Transitioning from Residential to Commercial

John Harcar (00:01.4)
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, John Harcar. And today we are with Jarred Elmar, and we’re going to be talking about that transition investors make from residential to the commercial space. Guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, entrepreneurs, and service providers 2 to 5x their business by providing tools and resources that help build the businesses they want to build and live those lives that they want to live. So Jarred, welcome to our show.

Jarred Elmar (00:28.931)
Thanks John, I appreciate you having me.

John Harcar (00:30.744)
Awesome. Yeah, I’m super excited to talk about that transition because I know and I hear a lot about folks making that move, mistakes they might have made. But before we get into the weeds on all that, tell us a little bit about yourself, right? Tell us about where you started, how you got into real estate, et cetera, and what’s got you here.

Jarred Elmar (00:49.603)
I got into it almost out of necessity. I dropped out of high school. I had a very challenging upbringing. died of drugs. Mom developed addictions. I had every challenge growing up. And I took odd jobs and I was on my own at 17. I never looked back. I got a bunch of shitty roommates and realized that I had to earn a living. So I realized that I had to act for sales. So I was looking for any sales commission driven.

know, company, business out there or job out there. And it all happened, the real estate, you know, epiphany happened in 1999 with a 2 a.m. infomercial called, it was buy houses with no money down by Carlton Sheets. And I’m sure if listen to it, if you’re old enough to remember, if they’re old enough to remember that’s, was, he was always, he was a late night infomercial guy back then. And

John Harcar (01:36.354)
Carlton Sheets, yeah. I was wondering if that’s what you were gonna say. yeah, I remember, yeah.

John Harcar (01:46.605)
Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (01:48.131)
I bought the course on an installment sale. I worked that course as hard as anyone could. I got a guy to take a chance on me, owned a single family home. He was in his third eviction for the year and just got tired of taking out the trash. I had $1,500 to my name. I put $1,500 down on the house and he held paper, owner financed the rest of it. Got the riffraff tenant out, fixed it up, raised the rent about $300 a month with a good tenant. And then around that time,

John Harcar (02:10.638)
Sweet.

Jarred Elmar (02:17.93)
Wachovia, which is now Wells Fargo, Wachovia was allowing me to tap equity out of these houses. So I tapped equity out of that house, about $20,000 within eight or nine months, and then bought another course and found out all the value is on the courthouse steps. So I learned how to buy all these houses in tax sales throughout all the counties. At the time, it was in Atlanta, Georgia. And I assembled, I amassed about 65 single family homes.

John Harcar (02:20.739)
Right.

John Harcar (02:35.054)
Hmm.

Jarred Elmar (02:46.396)
all with tapping equity going into the next one, tapping equity going to the next one. And I got up to 65 houses, rented them out, had a good portfolio of, know, good, decent cash flow. And then in 2007, I got an unsolicited offer to sell 55 of the 65 houses. Little did I know GFC was right around the corner and it was the right time to sell. That allowed me to stockpile cash at the right time and also have proof of concept to whatever investors I was bringing in on the residential side.

John Harcar (02:46.678)
Wow.

John Harcar (03:07.574)
Mmm.

John Harcar (03:15.916)
Wow.

Jarred Elmar (03:16.556)
And that really set the trajectory or transition into commercial real estate. It was just the right time. All the REO started getting flushed through in 2009.

John Harcar (03:26.174)
So right before the market dumped, you had an offer come to you to buy it. I bet that guy who bought them wasn’t happy. mean, yeah, that’s crazy.

Jarred Elmar (03:34.302)
I had no plans on selling it, he gave me as Sam Zell would say the Godfather offer.

John Harcar (03:41.262)
Yeah, make it off of Canva Fuse. Yeah, there you go. Alright, so you had all these properties and you said he sold 55 and you have about 10 left. Why not just take all that cash and start rebuilding that again?

Jarred Elmar (03:43.01)
It’s enough.

Jarred Elmar (03:50.082)
I had to.

