Mastering Property Management: Expert Insights from Matt Fonk

Quentin (01:31)
All right, hello everyone. Welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I’m super excited to be with you today. Of course, my name is Quentin Edmonds, better known as Q Edmonds. And today I am joined by someone I’ve been looking to chat with. We’ve been doing a little bit of chatting offline, just to let y’all know. But I am joined here today with my friend, Matt Fonk, who is making serious moves in this landlord. ⁓

and landlord development space. And I’m so glad to have him here. How are you feeling today,

Matt Fonk (02:08)
Feeling awesome, Quentin. You got it, man. The landlord development space. I like that. That’s good stuff.

Quentin (02:12)
Yeah, absolutely,

absolutely. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from your approach, especially with developing other landlords. Like, I love the fact that you like to develop people. And I think our listeners are really going to learn a lot from you today. And so if you don’t mind, let’s dive in. So first off, for people who may not be familiar with you and your world, give us the short version.

I will watch your main focus today. Well, these days, Mr. Matt, what’s your main focus on these days,

Matt Fonk (02:48)
Number one’s family, family quitting is what it is. But at the end of the day, you got to support the family. So we’re out there working on our podcast with you here. And we want to talk about the webinar a little bit that I coming up when it involves tenant landlord training. And we’re working on the land. Let me rephrase this. ⁓ Tenant.

screening program, helping landlords be better at what they do. Unlike the property manager who goes out and works with the landlord, we’re working with the landlords themselves, improving their game, bringing them up to ⁓ a quality product, allowing them to be able to screen tenants and improve their asset, their properties that they own and purchased and get past the mundane struggles of a typical landlord that’s not educated.

Quentin (03:10)
Mm-hmm.

I love it man, I love it man. Hey, what markets are you working in? What markets are you operating in?

Matt Fonk (03:43)
We are in a Tampa Bay,

I’m in the Tampa Bay market typically, but I mean, this webinar is for anybody. It’s nationwide. If somebody want to come in from overseas, they could and watch it online, of course, but I’m just, ⁓ I’m here and I talk to people all over the United States and Canada that are in groups that I belong to.

Quentin (04:01)
Absolutely, absolutely. I love it, man. What definitely caught my eye and my attention, of course, you talking about development and of course, like you building out this webinar, you know, that’s helping people get connected with these tenants. Like I love it, man. Listen, and that’s not easy really, especially in this climate. So let me ask you this, man. What keeps the machine running smoothly for you?

Matt Fonk (04:26)
Well, it’s the drive.

you study it, you put the program together and you get a nugget. You’re like, wow, I could go off on a tangent on this. And then you’re like, well, wait a minute, I could create a whole webinar off of that. That’s a whole hour talk on that. There’s just so much information. And I didn’t realize when I first started putting this together, I’m like, well, I’ll just talk about how I go through the application of a, for the tenant. But then I started realizing, well, geez, we can dive into every question that we ask every position, looking at the fraud, looking at the EAS animals, service animals. I mean, there’s

a whole one day course on service animals. And it’s just amazing where this is actually taking me and I’m my wife’s like, you got so much knowledge, she goes, you need to get that out of your brain and share it because it’s valuable to other people. And this is something that you can build on and be happy about doing and feel the reward. Now, if you’ve Quinton, if you had a property, I’d love to sit down and chat with you and get you motivated. Sometimes people lose that motivation because they get beat up because the system for managing that

property don’t run right. And that’s where I’m hoping these particular little webinars that I’m working on will help people and grow and improve who they are. Because without it, you know, if we don’t share our knowledge, we’re not helping the society we live in. We’re not trying to better the neighborhoods we live in in our community. And that’s what I’m here to do. I mean, that’s how I like to give back. So.

Quentin (06:37)
Absolutely, absolutely. Man, one thing that I heard that I relate to is when our wives kind of push us and encourage us and let us know like, hey, man, you got more in you that people need. I love that, man. And I think what our listeners are going to hear is that need coming out of you and how they can get that information from you that’s going to help better them and put them in a better position. So I’m so glad that you’re sharing these things today. I really am, man. I really, really am.

And so listen now, now every operator I know, you they have, they have a moment, let’s say when things kind of get real, maybe, ⁓ a deal that went sideways or, and you, mentioned this before, a time when you really had to pivot and you had to pivot, pivot fast. Like you mind sharing one of those moments that you had to do that.

