Real Estate With Purpose: Fix and Flips, Co-Living and Senior Housing

Jean Santiago (00:00)
My background as a nurse, I think after five years doing real estate, I felt like I wanted to do something with purpose in real estate. And when we met our partner now, his name is Ross French, he’s a developer. He had already built these ground up developments to help the community. For example, either it’s homeless populate like housing homeless population or what’s called a recuperative care, which is a post-hospital care for patients. That really, I think I like that that ignited a light in me.

Michelle Kesil (02:04)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Jean Santiago of Pine City Investments, who is a real estate investor focusing on fix and flips as well as co-living and affordable housing solutions. So excited to have you here today.

Jean Santiago (02:28)
Hello, me too. Thank you so much for having me.

Michelle Kesil (02:30)
Great, let’s dive in. So first off, for those new to your work, can you share what your main focus is?

Jean Santiago (02:38)
Yeah. Yeah, we’re a brother, sister duo, me and AJ. We started back in twenty nineteen, so it’s our fifth year. And really our focus right now is doing fix and flips here in our area in Los Angeles. And then we are right now building a ground up development in LA that’s a 36 bedrooms, 36 bath with the focus of providing housing to the vulnerable population. Either connecting with local organizations, with operators in the area. And our plan is to buy one of that. It’s called SRO, single room occupancy building. And our plan is to buy one every single year with the hopes of providing this kind of housing for every city here in the LA area. So that’s kind of like the big goal.

Michelle Kesil (03:25)
Great. And what do you feel are some of the main keys that have allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Jean Santiago (03:34)
Mm-hmm. I think I what we call our BRICS, which is our main pillars of our business, is definitely capital. For all of our projects, we have raised capital through friends and family. And we’re lucky enough to build, I want to say, a good relationship with all of our lenders, in which pretty much all the projects that we acquire, we are able to typically raise all the capital that we need for the whole project with the help of them. And I think one of the ways we build that too is we take them along with the ride. So if they were local investors, we invite them to the site visits, we tell them the the challenges of the projects, because a lot of them are new to real estate investing, but they are very interested in how the process is. And so I think us doing that for our lenders and our peers help with trust building, in which when we raise capital, we’re able to to fund all of our deals. And I think that contributed to to our success now.

Michelle Kesil (04:42)
Yeah, absolutely. And what are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve experienced in your real estate journey?

Jean Santiago (05:38)
I wanna say I’ll I’ll point out the biggest challenge that happened last year, in which I don’t know if you guys are aware, but we had like the ICE stuff protest going on here in Los Angeles, which is a very touchy subject, but that did affect two of our projects in our timeline. And so finding labor and finding labor that can do things on time, especially when we pull permits from the city. That was what one of the biggest challenges for us last year.

Michelle Kesil (06:11)
Mm-hmm. And how did you overcome it?

Jean Santiago (06:14)
I think as a team, me, my brother and our contractor, we talked about it. And we just we wanted all of our workers to be safe. And so we kind of just took that bullet and knew that yes, we would be losing time, we would be losing money, but we’re okay with that as long as our workers are safe and you know, with the ICE stuff going on. And so it was a hard pill to swallow. But I think as, you know, we’ve heard, and this is a real, I know this is a very touch, touchy subject, but we did hear of other real estate operators in our area where their workers were actually taken slash disappeared from their project site with you know, nobody knows what happened. And so we didn’t want that to happen. I think that would be, you know, we would carry that guilt with us for forever if that were to happen. And so for about one to two months, we were. We just kinda stuck through it and waited until everything died down before we restarted the project. So that was that was hard, but thankfully all of our workers were safe and you know, we can sleep good at night knowing that we’re protected.

Michelle Kesil (07:23)
Definitely. And what are you most focusing on solving or scaling to next?

Jean Santiago (07:29)
Our fix and flip is one. You know, that’s always going to be our bed bread and butter. But my background as a nurse, I think after five years doing real estate, I felt like I wanted to do something with purpose in real estate. And when we met our partner now, his name is Ross French, he’s a developer. He had already built these ground up developments to help the community. For example, either it’s homeless populate like housing homeless population or what’s called a recuperative care, which is a post-hospital care for patients. That really, I think I like that that ignited a light in me.

Since I did leave nursing in 2024, so two years now, I’ve been I realized that I needed that purpose. And we just recently went to the National Co-Living Convention where we met a lot of operators too. And our focus right now is learning more about senior living and senior care housing needs, but in the affordable space, because that is what that’s a huge gap, at least that I’m seeing with my experience as a nurse for 12 years, is safe and affordable senior housing. And so now with our building, that’s what we are focusing on is connecting with local organizations, connecting with the city on how to solve this. I think one of the biggest epiphany I had while doing research on this is there are a lot of developers like us, right? There’s a lot of real estate operators and developers that are doing their own thing kind of. And then there’s the city that’s trying to solve a housing need. But I think there’s a gap in communication on how we can work together. So that’s our focus for the rest of the year and really forever so we can really help out in that field. Cause I saw it firsthand with my patients for the last 12 years. So I think that’s a big goal that we are trying to we want to solve. We want to help solve at least one property at a time.

