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Show Summary
In this conversation, Dana Flanagan shares her extensive experience in the real estate industry, discussing her journey from sales and marketing to venture capital and funding. She emphasizes the importance of being investor-ready and understanding the complexities of the real estate market, including the challenges of securing funding and the need for transparency. Dana also highlights her networking efforts and the significance of community engagement in driving business success. The discussion concludes with insights on preparing for investment opportunities and the common pitfalls that aspiring investors face.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Dana Flanagan (00:00)
what we find is that a lot of people come to the table because they saw property. They got excited because they wanted to get into, whether it’s rehab or they wanted to get into the multifamily space or whatever. and whatever scale it is, I’ve seen it at every scale where people come to us and they are not prepared. They don’t have any money for due diligence. Theyhaven’t done a full assessment of the property, but they’re ready to write an offer because they don’t want it to disappear, right? They’ve got that sense of urgency, but they’re not fully prepared on the back end.
Micah Johnson (02:05)
Hey everyone, welcome to the investor fuel podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with who’s making some serious moves in the residential commercial and capital market space. Dana, glad to have you.Dana Flanagan (02:20)
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.Micah Johnson (02:22)
I think our listeners are really gonna take something away from how you’re approaching specifically in the capital world and making sure that people are investor ready with something we talked about pre-call. So I really love that. So let’s dive in. So for people who may not know you yet, what’s your main focus right now? What markets are you operating in?Dana Flanagan (02:40)
Yeah. So I operate mostly in all of the U S when it comes to residential commercial real estate deals. I have a, I’ve had a real estate license for 25 years, been very active in that space and also in the capital market space. So I’m a partner at a capital firm where we provide funding for all sorts of real estate deals and, fix and flips, ground up construction, hotels, resorts, developments, that sort of thing. So that’s really what we’re looking for right now is we’re reallylooking for people that are looking to flip a property, they’re renovating, or they’re doing ground-up construction and they need funding, and we teach them how to do it the right way and hopefully build those long-term relationships with that person.
Micah Johnson (03:21)
Based on our discussion so far, y’all been doing a great job with that doing it the right way, the strength in making sure people are investor ready. What do you think’s been a key to making that work consistently?Dana Flanagan (03:33)
gosh, well, you we’ve seen, I’ve seen it all in my 25 years in business. Andwhat we find is that a lot of people come to the table because they saw property. They got excited because they wanted to get into, whether it’s rehab or they wanted to get into the multifamily space or whatever. and whatever scale it is, I’ve seen it at every scale where people come to us and they are not prepared. They don’t have any money for due diligence. They
haven’t done a full assessment of the property, but they’re ready to write an offer because they don’t want it to disappear, right? They’ve got that sense of urgency, but they’re not fully prepared on the back end.
They don’t have the proper documentation that we’re going to be asking for. We’ll also see where people come to us with a beautiful pitch deck. The project will look amazing. We’re like, is going to be great. We love the project. And then we’ll go through the actual due diligence and come to find out.
They don’t have any money. You know they don’t have the due diligence. They’re not looking to put anything into the property. And so I think there’s a real misconception of what’s actually going to be needed from the prospect themselves. And we find that usually whoever kills the deal is always the principal right that’s coming for the funding. They’re not going to provide tax returns. They don’t want to provide bank statements. They don’t want to give the things that are needed.
in order to move the needle forward. So that’s probably one of the biggest problems that we have.
Micah Johnson (05:52)
So what would your recommendation be for someone to head that off at the pass? How can they, if they’re listening to this and thinking about that and say, well, wait a second, I don’t know either. I’m really excited. I do want to do this. What do I need to pay attention to?Dana Flanagan (06:07)
Sure, yeah. So, you know, get in with somebody and a firm, and this is what we do as well, where we’re gonna help you prepare yourself to win the first time around. Because what will happen is if you’re not prepared the first time around, you’re gonna try one person or one firm or one capital team or whatever you wanna call it, and then you’re gonna move around. And now what happens is sometimes those capital teams don’t lend from within. They’re going to their direct lender, which could besome, you know, a Chase bank or Viking cap, it could be a company and now they’ve already seen it. They’ve seen it two or three times from someone else and it sort of becomes stale. So establishing yourself with a team that’s going to help you with your pitch deck, that’s going to help you get your data room together. They’re going to help you get everything together. So you look and are prepared and that way you’re going to have that process going forward. So we kind of teach you how to go about.
