All Forum Posts by: George Yu

@Tyrone Hood find your niche and in the process life will put the right people in front of you to help you get to where you want to go. Believe that.

Hey guys my name is George Yu and I love passive real estate. The idea of investing into something and then collecting mailbox money whether you feel like working or not is like having your own golden chicken as long as you take care of it. I bought my first single family home in 2011 while I was a freshman in college for $32,000 move in ready from my uncle and it has been consistently rented out since for about $650/month. Fast forward till now, I have a total of 6 single family rental properties....and now a partner in 36 unit apartment complex.

I ended up partnering with a gentleman a few years older than I and he was a seasoned developer. Long story short came to see what he was building and loved it. I offered him my time and capital and we went to look for another ground up build and broke ground in early 2019. I realized partnering with someone really shortened my timeline from 3-5 years to just a few months. It was information overload at first but im a fast learner and so excited that I never got bored and never had too many emails, phone calls and meetings. Keep them coming! 

Our bread and butter is building smaller sized apartments around 400SQFT 1br/1ba apartments for workforce housing. We build them using some methods from passive housing standards like preventing thermal bridging and spray foam insulation to the best we can create an airtight envelope. The world is headed in that direction and there is no reason not to build for that in my opinion. Hoping that there are others who see a gap in market right now and want to do something about it. Lets connect.

I want to help others like me who are interested in building affordable, eco friendly products for a economic class that NEEDS this. I was someone with little to no experience being able to take part in a multifamily development by believing you can, teaming up with right people, having a willingness to learn, and a healthy bit of luck. If I did this on my own it probably wouldn't have happened this quickly for sure. It's also a great feeling help create homes for people in need while making great passive income. We are so excited to be breaking ground on our next development in December. I would like to answer any questions about anything to help people who are interested in learning. There’s a lot that I didn't cover such as financials. I can say that we are above a 10% Cap Rate after refinancing our construction loan into a longer term loan and the demand is good enough that we have a waiting list.

Finally i’m taking all questions so please........ Ask away!

Here are some dropbox photos of our journey from Parcel to Passive income:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tyk44xnpc0mev8z/AACQSjHK1IskpaDnt4VHLxpMa?dl=0

Sorry if the photos are out of order. Cant figure out how to get DropBox to show it right. 

@Bjorn Ahlblad yes we are pretty happy with the numbers. In the future I would hope to be able to help others develop their own small apartment units if they are interested

@Tyrone Hood We don’t go to any of the major cities like Atlanta. It just doesn’t fit our model we can’t buy into the land at a low enough price. We stay in the small towns that big developers won’t go. Developers often build for millennials, students, healthcare, elderly and disabled but rarely do they build for low income working class.

@Tyrone Hood nice to meet you. One thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of real estate investors/developers that don’t live on BiggerPockets. In fact my partner Jeremiah has never even heard of BiggerPockets and he’s been doing real estate for the last 20 or so years. He’s also from a small town in south Georgia and from his humble beginnings had no plans to develop outside of his small town until we partnered together. Does your friend have a lot of experience with mobile parks? I would find someone that’s doing exactly what you want to be doing and offer relation money on their next deal. Be willing to put in sweat and money. If you don’t have the money that’s everyone’s problem so I would recommend getting friends or family but don’t lose it!

@Dennis M. It is but am I experience I found it a lot easier if you have people ahead of you and pulling you along!

@Michael Ealy thank you for your kind words and really good to connect with you. Yeah in the past I always try to do things myself but this is my first real shot at partnering with someone who had the experience and bringing my time and money to the table. It turned out great and a really good friendship and partnership came out of it. Learning a lot about leverage right now and talking to local bankers. We haven’t had much luck with Big banks so most of who we deal with our local community banks but they love us. We also don’t see ourselves building larger than 70 units so we don’t need a loan larger than what a small community bank can keep on their balance sheet. If we keep with that strategy we should be able to do this for a while before hitting a problem with debt coverage

@Matt P. That will depend on your local ordinance and ULDC. Check with whatever city that you want to go to in google unified land development code or call the local planning and zoning commission and ask what their multifamily density is. Most places in Georgia or around 10 to 12 units per acre but we typically ask for minimum 18 per acre so in order to build 36 units of this piece of land was about 2 1/2

@Sherif Lyons well I’m assuming you’re talking about acquiring and not building from the ground up which is a part of my reason that I started trying to build from the ground up. I wasn’t able to find great deals on the market only good deals for fixing flips or buying holds. Dance your question I probably would just go at least an hour and a half outside of Atlanta into one of the suburbs and I would base my decision on the available inventory on the market and I would speak to local property managers to see what part of town to stay away from Ann which part of town can command the highest rents and best tenants

@Greg Dickerson Makes sense. I put some numbers together and present them later tonight when I get back to my laptop thank you