Firefighter to 9-Figure Real Estate Portfolio

Aviva (00:02.594)
This week's listener of the week is 1031Tim. 1031Tim, thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week. Week, week. This week on commercial real estate secrets, we have Ian Horowitz. Hey Ian, thanks for being on the show.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (00:29.059)
Yep, I'm excited to be on it. That was the most awesome intro. It's like throwback to the radio days, I guess, when we were all young. It's sad to say that when we were young, that's the radio days, but that's what it reminded me of. That's awesome.

Aviva (00:44.062)
I like to throw it back, try to take the fun parts and see how recyclable they are. So, stand by. Ian, tell me and the viewers who you are and what brings you here today on Commercial Real Estate Secrets.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (01:00.999)
Yeah. Hey, what's up, guys? My name's Ian Horowitz with Equity Warehouse. We're based out of Baltimore, Maryland, over here on the East Coast. And we have a heavy concentration in self-storage and multifamily. And happy to talk to you guys how we've gone from being two-broke firemen for the city of Baltimore all the way to owning and operating almost a nine-figure portfolio.

Aviva (01:24.851)
So, you started as a firefighter, and it sounds like you were with your partner as well. How did that all begin?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (01:32.211)
Yep. Yeah. So, me and my business partner and I, we grew up outside of Philadelphia. We were volunteer firemen and just had a passion for it and just wanted to do it. And Philadelphia, you had to live in the city to even take the test and it just wasn't an option for either of us. A couple of our friends got hired down in Baltimore. They said, come take the test and off we went. And you know, if you ever watch The Wire.

That's where we worked. If you watch the riots that happened, that's where we worked. We worked in the heart of West Baltimore. Got hired in 07 and 08, respectively. At the core value of the job, it's a beautiful job. But 07 and 08, when we got hired, by the end of 09, we're working a government job, right? Like, you work a government job in exchange for security, and we're getting furloughed.

Aviva (02:08.14)
Wow.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (02:24.267)
They're changing our pension system. Pension systems are going broke all over the country. And I was like, dude, this is not sustainable. And, you know, for whatever reason, my wife decided she wanted to have kids and all that fun stuff. And I was like, oh, I can't say no to this. And so long story short, you know, it was just a culmination of things. And, you know, seeing guys that were working 30, 40, 50 years and just

working till they're basically dead, they get their pension, that's it. I'm like, dude, this can't be real life, man. And look, I loved what we did. I loved helping people, but I knew there was a better way. And luckily, because there was no over times, pension systems going bankrupt, healthcare issues, all these other things, I bought my first rental property in 2012 and off we went, man. That was, that's how we ended up in real estate. Nothing, I tell people, we were lucky that we got hired when we did and had so much drama around.

the job of all these issues that forced our hand to go find a different way to make a living.

Aviva (03:25.838)
Wow. So this is a conversation I have with one of my best friends all the time about real estate and you said something that makes me wanna ask you it. Do you believe being a landlord is helping people? In the way that you were a firefighter and you're passionate about helping people, do you feel renting people space helps them out?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (03:52.211)
Yes, that's a very fair question because we actually got our start in subsidized housing, and I don't want to make this politics, but I'm on one side of the field, and, you know, people would say, oh, why would you rent to subsidize? It kind of goes against what you believe in. And I said, but yeah, people still need, like, people still need quality housing to live in. And one of the things that really changed my outlook on it was my second tenant. His name was Reginald Carroll.

and I got him from prisoner aid, and I said, man, Mr. Reggie, whenever I come to your house, it's so clean. He's like, yeah, you live in an eight by eight cell. You will appreciate anything you get. And I was like, yeah, you're right. I said, I wish you could tell some of our other tenants of how lucky they are to be in this situation, to have the help to maybe get to the next level. But it also brought attention. There's good people, whether they pay cash or subsidize. There's bad people, whether they pay cash or subsidize. It's the same in the commercial world.

