Flexibility is Key: How to Succeed in Today’s Real Estate Landscape

Dylan Silver (00:00.738)
Hey, folks, welcome back to the show. Today on the show, I have Nathan Walldorf. Walldorf Capital Ventures encompasses a team of real estate investors, brokers, general contractors and interior designers with a combined 38 years of experience in real estate. Nathan, welcome to the show.

Nathan Walldorf (00:21.581)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:23.392)
Absolutely man you know before we hopped on here I was mentioning I always am curious about how folks got into the real estate space I know for me it was not obvious or clear I didn’t know anybody in the real estate space how did how did you break into real estate.

Nathan Walldorf (00:39.493)
So yeah, so I’m excited to be here. I bet your listeners are excited to hear about multifamily investing. So, but we started or I started in as a residential realtor, my family’s been selling real estate in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area since like the twenties. So, so started doing that. My wife was a teacher and we were both kind of.

kind of grinding, paying the bills. I mean, there’s a lot more money to be made in owning real estate, to be honest, and helping people buy real estate. So buy and sell real estate. mean, you know, you can do well, but anyway, I think my wife was getting tired of kind of the grind of being a teacher and missing time with her kids, because she’s having to grade papers and stuff like that. And she always felt really, she had worked a little bit with me in real estate, felt super drawn.

starting to invest in real estate. Excuse me. So she started investing in real estate and we sort of both went that direction. She’s grown her own separate company there, but over, I don’t know, over the span of 10 years or so, had built up, we’d bought stuff that we had and kind of some stuff that she had flipped.

that we had sold some stuff that we had kept over time. So we had about 16 doors that we wholly owned around town after a while. And went to a conference where we heard about, you know, buying apartment buildings as with groups of investors. And so I always thought it was like, you know, some guy goes out there, a really wealthy guy and just buys an apartment building and that’s how it works, you know.

Dylan Silver (02:30.274)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (02:31.193)
Had no clue, obviously. So, but we learned about it and then, you know, got with mentors and a mastermind to really dive in, really know what we’re doing and to be surrounded by really great partners. So we have some really great partners that we work with. And so now we buy apartment buildings with groups of investors and that’s kind of what Walldorf Capital Adventures.

is and it did start from investing house to house to buying duplexes and then slowly getting to a point where we wanted to scale up and into something else.

Dylan Silver (03:09.806)
Did I hear you correctly, Nathan? You’re in Tennessee?

Nathan Walldorf (03:12.845)
Yeah, I’m in Tennessee.

Dylan Silver (03:14.382)
Alright so you may be my first guest in Tennessee and I think people think about you know the hot spots of real estate. A lot of people are talking Texas Florida you hear about this often kind of people flocking here. Tennessee is an interesting one and I’m curious how it is investing in the Tennessee area.

Nathan Walldorf (03:18.446)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (03:27.653)
Thank

Nathan Walldorf (03:36.741)
Well, so most of our apartment investments are actually in, we’ve got several, we’re in about 1400 units as general partners. So we’ve got several apartment buildings in Dallas and one that’s in Houston. So, and we, on our side, we’ve been, you know, we’ve been underwriting deals in Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville. So kind of East Tennessee.

We like those, those areas are all landlord friendly and their populations are growing. They kind of check all of our boxes. So, put some offers on a few things and then as rates have fluctuated upward, I guess, the last couple of years, that’s made some of the stuff we’ve looked at in Tennessee that had great value and potential, but then the price wasn’t right to…

really for even to get the loan. It didn’t have the cash flow for a lender to really give you the kind of money that these people wanted for these apartment buildings. So we’re still working on landing one in Tennessee that works.

Dylan Silver (04:48.28)
So if you’re comparing Chattanooga versus Dallas, for instance, are you seeing its way, for lack of a better term, simpler or more favorable to be an investor in Dallas than it is in Chattanooga? Or is it not that much of a difference?

Nathan Walldorf (05:10.885)
You know, Dallas and cities like Dallas and Houston, San Antonio, especially Dallas and Houston, they just have a lot more inventory than we do. So that’s, that’s the one challenge. And I would say we’re looking for very specific criteria where we’d like to double folks money in five years and, you know, have at least 6 % cashflow per year. So as we’re underwriting deals, if they’re not checking those boxes.

then we’re probably not gonna proceed. everybody you’ll talk to in the multifamily space will be like, yeah, I’d probably underwrite 100 of these things before one of them works out, which is the way you kind of gotta be. You gotta make sure that, especially if you’re bringing investors in, you need to protect their capital and grow their capital. And you hit speed bumps sometimes, but yeah, but that’s kind of the name of the game. And I don’t wanna ask anybody to invest in something that I don’t.

then I don’t think it’s going to give them a great return,

Dylan Silver (06:09.506)
would do.

