes later. Afternoon on a Tuesday walking the property, as I have done many times discreetly, maybe park offsite sometimes. Try not to be wearing a suit jacket or whatever, a little more pedestrian. Walk the property. Funny story, I walked in the leasing office and Justine was in there and who is… We can kind of dive into that. She’s one of our employees now. But Justine and [Maricela 00:09:01] were both working at that property.
Devin Elder:
And so I go in there with my little white lie of, and this sounds totally unplausible, but I’m like, “Hey, I’m looking for an apartment for my sister.” She’s moving in from California and so I’m here. And I think they’re both kind of on me, but they did show me a unit. They followed up with me on the lease which was great, I ignored them on the follow up. So it hurt their metrics that day for closing leases.
Justin Liggett:
I think you’ve made up for it.
Devin Elder:
I hope so, yeah. I hope so. But that was kind of the secret shop, right. Because this is an off market deal from a seller out of Dallas, who we’ve actually transacted with again. We bought the Ascent from them, which is a 154 unit asset we have in San Antonio. That’s another story, that property’s going tremendously well. So Mila was called Autumn Brook at the time, I was very familiar with the area. This is kind of north central, which is like basically most of our portfolio. North of downtown, if you’re familiar with San Antonio, south of 1604, in between I10 and 35, there’s just this pocket that’s got a lot of inventory, we’ve owed a lot of stuff there. So it was the secret shop. It was putting together an offer, and then the seller wanted to do a buyer interview.
Devin Elder:
And this is where I really kind of leveraged… This Multi-Family game is so much about credibility. And so by being able to point to Legacy, which is 130 unit asset that still owned at the time. And we might have even had 1048 in Seguin, which is 128 units. And then we’d gone full cycle on 75 units. So pointing to ’70s vintage assets in the immediate vicinity that we owned or gone full cycle, I think those guys… Any seller of Multi-Family just wants to know, are these as real, can they close? Because it might be a an 80 day sales cycle, you don’t want to go through that with somebody only to have to start over again. It’s a very long slow process. So as a seller of Multi-Family, you want guys that, and girls that can close, and that certainty of execution is really right up there with price in terms of consideration. So we had the interview that went well, this was an off market deal, and we were awarded
Justin Liggett:
Do you think in their minds, the fact that we were a known quantity, like we’d been tested, Multi-Family ’70s era asset. But do you think that being local to San Antonio and this is the market that we primarily focus on from a Multi-Family standpoint, do you think that that gave us a competitive advantage? Because from an investor standpoint, the feedback I get, they really like that. They like the focus. So I’m trying to identify if that was something-
Devin Elder:
Yeah, I think it was. And now that I think about it, Matt and those guys on the seller team actually came to this office. We had them here in the office and we sat down just like this, had a chit chat and I could tell they’re kind of looking at me sideways, but they’re like, “Well, you own this, you’ve done this, you’ve done this. Okay.” And then the brokers vouchering for us as well. So I think all those things played into local buyer, local expertise, existing assets, and the fact that the broker’s vouching for us and kind of established that credibility, all those pieces played into it. So yeah, that local presence I think is always a mark for us on any deal we buy.
Justin Liggett:
Excellent. Yeah. I had to have thought so, like what I’m hearing on the phone with investors and what’s important to them has got to be somewhat important to an underwriter, from a subjective or kind of soft spot kind of aspect of the qualification process.
Devin Elder:
We were just talking before we hit record about the buyer of Mila. So Autumn Brook, we rebranded it, The Mila, and Eli who runs our property management company was instrumental in all that, we can get into all that stuff. But the buyer not necessarily live local, but one of their key principles is a good friend of mine. It’s like, hey, and he’s local. So it’s like, there’s a connection. I know these guys are going to… Well, I feel pretty confident they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do, and that’s just huge. Certainty of execution is just so important.
Justin Liggett:
Right. And we’ll kind of touch on that in a second, kind of the bittersweet aspect of [crosstalk 00:13:26] Something that you’ve poured so much time and resources into. Even if it’s not a living breathing thing, it’s still a bittersweet moment, so we’ll touch on that in a second though. I wanted to transition to like, okay, we got it. We purchased it, Autumn Brook, and we embed, or we basically, we started our third party property management, we could talk about that. But I kind of just wanted to get into a little bit of like, what was the takeover process like and then starting to implement the business plan.
