Veena Jetti - $1 Billion In Real Estate
Veena is the founding partner in Vive Funds, a commercial real estate firm specializing in conservative opportunities for investors. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a degree in Finance, Veena pursued her passion in real estate. She now has over a decade in the industry, and has over $1 Billion in multi-family transactions in her own portfolio. She also leads a Facebook Community called Mastering Multifamily with Veena Jetti, and is the founder of MultiFi, a community of like-minded investors. In 2017, she was one of only 3 women to receive the Politico Woman of the Year award for the time & focus she spent on aiding a grassroots Hurricane Harvey disaster response.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Learn how to attract capital effectively for your real estate investments and build a solid financial future.
- Discover the secrets to successfully transitioning from single-family to multifamily real estate, unlocking new opportunities for growth.
- Find out how to identify and capitalize on profitable real estate markets, maximizing your investment potential.
- Master the art of multifamily real estate investing and take your investment portfolio to the next level.
- Uncover the strategies for achieving financial freedom through real estate, unlocking the key to long-term wealth and success.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - The Importance of Raising Capital
00:01:40 - Veena's Real Estate Journey
00:05:04 - Starting Small and Scaling Up
00:10:23 - Mitigating Risks in Real Estate
00:12:56 - The Importance of Raising Capital
00:13:21 - Overcoming Financial Challenges
00:17:03 - Building Investor Relationships
00:18:25 - Selecting Target Markets
00:25:29 - Generating Deal Flow
00:30:27 - Connect with Veena
Follow Veena 👇
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJihGnXYKS8d7Wkl6WYT-dw
https://www.instagram.com/veenajetti
SUBSCRIBE IF YOU'RE LOOKING TO BUILD WEALTH THROUGH OPPORTUNITIES IN THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY
✅ http://relfreedom.tv
GET STARTED INVESTING TODAY AND ACCESS OUR DEAL LIST!
📈 http://investwithelite.com
PARTNER WITH US ON BIG DEALS!
💵 https://eliteadvantagepropertieshq.com
BUILD YOUR REAL ESTATE AGENT CAREER WORKING WITH INVESTORS
👨👩👧👦 http://eliteadvantageagent.com
LEARN ABOUT REL FREEDOM & HEAR MORE REAL LIFE STORIES
🎙️ http://www.relfreedom.com
FREEBIES: DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE FREEDOM FOUNDATION BLUEPRINT
💵 https://www.relfreedom.com/blueprint
LOOKING FOR A REAL ESTATE AGENT ANYWHERE IN THE US? FIND A TOP AGENT IN YOUR COMMUNITY
🏠 http://www.eliteagentreferral.com
JOIN OUR FACEBOOK COMMUNITY
👨👩👧👦 https://www.facebook.com/groups/relfreedom
SUBSCRIBE TO THE REL FREEDOM PODCAST
🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rel-freedom-podcast/id1535281574
🎧 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xNDA3NjIyLnJzcw==
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5nXA5hLHbDzRwxypc2wLur
LET'S CONNECT
👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mswenson13
👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getrelfreedom/
👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@relfreedom
🏠 Minnesota Real Estate: https://www.eliteadvantageteam.com
Veena Jetti
I think that raising capital is probably the single most useful skill that anybody can learn. I'm not talking about just real estate, because every business, real estate or not, eventually will need to know how to raise capital if they want to get to scale. That's not everybody's goal, and that's totally fine.
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the REL Freedom show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities and 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 leverage Freedom, where we talk about building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. If you want to get started on your real estate investing journey, if you want to learn more about getting into real estate, check out our website, freedomthroughrealestate.com. articles, videos, great content like these interviews to be able to hopefully inspire you to find a path that's a good fit for you today. I'm super excited about our guest. We've got Veena Jetti on here. She is the founding partner of Vive funds. Just a really great story of getting into real estate. You're doing a lot of great things. A billion dollars in multifamily transactions. And we can talk about more, your niche, why you chose where you did. You teach a lot about helping people to raise funds for real estate. So excited to be able to kind of take this conversation wherever it goes. But Veena, thank you so much for coming on.
Veena Jetti
Thanks for having me, Mike. I'm so excited to chat today.
Mike Swenson
Well, why don't you just start, share a little bit about your background, kind of why real estate? Getting into real estate, and we'll go from there.
