Transform Your Future: Building A Lifetime of Success with Commercial Real Estate

Stephen S. (00:03.693)
Welcome back to the show or welcome to the show if it’s your first time here where we interviewed the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs. Today I’m here with David Seiler and he has over 40 years in the real estate business, specifically expertise with commercial and we are super excited to have a conversation with David today. Just remember add investor fuel here in the real estate pros podcast. We help real estate investors

service providers and real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted, to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. And with all that being said, David, welcome to the show.

David Seiler (00:44.98)
thank you for having me.

Stephen S. (00:46.779)
Man, I’m super excited. I know we were talking a little bit before we hopped on here and you You are self-proclaimed retired, but not retired at the same time still have a ton going on But let’s go back to the beginning. What what got you into real estate 40 some odd years ago and what got you to where you’re at today?

David Seiler (01:05.839)
You know, I have a fun story and you don’t want to take up all of our time, but like most of the people, especially within your podcast, you know, I was a young kid coming out of college and thought real estate would be a great avenue for me. Started looking at a couple of deals, got a real estate license, of course, so I had access to an MLS, put a couple of deals together, did a couple of fix and flips, gathered some capital from my family and my father-in-law and we did a number of those. And then,

Something unique happened. decided that I didn’t want to sell real estate my entire life and that I did really enjoy the operational stability within multi-family commercial real estate. And so I got out of the single family home business and got out of the sales business and then got into apartments. I bought my first 40 unit apartment complex before my

oldest kid was one years old and he ended up doing a lot of work on the properties over the years. And, and we continued to grow that and services with property management until such time that I kind of rolled into some other partnerships and through a long, think fairly successful career. I got involved in some pretty big syndicators. They weren’t big at the time, but as I retired, I

couple of two and a half years ago. The portfolio was just just under 40,000 units and it’s been a very fun ride and that’s mainly in the multifamily world but we’ve dabbled in you know industrial, commercial, telecom, HOAs, broken HOAs, trailer parks and

vacation rentals as well, not the Airbnbs that you see today, but in the old days, know, big resort type of area. So have had a lot of fun buying them, selling them, due diligence on them, making sure that we’re looking for operational efficiencies so that we could grow the business and be able to retire.

Stephen S. (03:16.315)
Wow. So now, for as long of a career as you’ve had in this space, how long were you doing ops when that syndicate grew to 40,000 units? I mean, how long were you basically managing ops for that corporation or syndicate?

David Seiler (03:34.481)
22 years. Yeah, 22 years. So I went, I started as a, as a junior executive and worked myself up to executive vice president. And eventually I was the president and I eventually, eventually left. So it’s been, it was been a great and a lot of good friends over there. I still do some consulting. I really enjoy being able to, one of my mantras is I like to work a little and play a lot.

And I have been able to do that. fly airplanes. I hike Mount Shasta. I hiked Mount Whitney last year, both of those last year, traveling. And again, all of the work that I had done in the previous 40 years has helped support that.

Stephen S. (04:17.467)
Wow, that’s incredible. So did you, when you were in that position, let’s say, did you have a whole lot of play then or was it mostly work? What does that look like in terms of the harmony of work versus the play hard for you?

David Seiler (04:26.64)
Mm-hmm.

David Seiler (04:36.762)
Yeah, it really wasn’t. As industry grows, you know, when we were at 10,000 units, you know, know everybody’s name and you’re at 18,000 units, you know, most of people’s names. When you’re at 25,000 units, people have to whisper in your ear and remember everybody’s name. And unfortunately for me, that’s not who I am. I’m a people person. As you can tell, I like to talk. And so that was, it became a little bit less enjoyable, but we had a mission.

everyone in the organization over that many years become friends and become family. And so we had a mission. and I think really for me, the, the stopping point was COVID and not because of the way people are saying, but suddenly my, my travels, which I’ve traveled, three to five days a week, 40 weeks out of the year for nearly 25 years. And so suddenly my travel stopped and, I got to come home and, and, hang out with my wife and my adult children. And I realized I liked them.

And we really enjoyed each other’s company. And so we started talking about, know, what is real estate to me? Where in the career has it been a fun time? And one of them that wasn’t so fun is one, not knowing the people and being able to affect the change and touch the real estate. And the other one was I didn’t like to travel as much as I did. It just kind of grew into that.

That was a great opportunity for me to take a look, see where our personal investments were, where our partnership investments were, and make a decision to help with a transition at the company and then find a time in which we could kind of go out and do our own things. And it’s been a lot of fun. Again, I get to help a lot of smaller companies with my expertise and my bandwidth and experiences.

