Transform Your Life: How Multifamily Investing Fuels Financial Freedom

John Harcar (00:01.106)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar. I’m here today with George Roberts and what we’re going to talk about besides George’s journey in business and real estate, we’re going to talk about passionate living through passive investing. It’s something that he is passionate about and it’s a book that he has. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers. mean, kind of all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra business.

And we do that by providing tools and resources to grow that incredible business you’ve always wanted and turn live that incredible life you wanted. So George, welcome to our show.

George Roberts (00:39.618)
Well, thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Harcar (00:41.904)
Yeah, I’m excited to talk about passive investing. love passive investing. But before we kind of get into the weeds and talk about all that, why don’t you give our audience a little bit of background on you? You like I said, your real estate journey and kind of what got you to today.

George Roberts (00:56.238)
Yeah, sure. mean, I was a bioscientist, award-winning data scientist. At some point, I decided that entrepreneurship was really the way to go. So I left all that tech life behind it. I started looking for a type of investment that made sense to me. So as a data scientist, I just literally scanned the entire landscape of potential investments, look at all kinds of sort of things in private equity. And I landed on multifamily real estate. That’s something that made a lot of sense to me back in 2020 when I got started.

and still makes a lot of sense to me today.

John Harcar (01:29.554)
Got it. Okay, were there any other real estate influences that kind of pushed you to that? Like did you have anybody back in your life that maybe was a contractor or a real estate agent or something that kind of gravitated you that way?

George Roberts (01:42.668)
Yeah, my father, huge influence in my life. He was always an entrepreneur. Ever since before I was born, he always had multiple businesses, great influence. He always talked about the value of land. He was also a farmer. And although he wanted to finance, because maybe farming, family farming, at least really wasn’t the wave of the future, but he never lost that idea that land, they aren’t making any more of it. And, you know, he’s 100 % right on there. He bought two major parcels in

John Harcar (01:55.302)
Okay.

George Roberts (02:12.682)
Troy, Michigan may not mean a lot to you, but it’s one of the few parts of Michigan that is growing. Although our population of the state is on balance growing, sorry, losing, but it’s, you when people, you say like, hey, you know, he had 10 acres in Troy, Michigan, people say, where, you know, where, where did you tuck that away? So, you know, he had the idea that if you’re really willing to buy and hold for a long period of time, if you’ve got that time horizon,

John Harcar (02:32.145)
Right.

George Roberts (02:43.551)
investing in real estate can be a great thing. And around 2010, when prices were just literally about as low, I mean, we’re not gonna see those prices again in our life. I’ll just tell you, I’m sitting aside of a half a million dollar home. We bought it for $180,000. And so that was when he said, listen, you really need to go and…

John Harcar (02:54.01)
No, never.

John Harcar (03:00.37)
Yeah.

George Roberts (03:06.604)
you know, know, upside your house right now, you got kids, this is the time to do it. And that’s when I became a landlord. You know, I said, yeah, sell this old house for what it’s worth. So I said, no, you’re going to keep it. And that that was really my very first taste of entrepreneurship was that very first, I call it being an accidental landlord, having a single home units. And that was literally the very first thing. Second thing, my sister with a construction company that came

John Harcar (03:26.236)
Mm-hmm.

George Roberts (03:37.308)
six years later. But again, I don’t want to go too deep into the history because I know you got a lot of other great questions to ask. But the idea is once the entrepreneurial spirit took hold of me, it never let go.

John Harcar (03:48.722)
And don’t apologize about the history. think the history was what makes makes the know The lead up to where we’re going to talk about but why not? Why not sticking in single-family? Why multi-family?

George Roberts (03:58.648)
So single family is great. And there’s lot of advantages to single family. You can get great deals. If you’re willing to look and work really hard, the quality of deal that you can find is second to none.

because you have unsophisticated sellers and you have sellers that are in a lot of trouble. Whereas in multifamily and commercial real estate, you have the advantage of the size of the transaction. You learn to do it. You can make extraordinary economies of scale. But at the same time, you’re dealing with very sophisticated sellers. And even when somebody’s in trouble, usually it’s going to be the bank who’s going to take over. And although they don’t want to hold that on their books, they’re not going to let it go for a

John Harcar (04:23.346)
Hmm.

