Better Returns: Invest Like a Pro

Your Assets are Covered with Sean Thomson

March 13, 2023 Sean Thomson Episode 18
Better Returns: Invest Like a Pro
Your Assets are Covered with Sean Thomson
Show Notes Transcript

Get ready to discover how to supercharge your apartment investment game! In this episode of Better Returns: Invest Like a Pro, we're spilling the beans on why an awesome asset manager is your secret weapon. Sean Thomson gives the juicy details on how asset managers work hand-in-hand with property managers to keep your investment on track. With their eagle-eyed focus on crucial performance metrics, these pros keep your investment risk at bay. Don't miss out on this insider info!

LISTEN FOR THIS

  • Sean started in real estate by buying a single family home franchise before moving into apartment syndications and asset management, which is a business he now runs with his wife and daughter.
  • The essential functions of an asset manager is to optimize outcome and to mitigate risk.
  • The asset manager works closely with the property manager to meet the goals of the business plan for the property. 
  • Sean is creating an asset management program where best practices and processes are developed and utilized for apartment syndications.
  • An asset manager should be creating and sending monthly reports to investors and communicating all the aspects of the business plan.

QUOTES
“You're trying to take the investors' returns and the production of returns of that asset and that investment and maximize those. You're trying to get every ounce you can out of that return for your investors and at the same time you're trying to mitigate any sort of downside.”

“You want to make sure your occupancy is at a certain level. You want to make sure your turnovers are happening at a certain rate. You want to make sure your rents are going the right direction. You know KPIs are critical and need to be talked about on every Property Management call.”

ABOUT
Sean Thomson has 13 years of experience in real estate and has moved from single-family residential investments to multifamily residential in the past three years. His approach and philosophy are informed by his passion for building wealth and achieving financial freedom for his family and his investors. The biggest risk to his investments is Asset Management, which is why Sean has made it his passion to develop a team to be “best in class” and help other independent owners asset manage.

CONNECT WITH SEAN
Website: thomsonmultifamilygroup.com

CONNECT WITH US
Learn more about passively investing in apartment buildings:
Website: hansenholdings.com
Free Webinar Training: hansenholdings.com/webinar
Schedule Call with Matt: Schedule Intro Call
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram


welcome to better returns where you will learn how to escape the volatility of the stock market by passively investing in real estate like a pro 90 of millionaires earned and maintain their wealth by investing in real estate we will share real-life examples from Savvy investors so you can do the same the show is for educational purposes only should not be considered legal tax or investment advice his favorite food is pistachio flavored Italian gelato your host and my dad Matt Hansen welcome back to better returns we've got our special guest here Sean Thompson from Thompson multi-family group John is 13 years of experience in real estate and has moved from single-family residential to multi-family in the past three years his approach and philosophy are informed by his passion for Building Wealth and achieving Financial Freedom for his family and his investors the biggest risks to Investments is asset management I'm so excited to have him on the show to talk about this which is why Sean has made it his passion for developing teams to be best in class and help other independent owners better asset managed so welcome to the show you're the first asset manager I've had on the show so I'm excited you're going to drop some great knowledge with us Sean yeah I hope so thanks for having me on I really appreciate it yes so let's let's get started with your origin story how did you get involved in real estate well you know I've been I've been a worker my whole life I've had a job since I was 12 years old and you know I grew up with a family that just said if you work hard save your money you know that's how you kind of win in this world and you know that's that's true you do have to work hard you do have to save you do have to be smart about things but I always knew there was something kind of more but I was I worked until you know I was nearly 40 in jobs just trying to be a good father and family man and bring home some some pay and I I made a decision to say hey I'm that's it I'm going to make something that's mine that I control and own and I always knew real estate was kind of one of those things of course you know you read the pivotal book a Rich Dad Poor Dad that talks about uh you know investing in real estate and and so real estate's always been something that I was interested in and I thought well I'm going to start my own thing maybe it might as well be in real estate and so I didn't really know how to do that uh on a business level I mean buying a house fixing it up and selling it for a profit isn't really not that hard to do that once time you know but to do that every month or every week you know it's a challenge and it's a unique challenge so I didn't really know how to do it but at some point I just decided I'm gonna go buy a house and figure this out and my contractor at the time when I when I bought my first investment property had just bought a home investors franchise and I don't know if you wouldn't know what home messages but it's the We Buy Ugly Houses guys you know you see the signs of the highway and um so we I he started telling me about this franchise he just bought and how it was teaching him a system and that had kind of been what I've been looking for this whole time and I said well I want to do that so I went down and bought a franchise and what they did was they had me um you know they had the coaching programs teaching programs on how to kind of make this into a business and that was my start into real estate and my goal with real estate has always been you know income I want to have monthly income and um with single-family homes it was I was doing fine I was making decent money my business was never that big I've never been concerned with being the largest operator I just want to be good at what I do that's always my goal I want to be the best if I can and so we had a nice small business of making money but my ability to scale that to a level that would make a monthly income for me that I was going to be happy with was going to take a really long time and so I thought well there's got to be a better way to do this I'm working really hard and it doesn't seem like I'm going to achieve my income goals so what other options are out there and I always thought apartment buildings were kind of out of my reach I didn't think that a guy like me a regular Average Joe like me could go and buy a big apartment complex and make money doing that I thought that was reserved for the wealthy you know the riots and the Wall Street guys and I met someone that um that was doing it that that was a syndicator and putting those deals together and I heard his story and I thought well if that guy can do it I can do it and so I asked you know can you show me how this works you know can you teach me how to do this and luckily he had a um a training program in his you know as part of his business and um you know I went through that and started just started developing my business and this is why I still had I still have my single family business going and it took me about a year probably to really decide to Pivot my focus away from single family into multi-family and that was uh we're probably three years yeah probably three years ago that that's when I made that that final move from single family to multifamily and ever since then we've just been working on you know acquiring assets and building our business sorry along that path to um my daughter was going to college and I you know I started talking to her she she came to me one day and said hey Dad I think I might want to take a gap year and travel Europe and I said I said baby I'm not going to pay for that you got to figure out how to pay for that and she said well that's why I'm talking to you I want to figure out how to have some passive income through real estate so that I can travel and not have to worry about having a job and things like that so we started working on a a strategy for her to how many rental properties she needed how much money she needed to make and as we were kind of going through that process we started talking more and more about my business and what she wanted to achieve and it came to a place where she changed her mind about the Gap year and I was transitioning my business out of single family kind of at the same time and we just said hey look Why Don't We join forces build something together that'll you know I can retire mom and dad and then she can take it build whatever she wants out of it you know in the future and so that's kind of what we decided to do and so she's my partner in everything that we do and um that's kind of where we're at now and we just decided to um build another company that she's partnering with me on that as well which we'll talk about excellent excellent that's good we were similar here Hanson Holdings kind of a family business my wife does a lot of my marketing my son's involved in the production stuff and a little bit of acquisition here and there so I get that it's really great and it's fun that you can work with you know your family members and what you're going to be leaving is a legacy business really here to your heirs and your daughter Abigail that's great that she wants to work with you wonderful well let's talk a little bit more about asset management and I think this is a real deficit we see particularly with newer smaller syndication groups is that they don't have a lot of asset management experience and I think across the board mostly unless you're a big herds company and you've got 15 people working for you you've got a full-time asset manager but a lot of syndications what people are just kind of Moonlighting as an asset manager and that's kind of scary to me because that's the most important role you know we close these 40 million dollar deals and then we pass it off to an asset manager that's going to manage the property manager for the next six years potentially you really want to make sure you vet that individual well and that they're trained well and that's what we're going to talk about today because it's what you're really focusing now in addition to your multi-family Acquisitions you're doing something else which I think is great for the industry so let's talk a little bit about um Asset Management just in general what it is because maybe not everybody knows what an asset manager does let's talk a little about the kind of the key roles and responsibility of an asset manager then we'll get into some other details yeah well you can you can boil it down to two essential functions of an asset