It doesn't matter where you are. There's good and people on either side of it. And if you do the right thing, eventually, the good tenants or the good people, the good vendors will come and find you. And I 100% believe in providing quality housing to people. Yeah, we would leave our houses and literally say, if I just got out of the Fire Academy and like I had to live here, I would. Like, that's always how we looked at it. We weren't trying just to, you know, carpet out of a can and paint in floors and seeing what we could get away with it. Yeah, sure. The first few houses, we might not have done it.

completely right because we didn't know, not because we were trying to screw someone over. And as you know, we paid for those mistakes a couple of years later. But you know what? That's what you got to do to get started. And I agree with you. I think doing the right thing and providing housing is truly helping someone if you're doing it for the right reasons.

Aviva (05:41.962)
You know, I've, I agree. I've heard, you know.

being a landlord is evil. I've seen that comment a million times. And those are people who haven't, you know, we rent small bay warehousing. So we deal with a lot of people, startup businesses, people out of their garages, people out of storage facilities. And when you have a couple and they have brought their four children to the, so we have the family of six staring at you, thanking you for taking a chance and renting your space to them,

It really changes your perspective from that evil landlord to like, oh, wow, we're actually providing someone with an opportunity to better their lives, better themselves. And oftentimes it's those tenants who go on to rent bigger units, eventually buy their own property. And that feels even better. So it's not all evil.

specifically when you're actually in the trenches talking to Reggie or talking to the family who is there to make a name for, you know, to make, yeah.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (06:48.243)
And it, yeah, and if you're doing it right, you're gonna get monetarily rewarded for doing the right thing. It's not like, oh, I'm gonna be a charity case and help everyone out. Like there was a big debate on doing collection calls on our storage facilities. Should we do it around Christmas? And I said, all right, I agree with you. Let's not do it from the 21st, 23rd to about the 26th or 27th. Just shut it down. We don't need to be those people. But.

they equally have a responsibility to pay their rent as much as we have a responsibility to our investors to collect that rent. So it's a two way street. And I think there's somewhere out there, and I know the world has become so divisive, somewhere in the middle, business and helping people can live together and we can get paid and they can get what they want. And it's a magic, what is it, in harmony, right? We can all live.

together or synonymously, whatever it is, and everybody gets what they need. But our premise has always been put the property first. If you put the property first, you'll attract the right tenants. And we were dealing very early on in our careers with subsidized housing, and it was like, all right, well, if we put together a nice product, we'll get the best of the best of those tenants, and that will ultimately reward us later on. And what we found out is we went into multifamily, again, like I said earlier, there's bad people.

It doesn't matter if they're paying cash or they're subsidized. It bad actors come out and it just comes out in the wash naturally.

Aviva (08:22.338)
So you've talked about self storage, you've talked about multifamily, your hat says warehousing. What is the asset type that you all work on? What do you do? What does a day look like?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (08:37.955)
You know, I wish I knew what my day was sometimes. What I want my day to be and what they are sometimes, but no, honestly, what we invest in, we look at self-storage and multifamily is our primary asset classes that we're attracted to, that we operate in. But what I like to tell people is we're opportunistic investors. We've ran the gamut. We've done single family. We've done fix and flips. We've wholesaled. We've done a little bit of everything to get where we are today. And a lot of people say, oh, well,

You know, everyone says just do one thing and do it right. And I said, yeah, we did one thing right for a long time. We operated in the single-family house space and cut our teeth, got our butts what? Built 100-house portfolio, flipped over 100 houses. We grinded it out to build our systems to now allow us to be opportunistic investors. And to me, as you're moving along, you know, it's a tool in the toolbox. I mean, people wholesale commercial assets. Well, we've utilized that tactic, right? That's not just a single-family tactic.

We've done owner financing deals, not only in the single family space, but one of the biggest multifamily deals we've done, a $5 million deal, was an owner finance deal at 90%, right? So again, it's just tools in the toolbox all the way through to allow us to operate in the different asset classes and then expand on those verticals, put the right people in place and allow them to do what each vertical needs to do to produce the income to support itself.

Aviva (10:04.126)
You know, I, I agree. I feel like in real estate, as long as you're doing something, it's always pushing you forward to.

