EP 61 | Building Networks and Seizing Niche Markets: Adam Stern’s Vision for Real Estate Investing

Craig Fuhr (00:12)
Are we going?

Peer cell. got it. Hey, welcome everyone to real estate investor. I'm sorry. Let me take that one more time. God damn it. We're such pros here, Adam. I got to get it right. Got it. It's the curse. Hey, welcome everyone to real investor radio. I'm Craig Fuhr joined by Jack BeVier and we have an awesome guest for you today that I can't wait to introduce. Jack, how are you today?

Jack BeVier (00:20)
you

Adam Stern (00:22)
messed up our reddit, let's just stop right here, alright?

Jack BeVier (00:37)
I'm doing great, man. I'm doing great. I'm excited to have our guest on today. We kind of jamming this one in here. And so we got him on the road to an appointment, but we were happy to just to like to squeeze it in.

Craig Fuhr (00:50)
Yes, this is an RIR first where we have a guest who's actually driving and going deep into real estate content. So let's go ahead and just introduce Adam right now. We talked a little bit before we hit record. So Adam, thank you for taking the time. Obviously busy guy on his way to a meeting and we got about 45 minutes with you. So really want to jump in, man. Thanks for taking the time to be on the show.

Adam Stern (01:14)
Anytime, Craig. Thanks for the invite. Appreciate it, Jack. Happy to talk to you guys. Excited for it, yeah.

Craig Fuhr (01:21)
So let me just go ahead and give a quick introduction for Adam Jack. He Adam launched Strata SFR in 2020 after exiting his previous role as president and co -founder of Own America, one of the first real estate platforms designed to market and sell single family rental properties. Adam and his team work with SFR.

portfolio operators, builders and land developers who are focused on expanding their volume and revenue by servicing the demand for single family rentals. And they work with large scale investors that own and operate rental homes in the United States and who are looking to purchase mostly portfolios. So Adam, welcome to the show. The brief introduction does not do it justice. I'm sure I've I'll just say this folks.

Adam Stern (02:05)
Peace out.

Couldn't have said it to myself. It was great, yeah.

Craig Fuhr (02:13)
I'll just say this. Adam's website is amazing. The content that he's provided on the website, Jack, is really cool. We were talking before the show today. If you're a single family operator, and Jack, we speak mostly to advanced investors. That's who the podcast is geared toward. But I speak to guys who call us every day, Jack. And they're at that 10, 20, 30, 50 properties in their portfolio, and they want to get to the next level.

I just think this is going to be a great conversation with Adam for guys like that who are looking to get to the next level and the content that on Adam's website is, I think, some of the best I've seen for guys who are looking to take their businesses to the next level from, you know, maybe start buying portfolios. So Adam, again, welcome to the show.

Adam Stern (03:01)
slot. You're gonna make me blush earlier on the show and I like it. I do. Yeah.

Jack BeVier (03:07)
I'll pile on the other strata SFR dot com is that website. And if anyone has been to IMN, you'll also remember the name strata because the strata party at IMN has become the party. They've the Adam goes way out of his way to to throw the best party at all of the IMN conferences. And so we very much appreciate his hospitality each time in Miami and Scottsdale.

Adam Stern (03:36)
Well, it's funny, Jack, you you talk about the fact that I work with you guys who work with large scale, like professional real estate investors and I myself am not a prolific investor. know, any knowledge that I have, any experience that I've gained or knowledge that I've gotten, I've gotten because I'm constantly in contact with really experienced, knowledgeable, like big investors that have a passion for it.

And I've not built a huge portfolio of real estate for myself. I own a real estate, but my passion lies in really building a network that enables other people to explore their passion for investing in real estate. I, know, by virtual like osmosis and learning a lot about how to, know, because of the fact that I focus on SFR, build for rent and as an offshoot of build for rent, land lots now, I just know a whole lot about the subject because I talk to really smart people.

