Appearances, continued.

Yeah, you know, first off, if you're going for easy, if you want an easy life, then just stick to whatever it that you're doing. There's no really, it's like choose your heart, right? I heard one of my mentors said that choose your heart. They say they're going to be hard, you're waking up in the morning, I'm going to a job for the rest of your life, it's going to be hard, you figuring out how to acquire this asset.

So, never been afraid to, for work, never been shy to take [inaudible], and I know [inaudible], and like I said, I'm excited about our viewers just getting to see things from your perspective, and so let's be honest, I want to dive in. I want you to tell people what your main focus is these days. I would love for you, maybe, if you want to get into the real estate space, and also, tell us what market that you're operating in as well. Sounds great.

great multifamily assets a what that essentially means is we buy apartment communities these are communities that are at least a hundred units or more we primarily focus in the southeastern markets we love the Atlanta market we buy a lot of deals in Atlanta so and we do this the reason for us doing this is to serve a community, a demographic that we needed this and did not have access to this. I'm part of that demographic myself. I'm am a busy professional, 9-5 professional, or at least I used to work as a nurse and a status in the hospital. Healthcare provider did that for over 10 years.

And while working at the hospital, you know, you're given all these different investment options. You could invest in stocks, you could invest in this 401k and all of this. But, when we came across the ability to own apartment complexes, we realized that a lot of members in our community do not even know that this asset class is available to them. But guess what?

to break that middle ground. A platform where busy, hardworking professionals like ourselves can have direct access. RYAN HARRIS Stop living on an island and join the number one mastermind in America for professional real estate investors. Investor Fuel is a community of hundreds of the nation's top investors working together to build stronger businesses and better lives.

In addition to the amazing community of real estate investors acting as a board of advisors I life-of-your-dreams, please visit InvestorFuel.com today and book a call with our team. Direct access to ownership of which does the premise on which XSITE Capital was founded back in 2019. And we are so grateful and really, really grateful and excited because since then we've acquired over 243 million of apartment communities across the U.S. with a group of investors.

Loving. I want to make sure I heard the name right. XSITE Capital. Did I hear that correct?

Excite. XSITE Capital. Excite. Got you.

I apologize. XSITE Capital. Man. Mr.

Leslie, I absolutely love it. I love it. the opportunities that you're creating, how you, empowering people, how you're looking at people, that's actually the backbone of our policy b but you, like, listen, you've been a You served well, how can you create a better opportunity for you to get your hands on true wealth. And I love how you said didn't say it to the audience, but you said it to me that the wealth is with the mindset.

And so I absolutely love that man. and I'm gonna mindset a little bit here because you made it sound easy. What are some of the secrets that you saw, sir? Yeah, you know, the first off, if you're going for easy, if you want an easy life, then just stick to whatever it is that you're doing.

There's no really, it's like choose your heart, R.I. One of my mentors said that choose your heart is either gonna be hard you waking up in the money I never been afraid to, for work, kind of keep this machine run in the way that it does. Good point. So, we've learned along the way, right?

We've figured out a lot of stuff along the way. Again, the biggest part of the system is first of all starting with a vision. You R gotta have a clear vision of where you wanna go, right? bigger than Dr.

Julius, only 10 of myself are acquiring apartment buildings and it was about us bringing access to a community that did not have access to this. And be able to do that in a way that has never been done before. So that is a bigger vision. That's the beginning part of the system because it's that vision that pulls you forward.

Then as you go along the, you have to ave the right structures in place, you have to build the right systems, right teams, right organization structures. One system that really helped us, one of our where he teaches the Entrepreneur Operating System, EOS. call with our team today. You know, I remember it was, we spoke to our mentor in December.- We got the book, read it, all three of us.

January, the next year we went. All of us met in North Carolina. Locked ourselves in a cheap hotel, in a conference room, and we locked in there. We implemented traction in our business.

And three months later, sorry, we acquired our first large apartment R community. Because at that time the vision now had met an operating system that we could follow, that focuses directly on our goals and we implement that step by step as we go along the way. So systems is key. I'm glad that you brought that up.

Having the right systems is going to help you move towards that vision much faster. Sure. Yeah, one of my mentors said to me, when you know who you are, you know what to do. And I've been living in that, like when you know your why, when you know who you are, when you know what drives you do, You could play a person in any situation, when they know who they are, they know what to do.

they know what's going to power them forward. And so when I listen to you, when you look at the bigger while, it's just not about me. Like, I'm a bridge builder. I'm a connector.

And everybody's connecting to me. And that way, that keeps me moving forward. And whatever situation I'm in, I know what to do. That's why attraction sounds so inviting to you as a, because one, it was from your mentor.

And two, you wanted to gain traction in what you were doing. So I'm just saying, it just sounds to me, you know who you are. And that powers you forward. That's what I'm trying to say.

Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And so I love you, I love your mindset. And so I always tell people, we just don't want to show people.

The success. We want to show people the journey of how they got to the success. And so I'm you've been in it long enough. I think 2019 is when I broke down.

I believe that's what I heard you say. That's what days when I got going. So I know you always said you choose your heart. So there are times when things get real, when deals go sideways, times when you have to pivot fast.

And I was wondering maybe if you could share a story like that a, again, to show the viewers that there is a journey in a pathway to success, and it always doesn't come just when everything is just hunky-d, if you know what I mean. I hear my story and they're inspired to go do it. And I think sharing some of the challenges in the early part of the journey might be helpful. So when we started to acquire this assets, you have to raise capital.

You have to raise capital from investors, obviously we don't have the millions of dollars or stuff to go do it. So you have to identify a group of investors and raise capital from, and then you. Manage the assets and you provide your investors the return. So when we started, all right, H we're so excited, get out there, start pushing, but we were so afraid to talk about this vision to the community that we initially set up this platform to serve.

We were so afraid to talk about it to our colleagues, to our friends and other people. So we thought the greatest idea was to go to a real estate community and go find people that already investors and talk to them. So, that's what we. did and went to a bunch of real estate conferences, got a few investors.

We had an opportunity We reached out to one of those investors and all we had to raise The ladies were like, yes, we got you guys, we love the deal. We presented the deal, sent them the underwriting, everything. They were so excited. They were like, oh, we got you.

You don't need to raise. more capital or bring the half a million dollars to the deal. So my partner and we started celebrating. We actually went and bought a drink, sat at my house, and we were having a nice drink and celebrating and it's funny enough because while we're there celebrating one of my friends came over she's a doctor and she was asking why are you guys don't worry about it we're doing big things you know we are the guys you know and guess what a few weeks later we're calling the investors that self-committed crickets crickets no response no response calling calling calling no response.

So that deal fell a pot, right. So we were not able to get on A lot of people you face that challenge, they'll be like, man, this is not for me. dealing and all of this other stuff, right, but this is what we did. We sat back and asked ourselves, okay, what is it that we were not doing that we could do better, we reached out to other people that have been successful that are mentors and said, hey, what are we doing wrong?

And they told us exactly what we're doing wrong, which we're not talking to the right people, we're not providing this opportunity to the right people who really need it, right? . We're letting our fears guide our direction vision to guide our direction. That's one very powerful thing because when you set that vision, you gotta let it guide your direction, not your fears.

The vision is going to be so big that a lot of fears will come from all over the place and try to stop you. And fears might come and distract you and move you away from that path. So you gotta let your vision guide your direction and that, and that's exactly what we started doing, and things just r took off from there. So while that was a challenge and many people call it a failure, it not so many other challenges.

It is part of the game. It is part of the journey. Doesn't matter what path you choose, you're going to have challenges. Better go for something big and deal with those challenges.

Yeah. Man, I can't help but when I hear you talk proverbs kind of jumped off the screen to me. like old ancient proverbs. And there's a proverb that says, division is foreign point in time, and when they hear division, they will pick up the vision.

completely transformed the platform, right? That's what made us who we are today, you know, so Yeah, no, I love it, man. I love a lot of what you guys doing excited capital. Yeah, I got it right that time, right XSITE Capital.

That's X R-X-X site. What am I doing X site? I got it, man, I'm just, I'm, I guess, because excited is my word, because I really, I'm excited about what y'all are doing, like, it's really, as, you know, it's something about people in businesses that serve people. When they serve people, you know, that's something I think is just one of the greatest way to a sustainable business is when you actually, serve, serving people, not serving yourself, but serving people and connecting with people.

And that's when I'm here what you're doing and it excites me. And so let me ask you this, Lesney, what are you most focused on, solving or scaling next? Like what's the next real goal for XSITE Capital? So we have acquired 243 million of assets.

Probably our goal is to get to a billion of assets in like the next two years. And to get there, we require people. the biggest focus that I'm focused. Because we're.

kind of transitioning from that phase of like the founder doing everything every day to actually bring in and qualified people that are. taking the Rams and doing all of that. We are so blessed. I'm so grateful.

We have an amazing team right now. So we're growing that team and bringing in more people to fill in those gaps. So that's what I'm focusing on right now as a leader is to make myself better, to improve myself, to constantly get better as a leader to constantly get better as that person that is able to create other leaders within the organization that could lead us into this vision. Because for us to get there, we have to serve a lot of people, right?

We have to serve a lot of, we have to present value to a lot of people. So we need the right people and the right people to help us accomplish that mission. Yeah, yeah. You know, it sounds to me what's happening is that you're making sure your foundation is certain.

that way, the heavier y'all grow, the weight comes on the foundation, the foundation ain't gonna crumble. And it seems like y'all are scaling the business and building at the right pace to me, yeah. Absolutely, I love to look at nature, to help out life from nature perspective.. And when it comes to growth, you can look at example of a plant or a tree.

There are two sides to growth, right? There's the growth underneath and there's the growth that goes on top, right? So if you're looking, if you're going after like a strong, big enough go that growth, the roots at the bottom needs to be solid to hold that tree that will grow so high up in the sky that it could hold it down. You know, so if we, if you start growing and you just focusing on what's on the surface, yeah, any wind that blows is going to break that plant down.

Right. So that's the foundation that we focusing on making sure that we have our roots planted very well, deep within the soil, build those foundations, those systems, those people in place, that could sustain that level of growth. So that's where the focus is at. Beautiful analogy, beautiful, sir.

And so this is a good transition point because you're talking about building a team, making sure the right people are in place. I'm listening to you. You talked about three of y'all locked yourself in a room. You talked about your mentor.

So it's talking about the people that you serve and bringing people in and to the vision. So it sounds like it's very good at valuing relationships. So I just wanna talk about relationships for a little bit and building relationships. And so when it comes, building those relationships and growing your network, Right, and for a very long time, I shied away from my C.

a lot of friends in life, at one of my mentors in the RNA community, that was like, Leslie, why are you not a telling me about this? Like, this is, you're a good guy. I've just put $500,000 for somebody else. I'd rather invest that money with you because I know you.

You're true, sir, if you're a good guy. You know, our community needs to get this more. And so that authenticity, right, that is the power of building and relationships. I cannot tell you how many people are willing to a step up and say, you know what?

We got you. We're pushing for you because as a person the authenticity doesn't start when you start a business. It is you got to be who you are at every stage, whether you're doing business or not. And that's what is going to lead you forward.

That's what is going to help you build true relationship. So I'm grateful for that because that has also helped me now build really good relationships in my CRN community. Like some of our biggest investors at CRN is they are true advocates for what we do. They are out there referring and talking to other people about what we doing it just like Sometimes I get emotional about it.

It really warms my heart, you know I know the fact that I'm able to come back as a nurse and a status now I don't practice anymore now I'm coming back and I'm able to serve that community and give them value to them. I know how my colleagues work really hard to get to their careers I know how we struggle through school and all of that so I know. So, being able to provide value to that community is just something that's powerful. So, relationship building.

Just be authentic self. I think sometimes we try to mystify everything, a lot of things, a lot of different things. We try to that you read a lot of books and try to make all these techniques and all of that. No, just be authentic.

That programming, that human programming that we generated from our ancestors where we were able to just pick on somebody that's authentic. It hasn't gone away. So that authenticity is key. Yeah.

Man, listen, that's a mic drop moment, sir. Like you just said, just so much. Ah, man, you know, and I want to add to what you're saying. It's just a little bit of what I want to add.

Not only is the authenticity to building business, but a sustainable business. And to me, that's why when I look at what you're doing, it's already having success but it's going to be sustained success and so you guys are going to get to that one billion in assets because you know how to R to build off authenticity and it's going to be continue to be a sustainable a. I think every level you go to the foundation is will be sure and then we build that foundation is sure then we build like you said with the tree the roots are down deep and we're going to be good and so man I'm so excited about what you're doing. I cannot thank you enough for just rming through and just really rally just adding so much value to this platform.

So Mr. Leslie, listen, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to reach out to you, sir? So I am active on social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, and my name is Leslie Awas Rassam L-E-S-L-I-E-A-W-A-S those are my names in every social media platform. Reach out to me on Instagram, reach out to me on Facebook, reach out to me on LinkedIn, send me a DM.

You know, we have a very robust community like the conversations we had prior to starting this podcast. I mentioned to you that, we believe that True Generation Award is not just about passing assets from one generation to another, but the True Generation Award is passing knowledge from one generation to another. And that's something that we're really passionate about because we came into this knowledge, So we do a lot of free education. We teach a lot of people.

We have different communities that we got and teach different people. So, yeah, hit us and join me. Hit me up on Facebook, come join one of our presentations. We do have workshops and all of that.

So learn, use the knowledge, pass it down to your family members, invest in this assets because it's available to you. Well, listen, allow me to put some respect on your name because I mess your name up at the top. So let me circle back around. Mr.

Awasom. . How did I do, Awasom? You did amazing.

You said awesome before, and I'm not gonna take that away. You are awesome. You are awesome, but I wanna put some respect on your name. Mr.

Awasom, thank you so much, man. No, absolutely, man. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you for coming through with your story, with your time, with your perspective.

You have been really, really just an added gift to this platform, and I know our viewers. They just wanna love this episode. So again, sir, I thank you so much for being. Thank you so much for having me.

I truly appreciate you. Absolutely. So listen, y'all, y'all, y'all got the value y'all heard Mr. Leslie, we need you just to go ahead and subscribe.

I say it all the time. You do not want to miss out on these amazing conversations. I mean, come on, listen, now I'm being intentional. The guy was awesome.

Right, now I see, right, Mr. Leslie was awesome. And so we just want to make sure that you can continue to come in and get this content from these amazing people. So Mr.

Leslie, sir, I thank you so much, again, and listen to everyone else. We will see you on the next time. Thanks for joining us for today's real estate pros show. You can learn more about the amazing benefits of the investor fuel, mastermind community, including surrounding yourself with hundreds of other rock stars, 100% financing for your deals, and members only discounts from vendors you're likely already using that, as a member of Investor Fuel, will save you more than the cost of ,

Of course. We've done value add in the past. The very first deal that we bought, we bought for $12.55 million. We spent around, I think, $800,000 to do value-out on it.

And we ended up in that deal. We sold for $12.55 million and sold for $17.8 million. We projected 18% analyze return to our investors. We actually delivered 29.97%.

That That's a typical value-add deal. Welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show, where we interview real estate investing- professionals as well as the service providers that serve the real estate investing industry. Our goal is simple. Share what's working now to help you improve and scale your business to the next level R and meet the pros that can help you get there.

Real Estate Pros is powered by Investor Fuel,. America's leader in helping real-estate investors and professionals build the business you need to live the life you've always dreamed of. Let's start today's show. Property insurance for real estate investors doesn't have to be difficult but it does need to be there to protect you when you need it.

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Looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely. And, Tenny, just before we get into what you're doing currently, can you share a little bit about your background, because you do have, you come from an interesting place. Thank you.

Absolutely. I'd definitely love to share about who I am. I came into the United States to go to grad school, study for my master's degree. I have a background in engineering.

I studied electrical and electronics engineering in Nigeria. And then I came R to the United States to, you know, pursue higher education, graduated from grad school, got a job, started working with the likes of Deloitte and Boeing. I have worked there for over a decade and I was a global cybersecurity professional for over a decade and in 2024 I went full-time in this private equity firm that I created with two of my partners, Dr. Julius Oni and Leslie Awasom.

We co- we've co-founded XSITE Capital in 2019 and interestingly we've been building the company since 2019 and now we have about 243 million dollar worth of assets with our investors and we've distributed about eight million dollars to investors as well. So I'm looking forward to share with you all some of the things I've learned, some of the lessons that I've made me today. And hopefully some of you can see that there's a lot of possibilities out there and how you can take advantage of that as well. Absolutely, and how did you go from being a cybersecurity professional to being involved in real estate?

That's a really good question. So I came in went to school, graduated, got hired, right before I graduated from grad school, got hired. And I started working and once you start working and you start earning certain amount of income, a lot of people talk about American dream. And I got to understand that American dream is to actually own a house.

So I bought my very first property. My wife at the time was pregnant, and I'm not going to bring my first daughter in an apartment so we have to go get our house. I was like, yeah, let's do it. So we went and we bought our the very first house.

And that was the American dream achieved. But as you start growing in the ranks of your career, you start thinking about what's next, what, what's next. Of course, I have the other investment instrument like the 401k, the index fund, the index life insurance policy. Stop living on an island.

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I have a lot of these different instruments I have saved in this account. But in your mind, it's like everybody keep talking about real estate, if you want to invest real estate. And all I could think about at that point. It was, you know, maybe I should go buy, since I have my property now, maybe I should go buy me a single family home out there and put somebody in it so that they can rent it and I'll build wealth that way.

But one thing that me and my partners quickly realized was this. The folks that have actually viewed the Significa Real Estate, some of them have done it using single family homes, but the ones that have done it in a significantly big way have done it using commercial real estate. When I say commercial real estate, I'm talking about large multifamily properties, five-unit plus, multi-family real estate, I'm talking about hotels, malls, mobile home parks. All of these are considered commercial real estate, but we decided to focus on one and the one we focused on was multi-family real estate and there's a whole lot of advantages that comes with it and we looked at it we saw that there's an opportunity for we to go in there and acquire it but we had one big problem.

The big problem we had was once you go commercial the amount of money, that you need to acquire the deal as a down payment increases significantly from it goes from maybe a 25% all the way to 40% and imagine if you a one million dollar property you need to bring in between $250,000 to $400,000. So that is the challenges that, we faced and we now observe and started learning from a lot of people out there how they did it and what we observe is a group of people, group of professionals, busy professionals or doctors or IT professionals, they come together, the pool resources together to acquire these assets. So we were like, well, if our goal was to invest passively, create generational wealth and reduce our tax burden, and we have a lot of busy professionals that don't want to deal with the headache that comes with real estate, but they want the benefit that comes with real estate. What if we can help them get in real estate, to get cash flow, appreciation, tax benefits without lifting a finger, would that be appealing?

And we did a sample in our professional community and we saw that, man, a lot of people are looking for what we got. And that's how we, you know, peer to this company and now we have $243 million worth of deals we've done. We've raised over1959 million from our investors and we've distributed over eight, $8 million to investors passively. So the company's continuing to grow, we have big ambition.

And Skylar, to your question, that's exactly why I got into multi-family real estate. exactly i mean it makes a lot of sense to me and as we're talking about earlier right i think what's stops the majority of people from and go through all of that, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And-and well, and one of the things to observe is, like, um, a-a lot of these guys, they just wanna-they love the world, they've spent so many years working, and they wanna continue to do because it's-they went into that profession because they loved it.

They wanna continue to do that. And a lot of the times when they say Rne invest in real estate, when they start dealing with ten-and-a- they start dealing with a lot of the-the issues that come with real estate, it becomes another job. And because of that, they hate it, and they just decide not to do it at all. They have the job, they have families, they have kids, they have their hobbies, they have things they're interested in.

Even if they want to build wealth in real estate, a lot of these busy professionals don't want to spend that additional time to go learn about it and manage it and do all of that stuff. So what we've decided to do is to actually give investors all of the benefits. I'm talking about the tax saving strategy that comes with it. I'm talking about the cash flow that comes with it.

I'm talking about the appreciation that comes with it. I'm talking about a peace of mind of that. If you, you're looking for a consistent high-quality leads, look no further than Investor Machine. Investor Machine isn't just another agency.

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I'm Rorrying about not putting a credit score on the line. I'm talking about not worrying about who is the property management company or who is the tenant or vetting the tenant. All of that, you get to sit back and let us do that work, and of course for We're doing all of that work, we get paid, but usually these deals have enough money coming into these deals to manage, take care of all the expenses that come with the asset. I used to get a lot of returns.

Now, that that's a very, excellent point there. And let me ask you what type of properties, I know it's, you know, multifamily that you're focusing on, but what are those look like to you? do you want to at this point in the, you know, in the market now, Are you trying to find properties that you need to put a lot of work into and then value add? Do you want something that's a little bit more put-together?

What does that look like on your side? Yes. So we're trying to get assets that are a little bit more put-together. In today's world, cost of materials is pretty expensive.

If you're going to do value add. That means you're going to spend a lot of money doing a lot of renovation. So what we're trying to do is in what family-related states, you have class A all the way to class D types of assets. We try to focus on class A and class B assets right now, where we don't have to come in and spend a lot of money trying to do renovation and try to figure out how to value a lot, do a lot of value out, like a lot of people coming in and do a complete repositioning, meaning they spend $30,000, $50,50,.00 to renovate a unit.

We don't do all of that. Right. Now, if you buy a deal, our goal is we find a deal. Now it takes us more time to find this particular deal.

but when we find a deal, All we have to do now is to optimize operation, reduce expenses, and do what we call a very light value add, where we come in and maybe just put in, smart time will start, key less entry, looked at to do a little bit more on the value add side, correct, as business actually changes. Of course. And we've done value add in the past. The very first deal that we bought, we bought it for that's a typical value add deal.

But now since then, we've been buying a lot more Class A and Class B assets rather than value add deal because we've seen that you're still able to get those returns that you're projecting to your investors without having to do a lot of that front day you have to spend a lot of money. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And in what part of the country are you focused on right now?

So we buy deals in the Southeast currently. So currently we have deals in several states, we have deals in DC, in Baltimore, in Columbia, South Carolina. In Georgia, we have three deals in Georgia. We have a deal in Indiana.

But currently, where we're focusing on is North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. We're beginning to, I think, see a little bit. And the reason why we're buying these markets is basic economics, which is demand and supply, right? You want to buy properties in location where people are moving to.

Now, people are moving to this area wide, a lot of them want more space. A lot of people are moving from west, all the way to the southeast because they want more affordability. Some of them want jobs, jobs are good, crime is low. So a lot of these are things that are making us go to this market and we make sure we monitor the trend when it comes to population, growth before we go into a market to acquire these assets.

Absolutely. Okay. And any plans in the future of expanding to other markets or do you see yourself primarily sticking to the southeast right now? Oh, absolutely.

We're definitely going to move sometime in the future. Again, like I said, there's demand of supply where people are moving to where we want to be. If we see that in the next couple of years, other places like in the Midwest right now, there are some places, Columbus, Ohio. I was.

just looking at that data yesterday, seeing a significant amount of growth as well. Some other places in the Midwest are seeing growth. If you're a new or newer real estate investor looking to launch or grow your real estate investing business, please check out Investor Fuel Club. It's a coaching community, but unlike anything you've ever seen before.

And you can actually partner with members of our mastermind from coast to coast on deals right in your market. There's no better opportunity to build a consistent business, than to literally partner-with pros to help you avoid costly mistakes, avoid the need for capital to do deals, and help you eliminate your fears as you're starting your business. Nevada, Vegas, and Nevada is seeing a significant amount of growth, Dallas, Texas is seeing a significant amount of growth. That's a smart way to go about it, instead of just going and chasing deals.

Absolutely, absolutely. All right, so you're looking for class A and class B assets. We have a runch of deals comin into that for now, and we, have to go meaning in the last 12 months of income and expense for the last 12 months, we also look at all the tenants that have been on a property that have signed the lease for the last 12 12 months to do- when we see that all of this, it makes make sense. And we put it in our model and we a see that when we do all of this, the property have enough cashflow to produce returns for our investors.