assuming these properties. Now, not every single type of property is going to require all of these types of things, but for the most part, you’re going to want all your ducks in a row. if you don’t have a pitch deck and you need one, we can prepare one for you. If you don’t have a data room, we can prepare one for you. Be very careful who you make your connections with, because what we find is if you’re, let’s just say you’re out on LinkedIn and you’re looking for investments, right? And you come across somebody that says, hey, I can connect to you.
Sometimes they’re just a middleman. They’re just a broker that’s looking for a referral fee for making the connection. The problem with that is when they end up taking your information from you, they are shopping it with like 10, 12 other people. So again, you run that risk of it being seen already and that person has no authority to really tell you what to do. And they’re honestly probably not that educated. They’re just connecting you to a firm like ours or all the other capital firms out there. So be very careful that the person that you’re working with actually
Micah Johnson (07:46)
Wow.Dana Flanagan (08:02)
is works at the company that you’re going to be talking to. Don’t just be talking to Joe Schmo from LinkedIn who decided to connect you. Do a little bit of your own research. And I feel like that’s a little bit reckless on the person looking for the investment is they don’t do their research when they see, I can get you funding. They just send their information over now before you know it, it’s being shopped all over. And I’ll see this stuff on some I’m on social media a lot. I see where people will have someone’s information.with their deck or with their project that they’re looking for funding and they’re actually shopping it out there when I know that that person doesn’t want it out there. So I think that’s something that you need to be really careful of is that it’s not getting stale by being shopped to several different people by people that really have no business doing that.
Micah Johnson (08:47)
Yeah, that’s it’s there’s so much that a lot I believe don’t even think about before getting into real estate because it does have a I wouldn’t say a low level of entry to get in. However, it’s easily accessible to just to get into it. You see it on TV. There’s TV shows about it where you’re watching people flip houses and you’re hearing them use all these words that where I’m getting my money from and in every show they always get approved. Right. The house always gets done and there’s typically a profit at the end.I feel like that can be a little disorienting to folks once they actually get into the space. Is there something you would recommend to someone doing their first deal of what they should think about? and like, so they’ve decided, yeah, I’m interested. How can I skip potholes that wrecked other people and keep making it in this game?
Dana Flanagan (10:10)
Sure. So first of all, get networked in this space. It’s so important. Go to events. There’s a ton of them out there. If you’re not sure where to start, I’m more than happy to make some recommendations. But it’s going to take a little bit of effort on your part. This is a business that you’re creating, and you have to look at it as such. So if you’re not quite sure where to get your capital from, or you’re not sure where to start, or you’re not sure who would be good to help you best prepare your financial documents,Go to some of these events and meet some of these people, and you’re gonna start to see referrals come in. And those recommendations typically at these higher end events are going to come from people that, the referrals typically come from people that know, like, and trust each other. And so you’re gonna find that somebody can give a recommendation and don’t just go into it willy nilly. Don’t just contact the first person that you see saying, do you need funding? Go to an actual firm and say, hey,
Make sure they have a valid website. Make sure it’s very clear what type of funding that they provide, because what I’ll find, we get a lot of requests for out of the country. And although we have some people that can do it, it’s not our specialty. And I constantly, constantly get thrown this stuff that isn’t even close to where we even fund or what types of projects we work on. So do your due diligence and do your homework. Take some time to actually interview these firms and get on a Zoom.
Get on the Zoom, meet with them face to face. If people don’t meet with you face to face via Zoom, that is a big red flag. And I found that, I know there’s some people have found that out the hard way.