manager there's really two essential functions it's to optimize outcome and to mitigate risk those are your as an asset manager those are really the two things that everything every decision you make should stem from those two outcomes right so you're trying to take the investors returns and the the production of returns of that asset and that investment and maximize those you're trying to get every ounce you can out of that return for your investors right and at the same time you're trying to you're trying to mitigate any sort of downside there might be you want to have optimal Insurance you want to have you know all those those sort of risk factors taken care of any sort of liabilities that may be involved you want to make sure you're taking you're covering those things I'm sorry and um so those two those two essential functions are really kind of where everything stems from the asset manager as a as a role their primary function is to oversee property management and then to report to ownership and if they're not in the ownership seat of the investors that are invested in the project so the property management company runs the day-to-day operations on site and they're the properties focused and Community Building focused entity or the operations the asset manager oversees what they're doing and then the asset manager also makes sure that the the decisions that are being made on the business plan are you know in continuity with the objective of the business plan as well so what the business what the property management company is doing every day should be trying to achieve a goal that is in the plan for the long-term execution like you said it could be six years of executing a business plan that you're trying to get to this outcome and all along that process you want to make certain that your entire team is informed about what's happening on the project good The Good Bad and the Ugly you know things go wrong all the time in these in these operations and hiding them from everybody doesn't doesn't do any good right you need to make sure everybody understands what's happening and then what's what sort of solutions you're taking to make those things better right so that's the essential role of an asset manager you touched upon that sometimes an asset manager is a general partner as well and sometimes they're a third party what are your feeling on those I've got I've got my personal feelings if you're a general partner that also is an asset manager or do you have a For Hire asset manager that's not part of the general partner team pros and cons well I don't know there's not that many third-party Asset Management Services available that I know of I think there's very few most of the syndications that I see the asset management is handled by someone on the GP team so they they find the most appropriate person of the the sponsorship group that seems like oh you're the most organized or you're the best you know you're the CPA you're the one that seems to be able to accomplish this day-to-day task the best so we're going to make you the asset manager which is fine and there's a ton of guys uh people in the asset management seat that are doing fantastic jobs they're just they're naturally good at it but then most syndicators are kind of like me they're like I you would never want to hire me as an asset manager I I make a terrible asset manager because I'm not in the day-to-day grind of things I you know if you show me a spreadsheet I start to nod off a little bit so uh so you want to have the right person in the right seat first of all and sometimes as a GP group you kind of get lucky and you get that right person but the goal I think should be to have someone that is that can do the job that wants to do the job and that will get out there and do the job right so that's really that's the essence for every role that you have in in any business really can they do the work you know do they want to do it and then will they get out there and make make it happen and so I think whether it's a third party or someone on the GP team as long as they meet that criteria and they can do the work uh you're going to have success right and I think that's the that's really the critical thing what we found is a lot of syndicated or sponsorship groups are full of people that they just shouldn't be in that seat their their personality wise they're not they're not qualified or you know they're just not suitable uh they just don't have the right you know they don't have any experience in asset management For Real Estate uh they've had a lot of experience doing other things which some of it translates but you know you have to have some background in real estate to understand you know what what changes to make and how what directions to go and there's some Nuance to that right and so some of those things are just kind of set up to fail from the beginning if you have the wrong personality the person you know really isn't capable of doing the job to begin with and they just don't want to be in that seat you're never going to have success there to begin with so what we've tried to do I guess in our business um when I was developing our syndication business I realized well because I've been operating our business our you know multifamil or our single Family Assets our whole time we've been our asset manager for years and you know during our business so we think we're pretty good at Asset Management and on the multi-family side it it's the same business except that it's um you know the complexity is is 100 times higher right there's a lot more there's a lot more levers to pull on a lot more kpis to monitor a lot more things to happen and so the complexity goes way up so for us we wanted to make certain that we were um capable and prepared and um Best in Class at Asset Management we talked to a lot of high-level investors early on in our business development on our multi-family acquisition side and they always asked us that one of the first questions they asked us was you know who's going to asset manage this for us you know and I started to realize well that's that's a very critical seat uh it's important when the investors that that matter to me and so we started investigating what what is the best practices in asset management and we talked to syndicators we talked to property management companies we talked to asset managers we talked to investors you know passive investors in these deals and the experiences that we were hearing from people were you know it was it was alarming you know I talked to investors passive investors that are in syndications that that he would tell me stories like well the the sponsors were great when we we put our money in the deal but I haven't heard from them in a year you know I haven't gotten paid I haven't seen in I haven't seen in um reports I haven't you know I haven't talked to anybody in a year and it's like well that's that's completely unacceptable you know agree and I've talked to I've talked to property management companies they're they're you know a lot of people think the property management company and the asset management company are in opposition and it's not it's a very symbiotic relationship those two have to function well together and it's a it's a push-pull system and if they don't you're never going to get you're never going to get progress made you're never going to be successful and a lot of ownership that are sitting in that in that Asset Management seat they can't get decisions out of those guys they can't get the money they need they can't get the resources they need so you're you're handicapping your property management group who's trying to do a good job for you by just not neglecting that relationship right so you know it's it's all the way from Property Management to investors it has to be a nice flow through that system and we heard stories after stories about you know cine care is that oh my property management company did this or that and you know the the on-site team is stealing from us and and it's it always it always boiled down to monitoring what was happening on a day-to-day basis and how successful you were doing that right and so we started to see we wanted to build it for ourselves right this original Asset Management business we started to see hey there's there's a real need for an organized experienced team that can come in and say hey we'll take care of this for you it's a day-to-day business it's a day-to-day job we'll be on the phones we'll make sure the kpis are happening

