Download Our Free Guide to Self Directed IRAs!

Welcome to another compelling episode of the IRA Cafe podcast! Host Kyle Moody is joined by Ben Suttles, co-founder of Disrupt Equity, for an inspiring discussion on Ben Suttles’s journey from single-family real estate investing to building a multifamily investment empire.

In this episode, Ben unpacks the origins of Disrupt Equity, the company’s people-first mission, and how leveraging technology and vertical integration have been essential to their explosive growth. He shares insights on creating lasting, positive impacts for tenants, employees, and communities through both business practices and philanthropy, highlighted by their in-house 501c3, Disrupt Gives. Ben also gives practical advice to new investors looking to get into multifamily, with a deep dive into the advantages of self-directed IRAs in real estate syndications and the flexible approaches his team offers for accredited investors.

The conversation highlights the resilience required in today’s real estate environment, including lessons learned from market shocks, challenges in property management, and the importance of managing macroeconomic risks. If you’re curious about the power of multifamily investing, scaling your impact, or how self-directed IRAs can boost your retirement portfolio, this episode is packed with first-hand wisdom and actionable takeaways.

Key takeaways:

1. Mission-Driven Business: Disrupt Equity’s simple but powerful mission to help people live the life they want guides every business and philanthropic decision, centering on tenants, investors, employees, and partners alike.
2. Tech and Integration as Differentiators: The firm’s IT roots lead to leveraging AI, automation, and vertical integration, from management to construction and insurance, positioning them as industry disruptors and ensuring efficient, client-focused operations.
3. Philanthropy and Community Impact: Through their nonprofit, Disrupt Gives, Ben Suttles and his partner provide rental assistance, financial literacy, and direct support to residents in need, fostering stability and upward mobility within their communities.
4. Self-Directed IRA Investing Explained: Ben Suttles breaks down how investors can use self-directed IRAs to participate in multifamily syndications, taking advantage of increased control, diversification, and the potential for better returns compared to traditional retirement vehicles.
5. Real Estate Reality and Resilience: Success in multifamily comes from adapting to challenges—whether it’s managing through COVID, skyrocketing insurance costs, or inflation by building a strong team, focusing on risk mitigation, and always learning from experience.

Tune in to hear Ben Suttles’s story and learn how mission-driven leadership and innovative approaches can make a real difference for investors and communities.

Schedule a free consultation with our team today!

On this episode of the IRA Cafe, Powered by American ira, we sit down with Ben Suttles of Disrupt Equity who's going to tell you how he went from single family investing all the way up to multifamily into what he has built into a complete empire with Disrupt Equity. How they take care of their tenants, employees, and all of the impact he has had in multiple communities. You're going to want to hear this one. We can't wait to see you. Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the IRA Cafe, Powered by American ira. So wherever and whenever you are listening to us, we are so glad that you're taking a few minutes out of your day or your evening to join us and to get some great information here, hear from a wonderful guest today and just kind of have a nice light chat on his profession, how it integrates and interfaces with self directed IRAs and anything that you can learn from that. Hope everyone is enjoying their spring so far. If you hear me a lot, you can probably tell a little bit in the hoarseness of my voice that I am definitely dealing with the pollen monster right now.

So we'll definitely be taking care of that through this show and the rest of the week. Hope everyone has had a great week. Also getting some great deals going on out there. Always remember that if you do have any questions regarding your self directed ira, whether it's somewhere else and you're ready to bring it to American IRA, or whether you are a current client or anything else that I can assist you with, please don't hesitate to Visit us@american ira.com if you are looking to get that account set up. They've got that guy right there in the suit and tie. We don't do too many suits and ties anymore, but you are always welcome to give me a call directly on there. We can set up an appointment to make sure that you are taken care of. Also, feel free to listen to this podcast and others.

You can catch us on our YouTube channel, American IRA on YouTube. Subscribe and you will hear this podcast, all the others and any of the webinars that are out there. So we look forward to having you as our listeners and also having you as our clients. Without further ado, I want to introduce you to the guest today. This is Ben Suttles and he is co founder of Disrupt Equity and I'm actually going to ask him about that name in just a little bit because I'm excited to hear a little bit about it. But Ben, welcome to the IRA Cafe. Thanks for taking some time out of your day as well, to join us and feel free to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are and what your past is and where it's gotten you to where you are now.

No thanks, Kyle. No, I mean, I always enjoy doing these podcasts. It's a, it's a way to kind of, you know, educate people on us and on multifamily investing, which is what we do as well as, you know, how that all kind of ties together with, you know, know, how do people grow the retirements. Right. And you know, and one vehicle is through self directed IRAs. And so, you know, appreciate being a guest on the show. I'm excited about it. But yeah, I mean, you know, to, to go way far back, you know, grew up in Houston, Texas.

