Real Estate Success Story: Vlad Muscalu-Ban on Flipping Homes and Investing in Commercial Properties

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (00:00)
It’s not that they’re being negative, but people get concerned when they start seeing that you’re not being successful. Everyone gets worried, maybe you should quit, maybe you should hang this up, it was a good run. And ⁓ you know, you just have to put your blinders on, you have to believe in yourself. And although that point in my life was very, very difficult because there was a lot of very large bills and I had to continuously figure it out, you know, you fast forward a couple more years from now and this year I made $750,000.

You know what mean? So things turn around. You just have to continuously focus. You have to keep the main thing the main thing. And good and bad things happen all the time. Actually what kept me in that moment, what kind of kept me afloat and kept me motivated is… Do you know who Cody Sanchez is? Are you familiar with her? Cody Sanchez is like… She’s like also like a social media influencer who owns businesses and kind of like, you know…

Kristen Knapp (00:50)
Mm-mm.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (00:58)
just motivates people, right? And one analogy she shared was she was speaking to like a mentor who was like a billionaire and she was talking about the same thing where like her cashflow is running out, she was facing bankruptcy and what the billionaire told her is that he faced bankruptcy over like 20 different times over the course of his career. And basically what he was saying is that if you don’t hit a moment where you feel like you’re about to lose it all, you’re not pushing as hard as you should be.

You know, it was kind of like a reality check where it’s like, yeah, I’m doing very big things. So when you do very big things, things can go wrong in a big way and they can go right in a big way. But as long as you know what you’re doing and you stay motivated and you stay consistent, it’ll turn around.

Kristen Knapp (03:16)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Vlad Muscalu-Ban. He is a real estate entrepreneur. We’re going to get into his vast experience in the market. So thank you so much for being here.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (03:27)
Go for it, no worries.

Sure, absolutely, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Kristen Knapp (03:45)
Yeah, so you have experience across investing, lending, construction, kind of all of it. How did you get into real estate to begin with?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (03:55)
Well, the way that I started in real estate, I started at a very young age. ⁓ So I actually got into real estate when I was 17. That’s when I started and it has basically been my primary focus this entire time. So that’s kind of all of that time and you know, a lot of trying different things in the industry has led me to my varied knowledge in the field. The main way that I got started is actually, ⁓ so I’m an immigrant, I came from Romania.

Kristen Knapp (04:02)
Mm.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (04:23)
And my grandmother, she owned multifamily property here in Broward County, Florida. And growing up, I saw that my grandmother and my grandfather, they never had a job. So their job was just maintaining all of the real estate that they had. So obviously, you know, fixing things, being there for their tenants, collecting their rent.

And from a very young age, just seeing how much time they were able to spend with me and stuff like that, my grandmother had a lot of influence on me when it came to real estate. So basically out the gate, as soon as I could figure out how to do it, ⁓ I jumped right in.

Kristen Knapp (05:48)
Wow, from such a young age. Do you remember that moment kind of like hopping in and realizing, I actually really love doing this?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (05:58)
Well, you know, obviously I would go with my grandparents from the houses, interact with the tenants. ⁓ You know, they kind of turned me into a super superintendent for a long time. So I was already like maintaining a lot of the real estate, just working on the houses, working on the buildings, being involved, collecting rent. I was doing a lot of that stuff even at a very, very early age. ⁓ But I remember when I was that young, one of my, the first things that I did

Kristen Knapp (06:11)
in it.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (06:27)
And I didn’t know what I was doing. And by the way, just for like your the audience, whoever’s listening, a lot of real estate, as much as you can do courses and training, a lot of it is hands on trying to figure things out for yourself, failing a thousand times and figuring it out a thousand and one times. So in the beginning, there was that too. And I’ll share a story with you. When I first started investing, I had a cousin in Missouri, in Kansas City, Missouri.

She was buying tax auction properties and the reason that Missouri was appealing to me is laws are a little bit different, varying from state to state, but over there, you only had to wait a year so you could bid on a tax lien property and the person who owed that lien, they have a year to pay it off. If they don’t pay it off in that year, that property becomes yours. So ⁓ it’s just the wait time is much shorter as compared to South Florida where South Florida you had to give people three years to pay off their tax liens.

