Connecting Money to Deals

John Harcar (00:00.846)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to the show. I’m John Harcar, your host. I’m here today with Corey Mortensen. And what we’re going to be talking about is connecting money to the deals. Before we get into all that guys, remember Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and really all real estate entrepreneurs, 2 to 5X your business. And what we do is provide tools and resources to help you and allows you to build the business you want to build and in turn, live the life that you want to live. So Corey, welcome to our show, man.

Cory Mortensen (00:31.637)
John, thanks for having me on. a pleasure and an honor.

John Harcar (00:34.294)
Yes, yeah, I’m looking forward to our talk. We talked a little bit off air, but I definitely want to learn more about the connecting money to deals because that’s some issues a lot of people have. But before we get into that stuff and get into the weeds, tell our folks a little bit about you, right? Where you’re from, how you got into real estate, really what got you here.

Cory Mortensen (00:52.619)
Sure, so I am from Lubbock, Texas. Texas Tech is there out there in West Texas. Grew up there, went to college at Texas Tech and graduated with finance with a cohort in and focus on commercial real estate investments and analysis. so shortly following graduation, moved to Austin, Texas and started my career in real estate as a commercial real estate appraiser for Travis County, which is the main county for the city of Austin in that area. That was great. That taught me a

about valuation and I wanted something a little bit more out of

my goals, right? I wanted to focus on the investments and be on the investment side of things. So I transitioned into brokerage, moved to a retail focused brokerage where that gave me great exposure and skills with developing a pipeline for both properties and investors, learning how to talk their talk and come to their level and talk about deals, structured deals and work transactions. The commercial transaction process is a little slow, as some people may know.

John Harcar (01:50.99)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (01:58.845)
And what I really wanted, I wanted reps. I wanted to learn as much as I could, as fast as I could. And so I had some friends at one of the top boutique brokerages in Austin and found that would be a great fit for me and what I was looking for. So I transitioned to residential, still doing commercials, still doing investments, but still focused on residential as well and adding that to the skill base. But that gave me a lot of reps and taught me a lot about transaction management, deal.

John Harcar (02:03.745)
Yeah.

Cory Mortensen (02:28.21)
sourcing transaction speaking with with clients and juggling all the things that come with the transaction Negotiation and getting deals closed. So that was really valuable and All the skills that I had learned in in my career and in the years leading up to me launching one nine holdings Everything was with that end goal in mind. I always wanted to be an investor. I always wanted to know how to handle

John Harcar (02:29.687)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (02:53.418)
deals and be a successful real estate entrepreneur, real estate investor, that everything led me to confidently launch 1-9 Holdings in 2021.

John Harcar (03:04.553)
Awesome. Let’s go back a little bit. Texas Tech, Patrick Mahomes. I my first partner, one of my or one of my partners, John Sheffield. He was from Texas Tech. He lives out in Vegas. But anyways, so you’re at Texas Tech and you got this real estate classes. mean, did you know or did you have any like life influences as you were growing up in the real estate world? Maybe other investors in your family, maybe realtors in your family. I mean, what prompted you to go to Texas Tech and study real estate?

Cory Mortensen (03:33.193)
Yeah, and that’s a great question. And so I know I did have some classes with Patrick Mahomes, actually. So I did rub shoulders with him and yeah, I saw him out at a couple of unathletic sanctioned parties. no, it was great. And as far as my influences into real estate.

John Harcar (03:37.761)
Did you really? Wow, right on.

John Harcar (03:44.789)
Ha ha ha ha!

Cory Mortensen (03:50.695)
in college. I went in just with a general business mindset. I knew I wanted to do business. I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I didn’t know if that was what that looked like, but I was kind of just going through the motions. You don’t really pick your major until junior year anyway. So no, didn’t know. I didn’t even know about commercial real estate going into it. My first major was energy energy management, which is a specific cohort. You’d be admitted into certain GPA requirements, things like that. But

John Harcar (03:55.82)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (04:06.005)
Yeah, until it’s second year, right? Third year.

Cory Mortensen (04:20.588)
Yeah, in those interviews with, because you do industry interviews with people who are in these jobs at these energy companies, at these oil companies, and something that I always ask them was, how did you get into this position? What led you here? Because I have, this is an industry not a lot of people have public knowledge about. There’s not a lot of.

