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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Michelle Kesil speaks with LaVonne Idlette, who runs a vertically integrated real estate investment firm in Florida. LaVonne shares her journey in the real estate industry, discussing the challenges and successes of building a business that focuses on lending, development, and affordable housing. She emphasizes the importance of belief, adaptability, and networking in achieving business growth and overcoming obstacles. The conversation also touches on the impact of the pandemic on business operations and the significance of community development.
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LaVonne Idlette (00:00)
I’d say the biggest lever is sort of…And this is going to sound like cliche, but the biggest lever has been belief. So the more I got around other people who were already doing what we were doing or doing bigger ⁓ transactions, the more I was like, okay, this isn’t as complicated as I’m making it seem or as hard to integrate and that sort of thing. like, so the more belief I had, the more belief I was able to like push to the other people who are inside of the organization.
has made the biggest change in our ability to do more deals in a year, to do more loans in a year, all of that kind of stuff.
Michelle Kesil (02:12)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, LaVonne Idlette, who runs a vertically integrated investment firm in Florida. So excited to have you here today, LaVonne.LaVonne Idlette (02:29)
Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.Michelle Kesil (02:32)
Absolutely, I our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve been approaching solving people’s problems and yeah, creating this business. So let’s dive in.First off, for those not familiar with you and your work yet, can you share what your main focus is?
LaVonne Idlette (02:52)
Yeah, so, hi everybody, I’mand I am a part of a family office that operates a vertically integrated real estate investment firm. So we do everything in house from land sourcing and vertical and horizontal development, but lending is our main focus. So we got into lending because we needed to know the pricing on money to do our own deals and
Realized that other people had problems sourcing capital for their deals as well My actual personal background is I am a securities and complex estates attorney So my dad has been pinkie-in-the-braining me for about 30 years telling me go to this school Take this class get this license Because he had been sort of under the wing of my grandfather Who started this business in the 50s?
Michelle Kesil (03:51)
Amazing. That is so cool. So how has it been like working in this role? are some of the steps that you’ve taken as far as learning all of the different aspects of the business and creating all of those structures to be vertically integrated?LaVonne Idlette (04:14)
So first of all, working with your family is challenging. ⁓ Partially because you actually care about them. So your delivery has to be a certain way and you want to be able to like manage using your talent in the best way possible. for a long time, no one and.You can’t even blame them because they’re just men and they don’t know any better. you know, so they didn’t take they’re like sending me to do things, but they’re not taking my advice when I bring back the information like you sent me to school to learn this stuff. And then when I try to implement it, it wasn’t it wasn’t going well. So ⁓ my approach has always been first.
create a plan that sort of removes bottlenecks, is them making decisions,
and then make it very simple. So that’s what made us start buying companies that did things that were sort of bottlenecks to the business. starting with a brokerage. So.
Unfortunately in Florida, realtors do not answer the phone. And so they were just doing a bad job of helping us get new deals and selling the deals that we had. So we started off in lending and added the brokerage, then added a builder, then added ⁓ construction management and ⁓ sourcing materials and all of those components. Mostly we were buying for
the talent, but also for ⁓ the ability for us to control our own speed to doing deals.
Michelle Kesil (06:47)
Yeah, amazing. And what do you feel are some of the main keys that made the biggest difference in allowing your business to be able to grow and continue to run smoothly?LaVonne Idlette (07:01)
I’d say the biggest lever is sort of…And this is going to sound like cliche, but the biggest lever has been belief. So the more I got around other people who were already doing what we were doing or doing bigger ⁓ transactions, the more I was like, okay, this isn’t as complicated as I’m making it seem or as hard to integrate and that sort of thing. like, so the more belief I had, the more belief I was able to like push to the other people who are inside of the organization.
has made the biggest change in our ability to do more deals in a year, to do more loans in a year, all of that kind of stuff.
Michelle Kesil (07:44)
Yeah, absolutely. And as far as like the lending aspect of your business, are you lending mostly to investors like that are creating specific type of projects or who’s kind of like your ideal client?LaVonne Idlette (08:01)
Yeah, so as I generally tell people, we will finance anything attached to the ground, our ideal.customer you would say is a person who we’re more like a partner like a capital partner for so they do lots of deals whether that’s ground up construction or fix and flips and We can just help them plug and play and get capital for their deals as they come in which for them is a service that is you no longer have to focus on How I already have all your documents so now I need you know property specific documents, but everything else is plug-and-play So that makes like so
So repeat ⁓ people are probably our favorite, although we do also do lending for home buyers as well. Because a part of our mission is providing affordable housing in Florida.
