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Invest Like a Mogul: How Fractional Real Estate Investing Is Changing Wealth

By February 3, 2026Real Estate Pros Show

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Show Summary

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Micah Johnson interviews Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club, a revolutionary platform that democratizes real estate investing. Alex shares insights into the user experience, investment process, and the unique value proposition of Mogul Club, which allows individuals to invest in real estate with minimal capital and without the traditional headaches associated with property management. The conversation also explores current market trends, the accessibility of real estate investments, and the future growth potential of Mogul Club.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

    Alex Blackwood (00:00)
    And honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    Micah Johnson (01:51)
    Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Alex, who’s been making some serious moves in the real estate investing world, even creating something we haven’t seen yet. And I’m excited to talk about it. Alex, welcome in man, glad to have you today.

    Alex Blackwood (02:06)
    Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Micah.

    Micah Johnson (02:08)
    Absolutely, man. I really enjoyed our pre-recording talk and I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’ve literally created a company that provides access to real estate investing in a way that hasn’t existed before. So let’s dive in, man, for people who may not know you yet. What’s your main focus right now and what markets you operate in?

    Alex Blackwood (02:30)
    Yeah, of course. So I’m Alex Blackwood, CEO and co-founder of Mogul Club. for those that don’t know, Mogul is almost the Robin Hood for real estate, a way to excessively invest in real estate without the headache or the capital requirements necessary. And so the way that it works is you go to our site, you invest in real estate that has been pre-vetted, pre-diligents.

    As a result, you get all the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends on a monthly basis, appreciation real time and tax benefits at year end. And so as for the markets we’re looking to play in, ⁓ typically we’re looking at the Sunbelt market in the single family rental space, operating across a few different business models, one being PADS, but so think midterm rental meets workforce housing. The other one Airbnb and then the other one is long term rental. So that’s kind of our typical.

    Target Operating Model is happy to dive into the geographic locations as well.

    Micah Johnson (03:24)
    Awesome, we’ll get to there. Take us back for a second though. How long have you been doing this and what led to this idea coming to life?

    Alex Blackwood (03:32)
    Yeah, of course. So we’ve been at this for about four, four and a half years now. And background on myself, I was out of Goldman Sachs and their investment bank division. I worked with financial institutions out of New York, TMT out of San Francisco, and ultimately joined the buy side and finished my tour of the North American GS campuses in Dallas on the real estate private equity group. Got my start investing in real estate outside my day job, thought there’s got to be a way, better way to do this.

    The knowledge requirement, not to mention the capital and time requirement just meant that it was prohibitive for me to do it outside my day job. And so I was looking at ways to invest in real estate. Didn’t

    see any platforms that were meeting the return profile that we were doing during our time at Goldman. And so really thought there’s gotta be a way to build this platform out. So came up with the initial concept of it.

    and basically threw it to the side, said I’ll come back to this way later on in life. However, met my co-founder out at Dallas, was blown away by his background. Joke, he’s the residential wunderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman’s single-family rental platform from zero to a billion.

    in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And we said, I said basically, hey, can you meet me at a diner? I’ve got this crazy idea. And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are today. And so four years later, we’ve received venture investment from top VCs like Tim Draper, Draper Associates, Rosario’s 43rd Treasurer of the US.

    we’ve been scaling out to about 20,000 plus users on platform, about 55 million plus in real estate and generating returns and kind of 15, 20 percent annual return basis.

    So that’s a little bit more, I apologize if I rambled a little bit there.

    Micah Johnson (06:04)
    No, you’re good, man, you’re good. Cause you’re giving us the background behind it. Cause the next thing I want to dig into is, you know, what’s that user experience? So you, you’ve spent this time and built this up. Now you have over 20,000 users. You said, ⁓ 55 million in management that you currently have. What are people getting on there and finding? So someone’s listening to this as, okay, I’m to go to www.mogul.club. What are they going to see? And what is it really giving them access to?

