Multifamily Property Management Strategies to Increase Occupancy and Rent

Pat Hancock (00:00)
It was about forty to forty-five percent occupied. And, you know, now, now, you know, kind of fast-forwarding three, about three years later, we’re at a hundred percent occupancy. The units, the average per door was about eight hundred and fifty when we acquired it. Now we’re at right around thirteen hundred with some of the units as high as fourteen hundred. We’re also converting it. It’s near FAMU University. We started also to convert to student housing. So it’s been, it’s been a good, good project.

It all worked out, but lots of learning along the, along the way, especially when it comes to raising capital. That, that might be the, the biggest learning lesson from this, this syndication. Welcome to the—

Dylan Silver (02:12)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by Pat Hancock, founder and CEO of Thomas Lynne, a vertically integrated company encompassing brokerage, property management, and investment throughout central Florida. Pat, thanks for taking the time here today.

Pat Hancock (02:27)
You’re welcome. I appreciate you having me on.

Dylan Silver (02:30)
Now, when we talk about all of the different segments of the real estate space that you’re involved in, there’s so much to cover. I’d like to look at deal flow and analyzing deals. What types of deals come across your desk?

Pat Hancock (02:44)
Really any kind of deal, you know, we, we look at both on the single-family side and also the multifamily side. You know, we’re investors ourselves, so we look to acquire and then we work with a lot of investors. So, you know, we, we try to, try to keep that deal flow, you know, that pipeline coming in as much as possible. It’s been a little, a little more challenging last couple of years, but, but yeah, I mean anything from single-family to multifamily, you know, real estate that we, we look at.

Dylan Silver (03:13)
What came first, the brokerage side of this for ya or thinking as an investor?

Pat Hancock (03:18)
Actually, the investor side came first, you know, without getting into too much detail, you know, my first foray into real estate was my neighbor across the street who became my real estate mentor. She was with I think RE/MAX at the time and she asked me, she, I, I just bought a, my first rental property, and, and so that was actually my first, you know, kind of step into real estate and

She asked me to start managing her, her properties for her investors. Little did we both know at the time we need a real estate license for that. So I quickly got my real estate license. So yeah, so looking back, you know, it was the, invest, the investment of a condo that I still own back in two thousand and four is how it, things all started for me as far as real estate.

Dylan Silver (04:02)
Where was that deal?

Pat Hancock (04:04)
That was in, it, I, it’s in Orlando, so I’ve been in Orlando since ninety-seven. That’s in an area of town called Vista Lakes, which is southeast Orlando.

Dylan Silver (04:15)
Southeast Orlando. I’m, I’m sure Orlando, everywhere in Florida has changed, but I’m sure Orlando’s changed a lot since then. When you look at going from single-family investing and that, that initial condo deal to then larger deals and looking at multifamily, was that a very intentional move? I know it is for a lot of people, or was there an opportunity and you took a jump at it?

Pat Hancock (04:39)
You know, it, I, I’m always that person that likes to do something more the next time, you know, more challenging. What’s the, the next step up, the next level up? And I had been in the just the single-family home, single-family condos for probably let’s see, fifteen years-ish, give or take. And it was when I, I acquired my first multifamily building. It was a, it was actually a quad. And as soon as I bought it, it was in Tallahassee. I still own it.

And as soon as I bought it, something just clicked. You know, I had heard from other investors in the multifamily space, you know, the pros and advantages of, of multifamily. And it was when I first bought that. And, you know, now I’ve got four tenants where if there’s one vacancy, you know, you’re still collecting rent, hopefully from the other three units. You know, the returns was better. So that, that was it. It just kind of was that next step up for me. And as soon as I

Soon as I bought it, as soon as I acquired it, it was, you know, that’s, that’s kinda all I wanted to do since was the multifamily stuff. Stop.

Dylan Silver (06:30)
Now when we talk multifamily, has most of the, the, the deals that you’ve looked at been that, you know, quadplex, or, or, you know, we could call it smaller multifamily, or depending on how you look at it, like larger single-family would be one of five, right? Or one of four, depending on where you’re at. Did you look at larger deals at any point in time?

Pat Hancock (06:48)
Sure. Yeah. We just, we’re actually just wrapping up our first syndication of an apartment building at, that, that’s also in Tallahassee. We, we acquired that back in September of twenty-three with a three-year exit in mind, you know, where we had the, you know, the, the general, general partner, limited partner set up and we had to raise capital for the first time. So yeah, definitely look at larger buildings. Again, things as soon as we acquired that, interest rates started to shoot up that next year and definitely slowed things down for us.

