A Surprising Way To Raise Millions Without Traditional Marketing

Aviva (00:23)
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This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Trevor Oldham. Trevor is the founder of Podcasting U. Trevor, thank you for being on the show today.

Trevor Oldham (00:53)
Thank you, super excited to be here and hopefully provide some value to your listeners.

Aviva (00:58)
I have no doubt you will. Trevor, do me a favor. Can you tell the listeners who you are and what you do and how we got here today?

Trevor Oldham (01:06)
Yeah, most certainly. So just to give a high level of view when I say that because it's been about a nine or 10 year journey. I mean, I could talk, I could probably take a whole day talking about how I got from where I started to where I am. Long story short, it was back in 2015. I was running a different company than I run now. I had started my own podcast way before podcasting was popular and I was the one that was recording the interview and guests. I was editing the show. I was doing the show notes. I was doing the social media clips.

I was bootstrapping the company with a partner and we didn't have any money. So did that for about two years. Again, wasn't making any money and just wanted to start making money obviously. Cause when you're doing 40 hour weeks on the side business and I was still in college at the time, still going to college, it was, it was a lot going on. So I just started freelancing myself out there and I used Upwork. Upwork is a great freelancing platform and I would basically find gigs of people that wanted to go on podcasts, people that needed help finding guests, people who needed.

help editing this show, basically everything that I had self taught myself. And then that really just grew over time where it was on my own. So then first year bringing on the first employee to growing over time to bringing on a few additional employees. And then nowadays what we do is we specialize working with folks in the real estate investment space, which has been really enjoyable. And early on we would work with any client and then specializing real estate, but learning.

just because we're in real estate doesn't mean that it's a small niche. There's so many facets. There's so many different industries. mean, if you're just talking asset classes to all the different types of tax professionals and CPAs and, and attorneys, it's, it's a big niche within itself. And then I would say on top of that, because of that, just being around all these investors, I'm a passive investor and four different deals across a couple of different asset classes. So I like to also invest in real estate. mean,

when you're to investors all day long and working with them, you kind of get that bug realizing I don't want to be active. I'd rather be passive. I don't want to deal with tenants or anything like that. I'd rather write you a check for 50 K and you deal with all of that and I get, you know, I still get a nice return on the back end. in short, that's really what nine or 10 years of my life has looked like.

Aviva (03:19)
Well, given you're on a commercial real estate podcast, seems like we're in the right space. Tell me about the synergy that you have found between podcasting and commercial or just real estate investing in general.

Trevor Oldham (03:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I would say the biggest thing that I found is people like going on the podcast more often than not to raise capital for their deals because you get a lot of folks that are trying to meet your credited investors. So you could think your doctors, your lawyers or dentists, high income earners. Typically, when someone is listening to a podcast, they're going to be more educated, have a higher earn higher income. Not to say that everyone hopefully people that are listening to podcasts are well educated, but more often than not, it's almost like folks that read books typically might be a little bit smarter than those who don't read books. It's just the

just makes sense at the end of the day. So I found that a lot of folks, especially in 2020 is when the business really started to take off and there was a lot of new syndicators. There's a lot of new operators coming into the space and they had these deals, but they're like, how can I promote these deals? And that's just my company just happened to, you know, we happened to be in business three years at that time and sort of caught fire. But I find that's more often than not where that synergy is, is do you have the folks in the commercial real estate space that are raising capital that have these deals?

that are trying to promote themselves but aren't sure how to promote themselves. And it's crazy because working with a lot of these investors, they're super good at what they do. They know how to underwrite deals. They know how to find deals. But when it comes to the raising capital side of it, that's one of the hardest aspects of, you you could find a $10 million apartment complex and buy it for $5 million and have to raise a million for it. But raising that million might be very challenging if you don't know how to promote yourself. And not to say podcasting is the only way to promote yourself. Obviously, you want to do other forms of marketing like

running ads and different things like that. But we sort of found ourselves a small little niche within the real estate community and find that commercial real estate really works with it. Because I mean, if we're talking like fix and flip, it might be a little bit more difficult where if you're a wholesaler at the end of the day, what could you be promoting unless you're a coach or you have a course where you're a commercial real estate, usually your deals are going to be a little bit bigger. And then because of that, you are typically raising capital, not all the time, but a lot of folks in commercial real estate, we find

our raising capital and that's sort of the bread and butter that we found.

Aviva (05:37)
So for somebody who doesn't know what an accredited investor is, can you explain accredited investor to a fifth grader?