Jarred Elmar (03:56.161)
I was running around like crazy when you have single family homes and a lot of your house flippers know this. You you’re not buying the same faucet for 55 houses like you would an apartment complex. You’re not buying the same fixtures. So there was no real way to get economies of scale with a single family home portfolio. The natural evolution is probably multifamily. Get into a 10 plex, 20 plex or larger. And that’s basically what happened. My first commercial…

asset was in 2010. It was an REO and it was 156 unit apartment complex. I knew the market. I knew the pockets, the good pockets from the bad pockets in Atlanta because my houses were scattered all over. I got a few investors to take a chance on me transitioning into commercial with 156 unit apartment complex, which I consider commercial if it’s larger than 20 units.

John Harcar (04:49.297)
yeah, for sure.

Jarred Elmar (04:51.234)
And it was, you know, it was almost, we were on the basement floor in 2010. You almost could throw a dart and make money on anything. So I paid less than 10,000 a door for 156 units, like 1.575 million on that property. And that was, it was the right time to get into it. It was the wrong class of multifamily. was a class C. I had murders, fires, strong arm robbery.

John Harcar (04:56.707)
Mm.

You

John Harcar (05:16.746)
Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (05:17.758)
It’s deal I would never do again, and it probably wasn’t the right deal for me to do in the beginning. But I think the most valuable thing I had back then is I was too stupid or too ignorant to know that I can actually fail and fall on my ass. So I took a chance and…

John Harcar (05:33.548)
Well, I’m to say that Class C had to have been an incredible learning. I mean, you got thrown into the fire. Yeah, about to say. I mean, that is like stepping in. You most people would buy a turnkey and then, you know, their troubles are maybe just people not paying, you know, not murders and all this other stuff happening around that joint. Wow. So that was that your hook? Was that your needle in the arm that I’m sold on big units commercial?

Jarred Elmar (05:39.734)
I got a bachelor’s degree in multi-family after that deal.

Jarred Elmar (05:52.866)
Yeah, murder in 30 days. was, never forget it.

Jarred Elmar (06:02.466)
Yeah, well, you know, again, it’s about scale. So 156 unit, we paid 10,000 a door. was going to be difficult to fall out of the basement floor and basement window. And we held it for 16 months. I had nine investors. I structured it in such a way that they were ultimately my equity partners, but they were also my debt partners. We didn’t take any any bank debt. that was the real the real reason why we didn’t take any bank debt is because in 2010, I was unfinanceable.

John Harcar (06:32.814)
Hmm.

Jarred Elmar (06:33.05)
The bank wasn’t going to take a chance on me back in those days, especially with no commercial experience. So I structured a deal where the investors ultimately became my bank. And we did it where it was, I think, 6 % interest is what I was paying them on the debt component. And every six months, their interest rate would go up 1%. So I kept the fire under my ass to fix this thing up and flip it as fast as possible. And that’s what we did. Inside of 16 months, we sold it for $18,000 a door.

John Harcar (06:38.381)
Right?

John Harcar (06:53.452)
Hmm.

John Harcar (06:57.526)
Yeah, for sure.

Jarred Elmar (07:02.496)
Now I had a good resume, had proof of concept with my investors, and off to the races with commercial. I did not feel that I can scale with that class of apartments. I should have kept multifamily in the repertoire, but I started focusing on retail, office, industrial, just trying to get a sense of what product type I felt like I can really build a business out of. I didn’t want to just be a rogue investor. I wanted to create a real estate investment business.

John Harcar (07:29.368)
Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (07:32.288)
And I knew we needed to streamline that and looking at other asset classes was really the way to do that at the time.

John Harcar (07:32.503)
Right.

John Harcar (07:38.432)
Okay, what do you think were some of the biggest challenges making that transition from residential to commercial?