You know, lived in a lot of different spots, including LA. Moved back here in 2010 right around the GFC, you know, decided that I needed to get a real job. I was doing some stuff in Hollywood for about 10 years and, you know, got into real estate investing. I mean, I think everybody, you know, has their kind of aha moment when it comes to investing. But, you know, as far as real estate goes, it was the Robert Kiyosaki Rich dad, Poor dad book. So I was recommended the book by somebody else. I was like, ah, you know, I mean, I know about real estate. I don't know if that's really for me.

But everything just kind of clicked. And from then on it was. He was flipping houses to rentals to my progression into multifamily in 2012, you know, and I just went out and made it happen. I mean, it was one of those things that I think I come from kind of a sales background. And so for me, it was very kind of easy transition into talking to investors, doing presentations, getting on and doing podcasts like this, doing webinars. It's just a different product, it's a different investment opportunity. And so, you know, I really love the challenge of taking on a bigger project in the commercial real estate space. And so multifamily really kind of stuck with me.

So, you know, you kind of fast forward through 2012 to 2017. I was kind of in another partnership before we started Disrupt Equity. And then I met my business partner whose name is Ferris Moose, who's still my business partner at Disrupt Equity. And we created that firm in 2017. And so, yep, there's the website there, you know, really, really proud of it. You know, from growing it to Houston's number one fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000. We were on there twice, you know, and you know to employing over 170 employees between Disrupt Equity and our management firm.

And so very, very proud of what we've built. You know we bought and sold about 8,000 units, done about a billion in acquisitions. And so you know, but bottom line what we do is we, we find, we close and we manage multi family investments and for people are like what the heck is multifamily? It's just apartment complexes just like the one behind me. So you know, we find deals where we can drive value, we're putting money into them, we're improving the properties, you know, we're providing clean, safe, affordable housing for our residents, you know, and we're driving the value. Right. You know, and mainly it's in Texas as people can see, there's the flag behind me. But we also have properties in Georgia, we love Atlanta as well as Florida as well. And so we, we typically, we're going to identify high growth markets where there's population, job growth, landlord tax friendly environments that are going to allow the, some tailwinds to these investments.

So fast forward we have about, I'd say about 6,000 units currently. We're a vertically integrated firm. We have our own property management, we have our own construction company, you know, and we work day in and day out to find investment opportunities. And you know, my role within the firm is to do that plus work with our investors. So you know, and we've got about a thousand unique investors in our database and we're always looking for more. And a lot of them, believe it or not, come from the IRA space. So we're very, very familiar with self directed IRAs and the powerfulness of them now, fantastic.

So for any one of you who are listening today and you might be wanting to do exactly what Ben did, you know, make that leap or integrate just a little bit going from single family into commercial to multifamily. I think that you are going to really benefit from this. A quick question for you. When I was looking at, I'm thinking Disrupt Equity, I'm thinking Disrupt sounds bad, equity sounds good. How did you guys come up with the name?

Well, I mean the, the fact that you're asking me about the name means that it's doing something right, which is, means it's memorable. And so you know, both me and Ferris come from kind of an IT background as well as in IT corporate sales for a while and, and he, he worked at Microsoft so he's kind of more on the development side. And I think, you know, we were trying to quote unquote, disrupt the way that the space was, was operating. Right. I think it was a lot of, you know, it was pretty antiquated. Still is to a lot of extent, you know, and you can't, you can't disrupt everything. In fact, we had a funny aside to that is our, the first foray into our property management firm. We called it Disrupt Management.

We figured out that people don't really want that in their property management firm. So we, we renamed it to Emerge Living and that's been a lot more successful. But you know, it's a clever branding tool first and foremost. But it also kind of gets to the roots of our IT background, you know, and we have tech, you know, pretty much baked in the whole DNA of the firm. Right. You know, we're heavy in AI, we've been heavy into automation and software throughout our careers and you know, we're segueing that into the commercial real estate space where a lot of this just wasn't done, you know. And so, and I think that kind of differentiates us a lot of ways from identification of deals to the underwriting of deals, to the management of deals. And how do we really be the most efficient firm and the most tech forward looking firm that we could be.

And that's even on the social media and the, and the, and the marketing side. Right. You know, we get a lot of leads through social media and Google and online and I think we have done a great job throughout our career, but being very, you know, tip of the spear or you know, very bleeding edge, so to speak with that. And I think that's all technology based and a lot of people just don't understand it. And I think that's one of the differentiator, one of the secret sauce that Disrupt Equity has, you know, one thing

too, getting back really to the beginning though, I don't know how long it took you guys to come up with this if it's something that you started with and then literally built your company around. But your mission statement, you, you, you say, well the mission statement basically is, and it's simple, people have these huge paragraphs, you know, yours is a few words, help people live the life they want. And that's your mission statement. Let's, I want to unpack that just a little bit and tell, you know, tell us who is your customer or your pool of, of customers, who are the people that you are helping live the life they want.

