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Show Summary
In this conversation, Marv McGuire shares his journey from being a Navy veteran to becoming a multifamily syndicator with Grovia Capital. He discusses the vibrant real estate market in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the challenges faced in acquiring properties in a competitive environment. Marv also delves into his new venture in tiny home development aimed at the digital nomad community, highlighting the unique features of the project and the positive reception from local authorities.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Marv McGuire (00:00)
my wife and I had six, a portfolio of six single family rentals. And, uh, in one summer, you know, we just had the portfolio kind of blow up. had a $15,000, uh, a tenant move out in the middle of the night after doing $15,000 worth of damage. had to replace a roof and we had a major leak and it just kind of.We had loans on all of the properties, but they were all cash flowing, know, several hundred dollars a month. And that summer, you know, that 90 day period kind of wiped out the cashflow for like two years worth of cashflow. And we just got really fed up and said, hey, there’s got to, we understood the value. My wife’s been a very successful residential real estate agent for 20 years. So we understood the tax advantages, ⁓ the passive income advantages.
of real estate investing. we, so we knew that that’s what we wanted to say. So we just, we looked into ways to scale that business and, you know, landed on multi-craming syndications. And that’s been a game changer for us for the last, we’ve been doing it for three years now.
Dylan Silver (02:30)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Marv McGuire out of beautiful St. Florida as a multifamily syndicator with Grovia Capital with over 1100 doors. He’s also a 25 year Navy veteran, brain cancer survivor, husband and father of four. Marv, welcome to the show.Marv McGuire (02:51)
Hey Dylan, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.Dylan Silver (02:53)
It’s great to have you on here. And we were talking a little bit before hopping on. You actually grew up in DFW in Weatherford. I wasn’t too far from there when I was living in Denton, right?Marv McGuire (03:04)
Exactly. I up in Weatherford, Texas, go kangaroos. Family is still there in Weatherford and has been there. I think my grandparents had a farm there and family’s been there in that area for probably over 75, 80 years.Dylan Silver (03:21)
And St. Petersburg, Florida is not DFW, but it is an amazing place to be. And I had mentioned to you, if all the places that I’d like to live in the United States, St. Petersburg is probably number one up there on that list. How did you get out to St. Petersburg?Marv McGuire (03:35)
Well, that’s thanks to the Navy. you know, they say, join the Navy and see the world. And we, did just that. Unfortunately, we landed in St. via ⁓ Tokyo and Yokosuka, Japan, Monterey, California, Norfolk, Virginia, Jacksonville, Florida. And we ended up right here in the Tampa St. Pete area at, ⁓ McGill Air Force Base here in Tampa. We, like I said, we lived in Jacksonville for six years, and then we’ve got two daughters in Miami.So feel like we’ve got a really good feel for ⁓ Florida real estate and the Florida markets. And we’re super happy and who have landed permanently in the St. Pete area.
Dylan Silver (04:08)
Yeah.I’ve heard that there’s many versions of Florida. You you’ve got West Coast of Florida, you’ve got Southern Florida, you’ve got Jacksonville. I’m probably missing many of the other markets, but each one has their own identity, right? And so I love going to Fort Lauderdale on the other side. That’s my connecting flight from Florida to where I live now in Santo Domingo. But on the other side, I’ve heard you’ve got the white sand beaches. It’s a little bit more cost effective, a little bit different speed of life.
How true is that?
Marv McGuire (05:30)
It’s a hundred percent true. It’s a hundred percent true. We get to ⁓ Miami frequently and that is, ⁓ it’s crazy busy and such a huge metropolis, ⁓ to see our daughters. And then, you know, like I said, previously we lived up in Jacksonville, which you might as well be in Georgia where my wife is from. And it’s, it’s a different environment, a slower pace, more sprawl. And then you get, you know, all thebest of both worlds in Tampa where it is on the West Coast. It’s got gorgeous beaches, but you also have a ton of things to do. You’ve got every professional sports team and museums and ⁓ retail. It’s just wonderful. And St. Pete, think is, ⁓ I think St. Pete’s going to be the next Miami. It’s just exploding and it’s gorgeous. And the food scene, the microbrewery scene, it’s just got a lot of culture. I’m super glad we’re here.
Dylan Silver (06:22)
I wasn’t thinking about diving into St. Pete, but now I want to because selfishly I love St. Petersburg from everything guests have told me. You know, it’s one of these places where unless you’re really doing a dive into it, you’re immediately going to think Miami, right? You’re going to think South Florida. You might think Tampa. You might think like Naples, right? St. Petersburg can sometimes fly under the radar, but certainly not if you’re in Florida. So you’re seeing, you know, the potential for it to be like the nextbig destination maybe in the country, right?