But I also get to help my kids. My kids have started to look into multifamily housing and trying to put a couple deals together and that’s been a ton of fun as well.

Stephen S. (06:39.931)
Now, with all that, what are some of the craziest things that you’ve seen within your 40 years of real estate? What’s maybe one of the top three? Because I’m sure it’s hard to pinpoint one, but just one of the top three craziest things that you’ve done, seen, dealt with within managing 40,000 units and more beyond for your own personal side of things.

David Seiler (07:05.363)
You know what, years ago, this is a precursor to the answer to the question, years ago when I was a young person in this industry, there was a industry icon, his name was Tom Night Sling, and we were walking a piece of property together, and he sat down and very patiently said, know, if you ever think you’ve seen it all in this industry, any real estate, then you probably should hang up your cleats because you’re just not curious enough.

and you’re not interested enough. You’re just checking the box. And so there have been a ton of things and every I learned something every day, but everything from, you know, people trying to pull wool over your eyes and you’ve got fraud to people who are genuinely working really hard and are walking into a blind scenario. I’ve seen people buy multi-million dollar pieces of property and never touch the property, never walk the property, never do their due diligence and then wonder why they

Stephen S. (07:37.883)
Hmm.

David Seiler (08:04.466)
had such a bad scenario. We’ve walked away from deals being in the third place and knew that the person was overpaying for it and knew that that younger organization was going to lose it to the bank. So we hung around the rim and bought it from the bank after they got foreclosed on. So I’ve got a plethora of stories on this stuff. I think probably the most interesting one is we did have a fairly large property.

And we had a big gas leak. was caused by a resident and it blew up a number of units. And thankfully knocking on wood, nobody was seriously hurt. There was a couple of shrapnel issues, but how lucky we were. wow. What a talk, talk about having to, to, manage, an unexpected horrific scenario. but, that was, those are, those are some of the things. Yeah. To start.

Stephen S. (09:01.221)
So what caused the gas leak and then it blew up multiple units.

David Seiler (09:09.457)
get off the foundation.

Stephen S. (09:13.613)
And no, was.

David Seiler (09:13.701)
Yeah, a resident moved their dryer and kicked the, somehow or another broke the T-valve and unbeknownst to everybody, gas was leaking and suddenly it went boom and came off the foundation and glass was broke and luckily, know, gases, if it’s not compressed, it’s not terribly bad, but it was enough that it caused national awareness.

Stephen S. (09:42.587)
Wow, that is nuts. Right, sure. Man, and how big of a complex was that?

David Seiler (09:44.18)
So yeah, you ask what the crazy ones are, those are them.

David Seiler (09:51.876)
It was, it was, we buy properties over a hundred units, so we don’t look at anything under a hundred units. It was, it was over that. It didn’t take care of, take out the entire property, but it was enough that it was, made us all pause. yeah.

Stephen S. (10:04.047)
Yeah, for sure. Wow, what a crazy situation. I’ve seen some videos of that happening and it just, I don’t know, it shocks me. I’m like, we hooked this up to our houses.

David Seiler (10:16.169)
Well, and you know, it’s really unfortunate because oftentimes, you know, professional managers, professional owners give all sorts of disclosures and give all sorts of support. There was really no reason for somebody moved their own washer and dryer. We would have been more than happy to do it for them. Not because of this. We would have never thought that this would have been the outcome just because of good customer service. But yeah, there’s, but there’s a lot of times when people

you know, do things and they don’t pay attention to the unintentional consequence.

Stephen S. (10:50.373)
What are some of the things in your 40 years that you can do to be prepared for something that you can’t be prepared for? Like, how do you navigate those hard to solve problems and prepare yourself, not even knowing what it’s gonna be, but knowing that that’s just part of life sometimes? How do you stay in a state of ready preparedness for things like that?

David Seiler (11:12.576)
Yeah.

David Seiler (11:19.636)
You know, that’s a really good question. like to think, okay, as an owner of commercial real estate, because there’s so many things that are happening, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the telecom, industrial, multifamily, you really have to be like a pilot. You have to be two steps ahead of the plane. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you kind of have to be prepared for it. The other thing is I think you need to stay curious. You need to stay aware and learn from every mistake that you make, whether that be a costly mistake, a grave mistake.

just an oops mistake, learn from it, keep notes on it, and then every once in a while do a little bit of a self-assessment and say, okay, I just sold off that fund and there’s maybe five properties in that fund, and I did okay. I got a 2X, I got a 3X, I got a 4X, but I know I could have done better. At that moment, with your team or as many people as you can, brainstorm it. What went well, what didn’t go well, and see if you can come up with on the next one.

to do a better job and what could have gone wrong if we hadn’t have done these things. Again, kind of figuring out. think one of the reasons people are successful in real estate is because a lot of us have the attitude of I’m gonna try to understand what the worst case scenario is and then I’m gonna be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t happen. So what happens when you’re in the middle of a refinance, you haven’t locked your loan and the rates go up.

