Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this conversation, Dylan Silver interviews Calvin Germinaro, an account executive at Agora, discussing the complexities of managing deal flow in real estate. They explore the competitive landscape for fund managers and syndicators, the importance of operational efficiency, and the challenges faced in property management and investor relations. Calvin emphasizes the need for streamlined systems to avoid bottlenecks and improve communication across teams. The discussion also highlights Agora’s role in centralizing operations to enhance efficiency and transparency in real estate investments.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Calvin Germinaro (00:00)
Yeah, no, I completely agree. In today’s market, there’s just so much volume. ⁓ think the biggest thing that people are running into right now is they’re underwriting so many deals, but even the ones that do make it past that, they’re still then going into a bidding war in a very competitive market. So a lot of capital to deploy, a lot of deals out there. And really it comes down to just having an operational advantage.you would put it any sort of advantage ⁓ in making sure that you’re not only winning those deals, but then you’re able to manage them, create the returns for your investors, and ultimately be able to scale your business.
Dylan Silver (02:14)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Calvin Germinaro, is an account executive with Agora, where they help investors, fund managers, and syndicators manage deals and deal flow. He’s also a former Team USA international wrestler. You can find him on LinkedIn or on Instagram at Calvin underscore Germinaro. Calvin, thanks for taking the time today.Calvin Germinaro (02:33)
Appreciate it. Thank you, Dylan, excited to be here. Excited to talk about really everything right now.Dylan Silver (02:39)
Absolutely, you know, when we talk about managing deal flow and how this is so important right now, we were talking a little bit before hopping on here, Calvin, you know, to be a successful syndicator, a fund manager, you’re now competing with not just people who’ve been doing this, you know, for long periods of time, but also a lot of people who are now coming into this space who are either raising capital themselves, you know, working with family offices, there seems to be more.of this happening. And so I was mentioning to you, you people have to have a competitive advantage and they’ve also really got to have streamlined systems and processes to where they know exactly where everything is in each step of the process, right?
Calvin Germinaro (03:23)
Yeah, no, I completely agree. In today’s market, there’s just so much volume. ⁓ think the biggest thing that people are running into right now is they’re underwriting so many deals, but even the ones that do make it past that, they’re still then going into a bidding war in a very competitive market. So a lot of capital to deploy, a lot of deals out there. And really it comes down to just having an operational advantage.you would put it any sort of advantage ⁓ in making sure that you’re not only winning those deals, but then you’re able to manage them, create the returns for your investors, and ultimately be able to scale your business.
Dylan Silver (03:58)
I’d like to talk specifically about where investors are facing obstacles, specifically when they’re managing these deals. Some of the things that come to mind from the outside looking in is you of course have to be collecting rents. You might be dealing with some level of forced appreciation, but you also have to be just in general managing the property, whether that’s doing it yourself or hiring out property management. Where are you seeingare the typical bottlenecks that investors and syndicators, fund managers will face when they are working through the first couple of years of a deal, let’s say.
Calvin Germinaro (05:24)
Yeah. I, I mean, not to sound cliche, but it really does come down to systems. So not just from a software perspective. mean, we don’t even really deal a lot on the property level, but property management, managing the rent collection, how that ties into your investor relations and your kind of investment capital management, all of those different domains, you really have either one of three options, right? You’re doing it all yourself. And if you’re doing everything yourself,You frankly do not have the time of the day to scale. You’re probably pulling your hair out. It’s not a very enjoyable experience. The other way is that you’re building out a giant team and that’s cutting into your margins, trying to have everybody manage all these different domains. And then the third is being able to build out those scalable systems. And obviously that kind of ties into every type of business, but being able to think of everything we just talked about as kind of check boxes. And you go into the first one.
And you figure out maybe on your first deal, what works, what doesn’t, and continuously kind of refine that system, but do so where you’re not necessarily having to completely outsource it, but you’re not also having to spend all of your time doing it. When you can build those systems out, you’re not, you’re not really stuck in as many bottlenecks. And then that really shows where the big ones are. Then you can put more time and emphasis into actually trying to work through those.
you start doing it yourself, there’s a million problems. You don’t realize what ones are actually problems until you’ve kind of ironed out and got rid of the really minuscule things. And then once you have the main ones, that’s really where you can start to focus on. I think that’s what the approach people need to take, especially starting out.
