Building a Multifamily Empire and Rescuing Deals, with Tim Bratz | Real Estate to Freedom Podcast #2

About Tim:

Tim Bratz is a real estate investor based out of Cleveland, Ohio. He invested in his first house in 2009 and now currently holds well over 500 rental units in his portfolio. His core focus is on investing in apartment complexes in multiple markets. He started his real estate investing career by flipping and wholesaling single-family residential properties. Now with a team backing him, he is able to buy, renovate, and sell over 100 properties per year. He relies on his mindset to build his success.

Contact him:

bratz@cleturnkey.com

www.cleturnkey.com

www.commercialempire.com

Transcripts (automated):

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in this whole multifamily thing.

I'm 32 years old, got interested in real estate when I was going to Miami of Ohio College, so the market was going gangbusters and everybody said, hey, if you want to make money, get involved in real estate. And so motivated me as a 20 something-year-old, 20, 21 years old. Started looking at different real estate positions and opportunities out of college, so who does New York City, my brother was living there at the time, so just kind of shacked up with him and became a commercial leasing it for retail storefronts. You ever been to Manhattan? You know, you walk around the entire ground floor of that entire city as retail space. So I would either find another location to expand to or I would help a landlord market their space to bring a business in. And so I remember brokering a lease on about a 400 square foot commercial space in the village as cool, trendy area, but probably for 400 square feet.

They signed a lease for $10,000 per month. That doesn't even include like escalations annually. There's four percent, I think escalations every single year and it was a 12-year lease and so I did the math on it and over the course of 12 years with the escalations and everything, this landlord was making around $2,000,000 from this one, 400 square foot retail space. Not to mention the other seven retail spaces that they had on the ground floor and like 15 stories of apartments above it, and so I sat back and looked at the situation. I was like, I'm on the wrong side of the coin. I need to be owning real estate broker in real estate. And so on a whim, I decided to move down south. Moved down to Charleston, South Carolina and is, 08, 09. Right after the market tanked. Bought my first place. I think it was April.

I did something like that and so it's been nine years now and bought a duplex down there, fixed it all up, did the work myself, change out the carpet, change out the fixtures, painted the inside, painted the exterior landscaping and didn't know what I was doing. So it just made up some flyers and some signs that said, hey, I'm going to do an open house. And I handed out to everybody on the street either way and he'll open house one Sunday and one of the neighbors came by and offered me to buy this thing for about $15,000 more than what I was all into it for. So it was all excited about that. Sold the property and rolled it into another deal, got into wholesaling a lot of wholesaling for a few years and then met some people who had money and realize that I knew what a good deal was.

I wholesale a lot of deals. I just kind of met all the players in town. They realized that I knew what the deal was, but maybe they didn't have the bandwidth or maybe I met other people who were familiar wanting to invest in real estate but didn't have the knowledge. And so I partnered up with them and gave up probably 50 to 70 percent of my first 200 plus deals in real estate just because I realized I needed the experience. So I needed to. People weren't going to invest in some pump 23, 24-year-old kid because I didn't have the experience. The relationship could be built that long because I'd only been investing for a couple of years, so I had to be very generous and giving up a lot of equity and ideals, giving a great return on investment so investors felt comfortable working with me.

That's what I did. I give up 50 to 70 percent my first 200 deals, but what that did is allowed me to put enough on my resume and build enough experience. We're now at your posture up with private money lenders. I'd go posture up with bankers and traditional lenders and so it gave me a lot of opportunities moving forward then.

Nice. Yes. I think now that we talked a bit before we got started, at this point though, you have properties in various states at this point.

I've done everything I've wholesale. I've lived retail houses, low-end retail, high-end retail, some of that hgtv kind of stuff. I'd done a lot of turnkey flips where a business owner or a white-collar professional asset cash, they want to invest in real estate. They just want to be completely passive. I would buy rent and then sell as a turnkey rental package up with management and sell it to a professional buy it from me.

So...