Trevor Oldham (05:46)
Yeah, most certainly. So basically an accredited investor is someone that earns $200,000 per year for I believe at least two consecutive years or you earn $300,000 for two consecutive years between you and your partner, whether that's your husband or your wife and you expect to earn that income the following year or you have a $1 million net worth excluding your primary residence where that can't be counted towards that. So that's going to be your accredited. Then you have your non-accredited which is

folks like myself that don't earn that income or don't have that net worth. So the reasoning I mentioned that is because a lot of deals, probably about 90 % of the deals I come across are open to accredited only. And that's important. And it's a distinction because if you're accredited, it means you can go out there and you can promote the deal on the podcast. If you're not accredited, you can't solicit folks have to find you. So there's that little difference where per just the SEC regulations, I couldn't

If I have a non-accredited deal, I can't go out and start marketing myself to investors. I mean, I can talk about what I did, but not the deal specific because you obviously don't want to get in trouble. would imagine it probably wouldn't be fun with the SEC breathing down your neck, which is why most people are accredited and have accredited deals that way they can't promote it and they don't have to worry so much about those regulations.

Aviva (07:02)
Fascinating. So somebody who is going to hire you, what does it look like from start to finish in order to find those LPs to invest in their deal?

Trevor Oldham (07:17)
Yeah, I would say really it depends like who's your target audience like some folks really only work with doctors and they make that's their entire brand. Some people only work with sales professionals and that's what they make their entire brand and then you have your engineers, know, your high your high income earners. So it depends who's your target audience. Like I remember one time I was talking to a client and I said, do you want to target doctors? And he said, No, I don't enjoy working with doctors where we got other clients and they do like working with doctors. So you want to figure out like who's your typical investor more often than not, it's those folks.

that I mentioned before. And then from there, just building out the strategy from there to figure out, we want to go after these types of shows. And then from there, it's putting like together like a nice pitch for you. It's getting a nice professional one sheet and a one sheet is basically, if you think when you're applying for jobs, it's almost like that as a resume. But instead, it'll go over like your bio, it'll go over potential topics you'd talk about potential questions, a host, a host may ask you, so you want to make sure you have that done. And then really, it's just

reaching out to the host, seeing if they want to have you on. And that's why I mean being strategic because there's so many podcasts out there and you want to make sure, okay, if I'm going on this podcast, does it even make sense for me to go on it? Or am I just sending a blanket pitch to every single real estate podcast, whether they're a real estate investing podcast or whether they are targeting real estate agent podcasts. You know, there's a ton of, if you just type in real estate on iTunes, there's going to be hundreds of podcasts out there. So you want to make sure you're targeting.

the right ones. And I'd say the really the big aspect of it comes on the back end where you can go on and you can talk on podcasts. But are you sending people to a website? Does the website look professional? Is there somewhere where you could capture that potential individual, whether it's a lead magnet, or they could book a call to your website. That's just a big aspect of it. And then mean, you can go even further. Do you have an email funnel set up? Do you have different things like that different, you know, tactics from different touch points, but

more often than not if you're going on these shows you just want to make sure you have a nice professional website look up because a lot of times most people aren't ready to invest 50k with you right off the bat but maybe they sign up for your investor portal then they get on your email list and then are you sending out emails it doesn't have to be like once a week are you sending out emails once a month with updates on the deals or new offerings different things like that so I find that podcasting is almost like one part of it but you want to make sure you have the other things on the back end because

Yeah, podcasts can drive people to your website, but if your website doesn't look great or it loads very slow or you don't have any of those things that I mentioned, it's just gonna be a little bit harder to drive those leads for you.

Aviva (09:52)
Have you ever come across a deal where you were just like, this is a dud?

Trevor Oldham (09:58)
Yeah, I would say quite a few. mean, in my experience, in my experience as a passive investor, I would say there's been there's been quite a few deals. And the reason I say that is before I even started investing, I think I talked to 25 different 25 to 30 different sponsors, and I was underwriting deals myself. And I could just look at the deals like, okay, you're overpaying, or your CapEx is too small, or you're

Aviva (10:04)
Sure.

Hmph.

Trevor Oldham (10:22)
Let's say you're expecting to be 5 % vacant where I'm expecting you to be 10 % vacant or 15 % vacant or depending on the type of market where you're let's say you're going in you're doing a value add deal and let's say your rent right now is a thousand and the competitor is $1050 and you expect to raise rents $1200 to $1200 and then you're but you're still a class B property and the class A's are going for $1200 different things like that where you're like, what are you getting these numbers?

Aviva (10:33)
Sure.

Trevor Oldham (10:51)
from and not to part hard on multifamily, I see it a lot in multifamily. find that it's easy to manipulate the IRR more than anything else. And for the audience out there, that's your internal rate of return. That's going to be your overall return over the lifetime of the real estate investments. So that could be five years. So maybe first year I get 6%, 7%, 8%, 9 % and then year five, the property gets sold and I get 25%. So whatever the IRR comes out to, to all of that math, that's what it looks like, but you can.

