Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this conversation, Dave Seymour shares his journey from being a firefighter in England to becoming a successful real estate investor in the United States. He discusses the differences in investment opportunities between the two countries, his transition to multifamily investing, and the current market landscape shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dave emphasizes the importance of education in real estate and the need for investors to be adaptable and informed in order to succeed.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Dave Seymour (00:00)
No, it was a transfer of equitable interest. So I put this deal under contract for 30,000 and then I sold the contract for 50,000. There was one other investor in there, so there was a $20,000 margin. One investor got 15 and I made five. And I remember looking at that deal at the closing, I walked away with a check for $5,000. And I remember looking at that deal and thinking to myself, you know, how many hours did I have to work?as a firefighter to be able to make a $5,000 check, right? And I never looked back after that. It worked out pretty good for me. So yeah, it was cool.
Dylan Silver (00:41)
WhenDylan Silver (02:15)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Dave Seymour, is a private equity fund manager and was a firefighter and TV personality before getting into the private equity space. Dave, welcome to the show.Dave Seymour (02:29)
Dylan, thanks for having me, brother. I’m excited to have a quick chat.Dylan Silver (02:33)
I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking guests how they got into the real estate space.Dave Seymour (02:39)
Yeah, I was forced into it. was forced into it. ⁓ Long story short, I came from a blue collar background in the south of England. I was born in London. I grew up in the south, emigrated to the States back in 1986. And here in America, ⁓ there’s a mindset around money, which was very familiar to me, which was to just trade time for money. Blue collar background, that was all I knew. Anyway, long story short, as you said in the intro, I became a firefighter, a paramedic, very blessed to be in that career.but I bought some financial illiteracy with me from England. I.e. you know the only way to make more money is to trade more time and you know I bottomed out bad during the financial crisis during the crash. I was losing my house. I was working 120 hours a week.
working construction on my day’s off as most firefighters tend to do. you know, I looked at the landscape and I went, I can either go down with the ship like everybody else or learn to do something different. And I had a flashback to a job that I was on in Boston. It was freezing cold. I’m trying to dig four feet down to a frost line so I can put in a deck so I can make some money. And these investors showed up on the job site. It was their property. And they looked a lot better than I did, brother. They were smiling.
Dylan Silver (03:32)
Yeah.Dave Seymour (03:59)
They were driving nicer cars. Their coffee was a cappuccino latte, tarté, something or other. And I’m like, what are they doing? One of the guys said to me, goes, those are the investors. I’m like, okay, they own the house. We fix it and they make the money. I’m like, okay, I got to figure that out. And that’s where it started. I went to an education event and then leaned all in and I started doing real estate the same way I fought fires. When everybody else went running out, we went running in.Dylan Silver (04:04)
That’s right.Dave Seymour (04:27)
I trusted my mentors ⁓ and I turned around, I saved my house, ⁓ my career took off, ⁓ my wife was able to ⁓ leave her job. She was a labor and delivery nurse at the hospital and she raised my boys. it’s been, America has been very, very good to me. it’s, yeah, yeah.Dylan Silver (04:29)
Mm-hmm. ⁓Yeah, it’s been pleasant. ⁓ When you were
a firefighter, what were those first real estate deals that you were involved in?
Dave Seymour (05:43)
Yeah. So I, like I said, I went to an education format and they taught me a strategy called wholesaling, which in the residential world meant if I didn’t have any money, which I didn’t, I was more than broke. I needed to learn ⁓ documentation. I needed to learn how to legally control assets.with a purchase and sales agreement and then be able to sell the ⁓ equity position, if you will, in that asset. So once I learned how to sell my equity position in a wholesale transaction, I remember the first deal I made, I sold the contract to another investor and it was a bank owned property. And back then they said you couldn’t wholesale bank owned properties.
And I realized that you could I was trained by experts. Once you get expert training, you learn some nuances that the average bear doesn’t understand, right. And I remember I sold my equitable interest in this bank owned property through a trust agreement, a land trust agreement to another investor. Again, I’ve been trained and I made $5,000 still $5,000 and I got so excited. It was like, nobody could ever tell me that I couldn’t do this business ever again.
