How Empathy Makes Multifamily Real Estate More Profitable | Anthony Marin

Anthony Marin (00:00)
You know, you may lose a little money on the front end, but you make it back so much more on the back end, because if you take care of your tenants upfront, they are going to stay there for longer. And that’s how you really make money. Cause turnover, you know, this turnover is your biggest expense in multifamily. So I want my tenants in there for five, seven, 10 years. And thankfully we’ve been doing this for 12, 13 years. Now I have tenants that have been in my properties for eight, 10 years.

Quentin (01:56)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds. I am excited to be here today. I have another fantastic guest and I love his approach. When we was talking, his approach is like, listen, I can connect with the everyday person. You know, his journey has been very organic. It’s so sweet, so good. And I know you’re going to love his journey because

He started off as an everyday person, but I’m gonna let y’all know, now he ain’t, he not the everyday person. He does a lot there, but I’m gonna let him tell you about what he does. And we’re gonna learn a lot today from Mr. Anthony Marin. Mr. Anthony, sir, how you doing today, man?

Anthony Marin (02:39)
I’m doing great, man. Doing great. How are you?

Quentin (02:42)
Oh man, I’m doing great, doing great. So glad we’re here to do this together. And Mr. Anthony, I am a type sir. I like to dive right in, right? So I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got into the spot that you’re in now. And then man, tell them what part of the world you’re in. People love to know where people are geographically. And so what you’re up to, your origin story and where you are. Mr. Anthony, sir, you have to film my friend.

Anthony Marin (02:51)
Let’s do it.

Yeah.

So I always like to say that I’m just a Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn, New York, right? So, you know, we started out struggling and, know, my mom was really tough on us. So we had to go to school, go to college and going through school, you know, IT was going crazy. So I got an IT degree and started on my IT journey at, financial firms and law firms and, got married. And then my wife came home and said she was pregnant. And that’s when

Quentin (03:16)
Yeah.

Anthony Marin (03:37)
My whole life changed at that point. It’s like, my God, I need to figure out how to take care of someone else. We’re doing okay. We have bought a three family house already. So we already had like the multifamily bug, but once that happened, it was like, okay, now I got to make more money. And, and so, you know, going back to the, going back to the office next day, Googling real estate just kept on coming at me, coming at me I already had an interest. yeah, that’s when it started. And then I learned, started investing in real estate in Newark, New Jersey. Right. So.

Quentin (03:48)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Marin (04:05)
Went from Brooklyn, got married, moved to Newark, New Jersey, started a small multifamily business in Newark, New Jersey, but I was still in my job. And I realized I needed a property manager because I couldn’t handle all the things as my portfolio was growing. Went through that process, couldn’t find a good property manager. So I started my own property management company. That’s going well. That’s what allowed me between the investing and the property management. I quit my job, went into real estate full time, 2020 everybody shut down.

I’m like, all what can I do now to grow? see there’s a need in my market for, you know, small to medium sized people such as myself that need not just property management, but the full service of beginning from acquisition through management, through refinancing, either keeping it managing and going forward or disposing at the end. So, you know, got my broker’s license.

and started a full service brokerage and that’s how MIT Real Estate was created. We like to call ourselves the Investors Brokerage.

Quentin (05:53)
So as you’re talking, sir, I’m actively listening, right? I’m actively listening. I’m writing things down. So I kind of want to give you a brief summary because I want to make a statement to ask you a question. Right. So Puerto Rican kid from New York family, you know, really pushed no education. So you went to school.

Anthony Marin (06:10)
Mm-hmm.

Quentin (06:11)
Got into IT, your wife wound up getting pregnant. He was like, listen, I gotta make some more money. So things started changing, right? And so, you you’re already, you already had the bug from like the multi-space because of what you know, what you bought. ⁓ And so you got married, y’all went to Jersey and then you could not find the right property management. So he was like, hey, let me start a company of my own.

And then that morphed into you helping other people because other people kind of had the same situation, not being able to find a property management that they could lean on. So this is kind of just how you just kind of grew into your sweet spot. Right. And so I love it. So, Mr. Anthony, I have a statement I make probably every podcast. Destiny has no wasted moments. Meaning that as we go through life, we are borrowing from.

Anthony Marin (06:47)
Yeah.

Quentin (06:58)
every part of the journey. And I mean, you, as you told your journey, you went back to your childhood. You was like, this is how things was in the family and you got to college. And you gave me that blurb probably within three to four minutes, but we know life doesn’t happen in three to four minutes. So all of that didn’t happen right in three to four minutes. And so it’s been a process, right? So Ms. Anthony, I would love to know, sir, what has the journey, what has the moments taught you about yourself? Has it taught you discipline?