Devin Elder:
Yes. So we went into this, it was interesting timing, mid 2019. I was doing a deal with another group out of Houston, another San Antonio deal kind of concurrently. As a partnership deal, that wasn’t what I would call like a pure DJE deal that were actually selling this month as well. A lot of exits happening. And that deal do very well too. However, working on this other deal, which we won’t go down the rabbit hole on, but was introduced to this third party management company who shall remain unnamed. It’s big company. They had done a lot of the due diligence, and I said, “You know what? Let’s just put them on Autumn Brook.” Because we’re here, it works, and interesting turn of events. The existing management company on Autumn Brook when we took over, was run by Eli, was running that property who now runs DJE properties and has built in this magnificent, huge organization.
Devin Elder:
And they were trying to retain the business. So I’m talking with Eli at the due diligence hearing, he’s like, “Hey, we’d really like a shot at the business and this and that.” And I had to tell him later that week, “No, we’re going to bring in this third party management company.” Super genius over here. I’m going to bring in this third party management company that had been vetted by some other business partners, right. And by all signs, they were completely big legitimate company and this and that. So we brought them in, take over and the business plan was fairly familiar and straightforward. We’re going to renovate interiors, we’re going to spend $4,500 putting down vinyl plank, and two tone paint, and fixtures and resurfacing countertops, resurfacing surrounds. That’s kind of the Multi-Family business plan, it’s almost comically simple that you upgrade these interiors.
Devin Elder:
And then we kept it. Autumn Brook, because it had this nice monument sign off west avenue, left that alone. Went in and did the things you do. Trim trees, maybe refurbish the office furniture, things like that. Pretty lightweight, but we started turning the units. And for the first several months, boy, the numbers look great. I actually heard someone from this management company and this should be red flag to anybody listening, he said, “I don’t know what you’re doing on site here, you should be on the beach drinking a pina colada. We got this.” And I was like, “That’s a little heavy handed.”
Justin Liggett:
I’m surprised they didn’t say guaranteed at some point.
Devin Elder:
Yeah, exactly. We guarantee it. So I was like, “Well, I don’t know if that’s true, but… Anyway, fast forward a couple of months, the leans just start coming in for vendors, just stacking up. And the reason the financials look good is because that management company was not paying bills. So you can do that for a few months. Turns out we had them on another asset as well, and it was such a devastation to me. And it was so painful that it actually forced me to create DJE properties. And the timing worked out with Eli leaving his job that he’d been at forever, another management company, coming on board jumping in to be the first employee of DJE properties. Working ridiculous hours, building everything from scratch. So that was kind of wild to start all that. But that was the catalyst right, was we had a new asset management company looked great for the first few months and then holy smokes out of nowhere we’re get just getting pounded with these leans, and it turns out nothing was what it seemed.
Justin Liggett:
Right. Yeah. And like whenever I’m hearing this story, there’s so many interesting themes. And kind of like, not like symbols, but almost like, and not red flags, but something like that, kind of like-
Devin Elder:
In hindsight, sure.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah. Like you coming across Eli and Justine and then how before these assets, things had been a little bit more heavy value add lift and we were transitioning kind of like the main ingredients of what we do across most stuff. But it was definitely, not like a transition period, but it also kind of highlights the fact that the entrepreneurial aspect of obviously, you and DJE, and how that is at the spirit of what we do, but also how we’re kind of like opportunistic and always looking for an opportunity. And whether that’s in a headcount person or a person who could be valuable talent to the team, or if it’s a investment that might not fit perfectly into what we’ve done in the past, which is evidenced by some of the land stuff that we’ve done since.
Justin Liggett:
Stuff that we found, we made a connection with somebody, we tested it and it’s worked out very well and we’ve kind of figured it out. So we’ve been able to pass that along to our investors. I hear all of these things and I see all these things that just like play out from the spirit of some of those things that happened during that time, and it’s really interesting to me.
