Cosmos

Welcome back to the show, my fellow extraordinary Americans. For today’s guest, we have Kevin Boo. Kevin is the founder and CEO of Sunrise Capital Investors, which invests in mobile home parks, parking lots, apartments, offices, and single-family homes across the U.S. 

He has 16 years of experience educating investors to locate, acquire, and create higher-than-average returns from the widely misunderstood mobile home park investing niche. He shares his expertise through the Mobile Home Academy and as the host of the Real Estate Investor Investing for Cash Flow podcast, which has become one of the hottest real estate podcasts on iTunes. He’s the number one best-selling author of the new book The Cash Flow: How to Create Financial Freedom Investing in Commercial Real Estate. 

Kevin founded several charitable organizations, including runningforbrews.com, a social running club with more than 10,000 active members, 72 hours to Key West, and an annual 218-mile bike ride benefiting impoverished families during the holidays. More than 300,000 have been donated between the two of these, and millions of lives throughout the southwest Florida area have been positively impacted. 

He’s an extraordinary American, and I’m glad and honored to have him on the show. Kevin, are you there?

Kevin

Hey Cosmos, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here, and I think she might be a little old. I think I’ve been at this for over 20 years. Anyway, I’m proud to say I’ve got two decades under my belt.

Cosmos

I’m glad you took the time to do this podcast with us and share your wisdom.

So Kevin, can you tell me in the audience a little bit more about yourself, your background and your story, and how you got started?

Kevin

Yeah, sure thing. Yeah. So, I’m a full-time real estate investor, and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I’m 45 as we record this, and I bought my very first investment property at the age of 20 and have been doing it ever since. I’ve owned other businesses outside of real estate, but real estate has been pretty much my entire life, in different capacities in one form, fashion, or another. My sole purpose in the last few decades is to be a professional entrepreneur. 

So, I am more than happy to expand upon that, Cosmos, regarding how that led to where our business is today, the kind of starting. But you let me know where you’d go with that.

Cosmos

No, of course. I wanted to follow up on this. What was your Vision from the age of 20 to right now, and how did your strategic vision goal regarding real estate evolve?

Kevin

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think early on maybe I’m an anomaly, but I think earlier on, like, our needs and wants are a little different than as we grow and mature and become a family man. 

 , at a young age, many of my wants were material related, the things that I didn’t have growing up or, you know, the latest vehicle or your toy or whatever it might be. Right. It was more material-related items. I grew up with my mom and dad, who were wonderful. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich, very middle-of-the-road, blue-collar. Both my parents worked full-time jobs. You know, we took one vacation a year and seemingly always kind of had money problems. There were always financial discussions in our household, but most of it was related to not having enough money. Maybe my parents got another car and shouldn’t have gotten a new loan, rolling some negative equity. Just as I look back, I don’t know what those conversations were back then, but now I can reflect and say that money was somewhat scarce in our household. 

Again, we had enough but surely didn’t have excess. For that reason, at a young age, as early as 12, I was always trying to pave my way. I had a paper out at the age of 12, and I had that for many years. At 14, I taught myself how to install electronics into vehicles. So, you know, CD players and amplifiers. I had an older brother; he had many friends. That was cool when they were in high school, and it was to have loud steroids in their car. 

So I taught myself how to do that and used my parents’ garage to make money by installing that stuff in my brother’s friend’s vehicles. Ultimately, we shovel snow and cut grass in the summertime and shovel snow in the wintertime—just anything to make a dollar. 

 With all that being said, though, I, you know, while I was an entrepreneur in nature, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I, I, I had no idea what excited me. I just knew I wanted to make money. I wasn’t academically driven in high school, mostly because I didn’t know. No one could ever fully explain why I was learning what I was learning. Where was it going to be applicable in adulthood? You know, where was I going to apply these things in these boring classes? What did I think were boring classes? Where was I going to apply this? And how was it going to make my life better? For that reason, I just didn’t try. I didn’t apply myself.

  I graduated high school, went to community college, got a job bartending, and worked on the weekends. You know, that was a fun job. I was making a lot of money by going to community college, but there was no direction for where to apply this energy. But luckily, as the world and universe would have it, I was introduced to real estate at 19. I joke and say that real estate found me. I didn’t find it. I was dating a girl at the time. Her mother had recently been divorced, and her mother’s new boyfriend happened to be a local real estate investor. 