We do not buy a deal that does not cashflow. They want. So we buy a deal that when we do all of this analysis and we acquired that the particular price, the asset have enough revenue to service debt, care of expenses and still produces cash flow to our investors. When we see that now we actually continue to increase the income on the asset because multifamily properties have valued based on the income the property is producing.

What we the operators have control over, is the income. Are we able to increase the income?. By doing more innovation, by adding more amenities, tech package, reserve parking, valet trash, all of this little income increases the value of the asset. So our job when we buy this asset is, can we identify opportunity for we to increase the income while we keep expense flat or reduce the expense.

If we see that, then we go in our buy the deal and then we execute our business plan of actually doing something to increase the income, and that income is called a net operating income on the assets. Okay, and how long are you typically holding the assets? rI r our whole time is five years, five to seven years, but we've been able to exit the deal in 21 months, meaning we're able to get invested investors, implement our business plan and exit in 21 months. That's our track record.

But we, typically, tell investors that we-we're going to hold the deal for five years because we. you need enough time, this is not get too rich quick, the system for us to take advantage of it to reduce our tax burden. How you use it is all dependent on you. Well one thing we as the operator would do we have to make sure we give you those depreciation or those tax savings benefits.

Even if it's a dollar that you use to reduce your tax burden that one dollar is what you can spend toward or send or direct towards your kids education, towards retirement, towards more grocery, towards your vacation towards charity, towards anything that you want to do for yourself and your family. So we always encourage you that if you want to actually reduce your tax, burden by investing, do that because real estate have a significant tax-saving strategy that you can use to reduce your tax, burden significantly, in addition to increasing your wealth-growing capacity. Yeah, absolutely. There's a ton of advantages.

So, important thing is you get the advantages r of owning you and your private equity firm, correct? Absolutely. He's 100. 100% passive to the investors.

100% passive. The only active part that we have them do is one, make sure you know, update your bank account information so that you get your distribution. Two, make sure you review the newsletter that was sent about the Make sure you review the newsletter that was sent about the performance of the asset every month. Three, make sure you join the quarterly call with all the investors.

And four, make sure you look out for your quarterly distribution and your K1 at the end of the year so that you can file your taxes. RYAN There you go. I like it. And you're still actively taking on investors at this point, correct?

All right, so if we do have some accredited investors that are listening to this podcast and they would like to get in touch with you, how. How can they do so? Please Skyler mentioned accredited investor. What does that mean?I means that you have to earn if you're single at least $200,000 a year and you'd have been making that for the last two years.

Or if you're married you need to be earning at least $300,000 a year and you'd have been ending that for the last two years. Or have a net worth of a million, excluding your primary residence. If you qualify as an accredited investor. You can reach out to me.

Just Google my name, Tolofari, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on all social media platforms. You can send me a direct DM or you can go to xicapital.com, meaning X-S-I-T-E, capital.com. You'll be able to get in touch with us that way. Excellent.

All right. Well, Tenny, thank you very much for hopping on the podcast. I know I learned a lot and for all of our listeners out there, if you got something of value from this interview here, please hit that subscribe button. We have got more and we have got more interviews just like this coming down the pipe all the time and.

We will see you all on the next episode. Thanks for joining us for today's real estate pros show. You can learn more. About the amazing benefits of the investor fuel mastermind community, including surrounding your of other rock stars, 100% financing for your deals and members only discounts from vendors you're likely already using that as a member of investor fuel will save you more than the cost of your membership.

Visit investorfuel.com to learn more. If you're interested in joining us as a guest of this show, please visit investorrefuel.com slash pros to apply. You can also check the show notes for access to free resources, how to get access to world-class lead generation, and. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss another episode.

Have a great day. We'll see you on the next show.

Hey everyone and welcome the first worst best in next. The real estate podcast where we chat with successful investors about their most memorable Rios we hear all about and we'll learn from their greatest struggles. So grab a seat and probably a notebook and enjoy the show. Everybody we have an awesome guest and it's full circle moment for me because this is somebody I was cold calling on a half a decade ago and now he's a guest on a podcast.

So our guest that I went from 60 hour weeks in cybersecurity to building a $217 million real estate portfolio with he and his partners and after climbing the corporate ladder he realized that he was still trade in time for money and shifted gears. And that's when he and his partners built XSITE Capital and that. Started helping other professionals do the exact same thing. He's delivered over $7.8 million in returns to over 300 investors.

And he's just getting started. Everybody, welcome to- the program. Teni guys are expanding and basically I had, in engineering One . I mean, I think in 2019, she still used to live in Maryland at the time.

Thanks. That's call. Now the drive from Charlotte to Charles St. South Carolina is three hours back.

One way. So I was like, well, I still waiting for him. So the 7 o'clock 730 715 730. And you who, excuse me, he rolled in at the 745 and he said, I got an 8 o'clock meeting.

Unfortunately, I'm so, sorry, I'm late. What do you want? You bought me coffee and we'll say, you know, I have 15 minutes, you know. And I told him, he was like, when did you come in?

I was like, I just came in this morning. And he was like, are you kidding me that you came out of the shower this morning? Oh, I'm so sorry. I feel so bad that I have to leave so early.

I say it's all good. And I'm reaching out to you because this is what many of my partners are looking to do. We're trying to expand into the Southeast. And we see that you're one of the key brokers in this market.

I wanted to personally come out and meet you and start talking and having conversations about how we can get deals done. And he was like, hmm, it's interesting. So he asked me what I've done in the past with my track record, who are my investors, and all that good stuff. And when it was all said and done, he said Tenny, you know what?

For the dedication and the effort, owe you a deal. And that was it. So he walked away. And then he left and they introduced to his colleague that not actually behave like he's a junior broker without having a conversation.

Because he's like one of the top. So you're like telling him not to have the time. So he introduced somebody else. So I stayed on that person.

Yeah, I stayed on that person. Because my title at XSITE Capital is the Head of Acquisition. I'm one of the founders. So we tried to look for deals.

So I stayed on him and just followed up and then we started sending us a bunch of bad deals until they send us one deal that we're on the road and it penciled. What I mean, penciled means that return metrics that we're projecting by investors made sense. But guess what? Because this is our very first deal.

We're panicking. How did this work out? I'm not sure this is true. Maybe we're listening something here.

They never penciled. What is this? Yeah, exactly. So my partner who's the one that we basically at the time was really on the writing.

You know, if I sell it to everybody, please take a look at it. Make sure we And he came out. Fortunately, we have to go with another group. But here's the one.

We have to call that in. They say, unfortunately, we have to go to another group, but you said this is the number we have to be at. We're there, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's like, no, you guys really don't have a track record.

This group, I have a track record deals in this market and this deal I'm talking about is from Columbia, South Carolina. Give me all the reasons why he feels like the other group is best. I was like, well, there's nothing I can do, you, the broker, you have talked to the seller and the seller feels like somebody else is more qualified than us. It's all good.

So you took the deal away and my philosophy is, if this is this not best, this one is going to be another one. Because this deal does not work, doesn't mean we'll burn the bridges, right? So I kept in touch with him, followed up with him like my normal kids every week or every other week, followed up with him and then one fateful evening, he called me and said, They used to want that deal. Subscores!

And that's the original deal. That original deal, yeah. So that's how we bought that deal, our very, very first deal 12. I-5 million dollar deal in Columbia, South Carolina.

And now that deal we've. We've actually bought and we've sold that deal. We sold it in April of 2021. We sold it in December of 2022.

We. We bought it for 12.5 million, sold for 17.8. So we made about a 5.3 million dollar profit in 21 months, we projected 18% average return to our investors who deliver 29.97% average on our return, with 40% depreciation at a time. So our,.

Our investors were super excited. That was a great success on that deal. And guess what? 2 weeks after we had bought the deal, there was a fire on it.

Oh, no. So we just bought the deal. Me, Dr. Oni Leslie, we went to Atlanta to good talk to the group that we bought the deal from over there and say, Hey, we just bought property.

Oh my goodness, as. as you're literally on the weight of the property. Ono. I went to Colombia and Ileda.

It was a 500 property, and we had two objectives to go to Colombia. We were going to go visit the property and visit the team. And then we had a mentor that is very, very accomplishing the space that we needed to go see as well. And we had a meeting with him at 1 p.m.

So the question I want to ask ourselves is this, well, we have a problem now. Do we have insurance? Is our property management company on site? Is somebody hurt?

If yes, we have insurance, to have a property happy with it. That was my very first deal. Wow. I mean, you checked a lot of boxes for the.

for experience on the first one then. That's for sure. That's a few things to unpack. I mean, the initial steps that you took to get in front of that broker to make the drive from Charlotte to Charleston, that I think it's so important to go the.

extra mile. It does a number of things. It shows that guy who, like. you said he's a top broker.

He has a lot of people probably calling sending emails and telling them that they're going to close any deal they send his way. Nobody's going up to him and saying, I'm brand new, and it's going to be a fee if you send me one. So, you have to go in there and impress him. And that extra effort worked.

And I would say that it started when he responded and just said, thank you. And that was it. It wasn't, I mean, that's a bit of a wall. I'm a salesperson.

So, when you get that, there it probably four or five steps further and were able to We're be confident that this deal makes sense for us to buy R.E.O. The other group was paying next time. Do you mind coming up a little bit? Well, sure.

So we came up, I think $100,000. and then we acquired it. You get one more deal from that guy for that 100 grand and you'll make that deal every day. Actually, that same guy helped us sold the deal when we were looking to sell it.

And then he introduced us to a couple of his folks. Since then, now we've bought three deals with the organization and we'll sold one deal with them. So that one deal has opened up a bunch of doors to a lot of other opportunities in the ecosystem. So, yeah.

That was a valuable 15-minute cup of coffee then. Absolutely. And I, always tell people, a lot of times we want something we just go ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. How about gift first?

Sure. And the reason, the first thing I gave to him was a compliment. You know, congratulations. You are awarded one of the top workers in your market.

Congratulations. And it only makes sense for somebody to see that I say thank you. Right? Right.

And then I went to see him. Right. And then in a addition to that, I bought him I think a gift when I went to see him because I'm from a little island in Nigeria, Bunny Island. And if you will see the King in Ireland, you do not go with empty hands, you go with the gift because he rules the kingdom, right?

The same thing. You know, you rule the market. You basically be recognized as the guy that runs the market. So I.

I cannot come to USA, give me something, without me coming and say, okay, I recognize what you're I went to the gig, stay, I cannot wait for us to celebrate closing together. And he was like, man, Tenny, I don't know you smoking, but somehow we're going to get a deal done. And so today we're really good friends and yeah, just a small community then continue to expand from there. And you know, the other part not to miss is that you came through.

So then you go into a situation like that, and you tell the broker, we have investors, We have money. We have experience. We can do all of the things. You still have to go do it because if you drop them all and you don't close when he One thing that was more of a challenge that brought some difficulties where you all have been through R.

So the challenge is when you start dealing with multi-million dollar deals, there's a significant amount of challenge you face. I don't know where to start. It's tough, right it's just the challenge is too much. I will be at the We're presenting on top of all we're doing and someone was like, man, everything you sound sounds so good.

I'm not hearing any challenge you see as a face and I'm like, that's what we created exactly. So that you don't have to worry about a challenge. That's right. We have views to deal with the challenge so that you don't have to worry about it because if I come in and I start telling you about the lender challenge, the seller challenge, the broker challenge, the property manager challenge, the back on faults, we're losing and winning a deal.

The number of gives, we, on the right, the total, we have to go, you don't want to hear a lot of that stuff. It's a really good point, though, because that's why someone becomes an LP. That's why you're part deal. So it can be can handle the problems and you just get the return.

There's already direct sign that return. There's an exam. Well, that's a we R we get compensated for being on the GP side because we should agree to want to take that responsibility. So I wouldn't want to see that if you ask me all the challenges, I want to tell you, I don't want to sit down and dwell on that, right?

Because that's something paid to do. But your question about challenges, in the last two years, raising capital has been challenging the entire market, and the last deal I just closed, we just closed the deal, March 6th of 2025, it was a $49.1 million transaction. And we needed to raise over $22 million for it from retail investors, and that was a huge challenge. Is that we're happy we're still so far?

That's the biggest deal that we are asking. That's a beautiful property too. I saw it online. Thank you.

Thank you. That was a big challenge because we have to reinvent everything. The essence of a, goal is not for you to hit the goal, but for you to become capable of hitting that goal. So what we now did on that whole process was to build our infrastructure, to build ourselves.

So being somebody that's capable of buying a 49.1 million of that deal, which is what we did. Now, if, somebody present with us a 15 million dollar deal, it's not a challenge because we're going to do it and we understand the infrastructure that we need to put in place to be able to achieve it. And that's what that deal helped us do. So we built our sales process, we built our marketing process, we hired more people, branded and positioning.

We deepened our relationship with the seller, we deepened our relationship with the broker in that whole process. We are very, very open to conversations about. the person or the type of team who can achieve the goal. You got it.

I love it. That's great. And it's really kind of captures the. essence of just level up your leveling up and you get through that challenge and get over that hurdle and you come out on the other side of completely different person or a team or a group that's yeah, that's really good stuff.

I like that it's wonderful to it was a piece of the painful process, you know, We end up working on 16-hour days, 12-hour days, sometimes you just go through the days and through the night, your mind is racing on how to actually achieve the goal. But in that whole process, you're fine-tuning a lot of things. You're putting in processes in place. You're incorporating technology, you're hiring more people and training more people and you're refining your company to become a company that have a potential to do more.- Now, listen to this, if for about to be a $100 million deal now, There's going to be a whole complete different changes that have to happen again, for us to get there.

And now we as a company, we recognize that. And we always remind our team members that hey, this goal that we're pursuing is not going to be easy. But guess what? I see you all the same.

There's life by the end of the tunnel. When we get it done. Now, if somebody presented a $100 million deal, where the company that is capable of doing it is nobody can take that Let's dive in. You've had a couple of deals that it sounds like a really gone well so what's the absolute home run property that you've had so far in your portfolio?

we actually went and did exterior renovation, did interior renovation, did the clubhouse, improved the community. And somebody saw that we've actually done something to the community and offer to pay us more for it, which is what we're doing in our other projects right now. How many properties so far? How many properties do you have active in the portfolio now?

So we have six that are active right now. Okay. All of a sudden, they are excited about the lead to a cool GP on them. Got it.

Perfect. We is a Bradley 2022 build deal that we're about to do just on. And once that is live, everybody's going to be R very good in the same area, in the Columbia area, or this one is in Atlanta, Georgia is a lot of MSA. Okay, very good.

So I know you have some other stuff going on too that I. Want to give you a. And a. Chance to really dive into and chat about as well.

So tell me a little bit about Exide Africa and everything you guys have going on that side of things. Absolutely. So as I was mentioning earlier, one of the things that happened in the last deal that we did was, we've been able to attract capital globally. On that deal, we were able to attract capital from Canada, from Ireland, from the UK, from in Nigeria globally.

So we were like, well, if we are doing this thing here, buying these institutional assets in the US, and we have the access to it, what if we can completely open it up to the world for people to be able to do that as well. Actually investing those And, and that's what we decided to do. So we went to Lagos, in Nigeria. April 8, we launched Excite Africa.

And the vehicle of Excite Africa is pretty simple, is to help people hedge against the devaluation of the Nair and the value of Nair has been dropping for a long time right now. So we're like, well, what if we can help them, hedge against that where they can invest in assets, cash provision assets in the US that's backed by the dollar. So that's one of the reasons why we launched Excite Africa. Now, the second reason that our CEO, he envisioned, I was like, is very unfair for investments to be un R directional, where we're only bringing money from Africa to the US to invest, institutional grade assets.

I would love, what if we can actually do it and make it a bi-directional investment where folks in the US or across the globe, we can be a conduit to actually help them invest in Africa as well. So the vision now of Exact Africa is to help in bi-directional investment across Africa and of course the West as well. So that is the a lot of response from people that want to be a part of the movement. We don't have any active projects right now in Africa, but we are having a conversation with some of the top developers in Africa toI start a project specifically in Lagos Nigeria for the start.

Now we're going to go into other parts of Africa, emerging markets. But for right now, where we're starting is Lagos, Nigeria, where we're going to start our first project. And we're working on the feasibility study, we're looking at a performer, we're having a lot of the conversations right now. And in the near future, we're going to unleash what we have to our community for them to be involved in what we're doing in Exeter Africa.

That's really great. And I love the idea of just the bilateral piece of it, the putting money back into that community of that country is so necessary and especially, you If you go and say, okay,. You want a beauty, 300 unit apartment building in a particular community back home. You're going to do a lot of stuff.

You're going to create jobs. You're going to produce housing, which we have houses so our shortage, you're going to be able to bring in money into the economy. And you're going to be able to do a. A lot of stuff in that particular area.

So if we can actually help do that, there's no reason why we shouldn't do it. So yeah. Yeah, and it creates so much opportunity and I think the flips on so many opportunities that you're presenting to people in the US-based opportunities, and it's the same struggle in the United States, I think, that so much of it is just what opportunities in front of you. You can't capitalize off of an opportunity if it's not in front of you and so many people or are in a spot or maybe based off of where they live, whether it's country or neighborhood, just that they don't have access to everything that everyone else does and that's the unfair part.

And I think being able to put that in front of people is awesome, so incredible work. And I wish I could do the best with that. It's really, really good stuff. Appreciate it man, appreciate it.

It is for one hand of ours and we're ready for it. Yeah, and you've been there, You've been through the ringer and sounds like, so you guys, like you said, you've leveled up, you know how to handle the issues when they come to you and that's your job is to solve them. So if somebody wants to solve their problems, what is the best way You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Instagram. I think that's the only tenetal or higher that's available all right.

And in my computing that week, I co-founded by partners of the Julius Oni and Leslie, is XSITE Capital, which is S as in those dial up phone S I T E capital.com. a to answer any questions that you potentially have. Very good. I'll put all of that information in the show notes as well, so everyone can find it easily and get ahold of you.

And Tenny, again, really happy that we finally were able to connect and chat. So it's been a long bong time coming. So I'm glad that I caught you now because the stories are great. The success is great and everything you have going on, I'm really happy for you.

And thank you again for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks, brother. I really appreciate it. opportunity.

Very special shout and a big thank you to Risk Strategies. Not only do they provide me a way of an awesome job and a paycheck and benefits and this cozy office Karen sitting in. They also sponsor this show and maybe I'm a little bit biased, but if you've scaled your business and your portfolio and you are serious about real estate investing, you should really be talking to our real estate portfolio team. Not- just because I'm on it, but the truth is that we're really good at what we do when we bring value to every single deal.

We understand real estate and we base our services around it. I'd love to just jump on a call and hear about where and what you're targeting for acquisitions. And then I can share how we can improve your insurance process and bring more value to you and your team. Please be sure to like and share this episode and our show and very much appreciate the love

I am Dr. Julius Oni. I am the CEO and co-founder at XSITE Capital. As an orthopedic surgeon in Baltimore, I am invested in relieving pain and restoring mobility.

I specialize particularly in hip and knee replacement. The joy of seeing patients live better lives and live higher quality of lives fuels my passion for excellence. My journey in medicine began at Howard a University College of Medicine where I heard my medical degree. That was followed by residency at NYU Hospital for Joint Disease, now known as NYU Langone or Prophetic Hospital, followed by a fellowship at Rush University Medical Center.

About five years ago, we started XSITE Capital and cultivated a vibrant, multi-family, real estate focused company. Over the last few years, our collective efforts helped us acquire $168 million worth of real estate, which was unimaginable when we started, but it is truly a testament to our unwavering dedication and the power of community. This success story resonates deeply with me. Based on my experiences, I've found better ways to invest my time and my money.

Learn from me. Learn from my failures. Learn from my successes. Join us in this R exciting journey called Volta Family Real Estate Investing.

Okay, we're ready to go. So, thank you so much for being a guest, Dr. Julius. It is an absolute honor.

I've been following you over the years and I've looked at your movement from U.S. Howard, orthopedic surgeon, now in Nigeria, real estate investing. Walk us through the journey. Thank you so much for inviting me on to this podcast and to this platform.

It's a great, great honor and I really appreciate it. Thank you for the introduction also. Actually that video was uh was shot about a year ago um for ex capital and since then our asset to just start college. And so, and I was lucky enough to go through medical school straight through and match for an orthopedic surgery residency in New York and then did my specialist training, fellowship training in adult reconstructive surgery, That's surgery of the hips and knees at Rush University Medical Center.

And since then, I've been in practice. That's about, I mean, my 13th year of practice currently. So, yeah, that's been my medical journey. And on the business side, at least when it comes to real estate investing, I collaborate with two other gentlemen, Leslie Awasom and Tenny Tolofari, to start a company called ExTight Capital, where we buy apartment buildings, apartment complexes, multifamily real estate in collaboration with other investors, just like I so we're busy, we are busy professionals and we collect resources and buy this cash flowing multifamily assets to create passive income sources for these reworking professionals and also create a legacy wealth, Well, let's walk through that first.

I love it. I love it. So, I mean, for me, I went in undergrad. I actually tried everything.

I tried anthropology, tried to do music, tried a few other courses, and I even tried to maybe do research. But eventually, I quickly realized that I love biology. I love the physiology of the human body And I love understanding the path of the physiology of the human body R and I'm a people person. So as much as I tried to run away from being a doctor.

As much I knew that this was kind of my calling. My father was a doctor, by the way, just in Nigeria. Oh, he's a doctor, a general practitioner. And so, and because he was so busy and it was his life was pretty hectic, you know, being a doctor in a relatively small town, I rewanted no parts of it.

You know, as a young person, you wanted to do something. A little easier than what you saw.. Absolutely. So, but eventually, you know, the infinities that I had in undergrad, pushed me in the direction of medical school.

So I eventually took the MCAT, did well, got into medical school. And then when I was in medical school, I thought I wanted to be a cardiovascular surgeon. So everything was geared towards that. And it wasn't until a chance conversation with my father talking about my paternal grandmother mother, and how she was struggling with end-stage arthritis of both knees.

Then I was like, wait, why can't someone fix it? It was like, oh, there's no one to fix it. And I was like in a country of, at that point, I think 180 million people, Nigeria, is no one to fix this expeditiously. She was like, yeah, this one person is doing surgeries, but they've got a 2-year waiting list.

So from that point on, I decided that I was going to become a monocropitic surgeon so that I could take care of all the people's, take care of my grandma, take care of all the people's grandmas, uncle's aunties, father's mothers. and so I switched from cardiovascular surgery at that point to orthopedic surgery. And the rest is history, I ended up getting into residency, ended up becoming an orthopedic surgeon. Unfortunately, my paternal grandmother died about three years after that conversation, but just like I promised that I've been able to take care of other people's family members and it's been the joy of my life.

So that's it. That's an amazing journey that something could trigger watching your grandmother there and nobody is there to do that. But again, you had the skills to move it to the next level to go out and get that degree, surgical degree to come back and do those kinds of things even though she's not there. So if you look at your father was an inspiration and your grandmother was also an inspiration and trying to drive your career.

Absolutely. There's no questions about it. I mean, she actually predicted that I was going to study in the U.S. So, she was very near and dear to my heart.

You know, she was a very religious a lady, prayed a lot and she had told my father that she had rained that I went to the U.S. and studied R. and at that time we were living in this very small town. It just seems completely far fetched that this young kid in this very small town were end up somewhere in the U.S.

But that vision, that dream, actually gave my father and mother the confidence to take the steps that were needed to allow me to take the SATs and just essentially do the things that were needed to at least give me a shot at going to school in the U.S. And when I did, and I did well on those exams and started to get some partial scholarships, even though at the beginning. It was just so far-fetched. And so that really ties, in together to why she was very near and dear to my heart.

I loved her dearly. And I just wanted to make a difference for her. and that changed the trajectory of my life completely. Wow, that's absolutely amazing.

Now you're an associate professor and director of global orthopedic at John Hopkins. That's a different level of success. You just don't get there. You don't come on and say I got the degree.

