Flint Jamison - From Boeing To 2200+ Units
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Flint spent 20 years in aerospace as an engineer and program manager. He helped design the wing structure on the Boeing 787 before leaving in 2014. Having endured a great deal of burnout, he turned to purchasing real estate in 2018. He quickly pivoted to commercial real estate, which allowed him to reclaim his time and quit his day job. Having founded Vestus Capital, Flint helps educate others on how they can grow and protect their wealth by passively investing in commercial real estate and break free from the Wall Street rollercoaster.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Hear how Flint was able to transition from his career with Boeing to becoming a full-time real estate investor
- Discover the path to financial independence through real estate investing.
- Explore the power of syndications for a strong start in real estate.
- Unlock the benefits of partnering in real estate deals for accelerated growth instead of attempting to do it all yourself.
- Embrace the potential of investing in build-to-rent developments for long-term wealth creation.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Introduction to Real Estate Journey
00:02:28 - Discovering Syndications
00:08:29 - Vet Operator
00:10:10 - Lessons as a Limited Partner
00:13:43 - The Risks of Doing It Alone
00:14:53 - Market Fluctuations and Real Estate
00:17:08 - Benefits of Diversification
00:19:47 - From Syndication to Development
00:24:37 - Handling Challenges and Learning from Failures
00:26:28 - The Value of Experience and Perseverance
00:27:12 - Being Prepared for the Unexpected
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Flint Jamison
It was super stressful life. I'll just put it flat out. And I was looking for something that I didn't want to work another 20 years of just abusing myself in a day job like that. So I wanted to find a little bit more, as you say, freedom. That's the whole point of this podcast. So I started dipping into real estate.
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the REL Freedom show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some REL Freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of REL Freedom. Real estate leveraged freedom, where we cover people building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. If you're listening to this and you want to get started on your real estate investing journey, come check out our [email protected], freedom through realestate.com. Great place to just learn. Plug in, answer any questions you might have about getting started, and go from there. For today's guest, I'm so excited to share. We've got Flint Jamison here. Flint is a founder of Vestus Capital. He's going to share his story of getting into real estate, being able to invest in some of these large deals. I know a lot of our investors like to think they get started, like, hey, I'm going to flip a home or I'm going to do something small. But there's actually some really good opportunities out there to be able to partner with great operators on some of these larger deals and hit an economies of scale that you just can't hit on your own. And so that's what Flint's doing, and we're excited to hear his story. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Flint Jamison
Thanks for having me.
Mike Swenson
Mike, why don't you just get us started? Tell a little bit about your path and your journey to get into real estate.
Flint Jamison
Well, I was mechanical engineer and went into aerospace for most of my career up until I pivoted to real estate and I worked at Boeing. I left Boeing back in 2014. At the time of this recording. There's a lot of Boeing news right now. I left in 2014. I worked on the seven eight seven, and then I moved on from there, and I modified aircraft for the air Force as a program manager. So I've done all levels of leadership, but throughout all that, it was super stressful life. I'll just put it flat out. And I was looking for something that I didn't want to work another 20 years of just abusing myself in a day job like that. So I wanted to find a little bit more, as you say, freedom. That's the whole point of this podcast. So I started dipping into real estate. I got in 2018, bought a duplex. I did the burst strategy. That was cool. But it didn't really. I mean, the realization came through and I realized I was only making about $300 per door. And that sounds cool. $600 per month on an asset that I bought for eighty K and put another 30K in renovations. But I was making $600 a month and I was like, well, that's cool, but how do I even just make $100,000? Just do some simple math. And I had to average $300 a month per unit was above average based on what I had read. Normally, it's apparently $200 per unit per month that people, on average make. So you do the math out to $100,000, you need 50 units. And to create 50 units, or to buy 50 units and have enough liquidity and time, I was like, there's no way. I didn't want to spend the next 20 years trying to acquire 50 units on my own because that wasn't my goal. My goal is to go faster. And then I found syndications and economies of scale, partnering with a bunch of experts and people with complementary skills. And then, yeah, I blew up. So now we're recording this in 2024, I have roughly 2200 units in my portfolio. So it's pretty sweet.
