Navigating the Multifamily Market: Insights from Justin Brennan

Quentin Edmonds (01:31)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I am your host, Quentin Edmonds, and you know better know as Q. Edmonds. And today I am joined by someone who I’ve been chatting with a little bit. I’m so looking forward to you getting to know this guy has a wealth of knowledge. I love his perspective on things. Now he’s in the multifamily investing field. So he’s going to talk about that, but he got so much more that’s going on with educating and

telling people about, you know, just some great things. And so I’m going to let him do the talking. I’m going to tee him up with some questions and we’re going to just get some great information and knowledge from my guest, Mr. Justin Brennan. How are you doing today, sir?

Justin Brennan (02:13)
I’m doing well man, how are you? Thanks for having me in.

Quentin Edmonds (02:16)
man, I ⁓ appreciate you being here. I’m doing great. And I know our listeners are really going to take something away from your approach when it comes to just your mindset, the way you approach things with integrity. Like this is what I am definitely looking forward to talking about today. So if you don’t mind, man, I just, I just want to dive in. So if people who may not be familiar with you or your world, I want you to give us a short version of what it is that you are main focused on these days.

Justin Brennan (02:43)
Yeah, thanks, man. appreciate that. And hey, and shout out to you guys, Investor Fuel, your podcast, your listeners, and kind of giving you guys the run around, your top tier professionals. So thanks to you for having me on and everybody needs to give you guys a big time review online if they can, whether it’s your Apple or anything like that, give them a review and a five, five star. So yeah, thank you for taking a few moments. So yeah, so I’m in the multifamily space, ⁓ you know, started kind of

Grew up through, know, dad, grandmother, all of that, learned the investing side a bit. You know, watched a lot of good and bad happen through markets with family investing in real estate and that kind of led me into the multifamily space. Been doing it about 15 years full time. Currently have about 1200 units, about $190 million in assets. Trying to get to 10,000 units and a billion dollars, right? I mean, that’s kind of our.

big time goal in the multifamily apartment space. We do it with investors. So we syndicate as they call it and we’ll bring in some of the money. We’ll put it together, run the show and then we’ll bring in investors passively to invest along these assets as well. So that’s kind of the one angle of what I do. And then from that has kind of spurred this mentorship community that has kind of been around for about three years, three and a half years now called multifamily school.

And I have a lot of people that have been seeing what I’ve been doing around the country, buying apartments, doing all this stuff. And they’re like, dude, I want to learn this stuff. I want to do this for my family. I’m a nine to fiver sitting in a job working for the man and I’m doing nothing but earning them money and getting them rich. I’d like to do it for myself and build generational wealth, the financial freedom, all that stuff for me and my family. I just don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to start. Or we get a lot of either real estate agents.

current investors, maybe flippers, wholesalers, people that are already in the space a little bit, they wanna grow and get into the multifamily apartment space and out of just the transactional hamster wheel. So we see that quite a bit, but that’s been kind of an indirect way, an awesome way for me to give back. We were talking about that a little bit before we came on. I mean, that’s probably one of my biggest things in life. One of my biggest passions is, how can we…

you know, create abundance by giving back, right? And we even about the podcast and all these other things and, you know, abundance to give and all these things that are really key to me in the legacy I want to leave for myself and for my family.

Quentin Edmonds (05:49)
Absolutely. I think what I love and what caught my attention about what you talked about is about educating people. It’s the word that you use is I can’t remember the words you use. I’m gonna have to surmise it, like empowerment mentorship. There we go. That’s the word you use. How you want to mentor people who want to be in this space, but also mentor people. And another word that comes to mind is integrity, right? Mentor them with integrity. Cause you and I, talk.

And we talked about how within this space there is some distrust because of some of the things that happened, bad deals, bad representations. And so what really caught my eye is that you guys are trying to do it the right way with integrity and mentorship and put people in a position to really be educated about what it is that they’re doing and services that you have. And so for me, that’s huge. That’s what really caught my attention on that.

Justin Brennan (06:37)
Yeah, and there’s a lot of, you know, I call it over promising under delivering, and then not setting proper expectations for people. You know, the space is great. mean, in terms of multifamily and apartments. But it’s not easy, right? But quite honestly, nothing that’s worth doing is easy. Like, the whole concept that you’re just gonna wake up and spin a wheel and make millions of dollars. I mean, yeah, you can go win the lotto that can happen.