Oh yeah, come over here. And this is a job we have as the assistant as director of global orthopedics. That does not happen. How did that come about?

So, I mean, my first three years of practice actually was in Philly, in Philadelphia. Yeah, I was at a hospital in Northern Philly called Einstein Medical Center, now called Einstein. And the reason why I actually chose that particular job was my very dear mentors, Dr. Richard Grant, who is now retired, was wrote a beautiful letter for me when I was applying for residency.

and it was there at that practice and it called me up and said, Julius, I need you to come join the practice. We have work to do in North Philly, you know, it was underserved, it was, and so even though I had planned to go back to, I had already had a job offer at NYU where I trained at that point, I rescinded that job offer and joined Dr. Grant in Northern Philly. just because that population was near and dear to my heart.

And after three years of working there, I grew, my practice grew really of different departments throughout the country in the audience. - and at the end of that talk, all three of them approached me and said, are you looking for a job? I was like, not really. And one of them was the division chief from Hopkins.

And he just never gave up for the next 18 months. He just kept pestering me until I eventually gave in. And after to talk into a lot of my mentees and mentors, And it became clear that it was time for me to move on and go on to the next challenge, so yeah, I made that move to Johns Hopkins, and it was one of the best moves I ever made in my life because yes now once again I was the super small, fish in a very large pond, and I had to, I was in my zone of discomfort, which throughout my life, I've realized I need to be in to grow fast. So being in that zone, I.

Was able to once again work hard, you know, build another practice from ground up. And before long, I was doing, I was the busiest surgeon in the academic division there, Hopkins, I became the fellowship director for joint replacement. I, you know, became the Rector for global orthopedics for the department. And things just kind of flourish from there.

So and I have a lot of great mentors, great friends, great college, great partners to thank for the growth that I experience there. And I certainly have my patients too because they trusted me with their bodies, they trusted me with their lives Why did you refocus because, you know, we all hit these roadblocks and we know and all those things. Walk us through the discomfort of, I don't know what. What to do next.

Am I doing the right thing? Oh, no questions. I mean, throughout my journey, it's always been, I mean, it's even starting from medical school. a relatively small undergrad, State University of New York, at Plattsburgh, New York, you know?

And so, when I got to Howard, and I'm talking to my classmates, and these people from Harvard, from Yale, from Stanford, and I'm like, this small people from all these institutions all over the country, and I'm coming from this small school, and I'm like, am I gonna be able to compete? And, but I give you my all, and I found that I was able to compete. And then soon I got to residency, NYU, Oxford for joint disease. And, there were all these people from all the best medical schools in the country.

And, I'm like, am I going to be able to compete here too? And at that point, NYU for the past, at least we tracked it as far back as 32 years, they had not matched a black-resident. Really? So, yeah, yeah.

So it was me and a gentleman called Dr. Damani in that combined program NYU Hospital for Joint Disease. And so, all of a sudden, people are looking at us, like not knowing what to do with us. Most people even mistook me for like the health, you know, like the transporter.

I can't tell you how many times people thought I was the transporter or something, because that's what they were used to seeing. So, but guess what? I And once again, I did, I was able to deliver, go to one of the best fellowships in the country where once again I was the first black fellow that RUSH University Medical Center accepted in I think over 30 years, But my goal in every of the spaces was always to make sure that, yes, I may be the first to come in or one of the first to come in, but I better sure, not be the last. I got to make sure that I'm opening that door wide open, that any misconception that anyone may have, that is completely dispelled by their interaction with me.

And so, you know, in a lot of those situations, you know, even in those toughest times that many times in residency and fellowship, in practice, I'm like, man, I don't know if I could do this, but the bottom line is I've always just fought in those tough times, I just pick myself back up and I say, listen, I'm just going to focus in the one thing that I can control and that's just trying, and just focus and just do it one step at a time. And before I know what I've dug myself out of the deep dark places and I'm. Back in the light and flourishing so and that works even now. The concept of that is imposter syndrome.

We get there. So do I belong? Can I compete against everyone else And what you're saying is what i'm getting is that you i'm staying focused I can control this i control what I can control and the rest will possibly fall. In the That's absolutely amazing, um So walk us through how you When we talk about staying focused and we have those moments that we question ourselves with any of the earlier concepts, you've talked about your grandmother, your father, was that kind of an anchor too?

So I can do this, I'm gonna focus on this, but here's what my grandmother told me,I stay focused on whatever it is, how did that tie in? So yeah, so my parents are my heroes and they are just incredible, incredible people. And one of the things that they taught me very early on is that I need to, it's self confidence, like self assure shortness, you know, and it's in the, this is one of the things that I'm extremely thankful for, because they made sure to let me know that what other people say does not matter. What matters is what I think about myself.

Okay. And so, and this is one of the, I think advantages actually of growing up in a place like Nigeria or Africa in general, is that you kind of are taught coin, you know, as you grow up. So yes, I remember something my father would say was like, yeah, I may not be a king anywhere else, but I'm a king of my own house, you know, so you may not be a prince anywhere else Raine, this house, you're the crown prince, you know, the first job. So you, so when for the first 17 years of your life, you feel like you could walk into any room with your shoulders high, you know, with her head up high and shoulder straight and walking with confidence, you know, even though when I first came to the US, that took a big hit.

Because all of a sudden, I was a minority, which was a strange concept to me. All of a sudden, there were like little microaggressions. All of a sudden, I didn't even know how to define them. All of a sudden, I'll raise my hands in my undergrad class and the teacher will completely ignore me.

And I would say something and it would just be like, no one really paid attention to anything that I said. And it was a complete challenge initially. But I just fell right back into the fact that, you know what, they may not know my worth yet. Yeah, but I know who I am.

And sooner or later, they're gonna realize it. And so I'll tell you this story. In undergrad, just to kind of let you know how just having those formative years be strong. a fantastic gentleman it's just a nice awesome guy but you know no one gave me a shot um to make it happen um but guess what i did i printed out a poster of myself the goofiest poster now that i think about it i walked every all every building where people the dormitories.

I knocked on every person's door. Wow. Like over a span of weeks. And I just introduced myself, and most people just slam the door in my face for the most part, but enough people listened.

And by the end of that exercise of doing that R think half of the campus knew who I was, and I won by a tiny little margin, but I did win. Do you believe To believe it or not, I won. But that was the beginning of me just believing that I could do anything, even against all odds, I could make something happen. And Greg, I ended up being one of my really good friends from undergrad.

We ended up doing a lot of great things together. But I mean, it was just one of those things, early on that showed me that even in the strangest places even, and in the most difficult situations, I could still face the greatest of odds and still come out on top. So that's an absolute masterclass of a story that no chance of ever thinking I could be there. But you know what?

I'm going to try it anyway. And then eventually I came out on top. I mean, that's masterclass stuff that when you talk about. That's so cool to take all of the learnings and all of that and now you're I always And I I've all this kind of thought of this I've had surgery before the surgeon is the CEO of that Operating corridor for that hour two hours or whatever it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Are there learnings from? All you've gone through in leadership and so-called managing people in a operating room or that's absolutely absolutely I don't know whether that's different a different context but you're in charge of that space as well as the patients absolutely I mean there's no question so I mean you do learn a lot about leadership and leading people as a surgeon because this patients I trusted you with your land with their life .

And they're expecting that you're going to be able to shepherd the entire surgical team to make sure that they have a good outcome, a great outcome. And I don't take that responsibility lightly. And so for us, the surgeons, we learned over time to prep for every possible scenario that could occur in the office. curve in the operating room.

So we learn to visualize the entire day to anticipate where some of the challenges to come up, to prep for those challenges. So before any surgery, we essentially have plan A, B, C, D and so on and so forth. So that training certainly It lends itself in almost any facet of life and it's definitely translated well to all. of the other leadership positions that I've enjoyed ever since I learned to become a surgeon and one of the most important things besides being conscientious, besides paying significant attention to details, besides being able to completely, phase out distraction and completely be focused for the long periods of times.

One of the greatest things that a surgeon can master is maintaining calm on the significant duress, because the ones you as the surgeon starts to freak out, everybody else starts to freak out. And no one can do their best work when they are completely confused and stressed. So that's one of the things that I learned over time. I remember when I was in my first year of practice, when a complication would happen, I would have this big reaction, you know, scrub out, go to the corner and do my woos, you know, and just try to calm my, do breathing exercises and try to calm myself down.

Over time, over-time, I didn't need that big reaction anymore. You know, something happened. You just know that, you know, and some of that comes with experience too. You know exactly what to do,.

What to expect, you know, how long this is going to take. You know exactly what to call for. So knowing and learning and having that experience and just training your body to withstands quite a bit of stress, eventually allows you to Raintain significant calm, regardless of what's going on. And so now it's hard to phase me and wrote 13 years into it, you know, no matter what's happening, you know, I just one step at a time, one step at a time.

And the goal is to continue to watch out for the patient and also watch out for the staff. But we said, you know, success first. But if you just take it one step at a time, and you just maintain calm, almost all the time You know what I'm thinking about, Professor John Hopkins University said, I see something here and I , this person to come back and do it. You just told all of that because the person that's a non-doctor, and you go into a surgical room, you would not think of the levels of thought that you've gone through scenario planning, if this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens, and how do we- how do we cor Well, about that and bringing it into a.

R, about the a real estate part before talking about the about many accounts and saw what most surgeons like retired with and I quickly realized that huh yeah for the type of life that I want to live of abundance and being able to do make a difference in R of millions of people I don't that would cut it put in my patients to sleep at Hopkins, after surgeries, we would just talk a little bit about business. I'll talk about what I was doing, and we'll talk about what it was doing. It was the one who planted the seed of multifamily real estate in my mind. They said, you know what?

You know, you've lived in an apartment before, right? I was like, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's people that own those apartments, you know? I was like, I don't have $10 million, $20 million, 30 million dollars to go buy an apartment building.

It's like, but we could do it by pulling our resources, all of us together, going and buying this apartment buildings. And initially I thought it was too I was like, that just seems a little too crazy. What do I know about all of this? It seems like something you need to go to school for.

And then, but slowly I started listening to podcasts, I had to listen to go to conferences and just kind of listening and explore it more, do some research. And I quickly realized that there were almost no LPA and professionals in this space. There were accountants, there were engineers, BAs, there was almost anything else. But no surgeons, there's no doctors, you know, or very few in this space.

And then I also realized that a lot of the people I was seeing in this room didn't Rook like me at all. You know, I mean, I saw a every hue and every but all of us black folks can count each other in the room. And I'm like, huh, this is interesting. So I went back to Leslie and he already had a partner, Tenny Tolofari.

And I was like, guys, I think there may be an opportunity to take the gospel of multifamily real estate to our communities of health care professionals and our underrepresented and minority communities. I was like, those will be our avocals, those two communities. And at the worst, we educate a bunch of them about it and we make-no-money. But best, they decide to.

Choose us as. Their preferred partners to actually pull resources together to do this. And low and the old, the message started to resonate. But initially, it was a little crazy.

The people did not really. People thought I was a little nuts to be trying to do this. I remembered I went into my phone book and listed out about 500 people that I thought could afford a $50,000 minimum investment to pull together to do this. fellow students like that.

And I would just talk to them and say, Listen, I think there's an opportunity for us all to stop banding together and think this is a great opportunity, but some, a few of them were crazy enough to just say, you know what, I know you as a person of integrity. I know you as a person of great character. I don't think you're going to take my money and run. I don't know anything about this, but if you said you've done your research, yeah, take, you know, take my money and we'll see what happens, you know, and that's how we did our first deal.

And then fast forward to, you know, now, almost five and a half, six years later, $2.17 million r, which sold one of those deals, where we bought for $12.5, sold for $7.7 million, dollars, 5.3 million-dollar profit translated to 30% average annual returns for the investors, you know. So we've proven that we can work together, that we can pull resources together and do uncommon things. And in 2022, finally, I made enough, I was making enough of income with all of my investments outside of medicine to essentially not have to depend on medicine at all for sustenance. So at that point, I had to ask myself, like if a money was not the issue, then how do I really want to be remembered?

What do I want my legacy to be? Is it that I became a professor and I was doing the same things that most of the, my mentors or most of the people around me are doing, that's a great, great pathway too. You're making a lot of difference in the lives of other people, but I had to go back to the basics and say, why did I do orthopedics in the first place? it was to serve people a lot of people like my grandmother.

Where are they are still in Nigeria, still suffering. There's still many of them that still don't have access to care. And even when they have access, they may not have access kind of care that I can deliver. So I was like, you know what, I came up with a vision statement, I was like, I'm going to contribute in whatever ways and whatever way.

I told my wife about it that we're going to be going to Nigeria with the kids and thankfully she's a fantastic woman she supported my dreams and here we are eight months in and guess what it's been the most incredible experience of my life it's been I've never been happier in practice. Right here at home in Nigeria, your own people. I followed that transformation and I was wondering, you know, big shot here. I'm going to go here.

I didn't understand the underpinning of that, that's a powerful story. And now you're back in your home country and you're bringing something that people would have to wait a year or two years to get an appointment. Yeah, in the past now, I mean, there's other surgeons doing. It in the country, but the type of innovations I can bring in the types of techniques I can bring in the type that.

Level of that I can do the surgery. There are only, the people that can do that in this country are few and far in between. So I'm bringing a significant value to, and yes, I'm making the least I've ever made in medicine but I'm the happiest I've ever been. So, but guess what?

I'm also seeing my kids a lot more often. I'm hanging out with my wife more often. I mean, the things that matter matter in life I have you know, geographic freedom. I have time freedom.

I have, you know, some significant financial freedom. I have health freedom. I'm working out more. I'm fit, you know, and I'm making a difference.

I mean, it's, I'm just so thankful. I feel, just every morning I have to pinch myself. I feel such an intense sense of gratitude. And one of the things that I was so scared of when I made this decision was, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to lose all of this hard work.

That I've done, you know, I had, I was like, right. I would my trajectory was so was going at a very significant pace. I was poised to be one of the new generation of, you know, joint replacement surgeons that were going to be the leaders of what we did in academic medicine. I was getting a lot of great opportunities.

I was on the development team for one of the implants that I put in, you know, it's like I was working with industry work, you know, mentoring people R just doing a lot of good work that was still very rewarding, very rewarding. And I was like, man, I'm going to lose all of this if I went. But now I actually don't feel like I lost anything. I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

I'm making the difference. I'm inspiring the next generation of folks who want to make a difference. That's such an inspirational story, starting at 17, coming to the U.S. and consistently roadblocks here.

I will navigate around it and I will do what I need to do to move that. When you look back through that journey and where you are now, what are you most proud of a decision that you made? Yeah, what's said, you know what, of all the things I've looked at, this was the key moment here. that one?

Yeah, so, oh, wow, there's been a few, but I'll tell you this. The one that comes to mind right now is one that I already kind of touched on just not being afraid to make the tough decisions. R. I, I, I, I, you know, I would be lying if I didn't say I experienced some significant fear when making this decision to move to Nigeria.

I was worried that no one would take me seriously in the US or internationally anymore that I was gonna become irrelevant, that I knew I wasn I wasn't gonna have the same access to all of the resources that I used to have that I was gonna have to build everything from ground up. And that was paralyizing, and I was like, what happens if it doesn't work out. And then I sold my home. And what if you know, and I burned the boats to do it because I didn't want to have a backup plan.

But then I thought about it, I was like, what's the worst that happened? So I returned back to the US and I'm an orthopedic surgeon probably in a pretty prestigious institution. I was like, that is a fantastic fall back line. I mean, how can I be so fortunate that is, that is, that's my backup plan.

when the conviction was as strong as it was when I did it. So I really am proud that I was able to push through those fears. And make the decision anyways, because it's, I mean, the proof is going to put in, the response it's gotten, the support I have gotten, the folks that a lot of us inspired, the opportunities that are coming my way now, the, I mean, it was just the right it was the right decision to make. And I didn't, it didn't look like it when I did make it.

Yeah, as we began to close out, I want to mention one thing that you talked about burning the boats. That was a frame in a movie. And they were going into battle. They said, you burned the boats because we have no other option.- and this is what we're going to work through.

That's absolutely amazing in walking through that. So one other question I wanted as we began a close is that you've, gone through all of these changes throughout your career and where you are now biz all blue sky and trying to move it forward from that. What are you most excited about for the future? Oh, wow.

Yeah. I am most excited to see my vision for transforming the world of musculoskeletal care and overall health care in this part of the world come to life. I really am super excited to see that happen. I also am extremely excited to see what happens and to see my vision with our real estate company a real estate company, and some of the dreams that we've had for transforming not just a lot of our African diaspora in the U.S., but also facilitate a bidirectional flow of investments both, from Africa, into our deals in the U.S., but also from the U.S, and other parts of the world into Africa to do some audacious projects that transforms the lives of Africans right here at home in Africa.

So, those are my twin vision, twin goals is to transform medicine, particularly musculoske and to a transform in the business world. real estate investments and that is what excites me, that's what powers me and interacting with some of our young people now in Nigeria just energizes me and I see the future in them and they just you know in many ways than one just to give me hope that the best yet to come from for this part of the world, that we are just getting started, that days in the coming years, there's going to be a significant transformation, and that our story is not going to be that of victims of the years past, that we are going to take charge, and write the new stories of the future, and that we truly going to maximize the potential of what it means to be African-American in this day and age moving into the traged future. I want to be part of that story. I want to be part of changing the narrative and so help me God.

Absolutely amazing. As I said, I've been following you over Peter Piccinini, he started out on Broadway, managing plays and all those kinds of things. And he's a wealth advisor now based in Long Island. Just Me says, super-excited to be here.

John Self says, good morning, comfort zone is such a mediocre place. He said, he asked clients, what do you do if you knew you could not fail? He started out as a reporter. And now he's an executive search, executive coaching.

so we all make these transformations. Yvonne Niezy says, the freedom to do what you want whenever you want must be beautiful. Absolutely amazing. And Peter comes back and said, good man, great show and all of that.

So I wanna thank you. I knew it was gonna be like, so I kinda sense. It was gonna be this powerful. Hopefully I'll see you in Nigeria.

I working on something, a project to possibly come there later in a year. So hopefully we'll connect. Fantastic. Please do not come without I got to show you.

I will let you know because I got to immerse myself, and all of this greatness, man, I mean, you know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

So I need you to hold on for a second as we begin to close out and then I'll come back and we'll talk offline. So thanks everyone for listening in. Share this to all of your network, and we're trying to grow the channel. and major streaming platforms.

It's not just an interview, it's a masterclass in leadership.

Wealth is more than money,. It's legacy, wisdom, and the alignment of purpose. Welcome. Welcome to Crown and Keys, where we unlock the secrets to generational wealth, passive income, and financial freedom through real estate, tax strategy, and personal development.

I'm your host, Cynthia Sperling, your guide on this journey. With over 20 years in real estate and the passion for aligning wealth with purpose, I bring you conversations with the most brilliant minds in real estate, finance and entrepreneurship. Together we'll R uncover the strategies that turn income into impact and assets into legacy. Your wealth isn't just for you, it's for the that follow.

So grab your keys, adjust your crown, and let's build something that lasts. Hello and welcome to crown and keys podcast. Today we have a fantastic guest. I'm happy to introduce you to Leslie Awasom as the most interesting person that I've talked to in quite a while.

We've learned so much about his journey from full-time work as a C, RNA, and to his huge success recently and acquiring a property valued. 49.1 million dollars. And so we're going to talk to him today about his journey from being heavily in debt and having that weight of responsibility until where he is at this point in time and a huge assets under management so welcome Leslie how are you? I am living the dream Cynthia thank you so much for having me.

Of course now tell us a little bit about yourself I know your dad and a wonderful husband a stew businessman clearly and a resident of Marilyn, correct? That is correct, Cynthia. My name is Leslie Awasom. Like you mentioned, I'm a dad of three kids, two beautiful daughters and a son, and married to my wife for the last 14 years.

I'm also a nurse and a studies, by training. That's a certified registered nurse and a studies or CRNA where I practiced in that profession for about 10 years before leaving the profession to focus full time on building our real estate business. I am one of the co-founders and CEO of XSITE Capital Investments, private equity platform focus in the acquisition of large apartment buildings across the US. So I'm just grateful to have the opportunity to share my story on how somebody else or share some kind of value to somebody else that are on their own journey as well.

That's awesome. We appreciate that. So. Tell us how did you Yeah, that's a good question, Cynthia.

So I was a CRNA, like I mentioned. Prior to becoming a CRNA, I was a nurse. I started working as a registered nurse back in 2008. And then after practicing for about four years, to get another job or to go to school to get an advanced degree, which is what I did.

So I went back to school, became a C-R-I-N-A, like a certified registered nurse and aesthetics, and started working, fantastic job to have, really good job, a great pay, great hours. You know, and I loved it so much. I. So in the beginning, I was spending so much time in the hospital, working all the overtime hours that was available to me.

I was like, Oh my God, this is easy work and I got to pay this much for it. So I'm in the hospital spending all this time doing about 60, 70 so around 2016, towards the end of 2016 I was at home one evening and just watching my daughter play around and I was seeing primary caregiver, like taking care of her at home. So I'm seeing her doing all these things and I'm like, oh wow, oh my daughter does this and oh wow. Then it finally just hit me right there that I have missed out on a really good portion of our life, the early moments of our life and that really really hit me hard and I.

I just kept asking myself, man, so this is what I'm going to re for the rest of my life in order to get the life that I want, to earn the income that I want, and this is what I got to sacrifice. So I was like, there got to be a better way looking around, like, I'm, like that, you know, I'm not the first person that they are wealthy people around. How did they get there? How did they figure it out?

So I started reading books on personal development and financial Education and one of the things that came up was like real estate investing. You a lot of millionaires process is like, especially for us nine to five professionals. When you hear, I R want to invest in real estate. the first thing that comes, to mine is I got to do of my own, when I figured out how to earn the income to go buy the property.

That's what I did. So I read all the books. I, like, a ment . A lot of mistakes on that asset, but when we went to the refi portion, the values of that property had gone up by about $77,000.

And I was like, Oh my God, this stuff worked. And most importantly of all, I really enjoyed myself doing it. When I was renovating the property, I took my two weeks vacation off work and that's what I did. I, driving back and forth going there meeting with a contractor, getting all of this done.

And I just love the process of transforming that, property for where, where is what today, getting a tenant in and all of that. So I really enjoy doing it. And I was like, okay. And this really is this stuff.

There really is no limit. there's no, ceiling.. So. I love this a R.

Maybe, maybe I'm going to do more properties. So the initial plan was to acquire one or two properties a and build a portfolio for 20 to 30 properties and create a passive-income be able to exit out my job. But then I met my wife came home one day, I met and then a lot of to see how, my wife came home one day and said, I met this guy at one of my clinical rotations, he was talking about life insurance, we need to review our life insurance policies, I think you should meet him. I was like I don't want to meet another life insurance agent.

The machine insisted, so I got to meet him over to my house And we were talking about insurance. I was bomb biding, him with all the questions, just to see how honest. He was, yeah, he was very honest, very straightforward. And then the conversation shifted from the.

The product he was offering to a like books, financial education and realized that we had read some of the same books. And then the other thing is we were reading the same book at the same time. I remember every Friday night for about six months Kim and I used to meet at a coffee shop here in College Park, Maryland. Friday night after work we'll leave, homes go meet over there and we'll play the cash flow board game.

Oh that's a fun game. We play for hours, we invite other people to play with us and, then we just talk business, learn about each other, learn from the game, we can tell about each other's money habits. So yeah so at. At some point, we saw that we had complementary skills, right?

So we decided we were going to partner up and scale the real estate portfolio. And so when we partnered up, we started going out, we do a lot of research. . We looked into buying more single family homes, renting them out.

We looked into assisted living because I'm in healthcare. So that made sense. Then we came across multi-family, like buying this large apartment complexes. And that makes total sense.

Yeah, that was a no brainer. It was like, it was found the holy grail. Exactly. It was a complete no-brainer because we realized that a lot of people in our community don't even know that this asset class exists.