Matt Fonk (07:26)
Well, I will tell you, I we just got hit by the floods last fall and that’s a huge pivot. And when we were sitting here now, I don’t have a huge self owned portfolio. I just quick backstory. I manage a lot of properties over the years for other people. I master leased them. I built that portfolio up a cash flowed little bit over time. And as time went on, I got better and learned how to buy properties on a fixed lease and increase my cash flow. I took all that cash flow instead of living off of it. We use it to invest in properties that we own today. Many of them are free and clear. However,

Quentin (07:30)
Mm.

Matt Fonk (07:56)
last fall what happened in Florida we got nailed with two big storms right in a row the first storm flooded one of my rental properties with nine inches the other house got about an inch of water in it my own personal resident on the second storm got an inch of water in it so I’m talking about some adversity here we had to pivot quick though because we had insurance flood insurance

paid out, but it took six months to get paid. Well, maybe about four months, but it took four months to get paid. in the meantime, we’re like, how do we, where do we get all this cash? Cause we’re tied up in equity right now because of our particular position with our family. And so cashflow dropped.

And you’re all of sudden you’re like, uh-oh, thank God this stuff’s free and clear, right? Because if I had to pay a mortgage, banks typically don’t work with you. That’s why you want to work with private investors and investor friends to make this stuff happen. Because you can always get a lot easier deal with them. So at the end of the day, we got in, we started looking for money, we borrowed money against our we borrowed private money from our free and clear houses. We use those as collateral to get the money we needed, to get the stuff we needed, to fix the houses we wanted.

back on the market. And I just rented a house that I just last rented my last house that was flooded just this week. And that is one way of getting it back up and going. But it takes I mean you have to gut the house and that’s adversity. You look at that you’re like what do I do. I’ve never dealt with this before. And so with that we’re pivoting. We’re taking this portfolio that’s closer to the coastal regions. We want to take an exchange this out for different assets more inland and maybe leverage

the assets we have for a larger purchase or ⁓ multiple purchases of different homes.

So I hope that answers your question when it comes to sometimes having to really get slapped in the face and have to wake up and pivot. Because we were living clean and comfortable. one day you’re like, I swear to God, my wife’s birthday, September 21st, we went over to the beach, JW Marriott, we’re just living it up. What happened the next weekend? That storm came in and just devastated us, man. One minute you’re up here, next minute you’re like, whoa.

Quentin (10:39)
Does it answer the question? No, sir. I if I say no, sir, mean, absolutely, yes, sir. It absolutely answers the question because that was definitely a pivot that you had to make. And that’s the kind of stuff people kind of really don’t talk about enough these days. Like the real stuff that they go through, right? And honestly, that’s really what separates folks like that’s able just from dabbling, just by being consistent in long-term about their passion, what they’re doing.

and making sure that they’re doing things the right way. So now, that was perfect, man. And I thank you for that, for sharing. Go ahead. Yes, sir. Absolutely.

Matt Fonk (11:11)
Well, I I could give you one more pivot real quick. I’ll try to make it quick if you’d like to hear it. So people

ask all the time, you know, hey, what about the market? And I’m like, look, any market you can do things in as long as you’re solving problems. doesn’t matter. We talked about that before. And you look at rents went boom from COVID. They went right up. mean, values in homes went up. Inflation doubled house values. Well, the dollar piece of paper went down. But if you had your money invested in real estate, your net worth doubled.

And so that’s why it’s so important to buy right and get things paid for so you are well structured the purchase so that they can actually increase in value over time because that’ll ride with inflation and you don’t get stuck in a down market. We saw rents go up and I put this house up for rent about a month and a half ago.

and it said it should rent for 4,600 bucks. And I’m like, great. So I go back, I’m getting ready. I didn’t have it on the market just yet, but I get ready and I still, okay, we’re gonna put it up today. It’s like three weeks later, I go up to go put it up.

maybe $3,400 you can get for it. I ended up getting $3,450 for it. But that, in six weeks, the market went from $3,600 down to $3,400. That may not be a big deal, but for a guy that’s trying to make $200 a month on a house because he’s got a mortgage, taxes, and insurance, and he didn’t purchase that thing right or structure the deal right to give him some cushion, that’s going to hurt him. So again, going back to learning how to purchase a home correctly and renting it and managing it properly is going to help. So you got to learn how to pivot and be able to move around those type of market conditions.