Jarred Elmar (07:45.419)
Well, for me, residential, I had one or two partners that came in for a small percentage of the actual equity. With the commercial side, it was building an organic investor Rolodex to tap. We have 52 limited partners in one particular deal we have. So we bring in a lot of LPs. And to build that investor base,

took a long time. mean, it was a good 10 years of really building an investor base. And there’s a million ways to raise money. know, people have their funds and they go to institutional or private equity or family office. But we felt that with the biggest fear I had in commercial was concentration risk with any one tenant and concentration risk with any one investor. And that’s why we go after deals that are a bit more management intensive, which are smaller units within a larger complex. we have, you know, we’re spreading out our risk.

John Harcar (08:16.535)
Right.

John Harcar (08:36.707)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (08:42.274)
over a lot of different tenants. Same thing with my investor base. I like having 50 plus investors in a $30 million apartment deal that we just bought. If somebody leaves me at the altar for 250,000, it’s easy to slip somebody in for that. And that worked for us. That’s not set in stone. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s worked for us for 13 years now.

John Harcar (08:57.421)
Yeah.

John Harcar (09:04.462)
Okay, so what is your business looking like today? how many team members do you have? mean, give us the lowdown.

Jarred Elmar (09:13.154)
So today we have 12 employees, 10 here in the office based in Deerfield Beach, Florida, and a couple in Orlando where we’re pretty concentrated. Our portfolio is pretty concentrated in central Florida. We try to stay lean, but we manage everything internally. We do all the accounting in-house. And really the buck stops with us. It’s a lot of times with guys like us, operators or syndicators, whatever you want to call it, they usually will spend all the time

John Harcar (09:25.357)
Okay.

Jarred Elmar (09:43.178)
underwriting the deal, modeling the deal, closing on the deal, and then pawning it off to a third party property manager. That’s where we differ. We manage everything in house.

John Harcar (09:48.952)
bright.

John Harcar (09:53.23)
Oh, you do? OK, so that was going to be one of my questions is, OK, so what are the what’s the pros and cons about doing it in-house versus hiring at a PM?

Jarred Elmar (10:02.658)
The car, can start with the cons. Overhead walks on two legs. And it’s very difficult to stay lean and it’s very difficult to be even revenue neutral within that management arm. You we have fees coming from all the different partnerships we have, but those fees, really it’s a break even business in the management arm. And as soon as you buy another property, you gotta bring in another employee a lot of times and now you’re back in the red. So it’s a constant balancing act and at some point,

John Harcar (10:23.864)
Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (10:32.234)
that management arm becomes a profit center once you have enough square footage. And we’re at about 1.5, 1.6 million. We’re probably revenue neutral around 2 million square feet. So we have a little ways to go before we’re actually at breakeven. That’s the negative. But the positive is I know everything going on real time. When my investors call me, I know exactly what’s happening with that tenant, who vacated, who’s coming in, everything going on, I get updates.

John Harcar (10:43.255)
Okay.

Jarred Elmar (10:59.902)
much faster than somebody who has a third-party manager, it builds that trust and it’s much more interactive with my investors because I have that real-time data right away.

John Harcar (11:05.528)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (11:17.132)
We’re able to, we’ll have to hire new people as we get more square footed, but it’s less. It’s less than if we actually third-partied it, believe it or not. Because we have scale within the office that can manage those assets.

John Harcar (11:25.304)
Sure.

John Harcar (11:29.411)
Yep.

John Harcar (11:34.9)
OK. How many people are on your team?

Jarred Elmar (11:37.922)
We have 12 total, 10 in the office. Two in our satellite office in Orlando.

John Harcar (11:40.014)
OK, then anyway, OK, two other cases, but you’re all in Florida.

Jarred Elmar (11:45.315)
Yeah, we’re scattered throughout the southeast. mean, we’re looking at a deal in middle Tennessee. We have a few hundred thousand feet in Atlanta, Georgia, but we’re pretty much Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, Palm Beach County, Broward County. So we’re pretty concentrated in Florida. It’s, you know, my hometown. You know, it’s nice to buy stuff in our backyard, but there’s definitely lower hanging fruit and other markets in the southeast.