Can I still do that? Can I run through the stress test? What happens if you buy a deal and you’re really over leveraged and the market goes down and you suddenly don’t have the rents to cover it? Start thinking about where your options are if the worst case scenario happens. And then you’re pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t. so, you know, even conservative underwriting, I’ve seen some underwriting lately where they’re walking in on a six and a half cap, which is fairly normal.

but their exit interview, their exit numbers are like three and a half cap. I doubt that that’s going to happen anytime in the near future. So you’re kind of setting yourself up for failure. Yeah, you made the model work, but you know, think about what the worst case scenario is. And then if you promised your investors a 2X, you gave them a 4X, you’re a hero and they reinvested.

Stephen S. (13:31.309)
Absolutely. And out of curiosity, you mentioned something in there, which I thought quite profound for my own self. I have a mentor of mine who’s been a long term mentor of mine. I sort of stumbled into meeting him when I was 14 and we’ve known each other, known each other ever since. You guys built, owned 25 companies in the last, in the last 30 years and

So very very successful financially and really holistically But we were spending some time with him recently within the last 90 days and he told me he said, know You’re the most negative positive person I’ve ever met And so and I’m like he goes it’s just like the way you say things sometimes where you’re like well This is gonna go like this. But if it doesn’t and goes like this and this and he goes and so

How do you kind of balance the or find the harmony between having that preparedness and being realistic on, something could happen and it could go really, really bad, but we hope it doesn’t. And we’re excited, almost not even excited by the good thing that happens. We’re almost more excited the bad things didn’t. How do you balance that?

David Seiler (14:43.692)
You know, that’s a good question. And I think as the leader of our organization, we have to be kind of the navigators as well. You know, we’re not putting the wind in our sails all the time. That’s sometimes our investors. But we have to kind of figure out where we’re going. Like I say, stay two steps ahead of the plane. I like to think that we can find a silver liner in every negative scenario. And so we do try to fail. Well, you know what? least we didn’t lose the whole building.

Stephen S. (14:52.197)
Mm, sure.

David Seiler (15:11.181)
right? Or something in that nature. But there’s a difference between being realistic and trying to make sure that you’re covering all the worst case scenarios and being Debbie Downer and being a deer in the headlights and never pulling the trigger because everything could go wrong. Yes, everything could go wrong. You’ve got to learn to be able to weigh out those. It’s good to be able to say, yes, this deal could go south and I could lose everybody’s money.

But what’s the probability of doing that? And so then you make a conscious business decision to accept on those risks, but you’ve already acknowledged that these things could happen. So it’s not like you’re going to get sideswiped when something happens. You’ve already kind of prepared for it. I remember when we were, when we were kids, our parents used to say, you know, always make the decision that you’ll be home by midnight. So that if you are tempted at midnight not to come home, you’ve already made the decision.

And it makes it easier to make the right decisions. It’s kind of the same thing. We’ve already gone down this road. We kind of talked it out. We know if this happens, how we would handle it, but we’re willing to take on this risk. We’re going to mitigate it a little bit. We might do this. We might do that. I’m not going to be Debbie Downer. I see so many people, especially in the investor and the syndication side, that can put the entire package together and then they sit on the sidelines and don’t pull the trigger. And the reason is, I think,

is because they haven’t done it once, obviously, but that also they outweighed the negative. Yes, it could go wrong. Yes, you could lose your reputation, but you’ve done everything right to this point. Somewhere along the line, you’re gonna have to step in that river. as know, Sadathro says, you can’t step in the same river twice. So the river you’re seeing this minute is not gonna be the same river next time, but do it. And know, Edison.

I’m a cliche guy too, but Edison didn’t fail at the light bulb a thousand times. He found out a thousand ways not to make a light bulb. So it’s kind of that way. And so a big difference between Debbie Downer and Dylan headlights and just being cognizantly aware of everything that could happen so that you can navigate around those icebergs, not into one.