And if you understand like my ethos being like the guy that creates the network, parties are a natural offshoot of that ethos. know, it's like, how do you gain as much exposure to people by creating a lightning rod where people, I always believe in bringing people to, you know, into your inner circle and the inner circle, you know, includes that emotional connection and that symbolic, symbolic connection. And that leads to a transactional, you know, opportunity. But unless you get people's attention,

and you connect with them on a personal and emotional level, I don't think you're gonna ever really have a chance to do long -term business with them. And that's really what the strata party's all been about, getting people to be part of something, to wanna join something, and to have the same experience. Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (05:14)
I gotta be honest, Adam, I think one of the cool things that I recognized when I started watching your content was just that authenticity. There's a real connection there, obviously with the folks that you were talking with on the calls. So yeah, couldn't agree more. Can you share quickly with us, because we have you for a limited time today, what was the genesis of the idea here to open up a brokerage solely focused on real estate investors and...

Adam Stern (05:23)
that.

Craig Fuhr (05:40)
frankly, larger real estate investors who are looking for portfolios and with working with builders who are providing that stock.

Adam Stern (05:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the genesis of the idea came when I launched my original company with my partner, Greg Rand, and that business turned into a brokerage that catered to people that couldn't sell their assets anywhere else. know, SFR portfolio owners were this relatively niche class of people that I realized really early on and Greg realized really early on, that just didn't have any kind of brokerage service or really any service.

Craig Fuhr (06:17)
Mm

Adam Stern (06:18)
catered to them and like, you know that idea that there were a lot of people that You know had these assets had nowhere to trade them. No one to help them No one that really understood their challenges. It just it spoke to me as an opportunity where I don't like competition I try to avoid competition at all at all stages of my life mainly because I I generally feel inferior to people that have a lot of experience to a very specific thing, but I felt like

Sfr portfolios were a niche that I could help a lot of people and that was totally Underexploited so I just decided to build a broken business around it

Craig Fuhr (06:53)
So what did it feel like in your first month of having the own America platform and attracting $1 .8 billion worth of assets to the platform within the first month? I mean, that had to be a pretty good sense at that point that, I think we just caught lightning in a bottle.

Adam Stern (07:14)
Yeah, it was cool. I knew it was a special thing when we ended up getting large portfolio owners with like 100 properties, 200 properties, and like they were asking us, they were pursuing us. It wasn't like we were calling them and calling them and begging them for a listing being a new real estate company. They were like all over us about trying to tap into our network, which we created of institutional investors that were on a very large scale, know, deploying tens of million dollars a month.

So I knew we hit something as soon as we sold our first portfolio and after we sold our second and third or fourth and the fact that it was easy because we built this network of really active buyers and that no one else knew anything about it, I kind of knew we had, we found our niche.

Jack BeVier (08:00)
Like interest, so interest rates have obviously been a big headwind, particularly in the portfolio side of things and in the build to rent space. How have you seen that unfolding over the past? I don't know, year or so.

Adam Stern (08:14)
Yeah, so over the last 18 months in my business, a big part of my business was SFR portfolios and Interest Relation really drove that business by and large. When I started Strata, my now company, after we soloed in America, the strategy with that was just like SFR portfolio owners, regional builders had this trend that was emerging called Build for Rent. Even though the biggest builders in the country like Lenar and Toll Brothers,

and MI homes and others like them, we're going to figure it out because we're big enough to like really form direct relationships with big, big institutional investors. I knew like the guys that I'm used to working with, which were the regional investors, had no idea about Build for Rent. And getting back to the interest rate question, that business was very largely driven by low interest rates. So when interest rates went up, what ended up happening was institutional investors by and large

stopped buying what I call programmatically. And they started buying opportunistically, which sucks because when people buy programmatically, they buy everything in sight that fits a certain mold. And it's really easy for them to deploy capital because all they're doing is fitting like a square peg in a square hole. And as long as you keep buying that square hole, they'll keep pegging it, right? Same thing with bill for rent. And when interest rates went up,

people started doubting whether or not they could hit their numbers because they made certain assumptions about rent growth, they made certain assumptions about home price appreciation, economic growth, and all that kind of slowed down and people became unsure about a whole lot of things, which means underwriting got a lot more tenuous and it got a lot more conservative, which means that the rate of people buying

SFR portfolios, for example, or bill for end projects. It just took a dive. Like my business went from like us doing a hundred to 200 transactions every single month, units every single month, us just, you know, barely scrimping by with maybe a dozen. so, you know, in terms of institutional appetite for SFR bill for rent, it basically went like this.

