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Value Add Podcast - From Zero to 9-Figure Portfolios! 🚀💎
Unlock the anatomy of success in real estate!
Welcome to Value Add Podcast - where we break down the ingredients needed to build real estate empires. This isn't just a podcast - it's your roadmap from scarcity mindset to abundance mindset!
🔥 What we do here:
• Unlock secrets of buying buildings with no money out of pocket
• Study the psychology of success and mental blocks
• Break down real cases from bankruptcy to financial freedom
• Learn to turn distressed assets into money-making machines
• Build passive income through value-add strategies
💰 Our guests are:
Former teachers who built 8-figure portfolios in 5 years
Young entrepreneurs running $100M+ portfolios by age 36
Artist-developers creating unique spaces that command premium rents
Investors who went from bankruptcy to luxury flipping
Mentors and coaches changing lives through real estate
Host: Rafik Moore - the guy who runs 5M+ sq ft of commercial real estate
🎯 For those who want to:
✅ Quit their salary job and jump into real estate
✅ Scale their business to the next level
✅ Invest in continuous growth and education
✅ Become a bankable asset for investors
✅ Build generational wealth
We believe: If you can find a deal that makes money - we'll find the capital! Because the hardest thing to find is the asset that generates profit, not the money.
Hit that subscribe button and start your journey to financial freedom right now!
Guys, I'm very excited to um do a podcast with one of our partners. Hassan Duri is uh our partner is a friend. Uh we have met I don't know five years ago now. We own multiple assets together and he's a friend and partner. I want to kind of share his journey and um I want him to give us feedback as to how and what we do as a company and how we can do better. But what I want to share here is um ultimately hero's journey from the beginning of our interaction partnership to now and uh what future looks like. So, um, uh, please welcome Hassan. Thank you very much. Good to see you. Yeah, thank you. Hassan and I met 5 years ago at one of the masterminds. There's not a lot of, uh, African African-Americans in commercial real estate. That's probably 1% or maybe 2%, right? And so, I naturally gravitate to my people because I realized that uh uh, and of course growing up in Soviet Union, I was just a normal guy. Coming here, they're like, "Oh, you're brown. This and that, the other." I was like, "Oh, okay. I guess I'm brown. I didn't know that I'm different color. Um there was no color back home. But anyhow, I work a lot with uh u immigrant communities, uh Latinos, I work with Africans, I work with uh Asians, I mean anybody. We are very international over here. But uh specifically with Hassan, what attracted me is his very cool uh demeanor, his highest level of integrity and discipline. And so um I don't know how we started working but uh why don't you refresh our memories how we our relationship started. So essentially I joined the that mastermind that you talked about and um everybody was telling me you need to meet this guy, you need to meet this guy and so um I met Rafi maybe in the fourth day or so and we instantly connected you know and he recognized I was Somali which was unique because most people don't right and um but he's he's familiar with didn't know Somalia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we instantly connected and he said look you should come to Minnesota at that time. I was actually living in Florida. Yeah. Tampa and um enjoying it too. Yeah, I was enjoying in Tampa and and um so that was how we initially connected and and and actually uh immediately afterwards I I was visiting in Minnesota and uh uh I just happened to call you and you invited me to your house and we went on a bike ride and he started telling me his values and just opening up his world to me and you know we instantly connected because we shared the values of integrity and uh many of the other things that you you you stand for and uh so th those were kind of our starting moments. So, uh, uh, you were sort of thinking about moving to Minnesota. Why did I invite you to Minnesota, by the way? Do you remember? You know, I think you mainly said, "Look, you know, there's huge opportunities here. You work with many people from my community and um, with my level of experience in this same industry that there's just a massive opportunity." So, that was your main reasoning. That's right. So, one of the very interesting things about uh Hassan is while I work with a lot of uh uh Somali tenants, we have um truck companies. Uh we have various various businesses, uh Somalian community is very entrepreneurial. There's everybody's an entrepreneur. They're all hustling, doing some deals. But Hassan is a different type of Somali. And this is what I learned. He was 8 years old when he came to United States. He was adopted by a uh how was how old was your host dad? Well, he was in the 60s. So 60-year-old bluecollar uh uh white collar white collar. Okay. So he was a white collar American uh uh gentleman and he basically raised Hassan as his own son. Correct. And I suspect a lot of values, a