So, I got to know him, and I’m going to visit her at her home. He’d be over there every once in a while. I got to know him and saw a different world than I had experienced growing up. This means he drove a fancy car and dressed differently than I was exposed to. He had a different swagger to him. He spoke, and always in a very articulate manner. He just seemed to have a lot of flexibility in what he did. I mean, I always kind of would see him during daytime hours, during the week, when my parents are at work in my mind, right? This. You should, you’d be at this 9 to 5. And he wasn’t; he just had all this flexibility. He traveled a lot. That was very attractive to me. And it was very intriguing. It’s like, just what does this guy do? How does he do it? He seemingly has a very different lifestyle than what I knew growing up. 

 I always to kind of categorize it as my rich dad and my poor dad. I do not mean a poor dad in a derogatory sense; I mean just a poor dad. My father exchanged time for, for, you know, hours, money, and a paycheck. Right. And, and that’s it. His investments were to the extent of his 401k, and whatever the market was doing was what his investments were doing. Right. And, and, and didn’t have any control over that and didn’t, didn’t have any investments outside of that. David, on the other hand, had a rental portfolio. You know, he’d been an entrepreneur for most of his adult life and just seemed to, you know, just live a different lifestyle because of that. 

 He became my first mentor. He got me into the business and taught me the ropes. I sent you the work form for free, which is what happened. Cosmos. I was attending community college, not knowing what I wanted to do. I made good money as a bartender and had a lot of flexibility in my schedule. 

Because of that, I pretty much just worked weekends. So, I offered David an offer to work for him for free and help him in other areas of his business where I felt he needed someone. And he accepted the offer. For literally a year and a half, between going to class and attending bar in the evening, I would help him with whatever he needed. I would answer calls and return phone calls. I would pick up two-by-fours at Home Depot and deliver them to job sites. I would pick up leases; I’d get leases signed. Whatever he needed, I was there to do it. And in exchange for that, I learned a ton. I mean, I was exposed to it on a day-by-day basis. And that was at the age of 19, going into 20. At 20, I bought my first property with some saved money. Tenting bar and leverage is one of the relationships David had exposed me to when one was a private lender, and the first deal was done first. 

And I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. I followed David’s lead in building a small single-family rental portfolio. One to where the tenants would ultimately pay down the mortgages and, over time, would pay off those mortgages. I would have homes free and clear and essentially be building a retirement every time I built one or purchased one of those properties. That was the start of it. It was a pretty simple business but was a game changer for me because it was just, it was a way for me without having to go away to school, without having to worry about a fancy education that I could simply apply myself, learn some basic skill sets and make a ton of money again. Money was the most important thing for me back then. Now, I view money a little differently. Money is a way for me to buy my freedom and time back.

I’ve got a wife and two wonderful kids. I love traveling and creating memories with them, but the only way to accomplish that is if we have more time. 

So now, my business looks very different from what it was back then. I’ve got a wonderful team and a huge staff of folks better than me in most aspects of our business. They have allowed us to grow and create a living, breathing organism that, if I’m not there one day, that business continues and probably gets better when I step back away from it. 

So back in the beginning stages, it was me and only me, kind of running at the world as fast as possible. And I’ve learned a lot along the way it’s going. It’s been 20-plus years. It’s been a fun journey with some bumps, but it’s still fun and lucrative.

Cosmos

Kevin, yours is a very inspirational story. You basically did a rich dad, poor dad kind of thing. You started in a scarcity mindset or environment, but then you found a mentor, offered your services for free, learned all the secrets of the business, and became successful.

So my question is, let’s say somebody from the audience wants to follow in your footsteps and transform their mindset. For example, they want to get into real estate and transfer their mindset from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, where they successfully do real estate investing. How should they go about doing it?

Kevin

I think what helped, I can only speak to what helped me. And there’s a lot of information out there. There’s lots of free content now readily available, whether it be in a book format or podcast or, you name it, live events. One of the pivotal moments for me was actually before I met David. I had an uncle, and he was in sales and corporate sales. He had been in corporate sales for 30 years. He was very much into self-improvement, at least in the earlier years of his sales career. I am just trying to learn about mindset and positive thinking, then lay on top of sales techniques and the effective art of communication. 

And I don’t know how I ever got into a conversation about that. It was over one of the holidays, Thanksgiving or Christmas, and he was just asking me about what I was into. And this was before I’d been introduced to real estate. And I just told him I didn’t know, I didn’t know I was, you know, having fun, but ultimately wanted something bigger, and just I didn’t know where to find it. And, like, two weeks later, he came to my house with a box full of cassette tapes. I mean, some were in like, you know, binders, and they’re all programs by, you know, world-famous folks such as, like, Zig Ziglar, right? Like, literally. He gave me his whole treasure trove of all these motivational mindset cassette tapes and programs. 

