Ready to revolutionize your real estate journey? Listen now as we share powerful insights from the Best Ever Conference. Perfect for anyone curious about real estate investment and syndication, this episode is packed with essential strategies, the latest industry trends, and incredible networking opportunities. Tune in now and discover how such transformative events can supercharge your investment career!

Key takeaways to listen for

• [01:37] How attending real estate conferences can change professional trajectories and expand networks
• [04:10] The significance of networking with top-level investors
• [07:26] Insights into Nomad Capital’s participation in the Pitch Slam event
• [12:42] Advantages of understanding syndication and the long-term value creation in commercial real estate
• [24:04] Reflections on how the conference serves as a team-building and strategic planning platform

Resources mentioned in this episode

• [00:25] Best Ever Real Estate Conference
• [00:52] Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever
• [00:54] Best Ever Apartment Syndication Book by Joe Fairless and Theo Hicks | Paperback and Kindle

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Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsored by Nomad Capital

Looking to invest in self-storage? Nomad Capital converts vacant big-box retail spaces across the Southeast into climate-controlled storage, with a target of 20% annual returns. Our fund combines low leverage and high depreciation for strong growth and valuable tax benefits. By buying properties at deep discounts, we often achieve break-even at just 40% occupancy. Join a proven model in a resilient asset class that continues to deliver, even in today’s market. Learn more at nomadcapital.us/tpi. Accredited investors only.

Clint Harris: 00:00:42

Every time we talk to an investor, our job is not to sell them on what we do. We don't sell our deals. We educate, we walk through our strategy and we explain what we do.

And it's up for that person, be it a shark tank judge or an individual investor, they decide if it fits in with the goals and timelines that they have for their lives.

Neil Henderson: 00:00:58

Welcome to Truly Passive Income. I'm Neil Henderson.

Clint Harris: 00:01:00

And I am Clint Harris.

Neil Henderson: 00:01:01

I love the way you kind of like look up and roll your eyes when I announce who I am. All right, so we're going to do a recap of the best ever conference that we just got back from in Salt Lake City, Utah.

We're there for about five days.

Clint Harris: 00:01:15

Yep.

Neil Henderson: 00:01:16

So first of all, give your impression of what the best ever conference is for somebody who's never been before.

Clint Harris: 00:01:21

Oh, man, there's a lot to unpack here because I got a personal story about this as well. But the best ever real estate conference is a conference put on by Joe Fairless, who founded the best ever real estate brand.

He has the best ever real estate podcast, the longest daily running real estate podcast. He wrote the best ever apartment syndication book and just a string of other best ever. He's a marketing guy, marketing guru, very good at it.

own to be conference of about: 1200

Specifically a lot of operators, people raising capital from groups of individuals to take on projects larger than what any individual could do on their own. That a fair assessment?

Neil Henderson: 00:02:07

Fair assessment. And I want to give a shout out. It was also co founded by Ben Lapidas, his partner.

Clint Harris: 00:02:11

Right. Did a fantastic job with that.

Neil Henderson: 00:02:13

irst went to the best ever in: 2017

I had pretty much done very little real estate at the time, but got convinced to go by a friend of mine who was a high volume house flipper in Las Vegas named Omar Merced. Thank you, Omar, for encouraging me to go. And that was the first time I ever heard about self storage.

And that was also where I ended up meeting our partner now, Eric Hemingway. And I say that conference changed the course of my life. Yeah, I mean, it's the best way to describe it.

that's been every year since: 2017

So it just tends to att tracked multifamily syndicators. But there's self storage syndicators there, there's triple net industrial syndicators there, there's triple net retail, I mean wind, you name it.

Anybody who's syndicating meaning, you know, taking capital from smaller investors and taking down projects that are bigger than they could take down on their own, they tend to be there. That's where they gather.

Clint Harris: 00:03:24

Okay, so that's like the definition of kind of what it is. And that's our description. Now let me give you my personal impression.