Quentin (12:41)
See man, you’re giving people, I call it a game, right? Hopefully everybody’s familiar with that, but you’re giving people advice on that long-term staying power. And so I really, really appreciate you sharing this. And I think this is really gonna help people out. And so thank you, man. Thank you for sharing these pivots. So Mr. Matt, let me ask you this. What do you focus most on solving right now? What’s your next scale? What’s the real goal that you’re looking to?

a team right now.

Matt Fonk (13:13)
personally or with my business.

Quentin (13:15)
Man, you can give me both if you want to. mean, you know, we trying to help the people out. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Fonk (13:16)
That what? Here’s where we’re at personally, just so you know, here’s where I personally

so I like the mobile home park. I like I like small apartment complexes or communities, I should say. I’ve looked at storage and I’ve looked at even small box flexi space, but I like the commercial side. This is me personally. I got people that beat me up a little bit, but there’s two ways of looking at this. You got single family homes and you can buy 10 of them in a row and you own the whole street, right? You got your own apartment complex or community right on one street.

Quentin (13:33)
Mmm.

Matt Fonk (13:46)
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 house. You got an apartment building, 10 units. Maybe you need cash one day. Is it easier to unload an apartment building or is it easier to unload one house? Okay, you can look at it that way. You could have houses all over the place or you can have your units all under one roof. It’s all personal preference at the end of the day.

So I’ve been looking at this different asset class because I’m bored with the single family home. I want to do something different. And don’t get me wrong, tenants are very challenging and they can wear you out if you’re not prepared. But at the meantime, we’ve downsized. We’re looking at that. We’re looking at different things. We’ve invested money with other apartment purchases here in Tampa with other people. And we still have our own properties. On the flip side of this, my goal is to take this tenant training course that I’m working on and go visit these.

smaller communities where you have the mom and pops running them. Work with them. Hey, let me teach you how to do a better job at selecting tenants for your homes or your mobile home park or whatever it may be. See if I can develop a relationship with them. Maybe I’m the first guy they call if they want to sell. You see how that goes? It’s I’m not trying to snake my way in, but they’re going to get chance to test drive my personality, my ethics and my who Matt is because we get to work with me.

And when that day comes that maybe they need to sell, being that I’m a broker, maybe I can either purchase it, structure a purchase, solve a problem they have, or maybe they just want to sell it and I can’t buy it, but I can find somebody that might. So that’s where I’m going. That’s the whole picture. I haven’t really completely decided what route to take off in when it comes to the asset class, whether it’s mobile homes or the apartments. But right now, I’m out there.

Quentin (15:50)
Hmm?

Matt Fonk (16:12)
testing the waters on all of them to see which one I’m really more comfortable with. At the end of the day, we all need a roof over our head. And with the course I’m putting together, that’s just another way to communicate and work with them.

Quentin (16:23)
Absolutely, no, that’s big. I was trying to take notes and listen actively at the same time. Because I think I heard you say storage facilities as well, right? Did you mention that as well?

Matt Fonk (16:34)
Yo, there’s storage facilities and then there’s something called small box flexi space that I like. If you ever driven down a road in your community in a small industrial park and you’ll have a business and it’ll have a garage door and then it’ll have a regular door you can walk into and you might see a lawn guy, might see a cabinet guy, maybe you’ll see a granite guy or maybe there’s just a small little printing company. Man, those things are gold. They don’t turn much. They don’t trade much. It’s a term I use and they got very low in my area. From what I understand, the vacancy rates are about 2 % right now.

⁓ Very hard to get into in the saturated markets like Tampa, because I mean, everybody’s after it. So, you know, we look at the tertiary markets to try to find the mom and pops. And I think that’s where we can build our foundation, get started, really cut our teeth and learn how to work and manage those particular asset classes, whether it’s that or even a smaller apartment building. Take that asset like I was telling you, I want to take my current portfolio of houses.

and maybe sell it off in those packages one day and reinvest that and leverage that into maybe a larger purchase that it has to produce the same amount of cash flow at a minimum, if not more, otherwise there’s no need for me to do that with the right amount of cushion. So I’ve got security. So ⁓ that’s what we’re working on and I think that’s the play. But you asked about those other asset classes and I wanted to touch on that.

Quentin (17:51)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I appreciate, and that’s big because you have a lot of different things that you’re putting in place. You are forward thinking. And I know like the next move, can either compound things or it can create chaos. And that’s depending on how you play it. And so I get it, man. So listen, so for people that’s listening and they’re probably early in their journey and they maybe look in the level, sorry about that, level up or make moves like you’re making, I think it would benefit

Matt Fonk (18:14)
is right.