Like at a very young age, not knowing what I was doing, ⁓ I reached out to a lot of my family members and friends, compiled as much cash as I could to go buy tax lien homes, and I literally hopped on a plane with kind of like a vest that I strapped the cash onto my chest because I just had no idea how to do things. This is like, I’m old, so this is… Yeah, and this is way back in the day, by the way, because I’m a lot older. ⁓

Kristen Knapp (07:45)
Not sketch at all, yeah.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (07:54)
But I went to these tax lien properties and I was just buying homes cash. ⁓ I had to get an ID in the state of Missouri. I got an ID. I got some bills in my name because you have to prove that you have residency there. And that’s how I got started. I just came up with some sort of plan. I drove around evaluating these properties, did like a comparable analysis to see what I could resell these properties for.

decided what my maximum bid price was and also back then these auctions were in person so you were at the courthouse and you were bidding against people in real life and I was a 17, 18 year old kid. I didn’t know what I was doing but I knew that I was gonna do it.

Kristen Knapp (08:33)
Wow, and you actually acquired properties through the tax liens? That’s kind of lucky, right?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (08:37)
Yeah, yeah, I would. would. Because

what I learned when I was doing these auctions is that since it’s in person, it gets a little intimidating. And a lot of these people, you know, ⁓ they didn’t necessarily have, find investors or find other people that would front money. So the amount of cash that I had was much more than the people around me. And what I started to learn quickly the first time around is that if I would aggressively outbid people in the beginning,

A lot of other people would just start to leave or they become unmotivated, they don’t get interested. then later as the auction would go on, it was much less competition. And then you could really start picking up property at a very cheap price because a lot of people would just leave. They just feel like this isn’t for them and they would get discouraged.

Kristen Knapp (09:26)
Wow, and this is when you were still 17?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (09:29)
⁓ yeah, it’s like 17 turning 18. Yeah.

Kristen Knapp (09:31)
in your teens. Wow and compared to

your peers did you just feel like you were doing so much more than your other 17, 18 year old peers?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (09:43)
you know, at the time, it felt normal for me because whatever you’re doing from one day to the next, you know, there’s like a bit of normalcy. But as I, you know, it’s funny because I had like a 20-year high school reunion where I met a lot of my friends during that time. And I didn’t realize, but a lot of my friends described me as basically already an adult. And I didn’t even make that connection.

Kristen Knapp (10:06)
Yeah, sounds like it.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (10:09)
that they were just, you know, they all felt like the type of things that I was doing and being involved in, it was not what everybody else was doing. But at the time, even now, all of this just feels normal to me. I’ve been doing it forever.

Kristen Knapp (10:57)
Yeah, it feels normal because you saw your grandparents do it and kind of got ushered into that. But I mean, not only do you have such a sophisticated mindset of how to do things and how to kind of game the system and do your own strategies, but you also have a lot of confidence. So having confidence that early in your career is really impressive.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (11:01)
Yes.

The confidence comes with understanding that you’re going to fail. And once you understand that you’re going to fail and you can get past that initial hurdle, having the perseverance and determination and tenacity to continue to figure it out even after you fail, you just readjust, do something else, readjust, do something else. I think that’s really what builds confidence because everything is scary. When I was in…

Kristen Knapp (11:22)
Yeah. ⁓

Okay.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (11:45)
that, you know, just that example. When I was in that courthouse, you know, everybody was a grown adult. There was lawyers next to me. There was investors next to me. There was teams of people with portfolios and notes. And I just had like a legal pad, you know, and I just did as much studying as I could, like three nights before the auction. After I bought a plane ticket and I didn’t even know these like these streets or anything, you know, and keep in mind, this was like. This was like.

2000 like the early 2000s. I don’t remember what year exactly but there was no like navigation Smartphones didn’t come out, you know, I had like map quest printouts trying to drive around figuring things out. So It’s all scary but You just do it anyways, you know

Kristen Knapp (12:31)
Do you remember that first time that you failed and kind of what you learned from it and how you bounced back?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (12:41)
Man, such a long time ago.

Kristen Knapp (12:43)
Or just any, I mean anything that comes to mind, doesn’t have to be the first.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (12:47)
Oh, mean, yeah, we can talk about failure all day long. A lot of people that I talk to since I’ve been doing this so long, I always share this same antidote. I say that I failed 10,000 times, so that way you can only fail 500 times because you’ll learn from all those other thousands of failures I had along the way. You won’t make those mistakes. You’re still going to find creative ways to make your own mistakes, but at least you can learn from the ones that I’ve made. But I mean,

Kristen Knapp (13:04)
Mm.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (13:15)
You know, it’s just part of it. ⁓ okay, two years ago, I was flipping property and I flipped multiple properties at the same time. So there’s a lot of overhead, right? There’s a lot of expenses. mean, every time I turn around, I’m cutting a 20, $30,000 check, right? ⁓ And I remember on top of that, I’m also a landlord, so I have my own properties.