Michelle Kesil (08:55)
Yeah, amazing. And so what part of your business do you feel like is the maybe like most challenging aspect that you’ve learned the most from?LaVonne Idlette (09:09)
Okay, so the vertical building part of the business is the most challenging, partially because most of the levers in that business are beyond your control. So the city hasn’t given you the permits. The inspection didn’t happen when you thought it was going to happen. ⁓people who are on staff and the subs for each little component doesn’t show up. It’s Florida. The workforce is kind of terrible. But, ⁓ so those things make that business a little more challenging, although it still is to me worth it to have it in-house.
Michelle Kesil (09:56)
Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense. And so are there like specific types of projects that you find yourself typically working with?LaVonne Idlette (10:40)
Yeah, so my favorite type of project ⁓ that we do is infill lot spec homes. So we’re building the same house over and over in different ⁓ single family lots. That’s the easiest, fastest part of our business. We also do build mixed use multifamily, butas you know, listers may know because they’re also in real estate that takes forever just from the assemblage of the land parcels to getting it entitled properly just to get to the point of building it takes a long time then actually building it takes a long time too so i i’m kind of impatient ⁓ i was a ⁓ an athlete who was a sprinter so i like to do things fast so i like all the transactions that you can do fast better
Michelle Kesil (11:37)
Absolutely. And so what is one maybe example of a big shift you had to make in your business or a pivot that was unexpected that now looking back in hindsight, you can see why it had to happen.LaVonne Idlette (11:56)
⁓ I’d say the biggest one was right around when the pandemic happened because going into 2020, I had set up things to be doing everything online.the adoption rate of the other people in the business very low because we have an office. We have to have an office. It’s just how most of the regulated things within the business work. So they allow people to come in, bring physical documents, and then we turn those, we have to scan those physical documents and shred them. Complete time.
consuming activity versus someone uploading a PDF and being able to automatically be filed. So the pandemic shifted everybody’s ability to not listen and not adopt processes we already had. So that pivot made the business so much easier for everybody to sort of work.
from the office when they want to, work from home, very flexible, and ⁓ has created a much better work-life balance for all of us because I actually, I live in Hollywood, Florida, which is about an hour from our office. And so I’m very happy to not be there.
Michelle Kesil (13:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine that there’s pros and cons to all those types of shifts.LaVonne Idlette (13:22)
Mm-hmm.Michelle Kesil (13:24)
And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next in your business?LaVonne Idlette (13:32)
⁓ Right now, I would say our focus is on scaling to get more people who are building affordable housing more affordable money. So being that lever and also helping them solve problems. if people are having issues in need, architectural help or… ⁓help with expediting permits and things like that in the different cities, especially here in Florida. My heart is for providing housing for families of Florida. And so I think the biggest opportunity and where our focus is literally helping the doers who are building the things.
Michelle Kesil (14:21)
Yeah, absolutely. So does that look like working with more developers? Or yeah, can you kind of walk me through what that looks like?LaVonne Idlette (14:30)
Yeah, so it’s mainly working with both more developers and more builders, but mostly focusing on small to medium sized builders. So the kind that build 10 to 25 units ⁓ a year and they don’t have as much easy access to low cost capital as a D.R. Horton, for example.Michelle Kesil (14:59)
Yeah, absolutely. And so when you’re working with like investors, is that primarily just through the lending aspect or how are you supporting them?LaVonne Idlette (15:51)
Yeah, so for investors, it really depends what they need. So if they need help with development or construction management or actually needing a builder or capital, or if they’re needing, so a piece of the capital.that we also do on the law firm side is helping them raise equity capital as well. ⁓ All of the documentation that is required to disclose the level of risk that an investor is taking on, but also facilitating relationships of people who are interested in being equity partners in real estate as well. So we help with both sides.
Michelle Kesil (16:34)
Awesome. What are you most looking forward to for this year with your business? there any like opportunities that you’re getting excited about?LaVonne Idlette (16:44)
⁓ So our biggest opportunity is that we own a lot of land. So watching as Florida has exploded in the last five years from being sort of a really nice place to being like, ⁓ everyone wants to move here. So there’s lots of other developers coming into the market. soThe biggest opportunity right now is figuring out what we want to build in different spaces from, so we own land from about Titusville down through Miami. And so as other things are building, seeing how we can add things that add value to that community, whether that’s retail, industrial, homes, or whatever.