Dylan Silver (07:03)
I’d to get a little bit granular if we can here Calvin. In let’s just say that the first year of a deal, which I think can be pivotal because you might have to make changes with property management or keep the same property managers in but tweak some things. You’re now dealing with rehab on the property potentially as well, increasing rents. So you’ve got a lot of spinning plates in the air. Are there specificthings that you see investors making mistakes with on a systems level, whether that’s something as maybe small as the way that they’re communicating with vendors, or it could be something as large as they’re completely mismanaging the property itself and they’re not able to, let’s say, keep tenants in place because there’s major issues happening on the property.
Calvin Germinaro (07:53)
Yeah, I think really the three main areas that take up the most time for an emerging manager and emerging syndicator is going to be the property management side. So anytime that they’re having to actually go out to their properties, waste an entire day to do so, that’s cutting into literally every other part of the business. The other two are going to be your kind of deal flow, cap table management, the financial aspects. If you’re consistently having to focus on managing everything in that sense.Again, if you don’t have the other systems in place, you’re spreading yourself too thin. Whether that is reporting, whether that is kind of deal level accounting, you have to be able to have those domains more or less working asynchronously. If you’re spending your time constantly on your computer, constantly living on Excel, you’re not going out and looking for new deals. You’re not going to go out and scope new capital. And then that third part is the investor relation side.
Ultimately, you need that capital coming in to then to be able to scale and bring in more deals. And if you’re doing that very sporadically, if it’s, it’s my friends and family, and I’m just trying to live off my address book and really my threat of text messages, you’re spending way too much time. You’re not doing that systematically. And it’s not ultimately helping you bring in more capital. And then the moment you do start to go up market, as you mentioned in the beginning of show, maybe talking to family offices,
maybe talking to larger groups, you can’t talk to them the same way that you talk to your uncle and your cousin and your high school buddy.
So I think those three ones is ironing out. I, I worry on saying institutional cause you don’t want to like take huge jumps, but you almost have to operate at like an institutional level when it comes to how you’re engaging with new capital and then being able to make sure that you’re not wasting time going to the property all the time. then
that at least allows you to focus on the deal stuff. And ultimately, hopefully you’re also being able to run that more asynchronously. But I think from what I’ve seen, manage the capital, manage the investor relations, have the property managed in some way, or form, and at least allow you to focus on the excels, the deal flow, the underwriting, because that is what’s going end up bringing in the cashflow.
Dylan Silver (10:40)
Yeah, and you know, what’s interesting about these larger deals is people often will specialize in one portion of it. So you might have a team and one person is gonna be raising the capital or working with family offices to raise the capital. Another person is gonna be focused specifically on acquisitions and on reaching out to potentially distressed sellers and so forth, even if it’s a apartment complex, right? And then you might have someone who’s specifically working on thattransitional part, a portion of it, whether it’s putting in new property management, they may be vertically integrated themselves and managing it, or doing some type of value add rehab. And so when you’re having all those moving pieces together, can sometimes be a little bit segmented and that can create challenges as well. So I’m imagining one of the things that Agora is helpful with is really piecing so many of those parts together.
so that it’s all under one roof.
Calvin Germinaro (11:39)
Yeah, I mean, you hit it right on the head there. think the two main things that I always tell people about what Agor is going to do at the highest of high levels is it’s going to centralize all of those things into one place. So now you never are running into those situations where the right hand isn’t talking to the left hand because everybody’s logging into a centralized operating system. And you can see your deal flow. You can see your capital raising pipeline. You can see your distributions being paid out likeEverybody has full transparency into what’s going on. So it allows for like a strict level of cohesion across the org. And then the other beautiful thing about bringing on our system is that when you have everything in one place, those systems begin to talk to one another. So you aren’t wasting as much of time doing the manual side of things. Like if I want to go and carry out a distribution, I can go do the waterfall calculations, the actual allocations, the payments, the reporting on it, all of those things.
extremely easily. And then that’s automatically going to be reflected on the cap table. So there’s no manual reconciliation on my end. So that allows you to, again, maybe do things that you’re working with the capital raisers investor group, but you’re also working with your controller who’s doing the payments and you have somebody in the operations that oversees the deal. And all of those different pieces are happening in one place and they’re not all having to live off a bunch of different excels.