Anthony Marin (07:13)
and lose it in process.

Quentin (07:26)
Has it taught you resilience? Has it made you humble? Has it changed, rewired your mind when it comes to innovation? Like what has these moments taught you about yourself?

Anthony Marin (07:34)
think there’s been different phases of my life throughout this entire journey, right? Because again, the way I stated the story in the beginning, was strictly about money, right? I just wanted to make more money to take care of my growing family that was coming. Right? So that was the focus money. And then you realize after you do it for a little bit, it’s really not about money because once you start buying multifamily property, you’re providing housing for other people. So you need to make sure that.

You know, you could do it one way where you just slumlord it up and you just throw it out and try to make as much money, or you can do it in a way that’s compassionate, trying to think about that person that’s going to live in there, make it as best and easy for them as possible. And especially in the market that I’m in, right? I’m in an urban market. So, you know, I may have to lose a little money on the front end, and this is what I love to like talk about.

You know, you may lose a little money on the front end, but you make it back so much more on the back end, because if you take care of your tenants upfront, they are going to stay there for longer. And that’s how you really make money. Cause turnover, you know, this turnover is your biggest expense in multifamily. So I want my tenants in there for five, seven, 10 years. And thankfully we’ve been doing this for 12, 13 years. Now I have tenants that have been in my properties for eight, 10 years.

Quentin (08:53)
Man, listen, so, you know, I’ma come back to that. I’ma end my show more on what she was just talking about because I love your perspective. I love the way you’re building. I’m just gonna kind of foreshadow community. That’s how I see you building. So I’ma foreshadow that, but we will come back to that. wanna, so you, of course, property management, man, you wear different hats. Like you’re multifaceted. So I wanna know because I’m sure you experienced a lot.

Adversity as we go through business, adversity shows his head. So how in your world, how does adversity look and what do you do when adversity comes knocking at your door?

Anthony Marin (09:35)
You do, I’m dealing with adversity every day, right? You know, a lot of people ask, you know, Anthony, what do you do? What is it like being a business owner, a real estate investor? And what I always come back to is like, I’m a firefighter. I am literally putting out fires every single day. That’s my job, right? It’s nice if I can just come into the office, write some emails under, some deals and then that’ll be the day. No, that’s not, that’s not the day. The day is that’s, that’s on the sticky, right? Like I got 10 stickies all over my desk. What to do.

Quentin (09:56)
There’s some caulking.

Anthony Marin (10:05)
But I usually get to one and then by the time I get to the second one, there’s a bunch of my staff coming in, you know, all these things coming in an email from a client that we got to take care of stuff. So I’m a firefighter and whether that issue is financing or, you know, we need into race capital or whether it’s a maintenance issue that, know, someone’s having a big problem and we got to figure out what’s going on there. Or if it’s.

Another issue with some of my staff that they’re not happy and I need to have, you know, calm that down between either two staff members or one. So you’re always dealing with adversity. And the only thing I can come back to is trying to be empathetic. Think about the other side, figure out where they’re coming from, let them know what we need out of the, out of our side too. And just try to come to some kind of plan to work it out the best way on both sides. Right. It doesn’t always work out.

But you got to think about it from their side first, and then got it from your side. And then we got to come up with a solution. and at the end of the day, you know, if you would talk to my kids, they’ll tell you that my soundtrack is everything always works out one way or another. always works out. So you just got to keep on moving forward. You can’t stop. You just got to keep on going and that’s for investing. That’s life. That’s everything, right? For the people that want to get in the game, get started and just keep on going.

Quentin (10:59)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Anthony Marin (11:24)
you know, the solutions will figure themselves out.

Quentin (12:01)
Man, I love the way you talking, sir. I love the way you talking, man. Well, listen, talk about moving forward. What’s next for you in the business? Like, what’s the next goal? What are you looking to solve at Scale Next?

Anthony Marin (12:12)
so here’s, I started from, know, two and three unit properties and we built up a nice portfolio, close to a hundred units, scaled that down to where we’re like at around 20, 25 right now. Now the game is large multifamily 50 plus units to, to, do that. And also development. That’s what we’re moving to. on the property management side, we’re managing around 500 residential units, 300,000 square feet of retail and office.

and 25 acres of land. So, you know, I’m really proud to say that, but it’s also that’s where we’re moving towards as well. So it’s, it’s just making sure we can take care of our clients. And then at the end of the day, I’m building that management side. I’m an investor at heart. I want to get into my development deals and my large multifamily deals, you know, build this where it’s running on its own, that management brokerage side.

Cause I’m a, I’m a deal maker. want to be out there doing deals, figuring it out. That’s where I really want to be. So that’s where, that’s where I’m leaning towards more is getting more on the development side and the large multifamily side.