Neil Henderson: 00:03:29

Okay.

Clint Harris: 00:03:30

The first time that I went there, I was like two days into that conference and I'm looking around in a room and the guy in this running the show started nine years previously at the time with four single family houses currently sitting on almost $2 billion worth of commercial real estate assets.

Neil Henderson: 00:03:45

I think it's two and a half billion.

Clint Harris: 00:03:47

It is now. It was 2.7 billion.

Now it's crazy, but I was looking at this room full of a thousand people and it was like a couple billionaires, 20 to 30, like center millionaires, a bunch of multi, multi millionaires in the 10 to 50 million dollar range, and then a ton of single digit millionaires and then like 20 chumps like me looking around at each other like, how did I get it? Like I should be wearing a waiter's outfit in here. I should be one of the servers. It was mind boggling to me. The brain power that was in one place.

I felt like I understood about every tenth word. It was just thinking on such a larger level and no inhibition or holding back based upon capital constraints or lack of vision or anything else.

These are top, top operators. That was my impression and it's been really interesting to see how that's progressed over the last couple years.

I had a moment at that conference, I believe three or four days into that conference, the first year. So this was, I just finished my third. So this would have been two years ago.

I had a moment when I was standing there and I was like, oh man, I gotta quit my job. We've talked about this many times. I tell the story, I've got a picture of where I was. A friend of ours came by and snapped a photo of that moment.

But I was like, these people are all in. I see the pathway, I see what they're doing.

And they are changing the financial velocity of the rest of their lives and what it looks like and the amount of time they're gonna have to spend with their kids.

I sat there and I was like, I have no idea how I'm going to do this or what the timeline looks like, but I was like, I'm going to have a second act and this is it, and I've got to quit my job. That's a pivotal moment that'll stay with me for the rest of my life.

Neil Henderson: 00:05:29

Yeah. That's the basics of what it is and what it can do. That conference, I think, clearly changed mine and Clint's life.

This year we were back in force with a team of eight from Nomad Capital. We really, really went hard. We took a whole team there and we had a booth. We were sponsored.

We were sponsored of the Left Field Invest conference that tagged on to the best ever conference.

And it was a very different experience for me being there as a sponsor, as opposed to just somebody who was just walking around, just, you know, watching the sessions and visiting other booths and things like that.

Clint Harris: 00:06:06

Yeah. One of the things I picked up on my second year at the Best ever conference was it was really interesting for me to go two years in a row.

First year I feel I didn't know anything. The second one, I had furthered my education a lot.

And it became very evident to me that operators in the alternative investment space are either getting better or they're getting worse.

And without pointing any fingers to anybody, it was very interesting because some of the people that were there were doing significantly better the next year. Some people were worse, some people had had stumbles along the way, needed to rebrand.

But it also helped me recognize the velocity of Nomad Capital and what we're doing with self storage conversions. Because you have a comparison, right? It gives you a baseline. You can compare yourself.

Especially as the market was tightening and getting harder, it becomes very evident who is navigating that landscape efficiently and who is hitting some serious roadblocks. And I think when times are easy, everybody looks like a genius, right?

And it's when times get hard that you see who the best operators are and the people that aren't going to slow down or able to work their way, you know, weave through the trees, essentially. So that was what I took away in year two. My big takeaway was, first of all, wow, there's some people that are really struggling.

There's also some people doing great. And, wow, we are a rocket ship. This is headed straight up. And that made what this year turned out to be special for me.

Like, it was great because just like Neil said, we showed up in force. We did all the things. We had the booth, we had the TV with the video playing. We had the loop. We were on the stage multiple times as a team.

We were breakout sessions for asset management with a packed room of probably three or 400 people.

senting our pitch in front of: 1200

Neil Henderson: 00:08:00

All right, so I'm going to sing Clint's praises here for a second. I've already done it multiple times. I don't want him getting too big of a head about it, but the praise is well worth it.