And I think there was like a big storm or something that came through South Florida and I got severe damage across a lot of my properties all at once. So before I knew it, besides the properties that I was flipping, I was cutting checks to do repair work on properties that I also owned. And ⁓ it got to the point where my cash reserves were depleted. ⁓ I had to get one of the properties that I own free and clear. had to…

put a loan on that property and I worked very, very hard for that one particular property to pay off the, you know, to not have a note on the property. I had to open up another loan and as all these things were happening, you know, people around me, most people don’t do what we do in real estate. know, most people have regular nine to five jobs, right? They have a boss, they collect a check, they have insurance, whatever. People don’t understand. ⁓

the ups and downs and the ebbs and flows of the real estate industry, especially when you’re working for yourself. So as I’m just bleeding money, at one point, mean, I wouldn’t say that I was facing bankruptcy, but all my bank accounts, my liquid cash, it was all gone. I had all my real estate, but my liquid cash was gone. So I had to get a loan from one of my other properties. And during that time, everybody around me who…

Kristen Knapp (14:38)
All right.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (15:40)
It’s not that they’re being negative, but people get concerned when they start seeing that you’re not being successful. Everyone gets worried, maybe you should quit, maybe you should hang this up, it was a good run. And ⁓ you know, you just have to put your blinders on, you have to believe in yourself. And although that point in my life was very, very difficult because there was a lot of very large bills and I had to continuously figure it out, you know, you fast forward a couple more years from now and this year I made $750,000.

You know what mean? So things turn around. You just have to continuously focus. You have to keep the main thing the main thing. And good and bad things happen all the time. Actually what kept me in that moment, what kind of kept me afloat and kept me motivated is… Do you know who Cody Sanchez is? Are you familiar with her? Cody Sanchez is like… She’s like also like a social media influencer who owns businesses and kind of like, you know…

Kristen Knapp (16:30)
Mm-mm.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (16:39)
just motivates people, right? And one analogy she shared was she was speaking to like a mentor who was like a billionaire and she was talking about the same thing where like her cashflow is running out, she was facing bankruptcy and what the billionaire told her is that he faced bankruptcy over like 20 different times over the course of his career. And basically what he was saying is that if you don’t hit a moment where you feel like you’re about to lose it all, you’re not pushing as hard as you should be.

You know, it was kind of like a reality check where it’s like, yeah, I’m doing very big things. So when you do very big things, things can go wrong in a big way and they can go right in a big way. But as long as you know what you’re doing and you stay motivated and you stay consistent, it’ll turn around.

Kristen Knapp (17:24)
Absolutely, and also just to have patience. Like things aren’t going to happen overnight. Things are going to go up and down. Progress is not a straight line.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (17:28)
Yes.

No, not at all. Not at all.

Kristen Knapp (17:35)
And so kind of going back to, you so you were in tax liens and you were doing that. When did you transfer over into flipping properties?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (17:45)
So I did tax liens for a while. ⁓ For a while what I was doing was buying a lot of properties and creating portfolios and I would either keep those portfolio property for myself or once the portfolios were done, I would package them and sell them to local investors or lawyers or whoever that I meet in these states or counties that I was working in. So that’s kind of what got me started into flipping. ⁓ I was buying a bunch of properties in Ohio.

they’re gonna be for me to keep. So I was buying properties in Toledo, Ohio. And I fixed the properties up, I got them rented out. A lot of these properties were old abandoned properties that I was buying cash at the time. So once I filled them up, I got them performing, I got all the leases in place, and it was like a nice product. What I started to notice is that the connections that I made along the way in the local area, ⁓ they showed interest in potentially wanting to purchase.

that finished product from me. And that was kind of like the light bulb that went off that not only can I buy, fix, and hold these properties for myself, but there’s people that will pay me a premium to kind of do all that legwork, have everything set up, and they’ll pay a much higher premium to have it be done. So that kind of like opened the door into flipping. And then I also met

one of my mentors starting out in flipping property, I was helping somebody here in South Florida in Broward County buy a property, it was a flip, and I got to know the woman who was flipping the property and we developed a good relationship, a good working relationship, and she kind of took me under her wing. And I was like very blatant about, I want you to be my mentor, like I’ll pay you for your time, like let’s talk, please, like if there’s something I can do to help you.