And they said, hey, these helped me at a younger age and helped me along the way. I’ve. I’ve let colleagues of mine use them and listen to them, and I think, take some time, dive in, and I think you’ll have some positive results. You’ll at least be able to gain some additional clarity in life as to, you know, what’s next and also change your mindset a little bit. Just kind of think bigger. Think about the future differently than maybe what you’re thinking of it now. 

And honestly, that was a game show I used to drive around. This was when cassette tapes were the thing, right? Maybe the audience doesn’t even know how those things look. But ultimately, I would go around and just say, “Zig Ziglar is my man.” I would just go front to back—eight cassette programs. I would listen to them nonstop all day when driving, walking or working out. And I mean, that helps. 

So when the opportunity presented itself, when I met David with this real estate deal, I was like, this is it. This is the thing. This is the thing that I can wrap my. I’ve been, I’ve been excited about. I don’t know what, but I’ve been excited to run at this. There’s an opportunity, a big opportunity in front of me. I figured as though if I just kept my eyes open and kept my, you know, ear to the grind. 

So, I would figure out what that is. And. And here it was. It was presented to me with a bow on top. Because Dave was a nice guy, he was willing to let me work with him for free and help him out in his business while, in turn, helping me out. I mean, that. That’s the objective, which was a win-win. I mean, I. I did. I wanted to help him in different areas, but I saw he struggled slightly. There was an age difference of 25 or years; he struggled with simple PowerPoint presentations that I could whip out in five minutes; it was a win-win endeavor there. But that was my mindset when I met him. It was ripe. It was ripe for the taking; it was ripe for doing something bigger. 

But a lot of it derived from those self-help books. Really. Cassette tapes weren’t even physical books because, you know, cassette tapes just got me into the right mindset that when the opportunity did present itself, I was ready to pounce on it.

Cosmos

It’s fascinating that just 20 to 25 years ago, we were, like, even three decades ago, we were using cassette tips. And now, we’re just doing YouTube. We can just click on the Internet, and it’s just wild how technology works.

Kevin

Yeah.

Cosmos

The evolution of the 21st century has taken place. But Kevin, get back to this as a continuation. What is the biggest lesson you learned during your time, from the first property you did to right now, the biggest lesson you learned in real estate investing in general?

Kevin

That’s a great question. The biggest one, I mean, I, Yeah, I guess I could take that covered a couple of different ways, but I mean, I’ll try to keep it tied directly to real estate. And we’ve all heard this, but it’s true: location, location, location. You can take me anywhere and give me property for whatever price. But you know, if I could buy it, you know, to what you might seemingly feel a deal, maybe it’s worth 100 grand, and I could buy it for 60 grand. But if it’s not in the right part of the market, if it’s not the right location, if it’s an area that’s declining, it’s not in the great school district, it’s on the wrong side of the tracks. While I might have bought it at a discount, it will be a struggle. I will have a challenging tenant base and inevitably lose money on it. Even though it looks on the front side going into this thing, I should have made $40,000. 

And, I’ve learned the critical lesson: there are certain properties that someone might say, hey Kevin if I gave this to you for free, would you take it? No, I wouldn’t. You know, and that might seem a struggle for most. Still, I found that if it truly is a challenging location, no matter how cheap you get it, you can’t fix the surrounding area, you can’t fix the neighborhood, you can’t fix the dynamics associated with being on the wrong side of the tracks, being in the wrong school district, being in an area that’s in decline, where employers are moving away. You can’t fix those items. You can fix the property, but you can’t fix those items. 

So I’d rather have the really bad property and pay a fair price for it but have it be surrounding the path, you know, in the path of progress. The best school district, the best area, the best part of town, is where employers are dying to come in and open up their businesses. I would rather have that because in the long run, even though I paid a fair price for it, maybe even retail price, I will still win; inevitably, it will appreciate much more. I will have a better tenant base that wants to live there. They will take care of the property better, which will lower my repairs and maintenance expenses over the duration that I own it. That’s probably the biggest lesson. You can’t fix others, those other dynamics of a bad area. Everything else can be learned or unlearned. That aspect cannot be done. Don’t ever trick yourself into buying something because you think you’re getting a steal if it’s not in the right location. Because you sure as hell can’t fix the location. 

So I’d say that’s the biggest one, and that’s applicable. We’ve owned properties in 18 states. We’ve bought and sold now at least as far as mobile home parks, 50 different mobile home parks. We own, you know, a $300 million portfolio at present. We look at a lot of deals, make a lot of offers, look at a lot of deals, and turn down a lot of deals. And almost every single one we turn down, if it’s not a price-driven reason that we’re turning it down, it’s because it’s not the right location. It’s just not. It might even look like a good commute, property, or in good condition, but it’s in the wrong part of town, and I can’t fix that.

