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Show Summary
In this conversation, Marianna Osipenko shares her journey from a corporate career to becoming a multifamily investor. She discusses her motivations for transitioning, her first deal experience, and the lessons learned along the way. Mariana emphasizes the importance of scaling up in real estate, choosing the right markets for investment, and overcoming challenges in out-of-state investing. She also highlights the control and opportunities that come with real estate investments and invites listeners to connect with her for further discussions.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Marianna (00:00)
I was really looking for something that would allow me to make money on a monthly basis without having to continuallytrade my time for money And I think part of that was because I had had, ⁓ actually by this point, I already had three kids. So once I had kids, my perspective on life changed quite a bit.
Dylan Silver (00:13)
Sure.welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Marianna Osipenko is a multifamily investor. She has a background in corporate, has an MBA and has worked for 15 years as the managing director of a business brokerage firm prior to going full time as a multifamily investor. Marianna, welcome to the show.
Marianna (02:15)
Thankyou, very excited to be here.
Dylan Silver (02:19)
It’s great to have you on here. And I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking guests how they got started, in your case, in the multifamily space.Marianna (02:30)
Sure. So I have always ⁓ loved real estate. I actually took real estate classes when I was an undergrad at Bapsin College in Massachusetts. ⁓ My father was a multifamily investor, so I grew up with it and I’ve always been intrigued by what it is and what you’re able to accomplish with the multifamily investing.I didn’t get into it full time until 2019 after spending 15 years as a managing director of a business brokerage company. And the reason I made the transition is actually twofold. The first one is the owner of the business brokerage company was looking to retire. So I wasn’t quite sure what the future was going to hold there. But the second was
While I loved business brokerage, you’re still exchanging your time for money. You know, you’re working with the clients, you’re trying to get a deal done, you close the deal, you make the money, and then you have to move on and do another deal to continue to make ⁓ that cash flow.
I was really looking for something that would allow me to make money on a monthly basis without having to continually
trade my time for money and look for the next opportunity and continue to sort of invest more into making the future money. And I think part of that was because I had had, ⁓ actually by this point, I already had three kids. So once I had kids, my perspective on life changed quite a bit.
Dylan Silver (03:58)
Sure.Marianna (04:09)
And I knew that I wanted to have more time freedom. I wanted to spend.more time with my kids. wanted to, you know, meet them at the school bus and I didn’t want to constantly be working in order to provide the lifestyle that I know I wanted to have. So I realized that real estate really was the way to go.
Dylan Silver (04:30)
Yeah, yeah, when we talk about the multifamily space in particular, longer deal cycles, right? It’s more intensive on the underwriting side. And for folks who, know, maybe first time investors, it can be tricky to get into the space. Walk me through that first deal ⁓ as a multifamily investor. How did you find it on market off market? What type of offer did you make? And also to how did you learn aboutyou know, investing in the multifamily space.
Marianna (05:48)
So I actually started out very small and part of that was because I’m in Massachusetts and prices here are very high. So I knew I wanted to scale and I wanted to be buying the, you know, 12, 15, 20 plus units under one roof because that’s really where you get your economies of scale and you’re able to kind of exponentially increase your income. But with Massachusetts prices, that is very hard to do when you’re starting out.So I ended up investing in Western Massachusetts in the Springfield area, which is about two and a half hours west of Boston. It’s a much more working class area.
And even there, I had to start with a duplex, which really wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. But you you have to start somewhere. And I thought for my first property, it might be a good idea to start smaller and learn and make mistakes that are only going to cost me a few thousand dollars versus, you know, 50 or $100,000. So I, I ended up connecting with a local property manager who also invested in that market.