I’m at your service, like I’m at your disposal type of thing. So eventually after a lot of convincing, she kind of took me under her wing and showed me how to analyze property, flip it, do the transaction, manage the crew. then I built my own business out of it as well.

Kristen Knapp (19:46)
Wow, that’s really impressive. mean, it must feel good to kind of give back and have people that you can help along the way too.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (19:54)
all the time. mean, the story of my career in real estate is people raising their hand, me raising my hand and asking for help and people answering that call and giving me their time and knowledge. It’s always been like that with me from the beginning. So I have a very strong sense of giving my time, knowledge and effort whenever I can. If somebody needs it, I very, very rarely.

Say no. If I can share something that’s going to help, I will because that’s what happened with me.

Kristen Knapp (20:28)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s so important to collaborate. And as you said, I mean, you have to you learn things by doing it. And when you’re out in the field with other people and they’re sharing their experiences, it all helps so much.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (20:42)
yeah, mean it’s a team. Nobody becomes successful by themselves. If someone’s trying to tell you out there in the world that you can do this by yourself, you go to enough classes, you do this, you do that, and you can figure out an industry and you can wear all the hats, that is just simply not the truth. It can get you a decent distance, but in order to really become successful, it’s going to take a team. You’re going to have to work with other people and trust other people.

Kristen Knapp (20:46)
Right. ⁓

Yeah, the people saying you can just take classes are probably the people selling the classes.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (21:12)
Yeah,

that’s for sure. And I’ve definitely also bought my fair share of those classics. I like I said, I’ve tried everything. I do everything.

Kristen Knapp (21:17)
Yeah.

Yeah. And so now you’re also acquiring commercial properties for yourself. Can you talk about just the opportunity in commercial right now?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (21:29)
So commercial is obviously a little bit different than the residential side. It’s a different animal. You analyze these properties differently. ⁓ What I would say is that the residential real estate world moves faster than the commercial real estate world. So a lot of times, whatever trends you’re seeing in residential real estate, as far as market trends are concerned, it will trickle into the commercial world much, much later, mainly because

most sellers and buyers don’t feel the same type of pressures to sell and buy the way residential people do, right? Because people who buy residential property, they buy these properties in order to live or whatever their life goals are, right? A school district, whatever. In the commercial world, it’s mainly just for investment. Unless you have a business and you need to buy a building, you know, to put the business that you already own inside of it.

most commercial acquisitions are just like a landlord-tenant relationship, just on a larger scale. the big difference is you’re buying from somebody who owns an asset that’s producing money. So the motivation, there’s a motivation to sell, but it’s usually never a very, very high motivation. If they get their number, great, they’ll sell it. If they don’t get their number, you know, they’ll leave it for sale.

three, four, five years, you know, it doesn’t matter because it’s producing income. And same thing on the buying side, there’s not a huge pressure for the commercial investor to buy unless the numbers make sense for whatever they’re doing with their real estate portfolio. So I would say, you know, one of the biggies is that commercial real estate is slower. Now, as far as like the state of commercial real estate, ⁓ it’s a little bit in flux because

Most commercial real estate during the time of the pandemic, interest rates were very low. So people who owned commercial real estate at that time, they would refinance the commercial property or take out loans to acquire more commercial real estate because the interest rate was so low during that pandemic period. But commercial loans are a little bit different than residential loans. Most residential loans are a 30 year fixed interest rate. So whatever interest rates you got,

you can lock it over that whole timeline. In commercial, a lot of those loans are a variable interest rate. So what happens is every three, five, seven, 10 years, there’s like intervals depending on obviously the lender and the terms where the interest rate gets recalculated. So a lot of people who took out loans during the pandemic, once they hit year five or year seven,

Guess what? Your interest rate got recalculated. And if you didn’t understand that concept at the time that you were borrowing money at a cheap interest rate, you were running a lot of your financial models based off of paying debt at, say, 3%. But now you fast forward five years after the pandemic, a lot of those interest rates have changed from a 3 % rate to like a 7%, 8%. I’m seeing like 10, 11, 12 % rates now in the commercial world. That’s a huge difference.