Marv McGuire (06:52)
I am. think there’s so much construction and growth going on in St. Petersburg. mean, every time we drive into St. Pete and we come over the bridge, there is just cranes everywhere, just cranes everywhere. There is so much construction there. They’re talking about tearing down Tropicana Field where the Tampa Bay Rays play and building a mixed use, huge residential retail, you know, business ⁓ development inright outside of downtown St. Pete. So I think that the future of St. Petersburg, is extremely bright.
Dylan Silver (07:26)
I didn’t even, so the Rays play in St. Petersburg. I thought Tampa Bay, right? But it’s St. Petersburg.Marv McGuire (07:31)
They do, they play pretty close to downtown St. Pete, Tropicana, Cleo Field.Dylan Silver (07:35)
Now, when we talk about the kind of sprawl, the urban sprawl of Tampa Bay, is St. Petersburg considered like a Tampa Bay Metro or is it a distinct separate area?Marv McGuire (07:47)
It’s completely a distinct separate area. mean, people call it the Tampa St. Pete, the greater Tampa St. Pete area is kind of the way it’s referred to, but St. Pete is probably 20 miles, 25 miles from downtown downtown to downtown is probably 20 plus miles. So it is definitely and across the Bay. So you’re going across a seven mile bridge across the Bay. ⁓it’s quite that far, but it’s a sizable bridge across Tampa Bay. So they’re two very, very distinct metros, although they’re close enough to be, you know, considered one, I guess.
Dylan Silver (08:25)
Hey, I have a couple more reasons now why I’m looking at it. It’s interesting because I had mentioned, you know, having just come from DFW and when I initially moved up to Denton, I was told, yeah, it’s DFW Metro. And so I was commuting between Denton and Dallas, which, as you know, Marv, that’s kind of a far commute. It would be like 40. Yeah, it’s not really feasible on a daily basis, especially the going home part. Like you never really knew. And soMarv McGuire (08:45)
It’s not next door ⁓Dylan Silver (08:54)
⁓ When I’m thinking about the sprawl of these cities, sometimes they can get very large, like in the case of Benton and Dallas, but St. Petersburg does seem to be a very hot destination. I do want to pivot a bit here though, Marvin, ask you about the multifamily syndication. I mentioned before hopping on here that I’ve had quite a number of syndicators on the show here in recent months. And I know you’ve got with Grovia Capital, 1,100 doors. How did you get into the multifamily space?Marv McGuire (09:59)
That’s a pretty good story. You know, it starts back when we were in the military, you know, a lot of military families, you know, very intentionally buy homes to, Hey, this is a great place. It’s close to the base. It’ll be great to start our family. And, and at the same time, you, a lot of people look at it through, Hey, I’m going to be moving every three to four years or two to three years. It’s a great investment model. Hey, I’ll buy this house. I’ll rent it out. It’s close to the base. And then I’ll go to the next duty station and buy another one and, just build your portfolio that way.Uh, that’s kind of, did a little mixture of both. And by the time, you know, I retired and transitioned out of the military in 13, uh,
my wife and I had six, a portfolio of six single family rentals. And, uh, in one summer, you know, we just had the portfolio kind of blow up. had a $15,000, uh, a tenant move out in the middle of the night after doing $15,000 worth of damage. had to replace a roof and we had a major leak and it just kind of.
We had loans on all of the properties, but they were all cash flowing, know, several hundred dollars a month. And that summer, you know, that 90 day period kind of wiped out the cashflow for like two years worth of cashflow. And we just got really fed up and said, hey, there’s got to, we understood the value. My wife’s been a very successful residential real estate agent for 20 years. So we understood the tax advantages, ⁓ the passive income advantages.
of real estate investing. we, so we knew that that’s what we wanted to say. So we just, we looked into ways to scale that business and, you know, landed on multi-craming syndications. And that’s been a game changer for us for the last, we’ve been doing it for three years now.
Dylan Silver (11:33)
What year did that single family home ⁓ chaos happen?Marv McGuire (11:38)
debacle the summer of 22.Yeah, the summer of 22.
Dylan Silver (11:42)
summer of 22. So I mean, yeah, that was an interesting time in real estate in general, right? Because there’s still some uncertainty where things are going to go. But right out about that time, rates were changing, right? When we talk about the multifamily space getting in over the last five years has been interesting. And as I’m talking to more and more multifamily syndicators, I’m realizing there was a time period before maybe like 2014 to 2019 or somewhere around there.where seemed like you couldn’t buy a deal wrong that people were having these pro forma’s that were hitting in 50 % of the time they were buying on market over over asked and it was just working out right and then black swan event COVID hits moratorium on rents ⁓ arm rate loans and sometimes the premiums double right price for materials goes up rents stabilize in certain markets like Austin Texas or even go down and then you’ve got all these
multifamily apartment complex is being built and so it’s increasing the supply. And so you had this kind of storm of events that made it challenging for some syndicators. So what’s it been like in the syndication space in St. Petersburg over the last handful of years?