Stephen S. (17:30.466)
That’s sage advice. So what after 40 years and obviously you’re not on a plane now, right? You’re taking some time and we spoke a little bit earlier you mentioned You know, you’re you’re actually enjoying some of the things in life with your family and spending that time and playing hard in this season of life But after 40 years, I mean you’re still doing deals. You’re still you’re still working to an extent even though you’re retired from maybe You know

pressure let’s say maybe that’s not fair but what keeps you going after 40 years of being in the business?

David Seiler (18:04.047)
I got to tell you, that’s pretty easy. I got involved in our organization. We started doing mentorship and not mentorship, internships and going out to the university and bringing in young college kids that really wanted to get into multifamily and being able to share some of that. That I want to say a wealth of knowledge and again, not to put myself on a pedestal, but after 40 years, you’re going to have a catalog of knowledge.

and being able to share some of that with some of these younger folks as they’re getting in the industry. Younger organizations that might be older folks, but younger organizations that are just getting into the industry and sharing. I mentioned earlier, and I do a little bit of consulting, but I won’t take on a client that I don’t have purpose for, because I don’t have to do this, but I get a huge rush. When I was on the board of directors for National Apartment Association, one of my first assignments are after

after leaving the board was to become part of the next gen program. Here I am the old guy in this young organization and it just was great to be able to just quietly sit back, listen to all the new ideas, maybe add a word or two of guidance from my opinion and be able to see, you know, what’s happening. I had a great scenario about a year ago. I had a guy who had been an intern with us.

And then worked for us for a while and went on his own, created his own capital company, his own syndications. And he put a deal together that wasn’t too far away from where I keep my airplane. So he asked me if I’d like to come out and hang out with him. And what a great experience for me to be able to have a full circle moment and share some ideas and opinions, look at his underwriting, actually work with a kid, you know, a kid. And I don’t mean that negatively, just a younger person who was

and had kind of taken advantage of an opportunity and was, you we like to think all of our interns have something, that part of that it, and this was one of those times that it was. So I get a great sense of accomplishment by getting somebody else to that next level.

Stephen S. (20:09.051)
Love that a ton. So where is most of your time spent now?

David Seiler (20:14.268)
Most of my time spent hiking and flying airplanes and riding Harleys. But as far as my work goes, a lot of conference calls, lot of listening in on business plans, giving opinion, dealing a lot with budgeting issues, looking at numbers and sharing with people that you’re missing a big opportunity, you’ve got huge value here in Los Angeles and somebody’s got to go mine it. And giving my opinion and then sitting back and watching people either take it.

and be successful or not take it and maybe they’re successful because I don’t have all the right answers I just have an answer.

Stephen S. (20:49.307)
How important was mentorship to you throughout your journey in real estate?

David Seiler (20:54.307)
my gosh, I can tell you there’s probably about four periods of time in my life that if I had made a different decision, I wouldn’t be here today. Not, I mean, I’d be alive, but I wouldn’t be in the financial scenario that I was. And I get every single one of those were a mentor at that moment. It’s not the same mentor. Not one of them are the same because as we grow, our needs for mentorship grows. And sometimes it’s not even a quote.

Stephen S. (21:03.567)
Mm.

David Seiler (21:22.972)
mentor, it might just be a partner who has a little bit more experience. you know, so, you know, I like to think, you know, God gave us two ears and one mouth, we should probably use it in that proportion. You know, sometimes sit and listen is an important thing.

Stephen S. (21:36.293)
You bet. Yeah, that’s something that was constantly told to me growing up too. I remember my mom saying, listen more than you speak. And I finally was, I don’t know, probably in my early 20s when I finally looked at her and I’m like, you’ve been telling me this my whole life. You guys realize that I only talk as much as I do here at the house because I can say whatever I want, right? Like you guys realize I really actually don’t talk that much.

When I’m outside of here, I’m just safe here to say dumb stuff I think it was an eye-opening moment for both of us so that That’s great now so if you had to go I mean if you had to really go back to Like the beginning of everything going back to your start, but you were able to take the 40 years of experience that you have

today and do it all over again. What would you do different and what would you do the same?

David Seiler (22:39.314)
You know, that’s a really good question. I believe that if I made any changes back then, I may not be exactly where I’m at today. I’m pretty darn happy where I’m at. So don’t have any regrets, but I’m a big fan of constructive criticism and learning and not telling stories, not for drama sake, but maybe we can learn from them. So there were a couple of moments when I was in single family, I was selling, but I was also flipping houses and I had so many deals.