George Roberts (04:42.032)
So I see there’s advantages either way. you know, recently we made it through that great recession and people who jumped into single family homes early after the drop did really well because it was a really short drop. But commercial real estate, partly because we had such abnormally low interest rates for a long time, commercial real estate had got bid up so much and it’s really taken it a long time to fall. And I think we’re finally there recording this in the second quarter of 2025.

John Harcar (04:43.014)
Yeah.

George Roberts (05:12.132)
I spent a lot of time looking at data. As I mentioned, award-winning data scientist, part of my past history. I look at the data all the time. And finally, our first data point where we can see we’re actually seeing multifamily real estate selling for more than it did the quarter before. That’s great news. So, you know, hey, things go in cycles. So maybe a couple of years ago, it would have been far better to be in single family. Now, maybe the time again to jump back into the multifamily.

John Harcar (05:18.055)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:29.755)
Okay.

John Harcar (05:41.724)
And then how did you learn about multifamily, about how to evaluate and underwrite properties and cap rates and all those types of things?

George Roberts (05:53.57)
Yeah, so I’ve always had wide-ranging tastes. I went to every meetup in my area. A lot of people tell you, know, hey, you don’t just do your first deal, right? I think a lot of that has died down as a lot of those gurus are gone from the scene at this point. But, you know, there is a lot of value to doing your research. People talk about analysis paralysis, but there’s no reason why analysis and taking action shouldn’t happen on separate tracks. I had a six-figure plus job. You know, I didn’t need to jump into

John Harcar (06:05.946)
Mmm

George Roberts (06:23.524)
real estate immediately. I was doing great in the stock market. You want to make sure you have more than one thing going at any one time. And I think that helps you. That’ll give you the time. You can do as much analysis as you want and jump in at the right moment when you’ve done an appropriate amount of analysis. And I tell people in my book, always, always, always continue to analyze. Analysis and action are two separate tracks. You always want to reanalyze what you’re doing and you always want that after action report. When you’re done, make sure

John Harcar (06:24.22)
Right.

George Roberts (06:53.424)
that whatever lessons you learn now look you can make mistakes and make money in real estate and you can make mistakes and you

George Roberts (07:15.454)
asset class in real estate or even within multifamily. Should I be going to B class? Is that doing better now? Or C class, for example. Always, always be ready to change directions.

John Harcar (07:22.79)
Right.

John Harcar (07:27.658)
And that’s kind of goes always be learning in the same token as well. You mentioned you went to a lot of RIAs and meetings. I mean, why not? There’s so much information on YouTube and on the internet. Why not just learn that way? Why go waste your time at these meetings?

George Roberts (07:30.99)
Yeah.

George Roberts (07:45.474)
Right, so there’s obviously a relationship between price and quality. Not always, but you can get a ton of free information on the internet, and you should, because when it’s free, you might as well consume that. I am watching YouTube, whether it’s diet or exercise, whether I’m learning dance, whether I’m learning finance or real estate, always consuming free information on the internet, but you gotta get out and press the flesh and get out to meet people. Now, if I was just learning about commercial real estate from the internet, I don’t think

that I would have taken the plunge, but I found a friend at one of these meetups and he said, hey, you want to buy your first apartment, I will teach you how to underwrite. We’ve got a group and we’re underwriting properties every week and they’ve been doing this for months. So I jumped on board with them and within six months we had our first deal. So atypical results, by the way, most people looking at least a year for that first deal.

John Harcar (08:28.86)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (08:34.503)
Wow.

Yeah, yeah, okay. So did you, mean, that was obviously kind of, guess, maybe I don’t want to maybe say a mentor, but kind of in a sense, because he helped you.

George Roberts (08:45.28)
It is, it is. So then, you know, you can do two things. You can buy mentorship and that’s fine. And it works for a lot of people. A of people get great results. But after we formed that mastermind, I realized, and I was really thinking really hard, you know, do I go the mentorship route? You know, we were really working each other really hard. We all got our specialties, either underwriting or analyze. Here’s one thing that’s very much underappreciated, particularly in commercial real estate, is knowing your market and knowing the demographics. And we really

realized after a short period of time this is where you start. Quit putting numbers in a spreadsheet. Make sure you know your market, know your sub markets, because listen if you don’t want to be there Saturday night at 8 p.m. when the Sun goes down then that’s not a market for you to invest in. Exactly. It might be for someone else, somebody who grew up in that neighborhood might be the perfect neighborhood for them to invest in, but know your neighborhoods, know and know how you stay in your lane, right? First you have to know your lane. Where are you best at? Do you like a

John Harcar (09:29.136)
That’s not a market you want to be in.

