Fix and Flip to Multifamily Syndication: How to Make the Jump

Moving from fix and flip to multifamily syndication does not mean doing bigger versions of what you already do. It means picking one job on a deal team — capital raising, underwriting, asset management, construction oversight — and letting people who already have broker credibility handle the rest. Alan Davison, who runs Springwell Properties (fix and flip, Cape Cod) and Coalition Capital (multifamily and senior living syndications), figured that out at his first Michael Blank bootcamp and built the second business around it.

The other thing that changes: the money stops arriving every 90 days. Syndication returns land in three to seven years, which is why Davison still runs the flip business that consumes most of his time.

This guide covers why flippers hit a ceiling, how to choose a lane on a GP team, why commercial brokers ignore new buyers and what fixes that, how the 3% underwriting era created today’s distressed inventory, and the operational headache nobody warns you about: renovating a building while people live in it.

Why Flippers Hit a Ceiling: A Job vs. an Asset

Davison is blunt about what a flip business actually is: “A fix and flip business is basically a job.” You are not buying investment property. You are buying inventory, performing work on it, and selling it again. Stop working and revenue stops within one cycle.

The usual next step is to keep one out of every four or five houses as a rental. Davison deliberately skipped that step, for three reasons worth understanding before you copy the standard playbook:

• Value is comp-dependent. You cannot do much to a single-family rental to raise its value quickly. The neighborhood’s comps set the price.
• Operational improvement does not translate to value. Get the rent up, get expenses down — none of it filters through to the sale price the way it does on an income-valued asset.
• It resists third-party management. At small scale, professional property management does not pencil, so you end up doing the hands-on work yourself. You have replaced one job with two.

Multifamily inverts all three. Value is a direct function of net operating income, so improving operational efficiency, pushing rents to market and getting occupancy into the 90s moves the asset price directly. And the scale supports a professional management company whose cost is built into the deal — the maintenance, leasing and lease-up all get handled by people who do it full time.

That is the real distinction between the two businesses. In flipping, you create value with your own hours. In multifamily, you create it by changing how a building operates, and someone else can execute that while you own the outcome.

Pick One Role on the GP Team Instead of Doing Everything

Almost every flipper moving up writes the same plan: find an asset through a broker, underwrite it, take it down, close, manage it, sell it in five years, collect the profit. Davison started with exactly that plan and now calls it impossible for one person.

Syndications split into general partners and limited partners. The GPs are the actual managers of the deal — they source it, underwrite it, sign on the debt, oversee the business plan and handle the disposition. LPs put in capital and stay passive. The GP side is not one job; it is four or five, and the working structure is a team where each partner owns a piece.

Davison and his son Patrick identified their lane on day one of their first Michael Blank bootcamp, not from the curriculum but from listening to the room. “We suddenly realized that the people that are going to be most popular in this business are the capital raisers,” he said. So that became the specialty.

His construction background became the second contribution. He bought the UK building company he worked for and grew it from roughly $3 million to $60 million in revenue over 20 years, specializing in high-end commercial interiors on hard deadlines. On a value-add deal, he oversees the capex work for the GP team — a genuinely useful skill in a business where most sponsors come from brokerage, sales or unrelated fields and have never managed a construction schedule.

The lesson for a flipper: your existing skill is probably construction oversight, disposition, or knowing how to find distressed sellers. Sell that into a team. Do not try to become an underwriter overnight because a bootcamp taught you the spreadsheet.

A fix and flip business is basically a job. You’re not even buying investment properties, really — you’re buying properties that go into your inventory, you perform work on them, and then you sell them again.

— Alan Davison, Springwell Properties and Coalition Capital

Why Brokers Won’t Show You Deals — and What Fixes That

The first thing that broke on Davison’s original plan was the deal source. He went and talked to commercial brokers, expecting to be shown inventory, and got nothing.

The reason is mechanical, not personal. Brokers hand their pocket deals to buyers they already know can close. A commercial listing is not like residential — you cannot spend a weekend touring open houses and pick one. As Davison put it, the deals do not hit a marketplace until they are bad deals. What ends up on LoopNet is often a seller with an unrealistic number that did not move privately.

So the entry problem is a credibility problem, and there are only two ways through it. You can spend years buying smaller assets until you have a closing record brokers recognize. Or you attach yourself to a team that already has one.

Davison took the second route. After several years spent on education and networking in the multifamily space, he and Patrick joined a mastermind of established multifamily and senior living operators — a paid room, based in Florida — where they could meet, vet and build relationships with sponsors already transacting. Coalition Capital has been running about 18 months on the back of that. Their role on the team is explicitly not to find deals; other partners do that.

Two caveats worth naming. Masterminds cost money, which is hard when you would rather put that cash in a deal, and Davison’s answer is that you are buying other people’s mistakes instead of paying for your own. And the free version — showing up at four or five local REIA meetings a month, some flip-focused, some multifamily — is still the cheapest relationship-building available.

Underwriting in the Real World: The 3% Mistake Creating Today’s Deals

The distress currently working its way through multifamily traces back to one underwriting assumption. When rates fell to 3% and change after 2008 and stayed there long enough to feel permanent, a lot of operators underwrote their deals at 3–3.5% — ignoring that the average U.S. interest rate over the last 50 years sits somewhere in the sevens.

Davison’s read on the sequence:

1. Deals get underwritten at 3–3.5%, often on floating or short-term bridge debt.
2. Loans come due at rates near the historical average.
3. Banks, facing a large-scale problem, extend and pretend rather than take the losses.
4. The extensions run out and foreclosures begin.
5. Cap rate expansion compresses values at the same time, so the property is worth less than the mortgage taken out to buy it.