Yeah, for sure. How many of your investor partners are very active in real estate versus are there any that are silent partners?

Nathan Walldorf (06:22.393)
I would say most of them, you know, are a little more silent. You know, we’re kind of meeting a niche where like Tony Robbins, if you read his, he had an investment book that came out recently where he had interviewed all these different billionaires that he works with and one common denominator is all of them had at least 25 % of their net worth in real estate.

And I would say everybody wants to invest in real estate, but not everybody wants to deal with tenants and toilets. And so that’s kind of like what we offer people is, hey, we’re going to deal with the tenants and toilets, or at least we’re going to have a property manager who’s going to deal with the tenants and toilets. We’re going to manage the property manager. We’re going to manage the asset. All you have to do is invest and you’re still going to get a piece of the equity and returns off the rent.

and the tax savings that you get with apartment buildings.

Dylan Silver (07:21.592)
Nathan, in hearing you talk about the real estate space, sounds like it’s in your blood and now even more so with the team that you and your wife have. Did you at any point in time think about anything else other than real estate? Was real estate always, hey, this is gonna be my career?

Nathan Walldorf (07:30.969)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (07:40.577)
Yeah, I mean, so right out of college, I worked in youth ministry with Young Life. And we actually started Young Life down in Guatemala City. And work that’s kind of an outreach ministry. Sí, yo hablo el español. Yeah. But yeah, it’s funny because my wife’s Venezuelan. I studied Spanish in Costa Rica.

Dylan Silver (07:50.178)
Wow.

of course you you know that!

Nathan Walldorf (08:07.365)
worked in Guatemala. So I have this mixture of Spanish where a lot of people are like, where are you from? I can’t figure out where my Spanish came from. But anyway, but we started working in youth ministry, like I said, in Guatemala city. And then we moved to Chattanooga. We kind of wanted to be near family. had little kids then, really little kids then. So ended up getting into the family business.

Dylan Silver (08:37.376)
It’s very side note, I’ve found that in the real estate space, so I’m a wholesaler by trade, but I interact with a lot of fix and flippers. It’s super beneficial to be able to speak fluent Spanish. Like you have a noticeable edge. You have a significant edge, because now you know everything that’s being said on site if you’re managing a crew. Anybody who’s maybe, Spanish is their first language and may not have complete fluency with the English language.

Nathan Walldorf (08:44.249)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (08:52.375)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (08:58.606)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (09:05.644)
you now have that immediate bridge to them. we’re seeing it take over. I don’t know what the projections are, but some people are saying it’s going to be a majority language here in the near future. And so the fact that you have this fluency in Spanish and that you have this team with your wife, I think, has probably benefited you in so many ways outside of just being able to speak two languages.

Nathan Walldorf (09:23.493)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it’s been great.

Nathan Walldorf (09:31.365)
Yeah, yeah. And know, my wife’s a builder. So I mean, I think most of her, most of the guys she works with are very endeared to her. You know what I mean? Which is, which is really nice because she speaks Spanish and she treats them well. And obviously she still has high expectations, but like anybody, any good manager should. But yeah, but yeah, definitely health.

Dylan Silver (09:51.512)
chorus.

Dylan Silver (09:55.34)
Now when you were getting into effectively commercial real estate right. And you said it yourself you tend to think it’s one guy you know with a whole stack of cash and you find out going to a mastermind that hey this isn’t the case right. What was your first couple of you know attempts or strategic relationships like.

Nathan Walldorf (10:08.815)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:22.51)
to get that first deal. Was it you just going up to people and saying, hey, how are you doing this? Or was the mastermind itself kind of created to bring people together to invest in commercial real estate?

Nathan Walldorf (10:34.501)
Yeah, I think the mastermind itself was created for that. It was created to help us create relationships with other people. And like in any business, you want to partner with people who are further and farther along with you. So that’s really what we did. I would say when we first first got in and we’re learning about it and everything, it took us a minute to realize

Dylan Silver (10:38.851)
Okay.

Nathan Walldorf (11:01.349)
Wow, I even think we went after a deal, but we didn’t have the team in place. You’ve really got to have your team. It’s a team sport to buy these things. You really have to have your net worth guy who can sign on the loans. You’ve got to have your partner who’s got the experience and even the partner has some lending track record. We needed all of those pieces as well as the other pieces like other folks who could help us raise equity.

and put the whole deal together. that was the big thing. That team is super important. And then we did kind of just build relationships with folks and did business with people we kind of know, like, and trust. We do have some core values that we always keep in mind. It’s kind of made it easy. It’s the service, SIG. That’s how I can remember it. Service, integrity.