Dylan Silver (06:49)
Sure.Marianna (06:56)
And his local knowledge and expertise gave me the confidence to make some offers. And I ended up purchasing a property that was owned ⁓ by HUD, which is like the housing and urban development. So it was almost like in foreclosure. And we ended up getting a really good deal on it. I knew that I wanted a property where I could boost equity pretty quickly and increase my net worth.Dylan Silver (07:15)
Okay.Marianna (07:26)
So I had to buy a property that needed a lot of work. So we bought a duplex, did quite a bit of work with both of the units, were able to rent them out at a substantially higher price than they had initially been rented at. And immediately the equity on that property. So I bought it at, I think it was 144,000 and I ended up refinancing it and the value came in at 250. And this was in less than a year.So it was a pretty quick turnaround time. And even though it wasn’t a lot of money, but this was my first deal. And it just really gave me a taste of what’s possible in real estate and how to accomplish it. Now, I fast forwarded to that year for you very quickly. There were a lot of challenges there. We had to do a lot of renovations. I spent quite a bit of money on it. We made some mistakes. ⁓
Dylan Silver (08:11)
Sure. Sure.Marianna (08:25)
Closing that property took longer because it was owned by the government. So there was a lot of red tape. the long story is within a year, I was able to, now I had to invest into it. 100,000 wasn’t the full equity upside because I think I spent about 30,000 on the renovations. But my equity upside was about 70,000 in that year.Dylan Silver (08:43)
Yeah.Marianna (08:48)
And it just really kind of opened my eyes to the possibilities. And I was thinking, okay, if I could do this on a duplex, what if I can get into a quad or I can get into an eight plex or 12 plex. So I started scaling locally in that area because I felt good about the property manager. I was working with my local team there and the market in general, even though property values there were much lower than mostly anything else in Massachusetts.but because my biggest goal was that equity upside, I was able to make it work. So I did quite a few smaller deals over the next few years. And after I did about six or seven of these smaller deals, I sort of realized, okay, this is going well and I’m accomplishing what I set out to do.
but I am playing with very small numbers. And because my goal was time freedom and being able to spend more time with my kids, I knew that I had to get into the bigger properties, the higher unit counts to be able to make the money that I was looking to make. So that is how I started looking at larger deals and all of my portfolio now is based out of state.
because again, Massachusetts is very expensive.
So it’s very difficult to get into the 20 plus unit properties here unless you’ve got millions and millions of dollars sitting in the sidelines. ⁓ So everything I own now is outside of Massachusetts, which brings in other challenges. I’m glad that I started locally because I was able to drive to the property, monitor the progress, make sure that the contractors were doing what they…
Dylan Silver (10:53)
Yeah. Yeah.Marianna (11:08)
you know, what they promise to be doing. And now that I’ve scaled out of state, it’s forcing me to have much better systems and processes in place because I’m not able to jump in my car and drive over and check on a unit renovation or make sure that, you know, the window has been installed or whatever has been done that needed to be done. So I think that again, I,also grew up with a father who was investing in multifamily real estate. And even though I didn’t know a lot of the details about it, but I knew that he was doing well and he loved what he did. And he loved the fact that you are the one that controls the property, right? So unlike investing in a stock where you, put your money into a stock and you just kind of go along for the ride with a real estate investment, you have so much more control.
Dylan Silver (12:01)
yeah.Marianna (12:07)
over your money and the valuation of that property. You can make choices that impact the property, you know, directly. So I love that about real estate. I love I wanted to be able to control my own future and to have a direct impact on where my you know, my money is and how I’m making the decisions. So I knew that I wanted to be doing multifamily.And I also do multifamily. I know a lot of people do syndications, which is a lot of people will pool money together and buy a property with a group of 10 to 20 people. And each person will own a little piece of that pie, which is, you know, it’s a great way for some people to get into real estate. I have elected to own properties either on my own or with one partner and we’re 50 50 partners.
Dylan Silver (12:38)
Yeah. Yeah.Marianna (13:00)
We make all the decisions, we control the asset, we don’t answer to anyone else, we don’t worry about having someone else’s capital in the deal because a lot of times, you know, that’s a big burden when you have other people’s money and you’re making decisions on their behalf. So while we do sometimes, we’ll sometimes bring in an investor or two into our deal, but we don’t syndicate our deal because we don’t want to give up the majority of the equity.Dylan Silver (13:09)
Yeah, that’s huge.huge.
Marianna (13:29)
and we don’t want to be responsible for 20 people’s livelihoods. So we like…Dylan Silver (13:34)
Yeah, I mean,it’s a huge burden. The syndication thing is no small, you know, it’s not like something you could just gloss over because the penalties are like jail. So it’s not like you could just syndicate willy nilly and screw up and now you’re moving on to the next skill. It doesn’t work that way. And I think, you know, what’s interesting about what you’re doing in having, you know, one partner or an investor is that and I tell folks this all the time.