    Alex Blackwood (06:31)
    They’re getting access to a highly curated list of assets that basically meet our risk return profile to a T. And so the idea being that when you come on our site, you can see the assets laid out in front of you and you can invest in as simple as two or three clicks. And from there, you’re invested in a single family rental asset. You’re receiving exact benefits that I mentioned, which are the monthly rental income paid out to your account.

    the appreciation which we track in real time and those tax benefits, which hopefully means that your yield does not only stay or yield post taxes, but might be a passive loss for income reporting purposes. And just to give you, for instance, on the quality of assets that we bring to the platform, myself, I’m the first check in every single property. It’s usually myself or co-founder that jostles for the pole position, so to speak, our equity incentive structure for employees.

    is such that they’re paid out, actually investment in the property for bonus structure come bonus season. And then not to mention too, these assets are one that frankly, we would basically stay behind and put our namesake behind. And so from that, you get a headache-free way of investing in real estate, all from the comfort of your computer.

    Micah Johnson (07:52)
    I can see why you would get the tag Robin hood for

    estate because the thing about real estate is, you know, it’s not as passive as you think. Once you get inside of it, there is so much you need to know. There’s so much that’s always changing. Like you’re, you’re, you’re catching a run and train for your first couple of years, no matter what, because this has been going on a long time already and the market cycle keeps going. So having to learn all the things that you need to learn. Like you said, most folks don’t have time to do that. And.

    Alex Blackwood (07:55)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (08:22)
    To trust somebody else to do it, that’s kind of a high bar. It’s not many people know about it. So to be able to get in there and provide information in a way where first y’all are putting money in the game too. That’s a big green flag to me when I’m working with somebody is, you willing to actually, do you believe in this project too? Or are you just raising funds? Which one is it? Cause there’s a different mentality that goes into all of them. You even built your business around when everyone’s successful, everyone’s successful. That’s how you do it.

    And the fact that, man, I love the access for folks that can sit there and say, you know what, I don’t have time to learn all these things. I don’t have time to do all this, but I do want to create a better future for myself and my family. You’re setting the table for them. Walk right in. Now, is there a minimum investment that you have to have on the platform? How does that work?

    Alex Blackwood (09:14)
    Yeah, so minimum, we really don’t have one. It’s $250 per asset. Now I will say that average investment kind of hovers closer to that 25 to 50k plus per individual investor. it’s really, when we initially set out, we thought set the minimum as low as possible, let everyone invest. But then the minute that we started generating the returns that we were generating, high net worth start flocking to our platform investing.

    Micah Johnson (09:39)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (09:40)
    hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars with us in these single family rentals. And it’s really funny that you kind of focused in on that incentive structure and the way that we invest alongside individuals. And

    honestly, when I was talking to our kind of marketing team, I just had mentioned it offhandedly. Yeah, I’m invested in every single property.

    I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you. I thought if you’re going to start a real estate related investing platform,

    why on earth wouldn’t you? And I was in shock to learn that a majority of our competitors, don’t invest alongside the individuals. And they were started by people with sales and marketing backgrounds that really their goal is to raise as much capital as possible.

    it’s like, where else would you be investing if not in the platform that you put your blood, sweat and tears into? And so it was kind of crazy to me and like a

    Micah Johnson (11:05)
    Right.

    Alex Blackwood (11:11)
    big light bulb went off when they were like, no, not everyone does that. was like, that is ridiculous to think that you build a platform. Anyway, that’s all. ⁓

    Micah Johnson (11:20)
    Well, you

    even said y’all are the first real estate platform that’s ever been created by real estate investors.

    Alex Blackwood (11:27)
    That’s exactly right. are exactly as you mentioned, we are the first real estate investment platform started by real estate investors, which is a crazy thing to say.

    Micah Johnson (11:38)
    And well, and man, the reality is it’s showing in your growth. The fact that you’re doing it that way, you don’t get high net worth individuals investing easily. That’s not what they do. They didn’t become high net worth individuals by just throwing money around. So when you get them starting to buy in and especially as the project goes, that’s where they start coming in. Now you know you’re onto something. You’ve created something that’s giving access to people where

    Even high net worth, they didn’t have access all the time. Not everybody knew about it, right? They research and try to figure out, but that door or that walkway from researching real estate to participate in it, there’s quite an education gap in here. There’s quite a bit you need to know in the traditional sense before you go from, hey, I want to invest in real estate to, I’m actually making money in real estate. It is a long road for a lot of folks where…

    What you’re able to do is cut that section out because not everybody’s personality is lined up for that. And the usual problem for the investor that’s on the ground is capital. That’s normally their problem is they know how to do the deals. They’re ready to do the deals. They’ve gone like y’all have done. I want to dig into this, how you target your particular assets, but you’ve created that strategy so that you can be successful.