And thank you for pointing that out. I mean, I think everybody should have a purpose or a Mission statement. I think you should have core values, I think you should have goals, right? And I think a lot of that was driven by our adoption of eos. EOS is a management methodology and platform that's very, very popular. Retraction by Gino Wickman I think if you guys want to learn more, there's a lot of companies, smaller to mid sized companies, even bigger firms that use this help them really kind of define who they are, what they want to do and where they want to go. And so I think that was very impactful thing that me and Ferris did back in 2020 and we've been going with it ever since. In fact, we have our quarterly meeting next week. But that's where that purpose or that mission statement kind of comes from.

But who, you know, who are these people that we're talking about? It's, it's everybody from our clients, right? And clients can be, you know, our property management clients to our residents. These are people that live at our properties to investors, you know, that are, that are invested in our projects, to our team members, right, that are on the 170, you know, person team that we have at disrupted emerged living, you know, to partners and anybody in between, right? We want everybody to live their best life. And so I think, you know, if we start with that one mission statement, that one purpose, then every other decision from that is driven by that. And I think that, you know, people appreciate that, that that's where we're kind of looking at it. It's not all about making money in this business. It's about providing clean, quality, safe housing for our residents. It's providing good returns for our investors who are a lot of ways putting that back into their retirement accounts, right? To providing a great career and job opportunities for our team members. Right? And so I think, you know, you can, you can look at that through a lot of different lenses.

But that was the reason why we created that statement is to, to, to, you know, let people know that we're thinking about them and their own situations and really trying to help everybody live their best life.

What was the second, the other side of the company, there's Disrupt and then what was the other one?

Merged Living is our property management platform. So yeah, they're right. So you have one that buys the deals and you have one that manages the deals.

I don't want to leave any of those folks out. Tell us a little bit about that one.

Yeah, so I mean that's where the majority of the 170 people are, right? I mean Disrupt Equity is still kind of a boutique shop. I think there's maybe 10 people on that side of the table. You know, the rest of the people are there to manage these investment opportunities and these properties throughout Texas, Georgia and Florida. So you have staff that actually are at the property, and then you have corporate staff that manage them and help support them. Right. Whether that be accounting, hr, it, you know, anything in between. Right. You know, to, to run a, a big business that, that manages multiple sites.

And so those people are where the rubber meets the road. I mean, we, you know, we go out, we try to find opportunities that we think are good, but, but they're there to validate that statement and ultimately they're there to execute on the business plan. And so, you know, we, we pour into that team quite a bit because, you know, ultimately, you know, we can put projections or returns out on, you know, a slide deck or in an Excel spreadsheet all day long, but if, if we can't achieve them or we don't have the right team to achieve them, then it's never gonna, it's never gonna materialize. So it's a big part of our business, you know, and, and we've got some great team members that run that company. You know, luckily, I get to do some of the less hard stuff, which is finding deals and finding money. So that's really where me and Ferris typically spend most of our time. But we've got some great team members that help execute on that and have been doing that in that space for decades, so.

Gotcha. Yep. Well, with. You know what, that's a great segue into this right here, which is, saw some information on one of these award platforms you were named. Was it a company of best bosses? There's something out there. Most admired CEOs, and then this one. Even though I worked in the government aspect of Ernst and Young. You were a finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year, according to.

Yeah, actually we were a finalist for about four years in a row. I think we're going through the process of it right now. We, we're still trying to get to that next, that next level. There's, there's several levels that you go through on the, the EY platform on the Entrepreneur of the Year, but just to be nominated and to get into the finalists. And so we've done that several times, you know, going over to Austin and, And, you know, we're amongst some incredible businesses and entrepreneurs and we've made incredible connections. That's one that we're very, very proud of. You know, but yeah, I mean, all of those, you know, to, to be, you know, admired or given accolades on being best boss. I don't consider myself to be a best boss, but, you know, I'm glad that people would nominate me to, you know, as such.

And, you know, but we're proud of that. And ultimately, all those accolades go to the team. I mean, know, they're doing all the hard work. You know, we are not here without their support and their hard work. And so, you know, it's as much theirs as it is ours.

Well, I think that they probably have a lot to say about that. That, you know, I don't know how much of it is inside influence or outside influence, but I tell you that that really stood out to me. I'm like, wow, most admired CEOs. I mean, you know, everybody can look at this podcast. Everybody can, you know, read the website and everything else, but this is something that really taps into really your, Your. Your core is the way that I feel about it. And I think that, you know, it also means that your. That your staff really has found the right place to be as well.