Veena Jetti
Yeah. So, you know, like you said, I've bought and sold over a billion dollars of multifamily assets in my own portfolio. I did not start there, though. My portfolio started where everyone else's does. I started at zero. Now, I did have a little bit of a shortcut, which is I come from a real estate family. My mom is actually a very successful single family investor, but she didn't know how to buy multifamily or really that you could buy multifamily. It wasn't until I was in my mid twenties that I learned that people that weren't Jeff Bezos and Oprah could own real estate at this magnitude and this scale. I thought multifamily was for billionaires. Now, I lived in many apartment complexes, but I never dreamed of owning one. And so back in 2012, I left my corporate career. I was in commercial real estate working at some of the largest firms that had multiple billions of dollars at that time of AUM and ended up leaving because, well, truth be told, I paid taxes as a high income w two earner married to another high income w earner. So we got married in 2012, and that was the first time we paid taxes as two w two earners. And it was not. We paid like, it was almost like $200,000 just in taxes. And I remember being so shocked that, you know, I called my mom to ask her, like, what? What do we do about this? She's like, quit your job, start investing in real estate, become a full time real estate professional. And, you know, so I was like, you want me to quit my stable company, like, this job that is a multibillion dollar company? You want me to quit that and just go see what happens? And actually, but thankfully, I was, like, in my early twenties, so my frontal lobe wasn't fully developed. I don't know, my risk assessment was up. But I took that leap of faith and started buying single family homes. Great. But you cannot get to scale with single family homes. There was a week where I bought five houses in one week. I put them all under contract in one week. And I was like, oh, my gosh. Even if I find five houses every week that are amazing by, I'm never going to get to 10,000 doors or 5000 doors. I'm never going to have economies of scale, and I'm going to be stuck doing the thing I hate, which is managing the asset. I want to asset manage. I don't want to property manage. And when you get into the multifamily space, that's where you really start to see economies of scale benefiting your portfolio. So that's where I started, obviously. Started out buying one deal, was terrified, cried myself to sleep night after night after night. Ended up being successful at that. And once I got bit by the bug, I just never really looked back. And now we're buying another asset under contract right now on another asset. Um, we'll close out in the next couple of weeks here and then on the next one.
Mike Swenson
And I think for a lot of people to realize, yes, you were exposed to it before you did it. Um, but at the same time, you, you start small and you grow bigger, you learn lessons and you learn how to scale those lessons. And so for people listening to this, like, yeah, you can, you, you have to start somewhere and then you can grow and scale from there. So talk about those first couple what were you looking for for properties? Like in terms of a buy box or how did you find those initial couple?
Veena Jetti
Yeah. So on single family, quite frankly, I don't even know if I had a buy box. I really jumped into it, not knowing or understanding the fundamentals of numbers. It was more, and this is back in 2012 when I bought my first rental. So it was like, can I afford the down payment? Right? Because at that time, I didn't know about raising capital. So can I afford the down payment? Am I bankable? So will the bank even give me a loan for it? And how much will rehab cost be? And if I can buy it at the right price plus my rehab cost, it was like a back of the envelope calculation, which, quite frankly, in single family, you can make a lot of those calculations and still be somewhat okay if you're making good predictions out of the gate. And then I had, like, a general idea of what I could rent it for just based on, like, zillow or Redfin. It wasn't anything fancy. There was no spreadsheet. You know, I'm, like, embarrassed to admit that now because I just know so much more and have so much better at what I do. But that's how I started. I started with literally, like, I would take, like, a piece of paper and I would write it down on there, and I'd be like, yeah, okay, this seems like a good buy. Let's go buy it. And so that's how I bought a lot of my single families.
Mike Swenson
Jeff, that's probably for the person listening to this. Like, that's probably how they start, too, right? And so I think seeing your path, that's where you started. And that's okay, because you're going to learn and build and grow. And I know when I show a, you know, like, a deal calculator, spreadsheet to people, their eyes kind of glaze over, but it's like, well, you know, what could I charge for rent? And here's my expenses. You can. You can do that on a five line spreadsheet or on the back of an envelope, too. And that's the basic math. And then as you grow and scale, the numbers just get a little bit bigger, and you have to be comfortable with the risk. But it's okay to start there. That's what people need to hear.