Ingenuity and growth. mean, everybody we partner with, we want them to have those same values where they want to serve our investors, they want to serve our clients, they want to serve our tenants, as well as be kind of folks who always are growing and always learning about the industry, always growing personally. And you’re going to have ingenuity because, you know, when things get

hard, you need people who are going to flex and make moves instead of go, uh-oh, and just stick their head in the dirt. You know, we don’t want that. We don’t want that partner. You know, no, you can’t have that partner. Or it’s more like you’re doing all the work and they’re doing mine. yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:36.088)
can’t have that.

Dylan Silver (12:45.058)
Nathan you know hearing you talk about this specifically as it relates to doing this not not necessarily fully remotely but you have Dallas and you’re in you’re in Tennessee was that newer to you doing these deals or had you already had lots of experience with doing deals in multiple cities.

Nathan Walldorf (12:56.847)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (13:06.277)
Uh, no, I mean, most everything we’ve done has been around the Tennessee area. We’ve, we’ve been, we were limited partners and deals all over the place, like in Florida and some in Tennessee and some in, in, uh, in Texas. But, um, I mean, it really came down to, we had boots on the ground that we wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t have boots on the grounds. had one partner who was there, who could do the asset management and be at the property all the time. And we still visit.

We visit all our properties probably three times a year or something like that. yeah, we had boots on the ground and that’s really the biggest reason why we were willing to do that because that’s hugely important.

Dylan Silver (13:50.136)
You know, my personal aspiration is I’d love to do real estate remotely. I got to get some deeds in my name first and or in an LLC that I own. speaking of, you know, Spanish language, I’d love to go live in a Spanish speaking country and somehow do real estate remotely. the most important. That’s right. That’s right. Hello. Is Buenos Aires in Argentina? I think it is. That would be tremendous. But.

Nathan Walldorf (13:54.483)
huh.

Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (14:03.359)
Yeah, Argentina is pretty cheap right now. Yeah, yeah.

Dylan Silver (14:19.234)
You’ll get me started down a whole path about living in a Latin American. Be careful. careful. But what I’ve seen and heard from real estate entrepreneurs is that if you’re doing anything in the real estate space remotely, whether it’s fix and flips, buy and hold, Airbnb, anything, you have to have processes and people in place.

Nathan Walldorf (14:21.423)
I feel like I’m about to edit this out.

Dylan Silver (14:46.252)
And that if you have that, you have those processes and people in place and it’s like down to a science that you can do it remotely. But if you’re doing it well in person and you’re you’re pretty much in the business and you’re you’re running it like it’s your crew and you’re overseeing the sites and you don’t necessarily have that level of trust or strategic relationship with someone else to take it over that that could take potentially years to develop. And so

Nathan Walldorf (15:00.525)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (15:14.594)
have you based on your relationship with your partner in Dallas, who’s part of the deal, have you felt like that was a critical component in scaling your business and maybe how do you see that growing in the future?

Nathan Walldorf (15:32.003)
Yeah, I mean, we’ve got, we’ve got two really great teams that we, well, I guess really three, some of the, two of the teams have some really common people, overlapping people in it. But, we have, sorry about that. I’m going to wait until that stops and then keep answering. Okay. There it goes. Done. where was that? So yeah, we’ve got two really, I remember.

Dylan Silver (15:52.662)
Okay, I’ll see if they can…

Dylan Silver (15:58.446)
teams.

Nathan Walldorf (16:00.645)
three really great teams that we work with and that’s been how we can do any of this. I like hands-on as much as possible. I I’m on all the, I’m on as many property management calls and everything as I can be. So it’s not, don’t wanna leave things 100 % hands-off. I’m not.

Not big into that. think you still have to manage the deal a little bit. You still need to what’s happening in your deal and what chefs need to be made and maybe work with the rest of the team to say, here’s what we need to do now. I do think those teams are important. If you’re flipping and stuff like that, sure, if you have a great team, I guess that can be doable.

Probably, I don’t know, with stuff like that, I think you’ve gotta be fairly hands on. Yeah, my wife’s got her own business where she’s building, but she’s a general contractor, but she also has kind of her, she has someone that she’s hired to be her project manager, and he’s able to run most everything, but she’s still involved. You’re always, as the boss, be somehow involved, and really should still be pretty involved.

Dylan Silver (17:00.12)
It’s tougher.

Dylan Silver (17:20.494)
for sure.