    Alex Blackwood (12:56)
    Yeah, I I would say that echoing that sentiment to around the investing in real estate without the necessary capital requirements. mean, a lot of people that we deal with, quite frankly, they have the capital necessary to invest in real estate. that exactly right. The knowledge barrier to enter and the time intensive barrier to enter is so substantial and it cannot be said enough.

    Because if you think about, ⁓ when I invest in real estate, not only are you deploying a large amount of capital upfront, but you’ve got to think about the risks related with it. And how can you weigh the risks related with it commensurate with the return that you’re getting without understanding the market? And so then that takes a whole year of diving into. And by the time you’ve done that, OK, can I take that template and apply it to a different market? OK, maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. So it really comes down to the fact that

    much the same way that a lot of these high net worths invest, which is kind of weighted dollar cost averaging in index funds or looking at hedge fund allocations where they do it on their behalf. That’s exactly the way that they could do with us in the real estate world. And so they don’t necessarily have to put all their eggs in one basket. They can invest across a variety of geographies, operating models, you name it. And so this gives them that access, that kind of quality without having to be up at night or

    learning a tremendous amount outside of their day jobs.

    Micah Johnson (14:23)
    Right. Cause it’s you, it, you realize that now you have to start a real estate business to do it. If you’re going to do it, like somebody’s got to be there on the day to day. Somebody’s got to be finding deals, sourcing deals, running numbers, talking to people. Like it, it takes multiple people just to close a property. You can’t do it by yourself. You title companies, lawyers, brokers, all these little pieces go into just even getting a deal done where that’s where a lot of folks kind of get tapped out.

    Alex Blackwood (14:30)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (14:53)
    And then upfront, if you do it and lose money, now you’re never coming back. You’re like, nope, this real estate’s garbage. They sold me a crock of stuff here,

    where in reality it’s just time intensive. It’s knowledge intensive. And when you already have a company or a lot of small family practices, they…

    You hear a lot of that, especially Dennis, my wife’s in the dental world and Dennis are heavy real estate investors that you see, but they got their own

    Alex Blackwood (15:57)
    Bye.

    Micah Johnson (16:00)
    or multiple practices. They can’t invest in real estate themselves. That’s not what they want to do. So creating those pathways for them to easily get in there. And then again, that access across the board, the fractional idea or the idea of fractional real estate investing. Here’s how you can start taking part in something to…

    build that generational wealth you’re after, whether you’re at the beginning of that journey, the middle of it, or even towards the end of it.

    Alex Blackwood (16:26)
    Yeah. And people always ask and talk about, okay, well, maybe I’ll only invest 25K today. What will that get me? Or maybe I’ll invest 10K ⁓ every single month. What will that get me? And really it’s just the return generated relative to the risk you’re undertaking. Real estate is obviously a tremendously stable asset class. So as you think about investing, it’s okay. Where do I want my money to compound in a more stable? There’s a reason it’s the world’s largest wealth generator. And so

    That’s why we started this and exactly right. It’s the process itself is just so manual and archaic in nature and not to mention two transactions even on an individual basis. They’re far and few in between, right? If an individual goes and invests a property, it’s like, okay, I’m just going to buy one property right now and maybe you wait another year until you buy your next property. It’s not like that’s

    transaction volume to streamline it.

    Micah Johnson (17:22)
    Exactly.

    Alex Blackwood (17:23)
    And so we basically are stacking up the different kind of transaction closing timelines. We’re making sure that we’re as efficient as possible as the closing happens. We’re making sure that our property managers are implementing the best practices and using other properties to implement decisions on other properties, maybe to improve performance. And so really comes down to taking that template and actually starting to build upon itself. And that’s exactly what we can do. We got

    Wholesale discounts at the property management level, wholesale discounts at the debt level. mean, we’re getting interest only loans. We just got our first quote at like five, nine interest rate, 10 year fixed interest only. That’s a absolutely wild concept. An individual to go out and get a DSCR interest only loan is going to probably fetch like seven and a half to 8%. And so we’re able to get 5.9 and give that benefit to the end investor. It really comes down to

    Micah Johnson (18:01)
    Wow.

