Joseph Hunike - The Property Management Mistakes That Cost Real Estate Investors Thousands | Real Estate Educators Podcast with Kevin Amolsch

Description

Buying a great investment property is only half the battle. Managing it well is what determines whether it becomes a wealth-building asset, or a financial headache.

In this episode of the Real Estate Educators Podcast, Kevin Amolsch talks with Joseph Hunike, Principal at WinVest Management in Miami, Florida.

Joseph shares how his company has grown quickly by taking over underperforming rental properties and transforming them into profitable investments through better communication, stronger systems, and disciplined property management.

The conversation covers how to evaluate your property manager, why every investor should understand their property's P&L, how to identify distressed investment opportunities, and what today's Miami rental market can teach investors everywhere.

Whether you own one rental or an entire portfolio, this episode offers practical advice on protecting your investment and maximizing long-term cash flow.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Meet Joseph Hunike
03:10 - Building a property management company from the ground up
12:18 - How poor property management destroys cash flow
15:05 - The importance of knowing your property's P&L
21:18 - Common mistakes with Section 8 tenants
24:08 - How to identify distressed investment opportunities
30:12 - Appreciation vs. cash flow in today's market
36:10 - Joseph's advice for choosing a property management company

Connect with Joseph Hunike:

Website: WinVestManagement.com

Learn more about professional property management, multifamily operations, rental property optimization, and investment consulting in South Florida.

Learn more about Pine Financial Group:

