Who Not How: Who can help me find/acquire rental properties

[Matthew Bailey]

I own a successful real estate land investing business that takes a great portion of my time.  I am looking to acquire three or four multifamily properties in before the end of the year to round out my tax planning strategy.  In keeping with the book "Who not how" I would like to try and see if there is a "who" that I should be networking with to help with this task.  Rather than asking, "how can I buy these properties", I am asking "who can help me acquire these properties".  Perhaps there are consultants that can help me identify the market that fits my goals, identify target properties and offer prices, and underwrite and help during the acquisition, and I'm curious if such support exists?  Maybe I should just find a good RE friendly agent, maybe there are people on UpWork who specialize in helping acquire/underwrite properties, I just am putting this out to the BP ecosphere to see what I don't know.  Is there a "who" for my situation that I could enlist to help?

Here are some important things to consider:

- I am pretty much at capacity running my RE business, so I don't have a ton of bandwidth to do it all myself

- Let's presume my opportunity cost is such that pulling away from my RE business to "do it all myself" for these rentals is not a good use of my time, as I'd earn a higher dollar per hour being the CEO of my RE business than the dollars per hour savings trying find off market deals (I.e. saving 20k and trying to do the rentals myself would cost me more than 20k of lost opportunity cost by pulling my attention away from CEO level tasks at my RE business, which might generate 40k of revenue for the same time)

- By the same light, turnkey could be an option, I'd be willing to pay the turnkey premium for the time savings of finding and vetting my own deal, however I know I'd still need to underwrite my own deal provided by a TK company, so having someone who can help that underwriting process would be super valuable, rather than me trying to learn from scratch how to properly underwrite the deal. (I've read all the BP books, I have a base understanding, but still need to learn the best way to find rents, check insurance, check crime, check this, check that, etc)

I know that the BP community is all about "do it yourself, you don't need a guru, save the money" type mindset a lot of the time.  But are there folks I could hire to help me through the process, since my time is better spent on my existing business that I'm scaling.

Thanks so much in advance!

[Matthew Bailey]

Thanks for the replies everyone! @Jared Hottle, I'll drop you a line. I'm certainly interested in those midwest markets, would love to hear more about your experience.

@Sam Wilson The search for multi has always been on my radar, land investing (flipping) is like wholesaling.  It is a good source of capital generation, not necessarily long term wealth.  It is also very labor intensive.  The tax liability of this year's success is pushing up the timeline on moving into rentals.  As a RE professional the $250k (single) and $500k (married) write of for a cost seg depreciation against active income would be about a 40% savings at my tax rate.  The land business is doing great, it's more beneficial for my long term wealth strategy to take the tax savings and I can afford to pay private money (friends/family) to fund the land deals.  As for the rest of your questions (2) I'm open to all asset classes with the focus being on the "right" type of asset to maximize depreciation (I.e. more value in improvements relative to land cost since it's not depreciable).  (3) No location preference at this time, but I think part of the tax qualification involves some level of self management, at least to part of the portfolio (clearing that up with my CPA in one week) so I'll do one CA property at least.  I think that also knocks off syndications in the beginning.

Thanks Frank!