So there is a little bit of pressure forming around the people who base their financial models of acquiring property at a 3 % rate. They’re feeling a lot of that pressure at the seven. So there is that opportunity. If you can find those people, they kind of either need to sell or refinance or figure it out. ⁓ So that is starting to happen where there are good buying opportunities for people who need to get out from under this looming interest rate increase.

That’s kind of where the opportunity is. But as far as commercials concerned, you know, it’s bigger, it’s slower, things take more time.

Kristen Knapp (25:15)
Yeah, you have to be a little bit more patient with it.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (25:18)
Very, very patient. And that’s a big mistake that new investors make. Maybe they finally feel like they’re at the point that they can transition from residential into commercial and they wanna dip their toes. They get very excited and they say, okay, I have this down payment or I have these investors, I have this group. I wanna do something big and they’re in a rush. They go see 10 commercial deals, 15 commercial deals. None of them are that great, but they say, no, you know what?

I’ve got this money, I’ve made up my mind, I wanna jump into something, but commercial is not like that. Commercial, you have to say no 100 times and then say yes once.

Kristen Knapp (25:54)
Got it. Yeah, it’s just a different strategy and a different pace.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (25:58)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kristen Knapp (25:59)
So, I

mean, you’ve done so much in this industry, what’s next for you?

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (26:05)
I think what’s next for me is I have a lot of residential inventory. I’m transitioning into the commercial space to add more commercial inventory to what I have. And really, really the goal is to just continue to build it. I’ve been doing it now for 21 years and…

I just really focus on flipping now. I I help other people buy and sell property as well. Like I have a license, you know, so I can represent other people on purchases and sales, but I mainly focus on acquiring my own property, flipping. And what I do is once I flip enough property in the year, I’ll generate a down payment to go look for some commercial property. So me and a couple business partners of mine will go look for some commercial property. And then usually with the commercial property, we’ll buy and hold it for a while.

and we’ll look for tenants that we can put in triple net leases. Do you know what triple net lease is? Okay, so we’ll, you know, we’ll.

Kristen Knapp (27:03)
You can explain it for people.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (27:05)
Okay, so ⁓ a triple net lease is a little bit different than a standard lease. In a triple net lease, your tenant is responsible for paying the taxes, they’re responsible for paying the insurance, and they’re responsible for maintaining the property itself. So what’s nice about the triple net is it’s very, very hands-off as a landlord. You don’t have to do much. And those triple net leases, they tend to be multi-year leases, so they’ll be like, you know, three years or five years, and…

there’s a built-in increase for percentages every year. So every year, maybe the lease will go up between three and 5 % each year. What you do is you can find a commercial property that maybe isn’t maintained that way. It’s just like regular leases. They’re only a year. They’re undervalued. If you can acquire a property like that, fix it up, get tenants who are willing to sign triple net leases that lock them in for let’s say like three years so you can have a very solid profit projection in the future.

That’s a very nice asset that now you can turn around and sell and you can make a large premium doing that. So that’s kind of something that I want to transition into. Instead of only flipping residential property, get a commercial asset, stabilize it, put market paying tenants that are on triple net leases and then resell it as a finished product.

Kristen Knapp (28:21)
Yeah, that’s so exciting. I mean, it sounds like you have a lot, I mean, a lot of new stuff to look forward to.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (28:28)
I’m obsessed man, I always find things. If my plate isn’t, even though my plate is full, I just try to figure out a way to build a bigger plate and keep filling it up. I get anxiety if I’m sitting around too long.

Kristen Knapp (28:30)
Yeah.

That’s awesome. We’ll tell everybody where to find you.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (28:45)
⁓ You can find me on my business page, which is Real Vlad or InstaVlad23. That’s my personal page on IG. Those are probably the two best places to find me and on my professional page, I’m always posting like day in the life stuff. So if you’re curious about me looking at property, analyzing it, flipping it, talking with my crew, going on buyer’s tours, all the stuff that I told you about.

I bought those like ⁓ meta glasses and my whole thing is like a POV so it’s like a day in the life where you can just follow me around as I do my day to day grind.

Kristen Knapp (29:18)
Amazing. Well, everyone please check Vlad out. I feel like you have a lot of knowledge to share. So thank you so much for being here.

Vlad Muscalu-Ban (29:26)
Of course, thank you for your time.

Kristen Knapp (29:27)
Yes, and thank you everybody for listening and we will see you back next time. Bye bye.