I was going to ask you, you know, what really allows Disrupt to racket those accolades, but it sounds like you're saying here that it really is just the full team effort, and those are really just the byproduct. The awards are the byproduct.

Trust me, I'm not filling out those applications. That's definitely the team doing that. But I'm always humbled to even be nominated on a lot of this stuff, especially stuff like the INC 5000, the Ernst and Young. Those are premier platforms for entrepreneurs and business owners. And so whenever I got into being an entrepreneur, I always looked up to people that are on this. And so to, to have those, you know, you know, on our belt buckle and say, hey, that's. That's something that we've accomplished too, is. Is very humbling and, and very, very excited to.

To use that as, as. As Fire to continue to grow the company and, and see what other rewards are out there.

Philanthropy is big to you too as well there in the Houston area, isn't it?

Yeah, there's. There's. We actually have our own 501C3. You know, it's called Disrupt. Gives you. And really the mission statement behind that, or the purpose of it is to provide rental assistance and literacy and education for our residents to. In order for them to get on a better footing, but also to help with that rental assistance in the short term. Right.

And so, you know, we've been doing it since again, right around Covid, and we've given back about, I'd say, almost three to four hundred thousand dollars to our residents, you know, at this stage. And so we're really, really excited about that. You know, we continue to fund it as part of our asset management fee. So a lot of it comes from us. You know, we've done some galas and some other things, have taken some outside donations, but for the most part, it's me and Ferris giving back to our residents. And we do it every quarter. You know, so people have to provide an application, you know, they have to go through testing, you know, so they can kind of get the literacy and the education piece one way or the other. And then they are, then, you know, they're either approved or they're not approved, you know, but it's, it's all in order to give back to our communities.

You know, it's a win, win for us. You know, you're providing assistance to people that you care about. You want to be successful because you want them to, to grow their families in the communities that we have. And so, but you know, I mean, me and Ferris are both, we're philanthropic outside of DISRUPT Gives. You know, we, we, we, you know, we sponsor and we donate to various causes here in town or Lunches of Love being one of them, the Houston Food bank being another that I'm very, very passionate about. I volunteer and I donate to. But, you know, that's, that's one of those things. You can't do this just for the money.

You have to do it for, you know, you know, to, to make this place a better place than when, when you, when you came to it. Right. And so, you know, if we can prop up our residents, you know, we can pour back into people in our community, if we can, if we can invest in our, you know, team members, then that makes the world a better place. And so, you know, know, that's a big part of what we do at disrupt.

Is that all of the type of, I mean, let's call it apartment living that you might have, is all that one in that one space or is that just one type? I mean, or do you have a spectrum of, hey, affordable apartment over here all the way up to, you know, large town home communities over there? What are, what are some of. Tell us a little bit about all the properties that you have, or at least a snippet of some of them.

Most of it's going to be workforce housing. Right. You know, there is some stuff that we were opportunistic about that's, that's, that's on the newer side. But nothing is going to be this swanky high rise, you know, $5,000 a month rent type stuff. I mean we are catering to people that meeting an income of 60 to maybe 80,000 typically, you know, give or take and you know, and so your rent is probably anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars just to give some people some perspective. And so that's just where our bread and butter is. That's what our property management platform's built on, is managing those type of communities. And that's why we have our own construction company.

So we can, we can pour resources and money and create value through improving these communities. And so that's the, that's mainly the spectrum. But I mean it dates from everything that was built in the 60s to stuff that was built in 2015. So it's a pretty big spectrum of properties. But most of the stuff that would be considered, I guess and workforce affordable, you know, sometimes have a negative connotation. But it's, it's essentially, you know, those types of communities, it's a need.

I mean, you know, people can call it what they want, but I mean it's a need. And there's those people that are out there and I mean obviously in that rent space, that range, I mean you've got to have very, very low vacancy.

Yeah, I mean there's, there is typically vacancy is not the issue. You know, you would have people that, you know, might be struggling to pay their rent. Right. You know, we really, the reason the disrupt gives was born is because we saw how much of a, just a cluster it was during COVID Right. You know, and the agencies and the government, they try to do certain things to make it, but they're, they're too little too late. And it's a very inefficient way to, you know, get to the, get the assistance to the people that were, that needed it very quickly. And so that was one of the other reasons why we, we started Disrupt Kids, you know, because these people are, you know, one paycheck away from not being able to make the rent or make a major payment for something. You know, they're living paycheck to paycheck.