pinefinancialgroup.com

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
There's a humongous demand for good property management in Miami. Florida in general is huge for property management and real estate. It's like, I mean, for me, it's like one of the top things down here. Everybody does it. So, yeah, I would say make sure that you're profitable and make sure that your friends know what they're doing. And otherwise, it might not be best to do business with them. It's good. with eviction laws down here. It's not like California or somewhere else where it takes forever. So Florida is a very business, like landlord, owner-friendly state. That's why I love it so much. We're in negotiations. We're investing in real estate. They're winning. They're making money.
Speaker #1
What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Real Estate Educators Podcast, where we provide the education you can build on. I am your host, Kevin Amalsh. We are back. We're having so much fun with this podcast. We're helping real estate investors. and real estate educators. Are you out there building a portfolio or fixing and flipping, or are you out there providing content to other investors? This is the podcast for you. I have another special guest with me this week, a little newer to the business, but I'm excited to get to know him a little bit and learn what he's doing down there in Florida. So Joseph Unikey, I think I got that right. Welcome to the show, man.
Speaker #0
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker #1
So I know you've been doing three-ish years in property management. Now you're a principal at Windvest Management. I know you have a big passion for helping deal structure and management and helping your clients out. So that's why I wanted to have you on the show. But take me back, man. You're still fairly new to the industry, way after COVID. So you weren't even doing it during that time. But what made you get started in property management?
Speaker #0
Okay. So I originally... got my degree in industrial distribution from East Carolina University in North Carolina. That was a long time ago. I graduated in 2017. I did logistics for a long time. I've always wanted to get into real estate. I moved around a lot, South Carolina, Tampa, and North Carolina, and finally made my way down to Miami about five years ago. And that's when my real estate journey started. I basically started going around to real estate, meet up groups and speaking with people, networking. just growing my organization. And basically, I met two other guys and we got a property management company started. This was like a previous property management company. It was called Threshold. I currently am a principal with WinFest, but I've been doing it for three years. The first company, basically, me and two other guys started from, I think it was like five, six units. And we grew that to about 130 units. And did that for about two years and then went my own way with WinFest. But we've been active since the beginning of this year, January, and we're at 50 units. So, yeah, just trying to get as many doors as we possibly can and helping our clients. And there's a humongous demand for good property management in Miami. Florida in general is huge. For property management and real estate, it's like I mean, for me, it's like one of the top things down here. Everybody does it. But just wonderful service. There's a lot of characters in Miami. The service level is it's different than the rest of the United States, and that goes for property management. We've taken over accounts where owners haven't heard from their property managers in two weeks. They live in a different country. The property. managers haven't sent them money in two months. So it's wild. It's really wild. I call it, it's not standard for the rest of the United States, but that's fantastic for us in WinVest Management because we can fulfill that demand and bring people great service. And that's what my mission is, really. I want to help people, and real estate is the way that I'm doing that. I'm serving these people. So we have a lot of great clients. Some of them are from all over the place. Ukraine, New York, Argentina, like everywhere. Turkey, like the country, Russia. So Miami, it's very, very diverse. You get, it's like an international city. But yeah, I absolutely love it. We're growing, like I said, we're at 50 units since the beginning of the year. And, you know, we would like to at least double that. or more by next year, and we believe we can do that. We have the strategies and systems in place to do that. You just got to... work your tail off and keep bringing good service to clients down here. So yeah, that's a little bit of the backstory of us. I'm from North Carolina originally, but I love real estate and I've been doing it for basically the last three years down here. So that's kind of like my background so far.
Speaker #1
So, okay. And then you migrated to the management side, which I got to tell you, man, that's the hardest part of being a real estate investor or real estate investing. And we talked a little bit before we hit record. I've got a portfolio kind of spread out a little bit, and I have some that I manage myself and some I outsource. And I could tell you the property management is the hardest part. So you're right in that there's a need for it. So if you're good, like you say you are, I'm sure you're going to have no trouble doubling that door count by the end of the year.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And for me, I mean, I've worked in different industries before, like the transportation industry. For me... like property management, it's like, if you're, if you kind of like grew up in real estate or if, if that's what you've done, it may be difficult, but for me, it's, it's the easiest thing I've ever done. I like, it just is. And I absolutely love it. Um, but yeah, there, there's a lot, there's a lot that goes into it and there's a lot of stuff that you have to deal with. So, um, I completely get it, but I can deal with it. Yeah.
Speaker #1
I had, dude, I had three floods in three different units within a six week period. And that just that just happened. Oh, wow. That's not so fun. Two of them had property management in place. But still, as the owner, you have to get involved with something like that. You have insurance and you have all of these things. So I don't know. Oh, yeah. I just shared that with you. But yeah, it's it's it can be challenging.
Speaker #0
It is. It is very, very challenging. And I mean, like some of some of the accounts that we've taken over like this, like Miami, it's it is the Wild West down here. They're like I said that we had a client. in Turkey, like the country. He called us, found us through our website, and he had not spoken to his property manager. And it was like the last two weeks and had not received money. This was a class C five-unit building in Opelika, Florida. And obviously this client lived in a different country. He had not received any money at all in like the last two months. And the property manager had He basically used his own funds to try to update this five-unit building because it was a C-class. It was falling apart, low income. There were some Section 8 tenants there and had not communicated that to the owner at all. So he was basically collecting the rent money back to himself after he had used his own funds to fix like one of the units. I mean it was bad. I mean it was like leaking, and it was not good for tenants. He was basically just trying to get tenants in there. Apparently, none of this was communicated to the owner at all. And the owner's calling us like, oh, my God, get over there. I don't know what's going on. I haven't received any money. I haven't talked to this guy. And this is my purpose, right? Helping people out. So I'm like, of course, obviously, I'm going to go over there and talk to the property manager and get things straight. And we switched the management over to us. And we did get everything straight. things like that, that like, I mean, I guess they happen everywhere, but I've had my fair share here in Miami. It's a little bit more than what I believe for other places. Yeah. So, I mean, there's all different types of things that you have to deal with. Absolutely.
Speaker #1
So you talk about in your intake form here, you talked about like your investment strategy and how you like to help your clients with investment strategy. That could mean a lot of different things. So tell me, Joseph, what do you do? What do you mean when you say help us with our investment strategy?
Speaker #0
Yeah. So if somebody is going to be investing down here, it doesn't matter what it is. Like, for instance, we have 36 units in North Miami. This client is from New York. He was working with a friend of his, a friend. And that friend had let his 36 units just basically rot. When we came in over there, it was, I think it was like seven or eight vacant units. And then there was four or five other units where the tenants, they weren't even paying at all. So, I mean, it was, I can't even remember how many units it was. I want to say about probably. 10 or 11 units in total that he was getting no money from. It's like a quarter of his 36 units. This is also a C-class building in North Miami. He had invested this. He had bought this, and his friend had let him down. There was no property management software. They were doing everything through the bank account. He had a groundskeeper going around collecting checks from the tenants. There was no software for them to pay. There was no P&L statement for the owner. And I'm just like, oh, my God. Like, what is going on here? So with that building. We came in and basically leased it up as quick as we could. We did have to do some value add on the units. The units needed to be touched up, repainted. This was like light value add, maybe like two to three K per unit to repaint it and get it looking decent where we could get people in there, get it leased up, brought in property management software. We use RentVine. The owner could at least know what was going on with his P&L. You need to know how much money you're making with your investment, with your building. And we got it leased up and running like it should after about seven, eight months. It took a little bit, but things like that. So this guy had invested in this building. He had a friend, and we came in and fixed up for him. And now that building is very profitable for him. you I guess I'm kind of giving like an operational perspective, not so much like a number perspective, but he was losing a lot of money before. Now he's making money, and he actually can see that on his P&L. So I'm just keeping it very simple.
Speaker #1
Okay. So the strategy is hire you and let you do your thing.
Speaker #0
Well, I mean it's a little bit more than that. I mean obviously we'll go over the details, the data, the P&L. We'll look at the building. In this case, this was like a... an emergency case where it's like, okay, we need just somebody decent to come in there and like to fix this up. I mean, he has a mortgage, like he has payments that he has to make. And he was not breaking even. He was losing a lot of money to begin with. So, you know, all the payments, the mortgage and the water and everything, he's just spending money and it's not coming in. So, yeah, I mean, we went over all that with him, but basically, yes, we came in and fixed everything up for him. So statements are good. Tenants are in place. We did have to update the parking. There was no assigned space or anything like that. So there was random people coming in from the building next to us and parking and taking everybody's parking. So it's been a process. It's been a process. But basically from bankrupt to making money, it took about a year. It took about a year to do that. And it's scary. He owns multiple properties, so he doesn't live in this area. He lives in New York, and he needed a trusted property manager to come in and fix things up for him, and that's exactly what we did.
Speaker #1
Okay. So I'm trying to extract a lesson here that we could learn from you for our listeners. So for the listener's benefit, what's a lesson from that experience from the investor's perspective?