John Harcar (12:06.978)
got it okay and if I’m I’m wanting to get into commercial investing or you know make that transition kind of walk me through some of the first steps I need to do or maybe things I should do that you maybe wish you would have done.

Jarred Elmar (12:19.21)
It’s become an easy answer lately. There’s so much free information out there that it doesn’t cost any money. YouTube channels, podcasts like this, to learn and get bits and pieces. And look, at some point somebody’s gonna sell something. It’s gonna be somebody selling a mastermind class, or I’ll teach you how to buy an apartment complex, I’ll teach you how to get properties with no money down.

There’s all these different courses that you’re exposed to, but there’s so much free information to really get a sense of where you want to start. then there’s going to be a course for exactly that. Hell, I found a course back in 2000 that the value on single-family homes was in the courthouse steps. That was a pretty specific niche in the real estate game. And there’s a million courses. I do speaking engagements with Commercial Academy, which is a

John Harcar (12:55.596)
Yeah.

John Harcar (13:08.558)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (13:16.258)
basic to foremost authority for commercial real estate education. And they do boot camps, four day boot camps, know, quarterly throughout the country. And, you know, a lot of millionaires came out of that course because they, and they started as a plumber, as an attorney, as a doctor, or as a house flipper or a realtor. And they transitioned because they were in the right room with guys that really can help them along with coaching and capital and deal flow.

John Harcar (13:37.208)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

John Harcar (13:43.726)
Yeah, that’s huge. mean, to be in the right room with people that can shorten your learning curve. You know what I mean? Help bypass some of the mistakes that people make. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing? I talked to a guy earlier that was really into the industrial flex space. I didn’t know much about it. I mean, knew a little bit about it. But where do you see trends in the commercial real estate going or kind of the path where we could see it in the future?

Jarred Elmar (14:11.074)
That’s a big part of our business. do a lot of industrial and flex and small bay. Industrial has been, you know, because we have office, medical office, retail, multifamily, industrial, all in the portfolio. So we’re all over the map and we’re really opportunistic. back in 2019, I was really thinking of streamlining. was like, all right, do we just focus on industrial? Do we just focus on multifamily? And then COVID hit and

John Harcar (14:16.004)
okay.

John Harcar (14:27.17)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (14:41.248)
my retail, was really the outperformer in the portfolio, obviously died and industrial took off. So it was actually good that I had a balanced portfolio where certain assets carried other assets. These days, the opportunities are absolutely gonna be, not today, but probably in the next six months, we’re gonna see a lot of opportunities in multifamily. think anything 80s, 90s vintage going lower than that,

John Harcar (14:44.878)
John Harcar (15:05.324)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (15:10.434)
We wouldn’t do, and I got a million reasons why I wouldn’t do anything under 80s construction. But 80s, 90s vintage, there’s going to be a lot of pain right now. There’s a lot of bad loans on the bank’s books, and the banks are ignoring it, and they’re extending and pretending. And what will ultimately happen is the banks are going to have to purge those weaker borrowers, the ones that can’t turn the property around, the ones that don’t have liquidity and aren’t going to be able to really do what’s necessary to sustain and keep that pot, keep that

John Harcar (15:20.428)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (15:40.631)
property alive until the other side of this. And those are going to be the opportunities. And it’s going to be multifamily. Office also, know office is still a bad word, but you know, there’s 25 % of office product that is really good product and highly amenitized, great markets. Rents are only going in one direction over there. They’re getting higher rents now than they were, you five years ago, you know, before COVID. And the occupancy is very high.

John Harcar (15:46.094)
Yeah.

John Harcar (15:52.206)
You

John Harcar (15:58.604)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (16:05.719)
Right?

Jarred Elmar (16:09.538)
75 % of the office out there is probably obsolete and much of that is going to be, you know, raised and, you know, for a higher and better use. But office is definitely the area that we’re looking at now. It’s hard to find financing for it. So there’s some real stress now. Those that, you know, would probably, great assets that would probably not be selling, but loans are coming due and these guys can’t refinance for one reason or another.