And yeah, maybe you get lucky and put it into crypto and it goes to the moon and you get become a crypto zillionaire overnight. That is possible. It’s just not likely. And so anything that is worth and is going to grow with a foundation is going to take effort. And there’s just no way around that, man. I don’t know. So I guess that’s probably a frustrating thing I see online is you get a lot of people selling just a bag of BS and making people think it’s somehow like the easiest thing on planet Earth.

It’s not terribly difficult, but it requires this thing called effort, and a good amount of it. But if you’re willing to put it in and stay consistent with it, you’ll absolutely get there.

Quentin Edmonds (07:34)
That part.

Absolutely. And that’s the part within this climate is not easy to teach effort, like really can teach it right.

Justin Brennan (07:51)
I wish you could man. I talk about that all the time. can’t teach motivation, man.

Quentin Edmonds (07:56)
Yeah, you can’t and I one of our money person I was talking to you on yesterday. She said that’s the problem with motivation motivation change for how you feel that she was talking about the angle of being disciplined and she was like, you know, that motivation is fleeting. And so, you know, we have brought up the one of my mentors that said that consistency beats intensity any day. And so you, gotta be consistent because that intensity will, will fade with your motivation.

which is sometimes based on your feelings. so.

Justin Brennan (08:25)
Yeah,

let me tell you a little story on that real quick. I think it’s a touch on that for folks that are, um, mean, half the battle is I call it the seven inches between your ears. Right. The only thing keeping you from where you’re at and where you want to go in life is seven inches. And people are like, what do you mean? I’m like the seven inches between your ears, man. I said, every single day you wake up, you have a couple of choices. You can get out of the bed and say three things you’re grateful for and start your day with positive energy. That’s option a, regardless of what may be going on in your life.

Or you can take option B, which is just to fall into a depression route and talk about, think about all the past and the bad stuff and negativity and the bad energies that are going on. And you’re to fall right into the negative energy route. So you choose which direction you want to go. About a year and a half ago, and I do this every year, I go to a conference down in Florida. don’t know you know who Patrick David is by chance. No, but if you don’t, there’s a great business conference and he interviews some of the top people in the world. Long story short.

Quentin Edmonds (09:14)
No.

Justin Brennan (09:19)
he had Tom Brady is one of his main, ⁓

speakers he interviewed. I took my son. Who’s that guy? And it was great for me because I’m a big Patriots guy. ⁓ and my son as well. took him right to this business conference. Cause I wanted him to see. Like how this game works, man. Like I want you be around great network, great people, great environment. And so we’re sitting there and Patrick’s interviewing Tom Brady.

Quentin Edmonds (09:59)
I’m sorry, go ahead.

Sorry, I’m sorry.

Justin Brennan (10:21)
And he asked Tom, says, Tom, you didn’t need the money. You don’t need the money. You don’t need the fame. You don’t even need any more awards, dude. You’ve got them all. when you had, cause you had that a long time ago, Tom. So like what motivated you every day to be as ruthless as you were to do what you’ve done for so long, 20 years, man. I mean, that’s incredible. And he says, honestly, Patrick,

You’re right. It’s not the money. It’s not the awards had nothing to do with that. He says, my greatest fear that drove me every single day to get out of bed and go stay consistently discipline. You talked about that, right? Cause motivation is great. It gets you going. And then discipline is even cooler. Cause that kind of can push you, but it’s the consistent discipline because anybody can do it for a day. Anybody can technically do it for a week. You can probably do it maybe for a month, but try doing it for 20 years.

Quentin Edmonds (11:13)
Come on,

Justin Brennan (11:14)
Right? And so he says, what kept me consistently disciplined was the fear every day of showing up to the locker room and not being prepared for my teammates and having them look at me and be ashamed or disappointed that I was their leader and I wasn’t ready to go. And he says that fear honestly drove me into insanity of just being ruthless in my mentality, which is why

You sit there going, well, that’s the difference, dude. Cause you from physical talent, you wasn’t the most physically talented and gifted probably wasn’t the most gifted, but his mindset is sick. Like it is sick. I mean, you want to know why he was who he is. I mean, it is disgusting. Ruthless ruthlessly competitive, to a level that you’re like, I would not want to face you. Cause I don’t know that my mind can beat your mind.

