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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Dan Brisse of Granite Towers Equity Group. Dan shares his journey from aspiring professional snowboarder to successful multifamily real estate investor. He discusses the importance of passive income, hedging against inflation, and utilizing depreciation to build wealth. Through case studies of successful investments, Dan illustrates how strategic real estate investing can lead to financial freedom. He also highlights opportunities for potential investors to partner with his firm.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Dan Brisse (00:00)
Yeah, you know, so the biggest stat that hit me hard was 78 % of all pro athletes are broke within three years. Now that’s just not just snowboarding, that’s all pro athletes. So the chances of a professional athlete moving on to have a really successful or financially successful life afterwards, the odds are stacked against them. So if you’re here listening to this and you can see retirement coming or a change coming or you just don’t like your job, I know what it feels like to be in that scenario.Michelle Kesil (02:01)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Dan Brisse of Granite Towers Equity Group, which is a multifamily real estate firm. So excited to have you here today, Dan.Dan Brisse (02:19)
Yeah, excited to be here. Thank you, Michelle.Michelle Kesil (02:21)
Yeah, absolutely excited to dive in with you. So first off, for those who are not familiar with you and your work, can you share what your main focus is?Dan Brisse (02:32)
Yeah, so Granite Towers Equity Group is a multifamily investment firm. We buy value-add real estate, usually 150 to 400 unit apartments located in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Nashville, Tennessee. We’ll typically have a five to seven year hold period where we’ll come in with a value-add strategy. We’ll come in and invest potentially 10 to $20,000 per unit.do some extra upgrades and ideally create a challenged asset into the shiny little gem in that sub market to stand out and drive NOI and bring a lot of investors along with us to create value through real estate.
Michelle Kesil (03:10)
Awesome. So how did you get started as a real estate investor?Dan Brisse (03:15)
Yeah, so my story, like many of your listeners here, I had big dreams as a kid and I wanted to be a professional snowboarder when I was young. So, you I went around Minnesota telling everyone how I was going to be the big name athlete and a lot of the teachers and people I told would ask the obvious question of how I’m going to do that. And in reality, I didn’t know how at that age, you know, 13 years old, Minnesota broke or middle class. had no idea. And so a big pushback.came from a lot of these folks saying you should have a backup plan or you might want to have college as kind of a fallback. And the thing that really struck me the most and still does to this day, Michelle, is when I went and talked to my parents about it, I can still remember my dad and my mom who said, go for it and do what you love. My mom and dad didn’t really chase a passion when they were younger and really stuck with them to push us, my brother and I, to do stuff we love to do.
When my dad said, go for it, he also said it, be willing to work harder than most others, be willing to do what others are not, and you’re gonna have to stick with it for a long time. And so that idea planted the seed in my mind that it was possible. And so for the next 10 years, was an all out grind, if you will, of a lot of failure, a lot of setback. I moved to Salt Lake City as soon as I graduated from high school to pursue this career.
I thought within that first year I’d be this big name pro snowboarder. I’m eating peanut butter and jelly for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’m working at Blockbuster, checking people out at the movie theater, literally living paycheck to paycheck, biking to work. And at the end of that first year, nothing happens. I go back to Minnesota, save my money, come back year two, I think this is my year. I’m eating peanut butter and jelly for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working at a restaurant called Payway. I’m serving, I’m busing tables. Nothing happens.
Year three I come back, I’m thinking this is my year, and I have a major knee injury before my career even takes off. I dislocate my kneecap, chip my kneecap, tear cartilage, tear my meniscus, and the doctor says, you got two options, I can cut it out, and you’ll be back in three weeks to a month, or I can sew it and you’re done for the year. And I chose to sew it and take that year off. I came back the next year, year four, and my good friend said I should go to Aspen, Colorado to compete in the Aspen Open.