Veena Jetti
Oh, 100%. I mean, look, if I had listened to this podcast when I first started, I might have made different decisions. I just really didn't know. I didn't have exposure. And I'll say this, too, for anyone that's starting out and thinking like, oh, where do I start? Why would I do this? Or I don't know what I'm doing. Look, I didn't know what I was doing either. And that I say that as somebody who comes from a real estate family. So I had a little bit of an edge in the sense that I could call my mom to learn about this tax code that I didn't know I was able to. I could understand, like, what escrow and closing was because I had been to it with my parents. I'd walked through a property, but I didn't have any formal training on real estate specifically, even with my degree being in finance. There was so much of this that I didn't learn at school. I learned this from experience and from taking action and from being around people that were more experienced than I was. And back then, podcasts were not really a thing. Like, they weren't everywhere and readily accessible, and there wasn't education that's available today. If I could do it today, I would have made way different decisions, because there's so many free platforms and places where you can get really great information. So that's how I started. Now, obviously, we have more formalized systems. So when I started buying multifamily, I didn't even know what I was targeting. I knew I wanted class B. I thought maybe Dallas was good, because I live in Dallas, and Dallas has been the hottest market in the country for basically since I started about a decade ago. Started looking for opportunities, just networking, trying to learn as much as I could. But what really changed the game for me was having a partner, and he's still a friend of mine to this day. We invest in each other's deals. They probably have about maybe two and a half, $3 billion aum at the moment, so they're pretty well known. Operator. But it was one of his first deals, too, and so called me up and said, you know, Vina, let's do this deal together. And I said, okay, what's the worst that could happen? The worst that could have happened, by the way, was we could have lost $16 million, my first try out of the gate, because that's how much that asset cost. Now, hindsight's really easy to see that it was a great deal, because three years later, we sold it for about 25 million, just under 25 million. So made our investors a lot of money, but that was really the catalyst, I'll say. The first deal is always the hardest deal. Always the hardest.
Mike Swenson
I remember answering questions from investors, and I do this on a smaller scale. But they're asking like, well, what's the worst that can happen? And it's like, well, if nobody pays rent or something completely tragic happens. Yeah, you lose all your money. The likelihood of that happening very, very small. And there's still going to be some tenants that pay rent, right. If occupancy goes down, there's still some tenants, there's still some value there. And I think I, there's so many benefits to investing in real estate. And that's what people need to understand is, you know, if I invest in other mediums, okay, great. But in real estate, there's lots of these little buckets where you can win, right, in terms of cash flow appreciation, the tax benefits, there's all these little buckets in your favor. And so even if something bad happened, there's still smaller wins that could happen and you probably wouldn't lose everything.
Veena Jetti
Yeah. You know, this was many years ago. I would say the risk of losing capital was fairly low because we were just in such a massive bull run in the market. Now, by contrast, today I have a lot of investors that are coming to me saying like, oh, I invested with this other sponsor and I lost all my money. And I'm like, but this is a very unique time in the industry right now. We're seeing cap rates expanding. We're seeing interest rates higher than they've ever been. We're seeing a lot of adjustable rate debt either coming due or having adjusted without a rate cap or rate cap expiration. So there, this is almost like a perfect storm, what's happening now. But I do think to your point, it's important when investors are asking about the risk that we as sponsors and operators, we're transparent and we are clear and we understand, because if we don't understand the risk ourselves, then were putting our investors into a dangerous position. But youre absolutely right. Theres so many ways to mitigate all of those risks that exist that it doesnt happen in a vacuum where a single family really is a lot more challenging. And I see it as more risky because, for example, if I have a tenant in one of my units and then all of a sudden they move out of that single family home, my vacancy is now gone from 100% or my, from 0% to 100%, right. My occupancy has dropped from 100% to zero. And that's a massive risk. Whereas the, like you said, the odds of like a hundred unit multifamily being vacant overnight probably not going to happen. Now, there are instances where it could, right? Like eminent domain. There's some kind of a natural disaster, like a flood or a fire or tornado or whatever. But like, the odds of that happening are significantly lower than someone deciding to move out of a single family home.