So, what if we create a platform to go and educate members of our community on how to leverage this assets to create wealth, and as the premise upon which Ex r was created back in 2009. Oh, that's wonderful. And so now you have over 200 million and assets under management. Now so your full-time clearly at this point.

that's great. And then do you have any plans or is there a way for that, you prefer to reach out to and educate people about this? Do you have webinars or do you teach live classes? How do you do that?

That's a great question, India. Education is a very important part of our platform. When we came out, most members of our community knew nothing about this access. The way we've been able to grow is by educating.

Over the years we've done different, we do like a monthly webinar every first Monday of the month. Okay. When I started out, I was doing, I was teaching an on the writing class every week on Tuesday nights. But now we've transitioned all of that because over the years it was like different bits and pieces all over the place.

So we've transitioned all of that to create like an exclusive community. It's called the beyond nine to five club obviously for 95 professionals that are thinking beyond the nine to five. So we've created this exclusive community there. We have a ton of, we have courses, we have a ton of education.

We get on there, we have an event at least once a week and we're working in to have like Q and A sessions and all of that. So that's going to be our ecosystem where we provide a ton of education and we bring in other experts that we meet along our journey as well that know stuff that we don't necessarily know Truly believe that true generational wealth is not the assets. It's not the money, but the knowledge R. Yes a hundred percent.

Yes. Yeah, I think that's what a lot of times people have the information I was just offering a class yesterday and The gentleman one of the viewers was saying. I've taken this course in that course in this course, but I haven't done anything yet And there's the problem a lot of people read books and take courses and they go home and they return to their old self, the one that's kind of procrastinating and over-analyzinging. What do you think is what keeps high-income professionals, you know, broke and not moving forward?

So, there are multiple reasons, but what I've seen is like, is the lack, is the knowledge that would be fed. It is the foundation that would be built, that would build that knowledge upon. Like, I can remember very well, you make a good point. enjoying one of the weekend coaching programs and did.

Did the weekend class, very valuable. a very valuable knowledge, but I can tell you that in that room, we had about 150 people, each person. Paying about $5,000 each to be there that weekend, but out of that 150 people, we are the only two people that came out of there and created successful. Isn't that something?

Yeah. So that's, I've been always, I've been fascinated by that. I've been trying to ask myself, like, what is it that makes a difference? You know, yes, yes, that is the million dollar question.

You know, what we found is you're one of the things there are many factors, but one of them is like you really got to have a strong enough. Why? The reason that is bigger than you a vision. Yes, a vision that is bigger vision that can fit more people than you, because if it's just about you, he can give up so fast on ourselves.

that when, people it's hard to give up a hundred percent yes it's like your have this assets under management that grew over time but now you're teaching other. People and so that energy just grows and grows and you're blessing other people and their families with this information and the action that follows with it yeah so they cared your vision, and they've got they caught, you know, the way like, I'll give you a good example. When we say we have $70 million of assets on the management, and I don't own that assets by ourselves, we own it with a community of other hardworking'working, busy professionals that are passive investors in this deal. So they are co-owners in this deal.

And when we came out and started giving the education, they kept telling us, we've always been looking for somebody like this in our community and we are glad that guys started so we are so happy we're so blessed that to have you guys, so here's my $200,000 yes my $500,000 R I'm investing with you guys because I believe in you guys. Yeah, you know XSITE Capital is not about us. It's about that it's about the people we serve it's about the people we educate it's about the people with me that along the journey that say hey guys I love this stuff that you guys are doing. Teach me how to do it, like a doctor, somebody that we met at a conference, no prior real estate experience, no knowledge on real estate investing.

She had no social media presence, nothing. She listened to the message and said I want to build this platform. I want to And then we took her on that wing show give her access to everything We got mentor herd along the way provided the guidance and now she's built a very, very successful platform That is even growing bigger than our platform. Now is the why that keeps us Right.

So now it's bigger than myself. It's bigger than the individuals now It's a movement that is catering to a whole lot of people So that that's one of the things that has kept us going and the more we do it Like we just closed the $49 million asset R and we went to the property last weekend and I was almost moved to tears because of some of our investors came and visited they got to see what we saw why we love the property so much and the feedback, the appreciation, you know, just makes this whole journey even more worth it. Well, share with the audience, they might also not be familiar with this type of product or property. can you kind of just outline briefly the steps to acquiring this property what's involved from your perspective, looking at this and underwriting it and what the investor is looking at to what we'll see as well?

That's a great question Cynthia because a lot of times we get estate so the investing takes a whole lot of work to find the assets that's an investment not a property. Okay. So to get to buying this asset it took us a lot of work. We have an entire team of about 12 people.

We reviewed over 2325 assets opportunities that came to market went to an underwriting profit because we have like a very stringent selection process where we could easily filter assets very early on in the process. So, they run to our filter system. This doesn't pass, okay, this R pass the SNF test, we take them to the next level, do another review. If that pass that second SNF test, then we take it over to underwriting.

The underwriting is where we go in and look at the financials, look at everything, all the history about the assets, and then we formulate a business plan on how that asset will perform over time. Now on that business plan, we know what our offer value is that will make sense by investors that will keep our investors capital protected. So is that value that we take an offer now to the seller and a lot of times we don't win because we are very conservative in our approach. And so you go through the process of putting out offers, putting out offers.

And then finally you find one that makes sense that aligns in everything that you want, like growth park view, which is just closed up on and then we submit an offer. And on deals like that we can be, on our offers, a little bit aggressive, not on the pricing but on terms because we know it's a really good asset and that is going to be a good investment for members of our a community. So it does take a good amount of work, but for those that love the real estate game, that love to learn real estate game. I don't so I don't want you to be intimidated by this.

It's not so impossible. When Tony, Dr. Oni and I started, we had nobody. And we make it easy even simpler now for other people to do it because we help people introduce them to our networks, give them access and teach them how to do it.

Even on the writing process that used to take us about five hours to on the writer deal. We created a proprietary system that decreases that process down to about 30 minutes. So yeah, so it's not impossible. Our goal is to really do create access, to help other people invest in this, and to create other XSITE Capitals because there are a lot of opportunities out there and we cannot buy it all back.

So that's really great. now we there's this famous book called The Four Hour Work Week now in this change of career how many hours are you working? I've read that book and I know the whole premise of the book but I hate that topic I hate the subject like the title of the book because it's a little bit misleading. As an entrepreneur, the work never stops.

Yes, seven days a week or seven days a week 24 hours a week. The asset I'm telling you about that we just closed, it was a challenging transaction to take it all the way to the end because it was a very large transaction. And during that period of time, we were, I was R sleeping about four, five hours a day. Some days it's been three hours because it's a constant part of work.

But now it's when you starting out, if you starting out So you cannot expect to come and be building a million dollar enterprise and expect to spend four hours on a week on it and make a lot of money on it and make R it work. Now, when you grow into a certain level and build the systems and have the right people, right seats, then achieve before our work week. But in the beginning, right now, I love to say my business is my life. I do allocate, make sure that I structure time to have time with my family, but I love what I do.

I really love it. I really enjoy it. So to me, it really doesn't feel like work. I'm not exchanging my time for money.

I'm building something for the future. Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah, it's a lifestyle.

And you've made work around your family, like you said, you integrated. So this part path here, where you're spending time with your children, quality time with your family, that is a legacy in and of itself, that youiosity in and of-itself, that you have taken the step and had the courage to take the time on Fridays to build to this point. It's tremendous because a lot of people aren't willing to make that sacrifice in those early days. They'd now.

So I really applaud you for that. So what's the fastest path to financial freedom? The fast path, especially for you a nine to five professional right now is you start leveraging what you already have to start building what's that. Your 9-5 job is your greatest asset that you have.

That's one of the things that we emphasize. I a lot of movement out here saying quit your 9-5 job and do this, no. Our philosophers do not quit your 9-5 job. Leverage it.

As a matter of fact, take advantage of it. Maybe even go talk to your boss and ask for more income. Then you start leveraging those hours that you're spending to build for the future. So one simple concept that I learned is, I don't know if you're familiar with like the cashflow a quadrant where you have like the E, the S, the I and the B side of the quadrant.

still exchanging your time for money. And the other side of the quadrant is where you have the B and the I. Yeah. Now, a lot of us employees, when we saw that quote, when you see that quadrant, you feel a sense of guilt, like I'm in the E quadrant, how do I get myself over there?

I just quit my job and jump or started investing in a asset that produced income over time. Now, if you start by doing just that simple step, right, it does a lot of things that eliminate the guilt of you. Feeling like you're extending your time for money, because a lot of times when you hear a people talk about financial freedom and you feel good, it eliminates that because your job now becomes an asset that is building you towards that freedom. You just have to take a portion of the time that.

You're already given and start dedicating that income towards B&I activities. It could be investing in real estate passively, investing in the markets or investing in education in an area that you want to learn about. You want to start a business, some of that capital towards that education. And if you do that over time, you're going to find yourself in a position where your B and I activities overwhelm the E and the S and that is where you walk away.

Love it, that is fantastic. Yeah, I love that. Now, that's something that you can put into action immediately. That's a gold gem.

Yeah. Right now, today. So I hope our listeners are really listening, taking notes, listen to this again and again to make sure that this is ingrained, imprinted in your mind, that you have the choice and you take the action and you hack your, - and leverage your current job into the BNI side. I love that.

That's a recipe for success, thanks for that, Leslie. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience before we wrap up today? No, the only thing I'm going to say is like, you know, I came to the US 20 something years ago as an immigrant when I think just a mother that loved us so much that she was able to sacrifice everything to bring us to this wonderful country. I came with nothing but a dream and a vision to go bigger and over the years I've made a lot of mistakes along the R in this journey.

even though building a and I've been at points- when I've looked at myself like nothing is going well, but there was always that glimmer of hope. So the last thing you see today, of XSITE Capital that you see today is somebody just like you that I've gone through some of the struggles that you might to right now. So I just want to leave the audience, wherever you are on your journey, know that anything is possible for you. Yes, yes.

Myself and my partners were able to do what we've done R-. know that it is possible for you to. So if you're a big dreamer out there, you're looking to do a big go after your goals. And if you need any value from us, please come join amazing community at the Beyond 9 to 5 Club and start learning how to start associ R, associating yourself with all the people that are thinking big and start growing from there.

And again, Cynthia, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Oh, I thank you so much for what you shared today.

I know will inspire encourage many of our listeners. We hope to have you again. Thank to align your finances with your future. Until next time, stay aligned, R stay empowered and keep building your legacy.

Your keys. Are in your hand. See you soon.

You're listening to the Preferred Way, a retirement podcast brought to you by Preferred Trust Company, the preferred custodian for all alternative investments. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Preferred Way, a Preferred Trust Company podcast. And today we're excited to have a member of the management team from XSITE Capital here today. We have Tenny Tollefari and he's going to talk to us all about multifamily investing and all about the initiatives they have going with XSITE Capital. So what?

Welcome. Thanks for being here today. Tinny. Thank you so much.

Christy, how are you? Nice to have you in the Las Vegas area. Tell us what you're doing here. First, we'd like to find out why you're in Vegas.

Yep, yep. Vegas, Vegas, Vegas. So last year, nmhc, National Multifamily Housing Council, they had their conference in San Diego. This year they brought it to Vegas.

So I'm here representing XSITE Capital. Basically, NMHC is where everybody comes to nationwide when it comes to multifamily real estate investing. So had an opportunity to meet a lot of folks that I've been talking on the phone with. And now we got to eat, drink, just hang out, talk all the things Vegas, everything.

Exactly. It was really fun. So tell me a little bit about that. So are you meeting investors?

Are you meeting other companies, other investment sponsors there? Yeah. So you get to meet a lot of people from different facet of different aspects of the industry. For example, I get to meet my competitors.

Like my mentor was here as well. I get to meet a lot of them. I get to meet the brokers. They say the brokers hold the keys to the cookie jar.

Basically, they sell all the deals. So you get to meet a lot of those guys here. Also you meet like property management companies, some investors. But this is not a place to raise capital.

This is not a place to try to get investors. This is a place to deepen the relationship of the people that you've been talking to on the phone, people that you've been trying to expand your rich with. And then you get to have conversation, deep conversation with them. So I think in this meeting, I had about 40 meetings over the last three days.

Yeah. So, well, we're glad you set some time aside for us. Absolutely. Joining us today.

You guys have been a great partner to work with. So I wanted to come out, see you guys office and have a conversation. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Enjoyed working with you guys. So tell us, first of all, tell us about your role with Excite and a little bit about your personal journey and your professional. How you got to be the role you are now. Okay, yeah, absolutely.

So my title at XSITE Capital, they just gave me a promotion. I'm the Chief Growth officer now at XSITE Capital and the head of acquisition and one of the founders of XSITE Capital as well. XSITE Capital was founded in 2019. My background is it cybersecurity.

So I went to Bowie State for grad school, and I did the nine to five stuff. You know, I was working. I worked at the likes of Boeing, Deloitte. I worked with them on cybersecurity, RAM.

And in 2019, me and Leslie, who is our chief operation officer and one of the founders of the company, we started a company initially, and all we wanted to do was just invest in single family homes. We just wanted to buy real estate because there's a principle that for you to build wealth, you have to go in real estate. And I did not have any real estate in my portfolio at all. So when I met Leslie, we had conversations about just doing real estate on a small scale.

And then suddenly we came across multifamily real estate. While we were doing our research on how to get into real estate, we came across multifamily real estate. So we were like, we lived in apartments. Maybe we can try to see if we can buy these things.

But we now got faced with a huge challenge, which is the knowledge gap. So Leslie's a crna. This is in the medical space. I'm in it.

We don't have anybody, uncle, brother, sister, anybody that does investments in the larger scale in terms of family real estate. So we were like, maybe we need to go figure out how to get knowledge. And then we went to Facebook. We just started searching stuff.

So we went to Facebook. We got a mentor from there. He told us about, man, you guys got to raise capital. I think that mentorship lasted for about two or three months, where he just like, man, you guys just gotta raise capital.

We're like, man, how are we gonna raise capital? We don't know how to do any of this stuff. We need to understand the fundamentals of what we're doing. And then we ended up seeing that he's not a good fit, because one of the ways that you can either learn from somebody else experience or you make a lot of the mistakes.

And we decided to invest heavily in ourselves via mentorship, Beer, books, via conferences, podcasts. So we did a lot of educational. Consumed a lot of educational materials in that process. So we got the right mentor that said, you know what?

I see you Guys are hungry. You guys want to really do this? I'm going to hold your arms and then teach you how to do it. So we started partnering.

We invested first in 2019. I think I invested in my very first deal as a passive investor in 2019, because I wanted to learn this stuff. Because before I'm going to go with somebody and say, come, let's go invest in deals together. I want to know how it works.

So I invested passively at first. Me and Leslie invested passively at first. And then we got invited to come in as cogp. Co GP is like general partner on the deal.

We have the active and the passive side. The active side is like the managers that run, find the deals, put it together, operate the deal, exit the deal. That is the general partnership side. So our mentor invited us to become co GP on a deal.

And he said, one of the things you can do as a cogp is to talk to your family and friends to raise capital to come and join the deal. So me and Leslie took the opportunity. And Leslie is a crna. He basically put people to sleep when they're about to do surgery.

Yeah. And then our CEO, Dr. Julius Oni, he's an orthopedic surgeon, so they both work in the OR together. So when we had the opportunity, he took it to Dr.Oni. I was like, man, Dr. Oni, we have this opportunity. Do you want to be a part of.

Do you want to be an investor? So Dr. Oni, he's a very. He's a savvy investor.

He's invested in a bunch of startups. He felt like, you know, at that point, he felt like he knows a lot with investing. But when we brought this opportunity to him, he said, I've not really heard about multifamily real estate investing and I consider myself a savvy investor. So he went around, asked about his buddies, and some of them know a little bit about it, but he was like, man, how come I don't know anything about this?

So he called me and Leslie up. I was like, guys, I don't just want to be an investor, I want to be a partner. So that's how Dr. Oni came on board.

And then three of us didn't have anything at that time. So when he came on board, we got a momentum. He became the CEO of the company. And now we have $168 million of assets under management.

In two to three weeks, we have a $49.1 million deal that we're closing that's going to put us at $278 billion of assets under management over just. A short period of time. Really? Yeah.

In six years. In six years, yep. And in this journey, we've brought in a lot of investors with us, folks that are looking to just invest passively, folks that are looking to be active as well. So it's just been an amazing journey.

And in that process, we came across you guys a partner that can help us teach people how they can use their retirement account to invest in alternate assets and then continue to build that relationship with you guys. And I think that's how. That's the short of the story. That's the short of the story.

So tell me a little bit about your new role now. Head of acquisitions, growth architect. Kind of going out there, finding the deals, I'm assuming, right? Yes.

So what are you used to be able to determine whether or not a deal is good or not? You know, what are your standards for when you're looking for what you want to invest? That's a good question. So as the.

I used to be just the director of acquisition. My partners just surprised me one day, and they're like, tenney, we see what you're doing in the company. I think both of us came together and said, you know, we want you to be the chief growth officer. And I think the reasoning behind that was because in the last six months, six, five to six months, we've seen a significant amount of growth in the company.

For context, the deal we're buying right now is a $49.1 million deal. We're buying it in Atlanta. It's a 268 unit property. We're raising about $22.3 million from that on that deal because the deal is not highly leveraged.

So when I mean highly leveraged, meaning the bank is not giving us too much money. They're giving us about 64% of the money that we need. So we have to raise the rest of it, and we have to go to a lot of investors, you know, and you have to talk to them about one by one. 25.

50,000. 50,000. 50,001. So in that whole process, we have to build our internal systems and processes to be able to sustain the amount of people that are coming into our environment to raise the $22 million.

So I played a significant role in helping build the whole internal system, the whole sales process and stuff like that. And my partners were like, man, you know, you. You're an example of tenacity. Because I don't know if, you know, you guys Are aware right now in the economy, people are not able to raise capital across the board.

Retail investor, institutional investors, syndicators like us, everybody's struggling and we being able to raise $22 million is a significant amount of work. So they saw, they recognize the work I did there. That's how they gave me the chief growth officer. I'm getting used to the name.

And then from the acquisition side, they call me tenacious. The reason behind that is if I want something, I do not stop. So now I've been able to build relationship with all the top brokers in all the markets that we're in. They know me by name, they know XSITE Capital as a brand.

And yeah, so I find the deals, bring it to the team. We have a huge team back behind us. So when we bring the deal, we evaluate it. And some of the things we look at when we're buying a deal, we look at population growth because it's like just little fundamentals.

If people are moving to somewhere, they'll need a place to stay and we want to be those guys that provide housing for them. And a lot of times if people move somewhere they don't want to go buy a house right away, they might want to just rent for a little bit, find the right area where they want to live and then they go by. Right. So we look at population growth is a key metric that we look at before we look at if we want to buy a deal or not.

Excuse me, job as well. Right. We don't want to go in an area where companies are moving away from. So we look at job growth, we look at diversify employers.

For example, if you go to Detroit right now is the author industries in Detroit is focused on one industry where if something happens to its, the whole economy tanks. So when we're looking at job, we're looking at diverse job, you know, medical jobs, it jobs, administrative jobs, retail, restaurants, everything. So we look at that balance. So we also look at school.

For example, this property we're buying right now, the average school rating is about 8 of 10, meaning a lot of families want to live here. Right. So we look at schools, we look at crime. You know, there's a crime high, crime low.

There's something called the sniff test. All of it I'm sharing with you right now is just basically our sniff test. So when we go through the sniff test, we look at job, population, income, schools, migration pattern, all of this stuff. And if all of that checks the box, that's when we're not diving to the deal.

Because when you're buying these apartment buildings, you're basically buying a business, right? And you have to understand the business that you're buying, meaning you have to understand the macro, the micro and macroeconomic analysis of the project. And then you have to do an analysis of the asset itself to see if it's a good business to acquire. Meaning you have to look at the income is producing the expenses that you're incurring in a project and then see if it's a feasible one.

For example, this deal, I think we reviewed about 2,000 deals before we found this one. These are all the things that we have to do upfront before we bring the deal to the investors. And of course, when we bring the deal to the investor, we've already done our due diligence on it. We know that it's going to be a great investment before we bring it to them and then they can deploy their capital on it.

So what areas are you guys looking at? What do you think are the most up and coming areas now for these type of deals? That's a good point. Actually.

Marcus and Millichov just produced that report before nmhc. I'll answer your question first. Where we buy deals, we buy in the Southeast. You know, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas.

We're looking in Texas now. But Microsoft minichap report came out and they identified five markets market that you want to buy deals in 2025. And I'm going to list them. Okay.

The number one on the list, at number one ranking is Miami, Florida. There's a lot of people from California, from New York. You know, they go to Miami and they buy nice houses there. So number one is Miami, number two is Orlando, Florida.

As you know, Orlando is a tourist location. But now people are beginning to move down there from the west and of course from the north as well. And then the third one was actually Las Vegas. Really look at us, Las Vegas.

The third one on the list is Las Vegas. I think we have seen a lot of people move to Vegas as well. You can tell by the amount of California plates on the cars that are driving. Exactly.

So Las Vegas is the third on the list. And then the fourth is Dallas, Texas. Dallas and Fort Worth. Those areas, a great area.

People, a lot of people are moving down there. And then lastly is Houston, Texas. So I had an opportunity to meet a lot of the brokers that are in Dallas and some of them are in Houston. I just told them, hey, going forward, even though I live in Charlotte, North Carolina right now.

So even though I'm buying in the Southeast. You know, I'm looking to come to the. You know, the Texas is in the Sunbelt, so I can go move down to Texas a little bit, look at some deals. So I'm going to be going to Texas where I visit Dallas and Houston to kind of find some deals for the team.

So one of the big things that I really like about Excite is that you all really work very hard to educate, provide education, even for people who are not ready to invest yet, right? How to teach people how to get involved. So talk a little bit about that, because I think that's a huge part of your company and what you put out there, which I think is such a positive thing. You're going to love to have people investing.

You're going to love this. So the name XSITE Capital is spelled X, S, I, T, E. So you came from the word excitement. Excite.

So when we came across multifamily real estate, me and Leslie got excited. So I can remember very well, we're sitting in Wegmans in Maryland. I used to live in Maryland. I went to Bowie State for grad school.

So I worked at the D.C. area. So me and Leslie were like, hey, let's meet up and have a conversation about where we're going to go with this business. So we met in the Workman's in Upper Marlboro, and we sat down there in a little corner.

That's where we registered a company in Maryland. And they were like, man, what are we going to give? What name are we going to give the company? Well, we're like, man, we're excited.

We're excited about this opportunity. So many people give you something that comes with Excite excitement. So we had the ex. So Excite is ex, C, I, T, E.

Right? But we're like, let's get rid of the E. Just leave X. And then we have a big logo X.

And they were like, site. Maybe we'll take out a C and put S, which is a location. We're like, man, that sounds good. Let's just call XSITE Capital.

So that is where the name came from, XSITE Capital, which is. We were excited about learning about this information that we did not know that was available to us because I lived in apartments, but I didn't know that I can go buy an apartment. I can remember at the time we were thinking about, how can we raise a million dollars? Because if you're buying a commercial property and you want to buy a million dollars, a million dollar property, that's Commercial, you're looking at from 25% or all the way to 45% that you have to raise.

It's not 5%, it's not 2.5%. So if we're buying a million dollar deal, that means we need to raise $250,000. That's minus the amount of money we're going to use to do the renovation and all of that good stuff, which is probably going to go to 350 to 400 grand. So me and Leslie was like, how are we going to get this capital to do it?

So that whole idea of actually even thinking about it was scary. It was scary. But we were like, well, but other people are doing it. Why don't we just try to figure out what they're doing and then we can try to do it as well, which is they actually go out there, teach people about what they're doing, and then they raise capital.

So that's what we did. So we were like, okay, we're going to go to our community, tell them that, dude, this asset class exists. Now. I'm talking about community.