Dylan Silver (07:16)
I was just gonna say that. There’s been so many syndicators and fund managers and people who raise capital and do deals collectively on the show. It has not been easy the last, let’s say, five years or so, for syndicators in particular, especially newer syndicators who may have seen this wild success from like 2014 to 2019, where you know, people frankly could buy deals wrong and still make out like a bandit, honestly. So

Yeah. How was your, you know, learning curve as a new syndicator and then also how did that deal come about?

Pat Hancock (07:49)
That deal, you know, again, it was us trying to or me trying to just kind of level up. You know, we did the, the, the quad. Next is logically a bigger building. You know, we had, we had thought about whether we wanted to go the fund route or the syndication route. And like you said, I mean, everybody was doing syndications from, from, you know, those years and, you know, like you, I mean, you could, you could buy whatever you want.

And just through the simple market appreciation, you’re gonna make money on it, right? So, you know, we thought that too. We thought it was gonna be easy, but you know, we quickly found out when we bought this building, it was brought to me by a, a broker contact that was in Tallahassee. And, you know, he had this building, it was off-market. He, the seller really didn’t want to sell it, but he was able to, you know, we were able to come up and agree on a price in terms that worked for us and worked for the, the seller. And yeah, I mean, it was a big learning curve.

You know, we, being on the management side as well, and we, you know, I’ve been doing and involved in property management for over twenty years as well. You know, you’ve got, you know, you can have more tenants that are more difficult than others. This building was full of those. It was a value-add opportunity, which that was part of our buy box is we wanted something where, you know, we could increase the, the value through renovations and improvements. It was about forty to forty-five percent occupied. And, you know, now, now, you know, kind of fast-forwarding three, about three years later.

We’re at a hundred percent occupancy. The units, the average per door was about eight hundred and fifty when we acquired it. Now we’re at right around thirteen hundred with some of the units as high as fourteen hundred. We’re also converting it. It’s near FAMU University. We started also to convert to student housing. So it’s been, it’s been a good, good project. It, it’s all worked out, but lots of learning along the, along the way, especially when it comes to raising capital. That, that might be the, the biggest—

Dylan Silver (09:43)
Did you go variable rate or fixed rate when you took out finance?

Pat Hancock (09:46)
We did the fixed rate, thankfully.

Dylan Silver (09:49)
Thank, thank goodness. Right. There, there’s so many people who, who took out variable rate and really because that’s what had worked, right? And so no one could have foreseen all of this—

Dylan Silver (10:34)
like black, you know, swan events happening, it, you, you never see this with the price of materials going up and then, you know, the interest rates going up, and then there’s more supply in some cases. So it was really challenging. But to go from eight fifty in rents to thirteen hundred and forty percent occupancy to a hundred percent, you’ve obviously navigated it very well.

Pat Hancock (10:57)
We, we did. It, it, it worked out real well. I’ve got a great team, you know. You know, collectively we’ve got lots and lots of years in the real estate business. Our lead property manager is unbelievable. You know, my COO in charge of, you know, the day-to-day operations are amazing. So it’s a great team. I, I definitely can’t take the credit, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s worked out well, thankfully.

Dylan Silver (11:19)
Let’s talk about property management because you mentioned having an extensive experience in, in property management. One of the things that sometimes gets overlooked on these types of deals is doing the property management yourself or partnering, really partnering, not just delegating, but partnering with a third-party property manager to kind of tackle it together. I’ve really recently talked with a number of different podcast guests who, who’ve

enlightened me, if you will, on how important it is to be in control of that side of it, because that can quickly become out of control.

Pat Hancock (11:54)
A hundred percent. And there are, you know, a lot, it’s easy for me to say this since we have a management company and we do self-manage our own properties. There’s a lot of bad property management companies out there, property managers. And they, they can—they can make or break your deal. You know, we realize that every dollar counts. Happy customers, retention. We have, we have a ninety-eight point something, almost a ninety-nine percent retention rate with tenants. So we, and the nice thing about managing ourselves

is it, it can, it, we can turn on a dime, we can pivot if necessary, we can make those changes quickly on the spot. You know, we’re in direct control and, and nobody’s gonna treat your asset like you do. Right? Nobody. Yeah. So it’s, it’s definitely super important, which is one reason why we, we definitely self-manage.

Dylan Silver (12:42)
Let’s talk about, you know, how on a granular level, without giving away all the gold here, but a nugget for our audience, how are you able to increase occupancy when, when it’s solo? I mean I’ve heard going from sixty to seventy or eighty, but from forty to a hundred is a huge jump.