It flattened out as interest rates kind of started to come down and then it's been nosedived in terms of the amount of capital being deployed in the space. And it certainly hurt my business measurably. And it really made me rethink my business in a very real way and what kind of value I was adding to, know, SFR portfolio owners and builders and how I could basically, you know, continue to add value and also create a thriving business.

Jack BeVier (11:02)
I with the interest rates coming down, I mean only very recently, like literally the past like a couple of weeks have you and kind of debt markets being a bit more stable. Like have you seen any renewed interest from the institutional owners to try to, you know, turn the spigot back on.

Adam Stern (11:22)
Yeah, I have. So the interesting thing about the interest rate movement was it didn't hurt builders buying lots and lands. And I think that had more to do with the fact that when COVID hit, builders stopped buying lots because they weren't quite sure what was gonna happen to the building market, the housing market. So they kind of tamped down or even like stopped buying undeveloped lots to develop into finished lots.

And my business for lending lots over the last 18 months took off while my Build for Ed and SFR portfolio business hit the skids. like it puts me in contact with lot of developers that have lots to sell to builders and a lot of builders that want to buy lots from developers. And the cool thing about it is as I kept talking to more builders and more developers, what I realized was there's a lot of really good inventory out there.

that people thought were gonna fit as built for rent and just wasn't being bought up by institutional investors because it couldn't hit the cap rates using the new underwriting they were using. forgetting the question that you asked specifically, but my view of it is the SFR segment is super stable because people need houses to live in and there's a shortage of housing in this country. And there's an affordability crisis in this country. And people just aren't.

builders and SFR portfolio operators just aren't creating enough housing stock to support the demand. And no matter what happens, as long as people can either build real estate or build portfolios for rent, always gonna be renters there as long as they're able to offer them out at a rental rate that makes sense. It's just the inflow of money is gonna change because the returns change as interest rates fluctuate. So that the business itself,

is kind of as stable as any other business, including like any stable business that you would ever come to rely on like food or, you know, food or basic necessities, shelters are basic necessity. And that's not going to change anytime soon. And I think that people's buying habits change because return profiles change. But ultimately, the underlying business is a pretty solid one. Now people are always going to need a place to

Craig Fuhr (13:43)
Jack's question, you haven't seen any like recent uptake uptick in calls coming into the office because of the rates just subsiding.

Adam Stern (13:51)
Yeah, we actually did. So when the Fed announced it was gonna decrease interest rates, like I have a point not too long ago, sometime around that time, we started to get calls from more SFR portfolio owners, wanting to see about selling their assets. And we had a handful of investors that got a little more aggressive than they used to be, that we put a portfolio in Atlanta under contract, we put a bunch of new construction properties under contract.

I don't know if that's a wholesale change or whether we just got lucky, but I feel like investors are looking at the, you know, the, the, maybe the, the change in administration coming up, if that happens, the change in interest rates, if that happens as, as reason to be optimistic. And I think institutional investors make their money by deploying capital and managing assets and they want to find any reason to do that. so I've seen a slight uptick in my business.

Craig Fuhr (14:25)
Yeah.

Adam Stern (14:49)
And it just came on the heels of that interest rate decline announcement, but I don't know if that's an industry wide thing. The sample for my example is just too small for me to make that assumption.

Craig Fuhr (15:00)
Yeah, I mean, I think we've definitely seen an uptick in calls here at the office. Jack would probably know the analytics better than me, but definitely feels a little bit more exuberant with folks who are looking to get the better rates of today rather than a couple of weeks ago.

Adam Stern (15:17)
Yeah, yeah, people weren't all that excited about borrowing at like, you know, at the low end to high six, all the way up to an 8 % interest rate. The idea that they can see that interest rate somewhere in the high fives or low sixes is definitely giving them a reason to be a little more optimistic.

Jack BeVier (15:31)
So over the past year, like the mix of the mix of the transactions that you've seen went from, was majority portfolios and what was majority portfolios with interest rates really kind of killed that. But the lot side of things kind of backfilled it. And there were lots of interesting opportunities in land. Do you still see those interesting opportunities in land? Is that still there?