Clint was the face of Nomad for an event called the Pitch Slam at the Best Ever Conference. They started it last year, invited people to submit presentations on their deals and what they were doing. They had 90 applicants.

They narrowed that down to 12 before the best Ever Conference, and we were invited, along with 11 other groups to present on stage. And Clinton absolutely crushed it. I mean, first of all, our team crushed it, putting together an amazing presentation.

And then we ran Clint through the ringer, getting him to practice it again and again, throwing hard question after hard question at him, which. There's a panel of judges for the Pitch Slam. They're all professional LPs. They're also typically operators, syndication operators.

So these are not chumps that you're going to be able to get a whole lot by. They've been through the rodeo, and they know the hard questions to ask. First of all, Clint just nailed it. I can't put it any. You crushed it.

And I know you've heard people say that before, but seriously, man, it was something to behold. And there were people up there that have been up there before. I don't know there was a presenter up on that stage that even came close to you.

There were people up there presenting deals that I thought were really strong, but I don't think any of them crushed the presentation as much as you did.

Clint Harris: 00:09:27

Thank you for that. I appreciate the kind words. I mean, like you said, that's a team effort.

I was presenting a presentation put together by our team with deals from our team and numbers from our acquisition team and pictures from our marketing, like this team. And everybody makes it easy, right? So we put it together and something that. Honestly, I had a lot of confidence in it.

And it's easy to speak confidently when you have Confidence in what you're doing. So appreciate the kind words. The exposure was the number one thing. Right.

We want to get up and just in front of a room like that, you're going to know very quickly how you stack up. They're going to let you know. And this was a Shark Tank style event where those judges are sitting up there, they're investing their money.

So their first prize was 600 grand, second prize was 200. So there's money on the line that they're going to be investing into your deal.

So they're not just asking for show, they're really looking for holes and then that creates conversation. Right. So when we did that pitch slam the first day, presented on stage, six minute presentation, a few minutes of questions afterwards.

And when I finished that, I was 10th in line. Then the 11th and the 12th group went. When I walked out after that event and I was at backstage to kind of watch it over to the side.

When I walked back to our booth out in the exhibition area, it was packed, there was a lot more people there and all of a sudden I couldn't go 10ft without being stopped by somebody and asking about Nomad, talking about our deals, talking about the presentation, talking about the fact that the cost of the building and construction were under $65 a square foot when new development is 120 bucks a square, plus the cost of the land.

All the little mic drop moments that Neil and Hannah did such a great job of putting in this presentation, those were touch points in conversation starters. And I couldn't go 10ft the entire rest of the conference and our whole booth was involved.

I was walked up and Heather, she's office manager and wears a lot of different hats around here, she's pitching the deals. She's like, well, yeah, because of that, we land at 35% LTV at stabilization, which means we don't have to liquidate the asset to have a payday.

And it was so funny to watch everybody kind of pick up the baton and take off with it so well like that. That was a great experience and it was really, really good look for Nomad.

Neil Henderson: 00:11:37

Yeah, we ultimately did not. We made the final four well deserved. That was kind of a no brainer when you watched all the other presentations.

Not to say that they were bad, but how much stronger we were than a lot of the other presenters.

We made the final four and we went in feeling really, really strong, which made it kind of crushing when we did not get selected as one of the top two. I'm going to have a Debrief with Joe Feralis tomorrow night. Find out some of the nitty gritty details about what kept us from coming out on top.

My impression, purely from an outsider's perspective, was that the two deals that they did select provide immediate cash flow, whereas we don't. And we're typically two to three years before we're able to cash flow. And I think that was very important to the judges.

Clint Harris: 00:12:25

Yeah, it's not a presentation competition. Right. It's a pitch slam, and they're picking literally what they want to invest in.

I think maybe some people were disappointed by that in the crowd based upon the reaction, but the reality is, like, they're shopping for themselves and that's their right. It's kind of genius because they're getting preferred terms by asking for them and giving people a stage to put their deals out there.