They’re not all having to sit there and manually communicate with one another and kind of kill time in the office, if you will. They can all operate really autonomously, working off the same single source of truth, and then eliminating a lot of the manualness that comes from being able to have every different domain talking and working with one another.
Dylan Silver (13:21)
Yeah, mean that in and of itself can create bottlenecks, right? So when people are having to, you know, relay messaging and…check between multiple different departments or segments of a business and not have everything under one roof. It can create a ⁓ potential obstacle towards not just that deal, but also other deals as well. Because if you’re looking at it, well, okay, I have all these moving pieces together for this deal and now I’ve got to go transition and go over here. It creates almost this level of like…
interpersonal lack of cohesion because now you’re communicating across teams and it’s challenging versus having it all under one roof. really does make a big difference. I’m also looking at it from the perspective of single family investing, which is a different game, But ⁓ single family investors deal with something similar, which is they may be strong suited towards
just doing the rehab portion of it, or they may be a developer and that’s their strong suit, but they might not have that ⁓ capital raising skillset. And so they may be needing to partner with people. And so in those instances as well, everyone wants to be able to see what’s going on in their partners. ⁓
segment of the real estate space. They want to make sure that, ⁓ how is the project moving along? How is capital being dispersed? And then also on the back end too, what does the rent roll look like? How has that been going on? And so that lack of communication can definitely create problems, not just in one deal, but in deals down the road as well.
Calvin Germinaro (15:44)
Yeah, I I see it all the time. In fact, I had, it wasn’t on the single family level, a smaller market, small business segment, if we will, group that was doing it. And when I spoke to them talking, just hearing other operations, how things are working in their firm, they literally had a woman who, she was on the operational side and all of the people that were capital raising that were actually going and bringing on the investors, getting the subdocs signed, they’d have to go.Walk down the hall to her to make sure an investor actually signed. And then the people doing the acquisitions were also walking down the hall to her to bring on new deals. And then if all of a you know, a subdoc wasn’t signed, if for some reason a deal wasn’t fully subscribed, they’re not walking back down the hall. That main woman, like bless her soul, she’s not even doing her own job because she’s having to manage all of these different things. And they’re also not only having to take the time out of their day to actually get up out of their desk and go walk, but every little thing that they
immediately hand off and then lose transparency on. Now they’re having to backtrack. The person I was speaking with, he’s now onto that next deal. He’s raising capital for his next deal. And then he’s just getting a notification that his previous deal isn’t actually fully capitalized because one or two investors didn’t actually finalize their sub docs. And now he hasn’t been thinking about that deal for two, three weeks. He’s wondering what the heck’s going on. He’s now having to go bug and take a few other people out of their jobs.
Dylan Silver (16:41)
thisThat’s right.
Calvin Germinaro (17:05)
And all of this is just, again, whether it’s at that scale or when it comes down to a single family investor trying to live off like a G Suite Google docs kind of approach or whatever it may be, that level of just lack of communication, you put it, lack of cohesion is going to be a huge operational inefficiency as they look to not only manage the deals they’re doing, but also hopefully grow and scale down.Dylan Silver (17:29)
We are coming up on time here, Calvin. Any new projects that you’re working on or the team at Agora is working on, and then also as well, what’s the best way for folks to reach out to you?Calvin Germinaro (17:39)
Yeah, so new projects, we have a lot of really cool things going on with ⁓ our system right now as it is. We immediately started with building out the operating system of what you’re doing on the capital activities level.We’ve also now built out an accounting center to bring in your bookkeeping and your financial or your tax and all the different financial services into one centralized place. bringing in some business intelligence and asset level stuff. Like essentially what we want is when you wake up and you’re sipping your morning coffee, you’re able to log into one single place and everything at that investment level is going to sit there for you. So that’s kind of the Agora side of things.
As it applies to getting in touch with me, whether it’s just real estate in general, you guys have deals, you guys are looking for a Gora. I’m here to network. I’m here to be a resource. Usually the best way, either LinkedIn, you can also just shoot me a text or a call at 763-954-0568. I’m always on my phone. Yeah, pretty easy to get in touch either those ways.
Dylan Silver (18:41)
Calvin, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for coming on the show.Calvin Germinaro (18:45)
Appreciate it. Thank you too, Don.