I'm talking about professional community, black and brown folks, immigrant community, a lot of doctors, because Dr. Oni is a doctor. He's an orthopedic surgeon, a renowned surgeon. And Leslie crna, I'm an it.

Why don't you go to these guys and tell them, do you guys know that you can buy apartment buildings? And I love them. Like, are you kidding me? Is impossible.

Not me here sitting down saying we're raising $22.3 million. When we started, I was scared of raising $200,000, right? But the only way we got here was through education to just letting people understand that there's trend in numbers. If we come together, we can go buy these big deals together and we all make money, right?

And if we do that again and again and again, we're all just going to build wealth. And in addition to building, you know, cash flow, you know, appreciation, there's a lot of tax benefits that come with investing in real estate as well. And a lot of us are high earners. We're making multiple, multiple six figures and we end up paying 40% in taxes.

How can we reduce our tax burden significantly? And we realized that real estate is one of the ways to do it using depreciation. So that's where like, man, we're going to go educate our community as much as possible. And that's what we've been doing.

We actually created, last year, we created a platform called the Beyond Nine. To five. I was just going to ask you about that because I love that. I think, yeah, we talked about that earlier today.

We love the name. Thank you. Thank you. And the principle behind that is more just education where we will let people understand that you can actually leverage your 9 to 5.

Your 9 to 5 is actually an asset rather than a liability. A lot of people are, man, I don't like my 9 to 5 anymore. I hate it. No, no, no, no, no, no.

It's a means to an end. You can use that to kick start whatever you want to do. Without my 9 to 5, we wouldn't have been able to build XSITE Capital. I recently just quit my job in July of last year.

For the last five years, I was leveraging my life to fight my 9 to 5 to build Excel Capital, my whole partners, that's what we did. All our investments, we invest in almost all our deals is these things where we invested and the only way we got those capital was we had a nine to five. So if anybody's listening to me right now, your nine to five is the seed capital is an asset that you have that you can use to do anything you want to do. You want to do a side gig, you want to have a.

You want to become an entrepreneur, you want to sell water. Your 9 to 5 is an asset that you can leverage to be able to get that done. So the house, the Beyond 9 to 5 came about where you can create endless possibilities for yourself and your family. Leveraging your 9 to 5.

And your 9 to 5 is what everybody we use to build, whatever we build. Again, don't quit your 9 to 5 until, you know, until whatever you're doing is producing a significant amount of revenue. Then you can quit your 9 to 5 and go all in. And go all in like that.

So earlier we talked a little bit about how you select deals, how you select areas. So but what have you seen in the change just, you know, across the board in the real estate industry where you've had to kind of adjust and make. You all have had to make adjustments in what you do and what do you foresee in the future. So, and that's a challenge we all are trying to navigate.

So in 2021, 2022, there was. So when you buy real estate, you use debt, you know, use money from the bank and debt is an instrument that you can use. Just an instrument. Depending on the climate, different type of debt exists for you to buy deals.

So in 2021, 2022, there's this thing called bridge Debt that was available for folks to use to buy deal. And why it was good was because they usually front you, they give you a lot of the money that you use for the construction of the project is a temporary loan where you get it, you go in, you do your renovation and then in three years you can refinance and then go into a longer debt. Because one of the laws of real estate is you want to use long term debt. But this tool came in and a lot of people were using it.

Now the mistake a lot of people made was they were not putting in what's called a rate cap, meaning it's a variable loan. You need to put a cap to how high that the interest rate can go up if something happens in the economy. So a lot of people did not do that. So inflation went up.

So during COVID there was a lot of money that pumped into the economy. Inflation got out of hand. The Fed had to step in. And when they did that, they increased interest rate.

When they increased interest rate, everybody that did not have a rate cap on their loan, everything went up. Now think about, you know, let's say as an example, your mortgage is a million dollars and boom, that million dollars now that you're supposed to be paying for mortgage goes to 1.5, $1.6 million. And you still have the same amount of income coming in from the project. So because of that, a lot of people that have these floating rate debt, they became, they started struggling, right?

So to answer your question, where we see things going in the real estate space is a lot of these guys that have this floating red debt. They are all coming due right now. The bank is going to force them to sell. So what we're seeing with high interest rates, high capitalization rate is reducing the prices of properties.

For example, the property that we're buying right now in 2022, it was valued at 6. $60.77 million. We're buying it for 49.1 right now. That's because cap rate has expanded.

Right then in 2021, 2022, cap rate was really, really compressed. And cap rate is basically just market sensitivity or market sentiment. The stronger the market, the compressed. The cap rate is places like maybe Detroit, cap rate is probably 8%, but in Las Vegas, that's going to be a hot market.

Cap rate is probably going to be five, five and a quarter, something like that, right? That means properties in these markets are going to be more expensive and stuff like that. So going forward, we're going to see a lot of deals Come to market. And that's some of the conversation we're having with a lot of brokers.

So what happened as well with the Fed increasing interest rate? A lot of us investors, we're not sure what we're going to do. Like, if I go buy a deal right now and they keep increasing the interest rate, that means the cost of capital goes up, right? So everybody was like, let's pause.

So everybody paused for two years. Now that we know that the Fed has started reducing interest rate, people are beginning to say, okay, maybe we can get back to the market, because we know interest rate is not going up anymore. We're going to stay a little stable, and now we can transact because we kind of know where interest rate is. Historically, interest rate used to be significantly higher.

We got spoiled. Right. In 2021 or 2020. 2020 21, interest rate went to zero.

You're basically getting money for free. Right? You know, so that spoiled a lot of people. And I'm believing that in the next quarter, things are gonna open up a little bit and we'll be able to do more deals.

More deals, yeah. What do you foresee for the future of excite and like, five years down the line, 10 years down the line. Oh, man. This year we're trying to do $200 million worth of deals.

I already told everybody, if you're listening right now, if you're a broker, you're an investor, come and join us. We're trying to buy $200 million worth of deal this year. Put the word out already. They say shoot for the stars.

No food for the moon, and you fall on the stars, right? That's the saying, right? So I'm shooting for 200 million. If I hit 100 million, I'm winning.

If I hit 50 million, I'm winning. But this year we're trying to do 200 million. Our goal is to buy $10 billion of assets in the next decade. Okay.

And the only way we do that is we're going to partner up with a bunch of investors. Our investors are their diverse background, but mainly medical professionals. And now we're beginning to build a relationship with some institutional capital as well. So some of this capital is coming into our deals.

This is what we're doing right now. We're working with a potential institutional partner on this deal that we're working on right now. So, yeah, we're going to acquire a bunch of deals. We're going to try to transform lives as well.

One of the things we do as a company is we educate A lot of people where you don't think that you have to work with XSITE Capital to get into these assets. If we're able to teach you how to do it, you can go do it yourself. Yeah, then go do it yourself. We empower you.

For example, in this conference right now, I invited a couple of my mentees and the relationships that I've been building for the last four, five years, in a very short period of time, I was able to link them up. You know, this guy sold me this deal. This person is trying to buy a deal. You guys have a conversation.

And those relationships are built because of the track record that we have now. They were like, yeah, I trust any. So because he's recommending you, I want to work with you. So we want to transform lives in that regard as well.

Teach a lot of people how they can go do what we're doing here at XSITE Capital. So that's one thing we're doing. Another thing we're doing as well, CEO, he's trying to transform orthopedic surgery in Nigeria. So we are supporting some of those initiatives as well.

So our profit that we make as XSITE Capital we're going to use to support here, help him transform musculoskeletal care in Nigeria. I'm not in the medical space. I'm trying to get one right. So he's trying to transform that.

So we're going to support that significantly. Also, we. There's this thing called the Skill Bridge program. We have folks that are coming out of the Navy.

They're trying to transition into the corporate world. We've been able to have about four or five people come to XSITE Capital, where they come and learn about apartment buildings, how to invest. Actually, right now we hire two of them that is not an employee of XSITE Capital. So as a way of giving back, you know, we support the skillbridge program, we support initiatives in Nigeria.

We help educate a lot of people to be able to create companies like Inside Capital while we buy assets as well. So, well, one of the things in working with you all is getting to really help people increase the value of their retirement account by investing in alternatives and being able to invest in XSITE Capital with their retirement account. So talk to us a little bit about that. How has that helped you guys raise capital?

That is huge. And everybody that's listening right now, this is super important. And you can Google this. You know, you don't have to take my words for it.

You just put it on Google. Just, you know, you just type what can I invest with my self directed ira. And what is a self directed ira? You know, it's amazing what your retire.

You can use your retirement account for that a lot of people didn't know about. I didn't know about it. I worked at Deloitte for seven years. I had all this retirement account.

And the interesting thing is right now I think there's a data point that's out there that says $1.65 trillion with a T. Yeah. Is hanging right now where folks don't have actually forgotten that they have that money there. And he's just sitting there.

They didn't know. Now a lot of people might be interested in oil and gas, you might be interested in crypto, you might be interested in precious metal art. All of these things are things that you can actually use your retirement account to invest in. And the only way you can do that, you have to roll it out to a self directed area and that's where you guys come in.

So in this deal that we're doing right now, I think we have close to $5 million from over $5 million from people's retirement Account. And the markets right now, the stock or the mutual funds, they do I think 7 to 10% on an average return. Syndication deals we can do. This deal we're doing to do 15.5%.

Historically we've delivered 29.97 average annual return to our investor. That's our track record. You can get that in the stock market and you're not investing in anything that's volatile. For example, they just talk about Deep Seek that just came out, all the tech companies that got hit.

That's not something that's going to happen with alternate assets like this. So if anybody doesn't know that you can use a retirement account for alternate investment, just do some research, you know, just go on Google and do your research. And of course, if you need somebody that will help you, Preferred trust is here to help. And they can invest with Excite and of course.

So how many deals do you have? Like are there deals open right now? So if somebody is interested in opening an account and getting started with you. All, yes, we have a deal.

Now the deal we have is wrapping up in like two, three weeks. We're going through the loan approval process with Fannie Mae, but there's still some spot left. You know, minimum investment in our deals ranges from 50. You know, we have some people coming at a million dollars, 750, 600 grand.

Yeah. So we have an open investment right now. It's an institutional grade asset, 268 unit deal, buying it for $49.1 million. Great asset.

Grade school occupancy stays high for the last 30 years, over 92%. So it's a stable asset. In Atlanta, Georgia, we're excited about our deal. This is going to be our second deal in Atlanta.

So we're excited about our project. Awesome. Anything else you want to tell us about Excite or what you have going on before we tell them how they can get a hold of you? We're just excited.

I think the future is super bright. I'm here in Vegas, meeting a lot of folks that I've been building relationship with now for a long time. Me and my partners, we, we're locked in, we're all, you know, in this full time now and we're just ready to buy a bunch of deals, help people make money and build wealth in that process, you know. And provide great education too.

I think the thing to remember about Excite is they can provide you if you've never invested in real estate before, if you don't, you know, kind of out there not knowing what to do, that's a great way to get started. The education that you guys are providing is phenomenal. Absolutely. And one very important thing that I want people to understand is access.

Right. A lot of people don't understand that they have access to these asset class. Right. And sometimes when you think about it, you get scared.

You're like, man, is $5 million is too big, I can't do it. No. There's no one person I've seen today that used their own money to become wealthy. None.

The building that we're in right now, the person that owns it did not use his money to buy it. They use other people's money. They come together collectively and go buy these deals. So if you're thinking about investing, educate yourself, pull some resources with people and then go buy it.

And you can get access to it. Just like I got access to it excited, my partners, we all got access to it. You can get access to it as well. And if you are struggling, reach out.

You know, I'll give you guys my contact information, reach out to me and we can chat. I can spend some time with you, give you some educational guidance and you can run from you, do with it, whatever you like. So tell us how they can reach you. So you can find me on LinkedIn.

I'm very active on LinkedIn and I'm on Instagram as well. It's Tenny t e n n y to Lofari t o l O F A R I that's the only tenet on a fari online. And the name of my company is Excited Capital is X s I t e capital.com. and yeah, and then my cell phone number is 202569 5072.

If you want to call me, text me, just reach out. I'm very responsive to inquiries, for sure. Well, thank you. We appreciate you being here today.

Appreciate you've been a wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much. And we're excited for you, too. I think it's kind of infectious the.

The attitude you have, which is. Which is phenomenal. So if you're out there and you're interested in investing, if you have retirement dollars socked away somewhere that you haven't looked at the account in a long time, here's your opportunity to raise some in some capital for a great company and to get your retirement going. So, yeah.

So definitely give us a call. Give them a call. And I've actually used my retirement account from. Using.

From Preferred Trust Invest. He has, yes. So he's a testament that it does work. And these guys are phenomenal.

Like, you know, I can't say enough about you guys, you know, very easy to work with. It's responsive. That's all you can ask for when you're looking for partnership, because when it comes to this deal, it takes a lot of work and you just need the right strategy partners that you can put on your side to go on this journey with. So thank you all so much for having me.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us today. And thank you all for joining us today. Look out for the next edition of the Preferred Way again, buddy.

Thanks for joining us for another episode where retirement savers meet alternative investments. Can't wait for the next episode. To learn more, visit our website at preferredtrustcompany. Com.

. Welcome to the Thriving Immigrant podcast with Paul Addier. This is where we share powerful stories of resilience, success and transformation. Whether you're an immigrant or navigating a new life, and aspiring entrepreneur or someone looking for inspiration, this podcast is for you.

Join me as we dive into real conversations with incredible individuals who have turned challenges into opportunities r. Let's learn grow and tribe together. Cheers to a life of a brother. Welcome to another insightful episode of a Driving Immigrant podcast.

My name is Paul Hadiye. I'm excited to always do this and before I go into today's conversation I just want to say a big thank you to you for tuning. In for listening to this podcast for sharing it with your friends. Thank you so much.

I really do appreciate it. Today's conversation. Of course is an insightful conversation. I am really excited to introduce my guests.

My guests moved to the United States over a decade ago, transitioned into the tech space, cyber security to the precise, did amazingly well in that space for some years, and decided to transition into entrepreneurship by partnering with some amazing individuals to set up their own organization called XSITE Capital. So XSITE Capital is an investment company. they've been helping professionals to build wealth and to show them ways how they can invest their money.I mean the beautiful thing about what they are doing is they not only serving Americans, but they also have opportunities for people across the globe. So regardless of where.

You are living or where you reside in, you can Thank you so much Paul for having me. I appreciate it R. I Looking forward to chatting with your audience and hopefully I can add value to your audience here. Thank you for having me.

Also, all right. So, Tenny, even from your accent, it doesn't sound like you're an immigrant. You sound like black America. But I know that you are not a black American.

I know that you were born in Nigeria. So do you want to talk a little Rit you want to share with us, your immigration journey. Absolutely. and you start growing in the world, you start dreaming and then oftentimes we dream of a place where we can have a better life and there's the same story like a lot of people that have moved from different parts of the world to the United States.

I wanted to come here for Greenest Bachelor. I was born raised in Nigeria. I had my undergrad in Nigeria, and I came here for grad school in 2010. Yeah, and that's I came down here, did my master's degree in Bowie State University in Maryland, graduated in 2012, and started working in the corporate world.

And yeah, I started working with the likes of Boeing, Deloitte, I was a global cybersecurity professional with them on my incident commander from a cybersecurity aspect. I used to be an incident commander right now. I'm an investor and no longer. You know, by the grace of God, I'm no longer doing cybersecurity anymore.

I'm focused on building a capital of my partner. So let me share a lot of information about what we're doing at XSITE Capital. But, you know, yeah, came to the United States, walked the 905 path and found myself here now being one of the founders of EXEC Capital and will be an amazing company without community of investors. .

Beautiful. Thank you for sharing. that with us. I'm really curious because you you're 925 or let me say your professional background was in a space that is still currently thriving.

And I believe that But if you had not left nine to five for entrepreneurship, you probably would still be doing amazingly well. People currently practicing cyber security and the number of people that they need in that space. So why entrepreneurship and why investment, why did you choose that path? Was that part of your dreams or part of your plan before moving to the US?

Absolutely not. My plan to move into the United States is to just R and get my master's degree and do the nine to five. So when you growing up, there's a lot of foundation out or there's a lot of things that you learn that subconsciously you don't know you actually learning from your environments from your parents where mom, your dad, and some point in the future, sometime in the future, some of these things that you learn might just kick in and he'd be like, oh, where did this come from? For me, I wanted to just come to the US and study and get good grades and get a good job.

And the way I looked at it is I get. I get to see things a little farther than a lot of people. When I came here, I think in IT that time, a lot of folks wanted to focus in being a DBA or being a business analyst or doing something else that's not related to cybersecurity. But for some reason, I had a professor that was like 10, the next 10 years is gonna be, cybersecurity is gonna be the key highlight when it comes to IT.

Maybe you should spend some time studying it. So I bought my first cybersecurity book in 2010, the So I bought that book and started studying it, and focused And I'm at a point. And as I continued my journey, there's this philosophy that I learned from Robert Kiyosaki. And he said, in the United States economy or in the world in general, you can fall in one or four, you can participate in one or one of four categories.

Rnd these quadrants or categories are the E quadrants, meaning you're an employee working for somebody and they get a paycheck. And then two, you can have the self-employed, which is, you move from, I don't want to work for somebody else, I want to work for myself. Think about the dentist, the solo entrepreneurs and the lawyers, those guys that start working for themselves. Now, you're running from not being an employee, you become a boss plus the employee, and if you have a problem or you're not able to earn any money, right?

So a lot of people move from the E and will go straight to the S quadrant. But what Robert Tiyosaki said is for, if you want to be wealthy, you have to participate in the B and I quadrant, which is on the right side of a quadrant. So you have the E, the S, the B and the I. So that's one philosophy that stuck with me, basically.

That philosophy is like the I, you're working for somebody, the B, you're working for yourself. Sorry, the I, you're working for somebody, the E, sorry, you're working for somebody, the a self-employed, you're working for yourself, the B, you're building a business, and then the I you invest in. The B and I are on the right side of the quadrant. And that philosophy stuck to because he said.

If you want to be wealthy, you want. to be in the B and I quadrants and on the big quadrants. What are you are doing? You have a product or solution that you're solving a problem..

You have people that are working for you. You have processes and you have technology people technology and processes and of course you have a solution that you're offering to the marketplace. Now, the hardest things, the hardest thing to do is to build a business. Because when you're building the business, you have to deal with people.

People are the hardest people to deal with, you know, one of the hardest things people to deal with when it comes to anything,. Because you have to manage people. And of course, you have a solution that you have to create for a problem that's in the marketplace. And then you have to figure out how to make money doing that.

So the B is one of the toughest thing anybody can do. And that's why they get rewarded significantly when you're able to build a business. And. Finally, the eye is you leverage other people resources, for example, people that are real estate investors, people that are producing.

For example, we have the all these companies and that have that in the stock markets, the S&P 500. 500. You have precious metal. You have oil and gas.

You have all of these alternate assets are all in the I quadrants that you'll be wealthy and that stuck with me. So the question I'm not asking myself is now I'm in the E quadrant, how do I find myself in the B and R quadrant. And that's what I think will help a lot of people on this podcast today, is if you're in the E quadrant, which is you're working for somebody, how do you get yourself- in either the S, the B, or the I quadrant. I upgraded in the E quadrant, I upgraded in the big quarter I'm going to be an eye quarter right now, but I can walk you guys through that journey.

And again, you can ask me questions about how I did that and I can share with fantastic, quite profound. So I've read a lot of things. I've read that book here talking about and I have a lot of questions from what you've said. My first one would be, almost everyone understands that, you know, it's tough to build wealth on the E quadrant doesn't mean that.

People don't build wealth on the E quadrant. It might just take a longer time. And even if you're going to build wealth in the E quadrant, you still have to find your way to the I quadrant. working for the rest of your life.

So you can be in the E quadrant, make good money, manage your lifestyle and also find R on the I quadrant. That's correct. However, to grow to the point because when we talk about to a lot of work or a lot of effort to work and get to the point where you can invest a significant amount of money. Now, my question would be, how easily can you transition from E to B?

I'm omitting S because, and I might be wrong, because I personally feel like the S quadrant is even tougher than the E quadrant. Yes, it is. It's absolutely tougher. It's tougher.

And if I'm gonna recommend that, so if you cannot find yourself on the B quadrants, just stay at the E quadrants and grow fast and grow well. Actually, everything on the right side of the quadrant is tougher than everything on the E quadrant. The B quadrant is really tough, anything because it's 100% dependent on you, right? So actually all the quadrants are hard.

None of them is easy. Because if you think about R&D in the E quadrant, if you go in there, you have to want to go to school or learn a craft, have a skill set. And then you have to prove to somebody that you're able to provide a skill set that they need in I'm gonna hire you and then they pay you a salary and they give you a bonus they compensate you for the skill sets that you bring to the table. Now if you do not have a good skill set or if you're not sellable in the marketplace nobody's going to pay you a lot of money.

So to your question how does somebody from the E quadrant goes go to the I quadrant or to the B quadrant or to the S quadrant is one you have to have a skill that somebody is willing to pay for. And if your skill is not, I always tell people that if you're choosing anything in life, the E quadrant is actually an asset. It actually helps you build that C capital for you to be able to do anything in the S. the B.

or the I quadrant. If I'm going to advise anybody today, please, if you have an employee of somebody. You want to leverage the income. You want leverage the platform, you want to leverage the experience that you have from there to a figure out how you can now go into the BDS or the I quadrant.

If you do that very well, you easily succeed in the B, D, and S quadrant. And if you want to move in any of those directions, does that make sense? Absolutely. You made a very valid point.

I think there was a time I posted something on, was it LinkedIn or X talking about how important the E quadrant can be for people who want to even build businesses, because like you mentioned, it's a very good platform for you to learn some skills for you to make some money, for you to even build your confidence and for you to also build relationships because when you become a business owner, you would need you're going to be dealing with a lot of people and people. Yeah, are also very important. And you probably don't know, maybe the connection, the relationship that you built about the years, how they're you as a new business owner or a self-employed person. At most times, people that build businesses, most people, they usually build business from their past experiences.

So people that work in maybe the retail industry, you find them building a business in that same industry because that's where they are comfortable. That's what they've learned over the years. one has worked in maybe the tech industry, you would like to find them building something in that, as well, meaning that all these skills, all the experiences to do something great ah like I said, without the there's no XSITE Capital. There's no me, there's no Dr.

Oni. Without a nine to five, there's nothing like that because all the investments we have to make in ourselves and our business in hiring people, all of them stand from the e quadrant. And all we needed to do was to make as much money from. the e quadrant as much as possible so that we can invest in the big quadrants because at some point we need to make as much money from the e quadrant as much as possible so that we can invest in the big quadrant.

Because at some point we can Because at some point you have to pay staffs, even when you're not making money. You Rave to create a solution, even when you're not making money. And how are you going to do all of that? You have to invest in the I quadrant as well, how are you going to afford all of that?

You have to leverage your E quadrant to be your job to be able to get that done. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Tony.

valid point. And I'm loving this conversation. I want to thank you. I wanted to talk a little bit about your experience in entrepreneurship.

And the question I would like to ask you, you've talked about your partners, maybe unconsciously, you've mentioned your partner as the same level of success in your business, if you have no partner at all. Absolutely not. Without Dr. Oni and Leslie, they are awesome.

There's no Ex, there's no me. Now, of course, I'll be here, but there won't be any XSITE Capital and all the things you're hearing about XSITE Capital right now will not be in existence. One of the beautiful things that happened to my life is finding Dr. Oni and.

Leslie to be partners because one of the things that you find that's really hard when you go in this entrepreneurial journey is actually finding- finding partners that can. actually see you all can create a vision and you're aligned with that vision and work on it for a long period of time. It's usually hard to find people that have complementary strengths, but what I'm about to say right now is super and complementary strengths, not the same strength. For example, Dr.

Tony, he's the leader the company, he's a CEO of XSITE Capital, you know, he puts our name out there, he represents our brand. He's XSITE Capital, right? He embodies the principles of XSITE Capital. Me, I'm the guy that go in and knock the doors and find the deals and bring it to the organization and we take it down and then Leslie's like our operation genius.