Mike Swenson
I think for a lot of people when they get started or they think about getting and started real estate, you kind of forget about all the time, it's going to suck up, too. And so to be able to do those 50 units, it's not just how do I have enough money to put into those 50 units, but it's then all the time that it's going to take to manage that. And for some people, they like to start without a property manager to learn the ropes, right? And then you got to figure out how to deal with tenants and find tenants and negotiate the contracts and property manage. There's a lot to it, too. And so that's the beauty of a model like syndication, is you can kind of just skip past, if we're leveling up, let's just say there's 100 levels of real estate investing, you can kind of just skip past the first 25 of those lessons you have to learn just by partnering with people and doing that. And then it's passive to you, but you're really working with people that know what they're doing on every level, and you don't have to figure out something. You don't need to know. You're not calling up the tenant, like, where's my rent this month? It's a little bit late, and so you just get to blow right past that. So it kind of feels easy, right?
Flint Jamison
Yeah. And I think that you hit on a good point there because I think most people want to get into real estate because they realize there's some benefit, whether they realize all the benefits or not, they just know that real estate is a good thing and they choose not to get into it because they know that having to go find a place to buy it, put a bunch of money into it and then manage it, even managing the property manager, it's a boatload of work. And, yeah, the syndication side, it's wonderful. If you just want to be truly passive and get all the benefits of owning real estate, you can just find a good operator. There's a little bit of work there, but it's far less than the other side.
Mike Swenson
And to your point, you had mentioned your job was super stressful and super difficult. And so for people that maybe are higher income earners, they probably have a certain level of responsibility and stress to be able to earn the income that they're earning. So it's like to deal with all that in your day job and then have to go through something in your night job, right, of trying to build wealth. That's tough. So you should have something where you can kind of push the easy button a little bit and not have to have that. Also drain you emotionally on nights and weekends as kind of your side hustle, right as you're getting started.
Flint Jamison
I remember I was working my day job and I had customers in for a three day meeting. We were doing some massive review, and in the middle of that, I get a call from my property manager on the duplex, and a tree had been blown down, and luckily it didn't hit the house, but it took out the fence. So everything's fine and safe. But I was like, I had a property manager in place and they could make the calls, but it was still me having to get in the middle and make some decisions. And it had questions for me, and it's just like, gosh, I don't need this right now.
Mike Swenson
So how did you get exposed to syndications then? How did that journey start for you?
Flint Jamison
To be honest, it was just podcasts. I got into real estate because I walking my dog every day. It's been a blessing because I have to take them for a walk. It's good for my health probably too, even though I work out aside from that. But just to learn stuff, I just constantly am digestion podcasts or audiobooks while walking my dog. And then that's how I got into real estate. And then from there I realized, oh, this isn't good enough. And I heard a syndication podcast and I was like, oh, that sounds like the right thing, and started digesting that too.
Mike Swenson
In terms of kind of getting started. Then I assume you started out as a limited partner on deals.
Flint Jamison
I did. I invested into two deals as an LP before I became a GP. And then since then I've done a couple more lp positions because with retirement funds. So for those out there who don't know this, you can invest into real estate with your retirement money using what's called a self directed IRA. So you can roll your old 401K or your current IRAs over to self directed IRA and put them in. And as a GP, we aren't allowed to use our retirement money in our own deals. I won't get into the rules behind it, but there's a bunch of rules, so it's easier for me to invest my retirement money into. Really, it's my friends deals at this point. I have so many friends that I trust as operators, and when I have some money available and they have a deal, I'll throw them money so they can make me money.
Mike Swenson
So talk a little bit about for people that it's like, wait a second, I can kind of hit the passive button here, put my money into other people's deals. What's important when finding these people? If there's a lot of people out there doing it, how should I make a decision on who I kind of want to work with?
Flint Jamison
Gosh, there's so many things I have a checklist of. I have 100 point checklist when I do due diligence, and a lot of those checkboxes are the operator. I think the operator is the most important person to vet. I mean, the deal comes secondary because a strong operator can make a good deal, survive or succeed. Poor operators doesn't matter how good the deal is. A poor operator can fail or is more likely to fail. So getting into that, there are simple things you can do, like just background checks or what's their track record? When you ask them a bunch of questions, really understand how they answer things. This isn't just about did they give me a very surface level answer, or did it sound like they truly knew what they were talking about and does their character sound good? Did it sound like they were just trying to blow you off? You want to get that character sense because someone who's likely to try to be fraudulent or is an operator that is not very confident you're going to get that in how they answer, not necessarily in what they're saying. So pay close attention there. There's a whole bunch of other things you can go through, but I think that character is one of the top things. And then track record really helps.
