Doctors Lose Money Too: How High-Income Professionals Can Protect Wealth Through Real Estate

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (00:00)
dabbling into them or kind of the way things were planned. So now the same was for the syndication. So what happened was that my first experience as an LP, had done two syndication deals, 75,000 each with the same real estate company. over the next, I was in 2022, over the next two years,

I lost everything. lost 90%. I got 15,000 back out of 150,000.

Dylan Silver (02:03)
Today we’re joined by Dr. Lajide Lawoyin, a critical care physician and real estate investor with more than 25 years of experience in medicine. And since acquiring his first rental property in 2011, he’s scaled to 33 doors at peak ownership and has recently served as a GP on multiple syndication deals, helping raise more than 2.5 million in capital. Dr. Lawoyin, thanks for joining us today.

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (02:27)
Thanks for having me, Dylan.

Great to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:29)
Now, you’ve spent more than two decades in medicine, simultaneously ⁓ building a real estate investing business. When was the moment you realized real estate could become a serious part of your future?

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (02:42)
⁓ I think

that as I always say to people, it’s not something that I kind of planned to do, but there have been moments in my life where looking back, that was what kind of drew me towards Real Estate. Number one, it’s solid. You can touch it. ⁓ It’s a good investment.

So I’ll tell you a little bit of a story. My dad was a gastroenterologist, he was a physician as well, trained out of Henry Ford. He actually spent 16 years in the US training back in the 50s and 60s. Came back to Nigeria in 73 the year before I was born. So he died at age 57. I was barely 15 years old.

I was 15 in November and then he died the very next month. And he died without a will in the state they call it.

and ⁓ he died without generational wealth behind. And he wasn’t like he wasn’t paid or he didn’t, he actually had his own private hospital and he was also the director of a government hospital ⁓ in the town where we lived. But ⁓ immediately after he died, like within a couple of months, we went from relatively well upper middle class.

to the bottom of the society basically within a few months. So I had to change school, change towns. So that resonated with me.

you know, there were times when we didn’t have anything to eat at home. There were times when I had to walk long distances ⁓ to school from home and things like that. ⁓ Life just changed drastically. ⁓ So I got into medical school three years after he died when I was 18. ⁓ So that was the initial kind of shock. And then I said,

grew along the way and I became older. I was in Ireland. left and finished medical school in 2000 and then went to Ireland in 2002. I lived in Dublin for about five years where I met my wife. But while I was living in Dublin, I had another friend who we went to medical school together who unfortunately has passed away.

And while we’re in Ireland and working as physicians, within a three or four year span, he bought about five properties. was like, and at that time they were actually giving us a hundred percent interest.

100 % mortgage. So you didn’t even have to put anything down. You’re a physician, give you everything. So he bought several. I’m like, why are you doing all this stuff? Because I bought my own single just two bed apartment. I felt I was done. And he told me, no, this is… And he kind of talked to me a little bit about investing, but I didn’t even think that he understood it to the degree that I understand it now. So that was at the back of my mind. So when I came to the US in 2007, I was done with all my training in 2010.

Dylan Silver (05:59)
Yeah, physician.

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (06:18)
I just knew that the next step, once I bought my own place to live, the next step was getting to the real estate market and then I bought my first rental property in 2011. So that was how I got there. So it’s kind of a little bit of a stopping and starting kind of process. So there wasn’t just the one thing, it was kind of accumulation of things.

Dylan Silver (06:38)
Now, 33 doors when you were at your peak, it’s a lot of doors when having a very ⁓ time intensive ⁓ career. Were you self-managing?

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (06:46)
Yeah, you know ⁓

that’s another story but I’ll kind of make the long story short. So we started out self-managing. My wife wasn’t working out of the home.

⁓ She did law in Nigeria and then I told you I met her in Ireland and then she also went back to school after our kids. So she first took care of the kids and when they were a little bit older, she went back to school and did ⁓ masters ⁓ in social work because we have a son who was on the autistic spectrum. So because of that, that stimulated our interest in social work and then she wanted to do that. But she didn’t really work out of the home and because of that, she was self-managing some of our properties.

most of our properties. ⁓ But that’s not easy. It’s a kind of difficult job and we had actually by the end of the day, she actually gave up when we had not gave up totally kind of said, we need property managers, which I had been kind of pushing for because somebody stayed in one of our properties in Florida in Jacksonville for.

about seven or eight months before she discovered that she wasn’t paying rent. And that’s when my wife discovered after about six months of her living there rent free basically. So ⁓ we tried the kind of self-managing thing and it just doesn’t work. So it’s better to pay ⁓ the professionals that are going to manage your property, whatever, 10%, whatever you need to pay them per month to get the property done. ⁓

So, but we did the self-managing thing and it didn’t really pan out well. So not right now, we have property managers, managerial properties in Florida. And then we have properties in Savannah, Georgia. We used to have property in Michigan. We just sold our last property was an eight plex last month. So right now we don’t have any more properties in Michigan. So we used to have a property manager there as well.