Michelle Kesil (10:07)
Yeah, definitely. And what are you most looking forward to when it comes to opportunities in real estate right now?

Jean Santiago (10:17)
Yeah, it’s the new Senate bill that is that is they’re trying to pass with the housing bill, I think that’s a good first step into helping cut the red tape in terms of building and developing. Because we are experiencing it right now, right? Like our our thirty-six unit building in LA, we have been waiting for final permits and approval, and it’s this is our fourteenth month. Right. And for smaller developers like us in the area, that’s a huge difference in the time frame. On top of that, that timeline to build with the housing need that we need right now, that’s just too long. So I think I I’m looking forward to see what where that bill takes us. But really also at the same time, working with the local city the governments, right? Because that’s I think that’s the fastest way we can connect with the local government in terms of like providing this kind of housing. I either either getting grants, getting local nonprofits to help with the build, especially if it’s something for the community, stuff like that. I think is is one of the biggest. I I’m 35 now and some like in politics, I was never really into it, but now that I’m a business owner, it’s becoming really apparent that we don’t it’s something that I learned at the Co-Living convention is we don’t wanna wait for things to happen to us. Like we can actually have a voice and an influence what can happen and that starts with our local community and local government. Mm-hmm.

Michelle Kesil (11:54)
Yeah, that’s an amazing way to look at things.

Jean Santiago (11:57)
Yeah.

Michelle Kesil (12:00)
What has been the most powerful lesson that you’ve learned as an investor?

Jean Santiago (12:09)
That’s a great question. Most powerful lesson. I think systems having systems and processes is is an important lesson. I’ll give a real example of what happened to us. We’ve only we’ve always only done like one or two deals at a time. But for operators that wanna do more, I think it’s very important to have a team and it’s very important to have a systemized way to do things because it helps with our timeline. It helps with our mental capacity in order to, you know, strategize what we need to do for a business. And it gives less risk of things falling through the cracks because that happened to us. And so yeah, I think I think the biggest challenge is when you’re scaling, at what point do you add team members? And I think if you’re an operator and you want to scale now, I think that’s that’s the time that you add help because that’s what happened to us. I think we waited a little too long to to hire a team and now now it’s become apparent how important having a team is.

Michelle Kesil (14:01)
Yeah, absolutely.

Jean Santiago (14:03)
Yeah.

Michelle Kesil (14:03)
And what have you learned through the different strategies you’ve been involved in, fix and flips, and more of like the development side, co-living? What’s kind of been some of the differences that you’ve experienced?

Jean Santiago (14:17)
Yeah, that’s a great question actually. I always believed in trying things as a business owner. And so early on our early on our our journey, we did try wholesaling for six months. And we learned a lot on how to analyze deals, how to negotiate, how to talk to people. But me, at least for me and my brother, we like the build part. And so after six months, we tried it and we realized we don’t. It’s not something for us, but it’s great that people, you know, have different fields and they have different interests. Right. So we tried wholesaling. We also tried fix and flip out of state, but we realized, yes, it is the prices are definitely cheaper outside California, but we realized that us being very hands-on, we actually last year we switched our strategy to we to where we’re only focusing on fix flips here in the area. So we can see the build, we can take our lenders to the site, you know, we can manage it better here on site rather than doing it out of state. And I think the biggest one too still is is the co-living is actually having a purpose behind behind what we do, behind real estate, behind business. Because sometimes, you know, every every everyone is motivated by different things. Different motivators. Some are, you know, finance and money, some our purpose. And so I think for for me coming coming from the nursing field, I think the purpose, our our first four years, I realized the purpose was what was missing. And that, you know, like real estate is great, right? Like we do fix and flip or providing homes, renovated homes, comfortable homes for for people. But what’s a bigger purpose? Like how are we helping the community? And I think that’s you know, this year that has become very clear that I want to pursue that that field in real estate. Mm-hmm.

Michelle Kesil (16:10)
Yeah, definitely. And what are you like what do you think needs to happen in order to reach that next goal or what are you like whats in the motion to get there?

Jean Santiago (16:22)
Definitely hiring a full time executive assistant to help us with the daily data entry, things that are urgent but are not in terms of like strategy and moving the the needle forward, right? But we need to, as operators, we need to do that. We need to do accounting, we need to do entries, we need to organize our books. But I think hiring a full time executive level admin, not just a regular VA, but someone that’s a little bit higher level to help us to help me and my brother focus on strategies and focus on research to the purpose that we’re trying to reach. Mm-hmm. And of course, like networking, like attending more networking events where you have the like-minded people that are also pursuing the same thing. For example, like the National Co-Living Conference that we attended, I joined it to be a member of the National Homeless Council, which is under the medical respite care, which is under the the medical field since I want to learn more and that. So yes, it does take some money, right? To to learn a new thing. But I think if your heart is there, then you will pursue it.

Michelle Kesil (17:27)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. So before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?

Jean Santiago (17:31)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I just have my right now we’re actually actively working on our GoHighLevel website for our company, but you can reach me at @jeanatpinecity on Instagram or my email [email protected].

Michelle Kesil (17:50)
Perfect. Appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here. Of course. And for the listeners tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Jean who are building real businesses. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much, Jean.

Jean Santiago (17:53)
Thank you. Thank you.