I attended the Joe Fairless’ Best Ever Real Estate Meetup where the speaker was John Casmon. He discussed what he learned while scaling from 13 units 4 years ago to 918 units today. For those of you playing along at home, that is a 7,000% increase in 4 short years. Quite the extraordinary pace.
In 2009 he was working for GM and saw them go into bankruptcy. Watching his coworkers with more experience and seniority lose their job, he realized that his safe secure job provided him less security than he imagined.
John Casmon deploys the investment technique of real estate syndication with his company Casmon Capital Group. He also hosts a podcast titled Target Market Insights.
The three Pillars of real estate investing:
- Deals
- Capital
- Execution
The Four C’s of Trust
- Credibility – Know your stuff, but be relatable
- Confidence – Confidence without credibility is just cockiness.
- Connections – If you do not currently have enough connections for this business, start attending meetups and getting out there
- Care – People do business with people they know like and trust. Unless they know you care about them it will be hard to grow
It is easy to get over invested in MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) information. For instance you could fall in love with the population growth of an area, but that information is already priced into the assets, so maybe it doesn’t provide an edge over any other MSA.
Two Main Verticals of His Business
- Investing in assets to operate first hand. Focusing on local apartment communities within 2 hours of Cincinnati
- Pooling resources to invest in other high quality operators in great MSA’s
The Difference Between Buy and Hold and Syndication
Buy and Hold: Values property for how they are operating today
Syndication: Values property based on what the exit will be
But I Don’t Want to Ask for Money
The key takeaway here is in syndication, you are not asking for money, you are providing an investment opportunity. Do not hinge your outcome based off of the feedback of one investor. If the opportunity is not right for a specific investor, it could still be right for others.
How to Systematically Grow a Business
- Identify obstacles one by one
- Devote your resources to solving that one obstacle
- Repeat
John was able to grow his business at a rapid pace, because he identified the core problem of growth to be capital constriction. He then set out to solve that problem and build a network of capital partners. Hopefully this inspires you to grow your own business!