Micah Johnson (11:48)
couldn’t agree more. it’s one thing I love about the real estate space, especially the high end levels of it. When you’re working with the top level operators, they all have a giving mindset. They all have the abundance mentality. They don’t hide their secrets from you. They’ll tell you exactly how to do it because it’s not a mystery how to do this. It’s just doing it with the right people not getting caught up in the wrong parts at the wrong time that knock you out of being able to keep investing. So I completely agree with that.Dana Flanagan (12:08)
Okay.Micah Johnson (12:18)
I fully believe real estate is a relationship business, 100%. So much of it you can get by just going to your local meetup once a month. Get on Facebook, there’s all kinds of ways to go find the free ones first. The ones where you do end up paying to get into, there’s valuable people there. There’s a reason why people pay to be inside them. So I love the idea of telling an investor, hey, pump the brakes just a second.Dana Flanagan (12:21)
So.Micah Johnson (12:47)
You don’t have to buy the house yet. You don’t have to put the capital down. You can take time to learn this phase first before jumping right in. I feel like that part gets skipped a lot.Dana Flanagan (12:59)
Mm-hmm, that’s such an important piece of it. You know some of these the best events I’ve been to are Paid events and there’s a reason for that because people that have money will pay to collapse time and to put themselves in rooms that are going to give them their highest ROI in the shortest amount of time and so when you see these pay-to-play events The quality of people that are there it weeds out the tire kickers and the people that aren’t serious and the people that are trying to Pretend to be something that they’re notAnd you’ll find that that’s where you’ll see some of the private, you know, a lot of family office, private funders, people that can actually just write a check, uh you know, millionaires, billionaires are there. And if they like your project, it might be a different scenario. I have seen the situation where we’ve gone to somebody that we know that’s just a check writer, right? They like the project. not, they’ll overlook, you know, they’re going to fund privately. They’ll overlook maybe the fact that you don’t have all your ducks in a row because they really, really like
I had a pickleball sneaker one time. The guy had a great product, but he didn’t have all his ducks in a row. And it was sort of a startup, but this guy loved pickleball. He’s like, anything pickleball, I’ll fund. So he’s a multi, multi-millionaire, maybe even a billionaire. But he loved anything pickleball. And he specifically said, find me something that I can put my money into that’s pickleball. Great. So you’ll find situations like that. But when you go to these events, those are the kind of people that you’re going to meet. And you’re going to find.
that in the end, if you want to keep doing this, it’s going to make your life a whole heck of a lot easier. If you’re able to go to your contacts that you’ve established these relationships, the respect that you’ll gain from the people that are at these events is going to be so much different than just some random, you know, random people throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks, which is what you find in a lot of these like Facebook groups and things like that. So, you know, take the time. It’s going to probably take you some money.
to go spend on a plane ticket, a hotel, going to these events, you have to invest in yourself because in the end you’re gonna spend more time and more money doing the trial and error than you would if you just get yourself around the right people and connect with those people that are gonna make those introductions for you. And you’ll find once you get in those rooms, those rooms are small. I see the same people all across the country at the same events.
And it’s, again, it’s a big group of people, but it’s also a small, you know, it’s a small world, right? So word travels fast when people don’t do right by other people. And when people do right by other people, word also travels fast. And that’s where you’ll see things multiply.
Micah Johnson (16:20)
couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more with that because it’s the fact that you’re in a vetted room with people at higher levels than you and the level you’re at. One thing I noticed too, and you mentioned it, It is it’s a big world, or it’s a lot of people, but a small space. And one thing I’ve noticed in my years of going to them, this is what the best do. The best are in these rooms. They’ve learned long ago, you don’t do this alone. Nobody’s a self-made anything. You’ve gone out and put yourself in connected with other people.to give you your best chance at succeeding, which is what we all wanna do anyways, right? We actually wanna pull this off. And you nailed this a second ago talking about this is a business that you’re building. There’s a certain mentality that you need to bring to that. I love sports and was an athlete growing up, but it’s the professional athlete mentality. That’s no hobby anymore. They’re not just messing around. It is a very serious endeavor, day in and day out. It’s not that you don’t enjoy it or love it.
but you’re constantly putting yourself in a position to win. And how what better way to do that than by finding these rooms, especially we were talking again beforehand that you’re in the business development space. That’s an area that you like to be in and and help with this very thing. So I love that.