Marv McGuire (12:47)
youwe haven’t been able to buy a deal in St. Pete. You know, we, we look in, ⁓ we look in Houston and Dallas and, you know, central Florida and South Georgia. And unfortunately we haven’t been able to buy anything in Florida just because during that same period, as you well know, the insurance, multi, you know, commercial properties just went through the moon. So we had a couple of different forces working against us. You know, the insurance was just crippling and not making any deals pencil.
Dylan Silver (13:13)
Yeah.Marv McGuire (13:23)
And then, you know, kind of like we’ve been talking about, people want to be in Tampa and St. Petersburg. So it’s extraordinarily competitive. And, uh, so it’s just really difficult to get anything done here in Florida, really. So we focused all of our efforts on, uh, Georgia, uh, and, know, so we have about 600, 550 doors in Savannah and, uh, a hundred or 150 doors or so in, South Carolina and Charleston, and then the rest of our unit.Dylan Silver (13:51)
Yeah.Marv McGuire (13:52)
rest of our units are in Houston. we’ve had, it’s been very, that’s a long way to say it was very, very difficult to get started.Dylan Silver (14:00)
You know, I’ve heard such good things about the Carolinas, North and South Carolina. You said Charleston. Did I hear you right?Marv McGuire (14:06)
Yeah, Charleston.Dylan Silver (14:07)
I’ve heard such great things, not just from one segment of real estate, not just from multifamily single, it’s like across the board. It seems like really a great place. Another place that I’ve got to put on my mental roadmap of places to either look at as investments or go check it out there. Because it seems like there is enough growth, but there’s also ⁓ not as, of course there’s competition, but there’s not as much competition as a Florida to where you can still find these deals.And I’ve also heard that there’s great tenants. I can’t speak for that firsthand, but I’ve heard that there’s great tenants in the Carolinas as well.
Marv McGuire (15:23)
Yeah, we started out, that was one thing that, ⁓ you know, we started out kind of spread all over. were looking in Texas and Florida and Georgia and North and South Carolina. And we love South Carolina particularly. ⁓ we love, you know, Greenville is amazing. Spartanburg is amazing. And we’re actually doing a tiny home development in Raleigh, North Carolina. So we love the, the North and South Carolina markets. But as we got further into multifamily real estate space,Dylan Silver (15:45)
Thanks.Marv McGuire (15:52)
We really rapidly realized the importance and the imperativeness to focus. So we really started to shrink the markets that we look at very, very purposely because you can’t know every market. You can’t know six or eight markets when you’re a small team. So we really focus for about four, really right now, about four markets that we’re going deep in.Dylan Silver (16:15)
Now you mentioned a tiny home community. That sounds like a new project. Have you developed before? Is this first time development for y’all?Marv McGuire (16:23)
It’s a first time development for us. We’ve got a really good partner ⁓ in Raleigh and we started talking about doing something. He’s got a piece of property about seven minutes out of downtown. And, you know, as this, you know, digital nomad and the remote work was blowing up around COVID, you know, we were kind of thinking, Hey, this, you know, everybody’s going remote is this may be something that’s going to continue on. And fortunately for us, it has.And so we’re we have two of the tiny homes developed right now. It’s called Nomad Village Raleigh. And we’re about to start vertical construction on the next 20. And they’re they’re tiny homes. You the first two or 600 square feet, they’re very high end with huge porches. And then the next 20 will be duplexes. They’re going to be like 300 square feet. But they’re super high end, 12 foot ceilings, water, waterfalls, showers.
rooftop decks. So we’re going to ultimately have 30 units and we’re going have a 4500 square foot community center with conference room, industrial kitchen, meeting areas, offices, and then a nice pool and gathering area. So it’s going to be specifically designed for the digital nomad, kind of the traveling nurse, kind of corporate housing type of stuff.