Mike Swenson
So for your first couple of LP deals, share about them, where are they at? Because people also want to know, where do I invest, what states, what's going to be helpful for me, what types of returns help? Kind of walk through that with your just starting out becoming an LP type.
Flint Jamison
Hat in pursuit of me becoming an active syndicator on the GP side, I had paid for column, a guru, someone with an educational course. I paid for that. And ultimately through that I ended up investing into two deals. This was right in the middle of COVID in 2020. They went most of 2020 without a deal. Then they had these two back to back deals. I invested in those because I know, liked and trusted them. Now I'm going to throw words of caution here because the gurus are having challenges. They've been around for a while, they've been in the up cycle on the market. It's easier to succeed when you have the wind at your back. What I did notice though, on the first deal I invested in, as the interest rates started climbing, the properties started not succeeding. Because of the bridge debt and the interest rates, they managed to offload one, which is good. So I went full cycle in two years on the first deal and I got about odly enough it became to be about a 15% IRR, so totally nailed that, but only for two years. The second one, they had to quickly Refi, so they saved themselves. Now the point I want to make here, this particular guru in their courses was teaching in the underwriting. You put in a cash out Refi after two or three years, depending on how long you think it'll take you to renovate. You should never ever put a cash out refi in the underwriting and give potential guarantees or projected, sorry, not guarantees, projected returns on the investor deck. Your deal has to survive without a cash out refi in the middle because it will bloat your returns. If reality happens and you do cash out Refi, it's cherry on the cake and everyone can celebrate. But if the returns are not good without that cash out Refi, stay far away from the deal. And that's what this guru did. They taught it, and they did it, and I experienced it. So back to the two years. Interest rate was skyrocketing. We were about ready to just do a cash out Refi, but interest rates climbed. The assumptions on that cash out Refi were way off compared to two years prior. So right there, the assumptions were blown up, and a deal no longer worked. Luckily, they were savvy enough to make a quick change and do what they needed to save the properties and save our money. So there's some good to that. But I think a lot of people have learned now, hindsight being 2020, for investors coming in, you will see who have survived the storm or who have suffered greatly through the storm.
Mike Swenson
I've given this a lot of thought, too. Even if you didn't make any money and you got your money back, rewind to what if I tried to do this myself, because I get asked this about kind of, like, worst case scenarios, and so we kind of talk about investing in real estate versus investing in a stock market, and I had somebody that I'd interviewed that had lost everything because they had invested in a speculative stock, and it tanked. Well, that could happen. But in real estate, you have a couple of levers that you can pull if things happen. But even if you just got your money back, what would it have looked like if you tried to do it all by yourself? So go back to that first duplex or something like that. You could screw it up yourself. And so I think giving some of the syndicators some credit, too, like, we're human beings. It's a fluid market. Things change. And go back to. I could have done it all by myself, learned everything myself, dealt with the property manager, dealt with the tenants myself, and still lost money, too. And so I think, obviously, we want to project. We're going to make money on this, but go back to if I wasn't completely passive and doing it all myself all the time, it would take, and I still could lose money myself as well.
Flint Jamison
Yeah, absolutely. And, hell, I like to tell this story, too. The people that are in the stock market in December of 2021, that was the prior all time high. And after that, the stock market dipped. It tanked. I don't know how far it went down. I wasn't paying that close attention to it. And then it started climbing back up, and by January 24. So two years later, we get a one penny higher, and all of a sudden, the news goes off crazy. We're at an all time high. Like, yeah, well, not only did you lose money in between, you finally climbed back to where you were two years ago. Plus inflation was an all time high, plus you were paying fees to your brokerage no matter what. So technically, you aren't recovered yet. You're going to have to climb a lot more before you actually recover where you were two years ago, in real estate. Most of my assets, or all of my assets, they were floating through there. We're still making money. There's still cash flow, even if we're not distributing because high interest rates, the properties are still surviving, they're still appreciating, and then when the economy recovers, it's still there. So there was no technical loss at all?
Mike Swenson
Yeah, there's lots of other benefits between the income, the tax benefits, things like cost segregation studies. So there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of hedge your bet and minimize things versus comparing that to the stock market. So talk a little bit about kind of becoming a general partner, what that was like, and kind of that first deal for you.