Marianna (13:44)
Right.Dylan Silver (14:03)
the fast money in real estate is really the slow money. You you got started working in these smaller multifamily, you know, in Western Massachusetts and then scaled up. And so being able to see the growth and hear the growth from you speaks to this idea that, okay, you’re gonna basically break off one chunk at a time, take on a partner, start investing in state, then invest out of state. Speaking of which, the out of state investing,Marianna (14:12)
Mm-hmm.Dylan Silver (14:31)
There’s so many different places where folks can invest. It can be tricky. It can be overwhelming, especially if you’re in the East Coast or the Northeast and you’re looking at totally different markets with different conditions, different population density, different average price of a single family home, let alone multi. But there’s also a lot of amazing areas to invest as well. What are some of your favorite areas to look at deals at?Marianna (14:51)
Right.So we took a lot of time on this, on determining where we want to be. And we kind of landed in Ohio, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. And a lot of that is dictated by the fact that you can still find opportunities in these markets. So there’s still reasonable prices and the ratio of the price per unit.
to what kind of market rent you could get is really favorable. Like in Massachusetts, you’re gonna spend on an average apartment, you’re gonna pay four to 500,000 for that apartment to buy it. And then the average rent might be 3000 a month. So with that ratio, you’re literally not going to cashflow at all after paying your expenses. In Ohio,
we can still get into a property at under a hundred thousand a door depending on you know the market depending on condition depending on age but typically you can still get into a property at under a hundred a door and you’re able to get you know 1200 1500 1600 per month rent for that unit once you renovate and stabilize that property.
So the numbers just make a lot more sense. You’re still able to cashflow after paying all of your expenses. So, you know, it’s a challenge because obviously I’m not there. So we had to work very hard to establish local team, get trusted brokers, get trusted property managers, ⁓ contractors. We have multiple layers of teams there. So we’re now able to have checks and balances.
Dylan Silver (16:57)
Yep.Marianna (17:19)
We’ll have our contractor doing work on a property and we’ll have one of our property managers stop by and make sure that what he says is being done is truly being done. We’ll have our real estate agent stop by and make sure that the windows got installed, that were supposed to be installed. So it’s all about coming up with the right systems and the right processes to be able to manage out of state.but you do have to make sure you’ve got people that you trust and that are going to do the right thing for you. And we did, we had a few not great experiences. We had to switch property management companies a few times. it is all about trial and error. And one of the things I learned in, you know, real estate investing, especially multifamily is that there’s going to be a lot of challenges. You have to expect them. Like you can’t,
You can’t let a challenge slow you down. You just have to kind of budget for it, anticipate that things are going to come up. And when it does come up, you have to say, okay, what do I do now to fix this? How do I move forward? How do I move the needle forward? Because, you know, dwelling on things that happened, being frustrated by them, letting them impact your actions going forward is, is not going to work in this industry. You just have to go full steam ahead.
Dylan Silver (18:27)
Yeah.Marianna (18:44)
deal with anything that comes up along the way, ⁓ figure out how to recover from it, and use the learnings to try to mitigate challenges down the road. That’s the best you can do, but challenges are going to come up.Dylan Silver (18:58)
Yep.They’re gonna happen. mean, I had multiple mentors tell me that if you’re looking for, you know, the perfect opportunity to either invest in real estate or as a realtor, you know, to advise clients on when the right time to buy is, you’re gonna you’re gonna be looking forever. You know, there are people in 2019 2020, when that was really, you know, the perfect time to be investing in so many different segments who were saying the same thing, when it was like,
Marianna (19:17)
Right.Mm-hmm.
Dylan Silver (19:27)
threading the needle of real estate perfection from the buy standpoint. are coming up on time here though, Marianna. Where can folks go if maybe they’re interested in reaching out to you or your team? Maybe they have a deal they’d like you to take a look at in Kentucky, for instance. How can folks reach out to you?Marianna (19:44)
So I am mostly on Facebook. I’m gonna date myself. ⁓ You can find me on Facebook and it’s just my name, Marianna Osipenko. And then my partner and I do have a website that we use.It’s on the Maven m a v e n capital.com.
TheMavenCapital.com and that it’s a very new site. We’ve just launched it. This is my partner and I, all of our investments in the states that I mentioned. And we would love to connect, happy to chat, answer any questions, talk about our journey so far.
Dylan Silver (20:31)
Marianna, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for talking about your journey and multifamily. Thanks for coming on today.Marianna (20:38)
Thankyou, appreciate it. Have a wonderful day. was nice chatting, Dylan. Thank you.