Devin Elder:
It Is interesting, and talking about kind of our previous deals, I think before Autumn Brooks which we rebranded to The Mila, we had done really heavy lift stuff. I mean like war zone type properties. And that was always, in my mind and I think in a lot of people’s minds, it’s like the more mess up is the more value there is. Not necessarily, right. And my thesis today is we are obsessed with an average annualized return net to investors. If I can get that on a simpler, bigger, cleaner deal, great. That’s less risk for everybody. So I think Mila was a step in that direction where 92% occupied at takeover, had some challenges ’70s asset is going to have physical challenges and tenant challenges, the usual stuff.
Devin Elder:
But it wasn’t like this thing that we had to completely reten it. Yeah, obviously we had our management company challenges, all that stuff. But it was a, a cleaner asset I think that we’d done historically, and kind of lit the path for, hey, all that matters is averaging dollars return net to investors. And I want to be in San Antonio, and we want to be in Multi-Family. So yeah, there’s these parameters but within that what’s the most efficient way to make that happen. So Mila was one of those where it was cleaner in terms of their occupancy and things like that. Now we had our management issues, which forced my hand, and it’s one of those things I’m so grateful.
Devin Elder:
We have an amazing property management company that’s led by Eli. We have this huge staff, we have these awards and events and things that I never imagined. And all of that leads back to better control and results on the properties. Like it’s a complete win all the way around. And the pain of having this third party management company issue was the genesis of the management company, which like a lot of things, oh, hey, it was a blessing in disguise. Sure didn’t feel like it at the time, but
Justin Liggett:
Right. And I think making that transition and I hope this isn’t going out, or misstepping or misspeaking, but it felt like that was an inflection point in the business.
Devin Elder:
100%.
Justin Liggett:
That was a critical juncture kind of thing. And yeah, it’s just been like there’s no going back now. It’s kind of like when the color comes on a Wizard of Oz. It’s just like, I don’t remember what black and light white look like. And it really shows up in the numbers. Because just by 2021 numbers on occupancy and rent collections, we were at 98% approximately on occupancy, 97… Sorry, 97 on occupancy, 98 on rent. Just from January one to sale date.
Justin Liggett:
Those numbers to a certain extent, or to a large extent, speak for themselves as far as the management team. And that is pretty consistent across the rest of our core portfolio, that is still active. So I kind of feel like I feel a lot of security and confidence in those numbers, especially in my kind of role whenever I’m talking to people and be able to say with full authority, like, “This is what happened and this is what you can expect, and this is how we do things.” So I really like that. We kind of talked about the renovation plan, so I don’t know if we need to spend a ton more on that. We talked about heavy value add stuff and the operational averages. So we’re kind of at the point now, like I said, we had announced that the sale had closed, I think on the day before Thanksgiving. And this a day or two ago,
Devin Elder:
Tuesday of Thanksgiving week.
Justin Liggett:
Right. And you kind of touched on earlier in the intro I think that, we had sent the first of the two distributions that we send in the process of closing out the investment. So that’s happened. And I kind of just wanted to talk about what’s next. We’ll send obviously the closeout distribution phase two of what we send, but what does this really kind of set up for you? And what kind of feeling does this leave you with, as far as the impact that you’ve had, not only on the business and the people that have come on to the business while this project was going on and how this sets us up in the future for us and our investors in the city of San Antonio.
Devin Elder:
Right. It’s interesting to look at two and a half years as a pretty short ownership cycle. I would say standard. A lot of other operators I know, kind of cycle out in two, three years. Everybody says, “Hey, we’re five year hold.” But year one, you kind of spend a lot of money, maybe rebrand, CapEx, do your thing. Year two, kind of have some cash flow, maybe year three, but at some point you’re going to refinance or sell. So objectively two and a half years is relatively a short period of time, but for our business it’s like a light year. So much has happened with the management company starting, growing into other assets. At this point in the firm’s trajectory, I feel like it’s just kind of another day at work.
Devin Elder:
Hey, we went full cycle. We moved our team to other assets, which I’m extremely proud of. No layoffs or anything like that, really happy about that. To have a big enough asset base to move people. Because it’s so important. The people that we hire and train. But we have to sell assets at some point, we might not sell any in 2022, in 2023 we probably sell one or two. And so to have enough of an asset base to move people around. The management company’s been huge, having you on the team’s huge. We’re we are a firm now that’s pointing to a firm track record and reputation. This is not Devon Elder out there running around like a crazy man, which certainly was a case first couple of years.