Adam Stern (15:57)
all over the place. In fact, we're doing a deal with Dominion right now where one of my clients is selling 16 different communities in and around Charlotte that total something like 340 lots. They're all like 20 to 30 lot communities. And one of the things that my client needed that I brought to you, Jack, and Dominion was everyone does horizontal plus vertical financing. They really want the vertical financing.

No one does horizontal financing only. So we brought it to you guys and you guys are actually able to help my client obtain just horizontal financing because what he was doing, I think it's a pretty common thing, especially for developers and a lot of small home builders right now that don't want to take on the risk of building homes in a kind of fairly unsure market. The trend of like regional and smaller home builders that bought a piece of land, brought it through rezoning, brought it through the entitlement process. And instead of building a home,

to sell in the retail market, is kind of the end goal. What they're looking to do right now is just sell a lot, like a lot to a national home builder, which gets them good profit, not as much as they built a home, but certainly a lot less risk in that sale. And like I'm finding that my position in their world is sorely needed because most national home builders like NBR, Lenar, MI Homes, LGI, Dan Ryan Builders, they don't buy undeveloped lots.

You know, they learned the lesson in the last downturn after a lot of home builders got killed by holding too much land. And all they do is buy finished lots, which opens up a whole nother aspect for like regional and local developers who are willing to take on the risk of buying undeveloped lots, developing them, and then selling them to national home builders. That like space is blowing up right now. For anyone that

Craig Fuhr (17:47)
Yeah, I've been working with a I've been working with a regional or a small guy down in Texas haven't put the deal together yet. But he's got a huge community that he's building out. In particular, these couple pods that have 180 lots and you know, he's already pre sold 90 of them to national home builder. He's got LOIs coming from for the for the remaining. And, you know, I asked him, what's the appetite for being a builder? He's absolutely none.

you know, when I can just sell off the lots pre sold to these builders with 18 % deposits and takedown schedules that are that almost seem ridiculous. So yeah, it feels pretty hot from that standpoint.

Adam Stern (18:23)
It's.

And like 18 months ago, before interest rates went up, like I would think the majority, I would have bet the majority of the builders that are now selling lots to the national home builders would have been able to pre -contract those units as bill for rents to build friend firms and have the ability to build them out and sell them as finished units via forward contracts. And like there was a little while there, like before interest rates went up where regional home builders that knew what they were doing could like write a contract with an investment firm.

buy a house that was gonna be delivered in 12 months, get a usable deposit to help fund the construction of the lots and the homes. And it was like a beautiful thing for regional home builders. And that kind of went away. And it's a pity too, because a lot of home builders, like they ramped up their lot acquisition strategy to feed that demands. And luckily there's firms like Strata out there right now that have kind of figured it out where, all right, you can't sell this bill for rent anymore, but.

There's a huge market of national builders and regional, super regional builders that want to buy your finished lots. It's just a matter of repurposing, you know, what you guys are building to, you know, fill that demand.

Jack BeVier (19:40)
Yeah, we've seen a lot of guys pivot who were doing build to rent a couple years ago, pivot to just selling all, you know, spec homes, you know, just into the retail market. So like, mean, that that side of things has hasn't gone, you know, hasn't gone away at all. Right. Like the the bill to rent side of thing is going to be very interest rate sensitive, but but an affordable housing segment. I mean, you know, the demand for four hundred thousand dollar houses is tremendously high.

Adam Stern (20:06)
It is and you know, people I think nowadays, it's funny, we talked about the affordability crisis and people call affordability crisis and I don't know if it's just a trend but you know, $400 ,000 house is an entry -level house nowadays. know, people that have college degree, two income families right now that are making $100 ,000 a year, finding it hard to buy an entry -level house and are deciding to rent. And I think, you know, part of the problem is

Jack BeVier (20:22)
Yeah, crazy.

Adam Stern (20:35)
The national home -builders, there's really no money in building houses at a sub $400 ,000 price point. So there's a lot of inventory that's coming out in that $350 to $400 ,000 range. If people could figure out actually how to make a buck by selling a $250 to $300 ,000 house, there's gonna be a massive demand for it, but no one builds it because the numbers really don't work out. But I think that kind of inventory is still needed out there. And what you get is any level home's at $400

Craig Fuhr (21:02)
I don't know, man. I'm talking to more guys lately, they're building that that entry level type house, guys in Florida, guys in Tennessee, you know, they're they're somehow getting the land for you know, next to nothing. They've got they've got their build costs under control their sticks and bricks, and they're putting out entry level houses in that 375 to 425 mark. And to Jack's point that we've spoken about many times before on the on the show.