Quentin Edmonds (11:52)
radius to go.

Justin Brennan (12:02)
But his level of consistent discipline is just nasty in a good way. So that’s kind of out to people to kind of understand that you don’t need to be a Tom Brady. I’m not saying that, but the consistent discipline is one of the hardest things for all of us every day to do. It’s so hard because you can get motivated for a week to go to the gym, right? And get motivated for a week to eat healthy, right? But then…

after week or after two weeks, you fall off the rail a little bit, right? You fall off the rail and then you’re okay, how do get yourself back on it? Right? And 90 % of it is the seven inches between your ears. Because if you can take control of this, right, then the consistent discipline stays intact and then you’re not doing it for the results. You’re doing it just because. And then the results will show up because of the compound effect does it. It’s just the consistent discipline is hands down the most difficult.

thing for all of us as humans because we’re emotional creatures and every day we get out of bed and we have positive or negative thoughts and this which direction are we going to go?

Quentin Edmonds (13:00)
And those positive and negative thoughts is beating our decision making. So you’re absolutely correct, man. You’re absolutely correct. And I actually want to expand on a conversation right here because you talked about consistency. You talked about discipline. But one thing that the people don’t know that you also talked about when you and I was talking about opportunities, you was talking about systems. Having systems in place that kind of create opportunities. So let me ask you this. You’re a business owner. You’re making great strides. So what is it?

that keeps the machine running smoothly for you. I know discipline is there, I know consistency is there. Maybe talk about some of your systems, I don’t know, but what keeps your machine running smooth?

Justin Brennan (13:38)
Yeah. So, you know, when people start businesses, whether it’s sales or marketing or whatever it is you’re doing in your business, a lot of people go after the revenue first, which great. That’s what keeps businesses going, right? If you don’t have the revenue, fine, but they don’t take the time to put inside the infrastructure or the admin side on the backend. And I don’t care if that’s through a CRM system for your clients or an investor relation software or accounting software or backend systems to where you can actually fulfill.

upon clients, right? Or investors or whoever it is. So we took the time before I even started the revenue angle to go get sales or get clients or get investors or get money, was I made sure I set up the back end of what we were doing from a proper website to where we look professional to back end CRM systems, to investor relations software, to with our education company having all the back end setups we can actually fulfill on our customers and our mentees to where

All the automations, the systems, the infrastructure, all of that’s in place. So just make, so when you do scale and you do grow and you do begin to bring in a lot of people very fast, you’re not tucking tail and running around like a chicken with your head cut off, right? And you’ll get a bunch of pissed off clients because now you can’t fulfill what you promised. So that is critical. I know a lot of people try and jump out there and run and get the sales in so they have revenue, that’s, that’s technically that’s okay to do that, but you better get the backend set up pretty quick.

So that way you don’t look like an ass, you know, if you don’t want to meet.

Quentin Edmonds (15:46)
Yes, sir.

Nope, absolutely. Yep. And I’m glad you mentioned that. think that is important for people to hear. Because I can’t remember if we talked about it on this portion or not. But some people, can’t teach people effort, right? And you got to put effort into creating the systems. And when you put systems in place, you can literally run the system over and over and over again.

If you got the strong system in place, you may have to tweak the system every now and then, but the system frees up your time for you to attack another problem. And so some people just don’t put the effort in creating the system. They think things are just going to fall in place by osmosis. It’s not going to happen. I think, and I think people listen

Justin Brennan (16:29)
I feel like I’m fascinated by it, is the motivation side. Because I know where I come at it from. I’m very self motivated by nature. And then when I was actually down at that conference, Patrick Bedd-David put up on the screen, this was actually an identity audit. He has you do this. was pretty overwhelming to be honest with you. mean, because he you go back.