lot of like these Midwestern qualities you acquired from being exposed to him. So you have the combination. You got the culture down, but you also have very deep, salted earth qualities of a Midwestern guy. I agree. I definitely have a unique perspective, you know, and you don't see many uh people in in from my community in real estate. Um or recognizing the value or recognizing the values, all those things, right? So, I really grew up American and so that was unique perspective for me. Um and so that obviously opened up my eyes into another world. So when I tell Hassan and and many of our friends, I'm like Hassan is a white guy in a Somali body, he's our basically our our own guy that basically goes hustles deals and we got a lot of business as a result uh in in investors. There's a lot of investors in the community. Uh there's a lot of uh tenants we work with. Which deal did we start working on uh uh first? So the first deal I actually worked on was uh Midtown Square. Uhhuh. So that was the first deal. Yes. Yeah. Actually, we the moment we met about two weeks later, we're working on a 100,000 square foot shopping center. It was an auction property in in St. Louis. I remember that one. Yeah. Yes. And it went pretty far. It didn't work out. We almost did several other deals that didn't pan out, but then you called me on that one when I was living in Florida at the time. So, Midtown Mall is a 250,000 foot building that was uh uh sold by a bank. It was a foreclosed property. It had 50% vacancy. my memory serves as you're right. And uh we bought it uh for um a redevelopment and I brought Hassan as a managing partner. Right. So uh what do you think about that deal now? Well, it's been an amazing deal, you know. Yeah, it it really is. A lot of moving parts. Um so it's a big one from zero to hero from not from doing a lot of deals doing 250,000 ft. That's a pretty big assignment. Absolutely. Yeah. So, but it it's been a great project and learned a lot and uh a lot of good tenants that we had there. We're able to bring in a lot a lot of new tenants, able to give opportunities to a lot of new entrepreneurs. Uh so, it's been a great first project for us to collaborate on and to really see how we work together um and working with your team. So, it's been kind of the start. Uh every deal is down payment on next one and uh we're still working on that deal right now. Um we decided to sell a piece of it. We have a the property comes with a Dunkin Donuts and uh we have an offer on Dunkin Donuts which we'll sell and when we sell a Dunkin Donuts uh we'll be left with um the property and I think Dunkin Donuts sale will ultimately uh allow us to pay off all our investors with a very very handsome I think they'll double their money in two years which if that happens I'll be really excited. But ultimately um the project is going it still has a ways to go. It does. Yeah. But um um what other uh things you wanted to comment on that building? You know, I think that building, you know, one of the things is it was neglected by the previous ownership. So, it it had a kind of a bad reputation in the community, the brokerage community, the city, nobody responded. Uh the tenants weren't really coming in there. So, it was a a dead m if you will. And we've kind of revived it and revitalized it as a uh retail and business center, not as a mall anymore. It's a business center. And so we get great compliments from people all the time right now in that community because it's a landmark asset. You know, it's, you know, 35,000 cars a day on a main road. And so it's really opened the door for uh the relationships in that city and for us to get other opportunities. Yeah. Since we purchased that property and we continued marketing our services, our company, we actually picked up four other properties uh I think in uh shopping centers mainly. And uh every time we told our seller that we bought this Midtown mall and we're revitalizing it, then they'd drive by it and they see how we've repainted it, that gave us an instant uh uh validation. And I think it allowed us to sort of expand our footprint in the market. Yeah. Yeah. And I and I I think one of the key things is when we purchase properties, we always want to provide value first, right? We're not looking to just extract value. And that's what the previous owners did on this building. they just collected rents and put didn't put anything back. We put in about $2 million uh since we bought it. We immediately started on the exterior. We did the parking lot. We repainted it, modernized it, and that really started to attract people. And so we've got over 35 businesses over the last two years that we brought in. And um we actually lost our anchor tenant and still were able to recover from that. So that was a big hit. So after we bought the building, a tenant that paid the highest amount of money and contributed almost 40% of the net operating income didn't renew on a second floor office and was a state of Minnesota and uh it was a big blow to us which um you know stuff happens. What are you going to do? What other challenges do you did you uh encounter in that property in that project and how did you deal with them? You know some of