Dylan Silver (17:24.71)
Pivoting a bit here and Nathan what do you make of the the current? Conditions the market if you will for people in the fix and flip space I know that you y’all are in commercial right now, but your wife

Nathan Walldorf (17:40.569)
Well, I so I do residential real estate sales and what we build and sell is all residential. So, so my commercial part is the multifamily part. Yes.

Dylan Silver (17:44.161)
Okay.

There you go, yeah.

Dylan Silver (17:51.35)
involved in both.

Dylan Silver (17:55.438)
So yeah I mean what I’m seeing over here in DFW is people are I don’t want to say that they’re going from fix and flipping to other strategies completely but I’m seeing a lot of people who were heavy in fix and flipping seeing the margins shrink and now they’re going into note buying. I still think there’s good deals out there and there’s people who’ve told me and I’ve had them on my podcast who said you just have to underwrite the deal a little better.

Nathan Walldorf (17:59.225)
Dylan Silver (18:23.512)
and you have to find the right deals. what do you make of maybe some of the difficulties that are present right now with fix and flipping?

Nathan Walldorf (18:35.168)
Um, I mean, I think it’s, it’s, it’s similar to even when you’re buying apartment buildings, know, like you want to look at the absorption rate. like, they’re, if everybody’s building townhomes and they’re like 60, 80 in a small area that are on the market and then that you may not want to build townhomes. So you just got, you’ve got to really look at that. Yeah. I think your agent’s going to be really important saying, Hey,

Where do you see the biggest need? And you knowing the market, really knowing what’s the biggest need? Where’s the area that’s hard? Because we even in Chattanooga have a lot of inventory that’s in the four to 500 range that hasn’t been moving as well. But honestly, some of the upper end stuff has been moving great. you just really have to watch those types of things and make shifts in your business when you see that.

maybe one segment of the market’s getting little overloaded.

Dylan Silver (19:35.992)
You know, I know no one has a crystal ball, but I do. I’m curious about my guess perspective on things like Airbnb or how AI is influencing businesses because I mean, I’m seeing it and you know, I’m not I don’t have deeds in my name or an LLC that I own, but I do see just how rapidly this is changing. I think.

Nathan Walldorf (19:49.166)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (20:01.678)
people have different perspectives on this. Some people think it’s not changing fast enough. Other people say it’s like we’re an iRobot and Will Smith is about to come out and take over. So on my level, I’m seeing lots of activity really globally in the short term rental space. We talked about Buenos Aires earlier. There’s Airbnbs I’m sure all over there. And people who are doing

Nathan Walldorf (20:09.933)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (20:27.67)
not just service related businesses in real estate, but service related businesses just for Airbnb’s. Right. I was talking to a gentleman who just manages all he does is he manages communication for Airbnb owners and then posts their property on other marketing platforms. So I’m just curious, where do you see this heading to?

Nathan Walldorf (20:34.181)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (20:49.637)
That’s a great question. mean, I’ve heard other guys, know, I think it was one of real, Ken McElroy was talking a little bit about how that Airbnb space may be getting a little oversaturated. So I think you have to be careful and you’ve got to, again, you’ve got to know your market. You’ve got to know what’s out there. You got to know what your competition is. If there’s too much competition, if there’s enough demand for your product.

And you’ve got to know your municipality. Like our municipality is kind of, allowed Airbnb’s, but now it’s super tightened up on them to where you can only have them in commercial zoning. So it’s really hard to do that. you know, for us, we had an Airbnb and that was fun and all until the pandemic hit and they let everybody cancel at will. And that’s when we were like, hey, if this, we are in control of our business, we’re out and we sold it and we moved on.

Dylan Silver (21:49.518)
Mm.

Nathan Walldorf (21:49.539)
didn’t feel like that was the business for us. I some people, you can make a killing, you know, in certain areas, but you just really need to know your market, if your market’s gonna continue to be friendly to it or what.

Dylan Silver (22:02.53)
I mean, yeah, in Addison, which is part of the DFW Metro, I don’t know if it’s still the case, but in 2023, which is when I was like August or July of 2023, when I was just getting into real estate as a wholesaler, it had been banned. I want to say that week, it might’ve been September, but it had been banned that week that I was at a conference. It was a RIA conference in Addison. And I just remember thinking, wow, like that can happen anywhere. So,

Nathan Walldorf (22:07.087)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (22:19.909)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (22:31.768)
It really can.

Dylan Silver (22:31.97)
You know, to your point, Nathan, you have to be able to be adaptable, but you also have to see the trends, see the market saturation. And, you know, you can’t you can’t handcuff yourself or fall in love too greatly with any one strategy, because just as you’ve grown your business, know, your people, all people in the real estate space have to adapt.

