- A strong team is your prerequisite to success
- Having a PM removes the unnecessary strain from your investing
- Crawl/Walk/Run – the incremental approach to success
- Multi-family is attractive due to scalability and lower impact per vacant unit
- Through GreenDay Capital, Erickson is bringing others with him on this wealth-building journey
For this first Investor Spotlight article, I interviewed Erickson Sainval, a rockstar who somehow manages to do it all. He is a husband and father, serves in the military, and somehow invests in real estate in between.
He drops quite a few nuggets for us related to how he got started, overcoming fear, and having a bigger vision for yourself and your wealth building. Check out the takeaways below.
Who is Erickson?
Erickson is an active duty Marine who came across real estate as wealth building tool, got the bug and has not stopped. Having invested in stocks in the past, he felt that he would occasionally get “lucky,” but wanted more control over the wealth-building power of his assets. He turned to real estate and bought his first property in 2014. Intended as a buy and hold rental, he enjoyed the rent checks, but really got convinced of real estate’s wealth building power after selling it in 2018.
Since his first acquisition, he has owned up to four single-families and sold one more. The best part about this: he has done most of these deals out of state while working his day job!
In any market in which Erickson invests, he forms relationships with potential brokers and property managers. Having overcome the initial anxiety of reaching out to a professional that he has never met (and potentially exposing his initial lack of experience), Erickson’s approach was to jump right in, recognizing that a strong team is his prerequisite to success.
Buying out of State
We spent time getting Erickson’s perspective on investing from out of state. Erickson says that due to prices in his home markets, he was forced to look elsewhere. I asked him, “How can you invest in a real estate asset that you have never seen?” His response was simple: “Have a great team.”
Erickson believes that key members of a great team are brokers and property managers. Being an active-duty marine and out of state investor, he knew that he could not manage his buy-and-hold portfolio without property managers. He further argues that having a PM removes the unnecessary strain and frustration from your investing trajectory.
Crawl/Walk/Run
Erickson says that in the Marines, there is a mentality of Crawl/Walk/Run. You start with an achievable goal, improve and grow further from there. This is precisely his approach with real estate. Having invested successfully in single-family homes, Erickson has decided to shift his focus towards multi-family. His reasons: Scalability and Improved Risk Management.
Having multiple paying tenants consolidated under one, or fewer, roofs is more efficient than having them spread across multiple states. Further, Erickson calculated that in order to meet his financial goals, he realized that he would need 40+ single family homes to make that happen! He added that vacancy has less of an impact in multi-families, as one vacancy in a 10-unit apartment (10%) is less of a financial impact than one vacancy in a single family (100%). For these reasons decided that multi-family investments would be his new focus.
Additionally, Erickson shared why the mobile home space is so attractive: the ability to charge lot rent, tenants are more self-sufficient due to pride of ownership and there is an opportunity to sell back homes to tenants. He shared that the challenge is space. Mobile home parks take up more space than apartments with the same number of units. Secondly, he has observed that lending can be a challenge compared to apartments. However, due to the attractiveness of this niche, Erickson keeps it on his menu of opportunities alongside apartment investing.
Next Steps for Erickson
He is building a syndication business where he seeks to help other investors grow their wealth through multi-family investing. Erickson and his company, Green Day Capital, are aggressively seeking multi-family deals that meet his organization’s investment criteria. Erickson, a strong-willed deal hunter, remains actively engaged with several brokers for multi-family assets in his key markets and expects to have a deal done in the next few months. We look forward to watching his journey!
How to get in touch with Erickson
Anyone can get in touch with Erickson through the following channels:
– Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/erickson-sainval-a7565566
– Email: [email protected]
– Website: www.greendaycapital.net
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Rodney Robinson II
[email protected]