He is unsentimental about the rate environment itself. Rates are roughly where they have been historically since the 1970s; he bought his own first house at something like 16%. The problem was never the rate. It was underwriting a permanent business plan on a temporary number.

That is the risk to avoid and the source of the opportunity at the same time. Teams that underwrite to the long-run rate rather than the current one are buying from teams that did not, and there is a meaningful volume of that inventory moving now. If you are evaluating a sponsor as an LP or joining a GP team as a partner, the single most informative question is what rate assumption sits in the model at refinance and exit — and whether the deal survives if that number is wrong by two points.

Running Value-Add Construction in an Occupied Building

The biggest opportunities in multifamily come from value-add, and value-add means substantial capital expenditure. That is also where the operational conflict lives, and Davison names it as his single hardest current problem.

The business plan requires two things at once: push occupancy up, then push rents to market. The capex required to justify those rents turns the property into a construction site. “Those two things aren’t conducive to each other,” he said. “They conflict in a great way. People don’t like living on building sites.” Nobody signs a new lease at a premium rent while walking through dirt and noise, and existing tenants who were on the fence about renewing now have a reason to leave.

His mitigations come straight from the commercial interiors work:

• Work extremely closely with the contractors. Not check-in calls — active daily coordination on what is happening where.
• Restrict access to defined work areas. Contractors get the zone they are working in, not the run of the property.
• Put a physical barrier between the work and the occupied areas. Hoarding, sealed corridors, separate entrances where the layout allows.

The honest caveat matters more than the tactics: the impact can be minimized but never eradicated. Build that into the underwriting rather than the hope. If your model assumes occupancy climbs on a straight line while heavy capex runs, the model is wrong. Phase the work, protect the units that are already leased, and give the lease-up timeline enough slack to absorb the disruption you cannot design away.

Funding the Transition: Cash Flow, Alignment and Realistic Timelines

Springwell Properties still consumes most of the Davisons’ time, and that is deliberate. Coalition Capital deals take three to seven years before returns arrive. Something has to cover the household and the business in between, and the flip business is it — roughly $5–6 million a year in property turnover, run by Alan, Patrick, Alan’s wife on admin and another son part-time. Long term they expect to scale Springwell down, not up. But not yet.

Their deal flow reality is worth studying, because it is where most flippers’ cash flow quietly breaks:

• They left the HomeVestors franchise over restrictions they found authoritarian and a fee structure that charged them when they sold a house and charged them again in months when they did not. Roughly two-thirds of the franchisees in their market who were there when they joined have since left.
• Bought leads rate about a 1 out of 10. They bid on counties and take what comes in. A Google Ads agency that pitched well produced nothing and got cut.
• Wholesaler relationships rate a 7 or 8. Not the auction-style wholesalers who mob a property with 30 buyers — Davison went twice and quit, on the theory that someone in that crowd will always be willing to overpay. The productive relationships are wholesalers who work a short buyer list of people who reliably close. Springwell has never failed to close, and that is the entire reason they get the calls.
• The seller still has to accept roughly a 30% discount. Anyone whose goal is saving a 5% listing commission is not a fit.

On the syndication side, alignment is the other piece. Davison and Patrick invest their own capital as limited partners in the deals they raise for, so they take the same outcome as their investors. It is the fastest thing they have found for building investor confidence.

Frequently asked questions

Should I keep flipping houses while building a syndication business?

Yes, in almost every case. Syndication returns typically arrive three to seven years after closing, so the syndication side produces no meaningful personal cash flow during the build-out period. Alan Davison still runs his flip business specifically to cover that gap, even though the long-term plan is to scale it down.

The practical constraint is time. Capital raising and investor relations take real hours, so decide in advance how many flips per year you can run without starving the new business of attention.

What role should a former flipper take on a multifamily GP team?

Whichever one your existing experience already qualifies you for — most commonly capital raising, construction and capex oversight, or disposition. Davison contributes both capital raising and construction oversight on value-add deals, drawing on 20 years running a commercial interiors business before he ever bought a house in the U.S.

What does not work is claiming the sourcing and underwriting seats on your first deal. Those require broker relationships and repetition you have not built yet, and an experienced GP team already has both covered.

Why won’t commercial brokers send off-market multifamily deals to new buyers?

Because they route pocket deals to buyers with a proven closing record, and a new buyer has none. A broker’s downside on a failed closing is a re-trade, a re-marketing cycle and a damaged relationship with the seller, so the incentive is to call the same short list every time.

The consequence is that public listing sites skew toward what did not sell privately. The two routes around it are building a closing track record on smaller assets, or joining an established team whose track record the brokers already recognize.

How do you renovate a multifamily property while tenants are still living there?

You confine the disruption rather than eliminate it. Davison’s approach is to work very closely with the contractors, restrict their access to specifically defined work areas rather than the whole property, and put physical barriers between the construction zone and occupied units.

Plan the underwriting around the reality that the impact can be minimized but never fully removed. Occupancy and rent growth will not climb on a straight line while heavy capex is running, so the lease-up schedule needs slack built into it.

Why can’t you force appreciation on a single-family rental the way you can on multifamily?

Because single-family homes are valued off neighborhood comparable sales, not off income. You can raise the rent and cut operating expenses, and none of it reliably shows up in the sale price — the appraiser is looking at what similar houses down the street sold for.

Multifamily is valued on net operating income against a cap rate, so improving operational efficiency, pushing rents to market and lifting occupancy into the 90s translates directly into asset value. That is the mechanism behind forced appreciation, and it does not exist at the single-family level.

The bottom line

Before you raise a dollar or tour a single 100-unit property, decide which one job on a GP team you are qualified to do today, and then find a team that needs it and already has the broker relationships you do not. Everything else in the transition — the education, the mastermind spend, the underwriting discipline — follows from getting that one decision right.