George Roberts (09:45.224)
rehab? Do you like a light rehab? Or maybe you just want to do a sort of an operational rehab as I call it where you’re just coming in and you’re trying to turn the tenant base. Maybe you have bad property management in there. You can do that better. You understand the financials better than mom and pop who’s running the business. Know, before you can stay in your lane, you have to know your lane. Means you have to go out there, survey the landscape, figure out what you’re best at, and then just do that thing.

John Harcar (10:09.168)
Yeah, 100%. So let’s talk about, you know, maybe some mistakes you made when he got started, like some struggles you might’ve had, or maybe some things you had to overcome that maybe some of our audience might be going through right now as well.

George Roberts (10:21.656)
Well, the first thing is credibility, particularly in commercial real estate. When you get started out, nobody trusts you to close. And, you know, this was still a good bit of a seller’s market. Now things started to change around COVID. People were kind of leery to pull the trigger and we found something was really good. And there was seller fatigue. Guy had two buyers that pulled out and we got a super low. I mean, like, my goodness. Now the broker said you better put an eight in front of that.

And you know, like we’re saying like, okay, $800,000 on, you know, that no more. He’s like, no, I was thinking more like 850. And they’re like, nope, nope, we’re gonna go in for 800. And we got our deal. It was, I mean, it was a real slog. I mean, there were all kinds of things that were wrong with this property. 14 units in Orlando. And we got in at the lowest per unit price that year of any property that transacted. So, you know, there were a lot of problems. So the first thing is not knowing what I was doing.

having the credibility so I partnered up. That got me over the first hump. Now I did have some capital. I’ve been working many years. I was in IT, had some decent money, had 401k etc. But we got into this for $90,000 a piece. So you don’t necessarily have to be rich to get into real estate or even into commercial real estate. If you know what you’re willing to do, you’re willing to partner up and you’re willing to take a property that has a few warts and let me tell you there were a few warts. But now it’s one of the nicest properties in the neighborhood.

John Harcar (11:51.42)
So how does someone find out kind of what their lane is? Like what they really, know, where they fit and.

George Roberts (11:56.214)
Yeah, again, I think it’s a lot of research, a lot of research. Those YouTube videos, they may not be the best place to go, but they are the cheapest, the easiest, most readily available. Just find out. I mean, there’s all kinds of commercial real estate. If you want to go into commercial, obviously, multifamily is the easiest way to go. We all know about housing because we have to live somewhere. But, you know, just go learn, study as much as you can and then partner up. Because when you start to partner up with people and whether it’s, you know, actually like, hey, we’re ready to do our first deal or you’re just out there just looking for a

steel forming a mastermind like I did, then that’s really where you find out where the gaps are. And you also find out what people are good at. You know, one of our partners, he was great at construction. We had one in the group who already owned a ton of commercial real estate and one who was a little bit newer.

And then we had one who had spent a lot of his time and his capital, he had focused on fix and flips. And so he had he lended to fix and flips for the longest time. So we all have something and I came from a data background. So you find out not only where you’re strong, but you find out where your partners are strong. And if you find out that there’s a gap, then you either got a partner up or you have to level up. Yeah. Yeah.

John Harcar (12:54.234)
Okay.

John Harcar (13:08.178)
Being around the right people, man, the power of proximity, right? Being next to those opportunities. So before we kind of talk about what our kind of topic was, the passion of living through passive investing, what does your business look like now? I mean, how many doors are you holding? What are you focused on?

George Roberts (13:25.336)
Yeah, so we’ve got over 500 doors. We started out focused in the Southeast and this is why I talk about pivoting. Now I talk about pivoting and I talk about staying in your lane. When I say pivot, usually, you know, it’s a sort of a gentle pivot. We move sort of from the Southeast to now focused in Kansas City. I love it. This middle latitudes of our country, I think are just beautiful. They didn’t get bought up like the great Southeast, that’s Sunbelt region. But at the same time, people are moving out there. And with the coronavirus pandemic, I know

we’re already five years into this thing, but people are able to work a lot of times, places where they couldn’t before. Places like West Virginia, for example, attracting population. And let me think of some other good ones. South Carolina is attracting population like crazy. Idaho is another one. know, a lot of places…

John Harcar (14:14.106)
I’m in Boise.