It's like you said, it's a tool in the tool belt and everything applies eventually, right? Something might feel like a waste of time today that in five years, you know, you might get that call or you might use that strategy and it comes into fruition. So that's the gangster thing about real estate. And if you play the long game, you get rewarded.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (10:35.447)
Oh yeah, 100%. And that's why rental real estate's the best, right? Like doing the fix and flip, there's something about getting that cash. It feels good, right? Like we all need cash to invest into long-term assets, and our passive income outgrows the active income. But I agree 100%. I mean, you know, it's the long game. And if you stay, if you're in real estate long enough, you will have your wins. You will be able to get to that point.

Aviva (11:00.91)
Totally. You know, I sold a storage facility in 2023, and it was a hell of a deal for many reasons that I won't go into. But something I noticed overwhelmingly was that, A, when I put that thing on the market, people came out of the woodworks from every inch of the country to buy self-storage, and

Then B, what I found was a lot of these folks were people with multifamily assets who saw that self storage was almost like the it's like the it's like the multifamily of housing where it's these small units where you store whatever you store but you don't have a toilet that could break you don't have a stove that could break.

Aviva (12:00.174)
What do you do like? Look, I know a lot of people say multifamily can be some of the hardest assets to manage. Do you find any parallels or differences between multifamily and self storage that way?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (12:15.227)
Yeah, so I like the question, and I'll maybe reframe it just a little bit. Like, what's the big difference? What is the attraction to self-storage? The attraction is, again, just please leave politics out of it. Everyone thinks I'm very, like, divisive, but I'm not. Is COVID exposed everything that's going on in the world, right? I'm in a very, very blue state, a very, very blue city. So COVID happens. Okay, cool.

Aviva (12:20.706)
there.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (12:43.219)
Hey, there's all this rental assistance money. Cool. Well, he resubmitted all our information. Oh, we're not releasing it yet. Okay, so the tenant doesn't have to pay, but you haven't released the tenant protection money to pay for the rent. And I can't evict them. So it's like, what are you supposed to do? You were handcuffed. And what happened in the industrial space, as you probably know, big companies just came and said, I'm not paying my landlord. I said, wait, what? Like, just stop paying on their leases.

Aviva (13:00.34)
Oof.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (13:12.075)
What happened inside Self Storage is, lien laws, that's how we operate, to get people out of the units, never stopped. California, for like an hour, said, "'Yeah, you can't do any more auctions.'" And that lasted all of like two seconds, and it was shut down almost immediately, and business was normal. The other part about Self Storage is, we can automate it. Like, our main office is in Baltimore, Maryland.

Aviva (13:21.89)
Wow.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (13:39.163)
Our assets are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, all in states that are pro-business, right, which I like. Side by side with that, we were still able to operate, and we were able to operate autonomously from up here. We have a call center, right? We have people. People move in and out all the time. Like, it was- that's- We had a little technical difficulty before the episode. I got caught up looking at a report because I love looking at the move-ins and move-outs that just happen online every day. Like, we've already had 20 move-ins and-

However many move-outs in the first two days of the month, like, things are transacting all the time. And that was really the big difference. Now, the comparison to multifamily, sure, it's similar, right? Like, there's ancillary fees. You got multiple units, offsets income. So if you're 50% occupied, but you're getting the highest rates, it's better than being 100% occupied with the lowest rates, right? Like, there's so many similarities to multifamily without the drama.

of having a tenant who's living there. And we all know if you've ever done any residential space, that tenant always tells you what. Oh, this is my house. Okay, cool. Thank you for taking ownership. But you called for a service call. Can I come in and fix it? No, this is my house. You got to schedule the time. It's like, well, wait, wait a second. It's my property. You told me that there's a water leak or there's no heat or there's some sort of issue. I'm here to fix it, but you won't let me in the house? Right? So, in the storage game, someone has a broken door.

Aviva (14:46.35)
I'm sorry.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (15:05.127)
you can transfer them to another unit. It's not an emergency. You secure their property. A light goes out at the facility. You don't want it to be out forever. Not the end of the world. There's not as many emergencies as there are when someone is living in your unit all the time.

Aviva (15:21.998)
Wow, yeah. The emergencies are a funny thing that I think about when I apply to, and just think about different tech classes. I have a friend who I work with whose family has a ton of retail. And you talk about an emergency in a warehouse over the weekend is not an emergency in a restaurant over the weekend. It's just funny and it's not funny. It's a nuance of our.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (15:43.805)
100%.