And so, you know, and all of them are hard working folks and you know, we wanted to make sure that if anything ever happened again or maybe just a one off something happens in their life, you know, that they have the ability to, to reach out to us and, and be able to Potentially get that rental assistance, a lot of

it too, you know, under no fault of their own. So no, that, that's really, that's really admirable. You know, you look at it and, and, and you took it on and you, you created an answer to it. So. No, man, kudos to you on that. Do you guys, you know, listen, you got your own construction company. I mean you guys have thought about all of it. Is there anything that you do contract out? Like, you know, do you have this construction also include full landscaping in all the different states and all the places or do you just contract that kind of stuff out?

You know, I mean there's always going to be, I would say the construction company is there for more the construction piece and the renovations. You know, there's always going to be vendors that we have in these different locations, whether it be landscaping or what have you. But you know, we've identified certain parts of the, the process that you know, we wanted to take in house, you know, and each of these businesses are their own profit center. They have their own third party clients. And you know, it's not just, it's not just, you know, driven by disrupt, equities growth and you know, and so, you know, they all keep us pretty busy. But we also have an insurance agency. That's where I'm at right now. And so all we do is we multifamily insurance as well on the property and the Gl and the umbrella side.

And so we've just identified parts of our business that you know, that we could do more efficiently and more profitably than going and subcontracting out or working through a vendor to do it. So yeah, it's been a journey. I think each one has been probably born from some amount of pain that we've had along the way where we're like, hey, and property management is a perfect example. It's a tough, tough business. And I'm not saying that we're perfect, but you know, I mean I fired probably half a dozen property management companies before we decided to just bite the bullet and start emerge living. And so, you know, it wasn't because I wanted to be in the property management business, it was because we had to be in the property management business.

I, I actually was found by this company at American IRA when I was in property management and I was managing an entire office in a, in a city where the, where we had about 100 doors up there. And yeah, I mean, you know, and it was, I was doing a lot of everything myself and, and that is so multifaceted and the, the logistics of everything. It tells you how to multitask and multi function really, really quickly. So the fact that you now have the team that you've got that can do this, totally understandable that that's the side that has the number of people. One thing that I'd like you to talk about is, you know, disrupt equity folks. If you haven't, you know, when you're listening to this podcast, whenever you're able to tune in and you're going to end up going to the website and seeing a lot about what Ben and I have been talking about, you're going to see a lot of things on here. And if somebody is brand new and wants to, to get into this, they're going to see, gosh, investment management, property management, construction management, insurance and financing. And it still goes on.

For me, that's not all of it. Somebody who's wanting to get started in this, been doing some investing, so knows the lingo, kind of knows what they want to do. Someone wants to reach out to you and says, hey, how do I become an investor with you? How do I get started? What, what do I do with all these different things and have folks there that can kind of say, okay, this is what all of this is. Here's how we can help you get started. If you're looking to invest with us.

Yeah, I mean and, and, and we've got a lot of content on our website that we've done a lot of podcasts, but I would say really there's so much out here, especially in comparison to 15 years ago when I started. There's a lot of great podcasts, a lot of great webinars, there's a lot of free information. I, I always encourage people to understand what they're investing in, understand what multifamily is and what it isn't and understanding the, the structure that we, that, that we are talking to our investors about, which is syndication. Right. So investors are buying shares of an LLC that is then in turn buying the multi family asset.

Right.

And then they get to share and the profits and, and the paper losses that that property has. And so, you know, and then as it pertains to self directed, you know, one of the vehicles that people can invest through is your self directed ira. And so, you know, but you know, if they're to go to our website, there's, you know, we try to make it super, super easy. They just want to talk to us, they want to learn more about it. You know, just click on that button Invest with us then I think that that's the best way to kind of get a hold of us because, you know, we've got a, we've got a good team and they're there to answer any questions. Right. You know, I mean, we can't educate people over a 30 minute phone call to, you know, but we can at least, you know, give you the basics and at least steer you in the right direction as to maybe some conferences to go to, some podcasts to listen to, to really, really truly understand, you know, the multifamily investing space. So.

But yeah, we try to, we try to, we try to, you know, curate that and put some of that on the website as well. You know, we've got a lot of stuff on our social media channels too, right. From videos on YouTube to, you know, shows that we've hosted on our, of our own. And then we have conferences, you know, we host what's called the Multifamily Investor Network conference. We just did it our once a year conference in February in Houston and you get typically 500 people out there. It's a one day event where we're really educating people multifamily. And again, the pros as well as the cons. Right.

As well as some of the negatives. Because it's not all sunshine and roses sometimes it's an investment that comes with risk. And we want our investors to be educated investors so they know that there's ups, downs and downs in this business. It's real estate, it's cyclical. Right. And as everybody know, with interest rates and inflation and all the stuff that's been happening last few years, it doesn't always go like a rocket ship. Right. And so, you know, when people understand that there's always there, there could be, you know, you know, some, some choppy years depending on, you know, where we're at in the market cycle.