As you go back to your room that night and you go through an identity audit, it takes you a couple hours. And I remember like crying because I’m like going through this and he puts you through this thing where you have to decide or you have to go through some questions to see, okay, are you an overachiever? Are you an underachiever, meaning you’re not meeting your potential currently? Or are you like kind of right in the middle? And then he goes through what’s called the seven mountains that inspire people and move nations.

the seven mountains that inspire people and move nations. And he says, you need to pick three or four of these because this is your inner drive. If you want to talk about motivation, he says, the reason why people lack motivation is because they’re chasing money or they’re chasing the physical material objects of the success, right? Of the results. And that’ll kind of get you going for a little while. But then once you start to make some money, and this is why you see this happen to a lot of people who’ve had money or gotten success,

Whether it’s athletes that have a great one year and then they fall off or one guy that has a one hit wonder, they fall off. Or some people that have a great movie fall off. Right? You see this happen. And the reason they fall off is because they’re not driven by a deeper purpose. They’re just driven by, I got the, I put in all the effort for the one hit wonder. And then to actually repeat that it, I don’t have the inner drive to go repeat that effort again. And it’s because you’re not driven by the core.

And those seven things are this. me see if I can met him out. religion, politics, family, family, education, business, media, sports and entertainment, sports and entertainment. And he says, these are the seven mountains that move, inspire people and move nations. And he says, you need to pick three or four of these that are your inner core.

that’ll move you every day. And most people, when I say family and friends, that’s more philanthropic, meaning it’s not just about your personal family and friends, but just how you help, right? How you give back. And so that’s the philanthropy side of things. Yeah, and I had to go through that for myself. And so the business was a core one because that drives revenue. But then with the revenue, what do you do? And so that’s where the education piece came in. So how do you educate, which is where the mentorship came in.

And then the media side of it. So the media is what we’re doing here today. So how do you actually expand your name and brand to help more people through media? And then the biggest part of it is the family and friends. How do we give back, help others, leave a legacy? Because that ultimately at the end of the day is what drives it. Yeah. Right. Because that’s what fulfills you. I I’m sure you’re the same way. If you go help somebody and you see the impact that it has on them, whether it’s big or small, but you just see their eyes light up and

You help them out a little bit for a day or whatever it is through a problem or maybe a little bit of money or whatever it is. But you see that fulfillment in their eyes. You’re like glowing, aren’t you? And most people, most humans, we do that. By nature, we get fulfilled by fulfilling others. All right, it’s the servitude mentality you were talking about earlier, which it’s all about that, man. The law of reciprocity.

Quentin Edmonds (19:24)
Absolutely.

Justin Brennan (19:37)
giving back, helping others, the legacy, you know, call it the freely you give mentality. It’s amazing how giving back, helping others will create abundance for you in your life, far beyond anything you can fathom.

Quentin Edmonds (19:48)
I am over here smiling because you almost verbatim quoted a proverb that said when you fulfill others, you in return will be fulfilled. When you fulfill others, you in return will be fulfilled. so yeah, you’re spot on.

Justin Brennan (20:01)
10x.

Quentin Edmonds (20:02)
Like listen, I’m looking at all the questions I want to ask and I’m like man, I get them all in? So I do what I want to do this because we talked about effort. We talked about, you know, we’re challenging people, right? But let’s be real. There are times when things just doesn’t go the way we expect them to go, right? And so I want from your vantage point, what is something maybe that you dealt with, maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that you had to pivot fast?

Can you talk about one of those times so that you can kind of demonstrate getting back on track with the motivation and the discipline?

Justin Brennan (20:35)
Yeah, so this, so we had a deal and I’ll talk about a deal. we had back in 2022, we had we are in escrow on a 200 unit apartment deal. Okay, about 32 million bucks. And we had when I say we my partner and I had about $800,000 hard deposit in with money, okay, on the table, completely non refundable at this point. And the markets were changing. This is when interest rates were going crazy.

Markets, you know, for us going down, rates going up, bad timing. And we thought about it literally for weeks, kept extending escrow, extending escrow, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. And finally got to the point where I sat there at night in bed, you know, with $12 million of investor money, sitting there going, do I continue to try and fit a square peg in a round hole?

and risk losing $12 million of investor money, knowing full well that if I put this square peg in a round hole, we could be here 24 months from now handing the keys back to the bank. And there’s a decent chance that happens and it’s too risky. Or do I do the right thing? There’s difference between doing things right and then doing the right thing. So things right would have been close the deal. I checked our 800 grand because we had 800 grand non-refundable, our money, not investors, our money.

So that’d be doing things right. Like let’s protect our money, get the deal done. We’ll see what happens. Doing the right thing would be saying, huh.