interesting we'll set everything up for you and make and monitor it make sure you're you're you're on track right and do all the reporting and take care of these things it's a Daily Grind type job and and so we started to develop what we wanted for our business into a service that we could offer out to a third as a third party and uh we just we're just launching it now really kind of and we're we're the idea for us was to build systems and processes around experience right and support that with experience so we we sought out uh people in our in our orbit that have a ton of experience and we've just been building this out for it's been about a year maybe a little longer that we've tried to been you know develop all these things to make a successful asset management for anybody that that you know we could we could work with so that's where we're at now is launching that that's phenomenal Sean because it's systems and processes anybody that's run a large business knows that and it's kpi's key performance indicators we're going to talk a little bit about that in the past or in in the next segment here but that's great though because a lot of people by default oh I'm the most businessy person on the GP team I guess I'll be the asset manager no no no no no no we don't want that we want the person that's got systems and processes and that's what I love that you're going to create templates and so everybody knows you know that's aligned with you or you know working for your your team is that here's the things you do every single month or every single week or every single day that's great that's wonderful and it is really neat in this industry so so I'm so happy that you're sharing this and hopefully we'll hear some syndicators reaching out to you um for assistance in asset management and getting right field up or you guys providing that third third-party Service as well is that that you you would not only do the training but you're talking about also providing that service yeah so we're doing uh there's I guess for me personally there's three phases I I wanted in my business so my my tonsil multi-family group has a really strong Asset Management component to our business we decided to launch that as a third-party service so if someone uh like if you if you're buying a new property you could come to us and we can help support you through that process and then asset manage for you as a third party we we don't necessarily need to be on the GP for that right um and then we're also working on because we see such a need for some sort of um continuity in this you know what are what are the best practices what are the key kpis what are all these things that you should be doing on a daily basis and no one's kind of I don't think sort of synthesized for a small operator you know I'm not talking about guys who have billions and billions of dollars under management those guys have their own teams I'm talking about the guys who were small operators you know six six properties two properties and they're trying to be successful and they're trying to get over this sort of this hump of inexperience to the experience right that's kind of our window and where we think we can serve the most people and we're hopefully going to be able to create with my partners we're creating an education platform that will set those sort of standards for this is what you need to make sure you're doing on day one this is what you need to make sure you're looking at every day these are the weekly things you should be looking at you know we're going to create a whole we're creating it now actually the curriculum for how to be a good asset manager so that someone that's getting started in this business they can just learn what they need to know before it's too late you know most I think most of the time the sponsors put together these deals and on day one they're handing the keys to this operation and now they're like okay now what right they're trying to figure out what do we do first and I think we can sort of take some of that mystery out of that and create an education platform for that and we're doing all that now that's excellent so instead of learning from the School of Hard Knocks we learn from your playbook that says right okay these are the things you should do and a lot of is just a preventative measures you're meeting with the property manager once a week you're looking at all the metrics you're following up when you see there's an anomaly and you're getting on things and transparency as you indicated I know I've passively invested in well over a dozen deals some of those are like so poor Communications I learned more from the bad syndicators than I did for the good ones those are the ones I'll never treat my investors this way because they need should be getting monthly Communications that something goes sideways have a plan in place but everybody has a fire or something like that don't hide it disclose it but have a process in place to manage it so I think that's really powerful so let's talk a little bit about so what should as a passive investor what are the questions I should be asking a sponsor about the asset manager for for the my investment what are the key questions well the what you want to try and boil down is how important is this role to this particular sponsor group right a lot of sponsor groups talk about um asset management and their track record and things like that um but you can you can find out pretty quickly if asset management is something that they're focused on or if it's kind of a an afterthought right right and you want to just ask them questions like you know do you have a dedicated person that's going to do that for you are they do they have experience in this have they done this before um you know do you have systems around your your operations and asset management you know what what do those look like what sort of reporting what sort of reporting should I expect you know a passive investor should be getting a monthly summary on on property you know operations and a full financial report you know or at sorry or at minimum they should be getting a summary of financials right I think that's that would be like the bare minimum I I think you you know for us we prepare a nice summary for the good the bad the ugly and all of our all of our assets and then a full financial report and that goes out to our investors every month you know right and um you can you can even that's like that for us that's the minimum I think you can do phone calls you can do webinars you can do all kinds of other things to keep your investors sort of connected to what's happening you know your investors are effectively Partners in this deal they they deserve the same sort of um I don't know respect is the right word but they deserve the same sort of openness and um you know access to deal information that you have as the operator right so I think getting you know that information out and being open with it is is critical so uh you want to make sure that as a passive investor that that is going to be coming to you if you're if you're a syndication team is not sending you reports every month you know are quarterly at the minimum uh I I would be very wary of investing with those guys it just seems like they're not interested in Sharing or I don't know what you would call that but you know I would make sure that you're getting it proports for sure it's neglect that's neglect again in that situation is like oh never invest with those people again and word spreads pretty quickly of the okay who's who's communicating clearly what's going on on the deals and like for we always at monthly updates financials and all to our investors you just have to I think once a quarter is not even enough because things can change in three months things can change dramatically look at covid or the economy you want to know what that occupancy level is you don't want to know what your Breakeven point is you want to make sure there's anything going on with the properties that um that that they need to know about that okay you know what before you hear this in the news we're already on top of it you know so I think that that's really key so let's talk a little bit about the the kpi so go and explain what a kpis and the ones that you think are critical that everyone should be receiving foreign