Well, that's a couple things I wanted you to touch on while we have some, a few minutes left. Here is the first one where you talked about how a lot of your folks are really coming in and investing with their self directed account. Obviously being in business development with a self directed company here at American ira and that's our specialty, that's all we do. But on the sales side, I can always give folks the information, but they're, but someone can think, well, he's the salesman. Right, Right. So you know what if you can a little bit, you were right there. The folks where people are going to be headed to make their investment, say with their self Directed ira. So if you in your position could talk just a few minutes on really the power and the control that someone has when they're coming in and making investments like this with their self directed account, you know, long term versus the short term, why it makes a lot of sense.

You guys did a writing on this and it was really influential on that. If you can kind of unpack that a little bit and let people hear directly from you, the strength of a self directed IRA in this type of investing.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, obviously I'm not going to be as much of an expert as you are, but we have, it's been a big driver of our growth. I mean, I'd say probably 33% or so, give or take, is going to be from the IRA space into our investments. And so we know a lot about it. There's, obviously there's some pros and there's some cons too, but ultimately it allows you to use your IRA as a vehicle to invest in these private placement memorandums, these PPMs, these smaller investment opportunities. And just for full disclosure, I mean, typically our deals are going to be for accredited investors only. So, you know, if you consider yourself accredited investor, you have a self directed ira, you could reach out to us and you know, ultimately we can, we can start a discussion about is this investment opportunity, A, the right one for you? And then B, do you want to, do you want to pursue it? And if so, you know, our investor relations team is going to white glove this for you. There's some documents that you're going to have to review.

There's some stuff that you're going to need to sign. There could be some additional paperwork that American IRA might, might ask you to, you know, to, to sign off on as well. Right. You know, to, to make it, you know, you know, to effectuate the transaction, so to speak. And then there's an investment being made on behalf of your IRA into the investment. And you know, from there you, these distributions flow back into your IRA account, right. You know, and then you can grow that investment account over time, right. You know, from the, from the profits of the deal.

And I think, and you know, I mean, ultimately you rinse and repeat, right? You know, you get your distributions over a couple years, you may have a sale, it all goes back and then you redeploy an app. Right? And so I have people that are constantly putting their money to work, so to speak, in a lot more efficient ways than traditional IRAs or 401ks are, because those are kind of, you Know, they're beholden to a smaller subset of investment opportunities. Right. And most of those are related to stocks, bonds and ets. You know, that's just how that world works. And this gives you the flexibility to invest in not only commercial real estate, but a lot of other things that, you know, and there is some restrictions, again, I'd probably defer to you on what's a prohibitive transaction, some of the tax, you know, things that you do need to understand even though you are within an IRA framework. But the, the pros of investing through this vehicle into commercial real estate far outweigh any, any potential negatives. And so that's why we educate this space because, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, I didn't even know that I could use the, you know, my IRA and shift it into a self directed IRA and then therefore use this.

So this money's just been, yeah, it's been growing somewhat, but it's all through stocks, bonds and ets and it's all been kind of, you know, there's a lot of fees involved in some of these, these platforms. Whereas this gives you the power back to your own retirement funds. And now you can invest in projects that you're passionate about or you feel you can get a better return on.

You know, we were all sitting here talking about baseball before we came on today. So you know, pardon the, the, the, the, the, the, the term here, if you really knocked it out of the park on that, since you absolutely have nothing else going on in business to take your time. Anytime you want to come in and talk self directed IRAs and, and answer some questions with some folks, we'll pull up a chair here so you can, so you can talk to folks because you did, you, you, you nailed it. Great job there. Real quick, do you own that complex? Do you guys own that complex behind you there?

No, we do not. We, we actually, the funny story, you know, we, we do, we have chased it, we were, we were trying to buy it, but it's currently owned by somebody else. But you know, I always, I would say that's an indicator of what we actually invested. It's just an apartment complex like that. Right.

You know, one, one last thing here, I sat in at my local RIA here Real Estate Investors association, sat in on a multi family presentation that a, that a guy gave a couple weeks ago. And it, I think the reason why I paid so much attention to this one is because of how simple he made it. He's a simple guy. He learned everything he, he knew from his local ria, didn't know anything about real estate, didn't know anything about, you know, alternative investing. And he got into this and when he started laying out why multifamily as opposed to single family, it was just like, oh, well, duh. I mean, you know, this is the sense that it made. So for the folks that are listening out there, for the folks who are doing single family now, this is what I'm getting ready to ask and for you to pitch them. It's not the person who really just wants to stay single family.