the challenges is dealing with kind of the changes in the community, right? Um so we had uh many tenants concerned that hey there's a Somali uh B building owner now are you are you going to rent to just Somali tenants I didn't know that those questions happen those kind of questions we experienced St. Cloud is a rural community and um there's racism, there's many of those challenges as the city continues to change and so we assured everyone look you know we are uh basically an equal uh equal opportunity. Absolutely. And so we we welcome everyone and we're able to bring in many American businesses and and many other uh diverse businesses as well. So, I think that was one element of it. It was people having concern from what they're seeing and we're um operating at really high standards and and bringing back the the dead event center. And um so there was an event center that was sort of abandoned and it was basically used for storage of stuff like it was basically like a warehouse storage for the flower company and uh uh we said look we wanted to bring it bring back people and weddings and it's active you know chamber of commerce had chamber of commerce meets there um there's a lot of weddings there's corporate events there's uh you know there's it's active uh event center for the community once again the other thing that uh we did is We reached out to the farmers market of St. Cloud and I talked to the lady and I said, "Uh, let's listen. We'd love to have you guys because in the winter it's cold outside and people don't want to go to to farmers market, but if you guys go and and set your stuff 40 vendors, I think they have inside the mall. Hey, as long as you clean after, we are happy to bring you in there." They said that they can they on average bring about a thousand visitors per weekend. Wow. And uh they were being displaced. So, this is perfect timing. If we can get them in there, I think it's going to definitely have another revitalization uh uh uh opportunity for them all. I agree. I'm excited to see what we can do. Another way to serve in the community essentially, right? Yeah. Now, we recently closed on a second project which uh um originally you lived in St. Louis. Yes. Um and uh we just closed down the shopping center in St. Louis with with you. But tell us about your experience before we started operating which you lived in St. Louis. What did you do? Yeah, so I lived in southern Illinois just a metro of St. Louis and um so I started out with a residential real estate company like many of us, right? Started there. Um fix and flip, wholesaling. Um then I had a turnkey real estate investment company. Basically, we put together a package of properties and we sold it to investors who were looking for passive income. Oh, nice. So that was my business and I had a property management company. had that operation and then got into multif family and so um around that time wanting to grow the mult multif family portfolio um is is what led me to join that that mastermind and so I I did some uh small office building small commercial buildings but really after joining that mastermind and getting exposed to you and building our relationship you know that's really where I decided to go all in on commercial commercial side yeah how many units did you have uh in your management's portfolio before you got them to commercial estate. So we were managing about 250 units. Um all yours or did you have? Majority of those we sold. So we we bought them, renovated them, rented them, managed them and sold them in packages. And so we managed them for investors in California, some even in China. A lot of them were out of state. So it was an area where you could get a really good return on investment. Yeah. So uh uh if you obviously coming from residential real estate and now doing commercial uh I always asked that question being a residential guy myself in the past which one do you prefer and why? I prefer commercial and the reason is the value creation that you can do with a lease uh is is significantly uh different. I mean I'll give you a simple example. I bought a multif family building in uh 2022, a 36 unit building and uh raised the rents maybe about 20% over 12 months. So we increased the value about u uh 600,000 with those rent increases and this was 36 tenants. That's $150 increase per tenant along those lines. We just the deal that we're doing as a simple example in Champagne, we signed a lease during due diligence for one tenant and 60,000 NOI that one tenants. Yeah. Versus 36 tenants versus 36 tenants in 12 months. And that's worth uh the same value. So actually it's worth more because the lower cap rate. So $750,000 value creation with one commercial lease compared to $600,000 value creation over a year with 36 tenants. So, uh, as, uh, obviously preaching to the choir here, uh, residential real estate is a great business. It's a good starting point, but for anyone who wants to scale and get into, uh, bigger, uh, deals, uh, I think commercial, whether it's industrial or, retail, uh, parking, office are are, in my opinion, much more profitable opportunities and easier to manage too. Easier, right? So, residential, you know, our team would get calls on