They're looking for the best deal for them.

And in my mind, in the current environment, very unsure real estate market, they're looking for the safe bet they're okay with lower returns, but it needs to be faster cash flow. And if that's the case, okay, well, that doesn't really fit with what we're doing right now, and there's nothing we can do about that.

So as a group, I think as a team, we did the best that we could. We presented a strong offer. And at this point, it comes down to mindset. Right. That wasn't right for that panel of judges.

Now, one of the judges that was an absolute champion for us ended up having to leave before the final. So who knows what would have happened if he had stayed there. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

Every time we talk to an investor, any investor, our job is not to sell them on what we do. We don't sell our deals. We educate, we walk through our strategy and we explain what we do.

And it's up for that person, be it a Shark Tank judge or an individual investor, they decide if it fits in with the goals and timelines that they have for their lives. So there's nothing on our side that I can change or pitch to you differently. That's going to work for you if it doesn't line up with your goals.

And I'll be the first to tell you, if it doesn't line up with your goals, you shouldn't do it. Don't invest with us. Right. So in terms of putting our strategy out there, I know, and I've already had investor calls today.

I know there's a couple million dollars coming out of that crowd, just from being on that stage and being able to present two days in a row and answer some pretty hard hitting questions to navigate, you know, all the curiosity about what we're up to. So the good thing is going to come from that. Of course I wanted to win. I'm hungry and I like to win.

But the reality is I don't think there's anything else we could have done. The real benefit is the platform.

The platform and the credibility with that comes from a lot of different sets of eyes looking at what we're doing, looking at our underwriting, looking at our track record. So that was a small part of the conference. It was obviously a big part for us and it took weeks leading up to that to get the presentation and done.

So, Neil, publicly, I want to thank you so much for walking through all those questions. When we were states apart, we did it on zoom phone call, driving down the street together in the office, navigating some of those questions.

And the real value I find is that it just makes me better outside of what they ask. Outside of that competition.

I'm more prepared now to make sure I'm giving people the information that they need to make a financial decision that affects what the rest of their life looks like. So I appreciate you and thank you for that.

Neil Henderson: 00:15:15

Absolutely.

Clint Harris: 00:15:16

Outside of that, again, the entire rest of the conference, our booth was swarmed. I don't think I'm wrong when I say that I think we were easily the crowd favorite.

I'm saying that because I was told that at least a dozen times and we were wearing the same Nomad shirts. We actually left Salt Lake City.

We went to park city, you know, 45 minutes away, and people were yelling at us off of balconies and recognized us walking down the street. Because Hannah, our marketing director, did such a great job of representing the brand well. So overall, it was a big win.

And listen, talk about some of the things that happened. The only words that we had coming out of this office while half the team was gone and out there were big wins.

And if you know anything about Nomad, we have a big hat.

It's a giant noggin boss hat that when we have a big win, we put the hat on, we parade through the office and we laugh and we joke and we give each other high fives. And we had the hat out there and all we had was good news coming out of this office and no big hat for them to use to celebrate.

So what were some of the things that we had? So we got co On Gastonia.

Neil Henderson: 00:16:18

Correct.

Clint Harris: 00:16:18

A brand new bottling facility in Gastonia, North Carolina that's opening up this coming week.

Neil Henderson: 00:16:22

Passed fire inspection on the expansion at Holden beach, which opens it up for.

Clint Harris: 00:16:27

Co building E. Opening up right as the rest of the facility is getting full. So we're rolling right into that.

Neil Henderson: 00:16:33

Yep. We did a refinance on our Danville project. That was not an investor refinance. It was just sort of a repositioning of.

Clint Harris: 00:16:40

Into non recourse debt.

Neil Henderson: 00:16:42

Into non recourse debt.

Clint Harris: 00:16:43

Had a letter of intent accepted.