Devin Elder:
And I think any founder entrepreneur is going to go through that. It’s very much a firm team approach now, which I think is… Well, first of all, the size we are, you have to do it that way. But it creates a lot of redundancies, it creates a lot of accountability. It creates a lot of cross training and things where it’s not wholly dependent on me a single point of failure, which I really, really love. So that sets us up for what we’re doing. Right now as we speak we’ve got 700 units in escrow, we’ll close in 2022. Objectively, that’s big, but it’s also just kind of right on our trajectory of what we’ve done. And I think there’s, you mentioned simplicity earlier, I’m just such a huge fan of that. For for everybody in the chain. For investors, for me, for you, for our internal accounting and processes, let’s just keep this…
Devin Elder:
There’s that quote that, something’s not perfect when there’s nothing left to add, it’s perfect when there’s nothing left to take away. And that’s my philosophy. This whole company is, how can we make it even simpler? And so I think that just creates… I hate to use McDonald’s but from a systems and simplicity and replication perspective, that’s really always been my vision, is how do we just create this beautiful machine that can just replicate these types of deals. San Antonio, B and C Multi-Family deals that we can just kind of rinse and repeat and plug the team in on it. And so Mila is just really in the scheme of things, another piece in that puzzle that’s just like, “Hey, we overperform, we did great.” But also that’s just kind of right up the fairway for what we do.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah, that’s what we said we were going to do.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. Right.
Justin Liggett:
We told you we were going to do that. And I think that that’s definitely something that’s a sentiment that I’ve gotten not verbatim feedback on from investors, but you’re like, you tell us what you’re going to do in a way that we can understand it, and then you do it and-
Devin Elder:
Magical formula.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly what you say.
Devin Elder:
Live up to your promises.
Justin Liggett:
But yeah, I do think that, one of the things that really kind of struck me that I think we had a natural understanding of as far as how this role and how communications and taking care of the investors was naturally going to play out, was just leading with simplicity and authenticity. And so I just think though that like… And part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation today was not only the timeliness, but I do feel like it’s almost symbolic. Like this Mila of the time that it happened. And it is a part of this story of transition, of transformation and things like that that is consistent with a lot of things from a brand standpoint that go on here at DJE and everything. But I really appreciate the fact that we are really just trying to be very considerate of our investors and trying to lead with their experience first.
Justin Liggett:
Because my understanding of a lot of the Multi-Family and private equity business before I came, because I came from the investment management retirement planning side of the business, far more regulated and things like that and all the tape. But like what I did know of private equity was that, there didn’t seem to be a lot of impetus or consideration to like explain things to people as far as how operations were going or how things happened and how they play out. So I think that that was one of the most encouraging things that like, we were a different type of firm than that. Like we were among them, but not of them kind of thing. And that we have just chosen to do business a different way, and by and large, I think that’s been received very well. So that’s very encouraging for me.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. The nice thing about these Multi-Family deals, as opposed to say, like a lot of Single Family stuff I’ve done on smaller projects, is like the pie’s pretty big. So investors own 70% I think, just about all our deals. They own most of the deal, right. And I was very intentional a number of years ago, setting this up. Not that I reinvented the wheel or anything, but hey, it’s in the core values, everyone involved wins, right. If we can set this up, we’re not trying to squeeze nickel out of somebody, let’s do 10 deals, let’s do 20 deals. Like that’s going to be way better in the long run and kind of approaching that with employees or brokers. It’s like, it’s not about this nickel here right now today, it’s about the system that we can set up to repeat.