Quentin (13:14)
Got you. Love it. Love it. Now I told you we would come back to this because I love the way you talk about serving. And I use the word serving. That’s what I’m saying. Serving your tenants. And I love how you say empathetic. I mean, you put the word empathetic in, Looking at it from their side. I do a lot of interviews. I don’t commonly hear that portion of it, like looking at it from their side. But I’ve always loved to ask this question of every guest because I want to get their unique perspective on this.

So I’m going love getting your perspective on the word relationship. When you hear the word relationship for you authentically, what comes to mind to you, the word relationship?

Anthony Marin (13:54)
The first word that came to mind is necessity. It’s a necessity to build relationships in real estate. Necessity. There’s no one, I don’t care who you can talk about the best real estate investors ever. None of them did it by themselves. You cannot play this game by yourself. And what I think has helped me in this journey, like I was an athlete when I was younger, right? So I played a lot of sports, so I was, it was always about building the team and

You know, sometimes you’re the leader. Sometimes you’re the role player and you got to figure it all out, but you know that you have to build relationships. have your attorney, you have your account, you have your property manager, you have your finance guys, your bankers, you have so many people you got to figure out how to work with. And that’s, that’s all this game is about. If you’re not good at building relationships, you can not win in real estate.

Quentin (14:26)
out.

Yeah, yeah. Oh man. Yeah, I know I was going to love hearing your answer on that, man. Like one of the words I equate to relationship is the word community, right? So building a healthy community, common unity. Like we know what we’re about. and like you said, everybody, like the sports analogy, everybody plays their role because uniformity is everybody doing the same thing all at one time. We don’t need that. We need unity. We need people doing different things at different times, but with the same common goal.

So we need somebody to run the pick. I need somebody to set the pick if we’re to do the pick and roll. You know what I’m saying? We all can’t be doing a pick and a roll at the same time. That’s just utter confusion. You know what I mean? So I love the fact, it just sounds like we have a community mindset of making sure that everybody wins, that everybody touches. Yeah. Now, this is a unique question to you. Normally, I come prepared kind of with a set of questions that’s kind of going to hold the conversation.

Anthony Marin (16:07)
Yeah

Yep, that’s a great word.

Quentin (16:25)
But I feel like I want to ask you this, When your wife got pregnant, you was like, man, it’s time for a change. Now, man, the business is successful. So looking back, man, I’m asking you this. How your journey with fatherhood, because one of the things that kind of got your wills turned is like, my wife’s pregnant. Like, man, let’s grow this dream.

And now the dream has erected. How has the journey been with Fatherhood in business, both clying at the same time?

Anthony Marin (16:56)
It’s been great, right? And what I will tell you is you need that strong reason, right? Everyone says that why you need that why to keep you going because this game is not easy. The real estate game is not easy. No matter what you choose, whether you’re a real estate agent, you’re an investor, you’re doing mortgages, whatever you’re doing in this real estate game, it’s tough, you know? And my why has always been my family has been

Quentin (17:22)
See you later.

Anthony Marin (17:23)
I, you know, my first daughter, now I have three daughters, right? So I have, I got more than enough keeping me that, that first child that got me in the game, she’s 13 years old. You’re about to graduate eighth grade, going to high school, you know? So it just keeps me going. whenever, whenever I had a tough moment and I had to sit back and I’m going, what the fuck am I doing here? I’m sorry. don’t know if the language is okay, but literally we all have those moments where what’s going on here. think I lost control.

Quentin (17:35)
Wow.

Anthony Marin (17:51)
You know, all I gotta do, have pictures all over of my family, my kids. I take a look at that and it just brings you right back. Okay. Again, keep going, move forward, find the next best thing to do.

Quentin (18:01)
Man, absolutely. So one of my mentors, said this, so I’m 44 now. I heard this probably in my mid thirties. He said, when you know who you are, you know what to do. And that has always settled in me because that determines my why. When I know who I am, I know what to do. And I’m just really diving in and learning the difference between my role and my identity.

My role is a father, but even though my role is a father, my identity is a nurturer, is a protector. So yes, I’ma play that role of father, but I’ma apply my identity to that too, because I’ma protect the hell out of my family. I’m gonna nurture the hell out of my family. And so I’m learning where my roles and my identity collide. Because even though, you know, I’m a businessman, is how I put my family, but my identity still has to be sure, because I need to know why I’m doing what I do.

Right? So knowing that I’m just not playing the role of something that is not true to my identity. It all has to matter. And I know my why, my why is when it comes to my family. So I love that you talk about your family. So thank you for answering that question, man. I appreciate it. Yeah. Absolutely. So listen, man, is there any topic that I have not talked about, Mr. Anthony? Is there any other words of inspiration, education, motivation? Like if you came in with a thought on your mind that you want to help viewers to know.