yeah so kpis are going to be your key performance indicators there's also key process indicators if you want to get deeper I have a business coach that you know kpis are you know on their thing so um I think there's you know probably a hundred you could have a hundred different kpis that you measure there's data points of all kinds of different things uh how many units you're turning every every week or every you know month how many um you know all kinds of things how many how many uh turnovers you're having in in renewals and how many new leases are coming up so there's there's kpis for all kinds of stuff there's um there's a handful of critical ones that you want to make sure you're hitting every month if you're an operator um I'd have to look review my list honestly to give to give you the right ones but you know you want to make sure your occupancy is at a certain level you want to make sure your turnovers are happening at a certain rate you want to make sure your rents are going the right direction you know those kpis are critical kpis and those need to be talked about on every Property Management call you have every week if you're not hitting just those those major ones at least on your your call with your on-site and your your regionals uh with the property management company uh you're you're neglecting what's going on you know if you're doing capex you want to make sure all your capex those those construction projects always have a way of slowing down or getting delayed you know we had a we had a project that was they quoted us a paint a quote for the building and they said oh we can have it done in three weeks I said well that's obviously six weeks from now you know because it's November you know it's November and you're going to have bad weather and you know sure enough it's eight we're eight weeks in and they're still just been finishing up right so you know as you want to measure those those timelines of things and what those are costing what you know what the expectations are you know they tell you three weeks but you know it's gonna be six so you set your kpi or your your performance indicator for okay this is the deadline for that and then you know are they staying on track for those things so um you know you have to kind of just monitor that stuff as it goes through but um I think the critical kpis for sure just you know off top of my head occupancy um turnovers and then rent rates going the right direction would be like the three most important ones for the sponsor to know I think right in addition to all the stuff you mentioned before like the financials and all those I mean those should be included there so you can take a look and see the details yeah the other 100 110 you know those all need to be in there too but I think if on your weekly calls you have to be hitting those and you know for us we on on our asset business we monitor all of them but we we summarize for ownership and for um investors the the critical critical ones right so the I guess the VIP list of of uh kpis that you know they don't know they don't not everybody needs to know every kpi every time so you want to make sure you're just hitting the highlights the top 10 or top 20 you know kpis for for investment for some reason stuff yeah because your investors shouldn't have to be an expert at that give them the critical ones and you can give all the additional supporting data but you don't need to send them 42 bullet points no no it's just the top like you said three or four really is what matters and then the rest if you want to dig into it because most about that's the whole point they're paying us to manage their their their their investment their real estate so we should be the experts on it and spoon feed them here's the important data that we need to make sure we're tracking that you're aware of yeah a lot of those aren't necessary until you get in the Weeds on something like uh um you know I talked to someone earlier today actually that they their occupancy has gone from 97 to 75. and so that's an occupancy number that you should have been talking about every week and it shouldn't have gone to 75 when it got to 90 you should have said okay well how many phone calls are we getting what's our website traffic what's our marketing like those kpis need to start to come into play right how are we being successful there are we how many people we we get this many phone calls how many people are we talking to are we returning everybody's phone calls are we getting conversions how many applications are coming from that right so those kpis that you necessarily wouldn't talk about to your ownership every month those become critical when you have an issue like occupancy dropping right so while there are kpis that we measure for sure like like I said they're not on the top 20 but when there's a problem those those immediately go to like a higher importance level because you have to figure out why is our occupancy going down is it you know if the if the the area is has a stabilized occupancy at 94 and we're at 75. we're doing we're doing something wrong we are doing something big and wrong right and we got to figure that out today you you know 75 occupancy and dropping is is horrible business so um kpis while they may not be on a daily basis the most critical things but you want to measure those things so that when you do have a problem you can get into the Weeds on those things and make sure you're you're doing everything that you can to get yourself out of a bad situation and into a good situation yeah you do the classic Rook cause analysis and determine why that number is going down and take actions to and you may have a couple lovers to pull but I love that I love that wow drop some excellent excellent knowledge here Sean you're phenomenal this is great I really think you're you're doing the the industry a great service by putting this together this program together and getting it accessible to you know people that aren't don't have a big Corporation they don't have somebody that's worked on Wall Street that's now their asset manager for the billion dollars worth of properties that's wonderful I would like to move into the lightning round