Dana Flanagan (17:36)
Yeah, and it’s funny that you say that too, because I’m an athlete myself and grew up playing a ton of sports and I still do play several sports and it’s just a different mentality. Because when you grew up playing sports, it’s very structured. You know what you got to put into it to get out of it. And that’s such an important analogy. So I can totally relate to that.Micah Johnson (17:56)
It helped me the most. tried to play professional golf and that journey taught me so much about running a business about just who has to show up each day to do it. Like you’re talking about one of the biggest leisure sports in the world that when you try to play at a high level, it is anything but leisure at that point. Like it is mentally taxing to go do this thing people do on their vacation. However, it just really opened my eyes to so much andDana Flanagan (18:13)
Right.you
Micah Johnson (18:24)
So many things even tie back into real estate. It’s one of the reasons I like real estate is how big it is. You know, we were talking about your career a little bit and you can expand on it if you’d like, but 25 years in the business, you’ve been all over doing all sorts of kinds of things, but all under this umbrella that lets you just keep growing.Dana Flanagan (18:28)
Mm-hmm.Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I started
as your regular real estate agent in my town and, you know, back in Connecticut where I grew up and now I’m in North Carolina and I flourished in that for a long time. And then I started branching out to making referrals and growing my real estate business across the country. And then I got involved in luxury real estate and then I started working with
family offices and high net worth individuals, not on a funding side, but on the white glove service concierge side. So I was always about providing extreme service to my clients. And I noticed that within family offices, they’re super private. They’ve got their own CPA, their own attorney all in house. They didn’t have a real estate advisor. When I was speaking to one of my friends who owned a family office,
I said, I think that’s really funny that you do so much real estate and you don’t have somebody in house that’s like an advisor. And he’s like, well, I don’t understand how you would help me outside of this town. Like thinking on a bigger level, like you’re only licensed in this state. And I was like, well, that’s not true. I can help you anywhere. So a light bulb went off and I thought, my gosh, what if I created a white club service concierge for family offices? And that’s what I did. And so that put me into a lot of rooms that…
Honestly, you know I really felt like I had to earn my way in, especially you know with my background. And it’s a very male-dominated industry. It really is. And so I did that. And a lot of people started asking me for funding. And I needed to really figure out how I could provide the best service possible to people that were asking for, I mean, we’re talking $350 million deals, hotels. And so what I would do is I would meet these hoteliers.
And they would say to me, we did this, that, and the other thing. And I’m thinking, well, why did you do that? My first job ever was in the hotel industry. And so I worked my way up in the hotel industry before I got into real estate. So I know hotels. And I said to them, why would you do this when you really should have done it like this? And they’re like, well wow, can you come out to my hotel and assess it? So I started being a consultant for these resorts and developments. So not only could I provide my real estate background and my, you know,
analysis in that way, but I also looked at it from a hotel standpoint, and I also was able to help them with funding. So I became very valuable in a space where most people are in one lane. And so that’s really what I, I really tried to work that angle. And so I, you know, again, I’m not, I’m an expert in a lot of things, but again, I’m not like, I’m not the person underwriting your loan. Like that’s not what I’m going to be doing, but I’m going to be able to get you to move the needle forward with your business.
So it’s been a lot of fun and it’s put me in a lot of rooms. It’s actually led to some TV media deals. And, you know, we just got a deal with Ritz Carlton with, with hosting for their resort, which is something that I also do now. So you just never know when you put yourself in the right rooms with people where it’s going to lead. And it’s been such a fun ride. And I’ve learned a lot along the way. I’ve definitely had, you know, I had somebody not pay me, you know, over six figures last year.