Dylan Silver (08:47)
You made the transition from the single family side into multi-family. That can, and especially with syndications, that can be quite a big jump. Was that something that was very intentionally done or did you get invited to raise capital? How did that transition come about?

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (09:02)
Yeah, that’s another long story, but I’ll

make it short. ⁓ So we were kind of doing what we were doing and ⁓

kind of learnt along the way. 1031 exchanges we learnt by mistake because we had sold the property and then the next year the government asked us for the capital gains tax and I was like, wow, why should I have to pay this much? Because we made some money and I thought there should be another way. we just kind of like, although I told you that my wife wasn’t working out of the home, we never ⁓ took advantage of the real estate professional.

because when we talked to our CPA about a years and years ago, maybe around 2012, 2013,

he said she needed to have a real estate license. So we actually bought her the books, tried to get her to sit the exam. Then our kids were young and she never got to sit the exam. So what I mean is that a lot of things we did was just kind of…

dabbling into them or kind of the way things were planned. So now the same was for the syndication. So what happened was that my first experience as an LP, had done two syndication deals, 75,000 each with the same real estate company. over the next, I was in 2022, over the next two years,

I lost everything. lost 90%. I got 15,000 back out of

Yeah, so that was a major joke. And yeah, Falaka is on there. So I couldn’t even tell that for about a week. was kind of gauging our mood and trying to see when I can let it out of the bag, you know, because that was the major loss for us. So anyway, long story short, I then was, after we had suffered that loss, a few months later, I was,

Dylan Silver (11:17)
Sure.

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (11:23)
I through LinkedIn, I was talking to somebody with another capital company who now became our partners and our mentors actually. I was to work with them. The three deals that I said we did as GPs were done with this company. And we got talking. They had a particular deal on their hands at that time was a $49.1 million property in Atlanta, $288.

and they needed about a 22 million dollar raise or something like that and they were stuck kind of they had raised some and they were stuck so i listened to them i was part of the webinar and i said ⁓ this sounds really good this is a good deal but i couldn’t so i just kind of put in the end and the text and the notes that look you guys have a good deal but i’m i don’t have the appetite for this because i just lost money and then he kind of texted me back so what happened

He said do you have time after the webinar? would like to get on the phone with you because I when he said what happened I said I really don’t know I you know because they really didn’t explain anything to me. They just said well, you’re not credit up. You’re an accredited investor ⁓ Your money’s gone. This is what’s left of it. Have a good life or whatever. Good luck So so after that webinar he he got on the phone with me and he went to he had other resources co-star and he just

He just said, give me the address of the properties. And I gave it to him and he went through and said, this is what happened. This how much it was because of the increase in interest rates and what I didn’t hear from the people that I invested with. He laid it all out to me in about 20 minutes or so. And I was very, moved. And I was like, wow, he didn’t even have to do this. He’s not even trying to sell me anything. He’s just trying to say, wow, this guy lost money. I need to explain to him why he lost money.

when he wasn’t the one that lost the money. So I was then interested and I had to kind of bring my wife along and tell her about it. And then we went to visit the property and that was how we ended up for that property. We actually raised about 2.4 million for.

for that property because we got really interested, got into it. I told all my friends and family and people I knew about it. And ⁓ being a physician, you have a little bit of relationship with people that have a high income network and you can raise capital from them. ⁓ But you have to do that with, compliantly, ⁓ compliant to the FCC. So I had to go through all of that and that’s how we got into it.

Dylan Silver (13:52)
Now, interesting, because you had what would many to many people have been a really devastating situation, losing money actually spur you to get into this on a deeper level. Once you started to learn more about being a GP and raising capital in the syndication space as a whole, ⁓ did you then at that point realize, OK, there’s an opportunity?

for us to do several deals and raise capital and for this to be maybe a longer term venture

or were you looking at it like, let me do this one deal and see how it goes. What was the mentality in that first deal?

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (15:12)
So, yeah, so the mentality was more

of do this first deal, see how it goes. And then I, you know, after I was talking to the owners of that capital company.