Quentin (18:29)
them like really, really hearing this. And so let me ask you this, when it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s been the biggest difference for you when it comes to that?

Matt Fonk (18:41)
We go into the coffee meetings at a McDonald’s with other local, seasoned, older guys, man. That’s the best office in the world. You know, it’s nothing fancy. You’ll get to down in the nitty gritty and you share your ideas and talks and people that are honest will tell you. Now you got to be careful. There’s some crooks in those corners too. You got to be real cautious. And one thing I would like, I’d like to share two things for your audience is if they’re going to go buy a seminar course and take it,

The instructors typically give them enough to get themselves in trouble and you know string them out somehow and it’s not done on purpose. But I think people don’t realize they go and take a seminar. They need to realize what that is. It’s enough to whet your whistle and you need to take that and find the road to the final answer. Because I’ve got a friend who’s an attorney and he’ll help people but he goes I can’t do it all for him. He goes and then they try to do it themselves.

and they spread themselves too thin and they get in trouble. you take it with a grain of salt. It’s not gospel. You need to take what you learn and add to it. In this world, we go to school and when we’re adults at Idaho High School, we’ve hopefully got the tools to teach ourselves what we need to do going forward. The other thing I’d like to tell your audience is if you’re struggling to get in this business, don’t quit, number one. You don’t want to quit, but sit down and figure out what your skill set is.

what you can bring to the table. I’m just going to use this as an example. I worked at truck stops in North Chicago back in the 90s and the 80s when I was in high school. We would do this thing called Sparkle for spring. We would clean the truck stop. We competed. So I learned how to clean things really well. And I’ve got an eye for dirt in the crevices and the cracks. So what I would do is I would go out and I would offer to clean the home.

If you had a rental property, before I had properties, I’d out and clean. I could do some minor maintenance. I could fix a few things like doorknobs and lights and that kind of thing. Then when I was all done, instead of just handing my landlord, the guy I was working for, I should say, the investor, instead of just handing him an invoice, I would give him an invoice with a marketing packet that said, hey, I can market this house for you. And I’ve got a way that I can help you find a great tenant. And we’ll move somebody into this home. And we’ll collect the rent, this kind of thing.

And here it is. In a nutshell, I basically put a whole marketing package together. Whether they want to hire me or not or work with me or not, they had the paperwork. This is before I really got going. That’s how you get into the door. You’ve got to provide them something they’re not expecting, that they’re not getting from anywhere else. And so at the time, I wasn’t a real estate agent. So I couldn’t actually manage the property. So Quinton, you had a property. And I do this and I show this to you. You’re like, well, how can you do this? I said, Quinton, listen, I’m going to lease the property from you.

I’m gonna turn around and find an occupant tenant to live in his home. They’re gonna pay me thousand bucks a month. I’m gonna pass through 90 % to you. And for my efforts, I’m gonna keep the remainder. So, I would rent the house as a subtenant, right? I’m not the occupant tenant, but I’m the master tenant. And you’re the landlord. Instead of having a, what we call a vicarious relationship or an agency relationship, me being your agent, we’re now business partners.

Quentin (21:51)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Fonk (22:02)
And the beauty of this that people don’t realize is when we master lease a property, which is what it’s called, with the right to sublease it, we now take you out of the picture so you don’t have to get these phone calls. You don’t have to go to the court. The master tenant is the principal on paper recorded who handles all the evictions. so going back to just doing the one simple thing, maybe you’re a painter. You paint the house. You bring in a cleaning crew.

Whatever it takes you get it all done say listen I can get the house clean for an extra 50 bucks or whatever it may be and by the way Quentin Here’s the photos. It’s ready to go I even took the liberty to writing up writing you up a nice description of what I think it could and here’s what I think this house should rent for boom He you just did his work for him. Who’s he gonna call next time? That’s how I think somebody trying to break into this or struggling can escalate their their game a little bit

Quentin (22:48)
Come on.

Hmm.

Man, you say so much good stuff right there. And that’s like, that’s the thing we can’t fake. Relationships are everything. And you really can’t fake that in this space. I love how when you even started off talking about going to the coffee shop with those that’s been around, you know, for a long time, who you can glean information from. Yeah, absolutely, man. Absolutely. Like relationships is everything. And, man, that was so good, man. Thank you for sharing. That was great. That was great, man.