Dylan Silver (06:39)
Yep.Dave Seymour (06:52)
Nobody could tell me I was too stupid to do this business and I just leaned into it. in the beginning that’s what I was doing. I was doing quite a few ⁓ wholesale transactions with bank on properties and then it just grew from there.Dylan Silver (07:05)
That deal was that deal, a sumable loan? Was that a subject to deal?Dave Seymour (07:09)
No, it was a transfer of equitable interest. So I put this deal under contract for 30,000 and then I sold the contract for 50,000. There was one other investor in there, so there was a $20,000 margin. One investor got 15 and I made five. And I remember looking at that deal at the closing, I walked away with a check for $5,000. And I remember looking at that deal and thinking to myself, you know, how many hours did I have to work?as a firefighter to be able to make a $5,000 check, right? And I never looked back after that. It worked out pretty good for me. So yeah, it was cool.
Dylan Silver (07:51)
Whenyou were getting more involved in real estate, you mentioned not looking back. Was it one of these situations where you said, OK, I’m going to go full time right now? Or was it you were still working the firefighter ⁓ job while getting more involved in real estate?
Dave Seymour (08:09)
Yeah, great question. Look, man, I was blessed in the sense that as a firefighter, I had some time off, you full days time off. And during my time off, I would work on my business. I’d get up early in the morning and work on my business. I turn off the TV at night and I’d work on my business. So I got to a point, it was probably around eight or nine months, maybe nine months after I started, that I was able to look at what I was earning in real estate and compare it to what I was earning in the fire.department and it sounds egotistical but it cost me too much money to go to the firehouse. So at that point I transitioned out and went full-time and ⁓ you know there’s some regrets. I mean I’ve been a blessed guy, I’ve done exceptionally well but at the same time it’s like I look at some of the guys that I got on the fire department with and they’re you know I just miss the stories, I miss some of that camaraderie but you know it’s all good.
Dylan Silver (08:46)
Mm.It’s tough to replace being
a firefighter with real estate. You don’t want to be putting out too many fires in real estate, although that does happen. ⁓ I want to pivot here, Dave, and ask you about the multifamily space. So going from wholesaling to single family investing, fix and flip, short-term, long-term hold, totally different ballgame than the multifamily space. ⁓ What time period did you start getting involved in multifamily and how did that look for you?
Dave Seymour (09:08)
Yeah, yeah.Yeah, it does. Sure.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, look, the small multi-families always ran alongside the bifix and flips.
I learned very early on again from experts that if I wanted to stay in the game long term, flipping a house is a job, multifamily is an ATM, it’s a cash machine, However, you still need to learn the nuances again and the specifics of what it takes to buy one, fix one, rent one, manage one. So I got up to about 150, 120, 150 doors in a C- neighborhood up in Maine with a
partner.
And I really learned, I learned the grossness and the joy of multifamily investing, you know, our biggest units were maybe 15 or 20 unit properties. So that always happened. And then we came out of that with a ridiculous return on investment, because I learned how to buy them with my tax returns, and then cash out refi everything. So now we’re working 100 % with the bank’s money. So we never had any of our own money in these deals. You build a portfolio like that and sell it.
Dylan Silver (11:02)
Mm-hmm.Dave Seymour (11:12)
So it was always in transition. And what happened just to speed this up was to I looked at the COVID situation. And when we were going into COVID, we started looking at what was going on in the marketplace and COVID brought a massive opportunity for us to raise money on mass, raise as much as we can and buy some of the distressed assets that we believed were coming into the COVID market. Now, I do that with a team. I’ve got feet on the street down in the southwest Florida market ⁓ where my guys are 30 plus years of experience.it’s in multifamily down there. I’m capable of raising a couple of bucks up here in New England in the Boston market, and then a COO, our operations manager, Eric, keeping everything moving forward and then being able to ⁓ oversee these multifamily acquisitions. But where we are today with multifamily is we are so bullish, it’s ridiculous. I’m looking to take down as many multifamily assets as I can in the next
three to five years and here’s why. There is approximately three trillion was the last notation that I took in distressed, distressed multifamily properties coming into the marketplace over the next 24, 48 months.