Speaker #0
If you're going to do business with friends, make sure that the friends know what they're doing, number one. Also, you need to know your P&L. You need to know what money is coming in and what money is going out. I would say those are pretty simple. If you buy something, you've got to make money on it. You don't want to lose money on it, right? And that's why we all invest in things. So, yeah. I would say make sure that you're profitable and make sure that your friends know what they're doing. And otherwise, it might not be best to do business with them.
Speaker #1
So it's okay to hire a professional maybe?
Speaker #0
Yes, it is absolutely okay to hire a professional property management company just like Winvest. And if anybody listening to this call does have issues like that where they don't know what's going on, they're losing money, you can definitely consult us and we'll hop on a call with you for free to go over everything and see what's going on and basically fix it up for you if we can. We'll let you know exactly what's going on. We're an honest company too. We're going to tell you exactly what's going on. There's no fluff. It's straight. It's straightforward, which is good. They'll kind of fluff it up and try to keep you happy, and they're not straight with you about what's going on, which can lead to problems over time.
Speaker #1
All right. So if I was working with a property manager, how would I flesh that out? How do I know if my manager is being honest?
Speaker #0
Well, I mean, you can look at the P&Ls. I mean, you can see what's being leased, the times, how long it takes to lease, and then the communication. I mean, if somebody's giving us a call, we're picking up that phone immediately or texting. We use Rentvine. And so. All of our owners can just message us and rent Vine 2. And I mean, they're going to get immediate response. I mean, if not like an hour or less, you're going to be able to tell. If somebody's kind of fluffing it a little bit, they're probably going to be lacking on like software, P&Ls. They might not be able to tell you how many days it's going to take to market. Yeah, stuff like that. I mean, even for an amateur. Basically, I don't even know how to explain it. I mean you should be able to tell immediately. I mean it's like just I mean the software and speaking with the person, just getting that general knowledge. The property manager should be able to explain to you exactly what's going to happen, and then you see that in the P&Ls.
Speaker #1
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is ask questions, and it's okay to ask your property manager questions. But definitely stay on top of your asset. Like I made a mistake once, Joseph, where my property manager leased my property out as one side of a duplex. They leased this one unit out to a Section 8 tenant. And they didn't verify, man. They didn't verify that they were on Section 8. So these tenants move in and they were like, well, where's our freaking rent money? And there's no rent money. We're like, well, go to Section 8. You said they're approved and they weren't approved. So we ended up having an immediate eviction. Now they stood behind it and they… They took care of the problem, but gosh, maybe as the owner of that property, I should have said, okay, let me see the approval package and where is the documentation that they're approved for this. That was my mistake, and that's 20 years in the business. I still made that mistake, but lesson there, right?
Speaker #0
Absolutely, and I've actually had to deal with something like that before. We took over an account, and those owners, they had just been basically duped. in that same situation. There was a Section 8 tenant that was trying to move into their place from this other place, and they never even got the package approved to be moved. So they signed the lease and everything, and the agent, even the agent, didn't even check it. And this was all before we took over the account, and the owner was really mad because it had been an extended period before placing a tenant. The agent came to the owners, you know, this tenant wants to move in, you know, here's the lease signed. I think the tenant even like paid like the deposit. And then when the time came to actually, you know, start, you know, like pay the first month's rent, like move in, it was like, oh, you know, like your package hasn't even been approved. Like you can't even move out of the last place that you were in. And like nobody said anything at all. And I'm just sitting there like, you know, on our free consultations, just listening to them. And I'm just like, oof, you know.
Speaker #1
It seems like such an obvious thing like, oh, my manager should do this. In my specific example, I just assumed it was happening. So I guess the lesson here is don't assume. Ask the question.
Speaker #0
Yes, yes, exactly. And with Section 8, that is something and it is kind of like open. If you don't ask that question, it's kind of like you do kind of like assume. Obviously, you never want to assume anything, but you kind of assume that, okay, it's fine. Section 8 is moving in there, but no. like there's like a whole like package and stuff and there's like a whole approval process that has to be done. So it's just very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker #1
So sometimes you got to manage your manager is the lesson, I think. All right, man. So tell me, tell me about the market. Look, I guess, let me ask it this way. It's scary out there right now. There's interest rates. We're supposed to come down. Now they're talking about maybe increasing them. So that puts cap rates up. Right. and you know As we know, if cap rates go up, your values come down. So do I want to be entering an asset knowing that cap rates might be increasing or cash flow going down because my rate is high? I don't know that right now is the right time to be buying rental properties. What's your feedback?
Speaker #0
Well, it depends on well, there's some people that are heavy action takers, and they never accept it's not the right time to buy real estate. With that said, here in Miami, things are very hot. So it's very high. So let me give you some more background. We have a mix of very high-end condos, like $50,000 for rent, penthouses, stuff like that. We also have a C-class. We're really focusing our portfolio more on the luxury high-end, A-class, B-class. But right now, we kind of get to see it all. And right now, the luxury market in Miami is getting hit pretty hard. Like, for instance, there was a penthouse condo that we had in Coral Gables. That rent, it was like $12,500 originally. This was, I want to say, about seven, eight months ago. And the last price that we were at to competitively put somebody in there, it was like $9,000. And there was a lot of units in that building. that were like that. So the placement, it was hard. And obviously that owner was not happy. He was losing money on his mortgage taxes, stuff like that. And it's really hard. His situation, he was basically just trying to invest money anywhere. He didn't really think about it. He was just like, I'm just going to buy some condos in Miami. And he didn't really think about how the market works. Rents don't always go up, just like you were saying. I mean, if the interest rates go up, your valuations are going to start to come down. If your interest rates go down, your valuations are going to go up because then you can borrow more money at lower prices. We have a lot of oversupply in the market right now too. There's a lot of different buildings that are being built. down here like Miami, Coral Gables, Surfside. So all this oversupply is bringing those prices down. And the owners, they don't like that, but it's the way it is. There's a market. There's nothing that we can do about it, right? If we're not competitive with that price, we're not going to get any action, any interest, inquiries, showings. In that unit, we've got to be competitive. Looping back to what you were saying, if you're going to invest, if you're going to try to acquire something in this market, you have to be smart about it. I was looking at a fourplex the other day in Davie. It's really it was like I think like 1.4 for like a fourplex. So it's very expensive down here right now. So conventional loans, if you're going to do that, you have to put down a good amount of money. I would say probably like 30%, 35%, maybe like 40% right now. You could probably get a deal if it was like seller finance or something like that. If you're going to I mean, you really have to put a lot of money down if you want cash flow right now. Like you're not going to be able to put down 15%, 20% like that. in other states, in Indianapolis. like Midwest, you can put down a lot less, get a better loan, and acquire a property that way. It's not going to happen down here. It's going to have to be like seller finance or something like that. So if you're trying to acquire, it's going to be a little bit harder down here unless you're going to put more money down if you're going the conventional way, if that makes sense.
Speaker #1
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Speaker #0
Well, I mean, down here, I mean, you're going to get a lot more appreciation. And there's a lot of people that are moving down here. It is a fantastic business environment. People from Texas and all over the country are coming down here, so everything is appreciating a lot faster. If you're going for appreciation, yeah, I think this will be fine. I'm not seeing a lot of cash flow on smaller deals. On the bigger deals, and when I say bigger, probably like 150 units and up, 200 units. Yeah, there'd probably be some more deals coming in there because there's a lot less people that can actually handle those situations. We specifically stick with about 100 units and less for our multifamily. So I didn't really say what we do, but we do specifically condos, single family, residential and multifamily. And that multifamily, we do try to stay below 100 units. And that's that's kind of like our niche down here and what we what we do focus on. People will always be investing, but you're going to have to look a little bit harder or you're going to have to do a seller finance deal or something to really get quality cash flow below that 100 units. I mean maybe even if two or three units were burnt at the building or something, it's got to be in distress. Maybe the previous owners have like a a rate that's not fixed and they're in distress. So if you're looking for distress and you can really focus on that pain with a seller, they're going to be selling at a loss. You would pick it up, something like that. And those deals, I mean, you really got to look for them. And I mean, when I say look for them, you're probably looking at like 50 deals, maybe 100 deals to find a good one, one good one.
Speaker #1
Okay, so you gave me an example of that guy that had 30-something units. I don't remember the exact number, 32 maybe. And 11 of them or so were not paying at all, right? And some of them were tenanted without a paying tenant, which is even worse because now you've got to get the tenant out before you can so that sounded like a pretty distressed property to me.
Speaker #0
Yes, yes. It was absolutely distressed, yeah. And he it was 36 units, North Miami, C-class building. Like it's the building is not that bad. They just the friend of his, they weren't doing what you're supposed to on leasing. So like obviously tenants are supposed to submit an application. You check their background. You check their credit. You check their income and make sure that they can actually afford the place. They're not criminals. Their credit is good. You want to put good tenants in there, and the tenants they had put in there, I think he was just throwing anybody in there that would That would do it. And yeah, we did have to evict. It was like four or five of the tenants that were not paying. And we did. I mean, we came in there. We did everything legally and we did it professionally, but we got them out. We got them out. It was relatively quickly. Florida is good with eviction laws down here. It's not like California or somewhere else where it takes forever. So Florida is a very business, like landlord, owner-friendly state. That's why I love it so much. But, yeah.