Veena Jetti
Yeah. So I think that raising capital is probably the single most useful skill that anybody can learn. I'm not talking about just real estate, because every business, real estate or not, eventually will need to know how to raise capital if they want to get to scale. That's not everybody's goal, and that's totally fine. Like, your goal might be just to have ten doors and call it a day and live a good life, and you'll live a great life off that, so. And quite frankly, owning ten doors, even owning one door, is more than most Americans can say. So I think, first of all, it's important not to diminish and undervalue accomplishments and to recognize that people have different goals. For me, I mean, really, I hated managing tenants. I wasn't good at it. I'm actually really not a profitable single family home landlord because I'm a bleeding heart. So I would have tenants go, oh, Miss Vina, I know rents do, but I had to buy diapers for my baby. And I'm like, next month. And that's not a profitable business model, right? So you can't do that when you have investors in the deal, because there's a profit motive that they're investing with you to make money, not to be a nonprofit. And when I wanted to get to a point where I didn't have to be the one managing when I wanted to do that, I knew I needed more doors. And the only way I could see getting to that scale in a reasonable time frame where I wouldn't have to be managing, like, 30, 40, 50 doors before that was by going into the multifamily space. Now, in order to buy a $16 million asset, I didn't have money. I, like, I had a couple hundred thousand, but that was, like, all of our liquidity back at that time. And I put it into the deal. Like, we invested into the deal. We put earnest money down. So we had risk in the game. There was absolutely no doubt about it. We had skin in the game. But I didn't have enough to close the deal on my own. And we had to raise, it was like a couple million dollars. I was responsible for 1.2 million of it. And I was really scared because I didn't think I was going to be able to do it. And, I mean, I was right. It was really hard. Like, there were many, many nights I cried myself to sleep thinking I put my family into financial ruin, thinking that I had completely just destroyed everything that my family, we worked to build. My husband, I had worked to build till that moment. And it was a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of hard work, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into that deal. But once you do it once and you start establishing your relationship, it's a relationship game. And that's something I've always been good at. I just was so scared, and I was operating from a place of scarcity, not from a place of abundance, and it showed, and that made it significantly more difficult. By contrast, you know, last year, we closed and a deal where we had to raise $66 million in eight weeks. And so over the course of a decade, to go from crying over raising 1.2 million to being able to successfully raise and close out a deal that required 66 million, it shows you that. And I wouldn't have believed that I could have done that. If you told me, even at the heels of my very first deal, that I would one day do that. I'd be like, you are insane. I barely made it through 1.2 million. What are you talking about? And this is part of like human psychology. Right? Like people really overestimate what they can achieve in a year, but significantly underestimate what they can achieve in ten years. And I definitely fall into that category, too.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. And like you said, it's relationships. What I found in my conversations talking with investors is especially people outside of real estate.
Veena Jetti
Right.
Mike Swenson
Like they want to invest in real estate. You know, I remember being an agent and recruiting, you know, finding, trying to grow the team. And you can talk to anybody about real estate because they're always like, oh, I thought about getting into real estate or, oh, I wanted to do real estate. It's not like we're doing something super obscure that nobody's ever thought of. Real estate has enough of a vibe there, right. And so people want to invest in real estate or have thought about it, they just don't know how. And they're looking for people that know what to do, can find good deals and can, they can place their money and feel good about doing that because most people don't want to have to figure it all out on their own to learn the market, pick the properties and do all that. They just want to know their money's in a good spot and they want to work with people that they can trust that can place it in a good spot.
Veena Jetti
Absolutely.
Mike Swenson
And like you said, you know, sometimes there's fluctuations in the market, investors are going to be more conservative, they might pull back, especially with the interest rates, especially with all these loans coming due. But long term real estate tends to win up.
Veena Jetti
I agree. I mean, and real estate is just a core asset class. If you look at the wealthiest people or households in this country, most of them own real estate in some form or fashion in their portfolio.
Mike Swenson
Trey, talk a little bit about picking your market. I know you mentioned you happen to live in a good opportunity zone where theres lots of great stuff, but how do you identify markets that are a good fit for your investors? Because you may find something that you would love to invest in, but an investor might say pass. Right. So you've got to find that mix of what's something that an investor is going to say yes to and finding something that's a good fit for that.