    Yeah.

    Alex Blackwood (18:20)
    the platform that we’re looking to build here.

    Micah Johnson (18:23)
    Man, I love that. It’s leveraging your expertise and allowing other people to participate in it. Cause that is really how real estate gets going at those higher levels. It’s powerful. So let’s talk about 2026. What’s the big opportunity for this year? What are you excited about? ⁓

    Alex Blackwood (18:39)
    Yeah, mean, 2026,

    think right now we’re seeing a lot of the markets in real estate. There’s all right. Let me separate it out. 2026, there are a lot of different ways to approach it in terms of excitement. think number one, it’s obviously real estate related excitement, the market. Number two, it’s mogul related excitement. And so.

    Separating out the two. mean number one. We’re seeing a lot of these markets that Honestly, it is a buyer’s market. You’re able to get a lot more closing cost contingencies You’re a lot more contingencies a lot more closing cost credits Paid out to you as the buyer you’re able to negotiate a little bit harder on the price And so because it’s a softer market and we do think that a lot of the markets have kind of bottomed out

    this is really the time that it’s going to be a time to buy. And we’re seeing that in record volumes on our platform, a million dollar, multimillion dollar weeks where people are investing across a wide variety of assets. so real estate markets are really going to continue to heat up, not to mention if the institutional ban comes into play, we will basically be the only way that a lot of these institutions can liquidate their assets.

    Happy to get into that a sec. Basically, that’s a much deeper can of worms that we could ever get into. But that’s a separate one. And not to mention too, interest rates are continuing to come down, which means that we can operate in different operational models. Last year, we would not have considered a long-term rental because it just didn’t make sense, because the debt was not a creative. And so this year, actually kept the NOI yields make sense. The debt will be a creative. And so we might start dabbling in that.

    Micah Johnson (19:52)
    Yeah, that’s a big one.

    Alex Blackwood (20:17)
    So in terms of real estate, I’ve never been more excited. In terms of mogul, the team is absolutely incredibly strong. We really are starting to hit fire on all cylinders. We’re looking to scale to about four or five X our volume on platform today. ⁓ we’re, I mean, it just goes to show you, literally sold out. We launched three assets last week, sold out three assets this week. We launched, we’re probably gonna launch three to four assets this week. We’re gonna probably sell them out by next week.

    And so we’re really starting to ramp up the amount of supply that we bring to the platform commensurate with the demand that we’re seeing. So I do think that Mogul itself, we’re going to see a tremendous amount of growth, at least 4x what we’re

    Micah Johnson (20:58)
    Man,

    that’s cool. That is something to be excited about across the board. Well, Alex, man, I can’t open up that other can of worms today. We’re running low on time, but as this year progresses on, don’t be surprised if I have you back on to tell us what’s been going on, how things have been changing, especially if that institutional ban comes down. That’s some fascinating stuff. So for folks that have been listening in, what’s the best way to find out more about Mogul and possibly participate in investing with you?

    Alex Blackwood (21:27)
    Of course, head over to www.mogul.club to get started investing in real estate today. Again, once you start investing, you receive all the direct benefits, including the dividends from rental income on a monthly basis, appreciation in real time, and tax benefits at year end. Go over, check us out, start investing, dabble a little bit, know that I’m investing alongside you along the way. And so that’s how they can get started today.

    Micah Johnson (21:51)
    Awesome, man. Check the notes for that if you’re listening. Our show notes will make sure that that link is there for you. If you’re ready to start investing in real estate in a way that eliminates so much of the issues that most deal with, visit that website. I highly recommend it. I’m excited to learn about this product myself. I get fascinated by these new things coming out. So Alex, thanks again for being on today. Appreciate you sharing your story, your perspective with us.

    I think we need more folks out there doing it like you man, seeing behind the curtain, seeing things in a way that no one has before and bringing stuff to life that allows us all to participate a little more in investing in real estate. If you’re listening out there and you got value out of today’s episode, please like the episode, share it with someone else you think could get value out of it. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe. We appreciate every single one of you that follow along with us. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators.

    just like Alex, who are out there building a real business, changing lives and investing in real estate. Alex, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next episode.

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