Speaker #2
They're good with the evictions, but not great with the foreclosure.
Speaker #0
Foreclosures take like a year. Yeah. I think so. That's a judicial state. But anyway, I digress. Okay. So if that property, for the listener's benefit here, if they found that property, like maybe here's an idea for the listener maybe to start thinking about. But if you're looking for a property like that in distress, before they find the property management company that could actually help them dig out of that hole, that was probably a motivated seller. I agree with you, Joseph. That probably is true. So maybe you could advertise to resend eviction filings because that's all public record, yeah?
Speaker #1
Oh, yeah, yeah, foreclosures, yeah, anything like that where the seller's distressed. Yeah, I mean if they're losing money and they're trying to get rid of it, yes, like that's a motivated seller, absolutely. And obviously, if you're an investor, it's all based on the cash flow, right? So if, you know, eight units are vacant and then the other, you know, what I say, four or five were. Not paying, that's like half the cash flow. So if you could actually buy a property like that and then put tenants in there and fill it up and increase that cash flow, you're going to appreciate that property. You're going to make a really good return depending on how long you want to hold it, maybe two or three years, maybe a little bit less, maybe longer, depending on what strategy is. But quickly with that, you just lease it up and you can. Turn it around pretty quickly. So yeah, I mean if you're an investor, that was exactly what you're looking for. He had bought the building. It was like I think two years prior, and basically the friend just kind of the opposite of appreciation. Yeah, it was depreciated by the friend, and then we had to bring it back up to where it normally was. But yeah.
Speaker #0
So those eviction, recent eviction filings, that is a powerful list to market to. So another way you could have found this specific seller if they wanted to sell would be an absentee owner because you said they were in New York, right? So that's a pretty easy list to put together as well. So just a couple of nuggets there, a couple of ideas for the listener. All right, Joseph, what else can you share with us? You did mention that you wanted to talk about how to adapt to a changing economic environment. So how do investors adapt to that? But tell me what you mean, man. What do you mean by changing economic environment?
Speaker #1
Well, just like right now, what I was talking about, like with the condos and stuff, you know, you have to monitor the environment. So if you're going to be buying whatever it is, a condo, a house, multifamily, if you have a brand new skyrise going up beside it, you have to take that into consideration, right? Also, the age of the building. If you have a brand new building and then you have an old building beside it, you know, where are the tenants going to go to? so If you're going to invest in a property, you have to make sure that you know exactly what's going to happen. And I mean, honestly, I keep talking about this 36 unit. It's a great example for a lot of things that you're saying. There's a brand new building that's going up right beside it that's big. So this is kind of like going into the oversupply that I was talking about. They're going to be doing a lease up. So I'm sure their leases will. probably be a little bit more than what we're leasing at. So in the Miami area right now, it's right about 1,500 for one bed, one bath, roughly 608 square feet. And this is like a C class building. This is a little bit lower income, but all the tenants in that area, they're going to start gravitating towards those nicer buildings. So you're either going to have to make your units nicer. Or you're going to have to drop your rents down to keep those tenants. And I want to say over the last year, the rents, they have been coming down a little bit. Two years ago, we were putting people in there at, it was like $1,700, $1,675, no problem. Two weeks, three weeks. And then over the last year, it's like incrementally. ticking down a little bit. We're like $1,500 and we're trying to keep people in there. And when the price kind of slips down, that changing economic environment that you're talking about, if something nicer is cheaper right down the road, your tenant might move out and move to that place. So you've got to stay competitive. And basically for the last year, we've been keeping rents the same. We have not been increasing them because We don't want to drive the tenants out. We want to keep them there. But the year before. We could bump it up $200, $300, no problem, and get people in there. So yeah, I mean if changing economic environments, I mean it's I love what you're saying.
Speaker #0
I agree with you. If you have a brand-new building, let's just use that as the example. That will get absorbed. We don't know how long, right? And once it's all rented out or fully stable, then your pricing can be a better match. But while you're dealing with that, I'm going to call it a problem. Joseph, I assume you want to drop your price down significantly to keep those tenants and attract new tenants from that building until it's absorbed. And then you can bring them back up because look, if you're telling me 15 or $1,600 a month in rent, that thing goes vacant for one month, you lose an entire year of income, right? So just drop it down a hundred bucks and you'd save yourself that full, you know, the full turnover. Absolutely.
Speaker #1
Yeah. You want to keep those tenants in there. Yeah.
Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, even if it's a hundred or 200 bucks, it's still worth it because it'll take, I mean, trying to explain what I'm trying to explain, but a $1,500 per month, if you drop it $100, you don't want to do that as an owner, but that you just saved yourself 15 months. So you don't want that vacant for one month or two months. If it's two months, then you have 30 months to make up for it. Right. So it's very important to keep the pricing correct. So I do appreciate what you're saying there.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And every time a tenant moves out, I mean, we're still doing those value adds. So, you know, like two to three K. Yeah, exactly. Paint, like a little bit updated kitchen, updated bathrooms, like acrylicing, making it white, making people want, you know, a very, very pleasant, warm environment when a tenant walks in where they're like, okay, you know, like maybe, you know, the outside of the building is not the best, but like this is comforting. Like I could live here. It's nice. Like the kitchen's nice. It's updated. We've got new cabinets. The bathroom, it's white, you know, nice and clean. So, yeah, I mean, we're trying to stay as competitive as possible. And that new high-rise going up beside us, I mean, everything's going to be completely brand new. So it's like, ah,
Speaker #0
you know. So a thought, you know, virtual staging or actual some light staging would help also. There's no better bang for the buck than that. All right, man. Well, I'm going to, we're wrapping up here. So what I'd like to do is go through my notes. I took some notes. What I do, Joseph, on this podcast is write down things that I learned when I was talking with you. So things, my takeaways, and hopefully that helps the listener have some takeaways as well. So I'd love you to listen to my notes as I rattle those off to you and let me know what I missed and what you think I value you added that I missed. Okay. And then after that, if you could give me a final piece of advice for a real estate investor. Maybe they're looking for a rental property in Miami. Maybe, I don't know, somewhere else. But if you could give us a piece of advice, that would really be great. Yeah, absolutely. We started talking about your story and how you were getting into this several years ago. And then you started WinVest. I think it's called WinVest, right? Yeah, WinVest Management. And you went up to 50 doors. And one of the things you said over and over was make sure your property management company has good software. Use RentVine. Rintvine is one that one of my property managers use as well. So I know it's fantastic. So make sure your manager uses a quality software. Be careful doing business with friends. That was the takeaway from that 36 unit. But also look at the P&L. Keep track of the profit and loss. That's a very easy report, even if you're not financial literate. That is just income and expenses, and that's it. So it's very easy to digest. Be prepared to manage the manager. I said that. I don't know if you like that. You kind of laughed at me a little bit. Look for distress if you're looking for cash flow. Cash flow is not easy to find. And I think that's very common across most markets just because of the softening in the rental market and softening in values. So I think that is right. You said look for distress. We talked about many different ways that you could find the distress, but you said it might take 50 to 100 offers or 100 deals to look at. to find that one that's going to be the right fit. And then monitor the environment. And what you meant by that was maybe there's changing inventory levels. Maybe there's pricing pressure from new construction buildings or other inventory coming onto the market. So you're looking at very local, like a very micro environment. But you can look at the macro environment too. So just anything in the environment, keep an eye on that and make sure you're priced correctly. So how did I do? Yeah.
Speaker #1
That sounds exactly right. Sounds fantastic. One piece of advice that I would give is to really dive into creative finance in situations like Miami. I guess, involved or if you don't know what creative finance is, I'm a fan of kind of like Pace Morby. He didn't create it, but he's kind of like known for it. I highly recommend diving into that because there are situations where you can't do conventional or maybe you don't have like $100,000 in cash to put down that you can look at creative finance for, seller finance deal, something like that. And you can actually basically give them the price they want. If they give you the terms that you need and you could do a deal that way and it may cash flow a lot better than what you would do conventional, especially in an environment where the rents are dropping a little bit. You know, so, yeah, that would be my piece of advice. Really dive into creative finance. They could definitely help you out.
Speaker #0
I love it. That's a great one. All right, man. Winvest Management. How do we get hold of you?
Speaker #1
Our website, www.winvestmanagement.com. You can find us there. We have a LinkedIn. We have a Instagram. We have an X account. We have Facebook. I highly recommend just to check us out online. Website, though. We'll message you right back. We can hop on a call and I'll be able to help however I can.
Speaker #0
Free consultations.
Speaker #1
Free consultations, baby.
Speaker #0
All right.
Speaker #1
Absolutely.
Speaker #0
All right. Well, I know you got a lot going on and you're building this. Sounds like a pretty successful management company. I know it's not easy to get to 50 doors when you're just getting started. I know you were doing it before that, but you still accomplished that in six months. So you're busy. You still join me for 45 minutes. Thank you so much.
Speaker #1
Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and thank you for having me.
Speaker #0
Yeah, of course. For the listener, you have other podcasts you could be listening to, but you chose the Real Estate Educators podcast. And for that, I am so grateful. Thank you. I know you got some value out of this episode like I did. So Give me a five-star review, share it with a friend, and I hope you make this day a great one. I really hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. If you did, please be sure to follow and leave a five-star review. Oh yeah, and tell a friend.