Neil Henderson: 00:16:45

Had a letter of tent accepted on our third property in our fund. Oh, and then our partner, Eric Hemingway got one of his bootstrap self storage facilities. Offer accepted on one that he's selling.

Clint Harris: 00:16:57

Yep. We're repositioning capital to get ready for massive scale. We spent the last year hiring new project managers and construction supervisors.

We've outgrown the meeting space we used to have at the office. We host an alternative investing mastermind group at the office. We've had to move that to an off site location because we need the space.

We're building six more offices.

Going to start framing in the next couple of weeks because we're adding those project managers and everything that we've been doing is leading up to this point. And it seemed like it all happened in the same week. Just like we had new properties opening up.

We had a letter of intent accepted on in Florence, South Carolina, our first property in South Carolina, my home state. So I'm excited about that. We still have three more LOIs out right now.

We've got two more properties that look like they're going to get Lois in the next two weeks.

And we have enough exposure coming out of Best Ever that I think we're going to be closing this fund in the next couple months and then immediately opening up the next one.

And I think there's a really good chance that we have letters of intent out right now on properties that are the first one, two or three properties in the next fund, which puts us on track for our goal. We're at 150 million in assets under management right now once we hit stabilization. And our goal is 500 million in five years and a billion in ten.

And this is going to put us right back on track and I think be the springboard to the next level for us. So that's a life changing Best Ever can be.

Neil Henderson: 00:18:20

All right, that was mostly what Best ever meant for Nomad. But I want to hear your chief takeaways from the conference in general this year. And I mean, just this year. I mean, overall.

Clint Harris: 00:18:29

than last year. So last year,: 2023

out of business by the end of: 2025

aybe it's not stay alive till: 2025

Maybe you should be in acquisitions right now. That so you're positioned for a cash event when we come out of this, when rates change.

There are still a few people that were very negative and thinking we're on the precipice of a recession. And maybe they're right. Nobody's got a crystal ball. I don't think they want to be right about that.

It's just the indicators that they're looking at makes them leads them to that conclusion. But overall, the sentiment was wildly different. Everybody's excited.

People are bullish in general, but extremely bullish in self storage, which is what we do multifamily, not as much. We have seen some people lose their stride recently in old, like office and old mill to multifamily conversions. Very, very expensive process.

We've seen some issues there, some liquidity issues and properties going back to the bank. But conversions in general, everybody's pretty interested because they're sexy, especially with the amount of office space available out there.

And then self storage is. People are very bullish on that.

So you combine those two together, I think even though we're a little bit out of the way, I think we had more foot traffic than anybody else. And I'm already stacking up investor calls.

And overall, what I'm hearing so far is people are scheduling a call because they've decided to invest with us, but we need to talk with their spouse, because their spouse wasn't there for me.

Neil Henderson: 00:20:31

I came away with one little nugget that I love that illustrates the power of commercial real estate so well, I think. And it's a concept that I understood, but I think it was one of the first times I've ever heard somebody put it in such a succinct way.

And I'll give credit where credit's due.

This was from Ryan Smith at Elevation Capital which is the idea that for every dollar increase a month in net operating income on a commercial real estate asset that you create, you increase the value by $240. Now let me break down that math for you. If you increase the NOI by $1 in a month, that's $12 in a year divided by a 5% cap rate is $240.

Now just magnify that by an asset that has 700 units and you're able to increase the rents, the net operating income by $10 per unit. And I'm not going to sit here and try and do the math in my head right here, but that's enormous.

Clint Harris: 00:21:34

Amount of value, $1,000 a month across a facility at a 5 cap, you just added almost a quarter million dollars, $240,000 worth worth of value. And I love the way that Ryan teaches this lesson to his kids. He's taking them to a Walmart or a grocery store parking lot.

He goes, okay, kids, get out and look around and find change and find me a dollar. And they're like, dad, we don't want to get out and find dirty coins like it's just a dollar. And he goes, nope, it's not just a dollar.