Anthony Marin (19:09)
Yeah. Great stuff. Great stuff.

Quentin (19:28)
Kind of just want to open up the floor so you can land that point. If it was something like that, so you can land that message.

Anthony Marin (19:33)
I really didn’t have anything. I don’t have anything to pitch or push or whatever. my, my goal here is just to try to be as open and honest and bring as much value to your community as possible. At the end of the day, you know, whether you’re, you know, just starting or you’ve been doing this 20 years, there’s always stuff to learn. And I think, you know, that is one of my favorite words is empathy. think if you’re going to be in this game, try to think about that other person, figure out where they’re coming from.

And just try to make a, make, a solution that’s going to work off of both sides. Not just, not just yourself and that, you know, me being in the property management world, have those confrontations sometimes with clients where, you know, we have to push back on. Listen, I’m not, I understand that you want to get your rent today, but they’re in this situation. They’ve been your tenant for three years and they’ve always been well, let’s show a little leniency right now. And then hopefully that’ll come back later. Right? So those are the types of things that are good.

property manager, a good middleman. That’s what I kind of think that we are, or whether we’re putting a deal together on the, on the agent side, right on the broker side. I mean, there’s always, you know, in the world that I live in, I’m usually in the middle of a transaction. And I think that if you try to just see both sides and be empathetic, there’s always a way to get things.

Quentin (20:52)
Yeah, man, did not, I wasn’t even aware of the word empathy until I met my wife. Like, you know, I did not know what that word meant. And I met my wife and she introduced me to what empathy was. And so that’s, that’s, that, that word, whenever time I hear it has a special place in my heart. Cause it’s part of my journey of just learning from my wife and being exposed to different things that I wasn’t exposed to. And so I love when you talk about the word empathy.

Anthony Marin (21:16)
Yeah,

that’s always, we have to think about them. Always, always happy wife, happy life. And then, you know what? Now that I think about it, if I’m going to throw a little bit of a plug, I’m going to plug Newark, New Jersey. That’s who we are. That’s who we’re based. You know, Newark had a pretty bad reputation. It is changing because I’ve actually, I just came back from Texas and we talked to, we know it’s changing. I don’t think it’s changing fast enough.

Quentin (21:20)
I have some.

Anthony Marin (21:43)
Newark, New Jersey, the things that are happening there. If you’re an investor and you’re looking for a market, take a look at Newark, New Jersey.

Quentin (21:50)
Well, you know, married me a Jersey girl, so that’s a good plug. So yeah, that’s a great plug. We’ll definitely make sure that making any show notes for sure. But listen, man, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,

Anthony Marin (21:53)
I am.

So our website is www.mig.properties. That’s it, there’s no dot com. MIG.properties. You can email us at info at MIG.properties. I’m on LinkedIn, Anthony Marin, Instagram, very, very active. So it’s MIG.properties on Instagram. And yeah, that’s it, reach out. If I can help anybody in any way, feel free.

Quentin (22:31)
Absolutely. But sir, man, let me say three things to you sincerely, Mr. Anthony. One, thank you for your time. I mean, you could have been doing anything with your time. You got three girls, you got a wife, business to run. So I mean, I know how podcasts work, but still, like, your time is valuable. You chose to give us your time. So thank you, sir. Thank you for your time. Secondly, man, thank you for your story. Thank you for the gift of your authenticity, the gift of your integrity.

and the gift of your vulnerability. And I say gift because these are things that you did not have to give us. We could have just been talking about X’s and O’s, strategies, but you gave us the gift of learning more about you. And so I thank you for that. I really believe stories have a way of planting seeds. We may never see the growth, but the seed is there. And at any given time, that seed can take root and grow two years from now, five years from now. So thank you, man, for coming on planting seeds. appreciate it. yeah, yeah, I know that for sure.

Anthony Marin (23:24)
I mean, we could talk taxes and ⁓

Quentin (23:28)
For sure, absolutely.

And lastly, man, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think, man, and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today, Mr. Anthony.

Anthony Marin (23:40)
Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

Quentin (23:42)
Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard Mr. Anthony. You can’t deny the nuggets. He gave you nuggets. We talked strategy and we talked mindset. We talked about both. We blended it together. And so if you want to learn more from him, get into his contacts. It’s in the show notes. Contact him. And listen, I’m telling you, he can talk strategy with you all day long. I’m telling you, he can talk. Whatever you want to talk about, he can talk about. So please get in contact with him. Learn from him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here.

I promise you, we’re gonna continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Anthony. So sir, I say thank you again and everyone else, you’ll have a fantastic day.