Aviva (15:50.882)
business.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (15:50.899)
It is definitely the nuance. And then, like, when you have an Airbnb or two, because you're like, Oh, that sounded like fun way back in the day. But that is like the highest level of service. And everyone's like, Oh, this is the best business. I'm just going to go right. I'm like, dude, that is the highest level of service. You are in a hotel. You are in a customer service-based business. We're in a customer service-based business in self-storage, but usually it's only at the time of sale. After that, it's like, hey, you rent your metal box. It's kind of like the industrial space. Rent your metal box and

There's an issue in your metal box. There's not much to fix, but I'll be out at some point to fix your metal box. And that's really what it comes down to. That's why I like self-storage just because that emergent issue comes off the plate. It allows you to invest further outside of your area. You know, and that was one of our theses behind investing outside of the Baltimore metro area was I don't want someone living in an apartment unit in Oklahoma

And I'm responsible where I have to rely on a third party property manager to manage that because in Baltimore, we had just a lot of trauma around the single family space of how to operate in Baltimore. It's a very, very special place, at least to us anyway. And we just knew that we didn't want to get into residential outside of our jurisdictional area.

Aviva (17:06.314)
Wow, that's interesting. The laws are a trip, specifically.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (17:12.243)
Yeah, well, and, you know, they're always changing. I mean, look, the nuances inside of storage are usually on a state level. Like, there's a state storage association. They have lobbyists that go and negotiate, hey, this is how lien laws are going to work. This is how you can communicate with tenants. And, like, that's it. You don't have to worry about being in Baltimore City, and then there's some reform that comes out. And, like, in Baltimore City, like, it takes me forever to get an eviction because now there's mediation that I got to go through. There's all these notices that I-

have to do. It's not, yo, you're late on the 5th. I can file on the 6th. It's you're late on the 5th. Then I gotta notify you by the 10th. Then after the 10th, I gotta wait two weeks to say that I tried calling you. Then I gotta have a mediation. Then I can finally evict you. But by the time I evict you, it's like four months later, I've lost all that rent versus in storage. It's in Mississippi, 30 days. You don't pay your rent by the, uh, I think it's the 10th. I gotta go and look at it. I'm put myself into a corner, but I can tell you in 30 days, if you don't pay your rent, you're done.

Aviva (17:48.142)
All right.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (18:11.307)
Day 5, I lock you out. Day 10, you're getting a lien notice. Day whatever, you're getting posted for an auction. On day 30, if I wanted to be that aggressive, you don't pay your rent, you're gone. Same thing with Texas. Same thing with Louisiana. Arkansas, where we operate, it's like 75 days, but still, there's a process, and you know exactly what it is. There's no, I'm going to go file rent escrow.

Aviva (18:29.483)
Wow.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (18:35.399)
I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go get the BS lawyer off the side of the street to come represent me pro bono and throw some kind of BS at you. Can you tell I got some trauma around residential real estate? And really jams you up. So that's why I think, you know, look, storage, industrial assets, warehousing space, more B2B type stuff is much more transactional. Everyone has a vested interest. There's a business behind it.

And I agree with you 100%. Sorry, I went on a tangent. I can't help myself, but that is, you know, that's how I feel today.

Aviva (19:10.07)
Well, no, I think it's valuable. And speaking of evictions, I know evictions are at all time highs right now. When you are syndicating deals, how do you mitigate your risk for yourself and your investors while you're doing the due diligence process?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (19:30.123)
Yeah, well, for self-storage, for us, you know, we never underwrite to the top of the market. You know, we like to be mid-tier market. We know the asset that we're bringing out. We stay mid-tier. There's been a massive retraction and rents. We also underwrite to make sure we're not getting to 95% occupancy. We're looking at 85% to 90% occupancy. We're not laying our own fees.