He's the one that puts everything together. So why don't I see you I'm the chief growth officer and head of acquisition. Leslie, is the chief operational officer. So all three of us have different complementary strengths, and we exactly know what our roles are within the company.

So there's no conflict. So, and what we did when we started the company, we agreed that everybody needs to stay in their lane. Meaning in acquisition, I don't want Leslie or Dr. Oni telling me what to do in that position, is my department.

Now, of course, I'm going to get feedback from you know, positive and-negative feedback. I want that, but the ultimate decision when it comes to, how to find a deal the deal, how to build a relationship, how to bring those deals to the organization. That is ultimately falls in my sphere. When it comes to the vision, when it comes to where we want to go, when it comes to building a relationship that, that will take us to the next level, a doctor needs the person, right?

And then Leslie, our awesome, he's the guy to integrate everything. Basically he's the one that makes sure. All our employees are working doing what they're supposed to be doing. He's making sure all our operations are good.

All our assets have been managed way shared. All our accounting are. Good. He is basically the engine running everything in the back end, right?

So that three draw came together and that's, what Yeah, so I really love what you made. I really love what you talked about. And I admire how you guys have been the able to work together. So, apart from, I made a very valid point and that point is very powerful, talking R about complementary strength, because it's very powerful.

I'm giving deep meaning to that complementary strength, because sometimes it is difficult to find or to even identify people that have strength that's they have complementary that you guys can work together with. And the reason why I'm saying this is naturally you would meet people that look like you, people that you share the same strength, but it doesn't mean that you guys can work together. So as you r have different strengths, you also have different weaknesses. So apart from complementary strength, what else should we look out for.

They say now Paul is trying to build a business and he's wants to work with different partners. So apart from complementary strength, are there any other things? Oh yeah, I have a whole lot. So the number one is Ego.

There's this book called The E R E is the Enemy. I think it's Ryan Holland. Is it Ryan Holland that I wrote that book? Ego is the Enemy and you know you guys research it.

It's a good book. Dr. Oni, he's a renownedopedic sergeant, leader, great guy to call a brother and a friend and a business-business partner. Same thing with Leslie.

Guess what we all do? We all put our egos, when we start talking about XSITE Capital, we keep our egos right there at the door. And then we come to XSITE Capital and start having a conversation-conversation. So, we call each other out and when we're doing something wrong, we'll do something right, we call each other out.

know. And you have to be humble enough to know what you don't know. And let somebody that knows it, take care of it. Right?

You have to be humble enough to understand that this is your weakness, and this is your strength, and you. Want to outsource your weakness as much as possible. So what me, Lester R. and Julius have been able to find and agree upon as one of our co-value at XSITE Capital is humility.

Meaning we check our ego at every point in time, because it's in the best interest of three of us, and of course the organization that we're trying to build as well. So EAGLE is a book that you should, everybody should read if you're looking to build a business. And that is one of the principle that have actually helped us at XSITE Capital to what we have today. Awesome, I'm loving this conversation.

Thank you for mentioning that. So humility, EAGLE is the enemy, so everybody drops their EAGLE at the door. Now, do you want to talk to us a little bit about XSITE Capitals? What do you guys believe of?

What are you guys going to. Absolutely. Yeah, it's pretty simple, man. I try to, whenever I have a conversation with somebody, I like to let them understand XSITE Capital is just a platform for busy professionals.

Folks that are looking to build wealth, but they don't have the time to do it. Just like we talked about earlier, you can leverage an E to be in the I quadrants. XSITE Capital What we observed is the way a lot of people build wealth is true real estate.. Not just single family homes, not just dup Rlexus, but large real estate.

And what we see when we did our survey around us, when we looked at our communities, when I say community, I'm talking about an Nigerian. African communities. I will talk about healthcare professionals, IT professionals, our professional community in general that we interface with. We observe that a lot of them are not previewed to investing in these institutional grade assets, or this large apartment buildings, or commercial real estate in general.

So, the question we ask ourselves is there a way we can create the solution where the e quadrant that wants to invest in the ad quadrant to actually get access to institutional grade assets to build wealth not just to build wealth also to reduce that tax burden. And in the last six years that's what we've done at XSITE Capital. We created the XSITE Capital for busy professionals to help them build wealth using real estate. We created XSITE Capital for them to have access to an asset class that was only available to the wealthy, meaning you only have to meet the certain income requirement and you need to have access to a certain amount of community in order for you to be able to get access Now we're bringing that to our communities and we're super excited of what we've done.

And there's no way we would have done this without a community. You ask the question about partnership. When you think about numbers, there's strength in numbers. There's no one person that have done anything great, there's no one person that have bought large assets across this country that have done it by themselves.

So what we're looking to do now and one of the things we identify is Nigerian immigrants, African immigrants, a lot of us are hard workers, a lot of us are high earning individuals. And guess what happens, we earn all this money and we give away 40, 50% to taxes, right? The most important thing when it comes to earning money, it's not just about making money but it's about keeping it. And XSITE Capital figure out a way to be able to help busy professionals like us get access to these deals.

Because there's no reason why we work, earn and all this money and we cannot keep. If everybody is doing it and there's a tax code out there that enables you to keep it, can't we do that? So what we're doing is helping folks grow up and reduce their tax burden using commercial real estate and when I say commercial real estate I'm talking about 100 plus unit apartment buildings across the country. So I really love what you just said and you know to me it's like a sword approach so while you're trying to help people build wealth They're also trying to help them reduce their taxes because in North America taxes is like the biggest body.

Absolutely. So the average immigrant doesn't even mind just reduce my taxes because we are advocates just like you said. Absolutely. And we make a lot of money.

We make a lot of money- Yes. And it is a tax progressive system. So the more you disposable income to even attend investing. So you helping them to take care of their future at R the R.

I think that's a fantastic model. R. It's the holy grail. Yeah, that's a no brainer.

So congratulations to you, Dr. Julius and Leslie for taking the courage to build something like this, empowering the black community and giving hope to the upcoming generation. Absolutely. Absolutely.

The thing is not when you think about it and you survey it, a lot of people, there's so many apartment buildings in this country or in the world. And when you walk around it and you ask yourself, actually somebody owns that right? So the question you ask yourself is why can't we own it or why can I own it. And when you're not dig a littleo little deeper you will realize that the person that own it is not one person.

There's some people came together they raised we get hired. We get hired, they say put some money away in your 401k. In your 401k they do what's called asset allocation. They put some of the money in index funds, the mutual funds.

They put some of them in REITs, which is real estate investment trust. And guess what those REITs do? They find people like us and say, hey guys, actually the deal that we just closed, we actually bought it from a REITs, right? They look for people like us and say, hey guys, did you guys find a deal?

We say, yes, we found a deal. They say, well, I'm gonna give you five, $10 million. I need it's 15, 15% a return on my money.- But guessI guess I. But guess what Because.

You don't. You don't need to go and put your money somewhere else that goes across the platform. No-no-no- you know exactly the asset you are investing in. the, middleman.

So a and this conversation. Welcome Everything in the world, even this business is the foundation is real estate. As you live your own, to go and work with your employer is existing because they've invested in real estate. At the very least, they have a building.

And the real estate, which is also an investment. Come back home, or on your way, you go to McDonald's to buy lunch. That's a business existing because of real estate. When I come back to sleep, that's the real estate.

So everything is the base of every investment a life is probably rill estate. And if I'm wrong, you guys can correct me. So when you think about real estate, it's basically solving some core human needs. Right.

For example, what we're buying to buy apartment buildings, we're solving the need of housing. In the United States right now, there's a shortage of housing right now. Right. So if you're able to provide a accommodation a business, it's where you solve problems.

That's what XSITE Capital is doing, is we're creating a business right here, where we're solving problems, right? - and then when we were bringing our investors with final assets, here, that in the I quadrant, that it can use to build wealth. So we're solving problems, we're coming up with a process, technology, the people, that we actually create that solution, finding the asset, put it under the contract, you know, do the dood Roodles on it, running it, making sure it's put it in revenue. And then a lot of investors from the E can strict directly in the ad quarter for them to be right now.

A lot of folks. A lot of folks have reached out to us and say, hey, listen, can I invest directly in the XSITE Capital? Yeah, we've not got public yet. So can I have met the XSITE Capital?

That was gonna be my next question. So I was gonna ask you that, but now that you've answered that, let's talk about the minimum requirement to even partner with you guys, like do you accept clients beyond the US? Can someone from Canada, Nigeria, can they invest? Absolutely.

Absolutely. We have people in Nigeria, in the UK, Ireland, Canada, that have invested in this deal right now. So one of the bottlenecks we the face when we started was we had a lot of people that had interest in investing in the US market, because we all know that US market is one of the strongest, is actually the strongest in the world. So a lot of people want to put their money in hard assets here in the US.

And since we have access to these assets, people want to invest. So we were, we're like, okay a, how do we, you know, take their money on what is the tax implication, so on this deal, we're able to actually talk to our council here to come up with the structure where people internationally can actually invest. And the minimum investment is $50,000, you know, a lot of our to come in a deal, but later on, we've moved it to a credit investors only investment. And that's these are some of the rules that the SEC here provide for us to be able to make sure we're operating the business in a good fashion.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I have a follow up question. So let's say Paul lives in the US now.

Now he wants to start investing, but you know what it takes to be an accreditor Absolutely. It's simple. There's an or you have a net worth of a million, excluding your primary residence. If you meet this requirement, you have qualified as an accredited investor.

Beautiful. Okay. So thank you, Tony. This has been a very insightful conversation.

I've learned a lot from everything you've said. I wanted to ask you now. I'm not yet a accredited. You don't make 200K.

I'm hoping that we make 200K in the future and I'm not married. And I really want to do something with you guys. Do you have anything for such people? When it comes to investing, you can either invest in assets or you can invest in yourself.

We have a bunch of materials that we put out there for people to educate themselves. For example, you don't have to be an accredited investor to learn how to invest in real estate. You can learn how to do real estate. We have a course that we've created just to educate our community.

we have a very restricted, one-on-one program where we hold people's hands to actually do this in the United States and across the world. r people that are looking to invest in the US market and using the same strategy that we have. We have a one-on-one mentorship program that we have. We have a course and we're looking to continue to provide a lot of educational materials for people that are looking to go do these themselves.

And again, all you just have to just reach out to us at the exact outcome and one of our team members reach out and try to understand exactly what your goals are because what we do is we identify what you're looking to do and we'll see if we're a good fit. But we're not a good fit to show you what you can go get or use to get to where you want to get. We don't,t know it all and we don't claim that we do, but whatever we can help in our platform. We're able to a way to help out with the investing and with education as well.

Wow. I really enjoy this conversation. a thank you Tenny for coming to the Driving Immigrant podcast. Honestly, I could go another one, two hours, but not to bore my listeners, I would like to call it today at this point.

But before then, there's a question I usually love to ask my guests. What is what's the most powerful piece of advice that you ever received? I think the advice that I would give that my mom always, my mom actually gave me the advice is, if you want R- something, you really want something. You have to be persistent.

You don't you can don't just, you know, face one challenge and you quit. Right? If you really want something, go for it. You're going to face a lot of obstacles, especially if the thing is big, from your family, your friends, brothers, uncles, friends, everything.

As long as you have it in your mind, it comes to your mind, you can achieve it. If you can conceive it, you can achieve it. And there's a reason why you have it in your mind. And if that's clay is enough in your mind, you can achieve it.

I think tenacity is one of the attributes that keeps me going where regardless of what I face, I keep going and I don't quit if I really want that thing. So, stay persistent, tenacious, and have a beautiful day. Profounds. Thank you so much, Tenny.

We've had a wonderful time with Tenny Tolofari of XSITE Capital. We are all excited. I'm excited and I'm really excited about what you guys are building. Shout out to your partner.

Thank you so much. Shout out to Dr. Julius Oni and Leslie and I look forward to hosting you, maybe, with your other partners another time. Absolutely.

We look forward to it. Thank you for having me Paul. Alright, so thank you everyone for tuning in. On this note, I wish you a nice day.

If you are listening for the first time, please subscribe. If you know anyone that you think would benefit from this wonderful conversation. Please go ahead and share this podcast with them. Let's build a thriving community, one day at a time.

Hello everyone and welcome to season two, episode three of the AYU podcast. I'm your host and I am very excited to introduce a special guest today. Today, I'm here with Dr. Oni, an exceptional orthopedic surgeon who has chosen to take in the brave decision to go back to Nigeria, driven by his passion for improving health care back home.

And in a world where so-many of us are quick to dismiss the potential for change, Dr. Oni stands out as a beacon for hope for the rest of us for his generation and especially our generation, right? So today we're gonna dive into his remarkable journey, how he navigates the challenges see and get ready. Thank-you, Christina.

Really appreciate your the opportunity actually to speak to your audience. Really appreciate it. And look forward to a robust discussion. So yeah, I am Dr.

Julius Oni. I am a orthopedic surgeon and entrepreneur, mostly focused on real estate investing with regards to my entrepreneurship work life. But with regards to orthopedic surgery, I'm a joint replacement and for the past 12 years I've been with the last eight years of those 12 years being at Johns Hopkins where until recently I was the fellowship director for joint replacements and currently I still am the director for global orthopedics at Johns Hopkins, even though I did take as a leave of absence last summer, to go to Nigeria to do some work. The a little bit of backstory about me, I was born and raised in Nigeria, you know, until I was 16, 17, then moved to the US to start undergrad, went straight into Medical School at Howard University, grade HU.

And then after that, I did my residency at NYU Hospital for Joint Disease, now called NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital. And after that, I did my fellowship at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. That's where I really developed the finesse. of joint replacement surgery.

So right after finishing my training, I took my first job in Philadelphia, that hospital called Jefferson Einstein. I initially decided to do joint placements because my paternal grandmother had instaged me on Friday, and there was no one to fix her several years ago, about a decade out, two years ago in Nigeria. So I was moved by that and I wanted to be able to make a difference for people who didn't have access to what I did. And over the last 10 years, I've actually been going back and forth from the US to Nigeria, visiting multiple times in gear, to offer services, to do some charity work, some joint replacements, and things like that.

And even though we were moving the needle significantly, the middle wasn't being moved fast enough, or at least in my opinion. So after much thought and much preparation, I decided to take a leave of absence from Hopkins. And now I'm permanently on ground doing the work, creating the systems, strengthening, creating more capacity, strengthening in the systems that exist, and trying to bring high quality, joint replacement care, and other orthopedic care to the population of Nigeria. So that's pretty much the summary.

That's amazing, and if you weren't inspired by that, guys, I don't even know what to say. But what really got me, because there was a video of a lot of you that went even how I found you in the first, right? So one thing that I think really triggered me to at least try to get you on the podcast was like you said when we were talking about your grandmother and the quality of care back home, right? So that's literally, I think I mentioned it, when I had messaged you that's R what inspired me, you need to start any kind of work in regards to getting people to kind of wake up about what's happening back home, trying to inspire the next generation because of the quality of care that is there right now.

I mentioned it before on here but both of my grandparents passed of cancer. I already knew that whatever I'm gonna do with this life, that's the role of cancer, right? And at first I kind of wanted to practice here, but the more, as I was going back and forth between here and there, we get to see more and more issues with what's happening back home. So my passion for oncology turned into a mix of activism, too.

So that's kind of how AYU was born is from that experience. So I think those personal experiences are what really craft who we are and what we do and our work to kind of change the narrative of Nigeria. So thank you so much for being so open with that. So He talks about the fact or you talked about how you decided to be with me.

And that is a big decision because already I don't think I've heard of almost anyone who is who even has like the interests of practicing or even starting work in Nigeria because you, because of the state of Nigeria right now. So a new share some of your initial thoughts and feelings about the locating and if you If there's any doubts and resistance, either from yourself or from your family and friends. Thank you for asking that question. I think, yeah, I mean, it's really natural that, you know, most people will think it's pretty ridiculous to go to Nigeria at this state.

You know, the country's facing severe economic headwinds and the macroeconomic situation in the country's not favorable to the vast majority of people. And health care is not guaranteed in the sense that 70%, maybe even more, of people have to come out of pocket to pay for health care. So it's a difficult environment to practice medicine or to do. Do any business, really.

But the bottom line is this. We all just talk about the problems, right? and no one is talking about solutions years of going back and forth, trying to R do the R work, you know, from a distance, and from a safe space, I just quickly realized that there was no way for me to truly move the needle fast enough to make great, you know, long-lasting impact without hanging around, right? Right.

And so once you realize that, like, there's to go out a way to make this happen. And some of the ways to make that happen was to make sure that I was ensuring the economic stability of my family units and myself, right? And so that involves invest, you know, putting structures in place so that my ability to feed my family, a couple of my lifestyle expenses is not necessarily dependent on, you know, my rent and my time for money in medicine, right? Because if everything is dependent on me showing up every day, doing a bunch of surgeries, seeing a bunch of patients, then the moment that then the tap essentially is turned off and now I'm in economic trouble, financial trouble, right?

If you don't have that freedom, then it becomes really tough, really challenging to truly be free to make decisions on how to create impact in the world. And yes, you could create in your daily job where you're renting your time for money, the true way to really leave the life of financial freedom, of time freedom, of geographic freedom of true independence is to disconnect the trading your hours for dollars type of situation and making sure that even when you're sleeping, when you out brushing your teeth when you're on vacation, there's still something coming in and there's what people passive income and it truly is the being able to achieve that is the key to being able to make all the decisions right. So for me the way I did that was a lot of investment as soon as I started practice, I started to invest a few years later, pretty significantly, not just in real estate, but in angel investing, I did some single family investing, and then ultimately landed in multifamily-family, which was really what, you know, was the most successful of my efforts and was truly what gave me the confidence to say, okay, this was time to truly go out there and do what my heart wanted, you know, was calling me to do. So, once I started to invest in multi-family, I run another company called XR Capital, where we buy apartment buildings.

We raise capital from the business professionals and buy apartment buildings and doing that. So this large apartment buildings and we all take a little bit of capital from the rents that's been paid on in this building and that generates some long-term income for some passive income for us. And so that was kind of it. And so eventually, once I was able to make enough passive income, that I was able to cover my lifestyle expenses and cover my family's expenses.

So the question was, how do I really want to make an impact in the world? When it's all said and done, when I'm 80 years past, on, It's clear that my impact, I wanted it to be to improve access to high-quality muskles skeletal care in underserved countries starting with Nigeria. So not limited to Nigeria, eventually, but starting with Nigeria, because I believe the vision is big enough that even when one such sets of motion in Nigeria, I should be able to go to other African I should be able to go to other places throughout the world where they still need and still serve also. That's my life's vision.

So once that vision became clear, and I add my true north, then the question was like, how do I execute? So I just reversed, you know, engineered all the steps I needed to take from a daily basis to a weekly basis to a monthly basis, quarterly basis to make sure I can achieve the goal of transitioning to Nigerian. That's what I did. Even though I had a five-year plan to do the transition, I was able to actually achieve it in about three years because I was right on it.

And when the time was there, obviously my wife had questions and we were living in our dream home on two acres of land in the woods and cars and, you know, the kids were going to some of the best schools, you know, so it's like, you know, there was, you know, everything seemed perfect from, you know, from any perspective. But, you know, when the is strong, the conviction is strong, and, you know, it's not always about just being comfortable and just enjoying everything and just, you know, becoming a professor. I'm an associate professor now, and the next thing was to become a professor, maybe take on, you know, the division chief job in some, you know, in some department and then eventually become a chair of some department, but there's no shortage of people doing those such things. And that did not excite me.

Well, for me, what excited me was being able to go to a place like Nigeria and start doing the same things I was doing in the U.A. But those, the same unit of work in the U.S. will make such a big, bigger difference in a place like Nigeria, you know? And just to let me know, in Nigeria, there's like 220 million people.

It's less than 400 orthopaedic surgeons. The vast majority of musculoskeletal care right now in Nigeria is being administered by traditional bone setters who have no formal training who typically would try to fix a fracture by using bamboos and wooden splines and stones and. Yeah, and so they have the that sometimes lead to amputs and the other types of r, this And God, it's rewardinging me to taking a step of, and s faith and doing this. this way more support has been attractive you know a lot of people are praying for me they're saying go go go .

They a doing everything they going to their office through this and for that I'm extremely grateful so that is way more than money to me that is way more than that accol seen us of the world, you know, the crisis of the world. Other the young folks there are forward thinking, progressive thinkers, that leads you to, you know, that's the thing. Start today thinking about wasteing, do this even earlier than I did, and then Nigeria is going to be great eventually because guess what? This is like India.

This is what they did. A bunch of the people came back. It was a combination of fast-run Chinese folks and the local Chinese came together and transformed the place. Same thing you need.

The folks that went out and came back the same thing for any place that has experienced significant growth over the last 20-30 years. Even in the Middle East, the vast majority of their growth was driven not just by local will and political will locally, it was also they used a lot of resources from their citizens, they're trained elsewhere and came back and leading industries there. So it's, we need to like start changing my mindset. It's almost like when we Nigerians talk with, you know, most people are talking about just getting the hell out of Nigeria.

You know, it's almost like a thing that I got out, you know? Right. I think we need to start reorienting ourselves and it would take some time that it's to say you come coming back into, yes, it doesn't look pretty right now but it's not going to stay that way for a long time. I mean look at what happened with Afrobeats, who knew that that was going to transform the world.

Our artists are on top of the world right and I know that's a example but you know but they are literally on top of the world right now and they didn they didn't anybody to do that. They decided that you know what we're gonna do it. And at one point even some of our top that we are excellent. I mean, look at what Nigerians are doing everywhere.

Africans are doing everywhere. Look at what people from the Caribbean. We are excelling when we are placed in the right, you know, situations. So why can't we create those situations in our respective countries?

We can't just blend the leaders alone, you know, we as citizens also need to in the spaces where we can control, we need to start creating ecosystems, many ecosystems that can facilitate the growth of us and others that can make the difference we wish to see in the world. If we all can create those little micro, excellent environments, eventually there will be a critical number of them where the entire society starts to transform. That's my belief. I'm hoping if there's one thing I hope with this effort is that there will be a critical number of us doing it in our own respective specialties in medicine, in our own respective career paths outside of medicine so that ultimately 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now, we transformation that has been driven not just by people by a combination of diasporin Nigerians and Nigerians who are state, but also just as excellent.

Wow. Do you see me smiling over here, because literally all of the questions that I had just answered it, I was just looking, but yeah, so like honestly, you just took the words right out of my mouth, every single word I had. But I just want to look again on the fact that you were talking about, you know, you have your dream life over here. And You know, and one thing that I always whenever I talk about like any kind of activism and hoping to one day practice medicine back in Nigeria, that's usually what people come at first, that you're not going to have that dream life.

That big car you want, that big house you want, because now you won't get it. And honestly, that's never been my focus. That's never been my end goal, because my life philosophy, and I've said it multiple times on here is to leave this world better than how I found it. And by practicing medicine over here, by pursuing oncology over here, can I impact people?

Yes, I can impact people, but not at the extent that I would if I did practice in Nigeria and hopefully the rest of rica so and I think that's what people need to change their minds about to stop thinking of okay how can I make it in this life right but when they say make it they're not thinking necessarily of how do I like spread impacts how do I make a change it's how do I make it how do I create personal wealth and you also talks about your financial part too, because the truth of the matter is that to make a significant impact, especially in Africa, the way that it is now, it's unfortunate, but you need to have some kind of, you know, income, some kind of high income, some kind of resource. Exactly. And so just like you said, just changing the perspective of- I feel like a lot of us need to do some, you know, self-reflecting on what do you define success as? Is success getting cars, getting money, being able to create that lifestyle that you want?

Or is success shaping the way that you see the community around you? And I think that's so important.

You've been searching for the best way to generate passive income in your life. And heard that real estate is a great way to do it. But you're tired of all the so-called gurus who are all talked in no substance. Get ready to celebrate because Kevin Buck has spent 14 years successfully making it happen.