These are not going to be 3 ,200 square foot houses. Jack's whole theory is that we'll just consume less as we sort of go into the future here in terms of housing size. And I think we're starting to see that now.

Adam Stern (21:33)
Now, 1400, we finished our repeat.

Jack BeVier (21:45)
What's so you mentioned, what do you so what do you how are you thinking about the future then? Like what's the what are the opportunities? You know, what's your planning for the next year? Then given everything that's hand, is it still in the land? The land opportunities seem stable because of the under supply. And then there's some upside in the bill to rent side because interest rates are coming down or or how are you thinking about, you know, the next 12 months?

Adam Stern (22:11)
Yeah. So, what I'm doing in my business, my opinion is there's always gonna be owners and sellers out there that wanna trade SFR properties. There's always gonna be builders who wanna sell their assets, whether they're new construction homes to home buyers or to investors. that business, my business is essentially a brokerage business and there's always gonna be that business around.

And it'll get easier and harder as interest rates go up and down and as the economy go up and down and as returns vacillate. But in my business, I think I'm a decent broker, but at the end of the day, I think my talent lies in helping people connect with each other, owners that have assets with qualified buyers that have capital. And the change that I'm making in my business,

is sometime in the next six to 12 months, I'll be making an announcement that Strata's gonna stop being a real estate investment brokerage and we're gonna veer toward being a real estate buyer network. like my idea that like my business was built on the fact that I've continually attracted the best buyers in the market of SFR and Build for Rent and Land and Lodge. And that's really been my claim to fame. And by virtue of attracting the best buyers, I've been able to create a lightning rod

for people who have assets that really want to get at those buyers. The most common question I get asked is not like, you list my property? It's, do you have a buyer for this asset that I have? And my answer is always the same. Of course I do. I've got a huge network. It's more about you tell me what you have to sell, and I essentially catalog, as well as I can, all the buyers in my network, and then I'm able to match seller with buyer. So in the next six to 12 months,

Craig Fuhr (23:38)
Mm.

Adam Stern (24:04)
I partner with some really smart people and I'm gonna create some technology that takes this concept of qualifying buyers, not only asking them what they wanna buy in terms of asset and where they wanna buy in terms of market, but also qualifying them in terms of access to equity and access to debt and experience and being able to get people with more access to both of those things, experience and capital, the best visibility and the best access to the...

to the highest quality properties. And that idea of creating a buyer network where my crazy idea was every real estate out there is built so that buyers can look for listings. I always wanted to build a real estate website where owners and sellers can look for buyers. And by virtue of having buyers, you can create a lightning rod to attract lots of assets. And I think I'll end up doing it mostly in Build4Ren and SFR and land in lots because of what I know, but I could see myself in very short order.

Jack BeVier (24:48)
That's really interesting.

Yeah.

Adam Stern (25:03)
It's getting out into other things like small multifamily, assets that don't really have a ubiquitous marketplace, like what the JLLs and the Markets and Middlechaps of the world actually specialize in. There's asset classes out there that really don't have really good services, broad services, to help them find an exit. There are these smaller asset classes, like mobile homes, for example. Huge market.

Craig Fuhr (25:15)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Stern (25:30)
Not very many brokers deal with them because they're relatively low cost assets and they can take a lot of work. But like if you coalesce a network of buyers that were all about buying mobile home assets in Pensacola, Florida and you got like 30 or 40 of them together, well guess what's going to happen? Everyone with a mobile home port in cell is going to come clamoring to you because you've now got 30 buyers to choose from. And if they're qualified and you've done a good enough job cataloging them, it can make an apt and appropriate connection.

Craig Fuhr (25:30)
huge.

Adam Stern (25:59)
facilitate a sale, I think it becomes a really special thing and that's kind of where I'm gearing my business toward the next six to twelve months.