Cosmos

So what you just described right now is short-term thinking versus long-term thinking, which a lot of people, when they see, think of a good deal, think of a good price. 

But in case you’re looking at the surroundings, but from your perspective, as a continuation of this, how do you go about figuring out what good surroundings are versus bad surroundings?

Kevin

You can look at data, demographics, unemployment rates, median household incomes, and the quality of the public school system in the immediate area. You can look at it; you can go to the chamber of commerce and find out who all the local businesses are in the respective area. Where are people commuting from to get to those businesses? There’s lots of data, and it’s readily available, and it’s free. One of the free resources we use that will give us all those data points, and more is bestplaces.net. It’s a free service. You can type in any zip code or MSA. It’s going to give you a lot of data to work from. But the more important ones are, do people have money? Are people making m. Are the people going to be my renters or the folks going to live in my home? Do they make enough money to live there? Right. Do they make enough discretionary income not just to pay their rent but also be able to pay their car payment and pay their bills on time? Right. 

Or are they going to be struggling month by month? Is it an educated population that I’m serving? Like, do they have, ah, just a baseline education? We have found that the more educated areas typically pay their rent on time. It’s more than that of an area maybe where a high percentage of folks don’t even graduate high school. 

So, there are lots of data points that we use to make decisions. And again, good schools are huge. At least the folks who we serve that even if they’re making the middle-of-the-road incomes, you know, hard-working, blue-collar family, still want their kids to go to the best public schools. That’s incredibly important; there’s got to be a supply of jobs and the immediate marketplace, and the more diversity of that employment base there is, the better. We tend to stay away from it. If one large, one or two large employers make up 70 or 80% of the job base, we steer clear of it. We will suffer significantly if one of those employers goes away or moves half of their operations offshore. 

So. But bestplaces.net is a phenomenal resource for folks that want to, you know, just type it as, type in where you live, type in Maybe where you’re looking to consider maybe invest and find out what’s happening in that local marketplace and is it a good era? People moving there or people moving away? Is the unemployment rate abnormally high or above average? If so, start asking why. You can start digging in. What are the employers doing? Who are the employers? Are they hiring? Are they, you know, offshoring, you know, some of their departments and divisions of the company? Like, what’s happening here? Much of that will drive you to make the right or the wrong decision.

Cosmos

So Kevin, since we’re talking about location and everything and investing in real estate, I wanted to ask your opinion on the 2007 and 2008 crises, when many banks gave loans to people without income. 

I know you were talking about looking into a person’s income. This is the right way to do it, but what is your perspective on the fact that banks created Prices, overlooking that people did not have income and giving them all those loans?

Kevin

Yeah, I guess I don’t necessarily. Maybe ask the question again to understand better what we’re looking at and the outcome. Which way do you want me to take that? I mean, I’ve got my thoughts and opinions on that. And that was just, ah.

Cosmos

The overall perspective on that entire crisis.

Kevin

Yeah, no, it was an implosion waiting to happen. You know, it’s just that you can’t take someone who doesn’t have income or isn’t proving their income right. It doesn’t mean they had no income to get those loans; they were just no documentation loans. That was pretty common. Lots of fraud is happening on loan applications. People just wrote down whatever income they thought you’d get the deal approved for. And ultimately folks that were, you know, waiters or waitresses working at restaurants, you know, were able to buy two, three, four houses. Right. 

And I mean that just, that was a failure waiting to happen. I mean, like, you don’t even have to, you don’t have to be an expert or understand finances to realize that inevitably making loans to folks that, number one, don’t have the financial means to support that loan should something change in the circumstances, I mean, that’s first and foremost. The circumstances changed, and they changed in a big way. 

So, I think it was just a failure waiting to happen. Ultimately, we saw the outcome. The lending environment has. It’s funny how these things tend to go. I mean, it was very tight following 2008. I would say it was incredible; it’s never got as loosey-goosey as it was back then. But I’d say in 2020, when rates were at all-time lows, you started seeing many more exceptions with lenders. Lenders were just looking; there was free-flowing capital in the marketplace. Lenders were looking to make deals. Banks only make money if they make loans. 

 I wouldn’t. You surely didn’t see nature as loose as you saw back then. By no means, but there was a drastic difference. When there’s a lot of money flowing in the capital, looking for a home, banks are fighting for, you know, they’re fighting for customers and clients. They start making exceptions and getting a little looser with their lending guidelines. I don’t think there’s any fear of what occurred back then, but ultimately, it’s a competitive marketplace. People are looking to make loans. Folks got in front of their skis quite a bit back then. You know, a lot of bad came from it. 