Flint Jamison
Yeah, well, the first deal I crashed and burned on, I lost my own money on that one. No investors were harmed. The second deal I got. So this is where I, making a long story short, I serendipitously found myself as a capital raiser. For the most part, it allowed me to be remote. A lot of the other positions, you need to be boots on the ground, or you need to be continually traveling to the place where it makes sense to buy. And where I was living didn't really make sense to buy, or there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity. Cost per door was too high. So I started partnering with experienced operators, and what I found was my friends, family, and investors loved to invest in these operators who had a track record, who had all the right systems in place. It was more comfortable investment for them. And on top of that, I was able to start working with other operators around the countries for different asset classes, diversify in different locations and cities. All of a sudden, it just became a really great thing for the investors. So rather than to just work with a sole operator who might only work in one city, they were able to diversify. And now I'm able to do build to rent developments. I'll probably do some self storage, so I can really bring a multitude of asset classes.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, talk about that. Because on your side, as a capital raiser, get to benefit from the best of both worlds as well, because you don't have to learn how to do build to rent yourself. You don't have to learn how to do self storage yourself. You're just leveraging the relationships that you get. And it kind of comes back to this idea of, like, it feels too easy and yet at the same time, it's strength through the relationships that you build.
Flint Jamison
It has been years in the making, lots of conferences, lots of sitting down with people. New investors will come to me and they're like, Flint, have you ever worked with these people before? And I'll say, no, but I've known them for a year and a half, or I've watched them for a year and a half, and we've known each other for a while and it's a time thing. And after a while, these relationships grow and an opportunity finally comes my way and randomly I'll get invited to, hey, Flint, you want to invest in Columbus, Ohio? And it was totally not even on my radar, but they needed some capital. And I was like, yeah, man, you guys are strong operators. I'd love to work with you.
Mike Swenson
So talk about that relationship piece, because it's a hard thing to define when you just say, build relationships with, like, how do you go about doing this? So if I'm somebody that's new and it's like, the syndication thing sounds cool, Flint sounds pretty cool. I actually know somebody that does. Like, how do you kind of navigate the relationship building piece?
Flint Jamison
I don't think there's a science behind it. I mean, it's like building friends. Some people you don't want to be friends with, other people you totally want to hang out with. But in this, you get a little bit more of a professional sense about it, too. If you like them as a person, you like their character, and you get a sense of how much grit and how much effort they put into their job, how much they care. I think that goes a long way.
Mike Swenson
So talk about the future here. What's some of the stuff that you're working on? You'd kind of mentioned build the rent, self storage, kind of going back to the Flint that just started with syndication. And where you're at today, talk about kind of how maybe you've changed a little bit.
Flint Jamison
Oh man, so much this would turn into an hour long episode. I think what's crazy is because I'm an engineer, naturally skeptical, analysis paralysis. I think it's been ingrained in me through my life, especially working in aerospace. One thing I realized is I could have taken action much sooner. I'm never going to be the expert in anything and I'm never going to know everything. So I need to just start taking action. You do need to learn how to take those risks and being okay taking risks and some first steps don't feel scary, but they're no risk. Just pick up a book and start reading it. Take your first step, there's no risk. After a while you get a little riskier, but at least you're gaining confidence. So in that, by the time I got into my first deal and capital raise, partnered on a deal within two months. And I would have never said this prior to after the first deal, I got into a fund of fund, I was managing my own fund of fund. I brought some other partners in with me and we partnered on it big. I think it ended up being 700 units, no, 500 units over three properties in three different cities, two states. And that was my second deal was a fund of fund portfolio thing. And if you had asked me that two months prior, I'm like, no way am I able to do a fund of fund that's like advanced, right? Limiting beliefs. So get rid of those limiting beliefs. It happened. I had mentors in the process. They're like, yeah, you could do this, it's not that bad. And so I took the leap. I did it. Now I'm doing Build to rent. I'm doing one thing that it's going to be a one off build to rent. It's a ten Year deal. We're taking the law of compounding returns into a development deal, because we can develop within around two years and then we sell. And the target is every time we develop a piece of property, we're doubling the investor money, but we don't give them their money back. We take that two X money and put it in another property and double it again. So then it's four X. Continue, continue. We do five cycles of those. And if you do two times two times two to the fifth, it's 32 X, which is mind blowing because in ten years we could potentially, we're targeting a 32 x your money. We have totally taken a different business model approach to not only your standard syndication of a five year value add, this is a ten year development with ten cycles of development in between or five cycles of development. We're raising $35 million for this fund and we're already somewhere between 25 to 28 million raised. A lot of excitement. I'm not a developer. I'm partnering with these guys who are super experienced in it. And my investors get to join me if they want.