John Harcar (04:30.626)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (04:41.052)
insight outside of the industry itself. So almost all of them told me they had experience in commercial real estate, which is something that I didn’t really know about. I didn’t really think about real estate. didn’t really, I knew what everybody else knew, HGTV, residential agent type stuff, just, you know, the common knowledge. So that was something that kind of piqued my interest because I, while I was getting into this interest of, you know, energy management and this, this career path, I wasn’t really sold on it.

John Harcar (04:41.325)
All

John Harcar (04:57.005)
Sure.

Cory Mortensen (05:10.966)
was still trying to figure it out. wanted to see it. so when I went through my first semester, I didn’t love it. And I’m a guy who follows his passion. I’m someone who always does what. I’m always looking to challenge myself. And I have to challenge things that I love. And when I found out I didn’t like what I was doing there, I started looking more in the commercial real estate direction. And finally, at that time, Grant Cardone was getting very popular on social media.

John Harcar (05:25.857)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:34.431)
Okay.

Cory Mortensen (05:40.811)
And I think one day, and this all kind of coincided at the same time, and I know a lot of people have their opinions about Grant Cardone, I think he’s one started the story. I saw his ad come up, and he, you know, it was, hey, I’m Grant Cardone, and, you know, I just bought this, and he’s standing outside what is, know, probably a class A huge complex. I just bought it my own if you want to know. And I’m like, hold on.

John Harcar (05:48.206)
Right.

John Harcar (06:03.176)
huh.

Cory Mortensen (06:07.498)
Because I was thinking about real estate investing and I always thought, know, flipping houses and residential investment, things like that. It didn’t occur to me that a single person could go out and buy property like that. And I don’t have very many limiting beliefs. And I said, that just broke the ceiling for me. And so I said, well, if he can do it, I can do it. So that’s what really

John Harcar (06:22.519)
Right?

John Harcar (06:32.747)
Cory Mortensen (06:34.416)
sparked the interest in commercial real estate and commercial real estate investment for me.

John Harcar (06:39.082)
Okay so then you got out of college how’d you start building your empire what were the what were some of the challenges that you faced?

Cory Mortensen (06:47.602)
Yeah, after launching the company. Yeah, so the biggest challenge was, you know, the time that we launched the company, right? So we launched it in 21 and we had great success putting, we raised about $1.3 million in the first few months for a developer in Austin on a Class A 300 unit deal and that went very well. And so we went out and started looking for

John Harcar (06:50.486)
Yeah.

Cory Mortensen (07:15.594)
our own acquisitions at that time to go out and start building our own portfolio. We took fees on the raise and we worked out an arrangement and everything. So that went very well. So now I said, okay, perfect. We’ve got a good base, a good little bank account to go out and start doing our own deals. But from my valuation background and knowing what the difference between a good deal and bad deal is, that provided the greatest challenge for us at that time. Because as we all know, post-COVID,

John Harcar (07:37.374)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (07:44.779)
21 all the way through mid 23 really was the biggest appreciation and jump in real estate prices. I’m not one to chase prices and from my time in negotiation and looking at how experience in residential sales and things like that, I can see how fast these things rise. But to me, there’s an underlying valuation as an investor that you have to stick to.

and be very strict on it. And so I was never, especially when I’m raising other people’s capital, right? It’s a totally different ball game and something I take extremely seriously. And so I was never going to put myself or my investors in a situation where anyone is gonna risk losing sleep, right? know, down to work hard, down for challenges, but we gotta buy a deal right. And I knew what that looked like. And every deal that came on the market in that year and a half,

John Harcar (08:18.795)
Right.

John Harcar (08:33.431)
Good idea.

Cory Mortensen (08:40.88)
after we completed that initial raise was nothing penciled, nothing made any sense. We got into a position where we were the final call for offers. It was between us and a couple other buyers that the seller liked. We could have taken out a portfolio of probably a $14 million portfolio in our first year. That portfolio would be worth about 9 million right now. So that, while it was disappointing,

John Harcar (08:53.281)
No.

John Harcar (09:01.025)
Wow. Wow.

Cory Mortensen (09:09.322)
not to get our deal in that first launch. I am more proud of the fact that we knew what to say no to than to be so eager to get a portfolio started that we are now a failing company and be in a similar position where a lot of syndicators, unfortunately are and other investors unfortunately are because they were buying deals with these lofty assumptions, these high rent growth and low cap rate, low debt.

John Harcar (09:17.27)
Yes.

John Harcar (09:36.813)
Yep.