This is what they want to do, or they're doing private lending or they have a set type of investment, you know, that they're comfortable. But for the person who really is really in questioning, okay, I want to take this step into multifamily, or is there somebody out there that can really give me good direction of why multifamily? Do me a favor for our listeners here just for the last little bit and, and you know, sell me on multifamily. Sell them on multifamily. Just some points to it of why it makes sense, maybe some benefits over single family. And then I've got one more wrap up question after that.

No worries. Yeah, yeah, I mean, happy to do it. I mean, obviously it really boils down to the, you know, at the end of the day you need air, you need water, you need food and you need shelter. So, you know, at the end of the day people always need a place to live. You know, and apartment complexes tend to be the easier way for people to, to move out of where they're at current. Like, you know, a family or, you know, they grew up and they moved, they transitioned into an apartment complex. Most of us that are probably listening to us have lived in an apartment complex. So it's, it's something easy to conceptualize and understand.

Right. You know, okay, I need it. I maybe even live there versus an office building or something industrial like that's a little bit more unique, you know, and, and, and people don't typically understand it. Right. And so, you know, that's the first thing. And I think the fundamentals are there too. You know, buying a single family house is becoming harder and harder. Interest rates are still elevated.

The down payments are becoming harder and harder for people to put down because the prices have gone up over the last five years, you know, and at the end of the day, that is forcing more people to live in a park. Apartment complexes, right. You know, and so I think the fundamentals are there where there's A lot more demand for apartment complexes than there ever has been, you know, and I think that's the reason why they're so going to be so important over the next 10 to 20 years. We've also got a gap in the, in the markets that we live in, let's call it Texas, Georgia and Florida not live in, but that, where we, where we buy these assets, where there's more people moving there than there is housing, right. And so people might complain all about this or that and you know, you know, it's a slow time of the. But my point is, is that you have millions of people moving to these states and you don't have enough housing. So that's one, people get it, people need it, and there's not enough of it. Right.

And so there's a pricing component to this. Right. So now I can, I can push rents at certain properties up because there's more demand than there is supply, right. You know, and then ultimately, if you do the right thing and you take care of the property, you invest in the property, you invest in the right markets that are growing and have population and job growth and are tax and business friendly, then over time the, the, the valuation and the price of those assets is going to increase, right? So I'm trying to create cash flows through increasing rents and taking care of the property. And then over time the value of that asset's going to grow and, and I'm going to sell it at some point or I might even refinance and hold on to it. I'm going to pull cash out, right? All of that goes back to our investors. So you're investing in something that's fundamental to how society works. You have cash flows that you can depend on, you have appreciation over time that you can do.

And then the other thing, regardless if you're, you're obviously your self directed, IRA is the most efficient tax vehicle that you can invest in. But let's say that you have cash, right? And you just want to invest in this. There's a lot of tax benefits that are tied to that as well through bonus depreciation and cost segregation, which is what we do on all these deals. And plus you could do ten 31s into these projects which, which are, which are tax efficient vehicles, you know, and then you can, you can 1031 out of them. So now you have this tax component that also plays into people's investment. And then I'd say, you know, the other leg of that stool is diversification, right? A lot of people are in stocks bonds and ETFs. Right. You know, you need some component in alternative investing of which the biggest component of alternative investing is going to be commercial real estate or real estate.

Right. And so it's a diversification play for a lot of people. Right. You know, take some money off the table. I mean, I've got a lot of money in stocks, bonds and ETFs too, but we've done really, really well over the last five years. So my point is you scrape some of those problems, profits, you know, and let's go do some alternative investing to diversify a little bit. So, you know, if there ever is a softening in the stock market that you have some other thing that's generating income into your retirement account. So, you know, I don't know if that touched on all the reasons why I love it, but that's probably the, the top five or six.

Some great, great points there.

Our investors. Right. So we're looking for those same benefits that our investors are looking for.

Sure, sure. No great points there. And that's why I wanted them to be able to hear it from you. One last thing you got here because every single deal you've ever done worked perfectly with no hitch. Right. There's never been anything that I started

off with hair at the beginning of my real estate career and slowly went away.

What's you share with folks? I always, I ask this question a lot no matter where I am because it tends to really bring down to everyone who's listening, especially if they think that they've made a mistake in the past or something. What is something that maybe a deal that didn't go how you think thought it was going to go. You had planned for everything. You, the end was in sight. You knew that this, hey, this is cake. And the next thing you know, it, it wasn't, it was no longer cake. If you can share with something, you know that may have gone wrong, but how that became the catalyst of what you learned the most from in your investing journey.