Michelle Kesil (17:33)
Yeah, amazing. That is exciting.LaVonne Idlette (17:35)
Yeah.Michelle Kesil (17:38)
What kind of, like how are you generating like the leads for the people that you’re partnering with for your projects?LaVonne Idlette (17:48)
Yeah, so we have been a 100 % referral business the entire time. So partially it’s podcasts like this that people start to reach out to me and say, hey, we’re working on this. Would you be interested in partnering? I also speak at a lot of conferences. We were at Uncorrelated Alts this week, which is Miami Alts, which is Alternative Investments Week. AndSo I am kind of like the face of the business as it pertains to like being out in public. But the good thing about doing good work is the referrals really come from past clients.
Michelle Kesil (18:32)
Yeah, definitely. What are some of the maybe things about your business that have really like taught you and shaped you that you wouldn’t have expected?LaVonne Idlette (18:49)
So, ⁓ hmm, that’s a good question. I’d say because half of what I do personally has to do with estates. So how things are titled and how things pass between people when people pass away. The most unexpected things that have happened in the course of this business has been the amount of people who fight.over ⁓ properties and the amount of people who don’t want the properties when when you know the person who accumulates them pass away. So I find that to be interesting and disheartening at the same time. So I’m usually like you know prepare your children for what they are going to be inheriting in
find out if they actually want it so that you can prepare in advance like okay I don’t want my things to go to the auction block of you know probate court and watch it go to other people ⁓ so protecting it in advance from yourself and from them
Michelle Kesil (20:00)
Yeah, that is pretty wild, I’m sure. People don’t think about that in their everyday thoughts.LaVonne Idlette (20:04)
Yeah.Yeah!
Michelle Kesil (20:09)
Yeah, so it sounds like you guys work through so many different types of avenues. Is there anything that you guys don’t touch?LaVonne Idlette (20:18)
Yeah, so the only thing that we don’t do inside of the business is insurance and title. So, and I look at it as the best opportunity to build relationships with others. So because we don’t do our own insurance in-house, and.Especially on the lending side we meet new title people and new insurance people on a normal basis and so building relationships with them We send them referrals. They send us referrals back also so That that has been an interesting. I just don’t like insurance at all and ⁓ I’m hoping that at some point title gets on a blockchain so that we can you know not need to run title reports every single time on the same properties, you
Michelle Kesil (21:05)
Definitely. So are there specific networking strategies that you use to connect with people that you partner with?LaVonne Idlette (21:16)
it’s mostly going and speaking at conferences that have other people who are internal to the industry, but also people who are just interested in being real estate partners, not necessarily doing the work. ⁓ so we do have a lot of partners who are dentists because we go to a dental conference and stuff like that. And so, ⁓But my number one tip for people as it pertains to networking is sit at bars and talk to strangers. So I, when I first got out of law school, would go to a happy hour at a bar on the beach. So whether that was Fort Lauderdale Beach or Miami Beach, and I would sit next to strangers and talk to them about their business, what they were doing, what they were interested in, where they were looking at real estate. And over time you just accumulate a lot of number one information
but a lot of friends and then those people may never become your partners but because they know what you do they introduce you to someone who is looking for a partner.
Michelle Kesil (22:23)
Yeah, definitely that’s great out of the box advice. Awesome. So before we wrap up here, if somebody wants to reach out, connect, learn more about what you’re up to, where can people find you and connect with you?LaVonne Idlette (22:28)
YouYeah, so my website is lalahurdles2.com, which is also my Instagram name, by the way. So that’s L-A-L-A-H-U-R-D-L-E-S, the number two dot com. ⁓ The funny story behind that name is I did the 100 meter hurdles in the 2012 Olympics. And so that name, I’ve actually had it since AOL dial up way to date myself. But that’s where you can find me personally.
If you’re looking for loans, it’s Reddish Bull Finance. The best place to reach out to me to talk would be LinkedIn. I actually do check those messages and respond to everybody there. And just my name, LaVonne Idlette
Michelle Kesil (23:23)
Perfect, well, I appreciate your time, your story, your perspective. Thank you so much for being here.LaVonne Idlette (23:29)
Thank you, thank you for having me.Michelle Kesil (23:31)
Of course. And for the listeners tuning in, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Lavon who are building real businesses and we will see you on the next episode.