holidays, right? And it's always happens at the worst time. Toilets or HVAC or whatever it may be. So here's a question I have for you. You're from Oelen, Illinois. You decide to move to Tampa. What year? 2022. So 2022. You said, "Forget it. I've lived all my life." Yes. In Oalen. Now I'm going to Tampa cuz I want to live in the sun. Yes. You go to Tampa for how many years? Two years. Two years. You lived there for two years. You have a house, school, kids, school. Why go to Minnesota again? Yeah. That's a that's a crazy question. Everybody looks at me crazy every time I say that. I remember you said, "Man, I'm my kids want to get out of here. It's too cold." Yeah. So, really, you know, um actually, we were working on a deal together, right? So, I was traveling here as a managing partner. You have to run the project. And so, I was here one week every month. No, man. Coming here and uh so it just posed a question to my family one day because they hate to see me leave. And um I said, "You guys want to go to Minnesota?" And they're like, "Actually, yeah." Yeah. I was shocked. Four seasons. We we took a family vote because my my kids never live close to family, right? We've always lived on our own. And so the family voted. Everybody had a vote. Nice. And um so and you guys out voted. So you basically won. Yeah. I didn't really want to move. I like Florida. I like my setup there. But believe it or not, the majority of the family wanted to move. So you voted out. Got voted out. Yeah. Now Well, I guess I benefited from you moving because now I do more deals. And I did, too. I mean it has been great to absolutely how do you feel our collaboration might uh impact you and uh your future goals um like can you share with the audience what you expect out of our relationship on our value ad network? What are your what do you think is going to happen? Yeah. So I I think we can um ultimately do more uh together uh as partners and more importantly with the value ad network, you know, helping many other people who are looking to get started and who want to understand uh this journey and how it can be done and so we can impact a lot more people um and uh being able to collaborate with other people whether it's on a partnership or advice or uh bringing investors in. I think from all those directions uh together the possibilities are are much bigger. Well, that's great. I'm excited about it too. Uh as we are doing more and more deals because what happened uh on the last deal we did which I didn't expect by the way I usually come up with majority of the equity like on Midtown Mall I think I put half of the down payment and I always expect that to be my responsibility but I got super surprised positively that uh we raised majority of the capital from the community. That's true. And uh uh tell us about that. How that how did that go? Yeah, that was interesting. Uh you know with this community being new but rapidly growing, right? And evolving and improving and this was one of the deals that was presented and believe it or not people were upset. Oh, people were upset because a lot of people wanted to invest in this deal. Oh, we couldn't take more money. We couldn't take more money. Yeah. Yeah. So, we actually presented it one time and less less than a few days it was accounted for. All right. So, here's what I want you to do now. Please connect with everyone who got upset about not having invested in the property and and get their numbers, find out the commitments and let's very quickly put it in the next deal. Sounds like a plan. Awesome. One of the things that uh is exciting nowadays is uh AI and the impact of AI on our businesses. But Hassan's own son is AI developer and he's developing some kind of a real estate software too. Yeah, actually so he wanted to get involved right naturally wholesaling is where we start. So I said, "Look, see if you can wholesale some properties." And he has some challenges with analyzing properties and the comp process. And um I said, "It's not that big of a deal. You just, you know," he's like, "Well, I think I can do it with AI." And so he started this about a year ago. Um and he created a tool where you can quickly analyze residential properties uh using AI. Um and he grew it extremely fast. I mean um right now they have subscription service. It's a subscription service is anywhere from 50 to about $90 a month and they have over 700 customers nationwide. Amazing. And um so he got some venture capital funding. Um they saw his his abilities and um that's amazing. He What's the valuation of the company right now, Bart? Well, the the the funding they received was at about a $2 million valuation for how old is he now? 19. He's 18. 