Jack BeVier (26:06)
That's really interesting because it does. That's a super interesting. Yeah, I know. I think that's really interesting. That's a really, it's an important or it's a, I don't know. It's a different take, right? Cause everyone always thinks of, like you said, everyone always thinks of like you put the, what are you selling? You you put the product up on Facebook marketplace and then the buyers browse and they say, do I want that thing? Right. And we all presume that all the buyers are created equal. Cause

Adam Stern (26:07)
If that makes sense. If that makes sense. I could be wrong, yeah.

Craig Fuhr (26:29)
Loopnet.

Jack BeVier (26:35)
Because when you're buying something for 50 bucks, all the buyers are equal, right? But when the assets 10 million, now the nature of the buyers, what matters like the asset is is a little bit incidental, right? Like it matters, but it matters. But the buyer, the nature of the buyer matters a lot more in. It's not just about the it's not as if, you know, they're just opening up their wallets like it's it's a deal structuring aspect that I think it's really interesting, man. I it's really interesting.

Craig Fuhr (27:02)
One of the things I know you've said before, just kind of tying into that, Adam, is this notion of the quality of the opportunities where it's seller quality, asset quality, price quality, but now it feels like you're sort of making a shift to buyer quality, right? Like you wanna have, yeah, I love that, man.

Adam Stern (27:19)
Exactly right. The experience of a seller that has an asset that doesn't have a huge market is generally like lots of marketing, lots of conversations with a lot of people that don't go anywhere. And you end up with like a predictable three or four different people in a market that are the most natural buyers for it, right? And like, if you can cut through all that bullshit and like give someone a pathway to stop

Craig Fuhr (27:28)
Mm

Right. Right.

Yeah. Right.

Adam Stern (27:49)
having to have the conversations with the aspirational investor who really wants to invest and buy a mobile home park or buy an SFR portfolio, or really doesn't have the money and might have to go raise it, all the way to like, all right, there's like, I want to sell this asset in a market. There's like four really stellar buyers that really need to see this because they have the best opportunity to give me an exit for the right price. I should talk to those four buyers first. And there should be a website out there that you can actually research those four buyers, find them, and in a very real way be able to connect with them and show them your asset.

And that's, that's coming to the end.

Craig Fuhr (28:19)
I think I think the the larger opportunity is what you just touched on briefly in your answer five seconds ago, it was so you've got those four guys in the market who you know you're going to talk to. But there's probably 20 more guys if they just could figure out the capital game, you know, like, you know, the equity game and the the bet game that you can present to them. Now you've got instead of four guys, you've probably got about, you know,

Adam Stern (28:39)
Yeah, down that, yeah.

Craig Fuhr (28:48)
many more, let's just say. And I think that's the real opportunity there that I don't think you're just going to be a guy who attracts who builds a buyer network. You'll also be a guy who understands how to give those people who didn't initially have, you know, they haven't been down the road of doing a PPM. You know, they haven't been down the road of attracting the correct debt and the correct equity. I think that's the real opportunity there for you as well, since you've done that for so many, I'm sure.

Adam Stern (29:16)
couldn't agree more and kind of my long -term strategy here is if you think about like the example that I gave, know, four buyers in Pensacola that want to buy a very specific asset, the real value in creating that network of four buyers, you might have to attract 100 and those four of them was qualified. But for like the 96 that aren't as well qualified, the knowledge base that you can coalesce from those four people

Craig Fuhr (29:28)
Mm

Right.

Yeah.

Adam Stern (29:45)
if you can get those four people to create content and share it with the other 96 to make the other 96 better. And also you can create an avenue where you can give those 96 people better access to debt and better access to equity along with the education from the really experienced people where you can go from those four people to now 10 people to 15 people to 30 people.

Craig Fuhr (30:06)
Well, think so. A perfect example would be and Jack knows the guy who I'm speaking of here. We've got I have a borrower who's, you know, has a job, a great job. They own about 150 homes currently that they've in, we'll say the Michigan area and they want to get to the next level. And they funded Adam. Most of these purchases, scattered site, all, you know,

basically single properties at a time. They funded all of this with their own cash or maybe some private, private lending. And then they refi out into DSCR, but they desperately want to get sort of to that next level. They're smart guys, very smart guys. They they're great operators. And I think with that sort of knowledge that you would provide, now you've got a guy who's not really your target guy, one of the four, but he's damn close.