Micah Johnson (21:41)
Nice.Dana Flanagan (21:55)
And that really stung and that was a hard lesson to learn because I always look at things as you know in real estate, was really regulated, right? It had to run through a brokerage. And when I run my own business, that’s pretty regulated. But when you’re relying on somebody else to pay you and they can skirt around you and cut you out and contracts don’t mean anything in some of these instances, I’ve seen a lot of things in the funding world that I didn’t see before. And so I want to try to prevent those things from happening.Micah Johnson (21:56)
Mm.Dana Flanagan (22:25)
to potential clients of ours and people that are getting into the space that are very green and they’re not quite sure what the next step is, go with a professional. And that’s what we do at our firm is we really assess your business. And if we need to take a step back and put together a data room for you, a pitch deck for you, because we can’t present it to our investors or our lenders, you got one shot.You don’t want to send them piecemeal things together. And that’s what some people do just to try to get things to stick. And it never works. So just be very careful who you’re aligning with.
Micah Johnson (22:59)
Excellent point. And we were talking about that ties back into earlier, just taking your, there’s no rush in this business there. It’s funny. I, you meet people that are all in a hurry and it’s like, no matter what, like there’s still all these little pieces that have to take place that you have no control over of the underwriting process. These other things they take days. And if you’re just in a big hurry, it doesn’t work out. It’s not, it doesn’t get that needle forward. So looking ahead, what are you most focused on solving or scaling next?Dana Flanagan (23:22)
Yeah.Yeah, so I mean, I think right now we’re looking at just really scaling our capital firm. We’ve really tightened up you know who we work with and how we work. And so that’s super important to us right now is really just getting some really great clients that… And we’d love some repeat clients. We have some really great ones now. We’d love more people that are doing hotels all over the country or all over the world even, resorts.
multifamily, several big projects is really what we love to help with. And fix and flips is that can be, you know, a solo fix and flipper or people that do it on a large scale. and I’m, you know, I do a lot of coaching and speaking to on with startup companies on being investor ready and also on how to market yourself on social media, which doesn’t really apply here, but, I’m scaling, you know, I’m scaling that I have a book coming out this, this month called burnout to brilliance. So people that are reinventing themselves.
midlife and that’s kind what I’ve done and some of it was by accident and some of it was on purpose. But you know we’re all just doing the best we can every day and we’re all just trying to move the needle forward. But what I find a lot is that people don’t want to stop and take a second to collect themselves when they’re trying something new or they’re trying to go for their first you know flip or invest you know investment property. They’re writing the contract and signing a contract and I see this happen a lot and I go dear god.
before they even have money to buy it. So, I mean, they’re losing deposits because they’re like, I’ll just go get funding later. And so take a step, a second to stop and do things the right way and prepare yourself to win. That’s the biggest thing that I can say about what I see. And it’s very simple yet people don’t, everyone wants instant gratification, right? They just want to get going right now and they don’t want to do the things that are needed in order to get them to where they want to be. In the end, it’s going to cost them more time and more money.
Micah Johnson (25:20)
Always, always. They always know how much money they’re saving, but never know how much they’re losing. That is what I found time and time again. There’s nowhere to rush to. So I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. We’ve taken it. If someone wanted to connect, collaborate, or learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?Dana Flanagan (25:25)
Right.So true.
Yeah, so our company is Nautix Capital. So it’s N-A-U-T-I-X Capital. You can find me at Dana at NautixCapital.com and our website is NautixCapital.com. So we would love to help you with any of your investment needs or your funding needs for your projects. Not just real estate, by the way. We do POs. We do all sorts of things, so merchant advances. So um not just not just straight real estate funding. So you’ll see everything on our site there.
Micah Johnson (25:59)
Excellent.Excellent. So if you’re looking to work with somebody who helps you get investor ready, make sure you are have all your ducks in a row and connected to the right things. Reach out today and we’ll make sure information’s in the description. Again, I really appreciate your time story and perspective. I think more people need to be out in the space like you are doing it the right way, making sure you’re actually helping and servicing those clients. So for those tuning in, if you got value out of this, please like this episode, subscribe to our podcast.
We got more conversations coming up with operators just like Dana who are out in the real world building real businesses. Thank you so much. We’ll see you on the next episode.