Veena Jetti
Yeah. So I'll tell you what we do and then I'll tell you what I think new investors should do because it's not always going to be the same. Right. So for us, we have a target in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Arizona. The only state that I just named that I don't currently have assets in is. Well, we just sold an asset, our last asset in Florida, and I don't have anything in South Carolina, but every other state that I named, we own. Currently we target class b value add. But now we've actually started shifting a little bit more conservatively to core plus. So we're buying slightly nicer assets. We're buying in a locations, like b plus assets, a locations. So we're kind of like whatever that next tier, you would say from an a class asset would be. So, like b plus. Um, now, with that being said, these are markets that we have studied for years and years and years, and we have a lot of data points around them. We have a lot of underwriting and deals that we didn't win, that we've looked at the numbers so we can see patterns and we can understand what these markets are going to do. Now, the question is, will your investors believe in those markets the same way that you do? Because this is really an educational hurdle. It's the same reason why we were one of the first to move prep down from 9% to 8%, and then we made that move from 8% to seven, and then we made the move from seven to six. And everyone always thought we were crazy. But the way to do this, and this is what every new investor has to do, and every season, investors should do. Talk to your investors. This is how you know what you can reasonably look at or not look at, and we can reasonably pay or not pay. So I know the appetite my investors have. I know that they're at maybe 510 years ago, they wanted a double of their money. In five years, they wanted a two x equity multiple. In today's market, if my investor tells me that they want a two x equity multiple poll, I will say, I so appreciate that. But the product that we target is not going to deliver a two x on any kind of underwriting that I'm going to feel comfortable making assumptions. So you need to go find an operator that's doing, like, new Dev or that's doing class D or class C or our opportunistic investors, we're the investor that's, like, super boring, really vanilla. Like, watching paint dry is more fun than doing deals that we do. We want it that way. That's our investor database. So if you're new, start developing your investor avatars. So know and understand who your investor base is. Build that investor base up. But don't forget to be talking to your investors and educating them. Right. Like, they don't know and understand all of the things that are happening that are creating this, like, macro and microeconomics of the deal, because they're theoretically professionals in another field, right? Like they're doctors and lawyers and engineers and entrepreneurs. They don't look at deals the way we do. They're not consuming this kind of content. They're not staying up to date with the latest, because if they're doing that, they might as well do the deal themselves. They're relying on you to do that. So first and foremost, call your securities attorney. Without doubt, that's the first question that you should be asking is from your securities attorney. Like, can I go out and say this or do this or can I post this or whatever, right? Like, so first call your securities attorney. We work with Nick McGrew out of LA. His company's polymath legal, so he's a great place to start if you don't have one. I've been working with him for like 15 years now. After you call your securities attorney, start thinking about your investor avatar. Are your investors accredited? Are they unaccredited? Are they professionals? Are they in real estate? Are they family offices? Like, who are you speaking to? Right? And then ask them, hey, if I brought a deal that has a 12% IRR, is this something you would be interested in? Would you ever invest into a deal in Texas? Would you invest in Oklahoma? Find out and understand that's part of the relationship building process, to learn and understand what they're looking for, to see if it's a good fit. Because sometimes I'll have a Family office that says we will never invest more than $5 million, and we want control rights, and we want the ability to come in and take over day to day, and we need a two x equity multiple, and we want a 10% current prep. And I go, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And then I put them on my list, and I know that they're not my investor, at least not in this market. But when the market returns to what it was 510 years ago, sure, they're my investors. I'm sure at that point their criteria will change. But at least I know that right now that $5 million is not going to come in because I'm not going to give them major decision rights. I'm not going to be able to produce a two x return. And if I told them I could do that, it would be disingenuous. And so building those strong relationships where you can understand what your investors looking for is going to be crucial, I.
Mike Swenson
Imagine obviously, over time you guys have solidified and honed that in. I know maybe early on you feel like you're trying to bend to a bigger investor thinking like, oh, if I can get this deal, I can get this investor where now it's like, here's our path. And I think, too, educating people like, that's a natural progression, right? Like, you're going to feel that early on. Now you can say, hey, we've got a billion dollars of transactions that we've done. Here's why we do it this way. They're going to trust that experience where early on maybe you feel like, well, if so and so is going to come in, I got to find that thing that they're going to say yes to, and there's that tension there.
Veena Jetti
Yes. Early on, if I had an investor tell me they wanted a major decision rights for a $5 million check, I would have salivated at that. Now I'm like, I'd just rather raise the 5 million myself than have someone else controlling the deal because I also have to think about my other investors, too. Right? Like, if they invested with me, they didn't invest with this random person who's now controlling the deal. So I just, I like to be mindful of that. But yes, when you start out, like, I was desperate for money when I started, now we're a little bit more discerning. Like, I even, I have some investors that I just don't like working with, so we just don't work with them anymore. They're willing and they're ready to write checks, but I don't want the pressure, the headache, the hassle of having that investor in my deal talk a little.
Mike Swenson
Bit quick before we close. And obviously, I know each of these topics could be subtopics we talked for hours on. But finding the deals. Right. You've identified the markets you're in, obviously something like Florida or Texas, right. There's a lot of real estate there. There's a lot of opportunities there. Finding things within your buy box is another struggle. So talk about having somebody come to you saying, hey, I've got this deal. What advice can you give for folks about being able to, to turn on the deal flow a little bit to where deals come to you and how do you go find those opportunities?