And I’m saying to him, yeah, I’d love to go. How am gonna get there? You gotta drive, you gotta rent the hotel room, it’s Aspen. And so he said, I’ll pay for it, I’ll bring you. And he brought me to Aspen, paid for the hotel, paid for my entry fee, got me in this contest. And the way opens work, for anyone who doesn’t know, is you get two runs. If you finish top 10, you go to finals. If you don’t, you’re done. I end up finishing sixth in qualifier. Go back to my hotel room that night, come back the next day, and whatever happened, I end up winning this contest.
and my snowboarding career took off. I had brands that were interested in me up to that point but never really invested in me. And at that point when I won that contest, I started getting invited to a bunch of events. got to Transworld Snowboard Magazine, Snowboarder Magazine, Superpark, and I got put on the scene in front of lot of brand managers and my career took off. And I ended up having this really great snowboarding career, 15 year run.
traveled the world, I was in X Games six times. I have two gold medals, two silver medals. I’m on the cover of every magazine and things are really, really great until I get to this point of seeing my friends who are five or 10 years in front of me who I get to know pretty well and I see their careers winding down and it terrifies me. You know, I see them losing their home. I see them losing their cars. I see the divorce happening. I see suicide happening and it terrified me, Michelle. So that was the point.
where I realized I’ve got to do something different. I got to start putting the capital I’m making to work in order to not have the same outcome as my heroes were having five or 10 years in front of me. So that’s how I got into real estate investing.
Michelle Kesil (07:53)
Wow, yeah, that’s an incredible story that definitely took you on a whole new direction.Dan Brisse (07:59)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. You I learned three things at the peak that changed my life forever. And I never heard about these in school. I learned about passive income and how to create cash flow. I learned about how to hedge inflation and how inflation is a silent wealth killer. And I learned about depreciation and how to use the tax law to legally help me pay less in tax. And so those three things changed my life forever.and happy to talk about how those three things work in deals that we buy as examples for your listeners if that’s something that you think they’d be interested in.
Michelle Kesil (08:34)
Definitely go for it.Dan Brisse (08:35)
Yeah, you know, so the biggest stat that hit me hard was 78 % of all pro athletes are broke within three years. Now that’s just not just snowboarding, that’s all pro athletes. So the chances of a professional athlete moving on to have a really successful or financially successful life afterwards, the odds are stacked against them. So if you’re here listening to this and you can see retirement coming or a change coming or you just don’t like your job, I know what it feels like to be in that scenario.And so with the three things I learned, you looking at passive income first, never heard about the idea of putting my money to work as a little boy growing up in Minnesota until I was 27 years old, living in Salt Lake City. And what I learned is as I’m making this capital from my profession, I can invest it into an asset that is starting to pay monthly and quarterly cash flow. And the part that really got me excited is if I could get my
passive income to exceed my monthly living expenses, I’m technically financially free. I’m in a state of being wealthy. That’s what wealthy is. Wealthy is when your passive income exceeds your living expenses. So for me, my whole goal one was how do I get my cash that I’m making as an athlete invested into great real estate that produces cash flow that exceeds my monthly expenses? And so that really turned into the name of the game for me. And the way we go about doing that,
You know, I’ll give you guys case studies because whenever I listen to somebody, I’m always like, why would I listen to you? Who are you that has the experience? So I’m going to only speak on things we’ve done. You know, again, a little bit more on Granite Towers as well as we’ve got 3,300 units under management. Done 31 deals total, right around 500 million of assets under management, 175 million of equity under management. So.
Been at this for quite a long time. I started in 2012. Our company was formed in 2017. Here we are in 2026 and we’re in a state of looking for very specific assets in specific sub markets to do a rinse and repeat model. So an example of creating passive income for us is we bought an 88 unit deal in Cleburne, Texas and anyone can do this. This isn’t something that’s reserved for extremely unique people. My gift was athleticism. It wasn’t necessarily, you know,
tax worker, legal worker, and we hire those team members. know, can, real estate investing is a team sport. You can hire the A players to fill in your weaknesses. So we buy this 88 unit deal and we bought it in September of 2019. We paid $6.75 million and we ended up raising $2.1 million from a group of investors. We put capital in and a bunch of limited partners put capital in and we invested together.
and we ended up selling this deal in October of 2021, and that wasn’t our plan to sell that early, but the market was peaking and offers were ridiculous. So we sold it for 12.14 million. And the cash flow that we received from this deal was on average 12%. So if you put $100,000 in the deal, 12,000 a year was paid out in cash flow, or $1,000 a month.