So. I don’t know if I have anything else to say about that. I mean, it’s, you know, interesting because I owned a mortgage company for about six years during, I guess, the years of 2002 to, I guess, I sold out of it in 2007 before the market crashed. But we made a lot of loans. We didn’t do any of the no documentation loans, but we, I mean, what was in high demand, were subprime loans for folks that had, you know, somewhat tarnished credit. Folks that had five called a 550 to a 620 to 640 credit score may have had a late payment at some point in their history. Maybe their debt-to-income ratio was slightly higher than maybe what a conforming loan would be. You know, they just had a couple, kind of stretched outside the parameters just a little bit, which ultimately creates more risk. 

 Inevitably, when things start going sideways, even those loans, those folks that did qualify with income, they didn’t have as good credit, they didn’t have as good of a track record with being responsible with making their payments on time, maybe they had a little bit more volatile type of career, you know, maybe their income, it was more of a roller coaster than linear. For that reason, those types of loans also defaulted at a much higher rate than your conforming loans. 

So, the banking world’s not that today. It got more flexible, but ultimately, I don’t think we’ll see ourselves returning to that type of lending environment anytime soon. I shouldn’t say that because history has repeated itself many times, but I’d be hard-pressed to see that occur again.

Cosmos

It just brings into account the concept of how to mitigate risk.

This brings me to my next question: How do you, as an investor, mitigate risk while evaluating deals?

Kevin

Yes. I can speak for us. Interestingly enough, these last two years, 2023 and 2024, have been two of the best years we’ve had regarding growth within the organization. And it’s at a time where a lot of our competition is stagnant; they’re more in a stagnant point where they’re not acquiring new deals, they’re not doing transactions. Interest rates went up, and capital got more expensive. That made it a lot more challenging to make deals pencil. But more importantly than that, what we’ve seen. 

So if you want to, if you want to back up a bit, 2008 was a very challenging time for my business. I lost pretty much everything, you know, from 2008 to 2011. And it had to go back through a rebuilding phase and try to reflect on lessons learned. What do I want to do differently this time, the second time around? And I decided, number one, I don’t want to do this a third time. I would be incredibly conservative and very disciplined. You know, don’t, don’t ever. If you look back, if you were an active buyer of real estate in 2020, you know, after Covid kind of started, rates, you know, went down later on 2020. 

And then we had historically low rates for over two and a half years. There was a fear of missing out. Everyone feared missing out, whether investment property or regular real estate. And there was free-flowing capital. It pushed, you know, numbers through the roof, prices through the roof, but everyone’s still buying, even though a lot of times it didn’t make economic sense to buy because they felt as if they didn’t buy today, there wouldn’t be anything left tomorrow. And that happened all across the landscape. 

 A lot of our competition is kind of the same thing. We were very conservative in 20. We sold several properties. We, we, we got offers, unsolicited offers that we couldn’t refuse. I mean, offers that made no sense on properties that we felt we knew better than anyone else and that ultimately would allow us to get, you know, eight, nine, 10 years of earnings all at one time. And hey, if they think they can do it better, let’s sell a couple of these properties.

So we sold more while people were buying crazy. And then we, you know, late 20, 20, 2021, 2022, while we bought several properties, we surely weren’t growing at the scale of most of our competition. We were just what made sense. We bought most of what we looked at, but it didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit the underlying fundamentals. We couldn’t put it; you couldn’t fit it in the buy box. You can make anything work on paper. You can work anything work. You can make anything work in a financial model. But if you’re disciplined and honest with yourself, most of the things that got bought back then only made sense, with rates staying low for many, many, many years to come. Now, as we see, you know, lots of folks are in trouble with floating rate debt that jumped up 400, 500 bis, on the rate, you know, their payment went through the roof, their debt to income is completely upside down. 

 It put us in a really good state. When the rates are going up in late 2022 into 2023 to where we had capital, we’ve never stopped distributions to our investors. Again, we might not have had the highest returns when everyone else is buying because we are very conservative. We have low, low-leverage debt. Our average LTV across our board is about 60%. We don’t have any floating rate debt. It’s all fixed rate and has no short-term loans. That’s very conservative. And that might not get as high a return or yield for our investors when times are going wild. However, guess what’s happened on the flip side is we never stop distributions. We’ve continued making distributions every quarter. All of our investors are still getting that mailbox money. 