Pat Hancock (12:59)
Yeah. No, I mean it, it took, you know, we, we reached 100% occupancy at one point last year. And, you know, it’s a college town in Tallahassee. So, you know, the peak rental times or whatever when you want leases to renew are in the summertime, right? So when we acquired it, we had leases that were expiring in months like February, you know, December, September, right after school started, which made it more challenging to lease, especially being near a school, right?

So, you know, it took time to, you know, get the leases on the right, you know, kind of the right track as far as the time of the year. You know, renovating the units obviously helped. You know, when we bought it, it, they were rough. Yeah. Real, real all nasty, right? We did a great job. You know, our project manager did a wonderful job of design and, you know, you know, making the units look really nice. So that, that obviously helped. And, you know, we do a good job as far as, you know, on the management side. Again, advertising

you know, the property and making sure that it gets enough exposure where we can have that, that steady influx of new applications for, for renting.

Dylan Silver (14:03)
If we look at another side of, of the real estate space, brokerage, what type of deals are you involved in on the brokerage side? Are these mostly investor deals? Do you do any single-family? Has that changed over the years?

Pat Hancock (14:14)
All the above. I mean, for me it’s changed. You know, I don’t work with directly with buyers and sellers much anymore unless they’re friends or, you know, something like that. But yeah, we do, we do all, all the above. We’ll do commercial, we do residential.

Pat Hancock (15:09)
You know, we’ve got agents that, you know, specialize in each. So yeah, we’ll, we’ll do, we’ll do the, all the above.

Dylan Silver (15:17)
Now, Florida in particular, and we were talking about this in the green room. I, I hope I don’t offend anybody. I’m a Texas realtor, right? I feel like Florida is maybe the best state, and for so many reasons. But there’s also so many people, not just in Florida, not just in the US, but internationally that want to be buying and investing in Florida. Are, are you now seeing more and more agents and brokers catering to an international audience?

Pat Hancock (15:42)
A hundred percent. And we’re even starting to do that as well. So we’ve got, we’ve got a couple agents that do work with investors buying in Central Florida from Central and South America. And it’s on our to-do list is to start, you know, running more ads, design a landing page for the website, things like that to, to draw some of that, that business or more of that business than we’re, than we’re doing so far from international buyers. Because Florida, it’s, it’s the number one state they’re moving to and buying in.

Dylan Silver (16:10)
No, no question about it. And it’s evident even in my time passing through Florida, you realize, okay, this place is really nice, and there’s also a lot of people from all over the world here right now. It could be a, you know, a relatively ordinary Tuesday in the middle of February, and it would still be absolutely a great time, and you feel that energy, even just passing through. One of the challenges that I’ve noticed for realtors, and this isn’t a Florida thing, this isn’t a Texas thing, it’s really everywhere.

Is it seems to be like the, the, the pace of innovation and marketing changes and the way that people want to buy and sell is like changing now faster than ever. I’ve seen some people say, hey, we’re just gonna stick with what’s worked, and that’s what’s gotten us to the dance. We’re gonna continue to do that. Other people like, hey, we have to stay ahead of this curve here. What’s been your approach?

Pat Hancock (17:01)
Yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m, I guess overall I, I, I’m still old school, I guess you could say, but I do realize the importance of staying ahead in the game, whether it’s AI, you know, whether it’s, you know, I got a lot of agents that are into, you know, the funny videos for TikTok and Instagram and, you know, and feedback we get from sellers is, is whether it works or not, they, they, they feel like it does and they, they, they like that, that kind of advertising or whatever.

But yeah, we’re definitely trying to stay ahead in the AI game and working with an AI, AI kind of specialist, I guess you could say, and trying to bring in stuff and create it for not only the brokerage but for our agents to use as well.

Dylan Silver (17:41)
Now on the commercial side, are you dealing a lot with like retail restaurants in a, and office space or, you know, more retail focused, or is this, you know, multifamily housing or a mix of everything?

Pat Hancock (17:53)
Mostly commercial it would be office. Okay. It’s primarily office.

Dylan Silver (17:58)
Let’s talk about that because this is something that I’m a little bit of a fish out of water in. For a while there it seemed like, you know, office was very challenging because people were working from home. But it also feels like everyone wants to now relocate their business to Florida and why not go into the office when it’s a beautiful day outside. So are you seeing more and more people interested in office space?

Pat Hancock (18:18)
Yeah, it’s definitely bouncing back from, you know, back in twenty-twenty when everybody started working from home and post-twenty-twenty. Yeah, definitely more of a, more of a, I guess a desire to get back in the office, whether it’s people that are, have been in Orlando or like you said, moving into the area. There is—

Dylan Silver (18:35)
An interesting trend there because I’ve seen so many folks who really don’t have any ties to Florida yet. They’re just aware that not only is it great weather and not only is it hot real estate, but also there does seem to be some type of like entrepreneurial energy in the water, if you will, because there’s so many people there who are building and starting businesses. Do you feel that? Does this get lost then people who are in Florida that this is out there? I guess.