And those are because of the craziness of the COVID crisis where we saw this massive compression of capitalization rates, meaning, you know, the return on investment was so small. And we know what happened afterwards, all that free money came in, people who didn’t know what they were doing were buying, interest rates go up, capitalization rates are now trash, they’re working in a deficit, they can’t raise the rents anymore. And that creates a massive, massive buying opportunity. So where we are in multifamily now, as I was explaining to you before,
Dylan Silver (12:33)
I meanDave Seymour (12:59)
we started recording the podcast was I want to arm an army, if you will, with education on how to buy these things ⁓ so that we can either partner with people or teach them and have those really good alliances for folks who want to get into cash flow during an inflationary crazy crisis, which whether you like it or not, is coming down the pike. It’s coming our way. know, the governments and the world order can only push this stuff off for so long. So that’s where we’re at today. We’re teaching people how to do it and then we’re buying asDylan Silver (13:28)
Okay.Dave Seymour (13:29)
as we can.Dylan Silver (13:31)
Now, when you are looking at buying these properties currently, is any of the capital ⁓ through syndication or is it purely bank financing?Dave Seymour (13:42)
No, I can’t. I don’t amount to anybody else. I can’t write from my personal business or bank accounts checks for 30, 40, 50 million dollars. I can’t do it. I wish I could. I probably wouldn’t be on this podcast if I could. So there is always the LP position, the limited partner position. I’ll just think of that as the money down. Well, where does that come from? That comes from private investors. It comes from family offices. That comes from some small retirement funds, things of that.nature. And what we’re able to do is now as a team, we can either do as you said, a syndicated deal, which is a one deal, one group of investors, or we can go into a fund structure, or everybody piles capital in. And then we as fund managers or GPs operators, we’ll go out and put multiple assets into a fund, if they’re part of the buying criteria, and they make sense. What we target coming down is some funds that we’re going to start, we’ll start looking at what you know, really pigeonhole and
area, this zip code or this specific geographic area could be a fund structure. But we can still tuck syndicated assets inside of a fund as well. So you can have two levels of investors in there. So it gets super creative. Every deal is on a deal by deal basis. But you need an army of people who understand what’s going on. An educated investor always makes a better partner.
Dylan Silver (14:52)
Right.When you talk about Florida but also coming from the Boston area by the way I lived in Boston for about five years so I have that affinity for all things Boston it was great for sports when I was up there from like 2013 to 2018 but then you talk about Florida Florida is probably the Mecca of all things real estate investing even if people have an established real estate business that is active outside of Florida I see a lot of entrepreneurs
Dave Seymour (15:53)
Okay, sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.Dylan Silver (16:13)
leaders within companies, owners going to Florida for the culture, the weather, so many different aspects of real estate. When you’re in the commercial space looking at these deals, are you agnostic to area for instance? Are you looking at deals all across the country or are there certain areas that you’re maybe ⁓ careful perhaps more so than other areas?Dave Seymour (16:18)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.
Yeah, great questions. Look, man, it’s data driven. a multifamily asset, say 50 units and above is a data driven acquisition. So what do I mean by that? I want to see job growth, population growth, I want a good geopolitical environment in which to do business. I don’t want to be having my balls handed to me every time I want to make a decision as an entrepreneur and investor, right? So I want some good alliances, some good, some good feedback, some some good feeling with the communities and the states and the counties in which we invest.
Dylan Silver (17:05)
Yeah.Dave Seymour (17:07)
So when you think about Florida, still the number one destination for retirees in the United States of America on the East Coast, on the West Coast is probably Arizona. So if I’m in that marketplace, we live longer, we have more retirees, and statistically it shows that for every retiree moving to the Florida market, it brings four service jobs. So those four service jobs, medical facilities, anything to support the health of that retiree, anything around… ⁓hotels around, restaurants around, know, maintenance of properties, anything of that nature as well. All of these jobs are moving in. So if I’ve got job growth, what does that mean? It people either need somewhere to rent or somewhere to buy. They can’t buy because they can’t afford, period, end of conversation. The prices are just way too high, even though they’re coming down, it’s too high. So what does that mean? That means I’ve got a renter community. I’ve got a renter state. So if I’ve got that demand, I have a responsibility to meet that demand.
Dylan Silver (17:54)
Yeah.Yep.