John Harcar (16:20.174)
Hmm.

John Harcar (16:23.918)
Okay.

Jarred Elmar (16:38.275)
Those are where the opportunities are.

John Harcar (16:40.302)
Okay, and then I know you mentioned before I think are you using Hard money private money. What are you guys doing for your fund your finance?

Jarred Elmar (16:49.314)
We, everything is an equity raise. We get bank financing for sure. We, you know, we’re 60, 65 % loan to cost. And then the other, the 35 % equity slug or 40 % will kind of pass the hat as they say, we’ll put up 10%, we raise the other 90 % and then we have a promote structure on that 10 % that we put in. And then that’s worked for us and there’s a million different ways to model the deal, but we try to stay pretty consistent because we have a lot of repeat investors.

John Harcar (16:51.722)
Okay, okay.

John Harcar (16:57.07)
Okay.

John Harcar (17:10.178)
Got it, okay.

Jarred Elmar (17:18.55)
And it’s very easy to plug one into a new project if they’re interested because the numbers are the same, the investor summary is the same, everything’s very consistent.

John Harcar (17:28.62)
Yeah. Where do you, where are you seeing your business going? I know you mentioned office, right? You keep an eye on office or you haven’t thought, where do you see your business growing, expanding? mean, how does that outlook look for you guys?

Jarred Elmar (17:44.085)
It’s funny, mean, so just with office, we’re dusting off, I’m dusting off a lot of the old investment structures that I did or financial structures that I did early on. With the apartment deal, I couldn’t get bank debt. So I had a structure or something that made sense to an investor on the equity and on the debt side. So I’m dusting those type of models off and I’m going with, we’re looking at assets with no bank debt and we’ll look to refinance down the road.

John Harcar (18:12.312)
So like seller financing type of things or, you know, the type of creative type of structures.

Jarred Elmar (18:14.402)
Well, yeah, mean, initially we did owner financing out of necessity. I didn’t have money, I needed that. Today, we treat every deal as if it’s our first deal. We’re always trying to get owner financing. I want a friendly lender versus a bank lender. Banks aren’t your friend, but a lot of times the private lenders that use the property that they’re selling you as collateral

John Harcar (18:21.61)
Right. Yeah.

John Harcar (18:29.477)
Yeah

Jarred Elmar (18:43.362)
They don’t want the asset back. So if things happen like a COVID, they’re understanding more so than a bank would be. So we’re still going after owner financing. But, you know, and we’ll get creative. Maybe we’ll get first lien financing with a traditional lender and maybe a seller will take a small second. Maybe we’ll master lease it and with strike price to buy in the future and take over management right away. So there’s a lot of different ways we do it.

John Harcar (18:43.49)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (18:50.808)
True.

John Harcar (19:03.979)
Right.

Jarred Elmar (19:12.738)
But staying relevant and staying in my investors face with video updates, which is what we do on a monthly basis, helps when we’re in between deals. The investors know that we’re active. We’re looking at new deals because I’m in a camera once a month talking to my investors. Hopefully that answers your question. not sure.

John Harcar (19:20.078)
Okay.

John Harcar (19:34.648)
Good. Well, yeah, no, it does great. And it’s important to have that relationship, especially when you’re dealing with investors. What do you think is holding you back from making a next jump leap step, whatever that might be? Is it money? Is it time? Is it staff?

Jarred Elmar (19:53.987)
It’s definitely deal flow and we have guys pounding the phones in the office talking to building owners direct letter campaigns that go out. So we’re in of course the brokerage community bringing a lot of most majority of the asset the deals to us. But they’re run-of-the-mill deals. There’s no value to be had. It’s sellers that are still trying to get last year’s pricing, know, when rates were lower.

John Harcar (20:06.424)
Sure.

John Harcar (20:17.613)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (20:19.474)
It’s tough right now. There’s a big disparity between what a seller is willing to sell it for and what a buyer believes that the property is worth. So that’ll flush itself out. There’ll be some price discovery. And I think there’s going to be a lot of volume and real good deals the second half of the year. But right now, it’s kind of a still be patient and know.