Dylan Silver (17:44)
So these are for rent, I’m imagining.Marv McGuire (17:46)
Correct, correct.Dylan Silver (17:47)
Now in the tiny home world, know that I’ve looked into this myself. You’ve got several different terms, floating around. I’ve heard ⁓ offsite construction stick built. I’ve heard ⁓ also too, and I don’t know if this is a different sect entirely, but I’ve heard manufactured home, right? ⁓ When you were looking into this space, was there like a spread of different⁓ build ⁓ setups that you were looking at or did your partner have experience lots of experience in the tiny home world and really guided the project in that
Marv McGuire (18:24)
No, we kind of did our research across the board on, whether we’re going to do stick bill or we’re going to do, you know, offsite construction, we kind of looked at all three of those options. mean, apart, my partner actually went and visited a, uh, a construction house in, I want to say it was in Virginia where they were building, they built units in their giant facility and then they shipped them to the site and just kind of plopped them down and you’re hooked them up and you’re good to go. So we looked at all three. Uh, we kind of went to,It was cost, you know, cost driven for us. And I think the, know, that you can do the panel, you can build a panels off site and then kind of construct them. You know, there there’s off site where you can build it in its entirety and ship it. Then there’s panel building where you can kind of partially concrete, you know, put the panels and ship them to the site. And then there’s just straight stick built where they’re built on site. So we chose the stick built a path.
It is a little bit more expensive, but we have better quality control, to be perfectly honest with you, because our units are very, very custom and high-end.
Whenever we were getting into and kind of making our plan, our business plan towards doing the development for the tiny home village in Raleigh. You know, we, had looked at, you know, panel building it, you know, where you’re just building the panels, the walls offsite. looked at, you know, doing construction on off completely offsite and just building the building the tiny homes and shipping them to the location and then stick built, just building them all on location.
And I was saying that we kind of chose to stick build them, build them all on site simply because our units are going to be super high end and custom. And we want to just make sure that they’re very, very unique and we can maintain the level of quality that we want to present to our tenants ⁓ by having that control and paying that premium.
Dylan Silver (20:14)
Now, when we talk about the process for renting out a tiny home, is it the same as renting out a traditional single family home? Or is there a specific market from separate distinct from, you know, the MLS that you would go to market these properties?Marv McGuire (20:30)
I mean, I think you can use the Airbnb model if you wanted to do short term rentals, but we’re really focusing on the digital nomad community, those folks that are so many of young people and even not young people are working remote from different locations. You had said before we started, I went down here and work remote for a month and I’ve got a 24 year old daughter.And she’s like, Hey, think I’m going to see if I can go full remote. Maybe I’ll go over to Europe and work for a few months. there’s, there’s a, there’s a whole culture around, you know, kind of the minimal, minimalist digital nomad working remote from anywhere that we’re going to tap into one of, we’ve got, I’ve got two partners on the deal and one of them has a, uh, has a digital nomad community that has, you know, I think it’s up to several hundred people in it right now that, uh,
that travel around the world working in different locations. And so we think that, you know, this is the first kind of digital nomad focused community that we know about in the world. And, know, we’ve got plans for, for building several others. So we, we think we’re, we’re kind of at the leading edge of a movement.
Dylan Silver (21:43)
I would imagine too that zoning and permitting would not be as difficult in this segment as some others because people need affordable housing, right? And the cities and the municipalities themselves are probably looking for these types of opportunities, but because it is out of the norm, ⁓ not every builder is going to be able to have expertise in this type of development, right? So it’s probably a win-win for all sides.Marv McGuire (22:11)
It completely is. You know, we’ve got a great reception from the city of Raleigh. We’ve actually had the mayor of Raleigh on site on our construction site to tour our first two units. We’ve had several ⁓ CEOs of, you know, manufacturing firms, several brokerages, major brokerages to come out and visit the site and really get a look at our units. We have a prototype ⁓ that’s off site and then we have two units that arefully constructed and occupied on our original site, our current site. ⁓ everybody that’s visited has just been super impressed and very, very bullish on what it means for affordable housing and housing capacity in Raleigh in general.
Dylan Silver (22:57)
If this one goes well, and I think it will, are we going to see some in maybe Houston?Marv McGuire (23:00)
I don’t know. really depends on, you know, we try to put them into really trendy markets and trendy locations. And Houston’s got a lot of areas that we love in Houston. We buy a lot of property in Houston and there are some great areas for this type of property, this type of community in Houston for sure.Dylan Silver (23:20)
We are coming up on time here, Marv. Where can our audience go to learn about you, reach out to your team, any projects that you’re working on outside of that tiny home community?Marv McGuire (23:29)
Go to groviacapital.com ⁓ That’s where you can find the most about our team and partners and what we do in the multifamily syndication space. You can also find me. very active on, LinkedIn and Facebook. So either one of those, you know, socials is great. And then our website, those would be the best places to find more information.Dylan Silver (23:49)
Marv, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for coming on the show.Marv McGuire (23:51)
Hey, thanks Dylan.