But on top of that, we’ve got access to capital and dry powder when other folks don’t buy opportunities presenting themselves in the marketplace when there’s less competition because everyone else is running damage control. Many of our competitors are managing what they overpaid for in 2020, 20, 21, 22. We’re now sleeping comfortably at night with everything we bought. It makes money. It made sense when we bought it. We didn’t; it didn’t have to be a short-term endeavor, and we’ve been able to. Last year, we bought $105 million worth of properties. This year, we’ll end at about $110 million worth of new properties. And they’ve all been great deals at great prices that make financial sense with where the rates are today. 

So, there’s no financial engineering that sticks to the fundamentals. If we can’t make a pencil with where rates are at today, then we don’t buy it. But everything that we’re buying makes sense today. No magic has to happen. Rates don’t have to come back down by 300 basis points for the deal to make money a couple of years down the road. It makes money today, and it’ll make even more money tomorrow.

Cosmos

And congratulations, Kevin. And I appreciate that you’re mentioning this.

And one thing for the audience: I want to know if you started with your first property, right? And then you’ve reached a place where you’re making millions with Sunrise Capital Investors. How did you scale from one property to multiple properties, and what’s a financial tip to do? So.

Kevin

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I mean, I guess I’ll. I could speak to version two. And you know, I bought my first mobile home park back in 2012, and you know, when I bought that first one, it was me and one of the business partners, and we went on to buy another nine total, of nine mobile home parks. He and I are just wearing all the hats. I am running the operations side of the business, and he is running the back-end financial side. 

And it just got to a point—most of these things do—where we should have probably hired some additional help—property number five. But what happens is that, at property number five, we’re just starting to pay ourselves. We’re just starting to put money in our pockets. It’s very difficult to regress and take a couple of steps back to take, you know, 10 steps forward. We continued this, a common mistake many people make. They just don’t hire soon enough. 

 We continued. We bought another property; we bought another property, and we ended up with nine. And now, again, he and I are just wearing all the hats in the business. You know, we’re drowning. We don’t have. There’s not enough time to handle all aspects of the business and day-to-day operations. There’s not enough time today to do that. And then we, you know, realize that we have to hire somebody. But it’s very difficult to hire somebody and bring someone on board and get them excited about what you have going on when you throw them into the deep end, into a convoluted mess, right? Of just chaos. And so, the first person we hired was someone we brought in as an admin. I mean, this is kind of rebuilding phase two. We brought in an admin to really. That person had a lot of hats, too, right? Cause we’re bringing one person into a business that probably needed five or six people at that time. 

So we brought this one person in. They wore the hats of a bookkeeper, an executive assistant, and construction or project managers on renovation projects. But I think you should hire fast and aligned folks. You’ll have some core values, understand where you want to take the company and make sure you make those first hires sooner than needed. 

But also make sure you find the right fit and take the time. It’s difficult to take the necessary time when the chaos is already happening to find those aligning with core values and mission and why they’re coming on board to help you guys achieve whatever it might be. It’s very difficult to do that when it’s chaotic, and you don’t have enough time today to breathe, let alone find the right talent to join the team.

And so, I mean that was to your original question of how we go from one property to, you know, now we own 19 mobile home parks today and five parking assets. But our team looks drastically different today than it did back then. Today, we have a Berkeley-integrated property management company. There are roughly 60 folks on that side of the business, and then we have a private arm of our business and do all of our capital raising in-house. 

So we have a whole capital raising team. We have sales folks and investor relations folks that handle day-to-day with our 700 plus investors in our system. Our entire internal marketing team handles all of our, from paid advertising on Facebook to managing our social media pages, emails to investors, quarterly reports, and the design of all aspects. We’ve got a full-blown marketing team and an internal CFO, and that is smarter than my business partner would ever be on the finance side of the house. Right? I was formally educated and worked for a very large, you know, real estate investment group for 20-plus years. He has forgotten more than we’ve experienced in our last 20 years in business. 

So I mean, bringing folks in who are smarter than you has allowed us to grow into something that does not just forget about the money piece of it. Still, it’s more about building something sustainable that we could step away from. I go away for a week, and I come back, and it’s better than when I left it because we have smart, talented folks with the right mission, vision, or core values, seeing where we want to drive it. And they’re on board, they’re excited, just as excited about we are to getting to that destination point. That’s the major difference. We just had the team in place and didn’t have a team before. You know, it was just me and a partner scrambling, going crazy, and having sleepless nights. 

There were still sleepless nights, but generally speaking, there was a lot of disorganized chaos. Today, it’s just more organized chaos, I’d call it.