George Roberts (14:15.83)
Yeah, a lot of places out there where they’re attracting population and may have lower taxes, lower regulations than California. And hey, you’re still out West and it’s beautiful. you know, look for those opportunities. So, hey, I stayed in multifamily, but I pivoted in terms of the markets I’m looking at. And I also pivoted a little bit from equity positions to lending. You know, I found, you know, the lender always gets paid. And the more I learn about lenders and I’ve got a lender in every deal, even if it is seller financing, which I’ve done a lot of.

John Harcar (14:22.449)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (14:45.585)
Mm-hmm.

George Roberts (14:45.744)
There’s always a lender in the deal and they ask great questions and they have a somewhat different approach because they don’t have upside. They’re focused entirely on protecting that capital. And, you know, I’ve learned that being a private lender, I can find deals that banks won’t do because they’re too small and they’re not in their wheelhouse. But at the same time, I’m getting interest rates that are just bonkers. I mean, almost like equity. And to know that, you know, I haven’t had a loan go bad yet, but if I do, I know that I can foreclose.

John Harcar (15:04.252)
right?

George Roberts (15:15.754)
I’ve got solid quality collateral and because I have operated these things and because I do have an extraordinary social network, I know what to do if it lands in my lap.

John Harcar (15:24.912)
Yeah, right. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. All right, so let’s transition. Let’s go talk about the passionate living through passive investing. This obviously is a book you wrote. What inspired you to write the book?

George Roberts (15:37.644)
So I started writing another book about being an active investor in multifamily and I thought that was fun. But I realized there are a couple things that set me apart from other investors. The one is my sense of adventure in life. And I see a lot of people, they’re just working nose to the grindstone every day. And they think if I just accumulate enough poker chips, then one day I’m going to retire and everything will be okay. And I’ll tell you, it won’t be. There will be a day where everything’s okay. That’s the day you die. Until then, you have problems.

John Harcar (16:07.111)
Yes.

George Roberts (16:07.658)
you find a way to live your life with those problems and love it too. you know, causing being working puts a strain on a relationship. Retiring puts a strain on relationship. And, you know, and I knew this. And so what when I went into real estate really hard, I was hoping at some point that I would have that passive income and that it’s just me or just me and the wife or me, the wife and the kids and just doing what I want.

John Harcar (16:16.998)
Mm-hmm.

George Roberts (16:34.286)
But, you know, as I went through that transition, you know, it was a little rougher than I expected. So I wanted to have another couple of years. I wanted to retire like 2024-ish. I mean, I say semi-retirement. I’m still probably working harder than most people. But it’s no longer dawn to dusk anymore. But, you know, rates went up. I was in FinTech and it’s like, you know, hey, if you’re a lender and rates go up, guess what? People aren’t refinancing all day long and they had to lay some people off. And I was happy to go. I went to the wife and I said, hey,

John Harcar (16:49.362)
Right.

George Roberts (17:04.24)
You know, that day came a little sooner than expected, but you know what? I’ve been planning this. I’ve been building my runway to our future success for a long time. What do you say that we just pull the stick and we’re going to make this thing fly right now? And I did it. And again, and I talk about this not only in my book, I got my print book right here, but I’ve got the audio version coming out. Engineer is going to have that back to me tomorrow. I’m to put that on Audible. I interviewed my wife at the end of each chapter because I thought, you know, this is a very intensely personal book.

John Harcar (17:27.782)
Awesome.

George Roberts (17:34.16)
So you asked me why am I writing it? I had a very intensely personal story to tell and when you do kind of semi-retire early You know that strain that it puts on the relationship I want to give her an opportunity to say you know hey, you know that thing you wrote in chapter 3 That’s not how I remember it and so we have a little fun there and and I took her into the studio and and we talked about all of the strains and stresses like for a while I was going out and dancing every night and that’s something you can do when you have passive income or when you have active income like really

John Harcar (17:59.345)
Mm-hmm.

George Roberts (18:04.11)
estate where it’s not like starting an electric car company. I mean, you can have your evenings off. So she was feeling like, you know, hey, I’m left behind what I want to do. you know, the old adage, if you can’t beat them, join them. So now she joins me. We go out dancing almost every night. I’ve got my dance shoes on right now. You know, right after this interview, I can go downstairs and dance in the kitchen. So I really wanted to build that life. And I want to tell people you can do that. You can have a beautiful and adventurous life. And it doesn’t have to have a huge price tag.