18y old guy with $2 million company. Wow. You're going to retire very soon, my friend. Well, if he sells his company for billions of dollars. Yeah. He has to, you know, with startups, it's uh it's it's something that grows really fast, but it's not making money, right? They they put so much more money back into it. So, let me let me throw something back at you and I really want to talk to him directly cuz you know, you don't make his decisions. He's a brilliant guy. So, here's the thing. Saul has invested uh into CRA uh pipeline AI agent for deal procurement, okay? about $150 to $200,000 already. And he was like, "Man, I I got what I need out of it. It's a really good system. I'm just going to use it. I'm not going to keep growing it." And I said, "Saul, let's let's not don't be selfish. Don't just use it for you. Let's let's do it as a application for people uh uh that might want to use it." And so he says, "If you want to invest, I'm happy to do it." So I decided to invest and match his investment, double it. And so really grow that thing except I don't have time. and when you know wherewithal to be running it. Now I know I'm a user of that platform but I'm not a startup guy nor do we want to necessarily uh you know take it public or make a big company out of it even though it could become one. So here's my proposal potentially that we could talk about. I want to improve the utility and uh improve the um functionality of that pipeline management and include capital raising module and plug in all the investors so that the AI agent communicates with investors deals and stuff like that. I also want to plug in a leasing agent. I also want to create a maintenance agent and and and basically create an all-inclusive platform for commercial real estate acquisitions, management, leasing, construction, etc. Here's the idea, right? If I invest that money and I hire him as a project manager, I can actually give him maybe up to 20% of the shares uh and maybe pay him some kind of salary if he needs money but obviously without a salary then he truly owner and basically have built this platform open it up for our community and work out the kinks and bugs and whatever. what he gets out of it is um he will basically be frontline with commercial real estate. We'll invest $300,000 right now. Number two, uh he will uh get benefits from understanding commercial real estate. Number three, he will empower all of our community members with a powerful tool that's going to analyze, underwrite, communicate with brokers, negotiate, raise capital. I mean, imagine the impact it's going to have. So, I did the stats. the uh yesterday. Apparently system has reanalyzed 566 uh deals already and out of 566 deals it recommended about um I think 25 or 27 deals as a potential good deals of which 10 offers were made between Saul and our acquisitions guy Babcock. And I was like wow and it's like and the deals keep popping. I'm like, how is this happening? It's amazing. It's absolutely. So, first of all, I want you to get a seat on that thing and really gonna get going. But, uh, definitely I was thinking about putting Rustam on it, but he's busy with all these deals. Anyhow, maybe it's a segue, but AI is definitely a future. How do you use AI in your commercial estate journey? Previous to AI, I was a um fake developer and I would try to customize some of these online solutions. I remember you had all those things, right? But I didn't know coding language. So that was always kind of the hindrance. But recently uh with the developments of AI has happened is really opened up a huge door. So I've created a tool myself which helps with our acquisition process and deal underwriting and analysis. And so you have a similar thing. Yeah, I have I have something like that for my workflow. And so I have our guys who are doing cold calling are able to put everything in the system and we're able to get out offers really quickly and track everything there. So that's one tool I created another tool and this all for internal use. Um I'm working on a tool right now to handle the value ad process. Beautiful. Right. So the moment so you are doing similarly we should join forces. Absolutely. So the moment you get under contract there's really nothing for managing construction, managing leasing. Um so those two pieces where our our team can log in and all collaborate in one place. It's so easy to do that right now with AI. So that's how I'm using it. I'm using it every single day. I'm using um you know claude and and and and the workflow management and but more importantly is these custom tools that we're able to utilize for our process is how I'm using it. Amazing. So what was really blow uh mind-blowing for me uh he's got this um in his phone he's got this uh app. He presses a button and talks to it and says, "Hey, give me the demographics, comps, and um information about 741 Bush Lake Road, which is our property." And uh within like 5 seconds, it'd spit out everything you want to know about that property. I mean, imagine the speed for for me. If I had to do it, which we do it all the time, to get all that data and to analyze it and to kind of come up with decision, I'll have to spend probably two, three hours, go here, go there, go to the county website because it's not a listed property, it's an offmarket property. But for the AI agent to go and collect all that data, compress it, give you an analysis and a recommendation is absolutely amazing. And what Soul does right now with this system is he gets properties under contract and he basically tries to uh uh get us to buy them, but we have so many of them I can't even close on all of them. So I started passing them out to friends uh in the community. Maybe