These guys are right on the bubble of being better if they just had the knowledge of how do we put together the equity? How do we put together the debt? And now they can really start to scale. And Jack, we talked to guys like Sean Mulhall, you know, or Chris Garan. These are guys that, you know, started out, well, not necessarily Chris, but Sean, started off with one, two, three, and then they figure out the equity and capital game. And now they're playing at a much larger level in terms of, you know, we're not just buying onesie twosies anymore.

Adam Stern (31:02)
Yeah.

Jack BeVier (31:29)
Is it a fair statement that because of the public records research, you can identify all of the owners of portfolios and it's probably like 2 ,000, right? Like it's a very finite number of sellers, like a portfolio owners.

Adam Stern (31:47)
Yes, it's a small one. The data is out there. It's not all that easy to get at. And once you find the data, there's some work to be done in terms of appending with phone numbers and email addresses. And then the question is what the best medium is to actually get your message out there to them. So yes, mean, more today now than ever, these people are findable. And there's not a lot of them out there. Like in a market like, I don't know how many exactly are nationwide, but like

In a top tier market like where I live, Charlotte, there might only be 250 people that own more than 10 properties. And there might only be 30 that own more than 100. And the people that own two or 300, there might only be like two or three. So yeah, it's out there and it's certainly gettable, but it's certainly not as easy as people might think.

Craig Fuhr (32:39)
Good luck finding those mobile home park operators. Tough list to find. There's only about 55 ,000 of them in the United States, so it's not that big of a market.

Adam Stern (32:43)
Well, I don't think

Perfect. That's my entire business strategy. Let the JLLs and the mortgage and millchaps of the world have the big multifamilies and the commercial properties. I'm very happy to take niches, whether it's mobile home parks or SFR portfolios or built -front communities, or whatever the niche is, and create a buyer network for it and create a brain trust that can teach people how to do that business better. I think that's an evergreen business. I don't think that opportunity's gonna go away, regardless of what its traits are. There's always gonna be a need for it.

So that's, you know, to answer your question, that's my plan for the next six to 12 months. And that kind of goes along with my thought process that, you know, I think we're at a really dangerous time in our country where this idea that you shouldn't own things and that you shouldn't, you should be a renter. I think that's all bullshit. I think the message that we should be given to the younger generation, my kids right now are in their teenage years from 14 to nine. I teach them to.

aspire to always own whatever it is, whether it's your house, whether it's your failures, whether it's, you know, your successes, nothing happens by chance in this world. And like this idea that we can take the people who've done real estate at least successfully and, create a learning opportunity where the real experienced people would very often have really optimistic out, you know, positive mindsets, that whole thing I love. And I love the idea of taking that knowledge and creating a way where people can get access to it.

And I use it to create transactions and I use it to generate revenue by selling, helping people to sell and buy real estate. I think there's a real aspirational thing in helping people share ideas, not only about how to buy and sell real estate, but how they got there personally. And that's the real goal, I think, of creating a network like the one I'm gonna be doing.

Craig Fuhr (34:38)
Love that.

Adam Stern (34:38)
Yep. With that.

Jack BeVier (34:40)
That's awesome, Yeah, I know. Well, yeah, you have a you have a 10 o 'clock meeting to get to. So we'll let you not have to scurry in there at the very last minute. Really appreciate you. taking the time this morning. Really enjoyed the conversation, man. That was a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you.

Adam Stern (34:49)
Appreciate that.

Yeah, me too, Jack. Appreciate it, Greg.

Craig Fuhr (34:56)
Adam, I would love to have you back on at some point when you have time again to talk more about the the idea of building out this network. And then, you know, maybe we could do a dive into a portfolio that you're looking at and, you know, maybe sort of share the analytics of it, like you've done already on your website, found it so fascinating. So thank you for taking the time today. I'd love to have you back on soon.

Adam Stern (35:19)
Yeah, happy to do that. Thanks for the compliment without a doubt. All right, guys.

Jack BeVier (35:24)
Sounds good.

Craig Fuhr (35:24)
Alright guys. Alright folks, that was Real Investor Radio for today. Hope you enjoy the episode with Adam. We'll see you the next time.

EP 61 | Building Networks and Seizing Niche Markets: Adam Stern’s Vision for Real Estate Investing
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