Cory Mortensen (09:38.396)
all this stuff and now we’re in the position, you know, three, four years later where we’re seeing a lot of the repercussions of that.

John Harcar (09:46.433)
What are the pros in, I don’t know how much residential real estate investing you did, but what are the pros of investing in residential versus commercial versus residential?

Cory Mortensen (09:56.585)
Yeah, so when I was in the appraisal, in the commercial real estate appraisal, my mentor, the reason I took the job was one, to learn the valuation and the appraisal process. I knew that would be extremely valuable. But the chief appraiser for the county, he was a connection that I had made while at Texas Tech and he let me know, he said he really believed in me. He saw my entrepreneurial spirit. He saw what I was doing at Texas Tech and a couple of the side businesses that I had started and we just kind of hit it off there and.

I was interested in his experience in real estate, his knowledge in both appraisal, commercial real estate, and he did some investing himself. So, you he let me know that was gonna be something that he could teach me. And my first year there, I was, you know, constantly looking at residential real estate deals in Austin and said, hey, is this a good deal? And that’s where I really started getting some reps on how to approach real estate investments. So I did start.

John Harcar (10:32.374)
Okay.

Cory Mortensen (10:50.0)
analyzing practical real estate investments out of the classroom because classroom I was doing a lot of textbook and institutional style underwriting for commercial but I still hadn’t gathered enough knowledge or learned about the syndication model and so for me residential real estate investing was where I got my start in interest so that is a big advantage for anybody looking to get started

John Harcar (10:59.03)
huh.

John Harcar (11:10.337)
Got it. Okay.

Cory Mortensen (11:16.462)
I have my interest in commercial real estate for different reasons than why residential real estate is a good investment. Both are good investments. It’s truly dependent on what you prefer in your investment style, your risk tolerance, what do you really want out of it, because truly there’s a lot more variety in the residential side than there is the commercial side. There’s different things you can do in both and it just really depends. But for me,

John Harcar (11:20.461)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (11:41.301)
you

Cory Mortensen (11:45.491)
Why I chose commercial real estate is because of the, it’s tried and true. It’s a larger asset. It doesn’t fluctuate as much. It’s not so dependent on even quarterly market cycles that residential is much, much more prone to. And you’ve got economies of scale, especially in multifamily. Whereas if you want to purchase, you know, 50 homes, that’s 50 loans, that’s 50 properties, that’s 50 areas, that’s 50.

John Harcar (11:58.094)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (12:12.81)
Yeah.

Cory Mortensen (12:13.7)
Different tenants and geographic locations and so for me it was always about scale, you know I wanted to grow something big I wanted to to be a know, quote-unquote mogul and The way that I saw that and the advantages of commercial real estate just lended itself to me in that respect And so that’s why I chose commercial over residential to answer the question in short. There’s not a best Investment it’s about what you prefer what you’re interested in because it’s gonna be a lot of time and a lot of hard work So you gotta love it

John Harcar (12:43.597)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean, that’s with anything else. gotta find your, like I your passion, right? Yeah, you find what you wanna go after and really put your energy into that. So where does your business at now? What does your business look like now? I mean, what are you holding? Like how many portfolio? Just give us an idea of what’s going on in your world today.

Cory Mortensen (13:03.304)
Yeah, so my business right now looks like we are fully scaling our investor platform. Name of the game is to let more investors know about us. We’ve really tapped out on our wonderful network of investors and people who have been so trusting in us and in our portfolio and what deals we brought to them. And we keep going back to them, you know, and they’ve referred us a lot of people, but it’s kind of come to that point where, and I’ll give you an example. Last week I was calling

on an investor for a deal that we had available and he’s invested with us multiple times and he said, man, I can’t give you anymore. You have all my money. I’ve invested everything I got with you guys in your deal. And that was kind of becoming a common response. And so I’ve been pivoting to instead of looking for

John Harcar (13:46.935)
That’s pretty cool.

Cory Mortensen (13:54.101)
Deal flow and other operators and acquisitions into finding more investors because between myself and my other trusted partners The deal flow is really not the issue. It’s how much capital we can get on the sidelines ready to go for these deals So I’ve been leaning much more into social media connecting with investors. I’m relaunching my podcast and which I started in 23 and

John Harcar (14:10.241)
Yeah.

Cory Mortensen (14:22.974)
Just being more of a thought leader and trying to get more focused on the brand and getting that out there to be a better known name and hopefully bring more investors into these investments that we have.