At a 5 cap, that's $240. So he goes, you get out of this car, go pick up change, and when you find a dollar, I will give you $240. And boy, you talk about some motivated kids.

I'm sure they pile out of that car. And it's a great lesson and it's a great way to tell that lesson because it's the power of commercial real estate.

So when I heard that, I was like, oh man, how powerful is that? The lesson to all of us is valuable, but the fact, the way that he impresses that on his kids, to me, that's really special.

So if they find a dollar, he's going to give them 240 bucks. Because that's the reality. If your rents go up $1,000 a month in a facility at a 5 cap, you just created $240,000 worth of value.

They can either be for, you know, a sale or potential refinance and a recapitalization. I thought that also was probably the one nugget that jumped out and stuck with me more than anything else.

Neil Henderson: 00:22:59

He put that nugget out there doing an asset management talk that our asset manager, Josh Mundy, was a part of. And he did that also as an illustration of why you should not use third party management.

Because if you got a third party manager and you're asking them to increase rents by a dollar. That extra dollar of rent for them means 10 cents. It means 10 cents for them if they're working for or 10%. But for you it equals $240.

So it's just a massive, massive shift in mindset that you really need to have.

Clint Harris: 00:23:35

I think it's the importance of, especially in the context of that conversation, asset management and property management, making sure that you're aligned in what you're both trying to accomplish.

Is it worth it for the property management company to go in and increase rents and deal with some evictions or people moving out because of that and have some vacancies and have to sign new people up and do the work? If it's going to increase the monthly rent by a thousand bucks, they're going to make a hundred dollars if they do all that work.

But if they do that work and it creates $1,000 to the owner of that facility, that's $240,000 worth of value to 5 cap. So how motivated is that property manager to do that? Is it worth 100 bucks to them? Probably not. But is it worth a quarter million dollars to you?

Absolutely. And so that's some of the value of vertical integration, asset property management and asset management.

Because the reality is we all know that a property is only as good as the operator and being willing to do the work, that operation and level of management ultimately can have a swing of millions of dollars on the overall value of the property.

Neil Henderson: 00:24:45

All right, last thing I want to say about the conference is this in regards to Nomad Capital, is it felt also like an extraordinary team building exercise. In a way it was kind of the world's greatest off site meeting for those of us who were there.

It was not the entire team that were there, but it was so cool seeing people who hadn't been there before to get a feel for the kinds of things that people at best ever we're doing and thereby sort of getting a glimpse into Nomad's future in a way. Getting to spend time away from the office with people that we work with every day. It just.

I've never been a part of a company where, where so many people use the word love a lot, honestly and genuinely. And it was just a really incredible thing to be a part of.

Clint Harris: 00:25:31

Yeah. For people that are new to the space, Syndication, very much like I was just a few years ago.

rted raising capital, I think: 2019

And for me, I think it's even better now because I've been there three years and I've seen the trajectory.

But everybody that went this year, the new people that have been there, and there was four that were new, or, excuse me, three out of the eight that were new, they all have the same look on their face. And then over the course of the four or five days that you're there, start to get just a little bit of swagger, little bit of a confident walk.

They hear all the pitches, they see all the deals, they talk to everybody else, and all of a sudden they realize that they're on a postseason All Star team and we're going deep. It was really cool to see. Everyone's, like, trying to get the lay of the land. What's happening here. Oh, man, this is big.

And then the more exposure they have to syndication. First of all, everybody's thinking big and doing. Doing big things, but also they realize that they are on a rocket ship.

And that's what I realized years ago myself. And it's been unbelievable to watch that journey. And I couldn't agree with you more. Couldn't be doing it with a better team.

Neil Henderson: 00:26:39

Yep. All right, that's all for now. About the Best Ever conference. We're doing this all again next week. We'll have a guest on the show.

Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening and watching the Truly Passive Income podcast.

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