Now, on the multifamily side of things, it's a similar product type, right? Like, we like to be that B-class, you know, high C, getting into a B, stay right mid-tier, and just, you know, not being super aggressive with rates. That's really how you can mitigate the downside. Now, with storage, we've always looked at it from a replacement cost standpoint that I know if I can get it below replacement cost, I can always sell it for more just because someone's like,

you know, you got it below replacement costs, they can't build it for the same price that you got it. There's always some sort of delta there as well.

Aviva (20:31.266)
Will you explain what replacement cost is for the viewers?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (20:34.951)
Yeah, so if you had to go out and build a new property, so for like, so for us right now, you could probably build like a drive-up type storage facility, not the big class A's. I'm just talking about like a standard drive-up. You know, you're building them anywhere from, I don't know, the building is going to cost you, before land acquisition, cost 40 to, I'd say 35 to 50 bucks a foot depending on what market you're in.

So if you can buy that property sub $40 a foot, right? Let's just use a round number. Like, our acquisitions were in the $30 to $45 a foot range. Well, we got the land for free, right? And if you go in there and you're able to, and you look at it from that standpoint, it's like, well, nobody's going to build against you. It's too expensive to build against you. And, you know, you're buying it below replacement cost, and most people look at that and say, okay, well, that's one metric I can live off of. So if you've bought it under that,

and you can sell it at par, then you've won, right? And land value is a huge thing here because some of these assets, and I don't know how it is for you and your industrial, there's some covered land plays, right? Like we might have a storage facility that has great frontage that the best use in a few years might not be self-storage. It might be the next hotspot in town. It might be the new multifamily spot that you've made a really good buy because you got your land for free. So that's kind of how.

That's like our backup. That's my initial metric. And then I go in and really underwrite it like, okay, let's pull all the levers. And then I come back and look at it from that standpoint as like a stopgap measure to say, are we making a good buy? Because we all know you build something new, people are attracted to new, and you could potentially rent better than the old facility around the corner. So that's kind of how we look at it and play the two against each other.

Aviva (22:25.994)
Oh yeah, hey, I told you I sold that storage facility last year. It was a land play. It was a land play with income in place until that wrecking ball comes. And that's a cool thing. Something I love about industrial and storage is the footprint that it actually takes up. You know, something like an office building where they build up. I mean, there's a million reasons why office doesn't make sense. But I love industrial uses because of the footprint that they occupy.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (22:54.471)
Yeah, and really, the, I mean, if you look at industrial and storage, they're similar to an extent, right? You know, I'm dealing on month-to-month leases. You're dealing on, you know, super long-term leases sometimes, right? But what I would say is there's so many uses for it, right? Like industrial, you know, it's, you know, small-bay flex. Like, you can get everything from a garage band to a screen printing press to a granite company. Well, it's the same thing for us.

We have econ businesses that rent storage units. Like, we're actually, I was just down in Baton Rouge at one of our sites, ran into a guy. We got talking to him. I said, what do you do? He's like, oh, I work for Energy. I said, he said, they're a subcontractor to Energy, and all they do is inspect power lines, and he keeps all the chemicals. He's like, I rent a storage facility in each location every 50 miles, and I put the chemicals there so the guys can run back. He's like, there's no point in me running an industrial space because it's too expensive. And then when the contract's over, I shut it down. I was like,

Oh, shit. Like, that makes so- Sorry, I didn't mean to curse, but it makes so much sense. You know, because with you, right? Like, you're locked in. And I think that's what's cool is, like, there's so many opportunities, like RV parking, small businesses that might need a location to rent, the family member that, you know, needs to store something. Like, there's so many uses for storage. We had another at a site. We had not Tastycake, Little Debbie. Sorry, Tastycake's an affiliate thing. Little Debbie.

They would come in. They would deliver the tractor trailer to all the storage units. And then all the vendors, they rented 15 units. Well, then all the vendors rented another 15 units because they kept their vans there. And then the truck would come in at 2.30 in the morning. They would come in and load their vans up, and then they would service all the convenience stores in Louisiana and Mississippi from our facility in Baton Rouge. And it was a really cool thing because like, well, nobody offers 24-hour access. Nobody has the availability to

have 18 wheelers come in here, and Little Debbie likes it, because if we need another unit, we can get one. If we need to consolidate, we can consolidate, right? And that's, I think, the benefit of industrial and storage is the flexibility in what you're renting. You can only rent an apartment to really one type of use, right? Like you're going to live there or you're not, right? And that's it. Like there's no other, that's it. That's all you got. You got nothing else, so.