Devin Elder:
And that’s why sometimes I’ll text investors or whatever. It’s like, “Hey, we have a new deal coming out, big shocker, same as the last five.” As far as like return profile, San Antonio Multi-Family like, let’s just rinse and repeat. And really we’ve resisted the urge to get into crazy esoteric waterfalls and stuff like… If you can’t explain it in 15 seconds. Because a lot of our investors, they’re busy. They, don’t want to go do all this work that we do, that’s why they work with us, right. They just kind of let us do all the heavy lifting. So anyway, just to underscore, keep it simple, stupid, rinse and repeat, everybody wins, let’s go do more deals. And I fight that a lot because you want a tinker and you want to improve things, but a lot of time I’m looking at things going, this is exactly what we set out to do. We’re doing it, that’s enough. Let’s just keep this running.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah. And I think that we did a lot of tinkering. Like whenever I first got here, we worked on the business for a month or two while things were kind of getting sorted out. And that was like… And a lot of it was communication stuff like really dialing that in. Eli joined the team during that time as well. So it was a time when we did tinker and I think like now the machine is running and it’s like, it’s upkeep and improvements kind of thing. Like dialing it in and iterating further and further. Yeah. And so I think that once, we talked about like, once we got the team together that was, “Hey, I understand the importance of processes to my job and how to do it effectively and efficiently.” Once we had that and everybody was [inaudible 00:30:46] the same direction and everything like that, then it kind of felt like gasoline got thrown on the fire kind of.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. 100%. And it’s something to behold too, and it’s really… Not that the deals we’re doing now are any different than deals we’ve done in the past necessarily, but it’s just growing responsibly. I see a lot where just because a sponsor can get awarded a deal, getting awarded a deal is the starting point of a multi-year journey. That’s the starting line. So that’s not even the… In my mind that’s not the win, getting awarded a deal. It’s like, okay, well, now you got to run this thing for three years.
Justin Liggett:
You got to perform.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. So I think we’ve really kind of like set our targets that are strong, growing, growing the company, but not like ludicrous. We’re not trying to be in 10 markets. We’re saying no to just about everything that comes across our plate and I think that helps everybody.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah. I think it’s very pragmatic and it’s completely in the context or in relation to the growth of the number of properties that we have and the number of people that we need to manage properties. Like that number, the optics of that aren’t out of scope. If we were like saying, “Okay, let’s go do it in St. Louis.” I’d be like, “We know about St. Louis.”
Devin Elder:
Right. This whole other thing.
Justin Liggett:
Yeah. So yeah, I think that it’s been definitely in the right sort of cadence and it’s felt very natural. It’s been fast, but natural kind of thing.
Devin Elder:
Right. Yeah. I think that’s it.
Justin Liggett:
All right. Well, that’s all I had today, I think. Unless you have something else that you want to add on to the listeners or anything like that.
Devin Elder:
I think there’s so much we could dive in on the metrics of the deal and our challenges, I think we touched on a lot of it. I would just say a big thank you to our teams on site. Those guys worked incredibly hard on that property. Big thank you to Eli for starting building and running a property management company. A big thank you to the investors. That’s awesome, to be able to just send money and congratulations and everybody’s so happy about it. That’s great feeling. But also it’s a great balance to feel like, oh, this is a total win, but also not like a total surprise. This is just kind of, hey, let’s go through our cycle and eventually all of these deals we sell at some point. So chalk another win up. And yeah, it’s one of those things, celebrate, great, high fives all around, back to work. We got a lot of Stuff going on. So it is just part-
Justin Liggett:
We said we did. We did it really well, and we did a lot of great things, but it’s like, back to work.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. And some lessons learned some blessings in disguise, no doubt. And I think we’ve got a great asset for the next ownership group. They’re very bullish about what they can do with the property, traded to a friend of mine which is why they were awarded the deal. We got many years’ relationship with them and that’s a win too. They’re going to do things with it. They’re going to inject capital into it. They’re going to run it for a number of years. And that just kind of keeps it all moving. So anyway, excited about it. I love talking about this stuff, happy to have another full cycle deal, and now back to work, other stuff to do.
Justin Liggett:
And in the spirit of that just to kind of [inaudible 00:34:09] we do have a couple more deals that are likely, or are looking to go full cycle. Now they’re not in our core portfolio, but that is some more good news related that should happen I think before the end of this year.
Devin Elder:
Yeah. We’ve got some land stuff going full cycle, Multi-Family.
Justin Liggett:
And then we have some pretty exciting stuff that I don’t want to go too far into, but this will probably publish in the next couple of days. So keep an eye on the next week or two. That’s all I can say.
Devin Elder:
There it is. Awesome. Justin, always great catching up. Thanks for jumping in with this Mila exit and here’s to a Merry Christmas to everybody, close out the year, happy new year, depending on when you listen to all this stuff and we’ll see everybody in 2022.
Justin Liggett:
Absolutely. Thank you for your partnership.
Devin Elder:
All right.
Justin Liggett:
Bye.