Aviva (10:59)
Yeah.

Trevor Oldham (11:20)
week those numbers depending on like I mentioned before how much are the expenses what is the vacancy look like what is that projected rent growth different things like that but I know I definitely come across I would say it's more so the operator I'd say than the deal itself and I find for me when I'm doing the passive investing I'd rather I want to make sure I like the jockey you can think of it like you know horses and you know I'd rather buy on the jockey and then make sure then make sure the deal is good not to say I don't look at the deal

Aviva (11:35)
Sure.

Trevor Oldham (11:49)
at all. But yeah, I know I've come across quite a quite a bit and all asset classes, to be honest, I think it was easy a couple of years ago to make a ton of money. But now it's become a just become harder given the interest rate environment people want so on sometimes one top dollar for their deals that they're selling and you know, they missed the boat two or three years ago. So there's a lot of variables going on right now where I do find that some people are are still putting out some duds for deals.

Aviva (12:17)
It's so interesting. The concept of smudging numbers and raising money.

and potentially going upside down on a deal is so backwards to me, right? Like if you want to syndicate deals, want to do, you probably want to actually under promise and overperform so that you can do it again with your investors as opposed to over promise and underperform, which we saw a lot of bad actors come up. You know, it was kind of like, you know, we can get real niche.

in system, you know, commercial real estate, Twitter. The butt end of all the jokes in commercial real estate Twitter in 2022 were these syndicators buying multifamily properties at low interest rates who are now underwater. And it's like, I just can never understand the concept of fooling your investors on the front end, raising money.

And maybe these GPs think that actually it is a good deal. they're not, intentions aren't, you know, they're not ill-intended, but I just think it's fascinating. As a syndicator myself,

under promise over perform as opposed to the opposite.

Trevor Oldham (13:46)
Yeah, I agree with you there and even looking at the deals there was I don't know if it was ego or they thought the market was going to go up continuously over time. But looking back now, I mean, you could look at the deals 80 % LTVs alone to value where the real estate investors doing 80 % leverage only 20 % down. You have your variable rates and they just expected that the rates were going to stay low. They didn't have a rate cap or they just decided not to purchase a rate cap because they don't want to spend that money. And then again, it goes back to those numbers they over projected.

rent growth maybe they were in a market like Austin, Texas, where rent growth has gone the opposite way, where they expected it to increase, where how could you really expect rent growth to increase like 30 % every single year? That's just not going to be sustainable. So it was different things like that, that I'm sure you've seen and I've seen in the real estate space of why some of these operators went underwater. And looking at it it's like, wow, like that makes a ton of sense. But we also didn't realize how quickly interest rates were going to grow.

Aviva (14:43)
So how do you track your KPIs when podcasting with investors?

Trevor Oldham (14:51)
Yeah, so I would say the biggest thing is going back to either having that lead magnet or having someone book a call with your company because there's two ways you could go about it. You could create a landing page for every single interview that you do and you can make it easy and don't want to make it sound that hard but you could duplicate it for each interview that you've done and I've had some clients want to do that and then other clients the way that I structure it is let's say they have a lead magnet they put in how did you hear about a section?

or they know in the sense where it's a little bit trickier when it comes to podcasts. And the reason I say that is because like Google ads, you could just put a tracking, you could just put a tracking tag on your website. So you know exactly where the individual came from. Podcasts are a little bit different. So I say the best way to look at it is the day that the interview goes live. And more often than not, if you have a good podcast host, they're going to let you know when that interview has gone live. You'll either get an email from the host or their assistant and they'll let you know, the interview.

has gone live and then that's where you can go and check your website. Did you get additional email signups that day? Did you get more booked calls that day? Not to say that's exactly why you got more calls, but usually it's a good correlation. If you're getting one booked call a day and then now you have five booked calls and your podcast interview went live, well, there's a pretty good reasoning behind that. But you just want to make sure again, you have some sort of lead magnet set up or somewhere on your website where someone can book a call. Usually I like the lead magnet.

because again, most people aren't ready to invest 50K with you or 100K or even 25K. Usually they want to hear from you a little bit more often, which is where it's nice having that lead magnet. Like for our company, you go on our website, it'll pop up within like five seconds. I can't remember what it was, but it's something about like the best reason to go on podcasts, something like that. I had it built over a year ago. can't even remember now, but we get like five to 10 signups a week from it then you just nurture those relationships.

Over time and then we do get people book calls directly from that and it usually comes Honestly, like after the fifth or sixth email that we sent them So we've had five or six weeks of having nice touch points with them So it's not something that's happen right away mean, maybe if you want like the Joe Rogan podcast and they had you millions of down or millions of people listening Yeah, it could happen. But more often than not it it's gonna be nurturing the relationships that you're building

Aviva (17:11)
Let me ask you, how does timing work out with this? Because if I'm raising, you know, if I'm under contract and I have 60 or 90 days, how do you line up the podcast to make sure that everything is cohesive time-wise?