Cosmos

Man, Kevin, you make it sound simple, but the reality is that for most people, it’s a daunting task to navigate the chaos and manage their stress levels as they’re trying to scale their business or their company. But you’re making it sound simple. I would want it.

Kevin

That’s not simple by any means.

Cosmos

No, no. My question is, how do you handle the chaos on a mental level? What’s your thought process on the stress that comes with increasing business?

Kevin

Yeah, no, I mean it’s. Do we all have a lot to do? Do we all have a lot to get done? If you make a to-do list and sit down, you probably end up with 15 or 20 items. And at the end of the day, there’s only much time, right? 

And trying to find what are those, what are those? One or two items from that list will move the needle and make an actual. You can quantify the progress you’ll find within your company and the organization. Those are the only items you need to focus on because what ultimately will occur is the remainder of that list. I hate to say this, but I treat emails the same way. I’m not a huge. I have an executive assistant who helps me manage my emails and sit in the other. 

But I found that over the years, and I learned this by accident, I get many emails and get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of emails coming in. I never had a great system to manage it. So, what I ultimately started doing was just identifying the ones I felt were a priority. They need an answer right then and there. There was, it was a critical element. Maybe it was a closing. Maybe it was about investor capital or a question from one of our investors. It was a. If I answered that or if I gave my feedback, something would progress forward, something would move forward. And everything else. I was like, there’s no way I have time today to answer all this. 

 I’d let it fall off. And the really important things that I might have missed, guess what? They rose back to the top. Maybe the next day, someone reached out to me and shot me a text saying, hey, Kevin, I, you might have missed that email, but can you get me an answer on the critically important one? They would find their way back to you. But everything else, all that other stuff just became noise, and it would just, it would dissipate, it would kind of go off, or it would get done by someone else in the organization, or it just wasn’t all that important. 

And so, really, just prioritize. What’s that one or two things? One or two things daily help you move the needle forward in your business, and you could truly quantify that movement. And if you don’t handle that item, you’re going to regress, or something detrimental might, you know, occur in your business. I mean, that’s as simple as that. I don’t know if you don’t necessarily have to break it down more than that because we, again, can only do much in a day. We also teach it to everyone in our organization. No matter what level you’re at. What is that one? We try to keep the one item because two can get overwhelming even. Right? 

Because if it’s a big item that you’re working towards daily, you ultimately get diluted if you start trying to do too much again; sometimes two things are too much. But just keeping focus and all that other noise tends to go on its way. And if it’s that important, it will find its way back up to the top again and become one of those one items, maybe a couple of days or a couple of weeks down the road. 

So I know, I try, I simplify that, but I am I, for me, it’s just I try not to complicate stuff. Business is complicated enough, and trying to break it down in a simple format is a simple matter. Other folks have different strategies, but for me, it’s just like, what’s the one item that will make things move? For the rest of the. How will we take one step further and reach our goals, whatever they might be? That’s it. I hate simplifying it for you, Cosmos, but that’s how it is for me. That’s only how I have found success. You know, like, and I know other, again, there are other strategies I could probably go, you know, there’s other folks that probably want to have a super elaborate answer for that question, but for me, it’s just keeping it simple. Stupid. You know, the KISS methodology.

Cosmos

No, I love it because simplifying something is the essence of success—like taking something complicated and simplifying it. I hope my audience takes inspiration from focusing on one task, prioritizing it, and getting through it because that’s how you move forward.

But Kevin, I wanted to ask you about your book. You wrote a best-selling book, Cash Flow: How to Create Financial Freedom Investing in Commercial Real Estate. Can you tell me the premise of what got you started to write this book?

Kevin

I’ve been hosting a podcast called Real Estate Investing for Cash Flow for 10 years. I’ve also obviously been the best full-time investor for 20-plus years. I’ve always been a cash flow investor. First and foremost, whenever I buy something, it’s got to have cash flow today. I’m not trying to. I am thinking about the future; I am banking on the future. But I won’t buy something solely based on what it can be from an appreciation perspective. It’s got to be a cash flow today, and appreciation is kind of icing on the cake. 

 I’ve always been a cash flow investor. That’s how I think of everything we consider buying or bringing to our portfolio. It’s got to make money today, and inevitably, it also, ideally, has a way for us to make more money down the road. But I’m not banking on that. I want to know what it’s doing today and know that we can argue that it’s a great investment today. 

And so, with that being said, I’ve interviewed, interviewed thousands of folks now, a lot of incredibly brilliant folks on my, on my podcast to where I always try to pull away gold nugget, when I have the interviews, things that I can apply to my own business. And I don’t think we’ve got a phenomenal team; we wouldn’t be there today without our team. I also don’t think I’d be where I am today in my business if it weren’t for several folks I’ve interviewed over the years who have taken that one gold nugget and applied it to my business. 