John Harcar (14:34.765)
What do you think is the main reason or some of the things made you so successful to putting yourself in a situation like that where the guy says, you have all my money. Like what things make you better than the next person that they’re not giving their money to?

Cory Mortensen (14:50.856)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And because there’s been so much growth in this space, especially syndication, that has become a much more household term in the industry, whereas that was a very little known strategy, especially 10 years ago. So what diff…

John Harcar (15:07.539)
Explain explain syndication to our audience real fast just in case they don’t understand what it is

Cory Mortensen (15:12.168)
Yeah, so syndication is pretty simple in that, so I am the person that knows and understands real estate. So I’m gonna be the sponsor, which is the technical term, or the general partner. And there’s generally two parts to a syndication investment. There’s the general partner and the limited partner, the GP and the LP. So the GP is the person who’s gonna go run the business plan, he finds a deal, sources a deal, does all the due diligence, and you are the investor, you’re the LP.

So I’m gonna go to you, Mr. Investor, and say, hey, I’ve got this deal.

This is completely passive on your end. know you’re a busy guy. You’re a professional. You may have your other business that you’re solely focused on, but you want to diversify. You’ve got cash hanging out in a bank account or a retirement account. We can do better. This is the returns that we’re offering. This is the structure. Does this investment work for you? And assuming you say yes, you say, great. You sign up and we do that with anywhere from five to 30 investors on average for a lot of our deals. And that’s syndication. So we pull money from investors.

John Harcar (16:14.316)
Huh.

Cory Mortensen (16:16.124)
to go out and acquire these large commercial properties, whereas ourselves individually couldn’t go and do that, which is the necessity for the syndication model.

John Harcar (16:22.253)
Couldn’t do it on your own. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, so let’s…

Cory Mortensen (16:29.288)
But going back to your question of what differentiates my company from others and myself from others and why I’ve been successful in this space, that really just goes to my experience and how I can pitch a deal, how I can talk about a deal. There’s other capital raisers out there and better marketers than I, and they can get investors very easily. However, the quality of the investments that they’re pitching can waver.

John Harcar (16:37.527)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (16:50.647)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (16:58.73)
I know and trust that my experience to vet a deal is almost 100%. You know, you can’t guarantee anything, but I know through all my experience, I’m going to deliver the best quality than anybody else. And that’s been proven time and time again. And investors, they’re smart. These are a lot of times accredited investors. These are high net worth individuals. They’ve worked hard and learned a lot through their time to understand how to look at these. And so through building relationships and earning their trust through

John Harcar (17:07.341)
Death and taxes. Yeah.

Cory Mortensen (17:28.766)
showing them deals and just spending time with them. That’s where the success comes from and having the expertise, having the knowledge to back, not just talk the talk, but walk the walk.

John Harcar (17:41.612)
Yeah and that’s huge. Let’s say there’s folks that want to actually before giving that let’s talk about what our topic was connecting money to deals right. You don’t just do this for your own deals you do this for other people right. Be that middleman type of thing.

Cory Mortensen (17:56.875)
Correct, correct, so while I look at deals on my own for my own company, like I mentioned earlier, other people have very successful deal flow and I really like the off market side of things. I don’t look at a whole lot of on market deals. I will sometimes, if there’s nothing else to look at or the off market stuff just isn’t coming that week, but.

John Harcar (18:11.405)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (18:20.36)
Yeah, the relationships that I have formed, they have such solid deal flow that these are the same deals that I would be pitching if I had found them. So that it has a pass my test. It’s not just any deal, every deal that somebody random has. It’s people that I’ve known for years trust and they have an amazing track record behind them. So pairing the capital is something that I have just kind of found my niche for. It wasn’t my original plan, but

John Harcar (18:28.531)
Okay. Got it.

John Harcar (18:48.333)
Mm-hmm.

Cory Mortensen (18:49.906)
I’ve always been a very adaptable, flexible, and someone who is able to pivot very quickly and structure deals to where everybody’s happy. Cause it could take a lot of time for me with everything else that comes with running a business to source investors and acquisitions. That’s a tough couple of plates to juggle. So focused on recently and it’s kind of come in waves. It’s acquisitions now and this quarter and then investors that quarter, but

John Harcar (18:56.522)
Yeah.

John Harcar (19:09.001)
Yeah, very true.