are you ready sure okay these are five five fun questions just to get to know you a little bit better Sean first number one what was your nickname as a child well so the funny thing is

also the funny thing is uh Sean's not my real name so I'll give you I'll give you the story my parents I'm the last of eight children whoa and my my parents wanted to name me after my two grandfathers one was named John and one was named Wesley so my real name is John Wesley Thompson but they always they always wanted a kid named Sean so they've called me Sean since I was born so Sean's not my name but it's it's that's what I've always gone by oh my gosh that's fascinating didn't even go close to your real name so all the alleles don't say Sean nothing says Sean well if you if you're my banker or my lawyer you know me as John but if you're my friend you call me Sean oh fascinating that's really good number two are you a morning person or a night owl yeah I am not a morning person I try really hard to do a better job of being a morning person and as I get older it kind of I don't know I'm shifting a little bit but um I definitely you know I stay up way too late and I I you know I'd much rather sleep in and stay up late than I would get up and go to bed early Kindred Spirits here my friend Kindred Spirits number three what would be the first thing you do if you won the lottery how much did I win let's say 10 million 10 million I wouldn't change anything I just that's not enough that's where I heard 10 million 10 million you know net worth you're pretty much truly comfortable but you need more than that you think well I would just park that in a fund and start you know just continue doing what I'm doing okay gotcha if I if I if I do if I win 500 million I'm gonna call a family office buddy of mine and get him on on board and and I'm gonna go take a trip got it very good number four if you could live anywhere in the world where would that be uh you know I like I like Dallas a lot but I've grown up I grew up here we've lived in Colorado in a couple other places but I'm I'm always comfortable here in Dallas but I you know you think to yourself I you know where else could I live and I I wouldn't have tried living in Spain a little bit and you know a couple other places I like Seattle so I'm not sure but I I like Dallas a lot but you know I might try some other places okay you with with 10 10 million you can move around yeah you could you could cover it summer in the south of France and stuff like that so yeah right right and then the last one uh number five what one piece of advice would you give to new investors to help them get better returns that's the one key nugget Sean