Nathan Walldorf (22:41.071)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (22:49.4)
Yeah, totally.

Nathan Walldorf (22:56.343)
Yeah, like I heard a great story about Encyclopedia Britannica. They kept thinking forever, like, yep, everybody’s going to keep buying these books, you know, the big stack of books from our encyclopedia. I’m surprised you know what that is. You know, your generation doesn’t even use them, you know. But they kept doing that and everybody kept saying, hey, you need to, you need to put that encyclopedia online. You know, that’s what you need to start doing. And they’re like, no, we don’t need to do that. So ends up that.

Dylan Silver (23:10.936)
Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Nathan Walldorf (23:25.017)
Some whole other encyclopedia brand, you probably knew it, maybe even used it at school, but now that brand is the one everybody knows and encyclopedia brand Hanukkah is hardly known and they finally did go all online, but that’s after they lost all market share, you know? So in business, we gotta be flexible and we gotta always be willing to shift. That’s one of my intentions every day is that I’ll make the shifts that I need to make in business.

when a shift is needed.

Dylan Silver (23:56.918)
It’s so critical and specifically in the real estate space, the commonality that I notice between the majority of my guests are the ability for them to adapt and really embrace new strategies that may frankly be a complete mind shift. Like if you’re fix and flipping and your job day to day is being a GC and then you have to go from that.

Nathan Walldorf (24:01.826)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (24:09.549)
Thank you.

Nathan Walldorf (24:13.315)
Yeah, definitely.

Dylan Silver (24:22.562)
to being a hard money lender, it’s a totally different, your day-to-day activities are entirely different. And just as a human, it’s a little bit challenging, right? You may be in love with this idea of managing sites or you may not, but either way, you have to have that kind of neuroplasticity, that ability to adapt. And I think it’s the hallmark of a good real estate investor is that problem solving and adaptability.

Nathan Walldorf (24:28.453)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (24:33.893)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (24:42.701)
Yeah, totally.

Dylan Silver (24:49.718)
More so than, yeah, you gotta be able to underwrite a deal. Yeah, you gotta be able to network and negotiate and bring people to the table. But also, as a human being, you have to be able to be adaptable and solve problems.

Nathan Walldorf (24:50.213)
Hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (25:04.153)
Yeah, totally. That’s why ingenuity is one of our, is one of the core values that we look for in partners.

Dylan Silver (25:05.826)
You know, go ahead.

Dylan Silver (25:18.095)
Nathan, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Nathan Walldorf (25:24.037)
Yeah. So, uh, we have a great handout that we give to folks, uh, at the wealth building trifecta.com and it, and it walks through, cause we have people ask us all the time, Hey, Nathan, um, you know, can we, can, can you help us invest in, real estate and, uh, in our answers? Yes, we can. So we’ve got a great resource that we have folks go to.

You can go in, you download the wealth building trifecta, make sure you put the V on there. And it kind of helps you be able to invest with confidence. It helps, gives you a game plan. And we’ll also, if you go now and download it, we’ll give you 30 minutes of our time after we’ve spent hundreds of thousand dollars in education and multifamily to learn what we’re doing to help you kind of come up with a strategy and see.

See how multifamily may fit in your investment strategy. So mean, whether you’ve got, you know, 50,000 in IRA or hundreds of thousands sitting on the sideline that you need to invest, no matter what, where you are, mean, something like this is the thing for you and it’ll help you know how to take the next step.

Dylan Silver (26:42.828)
And to our listeners, would just say, know, these resources are really invaluable. mean, I’m sure Nathan, you can attest to this. Having these relationships, that’s like the core of the business, right? And so for people to go to, you know, your website, it’s thewealthbuilding.com.

Nathan Walldorf (26:51.845)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (26:57.177)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (27:02.691)
No, the wealth building trifecta.com. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (27:05.87)
The wealth building trifecta dot com the wealth building trifecta dot com. You know for people to be able to have that as a resource is really distilling your your time and real estate down to a consumable bite. And I think that’s how I got in that you may have a similar story there. So I would just say you know the resources are out there whether you’re thinking hey I don’t know enough about this I don’t have a way in.

Nathan Walldorf (27:09.506)
Yeah.

Nathan Walldorf (27:28.184)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (27:35.864)
You know here here’s one additional tool in your toolkit Nathan thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Nathan Walldorf (27:36.421)
Mm-hmm.

Nathan Walldorf (27:42.167)
Yeah, thanks for having me. was fun.

Dylan Silver (27:44.331)
Absolutely.