Trevor Oldham (17:26)
Yeah, that's definitely one of the bigger challenges I find within the podcasting space. So I think there's one or two ways to go about it. It would be one, if you're never gonna be going under contract, you want to try to go and book yourself on podcasts beforehand. And the reason I say that is most podcasts, they might be booking a week or two out from when they send you over their booking link. And then from there it could be, I'd say on average four to six weeks for the interview.

Aviva (17:31)
Sure.

Trevor Oldham (17:52)
to live. So you're looking at five to eight weeks. So if you're looking at eight weeks, you're looking at about 60 days. So let's say 56 days, but let's say 60 days or two months out. If you have to raise for this raise for this property, and you only have 60 days, it's going to be a little bit more difficult. So like what I say for our clients is when I'm talking to them, what do you how long is the race for? Is it a six month raise? Is it just an open ended fund? Is it maybe a private debt fund where you're always taking on capital? Or do you need to raise this capital in the next 60 days? Because if you're

If you're going to be doing that, usually just not a fit within the podcasting space. I recommend going on and doing Google ads just because I can reach out to the podcast host and say, Hey, could you get this episode out a little earlier? They might oblige by or they're no, I've already done, you know, 10 other interviews that are going to be going live before you go before you go live. And it's really out of your control where Google ads are going to give you a little bit, obviously give you more control over it. But if you do have more of a longer runway than podcasts are,

are perfectly fine. And again, usually about five to eight weeks I find is the runway. Occasionally like I'll book myself on a podcast and they'll be booking out like eight months, 12 months in advance, but that's usually, that's usually not the norm. Usually it's about one to two, one to three weeks, and then about four to six weeks until that episode goes live.

Aviva (19:08)
Interesting. Yeah, that's something that we're finding. You know, we're my podcasting calendar. I think the soonest you can get on the book right now is in January and it's, know, but we're all learning. all trying to figure it out. So, Trevor, what makes you happy with what you do in commercial real estate?

Trevor Oldham (19:20)
Mm.

Yeah,

I would say the biggest thing is just working with investors that are super smart, but very bad at marketing themselves. And I think that just like the coolest thing I just come across so many cool businesses like even if we're talking outside of real estate and oil and gas space, we worked with an individual where they're raising money to buy coffee. There was some sort of coffee company in I believe, Columbia where super cool what they're doing.

but they're very bad at just marketing themselves. So I find it's very interesting or working with these different companies. Maybe they have a tax abatement or they're doing workforce housing and they're doing a really good job for the community, but they're just have no idea how to promote themselves, how to promote their company. So I think that's what makes me happy is just being able to help these individuals get more traction for their company where they probably couldn't done it on their own or they just don't even know where to begin with it.

Aviva (20:21)
Any advice for a podcaster like myself?

Trevor Oldham (20:25)
Yeah, I would say just be consistent. Just keep at it. That's really the that's the biggest thing. I think it's it's a crazy statistic. It's I know you're not part of the statistic, but it's like 90 % of podcasts stop after the 10th episode. So if you are a podcast host, know that it could take quite a while if you just started to see results from you going out there and producing your show. So that's why you just have to be consistent at it, whether you're producing an episode a week, an episode every other week or weekly. mean, or daily. mean, that would be pretty nuts doing a daily episode.

Aviva (20:38)
Yeah.

Trevor Oldham (20:54)
But if you're just doing weekly, just make sure that you're consistent. If you're doing it on Mondays, always post on Monday at the same time. If you can help with that, just going to build that consistency with your audience. And I find that just the biggest thing over the long term to building that relationship.

Aviva (21:10)
You called it a relationship. I am literally in a relationship with my podcast. It's exactly what you said. It is a lifelong commitment. I'm a year and a half into posting every single week and it is a labor of love, but it's really rewarding and it's brought me to a lot. I've learned a lot from a lot of people. It's connected me to a lot of people and I can attest to.

the results of it. speaking of connecting people, Trevor, where can the audience find you, follow you, listen to you? How can they connect with you?

Trevor Oldham (21:52)
Yeah, most certainly. So they can go to our website podcastingu.com and they'll have the lead magnet and the call I mentioned throughout the interview. That's just podcastingyou.com or they connect with me on LinkedIn under my name, Trevor Oldham. Always happy to chat with people there as well. If they have questions, whether about podcasting or whether they thinking about being a passive investor, happy to talk with folks on either side or if you are a podcast host and a passive investor, happy to chat as well.

Aviva (22:18)
Trevor, thank you so much for being on Commercial Real Estate Secrets. And for those of you listening, we'll see you next week.