 I’ve learned a lot trying to document all those items throughout the years. So, part of the book contains lessons I’ve taken away and how I implemented them into my business. And then outside of that, it’s just really based on 20 plus years of experience of buying single-family, building a business, transitioning to commercial and some of the reasons why I love commercial and why I think there’s a, it’s just a better path, it’s a more efficient path to grow a sustainable and scalable empire in real estate. I truly, you know, as I look back, I acquired 122 single-family homes early in my 20s. That was kind of my first foray into building a portfolio. So, man, I worked incredibly hard buying one by one 1, 122 properties over five years. And I busted my butt. I worked, you know, 70, 80 hours, 90 a week. And that was fine. I enjoyed it. I was grinding. But then I bought my first apartment complex and bought 30 units simultaneously. I’m like, what the, what, what am I doing? Like, like, work smart, not hard. Right? 

I found a better way to skin that cat than buying hundreds of single-family properties. Buy commercial, whether multifamily, industrial, or just. It’s a bigger game. But ultimately, it’s also sometimes easier. It’s easier to get financing on commercial property than on single-family properties. There’s a bigger opportunity to grow an empire and hire the staff necessary to come in sooner rather than later. 

For example, if you buy 10 single-family properties, there will probably not be enough cash flow to hire staff. You probably need to get to 30 or 40 properties before you can justify hiring someone on your team. However, I can buy an 80-unit apartment complex. That thing will generate enough revenue and net cash flow to me that I could probably bring on an admin to help me, you know, take some items off my plate on that property so I can focus on buying the next one. Right. And so, you can immediately find scale, both from property and team levels. You can start building your team out, which is that first property. At the same time, it isn’t easy to get there with the single-family stuff. There are lots of lessons that I kind of delve into.

Cosmos

That book is great, and I would tell the audience to check out your podcast and your book if they want to learn more about real estate investing.

Kevin, can you tell the audience more about your company, Sunrise Capital Investors, and what it does?

Kevin

Sure, yeah. Sunrise Capital Investors—I’m its CEO. We’re a boutique private equity real estate group that focuses on two specific verticals: mobile home parks and parking facilities. 

So think, you know, parking lots or a parking garage in a downtown business district. Those are our two verticals. We’ve been buying mobile home parks since 2012. we’ve been buying parking for roughly the last five years. But that’s our core focus. We find Opportunities in the marketplace. We feel we can add value to cash-flowing opportunities in really good locations and markets and growing MSAs that we can go into. We can pull a few levers and fix a few inefficiencies, whether operationally or how the capital stack was, was layered. Also, we can take what’s already good and make it much better by implementing our business strategy. And we do the same in parking as well. We can find great assets in great locations running inefficiently, knowing that we can fix those items quickly and add a ton of value. 

So, we raise our capital from high net-worth individuals and net-worth accredited investors through a reg D506C offering. You can go to our website and learn more about what we do- the history. We’re pretty transparent. We offer a lot of granular details. Investwithsunrise.com, we can even go as far as doing case studies. We’ll put up third-party reports, appraisals, surveys, and, in phase one, inspections. If someone wants to truly dive in and learn about that property and see all the different aspects of doing one of these deals, they can learn a lot there and get a lot of free resources.

Cosmos

So that is awesome, Kevin. And Kevin, how can the audience connect with you and learn more about you and what you are doing? If they wanted to contact you, how would they do it?

Kevin

So again, investwithsonrise.com, you can track me down there. If you drop a message on the Contact Us page, it will reach me. Outside of that, I often use LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. 

My last name is pretty unique. B-u-p-p, but if you go on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook and type in Kevin Bop, you should be able to track me down pretty easily. Of all those three platforms, LinkedIn is probably the one I spend the most time on.

Cosmos

That is amazing. I’m grateful you took the time to come to this podcast and share your knowledge about real estate investing, scaling, and all that stuff because everybody should know this if they want to become financially free. I do hope that you will take the time to come on this podcast at a later time.

Kevin

Yeah, no, I enjoyed it. Cosmos, I appreciate having me. Great questions. And I appreciate what you do. I know it takes a lot of time and energy to produce these shows; thank you for helping those tuning in to listen to this. I appreciate you, my friend.

Cosmos

I appreciate it, too. And I want to conclude this episode by letting my fellow extraordinary Americans know that, hey, look, there’s an extraordinary within every one of us. We must awaken it and unleash it. Until next time. Bye for now.