John Harcar (18:08.208)
Right, right. Sure.

John Harcar (18:20.666)
Awesome.

George Roberts (18:34.0)
If you’re not rich yet, or if you are wealthy, save it. Just keep working and enjoy yourself. Like my sailboat, I got a $5,000 sailboat and the family enjoys the heck out of that. Sometimes we pay like a $1.50 a night dock fee, 25 foot. Yeah, we’re talking $30 and some change. And you know what?

John Harcar (18:39.42)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (18:49.82)
That’s so cool.

George Roberts (18:54.86)
We have the time of our life and we never have to hit that app late at night. hey, hotels near me. Forget it, we’re done. It’s a beautiful thing. So you don’t have to be rich to enjoy yourself, but hey, you are, it helps.

John Harcar (19:03.366)
Right.

John Harcar (19:09.126)
That’s so cool. And what did your wife think about the final outcome of the book?

George Roberts (19:15.468)
Yeah, she loves it and she’s one of those audio people. So it was really hard to get her to read it. So then when I finally said, well, I just finished recording the audio. She’s like, yeah, okay, here. You know, they had her on my laptop and she started listening to the book. So I know there’s a lot of people that I’m going to reach the audio, but anyway, how did she like it? She loves it. And again, because I brought her into the process and that’s one of the principles in my book is bring your spouse into the process because as you’re trying to build this passive income, you’re really building a dream.

John Harcar (19:20.433)
Me too.

John Harcar (19:31.57)
Hmm

George Roberts (19:45.392)
And if you don’t bring your spouse into that dream, then I got news for you conflict.

John Harcar (19:45.766)
Yeah.

John Harcar (19:51.566)
Lots of it. Before we ran out time here, what is some advice? What is the one thing that you tell people, if you’re going get into investing, do this? Or what kind of things would you say to set them up for success?

George Roberts (20:06.658)
Yeah, so determination. If you want to be successful at anything, you got to be determined. Real estate may be one of the easier businesses to get into in the sense that if you can run one unit, you can run 10. And if you can buy one apartment, you can buy 10. But it’s still a business. So you need to be very determined. You’re going to go through market cycles. And when things are going well, you’re to think you’re a genius, right? And everybody does. But, you know, steal yourself for the down times. Make sure you have capital on the side. You always want to have reserves.

John Harcar (20:36.252)
Yes.

George Roberts (20:36.592)
care how much things are cash flowing, people lose their job, the steel mill closed down, the economy hits the skids, all kinds of things happen and you don’t know what’s coming. So make sure and who thought that rates were going to go up like up a cliff, literally.

John Harcar (20:54.886)
Yeah, right.

George Roberts (20:56.162)
So you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know if you can refinance out of it. You don’t know that any of your projections are going to come true. So make sure you always, always, always have cash reserves.

John Harcar (21:08.368)
Yep. Great advice. Awesome advice. If folks want to get a hold of you, they want to maybe get a copy of your book or talk to you about passive investing. How do they get in touch?

George Roberts (21:19.79)
So I’ve got my website www.robertscapitalenterprises.com. You can book an interview there with me or meeting, should say interview sounds really very formal. Book a meeting with me. It’ll be very informal, I promise. Or just communicate with me. Tell me you enjoyed the book or ask me some questions. I love to mentor people. I remember what it was like when I was new. One of the best things about real estate, people are happy to share their knowledge. So don’t be afraid to reach out. If you’ve never reached out to anybody in the industry,

John Harcar (21:29.714)
Yeah, right.

John Harcar (21:46.204)
Yes.

George Roberts (21:49.744)
Do it.

John Harcar (21:51.792)
I love it. George, appreciate all the information you came on and shared. Folks at home listening, watching, I hope you guys really took some good nuggets, because there’s a lot that he dropped there. And I hope you guys enjoyed the show. I know I did. George, thank you again for spending a few minutes with us today.

George Roberts (22:08.322)
Yeah, thank you so much, John, and happy crappie fishing.

John Harcar (22:10.98)
Yeah, thank you, buddy. Have a good one. Thank you guys. See you on the next one.