you can take one if you're not but uh I want you to definitely look at the the platform and uh maybe uh we can you know improve it and then offer it to uh our friends. No, I think you know one of the benefits of these tools especially for a lot of the students is you know when you're first getting started you get stuck on underwriting right you get stuck on analysis or one of these pieces and technology can solve all of that so I think you've got a great idea bringing that tool so that everybody can kind of plug into it and standardize and have a process that they can follow. Got it. Now you've been with Value ad network for now over a year ever since we started it. What recommendation do you have for a possible new uh mentee who wants to join? Well, I think you know first and foremost is um understanding if you really want to do this, right? There's a lot of people a lot of people like the idea, but there's work and um execution and and so if if you really want to do this, then the next thing is really investing in your education, right? And so, uh, you know, there's not a lot of, uh, organizations out there that you can learn this business from. And so, to have, uh, a network that's local, um, I mean, obviously it's national. You've got students from all over the nation, right? But I think being able to actually invest and get started is the next most important thing. A lot of people come and they they like the idea and then they keep coming and they keep coming. But I think investing in your education is the best education you can do. So that would be step two. And and step three really, you know, try to get involved with somebody else on a deal. Trying to do the first deal yourself is difficult. Difficult. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe that's what we've done with partner. Absolutely. Yeah. So maybe it's just investing in someone's deal uh in in one of the deals or maybe you know trying to figure it out on your own is difficult. So uh just collaborate with someone and that's what kind of the culture that's created here is all about collaboration and value exchange. One of the things I'm doing with uh uh the network is I want to sort of remove the fee system and uh instead of people paying annual subscriptions to be a part of it I want them to basically invest in our fund or in our deals and if you invest in our deals and fund you'll basically get a free um access to the community. I think ultimately I never created this uh community to make fees. I wanted to get deal velocity, partnership opportunities and and uh get activate a lot of agents in their markets to find really good deals. And I think the mission is sort of being accomplished. We are getting a really good deal velocity. Now, what I want to do is uh instead of charging people annual subscription fees, I'll say, "Look, just invest in our deals uh and if you're qualified, you have to be accredited investor to invest in our deals." In other words, you have to have either a million dollars of net worth outside of your primary residence. We have to make uh I think $300,000 a year. 200,000 a year as individual or 300 300 as a couple. And if you qualify, then we'll be happy to work with you. So I think that's going to put a lot of other opportunities for us to collaborate and add value to our mentees. Yeah. And I think the unique thing is the value ad aspect of it. It's not it's not just on a real estate, it's on the individual level. And so there's genuine relationships built here and people actually helping each other. And so I I think that's hard to find in in the real world, right? So um ultimately get involved, get active, take action. All right. Now, you talk about old noise things, but how about this? What are the challenges and what are the things that we I and my team need to do to improve the uh uh community? What what are the things that may be frustrating to you? Well, I think it's still early, right? And so there's always room for growth. Um so I can see drastic improvement from the first event to this next to the second event and I think it's going to improve even more. So, it's a growth mindset that you have and the community has and so I think it's going to naturally continue to improve as far as specific things I I don't really know off the top of my head at the moment. So, I would say just making it more accessible will probably be number one, right? Getting more people in here, more diversity and all those things. So, what we do is we have uh quarterly events where we get together, partners mainly, talk about our deals and um exchange ideas, pitch deals, raise capital. That's what we do quarterly. And then we have weekly zoom calls with the community where we talk about a specific uh topic or I I educate on some kind of a process or uh raising capital, finding deals or scaling your business. And then also I have partners call where all the partners get together uh I think about 15 of us and we talk about our deals and what's going on and the challenges and issues we have. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think this is a great great program and uh it's definitely just getting started. So, you know, everybody like talks about their wins and everything is great, but I know that real estate is not easy, but tell us about uh things that keep you up at night. Maybe tell us about a deal you're failing at or failed in the past and how you dealt with it and uh uh what the lessons you learned. I I think that's um that's important to talk about failures, right? It's easy to to talk, but that's really where most of the learning happens, right? Um, so there's uh, one of the things I I got into commercial way too late and one of the reasons was I always told my I told myself we tell ourselves these stories, right? So when I was in residential, I told myself commercial real estate the vacancies are too long, right? And so you have to sit on this vacancy for a long period of time. So that was too risky. But I learned on the other side of knowledge, you learn the reality which is, you know, it's a measured thing, right? It doesn't have to be that way. So, one deal that I did was a uh commercial warehouse building. Um 30,000 square feet I purchased and at a great price offm market. So, did all the right things, right? But, um I realized the property didn't have parking, but also all the near nearby properties didn't have parking. And I met with the city and they were very supportive of my business model and business plan for the property. So once the tenant vacated uh the it was time to execute the business plan to split this warehouse into retail into multiple spaces and it was a new city administration and the new administration came in and said hey you don't have enough parking uh oh you need I said well what do you expect me to do is it demolish half of your building to create parking oh my god it's just not practical practical I mean I paid for a full building I didn't pay for half a building, right? And so, you know, not not getting it in writing, not um you know, these are rookie mistakes, right? And so, lesson is never buy a property without parking unless you have um you know um approvals, right? So, in this particular situation, you know, I had to find out the hard way, became an expert on zoning and Yeah, that's good. And and what I learned is the property actually does not need parking. And you proved it though? I approved it. I had to hire an attorney and so it has an exemption because it's in a downtown district. So, um, but it still has the parking issue nevertheless. So, yes, you know, do avoid properties that don't have parking unless it's a supported situation, right? I see. I had one of those myself. I bought a 30,000t warehouse building in Minneapolis with only six parking stalls. Wow. I was so excited about the numbers. Yes, I was so excited about the rental income and whatever. I I thought that building I bought it for $800,000. I thought the stabilized value is 3 million and we figured we're going to spend 600 to $800,000 to stabilize it. So 800 plus 800, you know, the math is really good except we screwed up on the construction. It was way over budget. The parking was definitely a big issue. People didn't want to rent because it was unparked. I ended up losing money on that deal. And the good thing is I I bought all my investors out so they don't have to struggle because I thought I'll still make it happen. But uh yeah, it was a good lesson. So I I don't ever buy anything without parking. Um because it's just not my style of properties. Yeah. Well, the funny thing is my building is like exact specs to what you just said. Oh man. Yeah. The same numbers. You got $6,000. Well, I I have 15 spaces actually. You have street side? No, street side. I I didn't count street side. I probably 15 street side. Yeah. Numbers are like identical. the the valuation. Well, I guess everybody has to go through a 30,000 foot underpark building to learn the freaking lesson. And I may end up losing as well, right? Luckily, right when I was about to bring in investors, right, and actually you were going to be one of the guys going to maybe come in on that deal. Um, that's when I met with the city. And so, luckily, nobody else is involved in this. See, that's what you want to do. You want to have I'm so lucky I didn't bring an investor and I'm taking the loss myself. That's the kind of people I want to work with because uh most people they will oh we lost money whatever it's your problem because you put money in there. Uh and and those investors don't really last long. Uh but um I've made a lot of mistakes. So here's what I say and I I always preach it to my uh friends. We win some and we learn some. You only lose if you stop continue working. Otherwise, every single lesson you learn will make you a better operator, better investor on the next deal. And so, u I personally don't know anybody who has never made mistakes. Mistakes is part of the um process. And uh what but mistakes scare people. They don't want to make mistakes. Nobody wants to lose money. I actually told this to my daughter. She's 21 years old and she she made money on she made some good money on some deals and then she lost money on on a deal and she was really pained by that experience. But she made four times more money on other deals. And I said, "Look, you didn't make that money uh that year. I think it was $200,000 something. You lost 40 grand here. Guess what? You only made 160,000." If you focus on that the fact that you made 160,000, life is good. That's true. But if you're focused on the $40,000 loss because you're expected to make 60 to 70,000 versus losing it, then you're miserable. Absolutely. And so you got to control your expectations. And if you have that, I have a screw up 20% for my plan. 20% of my deals will be messed up. I just want to make sure that I account for it ahead of time. Then when that happens, you were like, "Okay, that's the 20% that I was supposed to lose on, but I'm still ahead on 80." And then you're good because one thing psychologically that I realize is that our joy of winning and making money on these deals is not equally proportionate to the pain of losing. I agree. The pain of losing is felt 10 times 10 times more. So when you're sitting there and you think your whole world's falling apart, although at Midtown Mall you made three times more money than a failing what you're going to lose on a failing. If you focus on the failing, you feel really bad. And so I constantly remind myself of the gratitude of all the good deals. Absolutely. And and by the way, we never talked about the Persing deal. So here is another deal that's a very interesting one. So Hassan was great. I bought a building in Decar, 60,000 square feet, vacant. I'm sitting in it for a year and a half. Can I get a tenant? The local person who sold me the building was so positive and excited. He thought he's going to be 10 guys, you know, uh, fighting for the deal. So, buy the building. I sign on like on debt with hard money lender. I put up they put up the money though, but it was the commission I paid him on the deal. Got it. So, uh, nobody put up any money because it was their uh uh commission. Long story short, we sit there and nothing happens. Hassan has a 1031. He's like, "Hey, I got some money. do you want to uh uh do you have anything I can put 1031 into? I was like, I got one for you. I got this Persian deal. It's losing. We're losing money right now, but when we find a tenant, it's going to happen. I said I but I said, look, Hassan, we might lose money here and it's okay. We'll make it up on other deals. And Hassan knows Illinois and the building. We did it right. The purchase is great. I mean, the price is values there, but finding a 60,000 foot tenant is like finding a needle in a hay stack. It is. He gets in there and we keep losing and losing and losing and I start losing the faith and what I got to pay off the $ 1.5 million loan. So I whisper to the guy, I'm like, "Just sell it for 1.5. I'll deal with I'll pay Hassan's money off. I'll take the bullet." I remember calling him saying, "I'll just make it up on Midtown. Don't worry about it." And then the guy is like, "Oh, we got one tenant now. We got a buyer." And patience is a virtue. I was gonna lose about half a million dollars on that deal because I was just lost patience. But now, if it happens and we actually sign the lease and it works, we can actually probably walk away with $800,000 of profit. Sounds like. I don't know what it's going to be yet, but it's going to be a good profit. What's your experience with that deal? You know, I was uh uh excited for a couple of reasons. You know, one, working together. Uh two, your local team there, they were kind of kings of that community and they're good guys, right? So, I was excited to work with them as well. So, I thought it'd be a great asset and um but sure enough, you know, it's a small town and trying to find this almost impossible tenant. Um it takes patience, something that in our business model, it's hard to come by. It's hard to come by. Absolutely. So, yeah, I was worried that now I already had one problem and I signed up for another like that. Well, that's not a problem. So, here's the other question I have. So, we have a tenant. We have an LOI, but for some reason they didn't sign a purchase agreement and a lease. They haven't signed a lease, but they're moved in already. And now we have a buyer. And if we sell it to these guys, we need to talk to these guys and buy them out at least or put them somewhere else. I think that's what we're going to do. Yeah. I think you have some other spaces. Yeah. We have a lot of space. So now now all of a sudden we have options, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Hassan, thank you very much for being a guest on our podcast. I love working with you. I'm looking forward to building a deeper, more meaningful relationship with you and your son and and uh hopefully our collaboration will be fruitful and um we'll be able to add value to each other for years to come. Absolutely. Uh pleasure to working with you and uh getting to know you and building our relationship and I'm definitely looking forward to growing as well. Thank you very much. Thank you. And uh yeah, if you would like to learn more about our community or want to learn more about investing in real estate, please comment below. I'll be happy to connect and uh uh I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you. Value ad podcast. Unfiltered insights from real estate's most successful players. Always adding value.