John Harcar (20:27.662)
Yeah.

John Harcar (20:46.254)
Yeah, hold on for a minute. It’s a lot of uncertainty still going on. So cool. If I want to get into commercial, what advice would you give? mean, what are a couple of main things that you would suggest someone do to get that step going?

Jarred Elmar (20:49.58)
Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (20:53.346)
And it.

Jarred Elmar (21:01.984)
I’ll definitely look at YouTube. There’s a lot of useful channels specifically for commercial real estate investing.

John Harcar (21:07.32)
Do I just type in commercial investing or what do I mean? Okay.

Jarred Elmar (21:09.986)
commercial real estate investing. There’s a million self-proclaimed gurus out there. the one that, I mean, again, the one I can advocate for because I got my start from them is a commercial academy. that’s a J. Scheele puts that program on. you have 100 people that started with houses or flipping or this or that, that have amassed.

John Harcar (21:15.022)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (21:27.895)
Okay.

Jarred Elmar (21:37.97)
know, hundreds of thousands, not millions of square feet in real estate. It really is, you know, the, what do they say? Your network is your net worth.

John Harcar (21:41.262)
Yeah.

John Harcar (21:47.529)
Network, yeah, network is a net worth,

Jarred Elmar (21:49.659)
Being in those type of courses and being in a room of people that have actually did it, and you just pick up a wealth of knowledge and, know, for a thousand bucks, two thousand bucks, that’s the best place to get started. And really, inside of a few days, you get an associate’s degree in commercial real estate. You really just understand the basics, the fundamentals, you know, what a yield is and what cap rates are and, you know, how they’re derived and different product types and what’s most appealing to you. For us,

John Harcar (22:02.52)
Good have.

Jarred Elmar (22:18.594)
What was most appealing to me was multifamily until I got into multifamily. And then I’m like, I, let me check something else out. And I got into retail and I really liked retail, retail, you know, neighborhood shops that all became, all came from these courses that I took to give me an idea of what may interest me. and retail was definitely the one I was most comfortable with. And then we started really getting into industrial around 2013, which is a good time, 2013, 2014.

John Harcar (22:20.984)
Great.

John Harcar (22:36.472)
Sure.

Jarred Elmar (22:49.893)
And that one, we do small bay industrial. So if we have a buy a 200,000 foot apartment complex, not apartment, 200,000 foot small bay industrial complex, we might have 70 or 80 tenants in there. But I sleep at night because unless I had this mass exodus, I’m not really gonna, I’m not gonna lose my, I’m not gonna have a big vacancy jump when a couple of days move out. So that’s really what I stuck with. And that’s what I liked the most because it was less finishes, less turnover.

John Harcar (23:02.008)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (23:08.814)
Right, right, right. Right.

Jarred Elmar (23:17.218)
And even when we had to turn it over, slap some paint on the floors and paint the walls, maybe put a partition up and you’re good. Whereas Mopi Family, the turns are a lot more expensive and retail and office, forget it. mean, the turns are, you know, 80, sometimes $100 a foot. it’s, again, it’s different for everybody.

John Harcar (23:24.054)
Then you’re good,

John Harcar (23:33.772)
Hmm… Yeah.

So, okay, so you’re basically saying just get on YouTube, find all the information we can. Yeah, I know, I get it. I get it. I mean, talking to you, second person today, about this flex-based idea, I think I might have to learn more about that. Now, I know you mentioned you wrote a book. You got a book coming out here. Tell us about it.

Jarred Elmar (23:43.874)
I wish I had the magic bullet, but I just have a bullet.