They just said, you know, why don’t you just do mentorship with us? You’re great at this. You’re great at raising capital. You’re great at talking to people. A lot of people trust you that know you from before. Obviously, the people that don’t know you, it’s a different thing. You have to establish trust with those people over probably several months. Sometimes it takes years to establish trust with people. But the people that have already known me, people I’ve worked with for years, already trust me because of my work ethic. So they said, you ⁓ you should probably do

mentorship with us. So myself and my wife did mentorship with them for a year and we learned a ton. They pushed us a lot. So when they were doing their second deal, they invited us to join us, CodeGP. Obviously, we didn’t raise as much as we raised the first time. And then the third time too, they invited us. Actually, we jumped on the third one because the second one was only like two or three months after the first one closed. So that was a tough raise because,

We just raised all this capital, but the third one, yeah, we were able to do better than the second time. And since then, we’re just like, OK, let’s form our company. We formed our company. So we have a website. We have our list of investors. We’re working on our CRM. I have a presence on LinkedIn. She has a presence on LinkedIn. And we’re just trying to grow our business from there on.

Dylan Silver (16:50)
Now, for busy professionals who are either active real estate investors or becoming active real estate investors, one of the trickier things is that they have to find a balance between scaling the real estate business, delegating certain things, while also maintaining their intensive career. How have you managed to strike that balance?

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (17:12)
You know, it’s not

been that difficult. ⁓ I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but ⁓ I love what I do. You know, I love the ICU. I feel at home there, you know. ⁓

You know, it’s just something I’ve done for so long now that there’s still some parts of ICU medicine that gets me every time. The human part of it, you know, having to navigate waters with family, whose loved ones, our life supports and things like that. you know, medical school never prepare you for that kind of discussions. you know, they’re frustrated and desirably so. They’re frustrated, they’re angry. They go through all manner of

emotions when loved ones are that critically ill. So having to be the person to try to guide them through that process and you can’t save everybody. And so basically you will lose some people over your career and having to deal with that. ⁓ It’s just something that kind of sits with you for some time, depending on your relationship with that patient or with their family. ⁓ I know that during COVID, COVID was horrible.

I’m sure everywhere, but more in the ICU because we lost a lot of younger people. ⁓ But you know, it is what it is. ⁓ coming back to your question about how I balance it, the medicine part of it is not that difficult apart from the emotional toll that that takes on you. ⁓ But the ⁓ real estate part of it was tough.

You know, I thought because I had done real estate since 2011 and we’ve done all these flippants, you know, we’ve done all this selling and then we’ve just done a lot of different things. I thought it was going to be easy, but there’s a steep learning curve to it. You kind of, I heard one of my colleagues, an orthopedic surgeon who is also into syndication said, this is more like a fellowship, you know, it’s more like training, you know, like another fellowship in training in real estate. real estate is broad. Some people will do

you know, ⁓ multifamilies, some who do single family, some storage and all that kind of stuff. There’s just so many aspects to it and it’s all a team sport. But there’s a lot of crossroads between. ⁓

Critical care medicine or medicine as a whole and real estate, commercial real estate, there’s just a lot of crossroads and where they meet and where there’s a lot of similarities and parallels that you can actually just apply the training you’ve already had to what you are trying to learn in real estate. So it’s been fun and I love both part of it and I’m happy I’m doing what I’m doing.

right now. So when you love something, it’s not as stressful as when you just feel that it’s just something you gotta do.

Dylan Silver (20:10)
No question. We are coming up on time here. Any new projects that you’re working on and then also anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience.

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (20:17)
Yeah, so currently

myself and my wife are in partnership with ⁓ some other people that we met through our mentorship and we’re currently awaiting an LOI on a property in ⁓

South Carolina not too far from actually is in Mercer Beach not too far from the beach and we were going to be ⁓ lead sponsors on that deal when when it’s all said and done. ⁓ So our company is called 3DS Capital that’s three that’s the letter three ⁓ sorry the number three number three the letter D and then the letter S capital dot com.

And ⁓ we actually named it 3DS because we have three kids and all their names start with a D. We have Dasoie, Damare, and Dakuumi. So 3DS, although 3DS can also be three dimensional in medicine. We have a 2D apple, 3D. Yeah, so that’s where that kind of came through.

came from. So we have that company and we have a list of investors and anybody that would like to join us can go on our website and join our list of investors. There’s also a schedule for you to book a call with us and we can talk to you about our new deal, about what we’ve done before. Our track record is on our site as well of the three deals we’ve done with ⁓ other partners. And we just want people to know that if they’re high-earning professionals, especially health

care professionals. Unfortunately, ⁓ physicians have a target on their back because they’re seen as, ⁓ you know… ⁓

kind of wealthy, although that’s a discussion for another day because having high earning capacity and being wealthy are two different things. But unfortunately, they are targets and if they fall into the wrong hands or the people that are underwriting the deals are not as conservative as they should be, then they can possibly lose money like I did. ⁓

I’m somebody that who’s been in their shoes and I know the ⁓ space very well now. I’m learning more as I go along every day and will protect their interest.

Dylan Silver (22:40)
Dr. Lawoyin, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for joining us.

Lajide Richard Lawoyin (22:42)
Thank you so much, Dylan, for having

me and God bless.