This is the real estate investing for Cash Flow Podcast. Now, here's Kevin Buck. Hey guys, Kevin Buck here and I want to welcome you to another episode of the Real Estate Investment for Cash Flow Podcast. Our mission is to help you build and maintain massive amounts of cash flow through income producing real estate investments.

Now our guest for this week's show is Real Estate Investment Expert, Teni Tullafari. Now, Teni is a co-founder and director of acquisitions for ex-site capital investment and investment firm that specializes in value and multi-family properties. Now, as the director of acquisitions and co-founder of ex-site capital investment, Teni has led acquisitions amounting to over $168 million in assets under management. Now, Teni's journey into investment started from a place of curiosity and networking.

And today, his goal was to help over 100,000 individuals gain financial independence. And guys, when Teni's not out there navigating the world of investing, he's looking forward to exploring its personal interests such as fishing, dancing, golf. We're going to talk about that today. I'm going to talk about the dancing actually more than anything else.

Absolutely. Breakdancing, I don't know what kind of dancing I'm very intrigued there. But more importantly, guys, I think just like me, I talk about family a lot in this show. He chairs the spending time of his family.

He's a devoted husband and father to the three beautiful kids. So with that, guys, I'd like to welcome Teni to the show. My friend, how are you doing today? I'm living in a dream, Kevin.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to have you. Excited to chat with you and just learn a little bit more about you.

Pull back the curtain and see what's under it. So you're with that being said, I gave that brief introduction. My friend, you know, I know there's that was condensed version of your background. Who you are.

I know you got your start and cybersecurity prior to entering your career path into real estate investment. So why don't we want to pass back to you? Tell us for those that aren't familiar with you. Don't know you, your backstory.

Tell us about who you are, you know, and how you ultimately found your way into real estate. Absolutely. Hey, Kevin, thank you so much. You know, I've been a supporter of your work and I've been following you for a while.

We've been connected on LinkedIn for a long time. And I'm just so appreciated for the fact that we can at least get an opportunity to chat here today. So thank you so much for that. But about me, I'm a young guy moved here to the US in 2010 for grad school.

I went to Bowie State for grad school at Studies Cybersecurity. I'm from a little island in Nigeria called Bowie Island. If you want to Google it, you can check it out. But I'm an island boy.

And all I wanted was an opportunity for me to do something different that a lot of people have not done in my family. Come here, get my education, and of course, build wealth. And of course, I say the United States is the land of opportunity. So I said, I'm coming to the US.

Mom, dad, sisters, my family supported me. And gladly I graduated from Bowie State in 2012. Started working with the likes of Boeing and Deloitte, doing cybersecurity for them. And then in 2016, I had a back injury.

And in that back injury, I was, again, is a fourth of my life. I was lifting weight. I was living, lifting heavy weights. Because I felt like I was too strong.

But I wasn't using good posture. And because of that, I hurt my lower back and my fifth disc. So I was home for a little bit. I was working at Bowie at the time.

And I had started thinking about my life and what I want to do. And so a lot of people that I'm listening right now, as you're growing up, a lot of the things that you picked up from your family, from your parents, that when you become an adult, those things kick in. So in 2016, I started having that edge of entrepreneurship. At that time, I didn't know where the status coming from.

But now I know it was from my mom, because my mom has been an entrepreneur all our life. But I started having that edge. I went to school, got all the degrees and stuff. But I was like, I need to do something about business.

I need to do something about business. And I started the financial services business. While I was doing that, I was selling life insurance. I was still doing my 95 job in cyber security.

But I started the side gig, which is in life insurance. In that process, while I was doing that, I met one of my partners, Leslie. Leslie, I was awesome. We did director of operation at the XSITE Capital and one of the founder.

I met his wife while I was trying to sell life insurance. And I told her about insurance. She said, you have to meet my husband. So I went to their house, met the husband.

And the husband was like, wow, I like the way you think. What do you do for personal development? And interestingly, both of us are reading the same book at the same time. Elon Musk autobiography, the first one that came up came out.

That was the same book we were reading. And before that, I just finished reading Money Mass at the Game by Anthony Robin. He has read that book as well. So we kind of had some similarity.

And we now moved from insurance to personal development. So he was looking for somebody that is in personal development. I was looking for somebody that was in personal development. That's not in our friend's circle.

And then every Friday, we started meeting to play the cash flow board game by Robert Kusaki at the brewery. So that's where me and him, that's what they're talking about business and real estate. Robert Kusaki have the cash flow quadrant, the E, the B, the S, and the I, right? And you see, if you want to be wealthy, you have to be in the B and I.

And that's a philosophy I bought. So I was like, well, I have my 905 as an employee. I'm building the business financial services. What I'm missing is real estate.

The only property I had at that point was my house, my primary residence. And that was it. I have no clue about flips. I have no clue about host selling more family real estate, more about home park and nothing like I was clueless.

So meeting Leslie, we started talking about real estate. And I was like, okay, let's just go in and do the regular single family home, do the burn method and then move on from there. That's what we set out to do. And what's Leslie in real estate at all at that point in time, was he actively running a real estate business?

Yeah, he had a, he had some properties in Maryland at the time. Okay. So I was like, oh, this is my key to real estate. So he was like, yeah, we can partner up because I'm very outgoing.

He's more on the intro outside of things. So he's like, you go look for the property. I will look at the numbers and all of that good stuff. So that's how we found our chemistry.

And we decided to create XSITE Capital. So we created the XSITE Capital. And the reason why we created the XSITE Capital was just to buy single family homes. And then later we realized that there's more something called more than family real estate.

I've lived in more than family in apartments, but I never knew that I could buy one. So I bought and how we came about this realization was I bought a material for $9.99 online. I studied it and I was like, oh, man, there's a lot of advantages to doing more than family real estate compared to flips and wholesaling and all of these things. So what we not started doing was to educate ourselves significantly.

We went and got the mentors went to the bootcamp, went to listen to all the podcasts. We did all of that. And that's how we not started launching XSITE Capital. And there comes our first failure.

So while we were doing this, we got very excited. We had what's called ignorant enthusiasm. We were very excited about our new venture. And in that process, we met a group of folks that say, hey, guys, come and risk cap it on our deal.

So we went in, tried to risk cap it up for the deal. We couldn't raise a dime. We raised $0 and our very first deal that the access to come and risk cap it all on. And then for me, unless it was like, well, do we really believe in this?

If we do, why don't we just invest in a capital? So in 2019, I invested my very first capital as an LP in the deal in Atlanta. And that deal has been distributing capital to me. It all returns to me since I invested in that deal.

So I'm very happy about that investment. So I put my money where my mouth is, I'm like, you know what? I learned, I like this stuff. I'm invested.

So I invested my capital. And then in 2020, this was in 2019 in 2020, the same group had an opportunity for us to risk cap it up again in DC to become a code GP as well. And then Leslie now took that deal to the hospital because Leslie is a CRN, and he works at a hospital. And there's this guy at the hospital, that is an orthopedic surgeon, Dr.Julius Ooni, he said, I'm going to take the deal to him. So he took the deal to him. And then Dr. Ooni looked at it and said, hey, guys, I don't want to be just an investor.

I want to be a partner. So Dr. Ooni came in on board, became a CEO of the company. And three of us joined forces and launched an XSITE Capital to what you see today.

And that deal, we raised $775,000 and then from there we went, I raised $4.3 million. And then that's how we just started growing as a company where we have $168 million of assets right now. So that is the story, I know it's long, but I appreciate that and ultimately, but a lot of that happened in a very short span of time. I mean, realistically said 2019 when you made that first LP investment.

And then that was shortly after I think the first fail attempt of you raising capital with the XI brand and then ultimately met Julius. And I think he said 2020 and had that first successful coGP deal, raised some capital and then, you know, often running from that point forward. So what, you know, I always try to, you know, try to reflect back on, I don't know, it's not a failure. It's because you guys, you learned quite a bit, right?

Like you want to look back on that first time you tried to raise capital, you didn't raise a dime, what'd you do wrong? I mean, like what were you able to identify that you did wrong? That the second time around that you decided to take a, maybe a different, you know, approach or a different strategy again, what do you feel were the failure points there? I think the philosophy of point for us that we detect that was we had a scarcity mindset.

The scarcity mindset was, well, let's just learn about this stuff. Let's figure it out and go do it ourselves. That's the scarcity mindset. We did not tell enough people about what we're doing.

That was the biggest failure. If anybody's listening, as long as you were able to, you have a dream, don't share it with people that are going to kill it. Share with people that will help you and I hope not to hurt it. And that doesn't have to be your family.

That doesn't have to be your friends. It could be an other social network or other network of people that are liquefied to do exactly what you're looking to do. But one of the things that killed that whole effort was we did not open our mouth to tell a lot of people about what we're doing. So when we came back to raise capital, it was a shock to them.

They were like, dude, how are you telling me about it? I think that deal was a, we bought that deal for 32 million. So we're like, well, we're raising capital for 32 million dollar deal. Come and invest.

Tanny, you're an IT professional. You're doing real estate financial services. How come not you're a real estate investor? What's going on here?

So a lot of people were not, is the trust because they didn't know about their skeptical, right? Yeah. 100% skeptical. So the advice I couldn't teach anybody from that is from the time you have the idea, start telling people that you're doing that.

So that's that would take time for it to get in the head that you're actually doing something related to real estate investing or anything that you want to do in life. And again, don't let the Nese to kill your dream. Look for people that can inspire you, that supports you and then you share that to them because if you're good share with someone, that people will probably kill it. So what outside of meeting Julia, it's in presenting him the deal.

And ultimately, he came on board, he applied for some capital to the equation, had some relationships with other docs there inside the hospital. What were some of the active steps and measures that you took to, you know, just yell to the mountain tops, right? Yeldus Louder, the message of who you are, what you're doing and the opportunities that you're presenting. What are the different steps that you take?

That is a really good question. One of the things we did was we just started doing more stuff. Like, you know, we started doing a monthly meetup where we hosted a monthly meetup in Maryland, we started going on podcasts, right? We started going on podcasts and sharing our story.

We started talking about our inspiration. We started going to more events. We came up with a blue ocean strategy where we start thinking about going to events that houses our investors, right? Where the kind of investors who are looking to attract to investments, we started going to those kind of events as well.

So, there's some of the things we started doing to help put the water out there. We said, I don't want to lose it. Let's unpack that one. What type of events outside of real estate investment events?

What type of events, were they special association meetings for particular industries or where were you going to get in front of your respective investors? Kevin, that's a blue ocean strategy. The blue ocean strategy within that is our strategy. I'm not giving it to the public.

I'm just kidding. Yeah. I'm just kidding. So this if you want to catch fish or you want to catch a particular kind of fish, you go to where those fish are.

If you want to serve a particular group of people, go where they congregate. So we were our avatar that would serve medical professionals, medical doctors, CRNAs, folks in the healthcare industry. So what we're not still doing was to go to those shows. For example, they have like Nigerian physicians, I'm from the origin, I'm from Nigeria, Nigerian physician conference.

A lot of people go there and they talk about medicine. We come there and talk about real estate, blue ocean. What is this guy talking about real estate? They have National Medical Association in the US.

They have a conference they have to do medicine. We go there, we talk about real estate, blue ocean. We have CRNA conferences. We are talking about nursing, CRNA and all of that stuff.

We go there and talk about real estate. So that now I started making people feel like, okay, who are these guys? You know, why they hear when everybody else is talking about something else? So that now has helped us significantly creating a lot of interest to what we're doing.

And we're using education as a means to bridge the gap between where they are and where they potentially want to go. So in my journey, I've never met anybody that's not interested in real estate. But I've met a lot of people that are interested in real estate, but don't want to deal with the headache that comes to real estate. That's right.

So what we're helping them do as a company is bridge that gap. So basically that's what we do. Yeah, no, I love that. I love every bit of that.

And I love that blue ocean strategy. I mean, that's absolutely, it's so simple, but so brilliant. So when you go to these events, would you get a boot? Would you actually like sponsor a booth and get like, you know, something in the expo hall?

Or were you just basically, you know, divide and conquer and, you know, rub elbows and start conversations? So initially we just go, but we now realize that to that off of you to be effective, you have to make people know your presence, like, I feel your presence. And one of the things we do is booth. We, you know, we have our own booth with the XSITE Capital on there.

If you've, you know, checked me a LinkedIn, you see some of the things on Instagram. You see some of the shows that we've been on. Also, we host like private events. So we can just say, you know, XSITE Capital is hoping to host in a happy hour.

At this date, at this place, at this particular time. So a lot of people show up and we're just interactive folks, right? Um, yeah, that, that's what's basically, and then sometimes we just sponsor the organization. So yeah, it's a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, XSITE Capital is the sponsor that you put us in their email.

They put us in their brochure. Yeah. So we do a lot of this stuff. Would you say that?

No, I love it. I love it. I love you sharing that again. It's just, it's thinking out of the box and it's not rocket science, right?

I mean, it's a pretty straightforward approach. Um, but most folks don't think about the very minor out of the box strategy, right? I've just going where the herd isn't and exactly, I love it. So curious to know and maybe you don't know the exact, now you probably have a general idea, like what percentage of your investor base, those that are actively in your deals today are made up of medical professionals.

Is it the majority? Okay. And the reason why those at least that's listening. I mean, seriously, like that, and there's hundreds of different industries that you could take this approach with, right?

Yes. Yes. Where there's plenty of high net worth individuals that are, you know, uh, professionals within that industry that I guarantee there's not a another booth there at their industry events that exactly an investment opportunity. You know, so I love every bit of that.

And this is the principle behind it. It's commonality, right? I see you. He's an orthopedic surgeon.

Let's just see RNA. They're putting the medical space. They understand the challenges that a lot of medical professionals go through. They understand the long hours that they work.

They understand all of these things. And they're like, okay, these are the same problems that I faced. What if we can find a solution and help you guys solve that problem? And that's how it was.

So everybody that's listening today, you got to figure out who you want to serve. That is the number one step. You have a product, who do I want to serve? And then once you find where you want to serve, you got to go to where they are.

And then go there and then some of them is as simple as that. Yeah. Now I love that. That's great.

Appreciate you sharing that, buddy. Um, I want to talk about basically your guys is business model, your strategy, um, in two parts of that. The first part being obviously capital was readily flowing in 2020. Obviously you guys got off running.

You know, there's lots of liquidity in the market. Interstrates, you know, hidden all time low late 2020 and stayed at an all time historical low for a number of years before starting to work their way back up. Well, fairly quickly in late 2022. And so, you know, quite a bit of volatility over the last two years.

But, you know, quite a bull run for a couple of years prior to that. And so just curious to know, um, you know, what the business, you know, I guess how the business differs today than maybe what it was when you guys first kicked it off for the first couple of years. I know you're in multifamily. You're still doing value and multifamily.

You shared some basic details of, uh, of a deal you guys are working on right now. We'd love to, you know, to go through that here in a few minutes. But just curious as to what those last four years have looked like and how you guys, more specifically, how you've been able to navigate, um, some of the uncertainty and volatility that's happened in a marketplace. That's a really good question.

Um, yeah, it's been challenging for the last two years. Isn't really challenging. Challenging on the outside or operation side or both everything. Yeah.

It's been challenging on the, we acquiring deals. It's been challenging. It's a capital. He's been challenging, managing deals.

Um, it's been a lot of challenge. But we are very, uh, we have a, what about COVID is tenacity. So it persists, um, amongst any adversity, right? Um, so doing 20, 2019, when we started buying deals.

So in 2019, we invested as LP in 2020, we did two deals. We did one deal, uh, where we risk capital on a deal in DC. 2021, we bought two, we invested in two deals. One, we bought that lead sponsor and we invested another group.

2022, we did four transactions. We bought a $60 million deal and then we sold one of our deals. We projected 18%, we give them 29.9% return and investments. So we exceeding one of our deals.

Markets was hot. Uh, we actually closed our last deal in 2022, December 30th of 2022. Yeah, tough time. And then very perfect timing and everything was perfect.

And then 2023, the whole market, uh, dried out, you know, and we didn't stop. So we did not, what we do is we have a machine from the acquisition side. We don't ever stop on the right in deals. We were still going to our cadence.

So we implemented this thing called traction in our company, entrepreneur operating system. Where we have metrics that we track every week and we have meetings every week that we track that. So on that acquisition side, we are looking, supposed to review 56 deals a week. How many 56, 56, supposed to review 26 says deals and we on the right, seven of them.

Okay, I got you. I got you. Okay. So there's a large portion that get through our cows and say, exactly.

How's that even possible? So in that time frame, we're going and looking at deals and then with something we have, that's called the slip test, what we basically look at the population, the income, the school, just the fundamental stuff. And if you see if it passes it, then we take it to on the right and we'll download the financials and then go through on the right in process, right? So we never stopped that from 2022, 2023, January, till today.

So that means we're still in front of the brokers having conversations, saying, hey, we're interested in the deal. We're interested in the deal. And that has put us in the mind of the brokers for a long period of time. So when this opportunity came up, we beat that on the deal and we finally won it because we've been consistent over a long period of time.

We told the brokers, we're not looking to stay on the sideline. We're going to be active. And the philosophy behind that was when everybody's scared, that's when you want to jump in. That's right.

And of course, you got to minimize the risk significantly. But that's what we've basically done. Yeah, that's fantastic. I'd love to dissect this deal a little bit.

Just, you know, I guess what, first and foremost, you know, what attracted you to it. I know that you're buying a discount from, you know, I guess what, you know, peak valuation might have been in 2022. But more specific, what's the business plan look like? It, you know, is it, uh, is it a light value add?

Is it a heavy value add? You know, what percentage of the use you guys intend to renovate? What type of, you know, rent, maybe premiums, uh, you know, exists there once the units are turned. Just generally speaking, if he gives like maybe the 10,000 foot view of the business plan, this particular deal, uh, that'd be helpful.

Sounds good. I can share that. I need the same business part. We've executed in a lot of our deals.

This deal in 2022, it was valued at 60 million, 60 million, $700,000. Mm hmm. That's what colleagues value this deal as a valuation of this deal. We're buying it at 49.1 million dollars today, right?

Two, we have another deal in the same market, during the different county, but in the same market. We do, one of the deals we bought in 2022 is in the Cap County, which is not such a great county in Atlanta. This deal is in Gwyneth County. And if anybody knows Atlanta, Gwyneth County is one of the fastest Gwyneth County in the state of Georgia, right?

So we're buying this deal in Gwyneth County. Another thing I would like to about this deal is the debt that we're assuming on the loan. And if anybody's, you know, inter-relisted, they don't know that one of the rules of real estate is you want to buy with a long-term debt. So we have a fixed rate debt at a 4.74% locked into the end of our business plan.

And you asked about our business plan, what is that? It's a light value add. We're spending about between 13 to $14,000 a unit in renovation. And the same kind of renovation that we're about to do on this project, we've done it on our other project in the Cap County that's 14 minutes away.

So we understand that some market, how much is going to cost us to do the renovation? And we're looking to renovate about between 85 to 105 units out of the 268 unit of the property that we're buying. Got it. That's exciting.

So and then I know we talked about this before. We start recording is we expressed, you know, our, you know, just I guess the additional hurdles that exist with raising capital in today's environment. I think a lot of it, you know, it's, you know, there's been a lot of economic instability, you know, we had an election coming up. No one knew what was going to happen there.

Lots of retail investors. If we're speaking to the retail investor group, there's been, you know, lots of challenging deals that have gone sideways. You know, folks have lost money. There's been lots of capital calls.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's been lots of challenges out there.

And I think it's made folks skittish as well. Absolutely. So for all those reasons, it's been a little bit more challenging to raise capital, at least from the retail world. And you know, we're not in the institutional side.

But I know that as well, it's also the equal amounts of a challenge on the institutional side. Although that's not absolutely our target audience. Just, I know that you guys, this is a big raise for you guys. You guys are making great progress.

But just, are you having the same experience with raising capital, just having to work probably five times as hard to get the same amount of capital through the door? One million percent. Yes. It's challenging.

It's challenging. You guys are doing like anything that you're doing that's unique in nature that that again, just thinking outside the box, anything that you guys have instituted that maybe you hadn't done two years ago when capital was more readily available. Yes. A lot of things.

So first, the highest deal we've done as lead sponsor was $25 million deal. That we did as a capital was lead sponsor. And we found the deal on the road, put it under contract, closed it, and all of that good stuff, right? For us four or two years later, we jumped to $50 million deal.

In that whole two years period, we were building, you know, investor database, we're using the blue ocean strategy. But there was a lot of hypothesis that we did not test. One, we said we've gone to all of these conferences, we have all of these investors. We did not test to see if they were ready to invest capital when we have the deal, right?

We did not understand who are the guys that are actually ready to deploy capital right away. So we had an assumption that we have all these investors and boom once we have a deal, because we've not had a deal in a while, boom, everybody's just going to go and start swinging capital to us. Two, we had election, where there's a lot of uncertainty in the economy, interest rates was going up, right? So just a whole lot of things and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear in the economy kind of made everybody want to pause.

Does that mean there was no capital? Absolutely. There was capital. Everybody had money.

But everybody wanted to pause and see what's going to happen. So we got the deal during this period when there was a lot of uncertainty. And that's what kind of stipend our progress when it comes to the race. Now, what are some of the things we were doing today that's helping us grow?

Personally, as an individual, I've grown because of this deal I've grown significantly in terms of my skill set. I thought I knew how to sell. Now I have to kind of take myself selling my sales skill up the notch. I have to come and develop myself again, professional development because that's key, right?

So one of the things we didn't have was a good sales process. Just like we know before we joined the call, you told me about some of the things you guys did from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom. We didn't have a whole good process with scheduling calls, getting on calls, following up on calls, asking for people to actually invest. We used to just be like, hey, you know, this is the deal.

Go check it out. And that's it. Whereas people they buy with emotion, right? And they justify it to logic, right?

And if you leave them, they'll use just that fear logic analysis, and they will take action, any action. So you as the investor, or you as the salesperson, or who is providing the opportunity, you have to be able to educate them about what this can do for them over a long period of time. Anyways, the court long story short viewed our whole sales process, marketing. Some of the things we were thinking were working marketing wasn't working.

We had to hire a new set of people to market it. Because the work that what actually helped us did is 25 million dollar deal, we thought that would help us do a 50 million dollar deal is a whole completely different ballgame. So those are some of the things that we've learned. Also, another thing that we did not factor in was institutional capital is, hey, do we need institutional capital?

And what would it take to attract institutional capital for a 50 million dollar deal? We did not know all of that stuff. With this particular deal, we've been able to test all of these hypothesis now, see what works and what doesn't work. So I will stop this if you have more questions.

No, that's great. I appreciate that. No, it's I mean, just you're taking the necessary steps and testing new, you know, new theories as to, you know, how do we get there? Right?

Like how we got there before isn't going to work this time around. This deal is literally double the size of the largest last deal that you did, and now capital is only five times harder to raise than what it was back then. So no, I appreciate that transparency. Yeah, it's just it's one of those things that you could push, you'll put your back into the corner.

And ultimately, you got to find you'll fight your way out of it, right? And find the right path. And the path that you took last time is probably not the right one. You're going to hit it.

Absolutely. Yeah. Would be curious and then I'm going to be conscious of everyone's timing your time as well. But would be curious as far as like underwriting, just general assumptions, how they might have changed, maybe on this deal versus maybe a deal that you guys did two years ago, like, you know, rent growth, for example, like what are you guys typically putting it for, you know, annual rent growth and then, you know, on the exit, what does that exit cap rate look like?

I mean, those are some of the rent growth is easier to, you know, to kind of pin your thumb on. Exit caps, a little bit more challenging, right? Especially like looking five years out. You know, what does that exit cap rate assumption look like and, you know, how do you guys arrive at that?

That's a really good question. So for rent growth, and these are again, these are some of the things we do for when I sniff test before we will put the deal on our contract. This particular area is looking at a 15% rent growth between 2024 and 2028. So we're looking at about 3% rent growth, right?