Pat Hancock (19:02)
Guess it depends. I mean, if you’re an entrepreneur yourself and you have that vibe and, you know, feeling on a day-to-day basis, I guess, yeah, you probably do recognize that. You know, I know I get excited to come to work and do what we do and so I, yeah, I guess, yeah.

Dylan Silver (19:15)
You know, it’s sometimes interesting to hear all the different business models that come out of Florida. This is why I, I have this question. It’s like, well, I have so many amazing guests that are coming out of Florida. Is it that Florida attracts these people or is it that Florida in and of itself is some type of real estate incubator and people just have great ideas and then they level up?

Pat Hancock (19:39)
I, I don’t know. I mean, maybe it’s in the water. I don’t know. I mean it’s a beautiful, like we were talking here before the show. I mean, it’s, I’ve been here my whole life and I, I do love the mountains, you know, like going to Colorado or North Carolina, something like that. Those are places we’ve been to quite a bit. But, you know, when it’s all said and done, I mean, we love the beaches. You know, although we moved, you know, we still ask ourselves how in the heck did we wind up in the middle of the state? But you know, we love the beaches and we love the west coast, the gulf, and the east coast, the ocean.

So I don’t know, maybe it’s just something in the water. I mean, the weather again is, aside from it getting pretty hot in July and August, it’s just gorgeous weather. You mentioned February. I mean, you know, we get so spoiled down here because of the weather for days like you get in February, you know, in March.

Dylan Silver (20:25)
I mean you’re basically living in the Caribbean in effect in a lot of ways. Now it certainly feels. Yeah, for sure. You know, the, one of the funny things that I’ve learned from, from guests in Florida is there seems to be multiple versions of Florida. And whether or not all Floridians admit this, I feel like there’s a friendly competition between different markets in Florida. You’ve got the people in South Florida and we’re like working. If you’re thinking of one spot in, in Florida, you’re thinking of South Florida. You think of Miami, you’re thinking of, you know, Boca Raton. Like this is what you’re thinking of.

And then the people in Tampa will be like, why are you thinking about moving to South Florida? We’ve got the West Coast and the beaches, and there’s less traffic over here, and Siesta Key is right over there. Then you’ve got like country Florida, like Daytona and Jacksonville. And they’re like, well, you’re, you want to be able to have Florida, but you also want to be able to go see

you know, country dancing or you wanna go country dancing or go watch NASCAR. Like we’ve got country Florida. Come on now, this is America. Then you’ve got Central Florida, which is a whole other entity of its own. Do you feel this as well? Is there like multiple versions of Florida?

Pat Hancock (21:27)
Sure. I used to when I went to, I don’t know, when I do tours of Florida and, you know, you’re talking about where you’re from and all that, and I would say I’m from Miami and, you know, everybody seen that and none of them had, were from Miami and it was like this unbelievable place. And I would always say I could take you on two very different tours of, you know, whether it’s Miami or South Florida. Yeah, each market’s very different. Don’t forget Orlando’s got Mickey Mouse, right? But yeah, they’re, they’re all, they’re all, they’re all

pretty different, you know, and you described them pretty well.

Dylan Silver (21:58)
Like to say that I’m jealous, honestly. And I can say that somewhat, you know, with, with a degree of pride, because every time I’m in Florida, I say, man, this place is nice. You know, on, on that note, Pat, we are coming up on time here. Any new projects or activities that you’re working on or anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience?

Pat Hancock (22:16)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I appreciate the opportunity. You know, we’re, we’re continuing to try to scale, you know, everything we got going on here from, you know, the management. We’re actively seeking to hire, you know, rockstar real estate agents and, you know, we’re trying to build, increase the number of team people we have on the team as far as underwriters to look at potential, you know, multifamily deals. I’m currently working on my fourth book, The Perfect Week for Real Estate Agents. I’ve published three so far

which are all on, all for sale on Amazon. And you know, I, like we talked about before the show, I, I have launched, launched a podcast called Success Equations that I, I love doing and hope to do. Hope to get, I don’t know if I’ll ever get to your number, what is it a month, four hundreds of a, a month, which again that’s very impressive. That’s awesome. But, but yeah, I mean just trying to continue to get better on a day-to-day basis and, and you know, you know, and just keep, keep grinding.

Dylan Silver (23:08)
Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks.

Pat Hancock (23:10)
for joining us. I appreciate it. Thank you.