Dave Seymour (18:07)
Now, can I find that in Tampa MSA? Tampa is tough, Miami is tough. But once I start coming out into the secondary and the tertiary markets, I can find those data points and we use a lot of ⁓ specific software to target that data pool so that I’m getting the very best information I can when I’m looking at an asset class. And again, on the education side, that’s what we give to our partners in this stuff is like, here, use our software, use our data, use this.let’s all be looking at these deals the same way. We all see in the same data set to make sure that we’re buying the right properties in the right market. you know, it’s not…
Dylan Silver (18:44)
in the right.Dave Seymour (18:49)
It’s agnostic to the extent that if the numbers fire in the markets where these points hit, then yeah, I’ll buy in South Carolina, I’ll buy in Texas, I’ll I’ll even buy in Boston if I can find, I’m never gonna get the right geopolitical market in Boston, but I could still get the good data points in Boston, so yeah.Dylan Silver (18:57)
Yeah.That’s
a good point. Quick side note on that. When I moved to Texas from Boston, I was completely unaware that they didn’t winterize anything. So like a small freeze is a disaster in Texas where he is.
Dave Seymour (19:23)
Yeah, Texaswent through that. I remember that. All the pipes burst. Yeah, I remember. Yeah.
Dylan Silver (19:27)
And I’m like, this is crazy. How come we can’ttake some of this technology that we’re doing in the Northeast? But when we talk about the education component of what you’re doing, Dave, what are folks backgrounds when they’re ⁓ taking on this education? Are they already active, you know, maybe in the multifamily space, maybe in single family, or is it a mixed range of people?
Dave Seymour (19:33)
Mmm.Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I’m going to that’s a great question, brother. It really is. And to go zero degrees on that, the less they know, the better it is.
because I don’t have to undo any kind of bad habits. Now that being said, doesn’t mean our education is a couple of thousand dollars. It’s a ⁓ weekly education format of which they need almost to graduate to be able to answer the right questions to understand exactly how we do this business. We focus ⁓ heavily on business owners and people already with an entrepreneurial background. But like I said, it doesn’t matter who you are, anybody can do this.
this business with the right education, support and implementation. But business owners specifically, they tend to have a little more debt financially to be able to put some money into their own transaction or use some retirement funds. These are the folks who are smart enough to understand that the noise in the marketplace about retirement and being all set is a bunch of BS. And they’re the ones that get real hungry for what it is that we’re doing because they know the government ain’t taking the property. The rents are going to be coming in because
Dylan Silver (20:57)
Yep.Dave Seymour (20:58)
even in the worst times ever, people will pay their rent first so they know they’re in a cash flow and asset. So on the education side, if you’ve never done a real estate transaction, you’re welcome. If you’ve done thousands of real estate transactions, you’re welcome. But that being said, this isn’t for everybody because you will have to pass some kind of interview process with us to make sure that there’s an alliance. ⁓ don’t, look, I am who I am today. I don’t have to be polite or politically correct anymore, but…There’s a saying in my business, dig jams, not welcome. And a dig jam is someone who says, darn, I’m good, just ask me, right? I don’t want those people around us. They’re not teachable, right? You gotta be teachable. You gotta be teachable. don’t need you to… Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want entrepreneurs, not entrepreneurs, okay? That’s what I want.
Dylan Silver (21:41)
Absolutely. There’s enough of them in real estate already. We don’t need more of them in education.I
can echo that 100%. I have so many stories about getting a real estate license and people telling me that you can’t be working with investors and doing creative deals and have a real estate license. But here we are. Dave, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to learn more about what you’re involved in? How can folks find you? Where can folks reach out to you?
Dave Seymour (22:05)
Yeah, here we are.Yeah.
Yeah, if you want to get a little head start on any education with us, you can go to LegacyAllianceWealthClass.com.
Legacy Alliance Wealth Class. My team, the way, Dylan, they’ll give you all the links and stuff of where to go. We’ve got some giveaways, some books that we’ve written that begin to bring people up the education gradient. You can get me direct on LinkedIn at Dave Seymour. ⁓ Freedom Venture Investments is our investment arm, freedomventure.com. But again, they’ll send you all the links. If you want to find me, I’m findable, okay?
Dylan Silver (22:51)
Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.Dave Seymour (22:55)
Thanks Dylan, God bless.