Aviva (25:16.03)
I was talking to an owner this week and he said, well, what about a big, a 40,000 square foot warehouse? He said, well, what kind of use could you put in there? And I said, you don't need to worry about the uses that are going into these buildings. I placed a woman in 7,500 square feet last year who sells individual Legos online and crushes it.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (25:38.707)
Really?

Aviva (25:39.37)
If you were to tell me that I would place the Lego lady in 7,500 square feet, right? Like the uses, like you said, are so vast, so broad, so creative, construction, e-commerce, trades, it's endless. There's not enough inventory for this space. Don't worry about who's going in there.

You know, worry about getting your rents to where they need to be for you to sell this thing.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (26:06.851)
Yeah, well, that's the biggest thing. I just wish that banks would lend on like, hey, don't worry. If I build it, they would come. But, you know, that's a great part about storage, right? Like, just to make some comparisons, we operate in 3-5-mile submarkets, so it's really easy to aggregate the data. Like, if we know that growth is going out that way, we see the big track home builders going a certain way, it's like, well, alright. I know there's rooftops. Checkmark for me.

I operate in a 3 to 5 mile radius, income numbers, everything else. Well, yeah, if I build it, there's a pretty good chance that I'm going to fill it up, you know? I know industrial, maybe it's a little bit harder to do some of the feasibility stuff, but for us, it's easy because we operate in just 3 to 5 mile submarkets, and that is it. And that's why everyone says, man, I see storage facilities going up everywhere. I said, yeah, because it's underserved. The 3 to 5 mile metric with this, you know, 7 to 10 square feet per person,

That number is real and they will fill up if you can find the right opportunities. And there's a lot of growth to be had.

Aviva (27:12.614)
I love it. So let me ask you, what is currently, this is kind of a, I'm just gonna ask you, what is currently making you happy in real estate today and for 2024?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (27:30.695)
Yeah, you know, what's making me happy is, you know, we finally get to a lot of people see where we are today. And but this is a culmination of the fruits of our labor for the past 10 years and really seeing what we built, where we've gone and what we've done. You know, we have 15 employees now. You know, some of our employees come from the recovery space, so we get to help them out. You know, and it's just it's been like really impactful. And, you know, well, growth like I have.

personal selfish goals to get to a certain dollar amount of real estate. That's not really what it's about anymore. It's more about like, hey, team, like, do you guys want to buy another property because you guys want to grow? Right? Like, we're all in this together. And I think that's the really cool part. So, you know, what motivates me is really making sure that our team is taken care of and successful and seeing how much they've grown as people.

Building families. I mean when we look at it, it's 15 employees, but there's probably Man, there's probably 40 family members amongst that 15 people and it's just like It's wild to see that the people that rely on us and I know that's like I kind of ducked the question maybe but that's really What's been motivating me as of recently is, you know pouring back into our personnel and our growth is going to be related to how much they want to do And how much they want to grow side by side with us and it's not just about

Dan and myself, it's about the company as a whole.

Aviva (28:55.766)
Hey, it's kind of like that initial question, is being a landlord evil or does, or is being a landlord helping people? And I think it's really easy to point at real estate or point at being a landlord and just saying.

You're greedy, it's all about the money. And it's like, yeah, that's a benefit of the industry, but there's so much more to it and so much growth that you can give to your tenants and your employees and your partners. And it's cool to share, literally share the wealth that way.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (29:28.187)
Yeah, and, you know, the fact that we're able to give like shares into our deals now to some of our employees, like, that's powerful. Watching those deals finally turn over, that's powerful. You know, but I think one thing that if there's a takeaway from this is that not enough people treat their real estate investing careers like a business, right? You know, a lot of people are like, Oh, I just got a collection of properties, and that's it. And then they're running around with their heads cut off, and then they get hair like me, and it's just a mess, right? Like,