Cory Mortensen (19:17.394)
Yeah, leveraging the partnerships is something that I have learned is strength of mine and in my business. Other people will spend lots of time just focusing on their deals while their investors capital is sitting and investors don’t wait for the operator. They don’t wait for one person. They have money to deploy. They know they got to get it out fast and put it to work. So that’s what I’ve leveraged and found as a more of an ancillary business service.

John Harcar (19:32.621)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (19:45.485)
Sure.

Cory Mortensen (19:46.398)
I offer on top of everything else.

John Harcar (19:48.748)
Well, yeah, mean, if you can provide value to other folks, mean, that’s what it’s all about, right? So let’s say someone wants to get into this to your world, right? What kind of advice would you give them as far as maybe first steps to take, things to do, study, read, whatever?

Cory Mortensen (20:06.568)
Yeah, there’s so much more information out there now than even five years ago when I was in school and learning about this stuff. Well, not five years ago, but eight years ago. And even years ago, I mean, the amount of public information for commercial investing has grown tremendously. AI is something that we’ve leaned into.

John Harcar (20:25.581)
Oh yeah, it’s huge.

Cory Mortensen (20:30.618)
asking chat GBT questions, just basic questions, it’ll give you an outline. I almost use chat GBT as my new Google these days. It just gives better, more accurate, quicker, more succinct results. But if you’re looking for stuff to look into, Joe Fairless’s best ever syndication book, I believe is the title. He’s also a Texas Tech guy, I found out. But he is, that book is the Bible.

John Harcar (20:38.502)
Okay, right on. Yeah.

John Harcar (20:51.798)
Mm-hmm.

How is he?

Cory Mortensen (20:58.036)
for what I do. It is a step by step template for getting into my space and doing what I do. It tells you everything you need to do to get loaded up on your company, investors, building a platform, marketing, what to say, things like that. My website, one nine holdings.com has a lot of educational content that’s free downloadable. We even have a glossary on there. It’s a dictionary for

John Harcar (21:17.537)
Nice.

Cory Mortensen (21:27.252)
common real estate terms, investing terms, syndication terms, and things like that for investors. Or just give me a call, reach out to me. I’m very passionate about this. There’s not a whole lot that I don’t know, and if I don’t, I know someone that does. So shoot me a message, shoot me an email. I’d be happy to help out any way I can.

John Harcar (21:32.395)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (21:45.11)
Okay, and then I was gonna ask, what is the best way to get ahold of you? But obviously you just said that. And what I’ll do is, I think you sent me some of your contact information and whatnot. So I’ll put those in the show notes, your links and all the stuff. So that way folks can get ahold of you. Any last words or advice, pearls of wisdom, things you wanna share with our audience that maybe they need to know?

Cory Mortensen (22:06.41)
Yeah. I mean, I can talk about this stuff all day and I would love to go into deeper detail on really anything and everything. But last good bit of advice for anybody out there who’s looking to get into commercial real estate investing. Don’t, there’s no limiting beliefs allowed here. I mean, you, if you have a limiting belief, it’s going to hold you back so much and take you a lot longer to progress in this field. You have to be confident. You have to be knowledgeable. You have to know what you’re talking about.

Just get reps, find somebody who’s in the space and find a mentor. That’s the biggest thing. If you want to know how to get a mentor, find someone who is in the position that you want to be in, find out more about their business, spend time. It’s going to take maybe a handful of tries and you might have to get some introduction. You be creative to get in front of them. Find out what a weakness is in their business. What is something that you do very well that can fit into this person?

John Harcar (22:46.593)
Yep.

Cory Mortensen (23:05.77)
And if you can find that strength and you at Give it to them for free say hey, I see this in your business. I really love everything you’re doing I do this I’ve created this for you if it’s interesting I would love to give it to you or work for you for free in exchange for just you know spending some time together on calls so that We can I can help you with this and your business so that I can learn more from you in your business

John Harcar (23:28.778)
Yep.

Yeah, always lead with value. Always lead with value, right? What can you provide? Corey, man, you dropped a lot of good stuff. And yeah, we probably could talk about this if we didn’t have a time restriction for hours. But guys, I hope you guys really enjoyed what he talked about.

If you want to get a hold of him, if you want to, you know, discuss that, all those notes will be in the, all the links will be in the show notes so you guys can find them there. Corey, I really appreciate your time and guys, I hope everybody enjoyed this episode as much as I did. And, you know, we’ll look forward to seeing you guys on the next one. Cheers. Thank you, buddy.

Cory Mortensen (24:04.586)
John, thank you, it was an honor.