That’s the passive income number that I’m speaking of of how do I get my passive income to exceed my expenses. So I hope that’s really clear. And the way we did that is we went into a sub-market that had a supply-demand imbalance. And the way we can measure that is we’ll go to the competitors and we can see what the occupancy is. And if occupancy is 94, 95, 96 % or higher, that’s extreme pent-up demand. There’s not enough units for people that want to live in the sub-market.
And we’d like to be in those sub-markets where we can see there’s just not a lot of places for people to go and there’s not a lot of new builds to come. It helps us control the value of the deals. Finding those deals is difficult. know, everyone would like to obviously be in a pent-up demand market, but that’s the part where you obsessively go looking for deals. You can find these unique gems, if you will. And the way we added value to this deal…
Excuse me, is we put 500 grand of CapEx into the deal. So we relocated the office, we had an extra LED lighting upgrade, we put in 48 backyards, we did some interior unit upgrades and we did a water conservation throughout the whole property, meaning we replaced toilets that had less water gallons being flushed down the toilet. And so that was the way we invested that 500 grand into the deal in order to increase rent or.
reduce expenses, that’s all we’re doing as we’re apartment investors is how do we find a way to bring real value to residents who want it to pay more and how do we bring expenses down or control expenses and through that you create cash flow. So that’s how we created this cash flow piece through Northridge Court and it paid us every month on average $1,000 a month if you put a hundred grand in, if you do the math, you know a million it’s the same thing, 12 grand.
12 % of a million, 12 % of 100,000, 12 % of 50,000. So that’s how we created passive income and on a real time deal.
Michelle Kesil (15:00)
Yeah, that’s amazing that you were able to utilize that strategy and create that investment portfolio to get started. so, yeah, like moving forward from that, then you created your firm or was that the next step?Dan Brisse (15:08)
Yeah.Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. the, with going back to the three things, passive income was the first and then hedging inflation, the piece that I didn’t understand when I was younger is that the amount of currency they’re creating, the government, they’re printing currency. So in 1971, Richard Nixon takes us off the gold standard and the dollar becomes currency. And once that happens, now they can print and create.
And once printing starts and they can create currency growth, the dollar starts to lose value pretty quickly. And as the dollar is losing value, it ends up being the silent wealth killer or silent wealth stealer, if you will. Pretty clear example is in 2020, if you had 100 grand in your bank account and you spent it in 2025, it bought you $75,000 worth of goods. So it just shows you in a five-year period.
what the dollar destruction has happened. And during COVID, it’s what they had to do. I don’t know the exact details on it, but in order to keep the economy going, they created an incredible amount of currency. And so that destruction is happening real time. And it’s something that if you’re not hedging that and your ultimate end game is saving dollars, it’s very unlikely your living standard is gonna get larger and nicer. And the way we hedge inflation with real estate,
Another real life example, you got an 84 unit deal. We purchased it for 4.75 million. We sold it for 6.75 million. And the way that worked is we put in our cap back spend again. This one, we had 420 grand for interior upgrades. We had 30 grand for a playground. We had 80,000 for water conservation. And we do all that work again to increase income, reduce expenses or control expenses to drive net operating income. It’s the exact same stuff, rinse and repeat.