Veena Jetti
Yeah. And this is something I learned the hard way, actually. So when I first started getting deal flow because I was making those relationships. So first of all, tell everybody what you're doing and what you're looking for, because when people see it or think they can help you they will help you. So that's number one. But when you do that, the challenge is people go, oh, she raises capital for her deal. She can come and partner with me on my deal. Or, oh, she has money, she'll invest in my deal. And they hear these big numbers, right? Like a billion dollars of transactions. That's not a billion dollars I have in my bank account. I far from it. In fact, I don't own that billion dollars of real estate. Own a very small piece of it. It's my. The bank and my investors that own most of it. So I think the challenge is when you first start telling people what you're doing and they start seeing or hearing about your success, then they start sending you everything. Like, just the other day, I got an email or an Instagram message, and someone's like, hey, I have an $18.3 million asset that you can buy. It's in, like, Maine, and it's an assisted living facility. And I go, okay, well, I appreciate you thinking of me and sending this to me. I only do one thing. Like, I don't know anything about anything unless you're asking me about multifamily. And even that, I only know about this very specific core and subset of the multifamily assets that we target. So, like, if you ask me about operating like a class D asset in LA, I don't know. Like, I can make some predictions and assumptions just from industry knowledge and expertise, but I don't know what that's like, as much as I know what it's like to own an asset in Atlanta. Right? Because I multiply assets there. I can talk to you about that, Mark. I can talk to you about what only those look like. So I think the first rule when you're trying to turn on deal flow is tell everyone what you're doing, followed by be very focused. Do not get shiny object syndrome. You will hear someone say, oh, I make a lot of money from land entitlement. And someone else will go, oh, I make money from being a hard money lender, or I make money from buying duplexes. You can make money in all these different ways. Anybody can be successful in any of these ways. But pick a lane and be an inch wide and a mile deep on that lane. Like, I always want to be the person that knows more about multifamily, class b, value add or core plus multifamily than any other sponsor in my MSA, right? So be focused. Say no to things, even if they're the deal of a century. And that was a hard skill for me to learn, and I'm still practicing it to this day where someone else had me a deal and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I can buy this for like 50% of value because it's upside down, it's distressed. The seller needs a quick exit, they're fire sailing. And I can't tell you the number of times I've been tempted by that. But I always come back to the core of, no, this is not what your investors trust you to do. This is an unknown. This is a risk you're taking on. Don't do it. So I'm very, very relentless about saying no to deals. Now, most of our deals come from brokers, so we buy a lot on market. Now, that's because of the size of deals we buy. We generally buy 200 plus units and we generally are buying like 75 million plus. So most of those are going to trade on market with a broker, or at least there's going to be a broker involved in some capacity. So having those relationships is really important, but also having a relationship just with other sponsors and operators. Because a lot of times when we sell a deal or we're getting ready to sell a deal, we'll go to our friend circle and be like, hey, we're getting ready to sell Main street. If anybody's interested, send over a CA or an NDA and I'll send you financials and you can have first crack at it. So really making those relationships, like going to conferences, building those relationships, knowing and understanding what the other person's buy box is and then telling people who like me, right. I get a lot of deals I'm never going to look at. And so now what I do is I take the ones that seem good or interesting and I go, oh, thank you so much. Let me share it with my community. And I share it with the community I have on Facebook because even though I'm not buying those, someone in there probably is. There's thousands and thousands of people. So that's kind of what I do to help with deal flow for other people. And people are willing to do this. They want to do deals, they want to work with you, they want to help you. So you have to kind of put it out there.
Mike Swenson
Thank you, Venus, so much. You could talk for hours. And I want to be respectful of your time, but at the same time, just love all the nuggets you've shared. Love you, sharing your story. And for people listening, you know, hopefully they can be inspired by what you're doing and find a similar path or, you know, realizing that, like you mentioned, you know, capital raising is such an important skill. I've learned so much more about that the last couple of years that, you know, worst case scenario, if something changes, you know, how to present something right, get people excited about it. And if it's not multifamily, it could be something else for people that want to, you know, reach out to you, learn more about you. How can they do that?
Veena Jetti
You can find me on all social media platforms. Veena Jetti. V e e n a j e t t I I respond the most on Instagram. And you can go to my free Facebook group. Mastering multifamily with Veena Jetti. It's pretty active community. And, you know, a lot of us hang out there. We do deals, we do a lot of meetups. We meet in person. So all that gets posted to my Instagram and my Facebook.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and excited to see where you continue to grow.