Description

Buying a great investment property is only half the battle. Managing it well is what determines whether it becomes a wealth-building asset, or a financial headache.

In this episode of the Real Estate Educators Podcast, Kevin Amolsch talks with Joseph Hunike, Principal at WinVest Management in Miami, Florida.

Whether you own one rental or an entire portfolio, this episode offers practical advice on protecting your investment and maximizing long-term cash flow.

TIMESTAMPS

Connect with Joseph Hunike:

Website: WinVestManagement.com

Learn more about professional property management, multifamily operations, rental property optimization, and investment consulting in South Florida.

Learn more about Pine Financial Group:

pinefinancialgroup.com

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
There's a humongous demand for good property management in Miami. Florida in general is huge for property management and real estate. It's like, I mean, for me, it's like one of the top things down here. Everybody does it. So, yeah, I would say make sure that you're profitable and make sure that your friends know what they're doing. And otherwise, it might not be best to do business with them. It's good. with eviction laws down here. It's not like California or somewhere else where it takes forever. So Florida is a very business, like landlord, owner-friendly state. That's why I love it so much. We're in negotiations. We're investing in real estate. They're winning. They're making money.
Speaker #1
What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Real Estate Educators Podcast, where we provide the education you can build on. I am your host, Kevin Amalsh. We are back. We're having so much fun with this podcast. We're helping real estate investors. and real estate educators. Are you out there building a portfolio or fixing and flipping, or are you out there providing content to other investors? This is the podcast for you. I have another special guest with me this week, a little newer to the business, but I'm excited to get to know him a little bit and learn what he's doing down there in Florida. So Joseph Unikey, I think I got that right. Welcome to the show, man.
Speaker #0
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker #1
So I know you've been doing three-ish years in property management. Now you're a principal at Windvest Management. I know you have a big passion for helping deal structure and management and helping your clients out. So that's why I wanted to have you on the show. But take me back, man. You're still fairly new to the industry, way after COVID. So you weren't even doing it during that time. But what made you get started in property management?
Speaker #0
Okay. So I originally... got my degree in industrial distribution from East Carolina University in North Carolina. That was a long time ago. I graduated in 2017. I did logistics for a long time. I've always wanted to get into real estate. I moved around a lot, South Carolina, Tampa, and North Carolina, and finally made my way down to Miami about five years ago. And that's when my real estate journey started. I basically started going around to real estate, meet up groups and speaking with people, networking. just growing my organization. And basically, I met two other guys and we got a property management company started. This was like a previous property management company. It was called Threshold. I currently am a principal with WinFest, but I've been doing it for three years. The first company, basically, me and two other guys started from, I think it was like five, six units. And we grew that to about 130 units. And did that for about two years and then went my own way with WinFest. But we've been active since the beginning of this year, January, and we're at 50 units. So, yeah, just trying to get as many doors as we possibly can and helping our clients. And there's a humongous demand for good property management in Miami. Florida in general is huge. For property management and real estate, it's like I mean, for me, it's like one of the top things down here. Everybody does it. But just wonderful service. There's a lot of characters in Miami. The service level is it's different than the rest of the United States, and that goes for property management. We've taken over accounts where owners haven't heard from their property managers in two weeks. They live in a different country. The property. managers haven't sent them money in two months. So it's wild. It's really wild. I call it, it's not standard for the rest of the United States, but that's fantastic for us in WinVest Management because we can fulfill that demand and bring people great service. And that's what my mission is, really. I want to help people, and real estate is the way that I'm doing that. I'm serving these people. So we have a lot of great clients. Some of them are from all over the place. Ukraine, New York, Argentina, like everywhere. Turkey, like the country, Russia. So Miami, it's very, very diverse. You get, it's like an international city. But yeah, I absolutely love it. We're growing, like I said, we're at 50 units since the beginning of the year. And, you know, we would like to at least double that. or more by next year, and we believe we can do that. We have the strategies and systems in place to do that. You just got to... work your tail off and keep bringing good service to clients down here. So yeah, that's a little bit of the backstory of us. I'm from North Carolina originally, but I love real estate and I've been doing it for basically the last three years down here. So that's kind of like my background so far.
Speaker #1
So, okay. And then you migrated to the management side, which I got to tell you, man, that's the hardest part of being a real estate investor or real estate investing. And we talked a little bit before we hit record. I've got a portfolio kind of spread out a little bit, and I have some that I manage myself and some I outsource. And I could tell you the property management is the hardest part. So you're right in that there's a need for it. So if you're good, like you say you are, I'm sure you're going to have no trouble doubling that door count by the end of the year.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And for me, I mean, I've worked in different industries before, like the transportation industry. For me... like property management, it's like, if you're, if you kind of like grew up in real estate or if, if that's what you've done, it may be difficult, but for me, it's, it's the easiest thing I've ever done. I like, it just is. And I absolutely love it. Um, but yeah, there, there's a lot, there's a lot that goes into it and there's a lot of stuff that you have to deal with. So, um, I completely get it, but I can deal with it. Yeah.
Speaker #1
I had, dude, I had three floods in three different units within a six week period. And that just that just happened. Oh, wow. That's not so fun. Two of them had property management in place. But still, as the owner, you have to get involved with something like that. You have insurance and you have all of these things. So I don't know. Oh, yeah. I just shared that with you. But yeah, it's it's it can be challenging.
Speaker #0
It is. It is very, very challenging. And I mean, like some of some of the accounts that we've taken over like this, like Miami, it's it is the Wild West down here. They're like I said that we had a client. in Turkey, like the country. He called us, found us through our website, and he had not spoken to his property manager. And it was like the last two weeks and had not received money. This was a class C five-unit building in Opelika, Florida. And obviously this client lived in a different country. He had not received any money at all in like the last two months. And the property manager had He basically used his own funds to try to update this five-unit building because it was a C-class. It was falling apart, low income. There were some Section 8 tenants there and had not communicated that to the owner at all. So he was basically collecting the rent money back to himself after he had used his own funds to fix like one of the units. I mean it was bad. I mean it was like leaking, and it was not good for tenants. He was basically just trying to get tenants in there. Apparently, none of this was communicated to the owner at all. And the owner's calling us like, oh, my God, get over there. I don't know what's going on. I haven't received any money. I haven't talked to this guy. And this is my purpose, right? Helping people out. So I'm like, of course, obviously, I'm going to go over there and talk to the property manager and get things straight. And we switched the management over to us. And we did get everything straight. things like that, that like, I mean, I guess they happen everywhere, but I've had my fair share here in Miami. It's a little bit more than what I believe for other places. Yeah. So, I mean, there's all different types of things that you have to deal with. Absolutely.
Speaker #1
So you talk about in your intake form here, you talked about like your investment strategy and how you like to help your clients with investment strategy. That could mean a lot of different things. So tell me, Joseph, what do you do? What do you mean when you say help us with our investment strategy?
Speaker #0