I'm trying to time these costs so they they can that's okay we'll edit them out there you're good don't worry about it

um so one key one key a factor for like a passive investor yes for Passive investor well you know I think I think the critical thing for Passive investors is don't really worry you know I think they worry too much about returns uh I think the most important things if you're investing in alternative Investments like multi-family and real estate you want to find people that you can work with you want to find operators that you're comfortable with that you know are going and doing a good job you know things are going to go wrong in this business even on a good day you'll have problems and you want someone on your team that knows how to deal with those things or can deal with those things they have the temperament for it they have the personality for it and hopefully they have the experience for it or they have a team that has the experience for it so you want to make sure that the people you do business with are the right people for you right you want to make sure that they have you have some alignment in in how they sort of look at things yeah and you want to make sure that you know what they're trying to accomplish is is something that you believe in right I think that's the first thing you want to do then the deal should be second you know I I have a lot of investors they get wrapped up in is it 18 or 17 percent or you know what's what is it my return rate and it's like well it you know that's important but are you comfortable with who you're investing with and what they're trying to accomplish here and do you think it's realistic right that's most important I think I wouldn't you know I see people investing in things because it has these great you know big returns and all these promises and then they just completely underperform because the team is not prepared to take on the challenges right so what they promise and what they deliver are two different things so I think if you can work with a group that is going to give you the best shot at delivering whatever they're saying in the beginning that's the most important I 100 agree that was excellent advice Sean excellent advice well how can well first off I'm going to plug because I downloaded your free report questions to ask sponsors about Asset Management you've got that on your website and also I think you have one on kpis that you should be looking at so check out their website download that this really good I thought it was fabulous um how else can people contact you and get a hold of you Sean uh the best way to reach me I think is just on our website Thompson multifamilygroup.com and Thompson spelled a little bit uniquely I don't know if you can see it but it's a t-h-o-m-s-o-n there's no p and that's probably the best place to go to reach us we're we started our asset management business under one brand we've we're changing our brand right now so I could send you that website but it's going to be changing in the next month anyway so okay but I would think Thompson multi-family group if you go there reach out to us we'll be happy to get you either the asset side or the multi-family side uh whatever your interests are with us that you want to contact us about uh you can reach us through there and we can get you sort of plugged in the right the right zone for us too outstanding and his information will be in the show notes below so check that out thanks so much for being on the show Sean and sharing your knowledge about Asset Management I think that's a really valuable and probably one of the most important roles in investing so we truly appreciate your time today yeah thank you man I appreciate you having me on and I I enjoyed sharing everything and that's a wrap thank you for listening to better returns brought to you by Hanson Holdings if you enjoyed this episode please leave a five star review because it helps others discover this valuable content if you would like to earn truly hands-off passive income go to hansonholdings.com where we help you invest in large apartment complexes to grow your family's wealth see you next week with another awesome episode have a great day