And this is all of this information I'm sharing right now is open to you in co-star if you have access to co-star. So we depend on co-star and of course we have market knowledge, which many we have, we work with asset liven, which is the property management company we use. So they have market knowledge. So on this particular asset market and this particular property, they're seeing the rent growth.

See, the property management actually wanted us to do 5% rent growth on the project, because that's what they've been seeing historically. But we brought it down to 3%. And then from a cap rate standpoint, we're going at a 5.3% cap rate. I will keep it flat and exit at a 5.3 cap rate, 5.3% cap rate.

Though co-star is saying at 2029, we already know this interest is usually trend with cap rate. Interest is go that cap rate usually follow along. In 2029, co-star is saying cap rate is going to be at 4.6%. If we use that model, the return metrics just shoot up significantly for investors.

But we're saying no, we're going to stick conservative. We're going to leave our entry cap rate and exit cap rate the same. And that is what we're using. Before now, and of course the debt that we're assuming on this loan is a 4.74% so we're positive going in.

Before now, the way we own the right deals, we use 10 business points every year. And that's how we project it. But based on where this market is, where this project is and the debts that we're using, we're keeping the capital flat on the 5.3% cap rate, which is the market cap rate. Yeah.

No, God, I appreciate you sharing that. Is the plan? What's the long-term strategy looks like? It looks like it's the plan that just exit out at the whenever the current loan comes due or will you guys recap it and put a new loan in place and hold it for a longer term.

So the goal is to come in value add. First, I appreciate an exit in 2029. Got it. Got it.

Okay. Fantastic, man. Well, that's exciting. I'm excited for you guys.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Now it's fantastic, man. Just again, you want to be blind, buying when there's blood in the streets and again, just going the opposite direction of the herd.

And most of the herd is on the sidelines right now. Absolutely. It's a good time to be buying. We've literally had our best two years last year and this year.

Just wow, you know, going gang busters, looking at a lot of deals to find the ones that actually, you know, fit the criteria and check all the boxes. Absolutely. But again, you know, we were a little bit more skittish in 2020, 2021, 2022. We bought, but we didn't.

We did buy as near as much of our competition. You know, lots of our competitors were scaling to the moon. But now they're not positioned to buy and we're in a position to buy. Let's work that with our riders and I had a crystal ball and that was going to happen.

But ultimately, what I couldn't do, I had a hard time making things under right back then. You know, I just, I wouldn't look into those places. I don't know what I'm missing. And I know that there's plenty smarter folks than I, but you know, it's just, you know, we were never, we've never make it even to final and best offers.

And so a lot of the deals we bought were direct to owner things that we've been building relations for years. So again, we did really well in those other years, but, you know, we've scaled significantly over the past two years when others haven't. And it can only really attribute that to just being disciplined and kind of just sticking to our guns and not really falling into the, you know, the FOMO or the fear missing out, right? Which I think, the shiny objects and draw, you know, I think it's just inherent nature, you know, for most human beings.

Like everyone's got, you know, a little bit, at least a little bit of FOMO, right? Of things going on around them. They're like, come on, man, what am I missing here? Like how's everyone else, you know, I can't make the economics make sense.

And so the only thing that really made me feel good about all my decisions, and I feel really good about them today. We don't have, we have no deals that have, you know, variable right debt. We have no debt maturities. We have, you know, anyway, all of our deals, we continue made, you make distributions.

We never stop making distributions, they're making us beautiful and all of our legacy funds. But the one, we started, we saw the number of our properties, we kind of pruned our portfolio out in 2020 and 2021, in 2020. You know, again, but only because we weren't interested in really selling, but, you know, let's elicit offers will come in. And, you know, if I could identify, number one, I knew the property better than anyone else we love for a number of years.

And while again, there's always a better operator. There's always someone that can squeak a little bit more value out of something. If I couldn't even remotely make sense of an offer that was being presented to me, and I could realize, you know, maybe eight to 10 years worth of earnings right there. Then and now, they're like, okay, let's get rid of it.

Yeah, absolutely. Like, it doesn't make sense for us to hold on to it. Oh, don't worry. You realize, you know, nearly, you know, eight to 10 years worth of earnings right now.

And I have no idea how they're, you know, getting to that number, you know, we know better than anyone else. So, anyway, always be everyone the best with their endeavors and, but I'm not sure, I'd love to know how some of those deals are working out now. But who knows? But it did is, I think we, people just have to stay disciplined, right?

That's right. That's it. The fundamentals never, I mean, the general fundamentals don't change. Don't change.

Right. Like the most changes rates change. But the general fundamentals don't change. And so anyway, I think it's, and at the end of the day, really say, I always argue it's a real stage.

It's a long term game. Like, it's not. It is. You can make quick pops.

You can get in, get out. We've all had those deals. And evidently, the longer you're in the business, you'll have many of those deals come your way in due time. Like, you'll have the, you'll get in, get out quick, you know, exceed projected returns, you're like literally by 2x.

But then most of the deals you do, it's more of a long term slow and steady, you know, steady always wins the race. And I've been at this now for more than 20 years. And so I have now I can honestly say, I've been through one full cycle. I don't know where we're at in this current cycle.

I'd like to say, I think we're at the bottom. I think we're at the trough. So, yeah, age myself by saying that because in the next year or two, I'll be able to say that I truly went through two full real stage cycles. Yeah, that's, I don't know if that's good or not.

But in any of that, I feel like I've learned a little bit along the way. So with that, that's a beautiful part about it. Like, you know, you've, and that's what that's what's helping because so I want to have an experience. Nobody can think that away.

You win the game when all of these things are happening. You know, so, yeah, I think we also, we tend to great grow more patient. We grow more patients as we get older as well. Just stations and take time and just know that like things don't happen overnight and just make good informed decisions and know that time typically will take care of the rest.

Exactly. Great property and a great market with good underlying fundamentals. And that's it. For the most part, the rest will take care of itself if you're willing to wait it out.

You can't read it out, right? Right. Right. So, tanny, man, this has been a lot of fun, buddy.

I'm glad we're able to finally connect in person. Glad to, you know, bring on the show and appreciate sharing, you know, all your insights and just, you know, the story is phenomenal. Wishing you all the best and looking forward to catching up in the future and just, you know, seeing where you guys are at. We'd love to maybe do a recap on this deal once you guys get it closed, get to the finish line.

And is that happening this year or is that going to happen next year? So we have to get it, we've got to get a loan assumed and I have to go through. Okay. Yeah.

So it's probably going to be early next year for me to get everything. Yeah, it takes some time. Yeah. So yeah, well, good deal.

My friend, for those that want to learn more about you, the company, your firm, what you guys do, where's the best place to reach you, your website? Yeah, is XSITE Capital, is Excite Xylophone, S-I-T-E capital, dot com. And of course, Tenetal of Fire, you can find me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, or Facebook, any social media is Tenetal of Fire. I think I'm the only one that's on there.

So, yeah, that's the same thing. I think I'm going to have a bump out there. It's not even Kevin Bup, you'll find me. So, awesome.

Tenet, it's been a pleasure having you, my friend. Thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate it. And of course, yes, once we close the deal, there's a lot of things that I'd like to share as well.

So hopefully we can revisit it. And if you in Charlotte anytime, just let me know. And we can grab a beer or something. We'll make that happen, my friend.

And guys, that's all we have for this week's show. So until we meet again, next week, this is your host, Kevin Bup, which is a huge success. Take care. Congratulations.

Now you've got more of the best tricks of the trade in building massive amounts of passive income from real estate. For more amazing resources, visit real estate investing for cashflow.com. And we'll see you next Monday morning.

Welcome to another episode of Global Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Charles He began investing in real estate in 2017 with single-family houses R before transitioning to multifamily investing in 2019. Since then, the Fermi co-founded X-Sight Capital has purchased 138 units valued at $168 million. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure being here. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to get you on and kind of go through your story.

So you have a very interesting background and can you go through a little bit about yourself both personally and professionally prior to getting bitten by the real estate bug and going full-in? Yeah, absolutely. So like you mentioned, my name is Leslie Awasom. I'm an immigrant.

I migrated to the US 24 years ago from a small central African country Cameroon. Just come to the US like most immigrants are seeking for greener pastures. So when I came to the US, I followed a traditional path which is thought to most of us, immigrant families, to go to school, get a good job and then, you know, start working to save money and retire at some point. So I followed that path.

I followed the path. My mother is a nurse. She pushed me into healthcare as well after I as a ICU nurse for about four years, then decided to go back to school to get an advanced degree in anesthesia and became a nurse anesthetist. So at that point, it felt like I was at the pinnacle of my career in nursing because a nurse anesthetist is a very prestigious job to have.

It's well paid, nice schedule, nice lifestyle. But I felt like I got to a point after about a year of my career, I felt like I had hit the ceiling of my career growth and just that feeling of being stuck in this routine of going to work every, day coming back and earning a salary just gave me this uneasy feeling. And then on top of that, as I started my career, I just had my second daughter, you. So I was spending a lot of time in the hospital trying to make this money, putting all this overtime hours.

And I realized that I missed out on a significant portion of my daughter's Like I remember coming home one day and I was sitting and observing her, tired, and she had started walking and doing all these things and it just hit me right there that I had missed out on all of our life on to this point. And it was because I was spending so much time in the hospital because. Because for us healthcare workers, we leave our homes, especially in the winter months like right now. I leave my house 5 30 in the morning and I come back at 8 p.m.

at night. I live when it's dark, come back when it's dark. So just your whole day is gone. You know, at that point, I was like, there has to be something better.

There has to be more. I cannot keep doing this for the rest of my life. And as luck will have it, or as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will show up. I was scrolling through my phone and I saw an article on Yahoo that said, the author reached that port that has written a book for millennials that are stuck in student loan debt and looking for a way or an alternate path to create passive income.

And the name of the book is Second Chance by Robert Kiyosaki. So I bought the book, read the book, and the book was speaking directly to me. It felt like Robert was like a long-lost uncle came back to live and was answering all the questions that I had. So, one of the recommendations he gave on there was to go invest in real estate.

So, I followed exactly what he recommended and then things just took off from there. Interesting. So, interesting. So, that was the book that kind of gave you the catalyst for choosing real estate as your investment vehicle or was there something else between it?

It was just a book. It was that book. I had experienced Since 2008, during 2008 crash, a few of my family members actually lost some homes. So I was actually scared of real estate.

After 2008, like I remember I was here in Maryland, there were properties I was were selling for $10,000 or cash. I had the money to buy it, but I was so scared I didn't buy it. So I missed out on that because of the fear and the misinformation. But then that book explained what happened in 2008, you know, and explained how the difference between buying real estate versus investing in real estate.

So, I dedicated my time to learn how to invest in real estate and took the plunge instead of investing in real estate, then just grew from. Yeah, so let's talk about that. How did you get how'd you get first started into real estate, dipping your toe in there? All right.

So, after I read the book, one of the things you recommended was going to networking events, talking to other real estate investors. So I went to and I signed up for the Baltimore Real Estate Investor Association. Took a class on the BRR model that's to buy, renovate, rent, and re-finance. And that really appealed to me because I've always wanted to be like a long-term investor, not like a flip or anything like that.

So I follow that model and I went and bought my first property. It was a condo in Greenbelt, Maryland. Same model. Estates, they sell.

The guy that was living there passed away, so the family, was selling it. We were able to get it for like a really good price. So did exactly that. Renovated the unit.

R I actually took time off work about two weeks. Vacation time off work and spent time working with all the contractors to renovate that unit. And I really enjoyed that process. Like leaving my house the morning, going to the unit, you know, walking with contractors, putting this- vision together and see that that little condo changed from what it was to become something else.

I really enjoyed that process. It didn't feel like work to me. You know, then on top of that, we did that. I put in a section 8 tenant in the and then after a few months, we went.

Did the refinance the value had gone up by about $77,000. I was like, oh my god. So this stuff is real, right? So that that was like, that's when it got ingrained in my subconscious that this is real.

And I just on and you transitioned into multifamily investing where you are now so can you just give us like a little bit of overview of why you did that, what were some of the factors because you did obviously really well and what-you're doing before, you like doing what you're doing, single-family properties like that. Why go into multifamily investing? So that's a very good question right? I was doing the single-family stuff, I had gotten that box, so my goal was and buy more of those single-family units and repeat exactly that you know I had this of like maybe owning 20, 30 properties and getting all this cash flow.

And then maybe I'll be able to scale back from work a little bit, you know, so, but along the way, as I was building on the real estate stuff. I met my first initial partner, Mr. Tenny Tolofari. So, he actually came to sell me life insurance because at that time he was doing financial services.

He came to sell me life insurance and we started talking about personal development and business and I realized that he was into personal development like myself. myself. We were reading some of the same books at the same time. He had read a Robert Kiyosaki's Cash Flow Quadrant, which I was reading, and we were both reading the first book on I had to learn his money habits, realize that we think differently when it comes to money and investing.

He's a hoarder. Why me, I'm more like go, go, go get it. Let's go invest. So after doing that for about six, seven months, I was still chasing the market looking for deals, right?

So at one point he was like, hey, you're doing this real estate thing. I wanna do real estate as well. Why don't we just partner up and scale and do it together? And I was like, yeah, let's do it.

So, initially we went and put offers, we're trying to buy and do what we were doing before. Fortunately, we didn't win some of those deals. Then one day he called me, he was like, dude, I'm sending you this audio. You got to listen to it.

I'm like, what are you talking about? You got to listen to it. So, it was like a short course by Grand Cadone is on the in about multifamily investing, very simplistic explanation of what multifamily investing is. right?

And what attracted me to it was the numbers. In single-family, I know that I'm buying and I'm renovating my values based on ARV. If something happens in the neighborhood, that ARV might decrease. In multi-family, it's all numbers based.

It's about the income that you're able to generate from that asset. So I was like, huh, why spend 10 years acquiring 20 properties when I could put in a lot of effort and just by 20 units at once. That made a lot of sense to me. Then the more I read and understood it, I also I realized that there was this model where you could syndicate.

Bring in other people to invest with you where you become co-owners of this asset and those people are passive. You know, and when I discovered that model, the first thing that came to mind for me was other professionals that I worked with at the hospital. Other health care professionals that I see day in day out doing exactly the same thing that I'm doing. You know, most of us don't even know that we could do this.

Most of us, all we know is that we could invest in the stock market, we could invest in ETFs and all these other funds. We don't know that we make enough income to qualify as accredited investors and we could actually invest in this premium multi-family assets. about this asset. The excitement is where that name actually came from, XSITE Capital Investments.

So that's how we transitioned. And we said, you know what? It doesn't matter what it takes. Even if it takes us three or four years to close one deal, it's better to put in those efforts and close a 200 unit property in two years than to go and start acquiring single family properties over a long period of time.

Yeah, it's awesome. That's a great story. Do you have money sitting in the stock market and you're worried about it? Or worse, you have money sitting at the bank, not keeping up with inflation?

My name is Charles Quirillo, founder and managing partner of Harborside Partners. Since 2006, I've been investing my money and my family's money into income producing properties. These are real assets, real properties, with real addresses that produce real cash flow. At Harborside Partners, we provide passive investors who love real estate with a turn R&B investing solution.

If you want to put your money to work in real estate, but can't find deals, don't have the time to get funding, and the last thing that product that people want to do is manage real estate. We find the deals, we fund the deals and we manage the tenants, the termites and the properties. Partner with us at invest with harborside.com that's invest with harborside.com. Go to invest with harborside.com.

If you love real estate, you like the idea of passive income and believe that the income producing properties will appreciate over time, go to invest with harbors.com.com that's invest with harborside.com. So can you kind of explain currently where your company is? What's your current criteria for investing and your investment strategy overall? Absolutely.

So currently we've grown, like you mentioned, we've acquired over 838 units over the last five years, something that we truly never dreamed of. We had these big visions, but thankfully, when we came out, our community has received this very well and have been part of all these deals. And we are currently under contract to purchase another 268 unit building in Atlanta, Georgia. Our focus has been on a value add, multi-family investing.

We acquire 100 plus units. We like to find B class assets or C plus assets in really good neighborhoods, good locations. They have an ability for us to be able to increase the income acquire and there has to be a where part of us increasing the income and the location, the market, very important for us as well. Nice, interesting.

So for the markets, going down to that question there, I mean, I see. You guys have properties everywhere, Washington, DC, South Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, Indiana. I mean, how can you effectively, and manage properties and projects in several different states with your team? So that's a great thing about this large multifamily assets because if the assets produce enough income for you to be able to hire a true professional property management company that's onsite that manage the day-to-day of these assets.

So we partner with some of the best property managers in the industry and we also try to buy markets that we just want to fly away and we visit our properties. I am the asset manager on our properties, I visit our properties at least once every quarter all of our properties, we make sure that we visit. We also buy properties that are not too far from one of us, like Tenny, my partner, he actually sold his house here in Maryland and moved down south, because we're buying a lot down there, so he lives in Charlotte right now. His boots on the ground goes out to our properties in Columbia, South Carolina, and Atlanta, and the properties here in the DC area, I go there all the time.

The one outlier is the one in South Bend, Indiana, which we are partnered with another group that has a lot of presence on the ground there. Nice. Yeah. The boots on the ground.

That's why I was asking. It- it-it is it,-,1959. It makes, you know. deal, especially the property manager but having the boots on the ground being And really in to a that is coming into the market to make sure that we're not going into a market where There's a lot like 0.7 REN decline average.

So we make sure that we look at the specific market dynamics in all the projections that we're doing and going in very conservative. But this, this time right now presents like one of the best opportunities that we've seen since we started this business. You know, back in 2019, 2020, everything was growing and now things have gone down like In some markets, we've seen like a 20 to 35% drop in prices from where they were at as well so that we able to bring some of this institutional-grade assets, to our busy professional investors. Yeah, that's great.

That's a great plan. You touched on before about your team and how important was partnership to becoming a successful, commercial real estate investor, making the decision because you were kind of by yourself as a single family. How important was it now, the partnership aspect of so to become a successful commercial real estate investor in multifamily? That's a great question, man.

Partnership is everything. There's absolutely no way I would have been able to do the things that I do in multi-family right now with my partners. I. I was personally blessed to have two amazing partners.

Dr. Julius Oni, an orthopedic surgeon who is a CEO and T. We complement each other so much that that has contributed significantly to our growth. And not just that, we are the three founders of XSITE Capital.

But outside of that, we partner with others, right? right? One of the things that we believe in is like we want to surround ourselves with the best, right? We do not know it all.

So, we identify partners that have more experience that are stronger in certain areas and we partner with them on some of this deals that a buy as well. For us, we believe strongly in the power of partnership and we always look looking to identify people that bring strengths in partnership so that we can work with them. There's absolutely no way we can go out and buy a 268 unit building. without working with other partners.

So, yeah, so for us partnership is important. Yeah, now it's one of the things is when we venture out of our home market here in Florida, definitely partnership and having partners with boots on the ground R that know. That and have their connections and network there makes a deal work without that. If someone were just like, Oh, there's a new market we're going into and you want to be part of it.

It be something that we would turn down, but having that, you know, a partnership with someone with a network and with that on the ground allows you to really plug into what they already have that's working, which is extremely, R extremely powerful. Yeah, I agree 1000%. So one more thing on partnering, I always want because you have a number of different, you have multiple partners. And one thing I found with businesses that I I've started that I've never really kind of R worked out before, whatever it was, you know, when you're starting a business with partners, it's not really easy because you know, people need to make money, usually the business isn't, you know, so it requires partners, to have a job or some side business along with the new business you're starting.

Now, when a you guys are starting, how did you manage to ensure your partners were putting in time at your firm, XI.I. Capital, while, I mean, obviously, keeping their expenses paid? Yeah, so that's a great question, right? And it's a one of those things that I've had to sit back and reflect upon, which is why I say that I am so lucky to have the partners that I've had, because we never really worried and all three of us time jobs while we're building the business and all three of us, contributed to building the business.

We came into this knowing that it's going to take a huge amount of the effort and financing for us to be able to get this off the ground. So we spent money. At least we have resources coming from our job to use that to invest in ourselves, invest in our business and build the business over time. It really wasn't until after three years that we're actually able to get some money out of the business and as far as contributing time and money into the business that has never been.

An issue for anyone of us partners or because it's like the passion the why the reason why we do this is strong enough on each and every one of us that we get up every day obsessed on how we can make this business move forward. I can tell you that since 2019 when we registered this business a day hasn't gone by that I have not spoken to my partners whether it's about business or just about how we could build this and go forward. So it's bigger than business at this point. It's more like a journey of growth.

And that we are all walking through together. That's awesome. Yeah, that's you sounds like you guys have a great company partnership there. Thank you.

One of the things that like you brought up before, and we really haven't talked about it, but obviously, I believe it's a huge factor. And your thoughts on what we're doing is that, you know, I have a number of friends that are immigrants or, you know, first generation from Eastern Europe, mainly they came and their families like left when it was communist over there and they came here. And the first thing I would see with those families is that they'd be buying real estate, starting businesses, a lot of stuff that they didn't have access to which as Americans, myself being born in America, the United States it, it's something that we take for granted almost that the abilities there. So how does being an immigrant change your view on the US economy and US business in general while possibly giving you an edge over other real estate investors that maybe don't see this of the immigrant.

I'm living some area that I consider trouble, right? I don't have enough opportunity over there. I don't have enough to eat. I don't have the nice shelter that I want.

I am struggling, I am putting everything a the line to go to America in search of opportunity. So when we come to the US, our eyes are wide open looking for the next opportunity, , the opportunity to better ourselves, right? right? We are not bog-down by the political climate or what this person says or what we belong to or that, at least in the early phases when we hear we are not bog-down by that.

All we care about are the opportunities that are available to us and when we come there is an abundance of opportunity in the U.S. that we see compared to the societies that we come to. Like when I came to the U.S., I got a job at McDonald's. I was getting paid $5.25 an hour.

I remember calling my friend back home with so much excitement. I am making money and I was going to McDonald's dedicated, the most dedicated employee doing about 60 hours a week without any complaints, right? But for an American that has been here, that has been given everything, you know, that doesn't mean anything to them. So I think it's about the perspective that you take.

And this is not something that is unique to Americans. It's kind of interesting because it's something that I've really thought about and reflected about and I see it in different societies even in Africa. Like for example, I'm Cameroonian. Cameroonian will leave Cameroon and go to Nigeria and don't be successful in Nigeria while in Nigerian will leave Nigeria and come to Cameroon and be successful in Cameroon.

So it's like that sense of entitlement that we have as citizens of a country, that that country owes us something that that prevents us from looking at the opportunities but when we leave that country and go somewhere else we're looking for opportunity in that country and when we look for opportunities. We see opportunities. That's fantastic. That's a great answer that's fantastic.

That's a great answer. That's a great perspective which I will keep in mind when any more of that conversation or. Topic ever comes up because that's a great way of looking at I just always thought like you were saying the you know opportunity but even going be just back between countries, no matter what level they are. You have a whole different perspective of what makes perfect sense.

One of the things here before we wrap up, I always like to ask real estate investors. You're five, going on your sixth year of real estate investing. I imagine you guys have turned out a lot of deals, especially over the last two years, since you haven't done any of you said, what are common stakes you'd see real estate investors make? I think you kind of mentioned it a little bit, like just jumping into a new market without getting a full understanding.I've like what that market is, the market dynamics, because a market can break a deal, can make a break a deal.

So just jumping into new markets without doing the adequate research for that market is one of the big mistakes I've seen people make. Yeah, that's a great answer. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. How can our listeners learn more about you and your business XSITE Capital?

All right. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm Leslie Awasom. Again, that's my name.

You could find me anywhere. I'm active on LinkedIn. Come join us. We give a lot of value on that platform as well So I know again reach out to me if there's any way I could contribute to your growth Leslie, thank you so much for coming on today I will put those links into the show notes and looking forward to connecting with a few here in the near future All right.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Hi guys, it's Charles from the global investors podcast I hope you enjoyed the show if you're interested in getting involved with real estate But you don't know where to begin Hey, set up a free 30 minute strategy, call with me at ScheduledCharles.com, that's Scheduled rls.com. Thank you.

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