And I kind of, I mean, this is not probably the end all be all, but I mean, we heard this a little bit earlier in the show where, you know, I mean, we made a lot of mistakes around it was managing these assets. And you know, we learned, we learned that hard lesson multiple times over until we created a solution that was more permanent, which is we had our own management company. So I would say that's, that's your first and foremost. You, you can have, you can buy the best asset in the best part of town for the best Price. But if you're not managing these deals properly with the right teams, it's going to go off track almost immediately. So you really have to, you have to fall back to making sure you're investing in the right markets, in the right assets and having the right team. So that's first and foremost, doesn't matter what commercial real estate investment you're getting into, you need those things. But I would say a lot of it is around this last few years was very humbling in the sense that you can, you can mitigate for risk at the property level and maybe even at the submarket level, but you can't take, you really need to mitigate risk at the macro level.

Right. And what do I mean by that? I kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but interest rates really hosed us and, and all pretty much the whole entire industry for a long time. It's still, it's still a damper on it on and on. Real estate really. Insurance was something that we didn't take into consideration. Right. And we own an insurance agency. But what ended up happening in the insurance market is it got really wonky after Covid and then they had a couple big hurricanes, you had fires in California, all of these things you think, well those are in California or those are in Florida and so that shouldn't affect my property.

But everybody in the United States is paying more now for their home insurance, for their car insurance, for all of these things. But because they're trying to offset losses that the insurance company has had elsewhere. And so that spiked, that went up 2,3x in some cases where we never saw that coming. And we probably have a better beat on the market than most people would. Right. And so interest rates, insurance. And then the third really thing that I think people need to take into consideration is inflation data. Why does that matter right now? It's a now multifamily.

Real estate's actually a hedge against inflation because I can re rack my rents every year, which helps me. I'm not locked into a 10 year lease like this office building is, but I still have to keep up with my expenses. And when taxes, insurance, payroll, all the things have gone up 30 or 40% more than they were in Covid. Your rents didn't go up 30 or 40%. So you, doesn't matter how quickly you recycle your rents, your, your expenses are going to way up above where your rents are, which are down here. And so you've got a problem. And so how do you hedge against that? How do you be more conservative on your underwriting. You know, we've, we've had to dial that in over the last few years to really take that into consideration because I think you're still going to have a few more years of some choppy waters.

It's gotten a lot better though, right? Interest rates have come down. I think they're going to come down a little bit more. Insurance has gotten better. At least it's not gone up. It's kind of been top, it's kind of been flat the last couple years. And we think inflation is somewhat keeping in line with where it needs to be. And so you've got to, you got to take these macro things into consideration when you're looking into investment opportunities. And I think that's been very humbling and it's allowed us to dial in a more conservative approach to these investment opportunities that, that, you know, we'll be able to hedge a little bit better in the future on Gotcha.

Well, listen, that's about the time that we've got here. I want to take that last break bit from Ben and let that really get absorbed by a lot of folks out there. Remember Ben Settles and Disrupt Equity. You saw and heard him here on the IRA Cafe, powered by American ira. So check them out. It's been a great conversation. We look forward to more. I know that we have also got a webinar planned.

So by the time this airs, hopefully you've had a chance to see the webinar and if not, remember you can always listen to this, the webinars and anything and everything else self directed related on our YouTube channel and also find anything else out there at american ira.com Listen Ben, thank you again so much for your time today. Really giving a deep dive into multifamily. But even before that, really just enjoyed the chat and getting to know you, the philanthropic efforts that you've got learning about Disrupt gives learning you know about your views on your tenants both inside and outside the company. Really the care to the employees there, all the accolades that you get, the awards. You guys should be really proud and looking forward to getting back together with you at some time and having another sit down. How does that sound?

I love it. Love it. Thank you very much for the invite and hopefully the listeners got some value today. Absolutely.

All right, well listen, we'll go ahead and let Ben get back to his day there in Houston with a nice breeze and the flag blowing in the the background. We're going to get back on to what we're doing here at American IRA and allowing you to get back on to whatever your day and or evening what you've got planned right now. Thanks again for visiting us here in the IRA Cafe powered by American ira. We look forward to talking to you again on another episode.

American IRA LLC, a North Carolina LLC, acts as a third party administrator for New Vision Trust Co. A state chartered South Dakota trust company as a neutral, self directed IRA administrator. American IRA does not not recommend or endorse any investments, individuals or entities, including financial representatives, promoters or companies. American IRA and the IRA CAFE are not responsible for other statements, representations or agreements, nor do we evaluate the quality or profitability of any investment. American IRA does not endorse Guests on the IRA Cafe podcast. Guest opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of American ira, its subsidies, associates or custodian. Participation in the podcast is voluntary and no compensation is provided. American IRA is not a fiduciary and cannot offer financial advice.

Please consult your CPA or another professional before making financial decisions.