Yeah. So if somebody is going to be investing down here, it doesn't matter what it is. Like, for instance, we have 36 units in North Miami. This client is from New York. He was working with a friend of his, a friend. And that friend had let his 36 units just basically rot. When we came in over there, it was, I think it was like seven or eight vacant units. And then there was four or five other units where the tenants, they weren't even paying at all. So, I mean, it was, I can't even remember how many units it was. I want to say about probably. 10 or 11 units in total that he was getting no money from. It's like a quarter of his 36 units. This is also a C-class building in North Miami. He had invested this. He had bought this, and his friend had let him down. There was no property management software. They were doing everything through the bank account. He had a groundskeeper going around collecting checks from the tenants. There was no software for them to pay. There was no P&L statement for the owner. And I'm just like, oh, my God. Like, what is going on here? So with that building. We came in and basically leased it up as quick as we could. We did have to do some value add on the units. The units needed to be touched up, repainted. This was like light value add, maybe like two to three K per unit to repaint it and get it looking decent where we could get people in there, get it leased up, brought in property management software. We use RentVine. The owner could at least know what was going on with his P&L. You need to know how much money you're making with your investment, with your building. And we got it leased up and running like it should after about seven, eight months. It took a little bit, but things like that. So this guy had invested in this building. He had a friend, and we came in and fixed up for him. And now that building is very profitable for him. you I guess I'm kind of giving like an operational perspective, not so much like a number perspective, but he was losing a lot of money before. Now he's making money, and he actually can see that on his P&L. So I'm just keeping it very simple.
Speaker #1
Okay. So the strategy is hire you and let you do your thing.
Speaker #0
Well, I mean it's a little bit more than that. I mean obviously we'll go over the details, the data, the P&L. We'll look at the building. In this case, this was like a... an emergency case where it's like, okay, we need just somebody decent to come in there and like to fix this up. I mean, he has a mortgage, like he has payments that he has to make. And he was not breaking even. He was losing a lot of money to begin with. So, you know, all the payments, the mortgage and the water and everything, he's just spending money and it's not coming in. So, yeah, I mean, we went over all that with him, but basically, yes, we came in and fixed everything up for him. So statements are good. Tenants are in place. We did have to update the parking. There was no assigned space or anything like that. So there was random people coming in from the building next to us and parking and taking everybody's parking. So it's been a process. It's been a process. But basically from bankrupt to making money, it took about a year. It took about a year to do that. And it's scary. He owns multiple properties, so he doesn't live in this area. He lives in New York, and he needed a trusted property manager to come in and fix things up for him, and that's exactly what we did.
Speaker #1
Okay. So I'm trying to extract a lesson here that we could learn from you for our listeners. So for the listener's benefit, what's a lesson from that experience from the investor's perspective?
Speaker #0
If you're going to do business with friends, make sure that the friends know what they're doing, number one. Also, you need to know your P&L. You need to know what money is coming in and what money is going out. I would say those are pretty simple. If you buy something, you've got to make money on it. You don't want to lose money on it, right? And that's why we all invest in things. So, yeah. I would say make sure that you're profitable and make sure that your friends know what they're doing. And otherwise, it might not be best to do business with them.
Speaker #1
So it's okay to hire a professional maybe?
Speaker #0
Yes, it is absolutely okay to hire a professional property management company just like Winvest. And if anybody listening to this call does have issues like that where they don't know what's going on, they're losing money, you can definitely consult us and we'll hop on a call with you for free to go over everything and see what's going on and basically fix it up for you if we can. We'll let you know exactly what's going on. We're an honest company too. We're going to tell you exactly what's going on. There's no fluff. It's straight. It's straightforward, which is good. They'll kind of fluff it up and try to keep you happy, and they're not straight with you about what's going on, which can lead to problems over time.
Speaker #1
All right. So if I was working with a property manager, how would I flesh that out? How do I know if my manager is being honest?
Speaker #0
Well, I mean, you can look at the P&Ls. I mean, you can see what's being leased, the times, how long it takes to lease, and then the communication. I mean, if somebody's giving us a call, we're picking up that phone immediately or texting. We use Rentvine. And so. All of our owners can just message us and rent Vine 2. And I mean, they're going to get immediate response. I mean, if not like an hour or less, you're going to be able to tell. If somebody's kind of fluffing it a little bit, they're probably going to be lacking on like software, P&Ls. They might not be able to tell you how many days it's going to take to market. Yeah, stuff like that. I mean, even for an amateur. Basically, I don't even know how to explain it. I mean you should be able to tell immediately. I mean it's like just I mean the software and speaking with the person, just getting that general knowledge. The property manager should be able to explain to you exactly what's going to happen, and then you see that in the P&Ls.
Speaker #1
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is ask questions, and it's okay to ask your property manager questions. But definitely stay on top of your asset. Like I made a mistake once, Joseph, where my property manager leased my property out as one side of a duplex. They leased this one unit out to a Section 8 tenant. And they didn't verify, man. They didn't verify that they were on Section 8. So these tenants move in and they were like, well, where's our freaking rent money? And there's no rent money. We're like, well, go to Section 8. You said they're approved and they weren't approved. So we ended up having an immediate eviction. Now they stood behind it and they… They took care of the problem, but gosh, maybe as the owner of that property, I should have said, okay, let me see the approval package and where is the documentation that they're approved for this. That was my mistake, and that's 20 years in the business. I still made that mistake, but lesson there, right?
Speaker #0
Absolutely, and I've actually had to deal with something like that before. We took over an account, and those owners, they had just been basically duped. in that same situation. There was a Section 8 tenant that was trying to move into their place from this other place, and they never even got the package approved to be moved. So they signed the lease and everything, and the agent, even the agent, didn't even check it. And this was all before we took over the account, and the owner was really mad because it had been an extended period before placing a tenant. The agent came to the owners, you know, this tenant wants to move in, you know, here's the lease signed. I think the tenant even like paid like the deposit. And then when the time came to actually, you know, start, you know, like pay the first month's rent, like move in, it was like, oh, you know, like your package hasn't even been approved. Like you can't even move out of the last place that you were in. And like nobody said anything at all. And I'm just sitting there like, you know, on our free consultations, just listening to them. And I'm just like, oof, you know.
Speaker #1
It seems like such an obvious thing like, oh, my manager should do this. In my specific example, I just assumed it was happening. So I guess the lesson here is don't assume. Ask the question.
Speaker #0
Yes, yes, exactly. And with Section 8, that is something and it is kind of like open. If you don't ask that question, it's kind of like you do kind of like assume. Obviously, you never want to assume anything, but you kind of assume that, okay, it's fine. Section 8 is moving in there, but no. like there's like a whole like package and stuff and there's like a whole approval process that has to be done. So it's just very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker #1
So sometimes you got to manage your manager is the lesson, I think. All right, man. So tell me, tell me about the market. Look, I guess, let me ask it this way. It's scary out there right now. There's interest rates. We're supposed to come down. Now they're talking about maybe increasing them. So that puts cap rates up. Right. and you know As we know, if cap rates go up, your values come down. So do I want to be entering an asset knowing that cap rates might be increasing or cash flow going down because my rate is high? I don't know that right now is the right time to be buying rental properties. What's your feedback?