We may need to take this one in the shorts to preserve our investors, our relationships and fight for another day. And after about two weeks of grappling with it, I made the call and we backed out of the deal. We let our $800,000 go to the, to the seller. was non-refundable. That was that stung. We didn’t have 800 grand to lose. If you know what I mean. And, but to tell you how this works out, all those investors were so impressed.

Quentin Edmonds (22:13)
Yeah.

Justin Brennan (22:21)
with once we told them what we did, that we had another deal that came up like two months later and they overwhelmingly threw all their money into that deal and they said, dude, the way you guys handled it and protected us and did that and did the right, we’re all in, let’s go. And we’re with you for life. Cause that just stood ground, right? The integrity, just that methodology, which most people don’t have treating their money like ours is rare.

and very hard. So going through that was very difficult, but it’s paid its dividend 10 times over now, because now we’ve built relationships, trust, the integrity side of it, where people believe like, hey, dude, you’re going to protect our money and do everything you can. And then markets be markets. If there’s risk, there’s risk. Things can happen. But we at least know you’re going to give your best effort and you’re going to protect us. So that meant a lot.

Quentin Edmonds (23:10)
What do you feel like is the next goal for you, Mr. Justin? What’s the next goal for you? Are you looking to scale anything up? Like, what’s your next goal,

Justin Brennan (23:17)
Yeah, on the multifamily side, we’re trying to get to 10,000 units and a billion dollars in assets. We’re still got a ways to go. We got about 1,200 units and about just under 200 million, but we’re on our way. So capital, I mean, I’d say, listen, at the end of the day, we’ll go execute and find deals and returns for people. It’s just bringing capital. So we have a fund, right? We have our multifamily fund, this $25 million fund that people can invest in passively.

So, and if people don’t wanna do the work and they wanna just get a check in the mail, that’s an opportunity for them if they’re interested in that, and we’re doing multifamily all over the country. So that’s definitely a big goal of ours. And then to build a community of the mentorship that’s really well trained to help people out. If they don’t wanna invest passively, meaning they wanna be active investors and actually help run the show for themselves and their family, they can come in and learn. We’ll help teach you and then we’ll put you inside our community to collaborate and network with other people.

and go do it for your family and take it to the moon, man. And maybe get out of your nine to five, right? Maybe you change from just being a flipper or a wholesaler in real estate and just do the multifamilies well and do both. Or if you’re a real estate agent and you’re tired of the transactional sales game and you want to add to your portfolio for your family and your wealth, well, multifamilies is a great way to do it. You can come on in for that. So it’s just trying to move people from a contributor mindset and an identity of a contributor in society.

to a creator in society, meaning you’re creating wealth, opportunities, money, movement. That’s what a creator does. And that’s why creators get the best tax benefits.

Quentin Edmonds (24:44)
Yeah. Listen, man, Mr. Justin Brennan, let me put some respect on your name, Mr. Justin Brennan. I’m excited about what you’re doing. I’m excited about this multifamily school. I’m excited about you empowering people. Take it from just being contributors to creators. Like I’m excited about what you do. So listen, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you and maybe connect or collaborate, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you,

Justin Brennan (25:09)
Yeah, two ways, but I’d say the best one would be, I want you to check us out on YouTube. You know, we have a YouTube channel that we’re growing and putting a lot of free content. That’s just great. It’ll literally walk you through step by step on how to buy a multifamily building in the next 90 days. So you can go to Justin Brennan, just go to YouTube and type in Justin Brennan multifamily, maybe Justin Brennan multifamily, and we’ll come up and you’ll binge watch our stuff because you know, that’ll help algorithms as we all know and

help more people see it and like, comment, subscribe, because if you like it and it helps you, it hopefully can help other people too.

Quentin Edmonds (25:41)
Absolutely. Well, listen, I appreciate your time. I appreciate your story. I appreciate your perspective. We absolutely need more people like you in this space that are doing things the right way. So thank you so much, Mr. Justin Brennan, for being here, sir.

Justin Brennan (25:54)
Yeah, thank you, man. Thanks to all your listeners for taking a few moments and listen to Quentin Moore, man. He’s got a lot of good stuff to shake up. give him review. Don’t forget, give them a review online for their podcast.

Quentin Edmonds (26:04)
My man doing my job for me. Listen, if you’re tuning in and you found value in this, make sure you subscribe. We have more conversations coming up just like with my friend here, Mr. Justin Brennan. Thank you all so much. We’ll see you next time.