Jarred Elmar (24:01.506)
A book is built from nothing. It’s the how a high school dropout made millions in commercial real estate. Hard, rough beginnings to dropping out of high school, to taking a chance on a 2 a.m. infomercial, getting it working it, pounding the phones, cold calling, finding a guy to take a chance on me, and then building and scaling in residential.

getting a little bit lucky, right? Finding, you know, it’s always good when your first deal goes right. That’s why you wanna be super selective on your first deal out of the gate. you know, selling those properties in 2007 helped. You know, I won’t say that timing wasn’t right. And then of course we ran into, we went into, you know, global financial crisis. And then the real estate, the commercial real estate, the commercial deals started rolling through, you the REOs. And it was just the right time. And we’re at that point again.

John Harcar (24:32.216)
Yeah, Yeah.

John Harcar (24:49.485)
Mm-hmm.

Jarred Elmar (25:00.226)
Within the next six months, there’s going to be real opportunities because there’s going to be real stress. For the last year and a half, banks have been ignoring this. So there’s been stress, but there’s been no distress. The operators are still operating without the banks up there. So this is a great point in time. I don’t know if it’s necessarily 2010, but it’s certainly not 2019.

John Harcar (25:05.549)
Yep.

John Harcar (25:28.098)
Yeah.

Jarred Elmar (25:28.814)
This is a great opportunity to start educating yourself so you can talk intelligently to your investors, build that investor base now and be super selective on your first deal. And best way to do this, find somebody that’s done this before, joint venture with them, lean on their knowledge and maybe your sweat. There’s a million ways to do this and you just can’t do

John Harcar (25:45.475)
Uh-huh.

John Harcar (25:52.736)
I wanted to ask you earlier which side of the coin you subscribe to. Find the deal first, then the money, or find the money first and then the deal.

Jarred Elmar (26:00.483)
I would say tell everybody what you’re doing. at least you get everybody to at least have the dialogue once you actually find the deal. But the deal is everything. You get a good deal, there’s somebody out there that’s gonna help fund that deal for you. I I’ve gotten into deals with no money out of pocket. I bought the offices that we’re in right now. It was a $3.9 million property and we did this with no money out of my pocket. I had investors that came in and I had to…

John Harcar (26:14.627)
Yeah.

John Harcar (26:28.024)
Bye.

Jarred Elmar (26:28.322)
The sellers hold paper on a large percentage of the purchase price, but I got no money out of pocket. it is possible. I’m sure some of your guys, some of your listeners will buy a house and bring investors in, and maybe it’s only $200,000 that they have to put down and they get an investor to do that. But it’s different approach when you’re trying to get $3.9 million.

John Harcar (26:35.714)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (26:50.168)
Mm.

John Harcar (26:55.369)
Sure.

Jarred Elmar (26:56.354)
from a lot of different investors in a bank. But it’s all doable and if I can do it, I mean don’t have a college degree, I don’t have financial backing, I don’t have family money. This all came from just grassroots prospecting and just grinding.

John Harcar (26:58.358)
Right.

John Harcar (27:12.482)
Blood sweat and tears man blood sweat and tears. I Love it man. I love your story, know, I mean the the racks are it’s this type of thing I mean you seem like you’ve done very very well and and I thank you again for joining us today if If our folks want to get a hold of you, maybe you want to find the book or whatever Pick your brain on on transitioning to commercial. What’s the best way?

Jarred Elmar (27:14.05)
No magic.

Jarred Elmar (27:35.254)
Yep, our website is GenevaGP.com. The Amazon will have pre-sales starting April 1st, and then we’ll be audible by May. So you’ll be able to find it on Audible. Again, it’s built from nothing. And look, if you need inspiration, I didn’t realize it. I kept a lot of the stuff that I wrote in the book very close to the vest early on in my career.

John Harcar (27:44.024)
sweet.

Jarred Elmar (27:59.968)
Now I wear this like a badge of honor and I want to tell the story to really inspire even one person to go make that leap.

John Harcar (28:08.416)
I love it. And I love everything you shared, man. Guys, I hope you guys got some nuggets today because I know I sure did. A lot of people are making that transition from residential to commercial now, and that was some good information for people to get off on the right foot. So everyone, I hope you guys had a good show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you on the next one. Cheers.