To have a mentor or to not

[Nate Gottesman]

Hi BP’s,

First time creating a new thread - here goes nothing.

Curious on what your perspective is towards utilizing a mentor in the MF space.

If you have a mentor, what has that experience been like? How has that affected your investing/ syndication journey? Has the relationship felt genuine?

If not, why? What tilted the scale in the direction of no mentor. How has that decision affected your syndicating career?

There’s obviously pros and cons that many podcasts, books, and even forums do a good job of outlining, but generally speaking, any insight you can provide on having that mentor relationship as a MF syndicator would be helpful.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post!

Nate

[Chihiro Kurokawa]

@Nate Gottesman

I tried first without a mentor, then with a paid mentor. I think either way you need mentorship. If you have the hustle and fortune to get free mentorship, more power to you! 

I had a lot of difficulty getting traction for the 16 or so months I went at it solo, so finally I decided to spend a significant chunk of change to join a group called Think Multifamily. From what I understand the pricing is around the same for all of these groups, which is enough to buy a new car. 

I'll tell you what I tell everyone. If you don't have the will or ability to take on a second job, don't do this. Getting an apartment is really hard work and requires a broad range of skills. You have to be good at networking. You need to be able to underwrite well. This isn't just about being analytical; it's about having enough experience to know what is aggressive vs. conservative. You have to be known, liked and trusted in order to raise capital. Then you have to be an excellent project manager and juggle multiple balls while the property is under contract. And then after all of that you have to deal with taxes, cost seg, investor communications, renovation, staffing etc.! Oh yeah and do this while continuing to analyze deals to grow your empire.  

Are you willing to relentlessly pursue this for an unknown length of time? For reference it took me almost two years to get my first deal under contract. Are you obsessed with becoming a multifamily operator? Will your spouse be OK with you spending seemingly every waking moment on the phone, visiting properties, going to networking events and conferences? This is all while your spouse's workload goes up because of your unavailability. While you're doing this you're spending tens of thousands of dollars on something with no guaranteed result. Shoot, are YOU okay with gambling on yourself like that? Note I said gamble on yourself, not real estate. If you have the right mentorship you won't overpay for assets. 

I think the hard reality is that many will join mentorship groups but not all will succeed, and my guess is that in most cases the student wasn't willing or able to put in the work.