Mike Swenson
It's so cool because going back to the beginning here you're a guy that worked at Boeing, and here you are now talking about this ten year 32 x opportunity on a build to rent development. And it took a few years to get there, but the thing that I always encourage people with is like, you don't have to be there yet. You're not going to find the 32 x development opportunity. The first thing you do in real estate. But then it comes back to the relationship side, right? The more you talk to people, the more you connect, the more you build those relationships, you'll find better deals. And so the deal that you invest in for your first deal might not be the best deal, but it's the learning and the growth that happens that gets you to that 32 x deal. And it takes time to get there in the relationship. Navigation to get there part of that.
Flint Jamison
And that relationship was born out of me getting invited to speak at a conference. And I was just standing out in the hallway amongst all the people who had booths. And I just started hanging out with one of the guys at the booth. He was a marketer and we were just hanging out, drinking the free beer that was coming out at the end of the day. And sure enough, we had a conversation after that. I was talking to him about his marketing thing, and then he's like, hey, Flint, do you do build to rent? Odly enough, I was already doing built to rent on something prior. So this whole thing was just serendipitous. It was being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right person, and all of a sudden, here I am on a 32 x deal doing built to rent. So you just got to be there. Luck is, what is it, the cross between skills and opportunity or something like that. I was ready, and I got in the right place at the right time.
Mike Swenson
Out of curiosity, like, for a ten year project like that, or some of the ones that have kind of gone full cycle for you, how do you handle questions from investors about things not going according to plan? Like you're trying to say, here's what happens year one, and here's what's going to happen year five. But obviously, nothing ever happens according to the spreadsheet. How do you kind of talk through people that have those questions when things come off track and still show them, like, your money is? We're in good hands. Here's how we try to correct this and move forward.
Flint Jamison
To be honest, you had a great point vetting an operator. Ask them what the worst thing that has happened to them was. And every person, there's only one person I've met that has had no wild stories, and he owned, like, three single family homes in a really nice neighborhood. Other than that, everyone has a wild story, including myself. Always ask those questions, because you will learn a lot about the person, because they will tell you what happened and how they recovered. For me, my first indication, I told you I lost money. It was earnest money. We tried to make the deal happen, and we had to back out before we closed. And any investor money that we had raised, we gave back. I learned a lot in that process. And prior to that, my duplex, actually, I had a lady who was doing arbitrage in my duplex, and she was running a geriatrics Alzheimer's care through the duplex that she was renting from me, which was a break of contract for one, but two, it really increased my risk. Imagine if one of those Alzheimer's patients tripped and fell and something really bad happened. I would have been liable as the landlord. So there's always lessons learned. It's good when you talk to someone who has that humility to tell you what happened and how they got past it. Or maybe it was truly a failure, like mine. I truly lost my own money. No investors were harmed.
Mike Swenson
And yet, at the same time, I heard somebody that talks about chalking that up to an education expense, right? Like, I could have gone to college, go to school for four years. I'm going to spend a bunch of money that's going to help me make more money in the future. That's exactly what this is like. You just spent money on the school of hard knocks 101.
Flint Jamison
School of hard knocks. That's exactly what it was.
Mike Swenson
But now it's going to help me for the next deal, which will help you make more money in the future.
Flint Jamison
Yeah, that's the other thing is I didn't quit. The other partners in that deal all just quit and walked away. I didn't let it stop me. I chalked it up to, well, that sucks. I learned a lot more and I'm not going to make those mistakes. And everything we do, I mean, even people that have been in it for 20 years, they'll get surprised that fire will happen in a unit and they'll have to deal with it for the first time. Whereas a first year person might be dealing with a fire for their first time, too. Just events happen and you just got to be able to get through it. So does the operator have grit and the willpower to fight whatever surprises come?
Mike Swenson
Absolutely. For people that want to reach out and talk more about your battle scars from the past and hear more about what you're doing now, how can they do so?
Flint Jamison
Yeah, if you want my 100 point checklist, I'll give you that. So my company is called Vestus Capital, but a lot of people screw up the spelling on it. So just go to investwithFlint.com. It'll take you right there. You can contact me from there and actually reach out. I don't actually have that 100 point checklist available on the website, so just reach out and I can get it to you.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you so much, Flint, for coming on and sharing. It was great to hear the stories and best of luck as you proceed with your new build to rent opportunity that sounds greater.