Speaker #0
Well, it depends on well, there's some people that are heavy action takers, and they never accept it's not the right time to buy real estate. With that said, here in Miami, things are very hot. So it's very high. So let me give you some more background. We have a mix of very high-end condos, like $50,000 for rent, penthouses, stuff like that. We also have a C-class. We're really focusing our portfolio more on the luxury high-end, A-class, B-class. But right now, we kind of get to see it all. And right now, the luxury market in Miami is getting hit pretty hard. Like, for instance, there was a penthouse condo that we had in Coral Gables. That rent, it was like $12,500 originally. This was, I want to say, about seven, eight months ago. And the last price that we were at to competitively put somebody in there, it was like $9,000. And there was a lot of units in that building. that were like that. So the placement, it was hard. And obviously that owner was not happy. He was losing money on his mortgage taxes, stuff like that. And it's really hard. His situation, he was basically just trying to invest money anywhere. He didn't really think about it. He was just like, I'm just going to buy some condos in Miami. And he didn't really think about how the market works. Rents don't always go up, just like you were saying. I mean, if the interest rates go up, your valuations are going to start to come down. If your interest rates go down, your valuations are going to go up because then you can borrow more money at lower prices. We have a lot of oversupply in the market right now too. There's a lot of different buildings that are being built. down here like Miami, Coral Gables, Surfside. So all this oversupply is bringing those prices down. And the owners, they don't like that, but it's the way it is. There's a market. There's nothing that we can do about it, right? If we're not competitive with that price, we're not going to get any action, any interest, inquiries, showings. In that unit, we've got to be competitive. Looping back to what you were saying, if you're going to invest, if you're going to try to acquire something in this market, you have to be smart about it. I was looking at a fourplex the other day in Davie. It's really it was like I think like 1.4 for like a fourplex. So it's very expensive down here right now. So conventional loans, if you're going to do that, you have to put down a good amount of money. I would say probably like 30%, 35%, maybe like 40% right now. You could probably get a deal if it was like seller finance or something like that. If you're going to I mean, you really have to put a lot of money down if you want cash flow right now. Like you're not going to be able to put down 15%, 20% like that. in other states, in Indianapolis. like Midwest, you can put down a lot less, get a better loan, and acquire a property that way. It's not going to happen down here. It's going to have to be like seller finance or something like that. So if you're trying to acquire, it's going to be a little bit harder down here unless you're going to put more money down if you're going the conventional way, if that makes sense.
Speaker #1
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Speaker #0
Well, I mean, down here, I mean, you're going to get a lot more appreciation. And there's a lot of people that are moving down here. It is a fantastic business environment. People from Texas and all over the country are coming down here, so everything is appreciating a lot faster. If you're going for appreciation, yeah, I think this will be fine. I'm not seeing a lot of cash flow on smaller deals. On the bigger deals, and when I say bigger, probably like 150 units and up, 200 units. Yeah, there'd probably be some more deals coming in there because there's a lot less people that can actually handle those situations. We specifically stick with about 100 units and less for our multifamily. So I didn't really say what we do, but we do specifically condos, single family, residential and multifamily. And that multifamily, we do try to stay below 100 units. And that's that's kind of like our niche down here and what we what we do focus on. People will always be investing, but you're going to have to look a little bit harder or you're going to have to do a seller finance deal or something to really get quality cash flow below that 100 units. I mean maybe even if two or three units were burnt at the building or something, it's got to be in distress. Maybe the previous owners have like a a rate that's not fixed and they're in distress. So if you're looking for distress and you can really focus on that pain with a seller, they're going to be selling at a loss. You would pick it up, something like that. And those deals, I mean, you really got to look for them. And I mean, when I say look for them, you're probably looking at like 50 deals, maybe 100 deals to find a good one, one good one.
Speaker #1
Okay, so you gave me an example of that guy that had 30-something units. I don't remember the exact number, 32 maybe. And 11 of them or so were not paying at all, right? And some of them were tenanted without a paying tenant, which is even worse because now you've got to get the tenant out before you can so that sounded like a pretty distressed property to me.
Speaker #0
Yes, yes. It was absolutely distressed, yeah. And he it was 36 units, North Miami, C-class building. Like it's the building is not that bad. They just the friend of his, they weren't doing what you're supposed to on leasing. So like obviously tenants are supposed to submit an application. You check their background. You check their credit. You check their income and make sure that they can actually afford the place. They're not criminals. Their credit is good. You want to put good tenants in there, and the tenants they had put in there, I think he was just throwing anybody in there that would That would do it. And yeah, we did have to evict. It was like four or five of the tenants that were not paying. And we did. I mean, we came in there. We did everything legally and we did it professionally, but we got them out. We got them out. It was relatively quickly. Florida is good with eviction laws down here. It's not like California or somewhere else where it takes forever. So Florida is a very business, like landlord, owner-friendly state. That's why I love it so much. But, yeah.
Speaker #2
They're good with the evictions, but not great with the foreclosure.
Speaker #0
Foreclosures take like a year. Yeah. I think so. That's a judicial state. But anyway, I digress. Okay. So if that property, for the listener's benefit here, if they found that property, like maybe here's an idea for the listener maybe to start thinking about. But if you're looking for a property like that in distress, before they find the property management company that could actually help them dig out of that hole, that was probably a motivated seller. I agree with you, Joseph. That probably is true. So maybe you could advertise to resend eviction filings because that's all public record, yeah?
Speaker #1
Oh, yeah, yeah, foreclosures, yeah, anything like that where the seller's distressed. Yeah, I mean if they're losing money and they're trying to get rid of it, yes, like that's a motivated seller, absolutely. And obviously, if you're an investor, it's all based on the cash flow, right? So if, you know, eight units are vacant and then the other, you know, what I say, four or five were. Not paying, that's like half the cash flow. So if you could actually buy a property like that and then put tenants in there and fill it up and increase that cash flow, you're going to appreciate that property. You're going to make a really good return depending on how long you want to hold it, maybe two or three years, maybe a little bit less, maybe longer, depending on what strategy is. But quickly with that, you just lease it up and you can. Turn it around pretty quickly. So yeah, I mean if you're an investor, that was exactly what you're looking for. He had bought the building. It was like I think two years prior, and basically the friend just kind of the opposite of appreciation. Yeah, it was depreciated by the friend, and then we had to bring it back up to where it normally was. But yeah.
Speaker #0
So those eviction, recent eviction filings, that is a powerful list to market to. So another way you could have found this specific seller if they wanted to sell would be an absentee owner because you said they were in New York, right? So that's a pretty easy list to put together as well. So just a couple of nuggets there, a couple of ideas for the listener. All right, Joseph, what else can you share with us? You did mention that you wanted to talk about how to adapt to a changing economic environment. So how do investors adapt to that? But tell me what you mean, man. What do you mean by changing economic environment?
Speaker #1