You can kind of get a theme between Northridge Court and Axis, same value add strategies or similar value add strategies to drive NOI. And when we sold the deal, we gave our investors an equity multiple of 1.8. And all that means is if you put 100,000 in, we give you your 100,000 back plus 80,000. That’s a 1.8 equity multiple. And we forced the appreciation, we forced the value. Single family, you’re waiting for the market. Multi-family, if you get in the right sub-market, right timing.
you can add value and force appreciation by driving net operating income. And so that’s an example of access apartments, again, an 84 unit deal, bought, sold, exit, and added real value to people that wanted it. You know, the playground was value to the parents, their kids could go outside and enjoy it. The water conservation, again, less water running down the utilities, that’s real value. Interior upgrades where we…
took out the Formica countertops and put in stainless steel and quartz countertops and the old appliances, that’s real value people were willing to pay for. And so that was the second piece of hedging inflation that was critical. And then the third piece was this tax pain I went through. You know, as a snowboarder, I didn’t know this, but I’m in the S quadrant, the self-employed quadrant. So here I am, a snowboarder in 2015. And again, this is a real life case study. This is really my tax returns from my CPA.
My gross income in 2015, I made $325,000. that much looking back, and 325 grand in 2015 was worth a lot more than it is today. Well, that’s my income. Without any real estate depreciation losses, I got a zero line item right there. Then I’ve got my normal expenses of running a business, which was 72 grand. So my taxable income, if you take the 325 minus the 72 of expenses, because it allows you to reduce your income.
I got 253 left over. So my tax on 253 grand is 52,000 bucks. Now with real estate, you take the same 325,000 of income. Now I got depreciation from my investments in real estate and that number was 140,000 in 2015. So if you take 140,000 off of 325 and then take the same expenses, which was the 72 grand, same as without it.
I’m left over with taxable income of 113 grand and my federal tax owed is 17,000. So 35,000 saved in that one year through depreciation. That allows me to put more of my capital to work for me. And you know, if you’re not a real estate professional, I get that a lot as, well, I’m not a real estate professional so I can’t take the losses. The reality is is that when you…
sell the deal, those depreciation losses are still available for you there. So you will get to use them. So anyway, those are the three things, Michelle, that completely changed my life and still are the three reasons we’re buying real estate to this day, passive income, inflation, and depreciation.
Michelle Kesil (20:07)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that value. think that those are great tips and resources for those that are just starting out to get started with.Dan Brisse (20:18)
Yeah, yeah, you bet. The way I would leave your listeners is, what got me so excited is picture a day where you have more capital coming in after you went on a vacation or you get let go from your career as an athlete or whatever you’re doing and it doesn’t affect you. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a big life change. It’s not this, oh man, am I gonna be able to keep my house?So that for me, when I learned about multiple streams of income, it felt much safer, much wiser than to rely on one income. And so that was a real driver for me to committing to learn more. And if anyone’s listening that would like to learn more, they can reach out to us on our website. It’s just granitetowersequitygroup.com forward slash contact us. And if you’re wanting to learn more about what we do, we can get you in our database and start seeing our email updates, start seeing our future deals.
and nothing moves quickly in multifamily, nothing moves quickly in real estate. You can be on our mailing list for a year, two years, three years, see many, many deals come through the pipeline and when you’re ready, you can reach out to learn more about how to invest.
Michelle Kesil (21:25)
Awesome. So are you actively looking for investors to partner on these projects?Dan Brisse (21:32)
Yeah, we are always open to new partners that qualify, you know, with these deals, it is important to be accredited or sophisticated. so accredited means you got to have 200,000 or more of net worth of income, excuse me, annually, or a million more of net worth, excluding your home residence. Sophisticated means you have a great understanding of how these deals work.so folks can learn more and become more educated to become sophisticated, or they can qualify through accreditation by just income or net worth. But always open to looking to see if we can help folks who are looking to create more, again, passive income, hedging inflation, and depreciation.
Michelle Kesil (22:16)
Perfect, well, appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. Thank you so much for being here.Dan Brisse (22:23)
Thanks so much, Michelle.Michelle Kesil (22:24)
And so, you mentioned your website, but is there anywhere else that people can connect with you and reach you?Dan Brisse (22:30)
That would be the main spot. Yep. granitetowersequitygroup.com. It’s forward slash contact us. There’s a little form there, fill it out and that’s the best way.Michelle Kesil (22:39)
Okay, great. And for those listeners tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Dan who are building real businesses and we’ll see you on our next episode.