Matt Fonk (23:17)
Still do that.

Those guys at the coffee shop,

they’ve seen my kids from infants and they would hold them. Today they’re driving cars, my kids. So yeah, that’s relationships.

Quentin (23:30)
Mm.

Yeah. Wow. See? Long-term

relationships, man. And I think that’s gonna be the key. You kind of hit on it kind of earlier when you had to, I think even with, when you were talking about your pivots, like you was able to pull on some relationships and consistency that was able to help you out in the long run. And so that’s what it’s all about. Making sure that you keep those consistent relationships, long-term relationships.

That way when we have to make a pivot or when we run into something unforeseen, we have those long standing relationships that can help us guide us through those tough situations. So that’s everything, man. That is everything. The relationships is everything in this space.

Matt Fonk (24:12)
And those relationships get

you the properties you need and that builds your estate. You have cash flow and you need to build your entire estate. I mean, at the end of the day, if I was 100 years old, I could live off cash flow and hire the right manager. I wouldn’t need to have any assets. Going back to one little thing, you don’t need to own real estate. So many people get blinded by that. But if you learn how to control an asset, a lease is more powerful than ownership because typically if a house sells and there’s the right lease on that property,

That lease goes with it. So just look up the, you know Guinness beer?

Quentin (24:51)
Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Fonk (24:52)
Look up the Guinness beer lease when you get a chance. It’s like a 7,000, it’s like a six or 7,000 year lease and they’re only 900 years into it. They don’t own the land, they just lease the land. Yeah, it’s a lease. It’s amazing how powerful leases are, so you know.

Quentin (24:55)
Are you so, ⁓ you giving me homework?

Okay. Okay. So yeah, you’re definitely, as I say, putting me up on game. You’re giving me insight that you gave me all the work. I’m definitely gonna go research that. So I appreciate that. So listen, Mr. Matt, before we wrap, listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you or connect with you, I mean, maybe collaborate with you. I know you go to webinars, so they wanted to learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way that they can reach out to you?

Matt Fonk (25:39)
Just go to www.matfunk.com. That’s M-A-T-T-F-O-N-K dot com. It’s all right there. My email is matt at yourrentalpeople dot com.

Quentin (25:55)
Well, listen, perfect man, perfect man. Uh-oh.

Matt Fonk (25:57)
the best way. Hey, catch me on LinkedIn. Just search up matfunk.com.

I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook. I try to be out there. You can even find me on Amazon. I got a little book out there too.

Quentin (26:07)
I love it, man. I love it. That’s right. Get all that information in there. Because listen, y’all want to connect.

Matt Fonk (26:11)
But hey, at metfunc.com,

metfunc.com, I mean, that’s where that webinar is coming up. And I got a lot of free stuff. mean, here’s one thing people don’t realize that you’ve got a tenant, he goes out and he pays to get a fake W-2, get a fake ESA or a fake tax return. And he hands that over to the landlord through a third party somehow or uploads it, gets it to you and you look at it you’re like, man, this looks good on paper. But yet landlords don’t go out and spend any money on their own defense or education.

I mean, $100 just to learn how to defend yourself against fraudulent documents. It’s all it is, a hundred bucks. It’s an hour and a half course, open to Q and A. I’m not here selling book and tape, but I’m going to give you all that for that. You’re going to learn, you’re going to meet a lot of really good people. It’ll be a great networking session as well. And you’re going to belong to my group and we’ll network together if you got a problem. That’s at mattfunk.com. So not to give myself a shameless plug, I hope that’s okay.

Quentin (27:10)
This is what this is all about. You’re educating the people. You’re giving them a resource that can help better their lives. So no, this ain’t no shame. It’s plug. You’re doing the right thing, You’re letting people know where to come if they need help. And you’re letting people know where to come to get things the way it’s supposed to go. And so man, I appreciate that. I appreciate you. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your story. I appreciate your perspective. Like, I really appreciate you, Mr. Matt Funk. I really do, man. So listen.

Matt Fonk (27:38)
All right.

Quentin (27:38)
We need

more people like you in this space, honestly, that’s doing it the right way. So thanks again for being here. And for those of you that’s tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you check out Mr. Matt Funk on his website. And listen, we got more conversations coming just like this with my man, Mr. Matt Funk. So if you’re out there building your business, build it the right way, you’re building real businesses.

Keep tuning in and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thank you so much