You know, it's rather than taking the time and building out the team and spending a little money, putting the right people in place, and treating it like a business and knowing your numbers, like, we could not have this team or this portfolio if we did not treat it like a business. And in real time, that shit sucked. Like, just straight up, I'm not going to lie to you guys, like, that sucked in real time. Like, we didn't know how we were going to afford Ryan, our No. 1 employee that we hired, and he turned out to be an all-star. We knew.

how we were going to pay for them. We were paying them more than we were earning in the fire department at the time. Like, mind-blowing crap to us. I remember my wife just being like, What are you guys doing? I'm like, I'm not up. This is what we need to do to grow. But those are the things, by doing those really, really uncomfortable things, we get to enjoy them today, and hopefully for the future and generations to come, we'll be able to enjoy the sacrifices that we made in real time at those times. So.

Aviva (30:48.782)
That's cool. Hey, that's what real estate's all about. And so my last question, if today was your first day in real estate and you could take what you've learned in your time in the biz, what would you teach yourself day one?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (30:52.382)
Yup.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (31:07.903)
Um, that's really good. What would I teach myself? Day one is it probably be more mindset than anything is that, you know, hey, like go swing the bat, go do it. Um, you know, and push on. I didn't, there wasn't much time that I wasted at the beginning, but I would really say that's what I would teach myself, you know, obviously, and then side by side with that, you know, wearing your heart on your sleeve, like

being able to go out and talk to people and raising capital earlier and trusting yourself, betting on yourself earlier is really what I would teach myself. It would mostly be mindset stuff that I would go back and tell myself, because we knew it in real time, but there was a lot of like, you know, chicken arms, like just kind of dip it in because you're like, oh, this feels so good. And then you're like, I don't know if this is right. But then looking back on it, you're like, damn, I was so right there. Like, I should have poured in. So that's really what it would have been is just, you know, I would probably go back and tell myself.

Bet on yourself, man. You know what you're doing. Go do this and let's go.

Aviva (32:07.35)
You wouldn't believe how many people I asked that question to and they have an iteration of the same thing. Like, just do it. Just trust yourself. Just get to work. So.

Ian Horowitz - LFG (32:18.583)
Yep. You can't hit the home run if you're not on base. You can't hit a grand slam if you're not on base, right? And that's always how I kind of relate it to is, like, get in the game, swing the bat. Oh, listen. Hopefully, if you have a strikeout, like, it's a swinging strikeout, and you're not going to lose money, right? Or you're going to get on base. And if you can get on base, then you can score some runs, and eventually, you're going to hit a grand slam. Not every deal is going to be a grand slam. Just hit singles, dude. And, like, if we look back at what we did, we did single-family houses over and over and over again.

And we just kept doing it until we got it right, mostly because we were, some of it was because we were scared to go to the next quote-unquote level, but a lot of it was just refining process, just doing it over and over and over again to get really good at it to allow us to grow to where we are today. So I agree 100%.

Aviva (33:05.366)
Yeah, hey, everybody wants that immediate gratification and I don't know if anything in life is really, really gives it, not the good stuff at least. So

Ian Horowitz - LFG (33:14.823)
Yeah, yeah, no, not if you want real true happiness. Like, you'd be gratified if you jump on social media, make a post, and tell everyone something, but what does that do, man? Like, do the right, again, do the right thing and work towards what you want, and if you do what's right, you will be rewarded at some point. In real time, it might suck all the way through, but at some point, you are going to get rewarded, whether it's financially, it's personally.

Whatever it is, whatever you're looking for, you will find that reward.

Aviva (33:46.162)
Awesome, well, Ian, for the listeners who want to learn more about you or from your work, where can they listen to you or follow you or get in touch with you?

Ian Horowitz - LFG (33:57.203)
Yeah, best place you can find us is on equitywarehouse.com. We have some case studies on how our friends and family co-invest and co-lend with us. That's the best place to really learn about what we do. I communicate the most on Instagram @equity_warehouse. If you shoot me a DM, I communicate the most on there. And honestly, we're out on all the social sites. You'll see us out there chirping. If you want to find us, we're out there and happy to talk to anyone that's trying to take that next step.

Aviva (34:26.294)
Awesome. Well, thank you, Ian, for being on Commercial Real Estate Secrets. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.