Stephen S. (22:50.011)
you

David Seiler (23:08.783)
I physically could not get in there and make the deals work. And so I’d reach out to contractors and say, I’ll buy the deal. You do the work and we’ll split the profit. And I was really, I weighed heavily on giving them more than they deserve, but I’d already shown that I could be successful. I knew my model work. knew that this process was happening. And I allowed myself to have a little bit of a,

imposter syndrome. Even though I had done quite a few houses, I allowed the contractors to say, no, this won’t work. It’s not a good investment. And I just said, okay, well then we won’t do the deals. And I think I could have done probably 10 or 15 more deals a year if I had somehow another been a better salesperson or maybe believed in myself a little bit more.

Would it have gotten me here faster? Maybe would it have made me make a decision not to get into multifamily, which is truly where my love turned out to be maybe. but, that was a huge one. Just, you know, if you, if you’ve got a product and you can prove it, you’ve got a model, a business plan that you can prove, you know, own it, tell people if you’ve told 10 people and you shunned 10, 10 times, and you just didn’t tell enough people.

Stephen S. (24:32.963)
And how important was believing in yourself in the beginning when you touched on that a little bit? Tell me a little more about that.

David Seiler (24:40.414)
You know, again, that imposter syndrome is real. I had a chance to have a great conversation with the president of now a very large group. think she’s got about 18,000 units now at the time. had about 6,000 units and we were having kind of a poignant moment and she was saying, you know, I just don’t feel like how a mom from XYZ area could build this business like this.

And I said, you know what, we all have this. So it’s not a matter of I wasn’t confident I could do it. I didn’t know how to do it. And I think there’s a lot of people that are confident they can do it. They’re just afraid of doing it the first time. I tell you, if you could do the first deal, if your goal is to get to in the multifamily world, you 4,000 units and you can do the first four, you are going to get the 4,000.

because it’s the first deal that takes so much time. It’s such an empowering moment. Learn from it because you’re going to make a mistake. tell my children or adults and they’re buying apartment complexes now. And as I told me, if you make your first three deals and you break even and you just get your investors, you don’t make the waterfall where you make any money, you build a track record. And then you’re going to be able to get cheaper debt. And then you’re going to do another three deals. Then you’re to be a qualified for agency debt. Then you’re have a track record.

And then you get paid for it. I’ll tell you, out of a thousand people that want to do this, one is going to pull the trigger.

Stephen S. (26:16.963)
Interesting. You know, I’ve heard a quote recently that says the most expensive real estate in the world is actually at the graveyard because there’s trillions of dollars of ideas that were never executed upon.

David Seiler (26:29.748)
Yeah.

David Seiler (26:34.816)
I’m sure if you met and you get the opportunity to interview a lot of people If you started asking them, which is the deal that you really regret not doing it’s gonna be some obscure little deal I can tell exactly line. It was a little duplex I was an agent. I have found the deal. I found a buddy who’s gonna help me buy it and We we couldn’t couldn’t pull the trigger. So I gave it to the broker broker not only

made the deal, he did better, he used my business plan to make the money and I got a handshake. But it was nice to be able to say, I knew it, I knew we could do this, I knew those numbers were going to work, I knew that this market was going to be changing, I knew that this was a gentrification area, but that was the first one I didn’t do.

Stephen S. (27:24.889)
And that sat with, how long ago was that?

David Seiler (27:27.391)
That was 40 years, I was still in college. was technically before I got, called, mean, started this industry. I was an intern for that broker.

Still hurts. It’s still in the town I grew up in. So when I go home on Easter, chances are I’m going to have this discussion with somebody and go, that’s the duplex right there.

Stephen S. (27:39.489)
still stings to this day.

Stephen S. (27:50.923)
my gosh, that’s great. Man, I’m so grateful that you came and shared some of these stories with us, David. And who knows, we might have to have you back on for a part two here at some point in the future. But for anybody that wants to connect with you, maybe they’re seeking mentorship, consultancy, or something along those lines, what’s the best way to get connected to you further?

David Seiler (28:15.586)
Um, email probably. Um, I’m, I’m just a retired guy who has a lot of folks that reach out to me. I’m, pretty open. I’m on LinkedIn. Um, regular email is pretty, uh, phone number. I’m old school. I like to up a phone call and talk. If you can’t tell, I do like to talk.

Stephen S. (28:34.127)
Yeah, you bet. I love it. Well, that’s perfect, especially for this type of format. while you heard it here first, folks, if you want to learn more about David Seiler, check him out on LinkedIn. And I hope that you all enjoyed the show here on this episode. We’ll see you in the next one. Just please make sure that if you’re not already, make sure to subscribe and learn more about Investor Fuel. We will see you in the next episode. Thanks again, David.

David Seiler (29:02.305)
Thank