Well, just like right now, what I was talking about, like with the condos and stuff, you know, you have to monitor the environment. So if you're going to be buying whatever it is, a condo, a house, multifamily, if you have a brand new skyrise going up beside it, you have to take that into consideration, right? Also, the age of the building. If you have a brand new building and then you have an old building beside it, you know, where are the tenants going to go to? so If you're going to invest in a property, you have to make sure that you know exactly what's going to happen. And I mean, honestly, I keep talking about this 36 unit. It's a great example for a lot of things that you're saying. There's a brand new building that's going up right beside it that's big. So this is kind of like going into the oversupply that I was talking about. They're going to be doing a lease up. So I'm sure their leases will. probably be a little bit more than what we're leasing at. So in the Miami area right now, it's right about 1,500 for one bed, one bath, roughly 608 square feet. And this is like a C class building. This is a little bit lower income, but all the tenants in that area, they're going to start gravitating towards those nicer buildings. So you're either going to have to make your units nicer. Or you're going to have to drop your rents down to keep those tenants. And I want to say over the last year, the rents, they have been coming down a little bit. Two years ago, we were putting people in there at, it was like $1,700, $1,675, no problem. Two weeks, three weeks. And then over the last year, it's like incrementally. ticking down a little bit. We're like $1,500 and we're trying to keep people in there. And when the price kind of slips down, that changing economic environment that you're talking about, if something nicer is cheaper right down the road, your tenant might move out and move to that place. So you've got to stay competitive. And basically for the last year, we've been keeping rents the same. We have not been increasing them because We don't want to drive the tenants out. We want to keep them there. But the year before. We could bump it up $200, $300, no problem, and get people in there. So yeah, I mean if changing economic environments, I mean it's I love what you're saying.
Speaker #0
I agree with you. If you have a brand-new building, let's just use that as the example. That will get absorbed. We don't know how long, right? And once it's all rented out or fully stable, then your pricing can be a better match. But while you're dealing with that, I'm going to call it a problem. Joseph, I assume you want to drop your price down significantly to keep those tenants and attract new tenants from that building until it's absorbed. And then you can bring them back up because look, if you're telling me 15 or $1,600 a month in rent, that thing goes vacant for one month, you lose an entire year of income, right? So just drop it down a hundred bucks and you'd save yourself that full, you know, the full turnover. Absolutely.
Speaker #1
Yeah. You want to keep those tenants in there. Yeah.
Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, even if it's a hundred or 200 bucks, it's still worth it because it'll take, I mean, trying to explain what I'm trying to explain, but a $1,500 per month, if you drop it $100, you don't want to do that as an owner, but that you just saved yourself 15 months. So you don't want that vacant for one month or two months. If it's two months, then you have 30 months to make up for it. Right. So it's very important to keep the pricing correct. So I do appreciate what you're saying there.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And every time a tenant moves out, I mean, we're still doing those value adds. So, you know, like two to three K. Yeah, exactly. Paint, like a little bit updated kitchen, updated bathrooms, like acrylicing, making it white, making people want, you know, a very, very pleasant, warm environment when a tenant walks in where they're like, okay, you know, like maybe, you know, the outside of the building is not the best, but like this is comforting. Like I could live here. It's nice. Like the kitchen's nice. It's updated. We've got new cabinets. The bathroom, it's white, you know, nice and clean. So, yeah, I mean, we're trying to stay as competitive as possible. And that new high-rise going up beside us, I mean, everything's going to be completely brand new. So it's like, ah,
Speaker #0
you know. So a thought, you know, virtual staging or actual some light staging would help also. There's no better bang for the buck than that. All right, man. Well, I'm going to, we're wrapping up here. So what I'd like to do is go through my notes. I took some notes. What I do, Joseph, on this podcast is write down things that I learned when I was talking with you. So things, my takeaways, and hopefully that helps the listener have some takeaways as well. So I'd love you to listen to my notes as I rattle those off to you and let me know what I missed and what you think I value you added that I missed. Okay. And then after that, if you could give me a final piece of advice for a real estate investor. Maybe they're looking for a rental property in Miami. Maybe, I don't know, somewhere else. But if you could give us a piece of advice, that would really be great. Yeah, absolutely. We started talking about your story and how you were getting into this several years ago. And then you started WinVest. I think it's called WinVest, right? Yeah, WinVest Management. And you went up to 50 doors. And one of the things you said over and over was make sure your property management company has good software. Use RentVine. Rintvine is one that one of my property managers use as well. So I know it's fantastic. So make sure your manager uses a quality software. Be careful doing business with friends. That was the takeaway from that 36 unit. But also look at the P&L. Keep track of the profit and loss. That's a very easy report, even if you're not financial literate. That is just income and expenses, and that's it. So it's very easy to digest. Be prepared to manage the manager. I said that. I don't know if you like that. You kind of laughed at me a little bit. Look for distress if you're looking for cash flow. Cash flow is not easy to find. And I think that's very common across most markets just because of the softening in the rental market and softening in values. So I think that is right. You said look for distress. We talked about many different ways that you could find the distress, but you said it might take 50 to 100 offers or 100 deals to look at. to find that one that's going to be the right fit. And then monitor the environment. And what you meant by that was maybe there's changing inventory levels. Maybe there's pricing pressure from new construction buildings or other inventory coming onto the market. So you're looking at very local, like a very micro environment. But you can look at the macro environment too. So just anything in the environment, keep an eye on that and make sure you're priced correctly. So how did I do? Yeah.
Speaker #1
That sounds exactly right. Sounds fantastic. One piece of advice that I would give is to really dive into creative finance in situations like Miami. I guess, involved or if you don't know what creative finance is, I'm a fan of kind of like Pace Morby. He didn't create it, but he's kind of like known for it. I highly recommend diving into that because there are situations where you can't do conventional or maybe you don't have like $100,000 in cash to put down that you can look at creative finance for, seller finance deal, something like that. And you can actually basically give them the price they want. If they give you the terms that you need and you could do a deal that way and it may cash flow a lot better than what you would do conventional, especially in an environment where the rents are dropping a little bit. You know, so, yeah, that would be my piece of advice. Really dive into creative finance. They could definitely help you out.
Speaker #0
I love it. That's a great one. All right, man. Winvest Management. How do we get hold of you?
Speaker #1
Our website, www.winvestmanagement.com. You can find us there. We have a LinkedIn. We have a Instagram. We have an X account. We have Facebook. I highly recommend just to check us out online. Website, though. We'll message you right back. We can hop on a call and I'll be able to help however I can.
Speaker #0
Free consultations.
Speaker #1
Free consultations, baby.
Speaker #0
All right.
Speaker #1
Absolutely.
Speaker #0
All right. Well, I know you got a lot going on and you're building this. Sounds like a pretty successful management company. I know it's not easy to get to 50 doors when you're just getting started. I know you were doing it before that, but you still accomplished that in six months. So you're busy. You still join me for 45 minutes. Thank you so much.
Speaker #1
Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and thank you for having me.
Speaker #0
Yeah, of course. For the listener, you have other podcasts you could be listening to, but you chose the Real Estate Educators podcast. And for that, I am so grateful. Thank you. I know you got some value out of this episode like I did. So Give me a five-star review, share it with a friend, and I hope you make this day a great one. I really hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. If you did, please be sure to follow and leave a five-star review. Oh yeah, and tell a friend.

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